Agony and the Blown Mind

Sartre was right. Hell is other people and I've concluded that those other people are incoming freshmen.

Somehow I must have missed the dire warnings that the Class of 2019 has been moving in over the past two days, discovering it only when I tried to get to Shoryuken Ramen to meet my dinner date and found Franklin Street closed to cars while over-sized suburban SUVs delivered spawn to dorms.

Another crop of Northern Virginia teenagers who've never lived in a city before have descended en masse to make our life more complicated while they learn to cross streets and parallel park.

I waited an eternity today behind a kid who sat in front of a flashing red light assuming it would eventually turn green. It didn't. And it won't ever.

My dinner companion and I weren't sure whether to expect Shoryuken to be empty or mobbed given the blockades, so we were pleasantly surprised at how uninhabited it was. That said, within half an hour every seat was filled and an awful lot of them looked like parents and or/parents and freshmen.

Translation: none of them looked like Richmonders.

Eating my Hiyashi Chucka - cold ramen in soy-tahini vinaigrette with corn, pulled chicken, scallions, pickled mushrooms, egg and bamboo - facing a window over Franklin Street, I marveled at a student toting a vacuum cleaner (probably his mother's idea) into his new abode. Surely he's not planning on using that thing.

Meanwhile my classic ramen-eating companion told me great stories about a mutual friend who now works at the Ignatius Hat Company in Petersburg. Of course I know someone who works in the hat business.

Replete, we headed to the Firehouse Theater to see Jean Paul Sartre's "No Exit," a play I'd never even read, unlike the guy behind me who boasted that he'd read Sartre in philosophy class. Even so, he was the worst kind of person to sit in front of, constantly fidgeting, folding and unfolding his program and moving in his seat non-stop.

I want to choose my own hell.

I was fascinated to learn that the play had been formatted as a one-act play so French audiences could get home before the German-imposed curfew. There was no curfew, but I definitely had plans to get my mind blown afterwards, so I appreciated the brevity tonight.

You can always tell what a man really wants by his actions.

Because it's the Firehouse Theater, no performance would be complete without a fire truck screeching by mid-play. It's nice to know that there are constants in life.

You are your life and nothing else.

It's even better to know that a provocative play cast with three solid leads can take an audience into hell for a night. Of course the lately-ubiquitous McLean Jesse nails the shallow socialite and  DL Hopkins inhabits the cowardly journalist but it's Bianca Bryan's all encompassing portrayal of the lesbian secretary that's most electrifying. Foot tapping, eyes piercing, legs open when sitting, she's a fiercely cruel combatant.

But surely all of us would be miserable in a windowless room with no need to sleep and two people we can't stand our only company for eternity.

Outside on the sidewalk afterwards, we were surprised by fireworks exploding over the Diamond and paused to opine about what we'd just seen while we watched the explosions. "We could talk about the play all night, but you have places to be," he reminded me after 20 minutes of discussion.

As if nubile freshmen weren't enough of a hazard, tonight was also the Down Home Family Reunion in Abner Clay Park, so the streets of Jackson Ward were alive with cars cruising for parking spaces and people lugging chairs to the park.

Clearly Hell was all around me today.

I lugged my own chair to a prime spot and was soon joined by Charlie, a sweet man who has worked at the Pepsi Cola bottling plant in Mechanicsville for 25 years. In fact, he'd come straight from work, intending to stay 20 minutes and go home.

By the time we met, he'd been there five hours. But like me (and probably most of the crowd), he was looking forward to seeing the Delphonics. I give him credit; he knew the words to practically every song and the man could sing.

I've been to enough Down Home Family Reunions to know that by the time the headliner comes on, the show is running seriously behind. Tonight, the Delphonics came on at 10:43 instead of the 9:30 start time listed on the schedule. Not a problem for me, but plenty of people packed up and gave up.

There was a teachable moment tonight when I learned that Major Harris had been a Delphonic back in the '70s (what?), with the band covering Harris' big solo hit, "Love Won't Let Me Wait." The shocker was that Harris was a Richmond boy (Charlie tells me, "I met him in Petersburg a good while back. Nice guy"), news to me.

Maybe because the Delphonics didn't have loads of big hits, their set included a few classics from groups like the Temptations - "My Girl" got the dancing started followed by "Just My Imagination" - and in their shiny red suits, they pulled it off.

Some of the high notes were still there ("I ain't lost nothin'!" the lead singer said after a particularly silvery one), a very good things when they got to the biggies: "La-la Means I Love You" and "Didn't I Blow Your Mind This Time" which got not only broken down, but an extended jam. The entire crowd sang along in fine voice, plenty swaying in place.

Walking home, mind blown, a guy in a giant truck looks at me and asks if he has enough room to pull out of his parking space. Are you kidding, buddy? There's at least three feet in front of your truck. Just go.

Gack. Too many people harshing my mellow.

Don't let me end up in a locked room with people who wait endlessly at flashing red lights or can't parallel park. Please, no freshmen after death. I want to choose my own Hell.

Mind Racing and Blown

If you're the least bit curious about the state of Richmond's theater scene, run, do not walk to see "Race."

Your mind will be blown and you will leave wishing you had a bigger brain to process what you just experienced.

My hired mouth and I had dinner with a girlfriend before I drove home, parked the car and walked over to Virginia Rep Center for Carol Piersol and the African American Repertory Theater's production of David Mamet's "Race."

As much as I adore good theater, I'd only seen one Mamet play produced before and that was 1999's "Boston Marriage," which I saw in Philadelphia back in the mid-aughts.

"Race" was written ten years later and boldly delves into racial differences in processing shame and guilt through the eyes of one white and two black characters who work in a law office and are defending a white man accused of raping a black woman.

An elegant and eloquent set greeted us in the Theater Gym and our usher warned us that the play ran 80 minutes, no intermission.

Fortuitously, I'd already made a pit stop.

Ten minutes of intense Mamet-speak dialog in and it was obvious why there could be no break in the action; the audience was already as enmeshed in the machinations of the story as the actors.

There were so many levels to the play: the black to black conversations, the white to black exchanges, the male to female, male to male, accused to defenders, all within the bigger context of the law and played by an all-star Richmond cast.

Billy Christopher Maupin and dl Hopkins as the two lawyers who've recently taken in a young, black female associate, play off each other with post-modern respect tempered by acknowledgement of wholly different cultural experience due to their racial differences.

Causing problems for them and their client is Katrinah Carol Lewis, who brings her own baggage to the case by being black and female, meaning she presumes their white, male client is guilty from the get-go.

The questionable client role was handled oh-so capably by Joe Inscoe, the focus of everyone's attention because he claimed the sex had been consensual, not rape.

With a Mamet play, dialog is always king ("I think all people are stupid. I don't think black people are exempt.") and provocative; between unfinished sentences, people talking over each other and as much politically incorrect dialog as could be crammed into 80 minutes, the play never let up for a second.

Twice the lights dimmed to indicate that we were going from one time of day to another and truly, it was only for those few seconds that your brain got a moment's reprieve from processing so much.

It was wildly stimulating in a way that reminds you of the wonder of live theater and the headiness of being fully mentally engaged.

When the play abruptly ended, it was with more questions than when it began and not so much as a whiff of answer in the air.

The audience was stunned and thrilled at the same time for what we'd just experienced.

My friend and I stood up but the woman at the end of our row was already asking us questions about the play.

We stood discussing it with her for about five minutes before taking our talk-back to the lobby where we found a cluster of astounded people ready to talk.

"I want there to be  a second act!" an actress lamented. "I wanna know more."

"Damn that Mamet! He throws so much at you and doesn't give you a hint of how things might go," another woman said.

"Shakespeare does the same thing; look at "King Lear" or "Merchant of Venice," someone said. "Besides..."

A half dozen or so strangers stood there for the next fifteen minutes talking about the play and the issues it raised about the court system, race relations, sexual relations and how everyone brings their own baggage to them.

It was less than an hour and a half of superbly-produced theater and I can almost bet the farm that everyone who sees it will continue to question, re-examine and return to thoughts of "Race" for weeks to come.

You know how cities choose a book and everyone reads it (Richmond Reads or something like that?) so that there can be discussion groups all over town about it?

I  make a motion that we have a Richmond Plays and everyone goes to see "Race."

Besides the thought-provoking discussion topics such a thing would raise, it would serve an even greater cultural good.

It would make a theater lover out of every single person who saw it.