I'm not a fan of traveling for business (at least domestically). I've done it for too long, and any novelty long ago vanished. The two exceptions to this rule are New York and San Francisco. Both are still quasi-wonderlands to me. I try to plan alone time whenever I visit either. Time for exploring, wandering, observing.
When I stay in Midtown, I like to get to a play. I am a novice theater aficionado, but I enthusiastically seek to be transported. I got on a lucky bus last night, when I went to see Geoffrey Rush in his translation/interpretation of Eugene Ionesco's "Exit the King" on Broadway.
I knew nothing about Ionesco (beyond recognizing his name) or this particular piece. I was excited to see the stars (Rush, Susan Sarandon, Lauren Ambrose) perform in a well-reviewed play, and to get away from the business-of-business that had dominated my day.
And then the lights went down . . . and poetry began to resonate all the way to the last row of the Barrymore Theater where I was seated. I was engaged from the first lines to the good king's inevitable death, two-plus hours later.
The play considers the narcissism which sustains all humans and particularizes it to a sovereign who would see every fellow human gone, if it meant he could survive. Ionesco was a master of the theater of the absurd, according to the biographical sketch in my Playbill.
The absurd in this work is the absurdity with which we squander life and covet it, unrelentingly, when we sense its impending departure. And it's about so much more.
"Exit the King" has all the great attributes that I admire in effective poems. The language is layered, original . . . the words are somehow cajoled into performing acts of reflection and illumination that spark the audience's consciousness toward some new vantage point.
The world may not seem much clearer from where this play takes one, but it surely seems more multi-faceted and magnificent to behold . . . like diamonds scattered across a field, with the sun burning through the overcast of the quotidian.
