Way back when I was in college, I took a class in dramatic criticism–I thought it might come in handy someday if I ever decided to start writing plays. However, as nearly twenty years have passed since then without my having felt the slightest urge to become a playwright, I eventually put the class–and all I learned from it–out of my mind. In fact, if I thought about it at all it was only to reflect that Dramatic Criticism had turned out to be a class on the same par with Invertebrate Zoology, Calligraphy and Hebrew for Travelers (to name just a few of the eclectic jumble of classes I took throughout my long college career). In other words: it turned out to be a class that, while interesting enough at the time, proved to be, in the end, almost wholly unusable. Or so I thought.
Oy vey, was I ever wrong on that one: although I have yet to be called upon to correctly name the class and order of some poor spineless creature, let alone to illuminate a copy of the Torah, my training as a drama critic has actually been needed on a more than daily basis. In fact, I am usually treated to at least one dramatic performance every single day–two or three on weekends (not including matinees). That’s right: I’m the mother of a preteen girl.
Like most drama critics, I have found that the perks are few and the hardships many. Sure I get to see first run performances for free, but believe me: for every brilliantly original piece of work that comes along (like last year’s Today, I Shave Off My Eyebrows) I have to sit through literally dozens of hackneyed performances of old chestnuts such as You Like Him Better Than Me and I Wish I Had Never Been Born. Off off off Broadway would be putting it mildly: some of this material is so bad that even Martin Lawrence would turn up his nose at it.
The worst part of it is, though, that even as bad as the performances sometimes get, I can’t walk out on them. After all, if I did, where would I go? My living room is the main stage, my kitchen the studio theatre, and even my bathroom has been pressed into use as an avant-garde “black box” space.
And the really worse part of it is that I know from painful experience that things will only get worse. I don’t even need all those parents of grown daughters telling me with barely concealed schadenfreude to “just wait until she’s a teenager”–I know because, perversely, I’ve already had to live through this once before with the person who could easily be Clementine’s doppelganger (or vice versa): my older sister, Kim.
My sister was such a successful drama queen that she ended up getting her degree in Theatre from ASU. And while it was apparent to everyone from the start that this would be the route she would take, it certainly didn’t make it any easier for me. I mean: you try and share a bathroom with a thirteen-year old version of Lady Macbeth. It was a nightmare, and one that I had thought I had put behind me once we both grew up and moved into our own houses.
Granted, Clementine has not yet reached the grand levels my sister did when she was in her prime. There have been, as yet, no “Out, damn spot!” moments (although there have been times–such as when she rails against my habit of buying whatever brand is on sale–when her “Out, damn generic!” has come very close). Still, as everyone keeps gleefully informing me, “just wait”–she’ll get there eventually. And when she does, then I’ll really have something to kvetch about.