All the World's a Stage

Have you ever sat down on a plane only to wonder whether you were on the right flight?  Then you tell yourself you couldn’t possibly have gotten on the plane with the wrong boarding pass.  That would apply to the theater too, right?  Maybe not.

Yesterday I was offered two $20 tickets to As You Like It performed by The Shakespeare Company.  My husband begged off because of the problem with his feet.  So I invited a neighbor friend to join me.

We zipped downtown at 6:45 to find a parking space right in front of the theater on 7th Street.  How convenient!

The usher had difficulty scanning my ticket, but hers made the required beep and we easily found our seats.

But as I looked at the stage I recognized the set from The Alchemist, which we had seen just last week.  I thought to myself how clever it was that they had somehow figured out how to incorporate it in As You Like It.

Then I looked down at my ticket and actually read the words on it to find out we were in THE WRONG THEATER!   How could that be?

It was a good thing we were early, because we still had time to walk the few blocks to the Sidney Harman Hall, the other theater where The Shakespeare Company performs.

O-5 and O-7 were equally good seats.  I mused about what might have happened if we had waited for the play to begin to figure out our mistake.  Or what might have happened if the rightful owners of our seats had showed up.

As for the play, it was a bizarre melding of As You Like It and The Time Traveler’s Wife, since their rendition spanned centuries, with Rosalind pulling everyone along across all that time.  It was entertaining and all the famous lines were there.  But it verged on being just a little too far out.

Perhaps seeing The Alchemist again might not have been such a bad idea after all.  I wonder if we could have pulled it off?