December 22, 2021

"A long time ago, I munched on a few handfuls of fetid mushrooms and brought on personal crises of my own design."

"There weren’t many bright colors, but some theretofore unnoticed textural quirks—on clothes, on faces—went wild with deep, scrutinizing, photographic detail. For many hours after those visual effects had faded, I haunted the hallways of my mind, regretting how many memories I’d retained and neuroses I’d cultivated. Mostly, I regretted eating the things at all. Nothing happened that I’d want to put onstage; certainly, nobody sang.... The closest 'Flying Over Sunset' gets to true surreality is when Cary [Grant], a guy with mommy issues who is consumed with masculinity and its meanings, dons a body stocking and a cap and flails around, having become a facsimile of the phallus that possesses so much of his thought and his posture.... The play is based on a groovy idea, but it indulges in the myth that... drugs alone... make for interest."

Writes Vinson Cunningham in "The Bad Trip of 'Flying Over Sunset'/James Lapine’s new musical, at the Vivian Beaumont, sets the LSD hallucinations of three nineteen-fifties celebrities to song" (The New Yorker).

15 comments:

mikee said...

The most fun I had with drugs in college was taking a helium balloon to a party where my college roommate and friends were doing LSD, and welcoming the partygoers to Munchkin Land in a high, squeaky voice. Their inability to process that experience was something to see, sober. Falling down like hammer-struck oxen was the least of their reactions.

That was the night I learned that smoking hash was thought at the time by sophisticated collegiate druggies to help people come down from bad LSD trips, for example, when Munchkins were attacking them. Pro Tip: Hash didn't help them.

Being high is fun. Watching it isn't.

rcocean said...

I never understood the thrill of (1) inhaling fumes of burning tobbaco, MJ, or crack, or (2) sticking a needle in my veins and injecting some weird substance or (3) popping some mind altering pill down my throat.

The idea that some drug trip is going to change your life, or open up new great vistas, or "Blow you mind, man", always struck me as hooey. I'd bet the only people who benefit are those with fucked up brain chemistry and the drugs give them some sort of relief. Lots of writers used to drink because the alcohol treated their Manic-Depression, and I'm sure some people take Cocaine, LSD, Opium/Heroin, or whatever for the same reason. Some of these substances are actually depressives but I assume they still help.

EAB said...

For a more positive review, see Terry Teachout’s in the WSJ. He has quibbles but was overall quite positive.

Joe Smith said...

Do you have to take drugs before you watch?

Tom T. said...

"a guy with mommy issues who is consumed with masculinity and its meanings"

I'm guessing that the author is projecting just a bit.

Tina Trent said...

Sounds dull.

Tina Trent said...

Sounds dull.

Temujin said...

Seriously?

Just some rando on the interwebz said...

Maybe, just maybe, Manchin understands his constituents more that all the journalists writing about him do as well as all the angry out of state angry kayakers.

Ted said...

It's always weird when artists try to convey the experience of being on psychedelic drugs to audiences who (mostly) aren't. On the high (ha) end, you get "Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds"; on the low end, you get dopey '60s movies like "The Trip" and "Psych-Out."(And eventually, it trickles down into something more pedestrian and entertaining, like the Monkees TV series.)

Narr said...

Music (especially live), food, and sex are enhanced for me by a light alcohol buzz, or better yet, a cannabis high.

I watched other people take chances with uppers, downers, psychedelics, and who knows what, injected straight into the temple, but only through college.

Lurker21 said...

The musical is a fictional account of a meeting between Aldous Huxley, Clare Boothe Luce and Cary Grant, who all used the drug LSD.

Taking LSD may have been the only thing all three of them had in common, but it was probably the dullest thing about them.

But I'd imagine James Lapine's had a tough few years, what with everybody getting him confused with James Levine of Me Too fame.

rcocean said...

Normally people writing about their dreams and drug trips are boring. Your own dreams are incredibly fascinating, but it loses something in the telling because other people's dreams are a conversation stopper.

Anonymous said...

I'm thinking that either the quantity of mushrooms this fellow consumed, or the concentration of psilocybin and psilocin within, was insufficient to produce the effects that most people report. I recall the "theological" dose I unknowingly took as one of the two or three most bizarre and memorable experiences of my life. One of those things that I have no desire to repeat, but I'm kind of glad I did it to see what it was all about.

At the time it seemed like the most profound journey into the mind of God that a human being could take. With the benefit of hindsight, and some professional knowledge of the biochemistry involved, and contemplation of the effect of mind-altering drugs on others I have known, it truly turns out to have been a gigantic waste of time. And although there is no known lethal dose, they are not risk-free. The hallucinations and delusions these substances invoke pose a grave danger to the mentally unstable, depressed, or foolhardy, or perhaps to the people around them.

I still have enough of the libertarian in me to think the magic mushrooms should not be illegal, but those who think eternal truths are to be found in jimmying the serotonin-receptor lock are bound to find only unhappiness and degeneracy.

tim in vermont said...

"I'm guessing that the author is projecting just a bit."

There is a documentary out based on Cary Grant's memoire, and no, the guy is not projecting.