One Thursday night a few weeks back (this post has been a while in the works) to the New Theatre in Newtown to see their annual “Mardi Gras season” play, A Perfect Arrangement. I went with D and our (lesbian) friend B. For the uninitiated, the New Theatre is the surviving form of a 1930s agit-prop theatre group.
Thursday night is the cheap night. Tix were $30. Combination of that and the Mardi Gras bit produces a singular audience. Lots of frugal older gay men! I suppose I have to count myself in for that.
The play was OK. The ‘perfect arrangement’ of the title is a double marriage between a lesbian and a gay couple in order to maintain outward appearance in Washington DC in about 1950 at the time (as it soon turns out) of the “Lavender Scare.” This saw gays and (to a lesser extent lesbians and other gross moral turpitudents) targeted and purged from government service, one rationale being that they were a security risk as vulnerable to blackmail. Bob works at the State Department and Norma is his secretary. For ease of exposition here, their other halves are Jim and Millie.
The play starts with a moment when the “perfect arrangement” is being put to the test. Bob and Norma’s boss, and his wife, have come for a cocktail party. The conceit is that we are a studio audience watching an “I Love Lucy”-ish sit-com on a studio set. From time to time Millie shares domestic tips to camera in the manner of an advertising spot. It is all highly stylised in a comic laugh-a-minute kind of a way – all, fittingly, very artificial. a kind of pretence within a pretence. I found this stuff a bit hard to take – basically because the forced comedy, together with the accents which actors were obliged to assume, seemed a technical challenge too far for the cast.
At the end of the first half, B was looking at her phone and radiating her own brand of former-Eastern-Europe unenthusiasm. Forewarned by the reviews, I told her that the second half would be better.
And so it proved to be. The perfect arrangement unravelled as Bob was tasked by his boss with rooting out undesirables from the department. Plot twists came thick and fast.
Part of the perfect arrangement is that the couples have adjoining apartments with a direct communication through a cupboard (just a little bit The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe-ish). This enables a running gag as calls to make the transition through the cupboard are announced as “into the closet.” There are also a number of other predictable anachronisms. A stirring speech culminates in a denunciation of “misogyny” – the speech itself is itself plausible in context but I’m not so sure about the word. The ending, though dramatically necessary, also strikes me as a tad aspirational.
Seeing as the production has now finished its run there can be no spoiler-harm in revealing the most brilliant touch. In the course of the play, and especially the second half, as the deceptions are peeled away, the entire set, on wheels or rollers, inched itself forward each time the lights went down and then came back up (punctuated with a sound effect fulfilling a function something like the Seinfeld “chord”). At first I didn’t notice it but then it became a kind of “pinch me” moment.
Seats at the New Theatre are general admission. As things worked out, this meant that D and I went straight in as soon as the theatre opened, almost half an hour before the show was due to start. Crazy! I can never retrospectively reproach the Sunday afternoon crowd for ABCFM’s free Sunday recitals (RIP) for their zealous early arrival again, even if I put a large part of that zeal down to the natural attraction between a retired person and a free event.
But it meant that I was joined on one side by two older (than I) women. The apparently (though not necessarily*) older of the pair was up for a chat. I think it started with some small talk about the size of the theatre. Other theatres were discussed. The opera. Hansel and Gretel. At this stage my older interlocutor identified herself, in a jocular way, as “the witch.” At some point when I offered some conspicuously obscure morsel of information, she politely said (maybe with an ironic twist) I was very knowledgeable, in response to which I said “you can call me ‘Suppository.'” Which she then proceeded to do.
We had quite a lively conversation. Rusalka rated a mention. We also talked about the play at interval and after the show. By the end I was emboldened to address her as Jezibaba. At some point “Jezibaba” mentioned she had come to Australia from Germany in 1990. I have a German enthusiasm which this gratified.
So as not to leave “Jezibaba”‘s friend out I dubbed her “the detective” when she inquired about some scratches on my arm. (She observed that I either had a cat or a scrubby garden – it is the latter. There’s a particular patch near one of my worm “farms” which regularly inflicts wounds on me. I’m sure my skin is getting fragile with age.)
It was a lively and enjoyable conversation (that intimation of mortality aside) which rather left D (and B, by now) to their own devices. Eventually I had to excuse myself to join D and B outside.
I definitely took a shine to “Jezibaba.” She was such a live wire and so funny. That’s not to diss “the detective,” who wasn’t given much of a chance by either Jezibaba or me to make her own mark. In some ways the encounter was better than the play itself. I’m left regretting that I didn’t find some excuse to break the fourth wall of “Jezibaba” and “Suppository” to pursue some further acquaintance.
*Afternote: “not necessarily” unnecessary given “apparently” but I put it down to the lengths to which one feels obliged to go to avoid offending people on the question of their age.
Stumbling on melons 