Painting You (William Finn) and Waiting for Philip Glass (Wendy Wasserstein)

With these final two pieces we’ve reached the end of Love’s Fire a night of theater based off Shakespearean Sonnets which, from my vantage point, is not as exciting as it could have been.

Then again, I’m looking for humor, and not everyone wants to supply that.

Arguably these two authors, William Finn and Wendy Wasserstein, are the ones I’m most aware of (with the exception of Tony Kushner,) and their styles are much more similar to mine.

William Finn decides to produce his work as a song, which does make it difficult to parse (at least for me.) It’s a short piece, barely two pages of lyrics, describing the… woe? acceptance? nonchalance? of a painter presented with painting his subject/lover. He finds that he is much less able to do so than he was when they began their relationship.

I’ve said before that Tuesdays are hard for understanding because I get so little sleep, and today I was challenged (though pleasantly so) to understand the why of what’s happening. The painter has lost objectivity, and although he likes the relationship that has caused this he is worried about the loss of identity and nuance that comes from being able to ply his trade.

It is the best that it can be, I think: evocative, simple, elegant, and I think it would gain much from the staging.

Wasserstein’s Waiting for Philip Glass is something else altogether. A wealthy person throws a party for other wealthy people so they can appreciate, support, and hobknob with Philip Glass. Over the course of the short play people enter and exit, often being snarky about whomever has just left the room, and being frankly disgusting with the level of wealth “pop over to Spain to see the opening in Bilbao” is a sentiment expressed multiple times.

It eventually settles into a tense conversation between two ex-lovers (the host and a guest) and their shared disappointment over what happened, and their shared disapproval of their ex-partners’ new partner.

I loved every moment of the piece, but it felt like it didn’t resolve into anything, as though it were always right on the cusp of making its point, but in the end perhaps all it wanted to do was show something true and not comment on it (which historically makes me crazy, but I’m growing peaceful with that lately.)

At the end of the day Love’s Fire is a night of theater which doesn’t ignite anything in me, and I think it shows the limitations of an anthology by several writers: in the absence of a cohesive vision each writer looks to their bag of tricks which makes everything stand out, but rarely gel.

If my barometer for what makes a good sketch show is akin to a cubist painting: we have one subject (in this case romantic love) looked at from many different perspectives. In this collection we see jealousy, ecstasy, change, and neurosis, but I couldn’t say I’ve walked away from the collection with any new thoughts on the subject and so I think it is something of a let down.