I went back to see the APT production of "The Chairs" again.

Hard to get tickets at this point, but go here. It's not impossible. What a fantastic performance! I don't know that I've ever heard a more enthusiastic standing ovation.

How often have you gone back to see the same theatrical production? I can only think of 2 other occasions, both in this theater (the indoor theater at APT). 

"Is that a fake fight? I find it hard to believe Tom Brady would just hit a guy."

I say, reacting to this, which X pushed at me this morning:

TOM BRADY AND LOGAN PAUL ALMOST THREW HANDS AT FANATICS FEST

👀🍿 pic.twitter.com/mks597nXn0

— FADE (@FadeAwayMedia) July 17, 2026

I was using the Grok fact check. I was told, "It's a genuine onstage slap" that might be "real emotion mixed with promotional flair, not a fully scripted WWE-style fake fight."

My next 3 prompts were: 1. "Arrest Brady," and 2. "If that doesn't deserve arrest then it's bullshit theater and we shouldn't be duped into paying attention," 3. "It was put in my X sidebar, like it's supposed to matter to me. I don't want to be used like that."

Grok told me: "X's algorithm surfaces high-engagement viral clips like this Brady-Paul moment to boost time-on-site, as fights, celebs, and drama reliably drive views, likes, and comments regardless of personal relevance." It advised me to mute keywords like "Fanatics Fest," which opened up a window on how awful entertainment is these days. "Fanatics" doesn't refer to the fans, but to a sports licensing company that stages events "to monetize collector hype and direct-to-consumer sales."

Why would X's algorithm prompt me to look at that, and more importantly, why does entertainment suck these days?

An overabundance of furniture.

On Wednesday, I saw the APT production of "The Chairs," which involved dragging an ever-increasing number of chairs into a surrealistic environment...

Then, on Friday, I went to the movies for the first time in over a year, to see "The Backrooms," and it too involved a piling up of furniture in a surrealistic environment....

It's a bit much. A bit meta. Seemingly separate surrealisms are converging. In one week, I'm seeing 2 things playing out so similarly, and I can't think of any other play/movie where the furniture was so important. I didn't set out to experience plentitudinous furniture.

Watching both the the play and the movie and thinking about them afterwards, I thought a lot about whether we were supposed to think of the place as a fantastical external environment that contained the characters or whether it was a depiction of the deteriorating state of a character's mind. 

"I have a message, that's God's truth, I struggle, a mission, I have something to say, a message to communicate to humanity, to mankind"/"To mankind, my darling, your message!"

Said the old man and the old woman in Eugene Ionesco's absurdist play "The Chairs," which we saw last night at American Players' Theater — "A Comedy About the End of It All."

We settled into our chairs before the crowd arrived, and the 93-minute play is about a crowd arriving and settling into the many many chairs dragged onto the stage by the old woman:

Be a mermaid.

We drove out to Spring Green last night to catch the American Player's Theater production of Chekhov's "Uncle Vanya."

It was 90°, but the sun was setting and there was a breeze. There were also about 100 women waving fans for the entire 3 hours, even after it got dark and cooled down. Just the idea of the heat is hard to take if that's what's stuck in your head.

We got to our seats a half hour early, and I used my time well by reading the beginning of the play, in the translation I blogged about yesterday. It was $16 in the (air conditioned) gift shop.

The play has 8 characters — 4 male, 4 female — and it's good to know in advance how they all relate to each other. It's hard to put the pieces together on the fly, listening in real time to the actors, who, by the way, did a great job even as they were bundled in heavy costumes, often huddling inside blankets.

Uncle Vanya is only the uncle to one person

"The performance turned out to be a string of gags about Bankman-Fried’s and Diddy’s sins that largely spared Mangione of the worst ridicule."

"It instead featured running jokes about how parts of the internet find him attractive, while the titular character is gifted love ballads, literally and metaphorically. His cast members call him a 'prodigy' and a 'legend.' His response: 'I’m not a celebrity. I’m just a normal, exceedingly handsome guy. To make matters worse, they all sing...."

From "'Luigi: The Musical' is a fever dream from hell/The show isn’t meant to 'glorify violence,' but it does. The protesters outside, meanwhile, think it doesn’t go far enough" (WaPo)(gift link).

"The musical has a bare-bones plot, practically no choreography and nothing in the way of a set apart from a couple of chairs and one prop, a gun. All that could be forgiven in a staged reading, but what is glaringly absent is any serious mention of [Brian] Thompson’s name or the wife and two sons he left behind. It’s clear the show’s creators think they have tapped into some profound observation of the nihilistic trends running through today’s culture: our numb responses to mass violence, the disintegration of societal trust. 'What kind of sick f---- would buy tickets to something like that?,' the characters lament onstage about the musical, in what’s meant to be a self-critical, meta moment...."

"In 1968, Janet Malcolm visited a new showroom for high-end furniture that was, she wrote, among 'the most beautiful and interesting' in New York."

"The venue was designed by Warren Platner, an architect who himself designed furniture; Donald Trump would later acquire a set of his chairs, and sounded gratified when, during an interview in 2010, a reporter from the Times recognized them. Platner’s son, Bronson, went into law, in Maine; his son Graham studied at Hotchkiss, a tony boarding school in Connecticut, though he hated it, skipped classes, and was quickly kicked out. Graham transferred to a different private school closer to home, where he starred in a production of 'My Fair Lady.' He played Henry Higgins, the haughty phonetician who teaches a lower-class flower girl to speak proper...."

Those are the opening lines of an essay by Jon Allsop titled "The Changing Face of 'Authenticity' in Politics/What Graham Platner’s scandal-plagued Senate run says about a tired cliché" (The New Yorker).

Here's how Platner entered the political arena, last summer:

Allsop ponders "authenticity":

"Because the beauty of the less-than-an-hour show is that it ends before 10. You can get a drink or even dinner or hustle home..."

"... in time to watch James Austin Johnson do his Donald Trump in the SNL cold open. Or just go to bed early...."

Writes Geoff Edgers, in "Very short concerts aren’t a scam. They’re brilliant. Lily Allen’s shows of under an hour have drawn some backlash. But many fans are content to go home early" (WaPo).

"'She’s offering something different — and I’m paying to see that.' It was a special show, reminding me more of a play than a pop concert. Allen delivered a performance as the scorned wife that was both heartbreaking (the contemplation of pills and drink) and defiant (one performance delivered in lingerie and heels). At one point, she’s wrapped in the 'revenge dress,' a length of green fabric printed with what’s said to be images of receipts she found documenting what her ex spent on other women. Even without a band, I found some of the songs coming alive in a way they didn’t on the record...."

From the comments over there: "150-250 bucks with no supporting musicians to pay? Just vain costume changes? 60 minutes? That's hubris. Nothing more."

"Méliès... filmed ordinary scenes at first, but after accidentally discovering that a jump cut appeared on film as an astonishing transformation..."

"... he pioneered other tricks such as double exposure, black screens and forced perspective. All of these became staples of cinema. On screen, he could make a man appear to take off his head and flip it in the air, or a woman disappear, reappear and double.... Méliès made more than 500 films but never progressed beyond his early technical achievements. The film world passed him by. In World War I, the negatives for most of his films were melted down for silver and celluloid, and he burned more himself after the war. But because his work had once been so popular – and because of widespread pirating – duplicate copies remained, and today about 300 of his films are known to exist. The Library has about 60...."

I'm reading "Lost 19th century film by Méliès discovered at the Library" (Library of Congress).

And here is that amazing 45-second film from 1897 — "Gugusse and the Automaton" — with its delightful jump cuts:

That is, the Library of Congress tells us, "was the first appearance on film of what might be called a robot." That words "might be called" may be there to fend off pedants who will say the word "robot" did not exist until 1920. It comes from a Karel Čapek play titled "R.U.R.: Rossum's Universal Robots" — an etymological detail well known to solvers of crossword puzzles. 

The word "automaton" — used in the Méliès film title — goes back to the 1600s. There's an essay from 1616 with the line, "The soule doth quicken and giue life to the body, the body like an Automaton, doth moue and carry it selfe and the soule."

The quote seems to expect the reader already to have a picture of an automaton. What is that picture? Mechanical toys? Elaborate clocks like the Prague Astronomical Clock (built in 1410)?

Maybe you thought "Gugusse and the Automaton" was — compared to the CGI action movies of today — rather dumb and dull!

And maybe you've journeyed to Prague only to be disappointed by their stupid clock... or were you disappointed by all the tourists wrecking the medieval mood with their disappointment?

"Do you think people are too mean to the clock?"

"I was thrilled by its truthfulness. It stuck with me for the rest of my life. And I’d still swear by that. I felt, 'This is true. Everything else is fake. This is really what’s going on.'"

Said Wallace Shawn, about the Eugene O’Neill play "Long Day’s Journey Into Night," which he saw when he was 13 in 1956.

Quoted in "Is Wallace Shawn the Only Avant-Garde Artist Who Gets Stopped in Times Square? He’s most commonly recognized for his screen roles as a plotting hit man and an unlikely Lothario, but it’s his work as a playwright that shows more of his true self" (NYT)(gift link, because the article is long and there's a lot going on, including the way strangers are always exclaiming "Inconceivable!" at him).

Unlike many of his characters, Shawn speaks slowly and with many pauses in the service of sentences that ultimately emerge perfectly formed. He is also polite and courtly and at great pains not to offend, so much so that one fears inadvertently violating whatever code of etiquette is obviously almost sacred to him. So private that he asked me not to reveal what he ate throughout our meetings, he nonetheless has written a play whose broad outlines, and even some poignant details, are flagrantly autobiographical....

The new play is "Moth Days." There's also a new production of his older play "The Fever." And you don't have to tell me, Althouse, you should go to New York and see both plays. I haven't traveled in years.

ADDED: The full title of the play is "What We Did Before Our Moth Days." According to the linked article, "Moth Days" are "those fluttery, flyaway moments before death, as one of the characters imagines them." Poetically, "moth" calls to mind mother... and also that Yeats line, "And when white moths were on the wing/And moth-like stars were flickering out...."

"He props his smartphone against a pile of books and adjusts the settings so the screen won’t go dark. He sets a timer. Then he waits."

"Eyes closed, Samuel A. Simon traces his breath from his ankles up through his chest, checking in with each part of his 80-year-old body before he begins. A purple binder holding a play script rests in his hands; the opening lines come from memory. Midway through, he falters. 'I’m getting all over the place,' he mutters, flipping a page. He finds his spot, then continues. Simon was diagnosed with early-stage Alzheimer’s disease in 2022. As his memory has grown less reliable, he has turned his experience with the disease into a one-man play, 'Dementia Man: An Existential Journey,' performing it publicly as a way to hold on to a sense of self.... Remembering one’s lines before a live audience is daunting — even without a disease that steadily erodes memory. Simon has chosen to take on that challenge anyway. For nearly three years, he has performed 'Dementia Man' in small theaters and public libraries across the country...."

From "He’s telling his story onstage even as Alzheimer’s takes his memories/Samuel A. Simon, a former public interest lawyer who worked with Ralph Nader, performs his 'Dementia Man' play to help himself and others come to terms with Alzheimer’s disease" (WaPo).

"Now the senator came down here/Showing ev’ryone his gun/Handing out free tickets/To the wedding of his son."

"An’ me, I nearly got busted/An’ wouldn’t it be my luck/To get caught without a ticket/And be discovered beneath a truck...."

Sang Bob Dylan, in his most-Bob-Dylan song, "Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again."

I'm just trying to read The New York Times* and the headline is "Handing Out Free Tickets, Mamdani Says Theater Should Not Be 'a Luxury.'"

What's with these politicians handing out free tickets? I'm suspicious, but maybe the mayor's just flaky, pie-in-the-sky.

“The shared laughter in a crowded theater, the eager debrief after a musical, the heavy silence that hangs over all of us in a drama — these are moments that every New Yorker deserves,” Mamdani said later, explaining the initiative during a news conference at one of the festival’s venues, Brooklyn College’s Leonard and Claire Tow Center for the Performing Arts.

That quote is wild. What man of the people would say "the eager debrief after a musical"? He seems like more of a poet... an abstruse poet. 

There was once a country ruled by a poet. It was Václav Havel, the last president of Czechoslovakia. 

_________________________________

* If you're with me in Bob Dylandom, you just thought "shoot a few holes, blow their minds." But I don't like seeing those words today, in the shadow of the killing of Renee Good, and there they are along with "showing ev’ryone his gun" and "discovered beneath a truck" — truck ≈ SUV.

"'The Bed' consisted of two handsome young men in white boxers sitting on a bed about the size of Cino’s small theater and discussing their feelings of aimlessness."

"The script was less than 15 pages, but the play lasted for more than half an hour because of many extended pauses. The same upbeat rock song, Dave Clark Five’s 'Anyway You Want It,' played twice all the way through, with the actors onstage incongruously silent. The Village Voice wrote wonderingly that the play 'achieves its most alive moments in complete stasis.'"

From "Robert Heide, Daring Playwright and Warhol Collaborator, Dies at 91/He helped create the Off Off Broadway theater scene, wrote and acted in Andy Warhol’s films, and turned his fascination with collectible Americana into books" (NYT).

That production of "The Bed" took place in 1965.

The New Yorker now has its entire 100-year archive digitized and on line.

You can get into everything starting here. I guess you need a subscription, but I have a subscription. I impulsively clicked into the year 1967 because I love 1967, and then into November 11, because I love Saul Steinberg:

But that's not the only Steinberg cover for 1967. There are at least 6 more! But don't get distracted.

"Facing down this digital firehose of – pardon the Silicon Valleyese – 'content,' how does Hollywood now decide what merits a cinema release?"

"Facing down this digital firehose of – pardon the Silicon Valleyese – 'content,' how does Hollywood now decide what merits a cinema release? What executives are looking for – at least at Sony, according to one of its partner producers I spoke with recently – is 'theatricality.' By that term, the company means films with 'the urgency to get people to leave the comfort of their homes, he says. Working out what urgency – or 'theatrical intent,' to use the marketing lingo – means is the current Hollywood obsession. Tom Cruise, for instance, interprets urgency literally – banking on personal peril in the form of old-fashioned, non-CGI stunt work to pack in the punters. It worked for 2022’s Top Gun: Maverick.... His proselytisation of real thrills in real cinemas is one way of defining theatricality – though the danger is the approach relies only on fading muscle memory of blockbusters past...."

I'm reading "All hail Avatar! How event movies are trying to bring back the box office blockbuster/Ahead of James Cameron’s latest Avatar sequel hitting the big screen, we look at how studios aim for ‘theatricality’ to get streaming film fans from sofa to cinema" (The Guardian). 

From the depth of my memory came a question that sounds like an entry for a new Dictionary of Received Ideas: Who was that French theorist who said theater must be spectacle? I believe he died putting on his shoes.

Such raw thoughts are — I think — good AI prompts. I immediately had the name: Antonin Artaud. Here's his Wikipedia article. He wrote a manifesto about what he called the Theatre of Cruelty. Here's a Grok-made chart to help you compare him to the Hollywood execs:

"I write fiction because it’s a way of making statements I can disown, and I write plays because dialogue is the most respectable way of contradicting myself."

Said Tom Stoppard, quoted in "Sir Tom Stoppard obituary: playful and prolific playwright/A popular and exotic figure, Stoppard was known for his dandyish appearance as well as his wit and eloquence" (London Times).

Goodbye to a great playwright. Stoppard was 88. We were blown away when we saw "Travesties" at the American Players Theater a few years ago.

[In] Travesties (1975)... Lenin, the Dadaist Tristan Tzara and James Joyce meet in Zurich during the First World War and become involved in a production of The Importance of Being Earnest.

APT also produced "The Importance of Being Earnest," so we took that in, then returned to see "Travesties" again. I think that may have been the best theatrical production I've seen in my entire life. 
 

I've also seen "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead" (based on "Hamlet") and "Arcadia," both at APT. And I saw his last play "Leopoldstadt," in New York City. If you click on my "Tom Stoppard" tag you'll see what I think are some interesting details. 

"[T]he character of Mr. Obama, played by T.J. Wilkins, is the near-perfect embodiment of the American ideal — a noble, caring patriot who could catch a beat."

"(The only character more perfect, it goes without saying, is Michelle.) Part revival meeting, part endangered species preserve for normie Democrats who can afford theater tickets, by the end, the show prompted audience members to put their hands in the air. I was less ecstatic...."

Writes David Litt about a "Hamilton"-like theater production about Obama, in "The New Obama Musical Made Me Feel Old" (NYT).

As the headline suggests, Litt, a former speechwriter for Obama, goes on and on about himself, which makes me assume the play isn't much of a play. It's no "Hamilton"... and it actually begins with an announcement "This is not 'Hamilton.'" The name of the new musical is "44: The Musical."

I was a bit taken aback by "a noble, caring patriot who could catch a beat." I think "could catch a beat" means about the same thing as "had rhythm." That's a stereotype about black people that sophisticated people learned to stop vocalizing back in the 1970s.

Litt continues: "While I’m not proud to admit it, watching Mr. Obama receive the cherry-tree treatment awakened my inner curmudgeon.... 'This was so much more difficult than you make it look!' I inwardly grumped...." I'm not sure what "cherry-tree treatment" is supposed to mean. Treated like a legendary hero (George Washington)? That would make me grumpy too... except it wouldn't because I can see from a thousand miles away this show is not for me. It's hard to understand Litt, a person who would go to this show but is nevertheless displeased.

"Sparked by a 2022 Twitter commenter who asserted that 'Yeah, Anne Frank had white privilege,' it reimagines Anne as 'Anita' — a pansexual Latina hiding from the Nazis..."

"... in a radically inclusive attic with her militant black mother, her neurodiverse father and assorted other disordered personalities.... For Peter, Anita’s love interest, the real challenge isn’t evading the Nazis; it’s daring to live your authentic self. Before coming out as non-binary, he laments to Anita: 'Outside, they’re fighting a war, but in here, I’m fighting expectations!'.... [T]he show’s real target isn’t Jews (or Nazis, for that matter) but the performative politics that have come to infect so much of cultural life...."

From "Inside Slam Frank — the ‘offensive’ Holocaust musical that could save Broadway/A show has turned the tragedy of Anne Frank into an ‘inclusive’ commentary on wokeness. And New York City audiences can’t get enough" (London Times).

And here's the review at Forward: "The new Anne Frank musical wants you to laugh at ‘woke culture’ — but is it funny? In ‘Slam Frank,’ it’s hard to tell who’s in on the joke and who is just…in it":

"There is no customary tree as part of the scenery, for one thing, and no country road. This Didi and Gogo while away their endless days inside a kind of tapering tunnel..."

"... that has an enormous gaping mouth at the downstage end, where they perch on its lip, nice and close to the orchestra seats. Visually striking spareness is a hallmark of [director Jamie] Lloyd’s work.... What’s curious in 'Waiting for Godot' is that the textual distillation we have come to expect from Lloyd is largely missing.... [H]e doesn’t seem to have anything to say. That’s disappointing on its own, because the play needs strong directorial focus to land with any force, but particularly so at a time when surely a good chunk of the populace could identify with Didi and Gogo’s sense of exhaustion, futility and despair in the face of a relentlessly brutal world.... This Didi and Gogo speak the words, but without the weight and meaning of the thoughts they have thought countless times before...."

Writes NYT theater critic Laura Collins-Hughes, in "'Waiting for Godot' Review: Cue the Air Guitar/Jamie Lloyd’s pristinely chic Broadway revival of the existential tragicomedy casts the 'Bill & Ted' stars Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter as Samuel Beckett’s clowns" (NYT).

The idea here was to have Bill and Ted play the Didi and Gogo in "Waiting for Godot," and won't fans pack the theater to see that? Isn't that how things are done on Broadway these days? I have a sense of exhaustion, futility and despair in the face of that relentlessly brutal world.

Anyway, here's the painting — "Two Men Contemplating the Moon" — that Beckett said inspired him to write the play:

Is it hard to accept a tunnel instead of a tree and the the moon? A tunnel is sort of like a moonscape, what with the light at the end of it — moonish, no?

Here's that photo I took last March that made me think of a "Godot" set:

And here's one Meade sent me from Presque Isle 2 months later:

The tree is important!

"Broadway is not a business anymore. The statistics are terrible. I am very worried. I look at the economics of this, and I just don’t see how it can sustain."

Said Andrew Lloyd Webber, quoted in "The Broadway Musical Is in Trouble/With the cost of staging song-and-dance spectacles skyrocketing and audiences drawn to older hits, none of the musicals that opened last season have made a profit. Fewer are planned this season" (NYT).

The new musicals “Tammy Faye,” “Boop!” and “Smash” each cost at least $20 million to bring to the stage, and each was gone less than four months after opening. All three lost their entire investments. Lavish revivals of much-loved classics are also fizzling. On Sunday, a revival of “Cabaret,” budgeted for up to $26 million and featuring a costly conversion of a Broadway theater into a nightclub-like setting, threw in the towel at a total loss. A $19.5 million revival of “Gypsy” that starred Audra McDonald and earned strong reviews closed last month without recouping its investment. Even a buzzy production of “Sunset Boulevard,” which won this year’s Tony for best musical revival, failed to make back the $15 million it cost to mount.

Is every new show about one nutty lady?!

"Smash" was about Marilyn Monroe. "Boop" was about Betty Boop as you can probably guess. The rest of the shows named there are all about one central strong weird woman — all from more than a half century ago. It's quite unfresh! Why were they expected to succeed? Maybe because they think their audience is a bunch of old ladies. Of course, they want to see Audra McDonald as Mama Rose. 

One Broadway investor, James L. Walker Jr. of Atlanta, is so frustrated by the current economics that he’s litigating. After putting $50,000 into the “Cabaret” revival, he filed suit against the producers, alleging fraud. In an interview, Walker pointed out that the show has grossed nearly $90 million in ticket sales, plus whatever it made in sales of liquor, food and merchandise, and that he can’t accept that the investors who raised up to $26 million to finance the show have gotten nothing back. “How is that a good business model?” he asked.