Duck Feet and the Lantern Theater Company

.

That's not really "Romian Lettuce" above, but a package of duck feet.  I was in a grocery store in Chinatown, stocking up on this and that and discovered that all the meat was wonderfully mislabeled. 

I was in Chinatown because it was close by St. Stephen's Theater, where the Lantern Theater Company presented The Breath of Life by David Hare.  It was a terrific production, though more for the bravura performances by Ceal Phelan and Cheryl Williams than for the play itself.  Here's the plot:  a dumped wife who's planning to write a memoir spends an evening with her husband's ditched mistress who thinks it's a bad idea.  They're both women of a certain age, as the saying goes, and that's the absolute best thing about the play.  I can spend forever listening to smart, experienced women talk, especially if they're "difficult" women, as Ms Phelan's character was.

What I liked least?  What they talked about was the husband/boyfriend, and they spoke about him as if he hadn't really done anything wrong.  I realize that he was the excuse for banging these two dissimilar women together, but I really wished the playwright had found a more interesting excuse.  It made me wish that a dramaturge would go through the collected Dykes To Watch Out For and craft a play from it.  Or, better yet, a mini-series.

The play doesn't really achieve much in the end.  I saw the Wednesday matinee, which meant that the audience was almost entirely made up of pensioners, and at the end they gave it enthusiastic but not rapturous applause.  Given that it addressed summing-up-of-one's-life issues that everybody in the audience was surely going through, I thought that was telling.  But I also think the play is going to be around for a long time.  It has two serious virtues.  First, because it has one set and two actors, it's cheap to put on.  And second, it gives actresses of a certain age the opportunity to strut their stuff.

For which, in this case, I was grateful.

 *