Well, the plays last night were pretty good. The first, The Respectufl Prostitute, I had never seen and was pretty messed up. It took place in the South (US) in the 1930’s, so you can imagine the nastiness of the race relations– which just happened to be the leit motif. [content removed] The set was quite simple and worked just fine. Alex was great as the black man. Oh, no… no typecasting there. (hee hee) Alex is great all ’round, anyway, even when he’s not type-cast. The second, No Exit, was also quite good. Except they didn’t do the ending right. They used the English ending rather than the French ending, which was disappointing. The ending is supposed to show the beginning all over again, and hence, hell. Hell is not just “other people.” It is that, surely, but also the concept of hell is ‘living’ that stuff over and over again in a cycle of which you are only vaguely aware. So a looming sense of déja vu (and I can’t find the code for the accent over the a, oh well) is constantly present… either that or you have full awareness of the repetition and can’t do anything to stop it. There are many interpretations for the repetition at the end of the play, but none of them were addressed in this showing because they chose not to show that ending in the first place. Ah well. The acting was pretty good… the young woman who played Estelle was especially good for her part. The other two “absentees” were decent, so no complaining here (shock!). They all really played their roles quite well. All in all, a good night out, and I didn’t feel like I wasted my three dollerinis.

PS- found out on Sunday that the director didn’t know about the original ending, and would have done that one had he known. I thought it sounded like something he’d like to try, and wondered why he didn’t… and now I know why.