On Friday night, we ate at Spice on University Place, which has excellent food, and then saw Stuff Happens at the Public Theatre. Since Emma knows someone who used to work there, he helped us get $15 tickets, and we also ended up in the front row. The play, by David Hare, is about the Bush Administration, particularly focusing on the time leading up to U.S. involvement in Iraq. The theater it was in was very amazing, with a rectangular playing area in the middle of the theatre serving as the stage in between two blocks of seats looking on from either side. The major props were desk chairs, and projections on the walls of either side of the stage added additional effects. The show did a great job of articulating various perspectives (those of U.N. members, reporters, Iraqis, the administration itself) and had a wonderful focus on Colin Powell that really added a great deal of interest.
On Saturday, we did some fun shopping at H&M. We also went to Marc Jacobs to look for a really cool Rufus Wainwright T-shirt sold there exclusively for the Carnegie Hall concert, but they were sold out; Emma got a really huge purple ring there for $1. We also looked in a lot of nice stores with prices far too high for me to ever consider, but we had a great time overall, and we ate at Peanut Butter & Co. on Sullivan Street.
Later on Saturday, we met up with David to have tea, and he came with us to the Public Theatre and waited with us while we tried to get into another play at the Public, Satellites by Diana Son and starring Sandra Oh (featured at left with Kevin Carroll). We got in and ended up with second row seats, which were superb. The show was really great. It addresses a young interracial couple (she's Korean, he's black) who move into a Brooklyn brownstone with their infant daughter and how they deal with their various pasts and reconciling them with the future of their child. The performances were excellent all around with Oh a particular standout, and the set was absolutely stunning. When you enter the theatre, it seems as if they won't be able to fit the proceedings into the relatively limited dimensions of the stage area vertically and horizontally, but once the play starts, the depth of the stage becomes apparent, and the various settings of the brownstone's floors transition on and off, backward and forward with amazing precision.Overall, two spectacular evenings at the theatre. We both agreed that we preferred the more human drama of Satellites to the politics of Stuff Happens, but we both enjoyed each of them.
On Sunday, we chilled in Central Park and overheard a really great phone conversation in Central Park with a guy recounting his wife's bowel movements and bra shopping to his daughter. He also saw Phillip Seymour Hoffman in Washington Square Park, and Emma and I had also spotted him on the same day in question. Then began the debacle of coming home. It took an hour and a half to get from Central Park to 14th Street, and then I got right back on the subway for a crazily long trip that lasted from around 5 to 9:30 and spanned two subways, two trains, a shuttle bus, and a trolley.
Anyway, I made it home alive and had a lot of fun with li'l Emms.
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