Where Does The Time Go?: We found out today that daylight savings time had ended. We hadn’t even realized it. Our clocks, phones and computers all reset their clocks automatically (which meant that we got up at the “usual” time). My cheap watch that I bought at Spitalfields had stopped because I accidentally wore it into the shower and Judie’s watch was wrong, but we figured that she just hadn’t reset it right after all of the traveling. So we went through the entire day blissfully unaware that the time had changed until it seemed oddly dark at 4:30. Good thing our appliances are more aware than we are.

Intelligent Guides: On Saturday night, we went to see “The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide to Capitalism and Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures” at Hampstead Theatre (where they refer to it as “iHo”). I’ll get to the play in a minute. But the name gave me a bit of a “madeleine moment”. When we were cleaning out things after Everett (my father) had died, we came upon a book entitled “The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism” by George Bernard Shaw. It was clearly my mother’s book and I think it may have been inscribed “Elizabeth Mahoney”. It brought to mind a picture of my mother as a young woman living in Greenwich Village, having just met this interesting young lawyer. She realized what his political leanings were and ran out to buy a book to learn more about socialism (maybe on his recommendation). In my mind, I owe my very existence to Shaw and this book. You may think this is a fantasy of my overactive imagination (and maybe it is), but consider that they kept that book for about sixty years and that my middle name Fabian refers to Shaw’s socialist Fabian Society. I’m just sayin’….

Getting back to the play, it was just a fabulous production. It is written by Tony Kushner. In the interview in the programme, Kushner said he had written this big and complicated play around 2009 and that he has been working on it ever since, assisted by the casts that have performed it. He thinks he is now ready to publish it, which he finds difficult to do, since he has trouble finding his works really finished (he is still fiddling around with the second half Angels in America). The director was Michael Boyd, who was the Artistic Director of the Royal Shakespeare Company for ten years, among other things. The cast was incredible and they had to be to perform this.

It is an impossibly layered play. One one level, it uses the classic Miller/O’Neill/Williams device of gathering a family around a kitchen table and having them tear each other to bits. That part alone would have been a great play. But the play was also about the history of radical Italian-Americans, the American Communist Party, the history of the Labor Movement in America, the 1973 Longshoreman’s strike, the guaranteed annual income that certain longshoremen received to settle the strike, and the future of radicalism and the labor movement. I have probably left out a theme or two, but you can see there was a lot to talk about. And the characters did talk and talk (it’s along play of about three and half hours), often at the same time. Just like a real family they did not take turns and there were often two or more arguments going on simultaneously. It was hard to take it all in. And because this a Tony Kushner play, there was whole other layer added about homosexuality and the difficulty of two of the characters to maintain relationships.

The story is about an imagined family of a real person, Vito Marcantonio, who was a radical Congressman, representing East Harlem until his opposition to the Korean War led to his defeat. At the center of the play is Vito’s fictional nephew Gus, a longshoreman and labor organizer and committed lifetime communist, who was one of the guys who received a guaranteed annual income as a result of the 1973 strike and hadn’t worked (except as an organizer) in the ensuing 30+ years. Gus is living in a now very expensive brownstone (I think in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn) with his sister, a former nun who later went off to work with the Shining Path. Gus has decided he wants to sell the house and kill himself and has called his family together to tell them the news. There is his eldest son Pill, a history teacher living in Minnesota with his long-time husband and who is trying to figure out his relationship with his lover, a male prostitute. The second child is MT, a labor lawyer and lesbian, whose wife is about to have a baby with sperm donated by Vito, the baby of the family, who works as a contractor and has a traditional family. Also wandering through is MT’s ex-husband, who is helping Gus sell the house and a woman who is assisting Gus to kill himself (his earlier attempt to slit his wrists had been unsuccessful). Put that all together, give it a shake and watch it explode. This play was one that hit a lot of buttons for me (besides the mere name, as I discussed above). The fact that the other central character MT was a labor lawyer was one obvious link. And I have met union guys like Gus in my life.

I won’t try to describe this all any further, since it was so complicated with so much going on and so many subplots to follow and thoughts to digest. I found it fascinating. The accents of the British actors were spot on. It never occurred to me that they were anything but New Yorkers. Two particularly stood out: David Calder was just wonderful playing Gus. And Tasmin Grieg was riveting as MT. But the entire cast was terrific. For a play as long and as complicated as it is, the evening seemed to go quickly. The production had an overwhelming momentum, which only let up at the very end, when Gus is trying to decide whether to kill himself.

A great night of theater.