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Me, an expert: My good woman, you are forgetting WrestleMania.
[Swishes opera cape.]
Evil is the natural climate of wrestling.
Roland Barthes
In hour six, my resistance finally crumbled.
Because at 10 p.m. Sunday, even metaphor broke.
Id grown complacent over my wine.
Other than the no-doubt Herculean efforts of the set and lighting designers, key adjustments had not been made.
Ive wondered aboutthe future of theaterin an era of social distancing.
Will we someday deliberately stage plays to empty houses and broadcast the films?
It drinks energy; it siphons it away.
The darker-clad wrestlers are sometimes difficult to make out against this shadowy backdrop.
Take Aleister Black, for instance.
When he passed beneath a strobing magenta light, he looked like a floating white head.
(It doesnt help when the announcers tell us hes from Amsterdam, since the Vikings werent Dutch.
But what, he was going to come dressed as a canal?)
Here, though, with black clothing blending into the walls, they become accidentally vulnerable.
They look human in close-up, and they look lost.
But at least they left together.
Black just packed up all his Satanist-panic cliches and disappeared.
I know how to start a party on Saturday night and finish it 30 hours later!
he crowed to no one, trying to pump up a party that would notget started right.
I far preferred the first evenings announcing duo, John Bradshaw Layfield and Michael Cole.
Without the boos and cheers of the crowd (a.k.a.
Even a swiftly moving play likeGlengarry Glen Rosswould have taken more than an hour to get somewhere similar.
Innovation didnt necessarily pay off the basics worked best.
So what broke me?
Styles for a Boneyard Match.
This produced video package got us out of the Performance Center and into a cemetery (Vince McMahons backyard?
), where they could both make a run at throw the other into a freshly dug open grave.
All this was charming.
If you decide to watch it, I recommend pairing this sequence with a Chablis.
But I had no reference point for the second evenings big produced sequence, theFirefly Fun House match.
The video references whizzed by.
My illusion that I could keep abreast of decades of mythology crumbled.
The official dramaturgical term is, Im afraid, bananapants.
Would he go the way of Hulk Hogan in the New World Order era?
At other points in the six and a half hours (the same length asAngels in America!
Indoctrinated by my hours with WrestleMania, the other violence no longer fazes me.
But can the WWE guarantee that their actual workers will come out ofthisexperience unscathed?
The key marker of villainy in many of the story lines is a disregard for another fighters family.
I leave that here.
