I ushered for a play at Brandeis the other night. It was a comedy entitled The Suicide, being put on for Russian Week. Thanks to Polina for suggesting it. I really enjoyed making sure that everything went smoothly for the audience. It reminded me of the days when I was a roadie for my friends’ band.
From the Brandeis theater schedule:
An unemployed man contemplates suicide but is besieged by spokespeople of discontented groups, from butchers to intellectuals, who want to turn his suicide into a gesture on their behalf. This brilliant Soviet-era satire is a classic of the Russian theater.
Anyway we caught the final showing and it was pretty crazy. About halfway through so many things were going on at once and it was hard to figure out what the point of it all was. Experimental theater at its finest, I guess. Since it was the last performance, I think they added some crazy stuff like having a random lady walk out of this guy’s closet and lifting up the backdrop to reveal the backstage area.
I talked with one of the other ushers, a graduate student who sat this play out for lack of enough parts to play. She explained the Suzuki Method to me (although I feel like I might have gotten the name wrong after reading that Wikipedia entry). She’s going to be in Euripides’s Bacchae later this semester. I might go usher that as well to enrich the 1/4 of myself that is Greek. It’d be a good way to get out of Olin a little more.
