after a walk.....

On the subway ride back, read two very intense and focused short stories by Lydia Davis. So this blog entry may sound a lot like her.
My day:
Out of the house for coffee around 6:30 A.M. then two other trips in the next two hours. Full of energy until I had eaten an old fashioned donut, then felt tired.
Around 9A.M. decided to rest. Slept an hour, and when I woke up the body felt weak. It took me two hours to get myself together, but I knew I had to get out. By around 12, strength seemed to return to me, so I took Ms. Davis's collection of short stories, and headed for my favorite coffee place, on Amsterdam and 83rd street. Got my coffee then moved to a bench a block away to figure out my next move.
Got up, began to walk north. To my surprise, my whole body seemed with it,  gave me the message to go to 96th street and maybe beyond.  At 96th. felt I could make it to 110th easily, and then at 110th, decided that 125th was a normal goal.
So I did it---very proud of myself---as I walked the weather got milder.  Between 79th and 110th on Amsterdam, a normal amount of people on the street---almost every store on those blocks seemed open, selling food or drink to go. The energy seemed good--one could almost feel an upbeat beginning to the holiday weekend that approaches. Between 110th and 125th, far less people, passed the Hungarian Pastry Shop, doing "to go" orders,  a place that loomed "large" in my life between
88 and 92.  After 118th street, I was almost the only person on the street, until I reached the 125th street intersection at Amsterdam, and then walked west one block to Broadway, passing many people outside.
  Much of my thoughts on this walk centered on my memories of watching After the Fall, the play by Arthur Miller that opened the Lincoln Center theater in early 1964. I replayed scenes, lines, memories of performances, even remembered a little bit of David Amram's music for it. Miller's play is completely autobiographical--in the first act, the central character of the play named Quentin looks
back on his relationhsips with friends, family and his ex wife whom he left. The second act is almost
completely devoted to his second wife, the amazing and frightening "Maggie", a character that all
assumed was modeled after Miller's late second wife, Marilyn Monroe.
  I saw the play four times; I think at that point I found a lot to identify with Quentin. He was the
quintessential "good Jewish striver" who had found success as a lawyer, but desperately wanted to
see some moral purpose to his life beyond his success. Jason Robards originated the role of
Quentin, and I saw him do it once; the other three times I saw his replacement, Hal Holbrook.
The four performances stretched from late March of 64, to April of 65--Barbara Loden played
Maggie in all of them, and she was truly amazing---catching Maggie's innocence at the
beginnng of her time on stage, and the moving easily into the vicious, self devouring
(according to Miller) creature she had become. The second act was really a descent into
hell for the two protagonists. Miss Loden, of course became the second wife of Elia
Kazan, the play's director, and wrote and directed Wanda, a much praised movie
of its time, about a  young drifter (woman) who moves from incident to incident, man to
man, without much purpose.
   What else could I tell you about After the Fall? The other characters, the cast changes,
the look of the staging--the theater, then off Washington Square, while the Lincoln Center
theater was being built--was constructed like an amphitheater--the stage was deep and went
lsoway back, giving characters an awful lot of ground to move on.  Also, the space between
performances that I saw represented a time in my life when everything shifted. In March of
64, I was completing my last year at Hopkins, a very successful one,  and by April of 65,
I knew that my one year at Yale Drama School had been a disaster---that once I left
there in a few weeks, my life would be going into unknown territory that I would
have to work out myself.
So it was, back to the real world---will report soon on the rest of the day.