A new "old" play

We went to the premiere of a new play this afternoon. Several surprising things about the experience:

• Set in a French chateau right after WWII, it was a "comedy of manners" of the old school, the sort of thing Coward or Wilde excelled at, but here as often dull and slow as witty, with no characters I actually cared about.
• So I asked myself, Why one earth would someone go to all the trouble in 2007 to write a play like this? I don't know the answer. I made use of the time by practicing the fingering of a piano piece I'm trying to learn. Progress, too! Dull plays have their uses.
• I had decided midway through act one to leave at intermission, as I am wont to do, and so started preparing my excuse to my wife, who frowns on this sort of thing.
• At intermission my wife leaned over and asked if we could go. My wife! Never in my experience has she done this unless I dragged her out with me. She apparently disliked it more than I.
• We were met on the street as we strolled to freedom by a gentleman who apparently noticed us in the audience and now asked us if we knew it was only intermission. Caught in the act. We kept walking.

In all fairness, this was a competent play and there are people who get off on this sort of thing but it requires very high wit and cleverness to work with me, none of which was here. I still don't know why a contemporary playwright would write a play without a clue in it that it hadn't been written in the 1940s. Well, as the cliche reminds us, "there's no accounting for taste."

It was so delightful to have my wife on my side in such matters that we walked to a nearby cafe and celebrated with coffee and cake. This was in my old neighborhood in northwest Portland. In the cafe it occurred to me that when this neighborhood was my stomping ground, most of the patrons in the cafe hadn't been born yet. Oh, my.