So Much to Say, So Little Time

I wanted to write a little about going to see "Faith Healer" on Broadway last week, just in the nick of time, because now it has closed. Three actors, four monologues, the opening and closing ones by Ralph Fiennes, better known for his movie stardom. A very intense drama that I would file under "Irish doom," although the reviews kept describing it as being about the struggles of the artist with his gift.

I was meeting a friend who had gotten half-price tickets on a Web site that morning. Not wanting to be late, I got to the Theater District early and strolled around. A beautiful summer evening, not too hot, raking light down the streets, it seemed a particularly pleasurable moment to be alive. There are lots of theaters in the Theater District, as its name might lead one to suspect -- it's amazing, in fact, how concentrated they are. Many of them, in mid-August, a relatively quiet time culturally in New York, were "dark." This is the term for a theater where nothing is playing at the moment. It had always struck me as rather overdramatic, but walking by a few dark theaters, I understood it better. Deserted lobbies, locked doors, blankness where the posters would be. Not even any ads of coming attractions. There seemed nothing more desolate than an empty theater. Only people can bring it to life, and there were no people; the rest is just quietness and waiting, empty velvet seats. I found myself thinking of all the performances that had gone on in these few square blocks, the famous actors that had passed through the doors of the Brooks Atkinson or the Booth or the Lunt-Fontaine, leaving no trace but in people's memories, which themselves are very fleeting things. The connection between theater and superstition is not hard to understand: there is something so spooky about it, conjuring something out of nothing, which then quickly fades into oblivion again.

But on 45th Street, where my theater was, there were several other shows still running. At 10 minutes to 8, I walked down a street thronged with theater-goers lining up to get in to their respective shows. (Even though lining up actually makes little sense; since you have an assigned seat, there is no profit in getting there early. I read an article about this -- it seems people have picked up the habit from movie-going.) Others were just milling around. There were so many people that I wondered how I would find my friend. Fortunately, I live in an age of text-messaging. I texted her to say where I was standing. She texted back to say she was still in a cab. Freed from the need to concentrate on finding her for the moment, I stood and watched the crowd line up and enter the theater; this was as entertaining in its own way as the play I was about to see.

Who goes to the theater? In an age of DVDs and computer games and TV and shopping malls and other rivals for entertainment time, it is amazing that this archiac, expensive and highly ineffcient form of amusement holds its own. But the evidence on 45th Street was hard to ignore. People were thronging in. The out-of-towners had lined up first. But I realized this only later, as the people passing me grew progressively more elegantly dressed and jaded-looking; here were the New Yorkers. The tourists looked cheerful, expectant, and slightly reverant. The New Yorkers looked rich. Nearly everyone was white.

The last of the long line had vanished into the maw of the theater and the street seemed oddly empty when I saw my friend, just on time.

Our seats were in the very last row of the lower section,on the aisle. Handy for nipping out and having a gin and tonic at intermission, which we decadently did. Although I could hear them perfectly, the actors seemed far away and small; I longed for opera glasses to see their expressions more clearly. When the curtain came up, Mr. Fiennes was standing alone on a stark stage, head down, in a hat and winter coat. The audience immediately began applauding, which I found most annoying. He hadn't done anything yet! Or were they trying to say he was so famous, they would love it, whatever he did? If theater is about magic, this broke the spell. Annoyingly, the audience also clapped, like trained seals, at the first appearance of the only-slightly-less-famous Cherry Jones and Ian McDiarmid.

It was great acting. I am all for applause. But why not wait until they are done?