nharcolepsy and irony

Saturday, sep. 13, 2003   |   0 comments

Gene‘s in town, and Thursday night I made him go with me to see this play, Nharcolepsy, at the SF Fringe Festival. It is co-written and co-starring a friend of mine from high school, Richard Harrington, whom I haven’t espied in over fifteen years, so the whole event was a bit of an X factor — that Gene , so game! But the play turned out to be really good! Funny! Insightful and dear!

The plot is kind of beside the point, but in brief it’s a heartwarming tale about two men freezing to death at the north pole. Describing it beyond that would only diffuse the delight of it, I think — you just need to trust me (close your eyes and let go, I will catch you) and see it yourself.

One added comic bonus: Thanks to this globally warmed heat wave we’re cooking our way through here in San Francisco, it was well over ninety degrees in the theater and I was sticking together just sitting there, carefully motionless in the audience. So feature how much, much hotter they were up on the stage, dancing under the lights in wool cap and yeti vest. So as their characters’ temperatures ostensibly dropped below 25 degrees Celsius, sweat poured and dripped from every pore of the poor actors’ bodies. Which, I think, is ironic? I don’t know, though. My grip on irony seems to have loosened considerably as of late. Perhaps a keen sense of irony can be harnessed only by teenagers or late-blooming twenty-somethings? Or, more specifically, perhaps as you age you realize that the ability to define or even identify irony with any concreteness is lot more complicated than you once thought? Or maybe it’s just a Canadian thing.