both your houses...

as in "a plague upon both"....

last night we saw the Pulitzer Prize winning play by Maxwell Anderson "Both Your Houses" at the Remy Bumppo Theater company. Unlike the Profiles Theater- they let folks in off the street more than an hour before the curtain time and then into the theater twenty minutes before the curtain time and the curtain went up less than five minutes after the time called for (getting any information from this one Profiles? - you should be!)

but back to the play at hand- a very large (for Remy Bumppo) cast put on the period piece that couldn't be more timely if it tried....

This play is from an era when quick snappy dialogue was king and the speed of the delivery of the lines might be an issue for the hard of hearing but it certainly put verve into the fun the characters were having - not unlike the James Spader performance in Lincoln - these guys (mostly) reveled in the chaotic process of divvying up the spoils available in the pork barrel additions to the spending/appropriations bill the president has asked for to complete a badly needed dam.

Although I didn't find the story such that I was on the edge of my seat - that may be due to 21st century cynicism about the process that the 1933 audience may not have developed... the evening entertainment was worth going out for even in our recent spate of bad weather (cold and rainy)-

so I would give this one a slight thumbs up - unless you are a political junkie in which case I would go with full thumbs up... Enjoy the fun.  Good performances and witty dialogue carry the day.

next up on our calendar - a trip to Italy- Trieste, Venice and Bologna - so more later...