Day 56: We Intellectual-ise, somewhere Off Broadway.

Pictured: A deconstructed sfogliatella. Less palatable than the evening's intellectualising.

Today my manager told me what I already knew. Sigh. I and others attempted to protest and it was interpreted as acquiescence. But then again, it's not like there's choice involved. Sigh again. Don't worry, I haven't been fired. I just like to be cryptic.

Anyway, on to better things. I had spotted this play that looked pretty interesting and so the other marsupials and I had talked of going. But things as they are, we didn't make any advance plans. Be that as it may, fatigue, colds, and lastminutenessbeingadangerincrowdedmanhattanness notwithstanding, the Atomic Squid and I set out undaunted into that tall, noisy, crowded Midtown.

The play we were to attend was in the Workshop Theatre, a small blackbox theatre on the 4th floor of some downtown building, not far from Madison Square Garden. It's a pretty cool place -- they carry productions through the initial workshop-scripty stages to the final production, with support at all levels, hence the name. Also it was the first indie-ish thing I've seen in Manhattan, in shiny corporate Midtown especially. It reminded me very much of small theatres in Vancouver, except of course the not-having-any-connections part :P

When we got there they weren't sure there would be tickets available, so we put our names on a waiting list and tried our luck. We figured it wouldn't be time wasted anyway since the people watching was quite fun - arty types, society types, grubby student types (we counted ourselves among the latter, at least we looked like them). In the end we did get seated and popped into the theatre just as the show started.

Intellectuals was a highly entertaining screwball comedy type thingo that played with a bunch of stereotypes. The basic premise is that a woman decides to leave her longstanding marriage and "become a lesbian", with hijinks galore following from there. Think Midsummer's Night's Dream after Puck's spell. We did feel that the play lacked a bit of heart - as the A.S. pointed out, it was very mannered, which worked extremely well in the funny bits, but was a bit less convincing in the serious parts. In addition, the supporting characters were extremely well done and the leads perhaps a little less so. However, there were one-liners galore, including some references to Canadian filmmaking that left me especially happy, and we spent most of the 2 hours chortling away. An excellent venture into the wild world of New York theatre.

Then we popped down to the East Village for a quick bowl of ramen and a dissection of the evening before heading back to Brooklyn, home, and bed.