There is a definite cultural deprivation to my life. I don't watch television and haven't for quite a while. I know so little, so next to nothing, about the culture of TV. There was a period when I watched Masterpiece Theatre and the East Enders but all those BBC landscape shots and that blue-collar melodrama became redundant. In any case, watching took up too much time. It's not that I never ever see something on a TV screen. It's just that I don't sit down to look at a show. When I have found myself in the same room as a TV, I've been pained by the view: dumb scripts, dimensionless acting, and nearly every character with a chip on his shoulder that somebody else is destined to knock off. Regardless of having limited adult acquaintance with American TV, I am given to say that a ton of it feeds on our ignorance and aggression. Then there are the commercials, which feed on our desire. More painful than the view of television is the sound. To my ear there is no sound more un-likeable than the sound of the human voice selling, seconded by the sound of a laugh track. Thus I basically do not watch TV (though I have been know to enjoy The Simpsons in the company of a certain young man) and thus I confess not to have known the name, to say nothing of the look, of Phylicia Rashad who recently appeared on the New York stage in the female lead of an un-stageworthy play entitled Blue.

At Ms. Rashad's initial entrance the audience applauded and at the curtain call they rose to their feet. There was nothing extraordinary about this Roundabout Theatre Company production from beginning to end: not the acting, not the directing, not the scenography, not the music and most assuredly not the script. The acting was not for a moment grounded in the given circumstances; it was essentially acting that acts feelings or fakes feelings; it was not horrible acting, just unfortunate because forced. The directing was visionless and therefore pointless, letting the actors wend their way on and around some living room furniture and not encouraging them to interconnect in a real way. The music was alright while the scenography was not alright in that it didn't help the actors create a sense of place. Most distressing was the script, a derivative of Tennessee Williams’s Glass Menagerie that would have been far more comfortable as a television movie rather than a play.

But after a run at the Arena Stage in Washington, D.C., Blue was produced at the Gramercy Theatre in New York, featuring a TV star, as I came to understand, that had played the spouse of Bill Cosby on The Cosby Show and was apparently much loved. I was happy to love her too. Yes, I found Ms. Rashad pleasant to watch and enjoyed her costumes but I could not have conceived applauding her entrance - why would a theatre audience applaud the appearance of a TV star? - nor could I imagine standing for her curtain call. Neither Ms. Rashad nor anyone on the stage of Blue delivered a performance equal to a standing ovation; not even Jewell Robinson, who demonstrated genuine performance talent but was trapped in a role so typically drawn as to be irredeemable: a straight-laced mother-in-law who ends up dancing sexy and winning the approval of her grandchildren by saying fuck.

So why did the audience stand for the curtain call? Had they bought a ticket not to see Phylicia Rashad create a character but to keep company with the flesh-and-blood Phylicia Rashad? If so, then what they had paid for was to be in the same room as a TV celebrity just to hear her talk even if she wasn't talking to them, though she may have seemed to be talking to them on her first entrance and at the curtain call which is when they applauded. Perhaps the audience was applauding themselves for having a history with Phylicia Rashad; or were they applauding Phylicia Rashad for her long run on The Cosby Show, and if so what does a TV program have to do with the stage? One thing is for sure: they could not have been applauding her performance in Blue.

On the 11^th day of this month, like never before, I sat down and watched television. Television proved remarkable on that extraordinary day if only in its capacity to record an incomparable event. People said the toppling of the Twin Towers looked like a movie but it did not. A movie has a different look. Any movie, a disaster movie, a movie like Independence Day or Towering Inferno, has the look of skill and artifice. Even though the destruction of the Twin Towers was shown in color, it looked utterly, dreadfully real in the same way that the assassination of John Kennedy and the murder of Lee Harvey Oswald, in black and white, looked real. On September 11 I was grateful to network and public television for offering this unadulterated reality. But all too soon, the chiefs of network televised news started rehearsing their words again, tending to deliver their analyses as if their commentaries were more significant than the event.