Play Week(end)

Work was ok last week. I felt like I was decently productive, if not stellar. It's hard to be stellar without any deadlines. I am building up a few too many little things that need to be dealt with, though. I tend to do those on weekends, and I haven't had any spare weekend time to go in and do them.

Otherwise:
Monday: Ryuna: The Plan went off far smoother than we deserved. Then the Other Villain jumped one of us after we split up, and we only barely managed to rescue her before her soul was sucked into his Evil Black Sword. Live and Learn.

Tuesday: Tarkanan: we slogged our way through the tunnel-of-bugs to get to the center, where we found *TWO* of the things that *TERRIFIED US* when we only fought *ONE* of them. That was a couple levels ago, but it was also when we had full spells, instead of being on our third major fight of the day. So of course, it's a cliffhanger. We'll see how it goes next time.

Wednesday: Lyric: First of the Plays, Mrs. Witherspoon, by Christopher Durang. Quite funny, although slightly incoherent. The ending also had the main character changing personality a bit more abruptly than I felt the rest of the show justified, since it was mostly about how stubbornly she wasn't changing personality. Still, lives 8 days of game before reincarnating.

Thursday: Hung about with brilit, doing nothing. It was good.

Friday: Rode in the van to NYC and napped.
Saturday: Plays 2-4. Voyage, Shipwreck, and Salvage, the three parts of Coast of Utopia, the new trilogy by Stoppard. It was very well done, and I think seeing them 1,2,3 was better than trying to see them separately, but in general, I don't think it was Stoppard's best work. He gets too caught up in the actual history (it's about Russian intelligentsia in the mid-1800's), and forgets to make it a play *about* something. Or even to make it particularly witty, after about the first play. Still, the acting was brilliant, and as Russian history it was kind of interesting, and doing the whole thing straight through was darn cool. The experience lives 9 days out of ten, but the actual plays only live about 7, I think.

Sunday: Play 5. Gray Gardens, a new musical about the cousin and aunt of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. The first half is a pretty standard farce, if a bit too vicious to quite be a farce. The second half, however, jumps radically off the "farce" concept, as the problems of the first act are left unsolved and we jump thirty years in the future to show how the lives of the main characters now suck. The music is decent, and the characters are fine, although the plot wouldn't really work for me normally, and really didn't work for me the day after three plays about long suffering Russian failures. Gives back the 2 days Coast of Utopia swiped, as the play is probably really about an 8 out of 10, but it was sufficiently Not What I Wanted Just Then that I only liked it about 6. Then driving home. Of all the fancy restaurants we visited (which were mostly fine), the restaurant I actually found most fun was the goofy Deli we stopped at on the way home. The food was nothing special, but the staff was entertaining, arguing with each other about baseball and being very happy we were willing to sit at the counter, and it was just a nice friendly atmosphere. ("How many?" "7" "Oh. Uh, we could put you at the counter, if that's ok?" "Sure." "Really?!")

Monday: Nothing special tonight, and not much for the rest of the week, it looks like. Next week's update may be extra-boring.