Thursday, March 3

Hotfoot

In The New Yorker of October 25, 2004, Larissa Macfarquhar (Yes, that Larissa Macfarquhar) wrote "A DRY SOUL IS BEST; Friendship, espionage, and the plays of Michael Frayn":
Some years ago, when "Noises Off" was running on Broadway, The Atlantic Monthly published a piece that concluded that Frayn's was the only play in town that was not, as the writer put it, trying to give the audience a "hotfoot." All the others were trying to make audience members feel that they weren't sufficiently guilty, or weren't sufficiently aware of some social problem.
I can't find the original citation, but I like how that summarizes a lot of art that intellectuals claim to like.

She also quoted him on how he felt after having fallen in love with a woman not his wife:
"There's a bit in 'Three Sisters' when Masha says, 'You read about love in books and you think you know what it's all about, and then it happens to you and you realize you hadn't understood anything about it at all up to that point,'" he says, when asked about this moment in his life. "Yes. It's very shattering. Anyway."
So, you see, imagining what it's like isn't always so easy.

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