I was fried tonight, so fried, and sitting in a tiny theatre in Tribeca, waiting for a play to start. It was raining, and it’s the new thing in New York City these days to start events late when it’s raining (this is for all the Cab People who are taking up space where the artists used to be). Anyway, the show was starting late, and men in suits were walking from the lobby into the theatre with bottles of beer in their hands, waving them around like they were about to watch the game on TV.
It was because I was tired that I was disgusted. (It is because I am tired that I’m sad again.) Anyway, I was sitting there, damp as a dog, beerless, sitting next to my usual empty seat (I mostly go to plays alone now), wanting to cry, wanting to vomit, and I noticed Sigourney Weaver moving around the theatre like she owned the place.
I checked my funky-Tribeca-theatre-Xeroxed-sheet-that-takes-the-place-of-a-Playbill, but she wasn’t in the cast, nor was she a producer, or on the board of directors. Still, she seemed to know many of the thin older ladies in very high heels who were sitting in the top rows. (In the old days, at the Fillmore East, we used to call that section “junkie heaven.”) The point is that what I saw amazed me in my fragile state. First, she came down from junkie heaven and surveyed the rows of suits with beers. She looked at me and my seat, but thought better of it: there was a “reserved” sign on the back of my empty seat, which meant that I was press, and you don’t mess with press. So then she looked at the row in front of me, which also had an empty seat.
“Excuse me,” she called down the row. “Excuse me.” She got the attention of the suits with beers and their wives (who all seemed to be wearing diamond nose rings). “Do you think you could all move down one?” And they did. Sigourney Weaver got an entire row of seats to move down one, ten minutes after a play was supposed to start. Then, instead of sitting down in the empty seat she had created, she walked away.
I was amused and still sad and disgusted. Then I looked up and saw a sign with the name of the play: “She Kills Monsters.” I don’t know: I was tired. I was annoyed. I was glad that the universe, at least, had a sense of humor I could dig.
Deitch 