So my desire to go was not about the subject matter. It was to see these two incredible actors perform together again. And the Metro Station here is just a block away from the theatre!
What I didn't know was that the play itself is amazing. One of the best new works of the American Theatre I've ever seen. It was in turns burst out laughingly funny, angst inducingly cruel, and heart rendingly tragic. There was banality, there was karma, there was even a splash of redemption. Ideas, phrases, props were woven in and out of each sense like a finely constructed tapestry. What it wasn't was what I feared it might be: trite.
In it, Holly played the aggrieved single mother who took out all of her fears about her son on the Librarian. Kate was the "rock 'em - sock 'em" librarian whose passion and integrity just made you want to stand up and shout, "YES! Goddammit, YES!" She was also the Manager at the Mother's office. And the sweet mother of the Mother's son's girlfriend. This is the genius of Kate Eastwood Norris, while I know she just fiddled with her hair, donned a different jacket or sweater, wore glasses, didn't wear glasses, whatever...what she actually did was become an entirely different person, with a different underlying affect that was palpable and astonishing.
And here's where the power of the playwright also shines. Each character is given a distinctive voice. I can only imagine how delicious it was for Kate to transform from one to another.
To frame this amazing play, Round House pulled out all the stops. Just a couple of years ago, it shutdown production for a season so that its theater space could receive a multi-million dollar over hall. The changes were deeply structural giving the Round House much more flexibility with its space. How that manifested itself in "Bad Books" was the construction of an entirely new stage area over what had at least four rows of seating within its normal configuration and then the addition of four rows of seating at the same level with the remaining house seats on what would otherwise be the stage to create a theatre-in-the-round experience. As I sat there, I just marveled at the degree of precision required to pull this off. I was thinking how proud the producers and the Managing and Artistic Directors and the Board of Directs must be at seeing their renovation in fruition.
Which is the perfect lead-in to a celebration of the Set Design. Meghan Raham's vision was stunning. Its simplicity felt like a perfectly polished orb. The new stage was built as a square, but filling the square was a circle that gently rotated throughout the entire play. The audience was in perpetual motion like people circling a fishbowl and watching as they performed some mysterious dance. The fact that in one scene an actual fishbowl played a pivotal role in the action only contributed to the metaphor writ large. This is what I call brilliant.
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