(Spoilers for A Streetcar Named Desire)?

I came home at midnight to a house like an oven. It is beautiful, this little house, but it is all wrong. All winter I waited through freezing weeks thinking: at least it will be cool in the summer. No. It will not be cool. It will be like a giant triathlete's sweaty armpit.

I know a giant triathlete, so perhaps that is why the image occurs.

I thought A Streetcar Named Desire would be the perfect play for the first really hot day of the summer, and in a way it was, though I didn't really feel the overpowering heat onstage, despite the smoking and the steam. It was benignly tepid in the seats.

Because I live in Victoria, I have the curious privilege of seeing, with a frequency well above the national average, Thea Gill, late of Queer as Folk, performing on stage. That is, as her husband runs the Blue Bridge Repertory Theatre here, and as I go see the Blue Bridge plays, and as she sometimes performs in them, I not infrequently see Thea Gill. It's not a bad thing; it's quite nice. But it's slightly odd. I don't see anyone else from the QaF cast on a regular basis.

Her Blanche DuBois was good; she's a little young, maybe, a little too radiant yet for the part, but she held the stage. I quite want Blue Bridge to make a go of it, despite their perplexing taste in musicals (The Fantastiks?) They're a real theatre company, and they do real plays, and this seems surprisingly hard to maintain here.

Everyone was solid, in fact. I thought the direction seemed unfocused during the monologues -- soliloquies really -- ( but the person I ended up feeling dubious about was Tennessee Williams. )

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Oh, and

Hey, Livejournal. How've you been?

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(no subject)

Is there any way to change the irritating heterosexual dating ads on my login to irritating homosexual ads?

Another hot night on which I remain unconvinced by Tennessee Williams. Convince me of his emotional truth. I want to be convinced. I have time. I can't go to sleep until the house cools down. I'm going to try sleeping downstairs on the couch, though my arising may startle any early-morning trampoline users outside the picture window. And you really should not startle someone on a trampoline.

Also, I ate a very large dinner of lamb, potato-and-kale mash, and a phantasmagorical birthday cake out of wonderland: a dense white cake in three layers joined by lemon curd and raspberries soaked in frangelico, with gory raspberries and apocalyptic chunks of pistachio brittle on top, bright green and gold shards like smashed concrete, laced with thick chocolate icing, coated with thin lemon icing, entirely impossible and delicious. What I mean to say is: I'm very full. So full that although I'm thirsty I don't really dare drink a glass of water.

Instead: I return to A Streetcar Named Desire.

I concede, invisible interlocutor, that Stanley's bestiality may be the point [SX 1: screaming cat, thump, rattle outside in the dark] -- that the emptiness of all three central characters may be the point. That we are supposed to con ourselves, like Stella does, into thinking there may be more to him, and to realize the emptiness of our own desiring response.

I, too, Tom, saw myself in Blanche. Not the faded beauty -- It is faded, my little share in beauty, and I am sad about that, but it wasn't the foundation of my happiness. The confabulation, though, the comfort of pretense, and the gradual onset of the knowledge that said pretense is spun finer and finer--that I recognize. I try not to lie to other people, but I lie to myself on principle. It's the best way to handle me.

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