(no subject)

[fajrdrako]

This morning I went to the 6.30 a.m. yoga class. It was dark when I went there, on foot. Little by little during the class the sky got brighter. While I was doing Prasarita Padottanasana I would see, under my legs, the sky becoming pink and mauve and grey in the east. Then when I opened my eyes after lying in Savasana, the room was full of beautiful sunlight.

I need to go to the early class more often.

Tonight, I went to see The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams at the Ottawa Little Theatre. I've read the script but I'd never seen the play before. Funny, in my mind I kept comparing it to the previous play, Brighton Beach Memoirs by Neil Simon. Both plays are set in the 1930s. Both are about a lower middle-class family which is beset by crisis involving one of the family members having a date which doesn't work out, and in each play the family members fight. In each case, the narrator (who addresses the audience directly) is a young aspiring writer. In Brighton Beach Memoirs the crisis brings the familiy closer together and it ends with an affirmation of life - despite bad conditions, they will welcome their cousins from Europe, glad they are alive and everyone is together, because they love each other. In The Glass Menagerie the problems and conflicts are unresolvable (or at least unresolved) and the family fractures further when the narrator walks out and leaves home.

I can't help wondering why Tennessee Williams is considered great literature of the stage and Neil Simon is seen as merely a popular entertainer. (Because he writes comedy?) Certainly Simon's play is more optimistic; I can't help thinking it's wiser.

The best things about our production of The Glass Menagerie were the performances of the two people who played Tom and Laura, Conor O'Hegarty and Wanda O'Connor. Both were excellent. I thought the other performances were more brittle, artificial and unconvincing. The result: though I enjoyed it, it didn't have the power it ought to have had.