Should I change Write All Nite’s name to Write All Curtain Calls?

A) It’s got a nice ring to it.

B) I’ve already detailed why I’m so fascinated by curtain calls. There’s the old adage that the most important parts of a story are the beginning and the ending, and the final stimuli a production gives to an audience are the last “artistic” notes to wrestle with.

The necessity for those quotes around “artistic” is another source of my fascination. As a medium, theater constantly blurs the line between the audience’s reality and the concocted reality of the show, perhaps never more so than during the bows, when those two realities collide.

Plus, the relationship between art and history is a dance between which traditions to inherit and which to subvert (which is also the relationship between history and humanity).

The Irish Arts Center’s A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings adds a curtain-call wrinkle that may not be novel, but is still unusual: the actors stay in character the whole time; they never “break” to provide a fleeting glimpse of the “real” person underneath.

Why?

Well, that’s for us to mull; the beauty of thoughtful subversion.