All right, you little devils, stop clamoring and Auntie Karen will tell you all about Day Two of Le Beeg Weekend du Theatre!
Le Beeg Weekend du Theatre kicked off with Friday night in the West Village. The play was The Mystery of Irma Vep; dinner was at Red Bamboo, a vegan eatery on West Fourth that served food of such excellent quality that I kept stopping in mid-chew, eyeing my carnivore husband suspiciously and demanding "Are you sure this isn't a real hamburger?" Nope - it was vegan, but it was remarkably - uh - lifelike.
I should probably make it clear, before you start thinking me nobler than I am when it comes to food, that I am not a vegan, being far too fond of good cheeses ever to contemplate giving up dairy products, and my vegetarianism is of the half-assed variety that allows for crustaceans, because lobster tastes good. As my stepdaughter Brianna, who was given to fits-and-starts vegetarianism, once remarked, as she coolly snagged a plump shrimp glistening with garlic butter off her father's plate, "Shrimp don't count - they're stupid."
Our dinner-and-a-play companion was our darling friend Carrie, and I had told her that if she was tired of being dragged into vegetarian restaurants she had but to say so and we would go to anyplace she liked and I'd either find something on the menu that had shrimp in it or have a salad. Because the fact is, I live in dread that my friends will privately start to roll their eyes and make that awful face when dining out with me is proposed, moaning, "Oh, God, no! I can't stand another bite of tofu, no matter how cleverly disguised!" But no - darling Carrie was, as always, darling, and so we all had a lovely time together and ate a great deal of tofu, cleverly disguised.
The Mystery of Irma Vep was playing in the West Village - so far West that it was practically in the Hudson - and as we trotted along, I had ample opportunity to see how the rubber-and-leather fetish shops have flourished on Christopher Street since the comparatively moderate days of my youth, when The Pink Pussycat was still the naughtiest game in town. Somewhat incongruously nestled in between Christopher Street's Maisons du Kink, however, is a little time capsule gem known as McNulty's Tea & Coffee Co. The store claims to have been in business since 1895; looking at the place, I believe it, and I mean that in the best possible way. Gazing at the tin ceiling, inhaling the aromas of first flush Darjeeling and elderberry teas, and running a reverential finger along the edge of the shiny brass scales, worn to the thinness and luster of gold with years of use, I was transported to the turn-of-the-century Williamsburg emporia described by Betty Smith in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.
The joys of Irma Vep I have already described, so let us now turn our attention to Saturday's revels. After reading a superlative review in the NY Times, I pounced upon a TDF offering of The Heir Apparent (very reasonable at thirty bucks.) My interest was piqued by several factors, viz:
1. The play is an English adaptation of a seventeenth century Comédie-Française farce, and hence has superlative Nerd Appeal.
2. The adaptation is by David Ives, whose Venus in Fur had made a star of Nina Arianda and left me
gasping with envy and wishing I had written it. Wit, fireworks, and intellectual frolic were practically guaranteed - and, according to the review, there would be an abundance of Poop Jokes. Now, it
may be a common taste to enjoy cloacal humor, but I happen to plead guilty to it.
3. The adaptation is in rhymed iambic couplets, with plenty of contemporary allusions thrown in to give it a little extra comic zing. Well, now - whose Andersen Alterations does that sound like? I had to go - I was doing Market Research!
I had managed to talk my long-suffering husband into a second day of theater without too much trouble - he'd enjoyed Irma Vep. But when I made the mistake of mentioning the rhymed couplets, he blanched and began to talk about going to the gym if I could find somebody else to accompany me. As he waved his hands and looked about wildly for an out, I was strongly reminded of the Enrollment Act of 1863, which allowed well-heeled draftees to pay $300 to a substitute who served in their stead in the Civil War. Luckily, not everyone I know is a Philistine - pardon me, I meant a fitness freak - and I was able to secure my friend Suzanne as a Theater Buddy.
Suzanne and I set out in plenty of time to get to East 13th St, but no sooner had our train pulled into the 86th Street station than we heard the crackly message every subway rider in a hurry dreads: "Due to a passenger medical situation at the 79th Street Station, we will be delayed..." In other words, it was 2:15; we had 45 minutes to get to Thirteenth and Third; and we were screwed. Either we were going to have to take out a mortgage on a very expensive cab fare, or we would not make the curtain.
And here is where it turns out to pay big dividends when you've quietly gotten yourself another Theater Buddy, instead of hocking your husband for being a Philistine and marching him onto the subway, one arm twisted into a corkscrew behind his back - for my very kind husband responded gallantly to our emergency call for help and appeared in the trusty family Saab in an amazingly short period of time, dropping us at the theater exactly five minutes before curtain - and this in the face of some truly hideous traffic occasioned by the fact that it was the weekend and all of the subways were having track maintenance.
Along the way, we all decided that my husband would go amuse himself for a couple of hours in the East Village and then we would all meet after the play and go to Sheepshead Bay for dinner, now that the car was out of its parking spot anyway. (You have to live in New York City to understand the way most of us guard a legal parking spot the way a mother cougar guards her young.)
As for the play itself? Delectable bit of froth, with everything I love about French farce. Lots of people in disguise, trying to pull of scams involving sex and money. An elderly dragon of an avaricious mère who seems to be an earlier edition of Lady Bracknell. A cuckoo clock that farts instead of chimes. A pert soubrette enamored of the valet de chambre, both of them a lot smarter than their employers - naturally, they can't get happily married until their employers do, too. And then there was Scruple, the lawyer - a character whose first appearance onstage made me realize just what hungry actor really means. For Scruple, who was talked about all through Act I as being unusually short of stature - two and a half feet tall, if memory serves -without ever putting in an appearance, in Act II at last came self-importantly waddling out in his wig and robes, a wee pair of slippers bobbing up and down at the front of his costume and a long train dragging out behind to conceal a perfectly normal pair of legs belonging to the unfortunate actor who, thanks to the whim of a playwright who had a weakness for sight gags, was forced to play the entire act walking around the stage on his knees. Whoever hands out the Obies for Best Supporting Actor - I hope you were there and took note!
After the play we went to Clemente's out in Sheepshead Bay, and my husband ate a dozen hardshell crabs cooked in garlic butter and told us all about the skateboarders he had watched in Tompkins Square Park and we tried in vain to convince him that the antics of the flatulent French farceurs were more fun than any skateboarders. After dinner, we went to Netcost, an enomous Russian supermarket at the edge of Brighton Beach, because Suzanne had never been there, and we all ran around happily squealing over this cross between a Russian Fairway and Zabar's and pointing to signs like "Crepes, 10 for $5.00" and "Pleece do not mix appartizers together - prices all different!" above large salad-bar style vats of chicken liver pate next to a sort of egg salad cake piled on top of something pink that looked like beets in mayonnaise.
Finally we ended up at Coney Island, where I procured an enormous $7 lobster salad sandwich for my son (there's another one who won't go to the theater with me!) at Nathan's, and Suzanne got a pistachio soft ice cream custard, and we got in the car and went home, and I fell asleep along the way because I was so tired and so happy.
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