Performance Overdosing

My mind aches from thinking, my heart aches from feeling.

I have rather recently become single and this means that everyone who has extra theater tickets thinks of me first. I am delighted for their kindness and for the distraction because (as I have frequently said) I love theater and love going out. I enjoy few things more than to discuss at length the strengths and weaknesses of a production or narrative, whether stage or screen (or page or screen).

And since I am wandering companionless these days, I figured I’d just post my thoughts and maybe some of you who have seen the plays will comment with your own thoughts.

On April 1 — I went to a theater screening of 12 Angry Men (the original movie) with a talk-back by the top trial-strategist in NYC as well as a man who was wrongly incarcerated and now runs a legal nonprofit to help others who are wrongly incarcerated. My brain tried to wrap itself around my previously unnoticed inherent bias against differently-grammared urban American English — exposed by watching this film from 1956 which exposes how individual experiences and biases in juries can help or hinder the exposure of truth. Additionally, my brain played with this idea of trial strategy as if it were a Rubik’s cube: yes juries of “peers” are not usually made of actual peers, but having a trial strategist instruct lawyers how to select the jury that will best win their case, or having them instruct the witness how to dress to win over the jury — this also seems perhaps a…