The Last Vanishing Man and Other Stories by Matthew Cheney

Author:Matthew Cheney [Cheney, Matthew]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

WILD LONGING

Early in my time as a college student in New York City during the final years of the 20th century, I saw Oscar Wilde’s play The Importance of Being Earnest performed by a small theatre troupe in a loft somewhere in Tribeca. Aspiring to be a playwright, I attended at least a hundred shows during those years, and have forgotten most of them; this particular production remains vivid in my memory now, decades later, because it stripped away my commitment to artifice while also revealing the impossibility of escape. I knew Earnest well, having performed the role of Algernon in a high school production, and it was during rehearsals that I first admitted to anyone (tentatively, obliquely) that my own desires were of the Oscar Wilde type. Aside from my high school experience, I had never seen a performance of the play, and so I attended the one in Tribeca enthusiastically, but also with assumptions and expectations not only of what I was about to see, but also what I should see. I found the show via a listing in New York Press, a free weekly newspaper that in those years had the most comprehensive schedules of far-off-Broadway plays. Until I arrived, I did not know the play was being performed as a showcase production in a loft space (one that hadn’t yet found a more permanent resident) rather than as a full production in an actual theatre. For a contemporary play, this would not have bothered me, as I was then a devotee of both Samuel Beckett’s sparse stages and Jerzy Grotowski’s manifesto of minimalism, Towards a Poor Theatre. But Wilde, I firmly believed, ought to be extravagant. The sets must be meticulous representations of the late Victorian era, the costumes must take the actors at least half an hour to assemble onto their bodies, and I would not have objected to a theatre space decorated with plentiful and aggressively aromatic flowers. Anything else was certain to be boring and likely to be homophobic.

Sitting down on a folding metal chair among no more than fifty other such chairs and perhaps ten audience members, I stared with unconcealed disdain at the playing area in front of us, a wide, narrow space backed by massive windows, the whole decorated only with large cream-colored curtains and a few painted wooden blocks for furniture. When the actors appeared, I probably gasped. They all wore t-shirts and jeans, with the t-shirts each a different color to help us distinguish between the characters. When they spoke, they spoke simply, they did not declaim, they did not recite, they did not demonstrate extraordinary ennunciation, and, worst of all, their accents were American. In the first five minutes, I was overwhelmed by righteous fury and something resembling panic, as if what I was watching was not just bad but harmful. But my curiosity was (only semi-consciously) piqued, and I did not leave, and within fifteen minutes I was entranced, suspecting something that, by the end of

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