Saturday was Mer’s day, and she started the day out with a graduation party. It was a party for one of Mer’s students whom I had not known, but that does happen every year. I always think that since Mer only has about forty seniors, I should recognize all of them. The party was a fine one, in a hall next to a church, with great comfort food and about five different kinds of dessert. Yum.

In the evening, Mer took me up to Cleveland, to Playhouse Square. She took me to a theater we did not even know existed – a small theater downstairs, under the large Allen Theater. It looked as if it used to be an old bar. It was now set up as a very small theater that could seat about thirty or forty people. We were there to see two one-act plays, to which I was looking forward, as theaters rarely put on one-acts.

The first play was Elegy for a Lady, by Arthur Miller. It told the story of a man who comes into a store staffed by a woman. The man is looking for a gift to give to his mistress, who he thinks is dying. The play unfolds details pretty slowly, and the language is vague enough to allow multiple interpretations of the action. I thought it possible (but not necessarily likely) that the play could be straightforward, or that it could all be happening in the mind of the man, or even that the man and woman were the lovers being discussed, but could not bring themselves to talk openly about the woman dying. It was not so compelling as Death of a Salesman or as The Crucible, but I still enjoyed the play quite a bit.

I’m afraid I cannot say the same for the second one-act. It was called Three Women and was by the poet Sylvia Plath. After the play, Mer explained to me it was about three women who had been pregnant:  one had a miscarriage, one had a normal birth, and one had to give the child up for adoption. The language was very dense, and the stories were interwoven with lots of overlap, and even though I really tried to stay with the play, I finally gave up on it about halfway through and just waited for it to be over. It was a fine piece of art, I expect, but not all art speaks to all people.