February 17, 2009

An Evening at the Wrong Theater

Bill and I went to the Goodman Theatre on Saturday night to see Brian Dennehy in Desire Under the Elms, which is an interesting production of an interesting play. Which is to say we pretty much hated it.
So anyway, the thing is we got to the theatre and went to our seats - great seats, 3rd row balcony, dead center - and were contentedly reading our Playbill waiting for the production to begin. Another couple came along and oddly enough had tickets for our very seats. We looked at our tickets to see if we'd mis-read our seats but no, we all had the same seats. At first we thought they'd double-booked but then I looked at the date on our tickets and it said February 27th. Last Saturday was February 14th. Turns out we were supposed to be at Steppenwolf instead.
Funny thing was earlier in the evening Bill asked me what the Seafarer was about (the Steppenwolf production) and I told him we weren't seeing that, we were seeing Desire Under the Elms. Hah! It still didn't occur to me to check - I just had it in my head that we were going to the Goodman.

So back at the theater, the curtain was about to go up and we waited in the aisle to see if there were any empty seats and there were so we were able to stay for the show. Dennehy was great, as usual. All the performances were excellent but it's a dark story about dark characters and no one to really root for. And the staging is very bizarre - lots of rocks, some hanging from ropes behind a screen which gives an underwater feel. We never did figure out what that was supposed to signify.
It was an unusual evening of theater for us, in more ways than one.

So, hey, we're free on the 27th now, if you want to do something.

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