NOTES FROM A WEEK AT PRINCETON AND ELSEWHERE: 1. The “Russia’s Age of Elegance” show here is really excellent. The portrait room was the most poignant for me–all these people with their birthdates in Russia and their deathdates in exile.

2. Puck needs to be played with some menace, especially because you’ll eventually get to that final speech, where you’ll really want to have built up some degree of unseelie credit with the audience.

(2a. Gay bondage fairies, while a common temptation for contemporary directors of Shakespeare, are never necessary. The audience just thinks, “Ooh, I’m glad I don’t have to squat in my underwear for an entire scene.”)

3. I also saw “The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia?”

There, I said it.

It’s reactionary to a degree that’s kind of awesome. The student director clearly thought it was liberationist, but it’s just not. There would be ways to make it liberationist (for example, playing up the “why does love become bad when you add sex?” angle), but those aren’t the angles Albee plays. He makes the main character completely, consistently self-indulgent. (At one point I was genuinely worried that I might snap and yell at the stage, “Shut up! Just stop talking!“)

The last act fails. I don’t want to explain why, because in fact, the play is worth seeing (oh how skeptical I was of this beforehand), but I don’t know how you end this story without going full-on either Secretary or “I was cured, all right.”

…And I still don’t know that the basic idea works. It’s bravura, but that doesn’t make it on-target.

4. The End of the Affair is excellent. I need to let it sit for a while, but I think it might be my favorite Greene thus far (after Brighton Rock, which has amazing opening and closing segments separated by a slack and boring middle; The Comedians; and The Power and the Glory, maybe in that order). For most of its length I thought it might be too blatant, too much an attempt to hit the audience on the head with a clue-by-four. But actually I think it’s subtle and really moving. Be interested in others’ views.