Bump
Completely unrelated: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pvPPA3Gv7RQ&ab_channel=SpankRock-Topic
This more recent play begins with a few small moments in the life of a pregnancy. We start with a pregnancy message board specifically tied to “December Moms” based on their due dates, which the specific acknowledgement that some might have their babies in November, or January, or not at all, depending.
From there, we move to our central players: Claudia is announcing her very early pregnancy to her parents. Her mom is excited, and her dad doesn’t initially understand what he’s being told. When he figures it out, he’s happy for her. Like most pregnancy announcements, this one brings up issues and Claudia’s parents discuss and likely argue about Claudia’s birth. We get some of the same from the message board, where everybody has an opinion, and a lot of people on the board have opinion on other people’s opinions. My own experience is that pregnancy and parenting bring up some real defensiveness of choices made or not made.
The main action of the play though involves Claudia’s dad, feeling glum about not being there for the birth (he was in the waiting room) when Claudia was born, and also watching a Youtube video and having a moment of inspiration. Thinking about the rough and dangerous births that involve forceps being used, and watching the video in which a wine cork is removed from the inside of a wine bottle with a plastic bag, well you see where this is going.
The play, or this part, is based on the real life discovery by Jorge Odon.
Glengarry Glen Ross
The saddest part of rereading this play for the first time in about 20 years is that it doesn’t include the fantastic speech by Alec Baldwin from the film. I bet I had the exact same thought when I read it the first time. I saw the movie when I was like 12 and well, I can’t say I really understood what was happening, and especially what “leads” were, but I liked a lot of what I was seeing. It’s one of those movies where you can just tell a bunch of actors are acting the shit out of things.
The play is based on David Mamet’s experiences as a salesman in the late 1960s, and I am sorry if you are in sales, but it just seems like the miserable job in the world to me, and is often filled with some real….well, characters. The play is the day of a sales contest, where the largest salesman of the day will get a bonus. There’s a feeling going round the office that this particular office is also that things are dire. Things are dire for Shelley, an older salesman who used to be very successful, but is now slumping. They’re also dire for Moss and Aaranow, who decide things are being split evenly around the office, and so they concoct a scheme to rob the office, taking the leads, but also any thing else of value, and sell it to a competitor. A last thread in the play is Ricky Roma, the best salesman in the company, who is closing in fast on a sale, but has to deal with a customer’s cold feet. Central to all of this is John Williamson, the office manager whose job it is to dish out the leads based on his directives from his superiors.
Speed the Plow
I know this play entirely from the fallout of the Broadway revival in which Jeremy Piven ended hospitalized for exhaustion or from eating too much fish. Regardless, I didn’t actually know what it was about. It’s a Hollywood play, specifically about a script reader and a studio head looking for the next big thing. The play ultimately ends up coming down to the choice between a glitzy movie and a thoughtful one. And the play goes from there.
I have zero interaction with or experience of Hollywood, other than knowing a few people whom I either know well, but only worked on the outskirts of Hollywood, or people who have ended up much more deeply involved, but whom I not not well at all. So it goes. I did want to try to be involved in filmmaking in one capacity or another, but I wasn’t an actor, have never really wanted to write, and honestly I barely watch movies any more. So that worked out for me I guess.
It’s weird because nearly one hundred percent of the things I DO know about Hollywood either come from writers who worked in Hollywood, like this play here, or from movies about Hollywood. Sometimes those are celebratory and sometimes not, but boy does Hollywood like to talk about Hollywood. I do bet Jeremy Piven is good in the role, but it’s already basically just Ari Gold, which is already basically just Sammy Glick.
Moon for the Misbegotten
This play is a kind of sequel to The Long Day’s Journey Into Night, which I don’t recall all the details of that play even having read it not that long ago. But weirdly it was also produced in Eugen O’Neill’s lifetime while The Long Day’s Journey into Night was not. Both were written about the same time and involve a character apparently based on O’Neill’s older brother who went away from the family, and was especially haunted by his mother’s death. In this play our brother character is that same state here as a low-rent landlord. As happens, the kinds of schemes that people can get up to have a way of scaling up or down the social strata as needed to be perfectly aligned to the situation. What I mean by this is that you can have tyrants both petty and large, and you can sexual scandals both high class and low, and you can have power grabs and thievery no matter where, when, or how you find them. And that’s what we have here — well all of them really.
American Buffalo
A kind of heist story. In this play, a coin dealer (well mainly a pawn broker) has sold a coin for a decent amount, but begins to suspect the coin was actually worth a lot more, and this gets him thinking. He plans to steal the coin back and will enlist the help of his young assistant, a kind of go-fer generally played by a relatively young actor. As they’re planning the heist, a friend stops by, realizes what they’re talking about and convinces the owner to enlist him instead, as the younger man would be too inexperienced for the scheme to work. And of course as the three circulate around each other more and more, the petty differences threaten to tear them all apart.
I really did believe from movies and tv shows that pawn brokers, and adjacent professions would end up playing a sizeable role in my life. Not because of me particularly, but because they loom large in the books, movies, and tv shows. Have I been in a pawn shop? Yes. There was a large prominent one in my hometown’s downtown area and it was filled to brim with musical instruments and cameras and jewelry and guns. Have I eve bought anything from such a store? Nope!
Anyway, they do have a large place in our cultural consciousness I think because of the way they straddle the line between civil society and the demimonde, at least in how they’re used, whether that reputation is earned or not.
