I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: DAN BEHAR-Songs from All Our Happy Days Are Stupid (2002).

In the book, it says that you can hear all of Behar’s songs from the book here.  But that link takes you nowhere.  Bummer.  You can hear newer versions of four of the eight songs on Destroyer’s Your Blues album.

[READ: August 2, 2015] All Our Happy Days Are Stupid

Pretty much the only reason I read works by Heti is because she is often published by McSweeney’s (and since I subscribe to their book series, I’m going to read what they send me).  I tend to not really like her books–they often feel arbitrary and neither funny nor thoughtful enough to warrant the arbitrariness of the characters’ actions.  But this was a ply, written much earlier in her career.

This play was conceived in 2001.  She tinkered with it and rewrote it and it eventually became a convoluted mess.  She gave up on it and wrote her novel How Should a Person Be, in the mean time.  Then Jordan Tannahill read the novel and talked to her and learned about this play.  He asked to see the first draft and he liked it, so he put the play on.  Initially it was done a in small theater (about 30 people max) and since then it has been performed in larger venues.  This release corresponded with a joint Toronto and New York City series of performances in February 2015.

So this play is ostensibly about two families, the Oddis (who have a 12-year-old daughter, Jenny) and the Sings who have a 12-year-old son, Daniel).  They are both from Cedarvale (which I assume is in Canada) and they both happened to take a vacation to Paris at the same time.  The kids know each other from school but aren’t exactly friends.  Nevertheless, Jenny is super excited to see someone she knows.  In part that’s because she is generally pretty happy (even though her parents tend to shoot down her happiness), but also because she is sick of Paris because it appears that there is a parade every day and she hasn’t seen anything authentically French.

The families talk and immediately fail to hit it off.  Mrs Sing is intolerant of Ms Oddi and frankly none of the grown up appear to be very thoughtful or even nice.  By the end of their meeting, Daniel has run off.  And he remains missing for most of the play.

The families are staying ta the same hotel, but tensions are even higher between them now.  The Oddi’s make overtures, but they also fail to work.

Eventually, inexplicably, Mrs Sing tries to befriend Ms Oddi, but Oddi now wants nothing to do with her.

So far so good.  But then there’s that arbitrariness that might be meaningful but I’m not sure how.  Plurabelle, the owner of the hotel hears Ms Oddi playing the flute and invites her to perform at at dinner.  She is further persuaded to do so by The Handsome Man Who Doesn’t Know Why (Plurabelle’s husband).  The dinner is for The Prince for All Seasons and The Young Bride.  And the dinner grinds all the action to all halt, just as badly as Ms Oddi’s flute playing does.

Another character is The Man in the Bear Suit who interacts inappropriately with the entire Oddi family.

By act two, Ms Oddi has fled Paris (with Mrs Sing following along) for reasons unclear to me.  The entire second act follows these two women as they sort of become friends, but not really.  And they each seem to try to reach a conclusion about their lives.

The epilogue seems to come out of nowhere and while it is satisfying as a conclusion it is not satisfying as a part of the play.

I really want to like Heti’s work.  She is lauded by so many people, but I just can’t find a way in.

Incidentally, there are songs in the play and they were written by Dan Bejar.  He recorded a bunch of sings and sent them to Sheila.  When the play seemed like it would never get made, he recorded some of them on a 2004 Destroyer album called Your Blues.  Sadly, we can’t hear the songs, but the lyrics are printed in the story.  They seem vaguely relatable to the play, although even Heti said she wasn’t entirely sure where to put them.

The songs are: (asterisked songs are on Your Blues).

• New Ways of Living*
• What Road*
• A Million Votes for Jenny O
• Johnny Rockets’ Song
• Submarines Don’t Mind
• An Actor’s Revenge*
• Daniel’s Song
• Don’t Become the Thing You Hated*