04 Jun 2010

R: B's friend has a role in a work-in-progress, so B invited me to come with him to see an interactive reading/performance of the play in the Lower East Side. Unfortunately, I was a little drunk when he met up with me (I really don't know how it happens). I managed to sober up significantly after eating some dinner though, and I made it through the performance without incident.

The play was interestingly staged in a long art room with a live jazz set-up on one end. The only problem was that a lot scenes took place in corners of the room and the audience was set up facing the middle so I missed a good chunk of what was going on. The dialogue didn't help with the obstructed viewing since it was F. Scott Fitzgerald, whose characters tend to be wordy and superscilious, especially the women. The play was basically A Midsummer Night's Dream with Gatsbian airs, and I found the female characters unlikeable and annoying and the men, grotesquely earnest and boring or silent and brutish.

It was fitting that afterwards B and I went to a Columbia Young Alums event at the Intrepid to hang out with the highly unrefined, but ultimately more amusing Columbians. They were all ridiculously dressed for clubbing - at a museum with very limited and crappy open bar - but after all that Jazz Age talk during the show, I was very happy to be in with the young and the truly unsophisticated.

C: