Theater Challenge: [4/9] shows - Proof
“Pasta, oh God don’t even say the word pasta. It sounds so hopeless, like surrender: ‘Pasta would be easy.’ Yes, yes it would. Pasta. It doesn’t MEAN anything. It’s just a euphemism people invented when they got sick of eating spaghetti.”
“It’s 1985. Fifteen years till the third millenium. Maybe Christ will come again. Maybe seeds will be planted, maybe there’ll be harvests then, maybe companionship and love and protection, safety from what’s outside, maybe the door will hold, or maybe… maybe the troubles will come, and the end will come, and the sky will collapse and there will be terrible rains and showers of poison light, or maybe my life is really fine, maybe Joe loves me and I’m only crazy thinking otherwise, or maybe not, maybe it’s even worse than I know, maybe… I want to know, maybe I don’t. The suspense, Mr. Lies, it’s killing me.”
Cast of Angels In America (HBO, 2003)
Harper: I don’t understand this. If I didn’t ever see you before, and I don’t think I did, then I don’t think you should be here in this hallucination because in my experience the mind which is where hallucinations come from shouldn’t be able to make anything up that wasn’t there to start with that didn’t enter it from experience from the real world. Imagination can’t create anything new can it? It only recycles bits and pieces from the world and reassembles them into visions. Am I making sense right now? Prior: Given the circumstances, yes. Harper: So when we think we’ve escaped the unbearable ordinariness and, well, untruthfulness of our lives it’s really only the same old ordinariness and falseness rearranged into the appearance of novelty and truth. Nothing unknown is knowable.
Leave him a note. Write him a note like the olden times. Break his heart in ink. He will understand if he loves you.
Harper: Oh, God. Home. The moment of truth has arrived.
We assemble that we may mourn collectively this good and righteous woman. This woman. I did not know this woman. I cannot accurately describe her attributes, nor do justice to her dimensions. She was…. Well, in the Bronx Home of Aged Hebrews are many like this, the old, and to many I speak but not to be frank with this one. She preferred silence. So I do not know her and yet I know her. She was… not a person but a whole kind of person, the ones who crossed the ocean, who brought with us to America the villages of Russia and Lithuania - and how we struggled, and how we fought, for the family, for the Jewish home, so that you would not grow up here, in this strange place, in the melting pot where nothing melted. Descendants of this immigrant woman, you do not grow up in America, you and your children and their children with the goyische names. You do not live in America. No such place exists. Your clay is the clay of some Litvak shtetl, your air the air of the steppes - because she carried the old world on her back across the ocean, in a boat, and she put it down on Grand Concourse Avenue, or in Flatbush, and she worked that earth into your bones, and you pass it to your children, this ancient, ancient culture and home. You can never make that crossing that she made, for such Great Voyages in this world do not any more exist. But every day of your lives the miles that voyage between that place and this one you cross. Every day. You understand me? In you that journey is. Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes | Tony Kushner Part One: Millennium Approaches
Mary-Louise Parker in Esquire
oh, god. home. the moment of truth has arrived.
One of my favorite scenes from anything ever.
The Quartet makes me cry every time. Love it more than words can express, and I can recite every word. My god. Harper... Mary-Louise & Justin are perfect, as is Thomas Newman's score. Beautiful.
