1. Paul Roberts turned 64 years old today. He requested a taco salad birthday party. So at 1:00 this afternoon Paul, Carol, Christy, Zoe, Debbie, Cosette, Taylor, Saphire, and I sat at Carol and Paul's dining table and made ourselves each a custom made taco salad, choosing from a variety of ingredients. After eating our salads, we gathered in the living room and Paul opened his gifts, which emphasized primarily his love of hot sauce and of Amaretto. Carol roasted a pumpkin she plucked from one of hers and Paul's gardens and made it the centerpiece of Paul's birthday cake. It was called a Delicious Pumpkin Bundt Cake.
2. After Paul's birthday party, I was wiped out and took a nap. It helped refresh me to watch the Sixth Street Theater and Melodrama's production of Arsenic and Old Lace in Wallace. If I'd ever seen this play acted out before, I sure didn't recall it, and, to my delight, I'd kept myself about 95% unaware of what happens in the play. Paul directed this production and he played a lead character, the psycho Brewster brother named Jonathan. Carol played a small character role at the story's end and gave the play its finality.
3. Debbie and I returned home and each poured ourselves a nightcap. Almost always, when we go to a movie or a play together, we don't talk about it right away. But, by the time we traveled back to Kellogg from Wallace and got settled into the living room, we began talking in earnest about Arsenic and Old Lace. Before long we were discussing a favorite subject, the fine line between farce and tragedy. I couldn't remember who first introduced me to this idea. I thought it might have been T. S. Eliot. But like dramatic tragedies, Arsenic and Old Lace is a story about death. Invariably, tragedies focus on the demise of a central character who lives by some kind of illusion. The tragic character's delusion develops into the source of the character's demise. Likewise, Arsenic and Old Lace is a farce built upon the delusions of the Brewster sisters and their nephew, Teddy Brewster.
This idea that farce often teeters on the edge of tragedy led us to discuss the television show, Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman (1976-77), a dark satirical, often farcical send up of the soap opera that often hit serious social problems so directly that it could be a painful comedy to watch. Later, the program, Soap, did much the same thing. It was a farcical comedy, a cutting satire, but often took its viewers to the brink of tragedy, if not occasionally crossing over into the tragic, and was often moving and unsettling in ways usually reserved for tragic drama.
We also talked a bit about the self-referential bits in Arsenic and Old Lace, how the play was a play about plays, even poking fun at plays that had much in common with Arsenic and Old Lace itself. We both agreed that Arsenic and Old Lace could be regarded as an absurdist play and I remarked that I thought at one point a character had referred to someone who had the name of Pirandello, who wrote the superb absurdist play, Six Characters in Search of an Author.
Last of all, the character of Jonathan's face has been surgically altered. He looks, in the play, like Boris Karloff.
Well, guess who played Jonathan in the original cast of Arsenic and Old Lace?
That's right, Boris Karloff!
Self-referential city, man!
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