David Haglund attended the Under the Radar Festival performance of Daniel Fish's A (radically condensed and expanded) Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again - after David Foster Wallace, and has reviewed it for Slate, This Isn’t Water, Putting David Foster Wallace onstage at the Public Theater.
It sounds like it was an interesting production:
Soon one young woman is alone reciting a section of “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again,” Wallace’s existential and occasionally uproarious account of a cruise on what he calls the Nadir. These sections are funny, and the audience laughs at Wallace’s jokes, even delivered, as they are, in stagey monotone with bits of performative reaching and crouching. Then the first ping: Petra, the cleaning lady on the Nadir who makes Wallace’s lodgings immaculate and whose movements Wallace tries and fails to track, is a real-life (maybe) analogue to the bathroom attendant of Brief Interviews. One’s perspective shifts: from Wallace’s to Petra’s; from the crazy-making mystery of her ninja-like appearances and disappearances to the sheer drudgery of the labor she is repeatedly performing; from the unpleasantly antiseptic quality of the cruise to the overwhelming privilege of Wallace’s position (of which, it should be noted, he was fully aware).Continue reading here.
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