"Gravity's fucking Rainbow" ["fucking" should be, but can't be, italicized, I say]

[Mark Kohut]

My little town has a growingly famous Theater Festival, acronym CATF. Look
it up.
Original plays, best of submitted breed, with some of them going on to NYC,
DC and
other leading theater cities. Michael Weller, Joyce Carol Oates among
unknown names.

Yesterday I saw a play called *Wrecked *by a Greg Kalleres.

This play is deeply indebted, influenced, by Edward Albee, all the way to
an older-child-sized
giraffe artifact in the living room (which gets humped, for effect, maybe
gratuitously says I).

And especially to Albee's great *Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? *Two
couples. Arguing. Even about arguing.
And about what binds them---or dissolves them. The lies and fantasies that
sustain-- or kill-- reality. What reality?

Anyway, to get to the subject line, one of the couples has just been
together, not married, six months and as the
wife in the other married-with-kids "successful" couple pushes, she wants
them to act out scenes from their life
that matter.

This actress does a wonderful little soliloquy on GR......Early on, they
were in a bookstore and he picks the book up.
opens it to sections, reads silently, chuckles at times, says it is
masterful, etc. ......

So, she decides to read it to impress and talk with him about it....

"It took me four *fucking* months...but I read it all....I even read the
Companion, yes, this book, which nobody wants
to be alone with, has a companion....and ........." I still din't
understand this postmodernist........and words on its meaninglessness
I cant remember like 'verbal gibberish".

This play could have been called Who's Afraid of *Gravity's Rainbow*? but
nobody might have come.

PS. the guy at first 'confesses' he had never read it...he'd heard it was
masterful ,etc.....she scorns him like
Liz Taylor in the movie.......but when they leave together reconciled (for
the evening anyway) he says he actually
has read it twice. But, in the play we know he...sometimes lies....as we
all do, is one nicely done theme. Which time
did he lie?