YOU MIGHT AS WELL LIVE
Temporary Theater Company at the Okefenokee Playhouse
Adapted and staged by Frank Farrell, seven Parker stories and three poems compose the Temporary Theater Company’s sardonic but slow You Might As Well Live. Illustrating to the point of tiresome repetition how relationships self-destruct, the tales focus on assorted failures to communicate, some deliberate, others innocent.
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The same protective (and self-defeating) sarcasm appears in “Here We Are.” Set on a train heading for New York, it’s a scary picture of two newlyweds suddenly having to deal with their mutual strangeness; again a too-nervous woman perversely puts the wrong (i.e., jealous, petty, or self-pitying) construction on any remark hubbie forces himself to make. Clearly, these two are really bound for Reno.
In the stronger fare, Parker manages to get beyond self-fulfilling prophecies of doom. “Glory in the Daytime” contrasts a frumpy house wife with a glamorous actress she’s dying to meet. The famous star turns out to be a fatuous lush, who hallucinates that the wife is a well-known playwright whose husband deeply loves her. Disillusioned by the encounter, the wife discovers she’s happier than is this potted actress wallowing in self-pity over all the louses in her life. The ending here may be smugly safe but not the way it’s reached.
Kevin Kenneally’s sound design does a fine job of filling in the settings that Sheila McGlinchey’s sets barely convey.
What’s fascinating about Opal’s jottings is her direct response to nature and to adult peculiarities (like the man who wore three ties) and especially the sense they give of someone continually reinventing the world. Her impression of how frost pictures on the window go away too soon feels fresh from the mint. Her favorite horse, William Shakespeare (with whom she loved to converse), dies by going into “a very long sleep.” Writing of the “death song of the great birch tree,” she tells her terror as the future log crashes to the ground. She engages in imaginary, sometimes incoherent, conversations with illustrious secret friends: Queen Eleanor, King Edward, Felix Mendelssohn, Mozart’s sister Nannerl, and Louis II (to whom she builds a shrine).
