Wall Street Journal arts critic Kyle Smith, in a snit, jotted down a disturbing experience he endured earlier this month at the Palace Theatre, on hand to see David Mamet’s well-known, and superb, Glengarry Glen Ross. I’d like to see it, as my son did on opening night, although the jovial actor Kieran Culkin playing Ricky Roma—it’s hard to forget Al Pacino’s turn as Roma in the 1992 film adaptation, a box-office dud—seems off.
Just behind Smith at the play was a man, ignoring the rules, loudly eating a bag of nuts. The critic said the “gentleman’s” crunching and munching, was “an assault, an insult, a perversion,” and drowned out Mamet’s “finely tuned dialogue,” a reasonable complaint. (I’ve attended dozens of Broadway and Off-Broadway performances and can’t recall a single such “perversion,” but don’t doubt Smith’s account.)
But he couldn’t let go, concluding with this condescending remark, which is as boorish as the slob eating nuts. He writes: “Our friends from out of town may not be aware of the distinction, but going to a movie and going to a play carry very different expectations along with those very different price tags. At the movies, where there is a loud musical score and often a shootout, alien invasion or dinosaur rampage, no one can hear you munching.”
Non-residents of NYC are rubes!
It reminded me of an awkward conversation in Baltimore in 1975 when a college acquaintance of mine, hosting a party on St. Paul St., and attempting to make time with a woman, took out a Coltrane record and said, “This is jazz. It’s different from what you’re used to.” Holy mackerel, I thought, that’s not a grade-A pickup line! I left soon after, so never found out what happened, but I hope the lady made her excuses in quick order.
•••
She’s no David Mamet, but I found Alison Espach’s 2024 novel The Wedding People unexpectedly entertaining. Can’t remember where I picked it up, maybe the local Barnes & Noble, Atomic Books or a random Amazon recommendation, but the “New York Times bestseller” (whatever that means today, I couldn’t find out how many copies it sold) held my interest for the duration of its 384 pages.
In short: protagonist Phoebe Stone, nearing 40 and a depressed and cerebral professor from St. Louis, dumped by her tightly-wound husband not long after a fifth IVF treatment failed, says fuck it to her small, meticulously-ordered life and flies to the ritzy Cornwall Inn in Newport, Rhode Island, intent on having one luxurious night before killing herself. She had no idea that the hotel was overrun for a week-long wedding celebration of the wealthy, very funny but badly-educated 28-year-old Lila, who’s getting married because she doesn’t know what else to do, to a similarly reluctant man named Gary, a widower who can’t let go of his late wife, and has difficulty relating to his precocious 12-year-old daughter “Juice.”
Phoebe, liberated from her rules-abiding Midwest life, becomes fast friends with Lila, doesn’t kill herself, and, one night in a hot tub asks the man next to her, “Do you want to fuck?” Naturally, the startled but curious fellow is the groom-to-be, and he politely declines, leaving newly-minted party girl Phoebe to go back to her room, drink a lot of wine and lose herself, happily, in the bed’s coconut-infused pillows. What follows in the week is a series of improbable, silly, and sometimes thought-provoking madcap adventures in which Phoebe, for the first time in her life, is the center of attention, attending to the psychological needs of a dozen characters or so, applying her expertise in Victorian literature.
One excerpt cracked me up: “Phoebe hates the word fun. Phoebe thinks that if people could just stop using the word fun, stop expecting everything to be fun, everything could be fun again. She was exhausted by her husband’s insistence that everything should be fun.”
On the off-chance you give The Wedding People a whirl, I’ll stop there, but give the novel my irrelevant, but enthusiastic, approval.
The semi-far-out picture above is of my son Booker posing for his pre-digital shutterbug dad on the roof of our condo in Tribeca many years ago. He’s currently reading biographies of Helen Frankenthaler and Calvin Coolidge, and might consider The Wedding People a “beach read,” which it isn’t, but that’s okay. Besides, his “Sultans of Swag” fantasy baseball team is off to a dreadful start, and I wouldn’t dare send a lightning bolt to his abode in NYC.
Take a look at the clues to figure out the year: The Washington Post’s Katherine Boo wins a Pulitzer Prize for “public service”; report on North Wales child abuse scandal is published; Winston Churchill statue in Parliament Square is smeared with graffiti; Robert P. Parker’s Hugger Mugger and Zadie Smith’s White Teeth are published; Dennis Hastert is House Speaker; Ice Spice is born and Walter Matthau dies; Walt Disney’s Dinosaur is released; Montgomery Ward announces it’s going out of business after 128 years; Bill Clinton is the first U.S. president to visit Vietnam; Sweden wins the World Floorball championship; Tiger Woods wins the British Open; and Metallica files a lawsuit against Napster.
—Follow Russ Smith on Twitter: @MUGGER2023