Why am I gripped by NY Theatre? pt 1

It started with a trip in the late 90s with a group from school, led by my mentor (and then-Dean) Al Goldfarb. Al picked the shows and some of the restaurants, told me how to navigate the subway, and generally made the city manageable. Two of the shows were standouts: Sideman, which won the Tony that year and starred (then-not-so-well-known) Edie Falco, and Wit with Kathleen Chalfant.

For Wit, I sat front row center, and Chalfant used me as one of her visual touch points in her performance. My mom had died just exactly one year earlier, and the show just wrecked me. Sobbing, I was, by the end. There is one scene where she is remembering being a young girl sitting on the floor next to her father's chair, reading. I flashed back to many evenings with Mom in the kitchen preparing dinner, Dad in his work clothes reading the paper in the living room, and me on the floor near him with some part of the paper spread out before me spelling out the words I did not know to them. I remember with great specificity doing that on the day Judy Garland died, spelling out words like n-a-r-c-o-t-i-c-s to my mother, as tears fell on the South Bend Tribune.

But the real hook, the game changer for Shari and NY theatre was 2003's Long Day's Journey into Night, with Brian Dennehy, Robert Sean Leonard, Phillip Seymour Hoffman, and above and around and over everything, Vanessa Redgrave. I'll go on about Redgrave in another post. I found then the possibility of seeing her in the flesh in such good company sufficient reason to ask my friend Cindy from New Haven if she wanted to go with me to see the show and spend a night in NYC. We couldn't get tickets together, so she sat in the last row in the Orchestra house right, and I sat one row in front of her. Crap seats. But when Vanessa Redgrave walked on stage, her blue eyes shone to the back of the theatre. Seeing her and Dennehy work together was thrilling. This play, which I never much liked, lasted about 15 hours, but the time flew past--normally a fidgeter, I don't think I moved a muscle during the first act.

Cindy and I were giddy after the performance, and I knew NYC theatre and I were not done with each other.