Looped.

It was one of those pitiable moments of faded glory revisited. She lifts up her hands to shield the light, slowly lowering them as she takes in her surroundings. Her fingers gracefully move to right below her neck, clasping her chest out of equal parts gratitude and fear, and imbues those famous Tennessee Williams lines with such lamentable honesty, so much reality that the audience begins to hoot. It's apparent now they didn't come to see the tragic character, but the tragic actress. Oddly this doesn't offend her, but instead the lady of elegance degrades to a campy showman supplying the crowd with that loused decadence they egg her on to give. Her covered inebriation then rears its sad face in full as she stumbles off into a pink-purple back lighting and Southern balcony silhouette. The curtain comes down, the lights come up, my head turns to the left and I notice my friend sitting next to me. "Oh right…I'm watching a play."

That's probably the first time my disbelief has ever been unconsciously suspended. I must say it's not like I imagined it. The luring in was so gradual I felt like a frog in a hot bath with the burner on low. Before I knew it, I was cooked, so engrossed in that moment where Valerie Harper, as real-life screen legend and bon vivant Tallulah Bankhead, in drunken nostalgia replays her bleary performance as Blanche DuBois. And get this, the show is a comedy. All the more reason this singular moment of unadulterated pathos was particularly ensnaring. The greatest plays are neither straight comedy nor straight drama, because that's just not the way life is. Melody's right, it really is so cool that I get to just go watch a Broadway show every now and then.

Walking down the stairs of the balcony following a standing ovation well deserved, Ana turns to me and says "see, this is why I want to be an actress. It's that applause, you know? Not like in a self-centered way, but it's that moment where you remember why all that work is worth it."
"Yeah, I know what you're saying. It's not just some self-indulgence, though it certainly can be--it's the finish of the exchange. It's the other end of the dialogue, the completion of that communion between performers and patrons that makes the stage a unique and irreplaceable medium of fellowship."


All performers understand this on some level. The tradition of applause was not invented for self-indulgence, I think. Dancers, singers, actors, musicians, artists, those of us who brave the vulnerability of that penetrating light, that glass that allows onlookers to bury into some fragile part of us beneath the bramble, shouldn't we be reciprocated with some sort of response, some requital that affirms what we've given has been received to its purpose? Which also gets me thinking--what then do we, as creations ourselves, owe to our Creator?