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Ball | Oct 17 2006

A few nights back I saw a play written by a friend. I’d seen the play years ago, in a different production, and had read it before that and had loved it. It’s a beautiful play. Poetry, of a kind.

This time it was lousy, mostly, because the lead actor was lousy. There are only two actors in the play, and only the lead speaks, so if the lead is lousy, the play is lousy. Although maybe the lead wasn’t that lousy, really; maybe he was so-so or mediocre or some word or phrase meaning less than good but not that terrible. I don’t know. I just know I felt for him because he was trying so hard to make it good, but for one reason or another it wasn’t very good and he had to know this.

The problem was, he entered too agitated, leaving little room for increased agitation later in the play. So all his agitation was at the same high level throughout, with little dynamic variation. It’s an easy mistake to make. Afterwards I wondered if I should mention this to him, but of course I didn’t—I didn’t even speak to him—and instead got out of there as quick as I could without making it seem like I was hurrying out.

During the play, I kept thinking about a poem I heard long ago at a poetry reading in the West Village. The poem was by a man named Chris Brown who is probably dead now, because he was already quite ill at the time and because it was so long ago. It was a simple poem. Chris and a woman, evidently his girlfriend, are walking through the park when they stop to watch a Little League baseball game. A ball is hit to the boy playing second base, and the boy fails to catch it.

The ball rolls through his legs, read Chris. What pain.