The play, for those of you like me who had heard nothing about it before, is about an english professor dying of ovarian cancer -- the whole thing takes place in a hospital during the final 8 weeks of her life and ... it's like you're there, invisible, peering into someone's desperate hours -- a fly on the wall. But what makes it really remarkable is that the protagonist, Vivian Bearing, Ph.D. is not simply desperate -- she's eloquent and witty, and funny and charming and wonderful and every word from her mouth is one you wish you'd thought to use and you love her and you believe in her and you want desperately for her, but you know that she is doomed.
In any event, after the curtain falls, the audience leaps to their feet, thunderous applause, tears streaming down everybody's face, you're just aching to give this woman props for an amazing performance. After long minutes, the noise dies down, the curtain closes, we dry our eyes and hope that somehow we can continue with our lives after having witnessed this.
She yells across the room: "
I freaking kid you not.
They embrace. Susan Giddings gushes over Trillian. I quickly receed into the background as the jabbering lunatic who couldn't say anything comprehensible. Susan says: "So! Trillian! Let's go have a drink!"
And thus I am reduced to the whimpering simpleton I am.
And here's a swamp.