Jungle Theater

I was invited to the theater last night by my friend Shar. She likes to get season tickets to a local theater and invite friends to join her for dinner and a show. This year she picked the Jungle Theater. I looked at the calendar for the year, and thought a number of the plays sounded good. Obviously anyone who does things like this is bound to have lots of friends, so it is a bit of a crap shoot which play you wind up going to see. I mentioned that the first play was the one I was least interested in, but naturally that one was the one that everyone else had conflicts with, so I wound up going last night to see Hitchcock Blonde.

It probably would have been better if I had ever watched a Hitchcock film. I enjoy movies, but I don't really get the whole "art of film" thing. Sort of like visual arts--I know what I like, but I can't really tell you what is good or why. I also do not care for "scary" movies, so I was worried that perhaps the play would fit sort of into the Hitchcock genre, but that did not turn out to be the case. (There was an on-stage stabbing of course, but I was fine, thank you for asking.)

Let me just back up a moment and put in that we went to the same church as Shar and her family for many years, but the last couple years my husband and I have been attending elsewhere. So there were four of us last night, Shar's sister and another friend that I know from our ex-mutual-church. I really enjoyed seeing them and catching up. The theater is in Uptown, and we had a nice dinner at Figlio's, which I had never been to. (Italian--cannelloni, but I wish I had just stuck with the ravioli. I never learn to stick with the simple thing.)

Anyway--the play was a three-layer affair and I quite enjoyed it. There were three layers of story that is, although I think there were more layers than that of what-the-play-was-about. (There's probably a word for that.) My inner feminist was quite intrigued by the idea of actresses who had to perform nude on the sound stage for movies that were considerably primmer on the screen and what that must have been like in 1959 (one character was a prospective body double for Janet Leigh in Psycho, and her experience was pretty hair-raising, sorry). Quite a bit edgier than anything you'd find at the Guthrie, but I thought the staging and acting were quite good. The theater is not large--I would describe it as cozy, but a pretty good size. We were in the third row. So, I'd like to go back, but I don't think Tom was too interested in any of the other offerings. We'll see.