Sleeping fitfully, probably due to that 4-shot espresso late in the day, I finally gave up on bed and went downstairs for a snack to fill the aching void in my stomach left by a paltry fish dinner six hours ago. (One cannot fall asleep when hungry--at least not in America.) Happy with my cereal, I perused the Arts section of today's New York Times and read a review of a gimmicky, off-Broadway play I wouldn't see if you paid me a million dollars, and I mean it. You could slap down the bills one at a time right in front of me, and I'm still not going.
The play is called Roadkill. Which gives you some idea. It's about the sexual trafficking of teenage girls, and the gimmick is that the entire audience-- about 20 people for this reviewer's performance--gets on a bus and goes with the actress playing the young Nigerian girl who is about to be sold into forced prostitution but she doesn't know it yet. She talks on the bus, as the play has begun. At the end of the bus ride the audience accompanies her into a seedy hotel in a crummy part of Brooklyn where they watch the rest of the play. There are some other actors already there. The girl gets raped a few times and it's all very depressing and shocking, etc. After about 90 minutes of this horror, everyone rides the same bus back to the theater where they first started, except for the girl, who is now a sex slave. She stays behind.
I am into the avant garde, believe me. One time I was I thoroughly soaked with cold water, in winter mind you, and another time I had pig's blood splattered on me, and a few other weird things happened I can't remember right now, all for the love of theater, but I am not doing that. It sounds like no fun at all, and starved as I am for experience, I'm just not that hungry.
The play is called Roadkill. Which gives you some idea. It's about the sexual trafficking of teenage girls, and the gimmick is that the entire audience-- about 20 people for this reviewer's performance--gets on a bus and goes with the actress playing the young Nigerian girl who is about to be sold into forced prostitution but she doesn't know it yet. She talks on the bus, as the play has begun. At the end of the bus ride the audience accompanies her into a seedy hotel in a crummy part of Brooklyn where they watch the rest of the play. There are some other actors already there. The girl gets raped a few times and it's all very depressing and shocking, etc. After about 90 minutes of this horror, everyone rides the same bus back to the theater where they first started, except for the girl, who is now a sex slave. She stays behind.
I am into the avant garde, believe me. One time I was I thoroughly soaked with cold water, in winter mind you, and another time I had pig's blood splattered on me, and a few other weird things happened I can't remember right now, all for the love of theater, but I am not doing that. It sounds like no fun at all, and starved as I am for experience, I'm just not that hungry.
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