A Truly Awful Play

I took my husband to a play at one of our town libraries today. We met up with one of my friends, Kathi, and her friend, Dave.

Kathi and I, along with some other friends, had been to a play there a few years ago.  The play was performed by a traveling acting company. The actors were from New York and we live in Connecticut, and I think that’s as far as they travel. That play was based on a Nora Ephron book, I think. The scenery was bare bones, but it was really well done.

Today’s play, Marriage is Murder, was also put on by a traveling group. It might be the same group as before. If so, their standards have slipped drastically.

There were three actors today. One of them was a woman, dressed in black, who came on stage between scenes and cleared up all of the props used in the previous scene. She made exasperated faces and hunched over like she was carrying a load of rocks instead of papers and sweaters. She was the comic relief, and she was very funny.

The other two actors, a man and a woman, played ex-spouses who were trying to write another murder-mystery novel together. They had attained some success earlier in their lives with their mystery character, and they wondered if they could do it again … without killing each other.

The man was really good. His acting was terrific and believable and, most importantly, he knew his lines.

The woman was truly terrible. Her acting was over the top. She sneered, grimaced, and mugged. And she didn’t know any of her lines. She knew the general outline of the play, and that was it. Her lines were posted on every flat surface on the stage: on an ironing board, on the lid of a box of chocolates, on her martini glass. And she still flubbed them. On a number of occasions, she just stopped talking and looked at the script to see what came next.

It was horrible. Awful. Terrible. My head was aching when I got there and the pain escalated throughout the six — yes six! — scenes. The running joke was that the spouses wanted to kill each other.

I was pulling for the husband.