Some Reading, Some Griping

I read a play today. It was pretty good but I did not manage to get excited about it. It was from the same book I was reading yesterday and was called She Stoops to Comedy, I don’t have the book in front of me so I’m not sure but I think it was by David Greenspan. The play was about an actress (to be played by a man who is never to be in drag) who having recently broken up with her girlfriend disguises herself as a man and gets cast as Orlando in a production of As You Like It which stars her ex- as Rosalind. it’s kind of a farce, and kind of a backstage comedy, and kind of queer theatre piece, but really it’s about theatre conventions: fourth wall, soliloquy, cross dressing, cross casting, post-modern stagings of the classics, the looming specter of film, changes between drafts (there’s a character who is either an archeologist or a lighting designer depending on the scene and everyone is very open about the fact that this was change the writer considered mid-development and never really settled) et cetera. And in that way it was pretty entertaining, but there were a lot of inside jokes and although I knew almost half the references it was a bit tedious and a little preoccupied with being smart about theatre as artifice.

In an unrelated matter: backstagejobs.com is really poorly designed website. I spent about forty-five minutes today going through all twenty seven pages, every posting they have. I went through every job because their location sorter is apparently entirely ornamental. I’m sorry but I refuse to believe that there are no theatre job postings for New York, NY. On top of that there is no obvious logic to how the jobs are sorted, the site doesn’t include a posting date so I don’t really know what’s new and what’s old. All they have is an expiration date for the listing ,and many of those are actually set to after the jobs they advertise are finished (I know because there where a lot of jobs listed as “last minute” (which I think just means that the listing is about to expire, not that the companies are desperate) for shows that had August runs). They even have a setting where you can only view postings after a certain date but when I tried to use it it said there were no jobs posted in the last two months which I, being a frequent visiter know isn’t true. The truly maddening thing is that they know what people want in a job seach site, you can tell they know because they put it there. so you log on and everything looks great, then, slowly, you realize that it was all a lie.