La Dolce Vita
Last night we went to a performance during the Tennessee Williams Festival of A Witch and A Bitch: An Evening with Flora Goforth and Marchesa Condotti. The play was a stand in for Bent to the Flame because the main actor was in a car accident and it was a condensed or “scenes from” version of The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore (a difficult four + hour dark play) by Williams. It’s a hollistic view of a woman who was a legend in her own time in denial of her dying condition and the dark angel who comes to help her passage. Williams wrote so often about our tragic or fragile condition but all of his characters seem to allude to a time when there was a life lived, la dolce vita, a feeling of aliveness that permeates the ephemeral and temporal quality of life – a feeling of observation of our own joy that tinges it with darkness because we know this too shall pass. He lived and wrote the bittersweet life and held up the mirror daring us to look.