The Tale of the Allergist’s Wife

The greatest thing about living here is that you can be sitting in your office at 5:30 in the afternoon, getting ready to leave work, and suddenly say to yourself, “Hmm… I have no plans tonight. I think I’ll see a Broadway play.” That’s what I did yesterday. I tooled around on Playbill.com and came across The Tale of the Allergist’s Wife, a play that my mom saw last year and said was hilarious. So I took the subway to Times Square, walked over to the theater and got a cheap ticket. It’s not a huge theater, so even though the seat was in the rear mezzanine it was totally decent.

I enjoyed it for the most part. Linda Lavin played the lead, and she was a real treat, although I swear she sounded exactly like Nathan Lane in “The Birdcage” — a nasal, reedy, drawn-out voice. The play was kind of sitcommy, and a couple of the characters were total clichés, but at the same time it was able to transcend those barriers and present something original. Having seen it, I might need to take a second look at Herman Hesse’s Siddharta, which I was required to read during the summer before I started college and which comes up during the play.

It was such a refreshing evening, much better than going home and boiling some pasta and turning on the computer. All this theater is right here, and I always forget! Like I wrote the other day, I’ve decided to do this more often, to the extent that I can afford it. If I can keep finding tickets for twenty bucks, it should be doable. Lately I’ve realized that I’ve been repressing my interest in theater for the last few years. Why? A few reasons, all interrelated. One, a little internalized homophobia, strangely enough. Two, when I got to college, I didn’t feel like I fit in with the die-hard drama people. I was probably scared of their openness. Three, I fear that if I start pursuing the interest again, it will once again take over my life and make me irrational and impractical and dreamy and flighty and unrealistic, like I was when I was a teenager. We fear what we desire.

When I was a kid, I thought Manhattan and the theater district were synonymous. From the time I was six or seven, my parents took me to lots of Broadway shows, beginning with Annie and Peter Pan, and growing up in the 1980s I got to see many others. I’m probably one of the few people in the world who saw the spectacularly awful Carrie, based on the Stephen King novel, which ran for 16 previews and closed after only five regular performances.

My (lately repressed) love of theater is really due to the influence of my mom. She’s loved the theater her entire life; when she was a teenager in the sixties, she’d take the bus into Manhattan from Queens and see whatever she could. She has a huge collection of Playbills that would probably give Mermaniac an orgasm if he saw it.

Anyway… I hope last night was just the first of many more trips to the theater. I’m reconnecting with a part of myself I neglect far too often. This is a good thing. And who knows where it will take me?