Saw two amazing plays this past weekend. I need to start with FALSETTOS, which I had seen over thirty years ago-off-Broadway, and as two separate plays. Lincoln Center theater decided to combine the two pieces and create one longer work, which celebrates love in the time of AIDS. Given its historic context, I had feared that the play would not be as relevant. The play was revolutionary in its time, with its focus on one Jewish family where the father leaves to start a relationship with a man, but his partner becomes part of one big, extended family. The concept of family not necessarily being those biologically related and learning to open up your mind and heart are just as relevant today as they were decades ago, for a different reason. Now our world is so divisive, that it is always crucial to realize love still matters, even when a family is split apart. And the children, somehow, survive when that love is significant in the equation.
The other play, KINGDOM COME, is at the Roundabout Theater Company, and is about love, but also loneliness. Two lonely women, cut off from the world for different reasons, form an online attachment, and grow extraordinary close, but with fictional identities. This is a story about alienation, affection, despair, but also happiness-how everyone exists in her own world with so much painful longing. It is poignant, funny, tragic and so well-acted. I laughed and cried and it always felt authentic, real in a way only good dramatic theater can be!
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