Teatro "La Comedia" de San Jose (Calle 13, entre Av. 6 y 8)

We did the whole dinner-and-a-show thing today, like middle-aged middle class couples. Because why the hell not.

The dinner was the Indian place, because girl on escort duty really likes the food there ("It's my favourite restaurant in the whole world!", spoken in Marilyn) and then the show was...

Well, first we went to Teatro Angel "in the bad part of town". You might expect various things when going to a theatre in say the Bronx, or Lafond's side of Baltimore. Perhaps a thin front for a cheap prostitution venue ; perhaps an old ruined warehouse rented on the cheap and filled with rats awaiting their turn to burn as such ; perhaps who knows what else.

What we encountered was a cramped hallway, just about fit to lead into a bachelor pad, stuffed to the gills with insufferable hipster doofuses. The truly miserable kind, call center employees with delusions of ardour and a quora account. I waited in line for maybe five minutes, admiring the wiring job (on wooden wall, exposed wire connected to capacitor and transformer, both elements sustained in midair by the wire itself), but eventually, on the second pass of approximatedly-bearded idiot with his imbecile girlfriend trying to pay a (5 dollar) portion of the entrance fee with his credit card I just turned around and left while reciting obscenities. Motherfucker.

The backup, because yes girl on escort duty knows better than to not have backups (she had five) was the item named in the title : Teatro "La Comedia". To be perfectly honest, it's not a theatre in any sense. There's a lot of loud talking, there's after a fashion dancing (as Texas Guinan explained -- the girls have to dance on the customers because there's no room to dance anywhere else -- exactly) and short comedy. You certainly recognized the (low rent) cabaret venue.

There is no stage. You may think stage fright is a legitimate concern. If you do, try entertaining an audience without the benefit of the stage. Straight on, defenceless, captive in a small carpeted square. The enemy -- and make no fucking mistake : no entertainer has any other enemy, nor is any audience anything but the whale looking for Jonah -- is right there. Close enough to break a bottle and the back of your skull in one swift interaction. Heck, close enough to punch your jaw in before you'll know what hit you.

You may think even that's doable, if you're a young girl and naked. Your this and that'll distract them, and besides, they're unlikely to actually want to kill you. Sure. Try doing it as a squat, old woman or a couple of unremarkable boys -- the two categories everyone ever wants to kill ; and does.

Yet in this dismal position, for an audience hardly three dozen strong, they never sat put (nor almost ever shut up). Sweat was pouring over the fat and the slim alike, constant, a shine more merituous than any diamond dusting, a slick more worthy than any laurel wreath. They licked every square inch of that filthy carpeting, with an enthusiams which, while entirely unproductive, I dare not say was wasted.

They have not the slightest clue about Theater, or theatre, or acting in any conceivable sense. It doesn't seem like anyone ever mentioned blocking to them, at any point, ever, at all. The woman was unconcerned to the point of not merely never giving any thought whatever to what she's doing with her hands, but rather employing them to wipe sweat off her creases and onto her costume. Yes, just like that. They simply talk, together, over each other, a formless deluge that in itself stands simply opposite to the venerable institution of the stage. Addison deWitt'd have had an aneurism -- fortunate am I to not be he.

They did the whole male in drag thing, which I suppose was a riot in the 1800s, or in the more brackish backwaters of our colonies as late as Divine's time. By now it's trite, tired, like rhyming about spring and melting snow and the beloved's undun breasts or something in that heinous vein.

They did Cornudo, apaleado y contento, which is a very classical (read : tiresome) farce, vaguely stolen from Bocaccio. You know the fare, husband wife and servant, except the servant's a gentleman who used the disguise to get close to the woman, whom he propositions, and who fucks him in between being propositioned and propositioning her husband to dress in her clothes to encounter the servant so as to have proof of his treasonable betrayal, except obviously the instructed servant beats up his master for his imaginary sin of being a total slut because hey, he only was testing her, and so on and so forth, they end up all friends in a freely fuckfest as these stories always go.

They did the "innovative" anachronism, whereby all references were simply bowdlerized into items the audience would readily understand and be familiar with. The strangeness of 2017 kids in costume speaking (in a vague Portuguese accent) of social structure and interaction that only makes sense from a 1400s perspective as if it happened in Heredia, across from the Mas para Menos is apparently acceptable here. Historically, it is the price a culture-less place has to play to get its stage going -- it was exactly the case in 1800s Romania as eg. Caragiale acutely records. What can you do ?

What we did was we hit the blackjack and brothels, and then we came home -- ceea ce va doresc si voua.