Explicit Vows

A man I know a little, from our children's school, is performing his one man show at a tiny theater in Tribeca - Explicit Vows at the Flea Theater. So we went to see it.

The theater seats about 50, and we bumped into 2 other couples we knew, so the room felt friendly. But the play, about a man's struggle with commitment in the hour before his wedding, and his backtracking over his relationship history, didn't work for me.

It's just I never found players, as I think of them, that attractive actually. Even as a teen, if I saw a guy who was longing to play the field, he just didn't do it for me. I don't want unavailable commitment phobic people in my life, and when they bump into me, there are no hooks, as we just slide against each other, and they go away. So this journey he was outlining, while familiar and it felt real (it made me sorry for his wife, who I know and is a really decent, admirable woman) just didn't connect with me.

I could see his pain but I didn't empathize (the horror of never being able to 'unwrap' another woman again.) He portrayed himself as overly romantic, committed to Noel Coward and his view of life, and finding every real life relationship less than the glories he saw in 1940's movies, and therefore not as good.

And the ending made me slightly queasy. He turns to look at a pretty young flower girl, implying that children, the daughter he would have with this woman, was what made the sacrafice of commitment worth it. What made marriage acceptable was not the love of a good person, but the child/ren they have together. And that pressed some of my buttons - what if they couldn't have children? What about the relationship between the spouses? What about growth and friendship and sex and companionship and comfort and laughter, developing a shared history, being part of someone's life? It just felt all that was minimized.

So the play just felt like it was all too much - too autobiographical, too long, too self referential
(though I did laugh occassionally, and the audience laughed more often than me.) I will say that other people seemed to enjoy it far more, and some of the reviews were much kinder than me. But it left me feeling that sometimes people don't know how much they are revealing when they write... (which of course made me wonder about here, and what do I reveal that others see too clearly...)