It’s just a mania, I guess…

It’s just a mania, I guess…

One of my favorite websites to check on a few times a week is called “Theatermania.com”—it is a site that keeps me up-to-date on theater in New York, with news and reviews of Broadway and Off-Broadway. By the way—it is not a gossipy site, it is full of (crucial) information for theater-o-philes like myself. My favorite feature on the website is a column written three times a week by a Peter Filichia, a former English teacher turned theater maven and journalist. Every so often Mr. Filichia solicits input or responses from his audience, and I write occasionally about first impressions in the theater, or dream days when I caught two sensational matinees, or other topics in his column. I met this man on my trip to New York in December, and I learned that in his work he sees about 360 plays a year. Wow! What a busy life in the theater! (And just for the record a really nice man and interesting to talk to—he loves to pepper you with questions: “What is your favorite obscure musical?” and then “What performances from the past do you wish you had seen?” were just two of the questions in our hour-long meeting in an 8th Avenue diner.) From the responses he gets, there must be other people like me that get enthused about theater.

Sometimes—just sometimes—I wonder if my enthusiasm borders on something a little beyond normal. I wonder if I suffer from more than just a casual desire to go to theatermania.com and think that I may actually have a case of mania about the
theater. I took advantage of dictionary.com just now to take a look as to what the dictionary writers say about mania. The first definition reads of mania: an excessive excitement or enthusiasm; a craze. Hmmm…that doesn’t sound too weird. The second definition reads that mania is a violent derangement; madness; insane passion affecting one or many people; lunacy; delirium; aberration. Oh dear.

I am pondering this mania as I look back at my recent whirlwind trip to New York. Perhaps I will not self-diagnose, and let you all weigh in about the level of my “mania.”

Okay. On Wednesday, I landed at JFK about 6:00 a.m. and by 7:30 a.m. I am already safely delivered to my friend Christy’s house on the Upper upper West Side (when realtors describe her area they sometimes call it SoHa—south of Harlem—anyway, that’s just agent lingo). While I have just come off of a 12-hour flight, and the main purpose of this trip is business—attending a Job Fair at Teachers College at Columbia on Thursday—one of the first things Christy and I do is rush to her computer and check on theatermania.com. What’s up? What’s up? Now we are not trying to be all hip with a variation on the ghetto-cool wazzup? but rather we want to go to her gold card account and see what plays and shows are available for that evening on Theatermania. Years ago we discovered the beauties of services like Audience Extras, Play-By-Play, and Theatermania that allow you to pay a subscription fee (like an incredibly low $100 a year) and then you have access to discounted theater offerings, cabarets and concerts. And I mean discounted—not like the fools who stand in the half-price ticket line—I am talking shows for $4. Way.

One of the saddest parts of moving away from New York was when I called those organizations and told them I needed to terminate my memberships. I asked if they had a sister organization in Amman, Jordan. Sadly, the answer was no.

You can see how someone with a mild enthusiasm or excitement could stoke that into a mania if you can attend productions at only $4 a pop—I know—first-run movies cost so much more! Who wouldn’t want to see real people doing something creative instead of a movie! So I often saw 2-3 productions a week during those New York days.

So like little theatermania addicts we scroll down to see what is available that night. Christy had to teach all afternoon so we didn’t consider matinees. And there were a couple of good offerings. While we debated a few possibilities for the evening, we lost a couple of shows. Gotta act fast! Can’t lose a good one! So as we debated, and while the pickins’ were slim, we decided on seeing a play called Southern Gothic Novel in a small theater in an industrial part of town. In the ad it mentioned that it had had a favorable review in the New York Times. We clicked the button and scored two tickets. All that before 10:00 a.m.!

After Christy went to go teach, and I was left to go through the 90 resumes of the participants in the Job Fair, I realized I might have acted hastily. I was a little tired. Why in the world hadn’t we thought I might be a little jet-lagged after traveling all night from the Middle East? It didn’t even enter my mind to have a quiet evening! Nope, the old theater mania just settled in.

I left around 7:00 p.m. to get to the theater, shivering in the bitter cold (you never think it is really as cold as they say, and again, the day before it had been about 68 degrees in sunny Madaba). How long is this play going to be? As I walked down seedy 37th St. heading west, I hoped this would be a wonderful surprise. The thing with these ticket services is that you never know the quality of the show. We had a continuum in our discussions of these theater offerings. On the high end of the scale was a show entitled, Dinah Was that was just divine, and at the other end were clunkers called Andrew My Dearest One and Looking at Love. Those last two could turn theater maniacs into bitter, snarky, theater-phobes.

I arrive at—can’t call it a theater—but it’s an industrial building, find a buzzer for 5A—and walk in, up the elevator and down a loooong hallway (how will Christy find this place? she is a little direction-challenged) and enter what the woman is calling a lobby. Ummm…isn’t this just a room in your apartment? “The house is open,” she says with a broad smile and sweeping gesture. She giggles and says, “we’ve sold out for tonight!” Well, I walk into the theater, “house” in drama-speak, and it is, well, I guess her living room with a stage the size of my bed, with 25 chairs arranged in front. Well, she is excited about the sold-out crowd. I just can’t ask about the rave Times review. Did everyone pay just $4 or did anyone pay the advertised $25??

There are cell phone calls to Christy so that she can find the place, and when the producer announces that the play is one hour long, we look at each other in relief. Why relief? Why did we choose to go out on such a cold night if we are going to have relief over a short play??? Ahhhh…the touch of mania.

It is a one-man play. Oh my. There have been good one-person plays in the history of theater. But there are many self-indulgent, or therapy-like plays involving just one actor. You better be really good if you are just one actor! This nice man takes the stage and opens his—guess what is in his hand—his southern gothic novel, and proceeds to read aloud from chapter one. Then he puts the book down and his play is an enactment of the entire story, and he plays all 17 characters.

Now I know from southerners. And they make great story-tellers. My friend Mary could easily charge $25 a head for her great story-telling skill. And this nice man was okay, but it was exhausting to listen to him and watch him tell this story of some sex-slave incident in Mississippi. And since the audience was so small you felt a need to rally for this actor putting himself through these paces.

After a few minutes I couldn’t take it—we’ll blame it on jet-lag, but it was too tiring to actually watch. Christy elbowed me a couple of times when I guess my heavy breathing was taking away from the audience hearing of the next chapter in the misadventures of Viola and June and Mrs. Wong, the owner of a Chinese restaurant. I just hoped my head wouldn’t fall into the man in front of me.

Finally it ended. We clapped. We smiled. We high-tailed it out of the living room cum theater to get fresh air. Outside we just laughed at our choice—why had we insisted on seeing something theatrical??! Why couldn’t we just stay in the warmth by the metaphorical hearth?? We decided to be much more conscious about our theater choices in the future and only make smart decisions from now on.

Okay. Saturday afternoon we planned to go join the fools in the line for half-price tickets. We had decided that we really did want to see Music in the Air (check the last blog entry) and would pay top dollar—half price to see this 1930s musical confection. And I had actually read a rave review in the Times that morning.

We join the throngs Saturday morning (fortified with a great diner breakfast of blueberry pancakes and bacon!) and wait for 45 minutes for our tickets. We get up to the front of the queue, and we have decided that we will pay up to $60 for these seats—but we are making a responsible, sensible decision about theater. No more mindless mania for us!

We ask the man about the seats for Music in the Air, and he says they are in the rear mezzanine. Christy and I look at each other and exclaim, “those are terrible seats! No thank you!”

Before we know it, we have responsibled-decisioned ourselves and ejected ourselves from the line. We didn’t even check to see if that meant rear balcony, or where the rear mezz was or what the cost was…what had we done?? We had just spent 45 minutes in the cold and foolishly walked away.

We laughed at ourselves, wondering if we had cured our mania, or just settled into very odd decision-making habits.

We decided to save all that money and went to see an 11:00 matinee of Slumdog Millionaire for $6. It was great.

Maybe there is hope for us. Maybe maniacs don’t actually know they suffer from mania. We at least know we have a problem!