Tables and Paperboys

The cast of The Table seated for a typical Friday night dinner in a Jewish household. Image found on Google.

"You're sure that you know where you're going?"
"Yes."
"How sure?"
"Sure."
"Positive?"
"Stop worrying, Natasha," I practically scream, my nerves on edge after a day of dealing with client complaint after client complaint. I feel guilty immediately, but we are both reassured when we see a sign pointing us in the right direction, the direction that I knew we were supposed to be going in.

"What are you watching tonight," Grant had asked earlier.
My response, as always, had been: "Ask Natasha." She was the one who had read the program, had chosen the shows. I was merely coming along for the entertainment value, happy to tag along without the effort of finding shows that sounded interesting. Let someone else do the work. That way if it isn't good, I have someone to blame. Not that I would ever blame K if she chose a bad show - it's just good to know that there is someone to fall back on if I need to. I preferred not knowing, being surprised. All that I knew about these two were their names - The Table and Paperboy - and their genres - drama and comedy. We had chosen these two for a very specific reason - they were in the same place. Well, just about. One was in Victoria Theatre, and the other at Vicky's. Having looked them up on the map and seeing that they had the same venue number, we shrugged our shoulders and booked our tickets.

We arrived at Victoria Girls in good time, half an hour before the play was supposed to start. I parked the car near the entrance to the school and we didn't have to walk more than 100m to the entrance of Victoria Theatre. Perfect. We made our way into the theatre itself and found some good seats - about six rows back, right in the middle. The seats, we were pleased to find, were a lot more comfortable than the Graeme College alternatives, and we settled down nicely before the play began.

The lights dimmed and a woman walked out on stage, tottering slightly in her high heels, walking slowly and with each step shouting a word that sounded distinctly Hebrew.
Oh God, I thought to myself. It's going to be Jewish.
And I wasn't wrong. The play is about a Jewish family enjoying a Friday night dinner together for the first time in a year and joined by the maid that has been with the family since the youngest was born and her daughter. It starts with the typical greetings after a year spent apart, and descends into the family drama that, as any Jewish person knows, comes with Friday night dinner. The show jumps between hilarity and misery, and the audience jumps between laughing and crying as the characters act, dance, sing and, of course, eat. Not wanting to give too much away, I won't go into very much detail about what happens, but I will say that this show is absolutely a must see! The actors were incredible, the dialogue is awesome, the dancing and singing in between is far from cheesy and the whole show left me wanting to come back for more.

After thoroughly enjoying The Table, it was time to make our way to Paperboy. We had half an hour to meander over to Vicky's, and even though I didn't quite know where it was, I had faith in the signs that tended to point us in the right direction. And they worked.
Up to a point.
And then they stopped working. Suddenly we found ourselves at the Gymnasium without any idea of where to go from there. We walked back to the Theatre and found someone to ask, and, after being pointed in the right direction and walking around the building to find an entrance, we arrived at Vicky's just before the doors even opened. Phew. No problems there.

The Paperboy preparing to deliver the papers to the doorsteps of his neighbours. Image found through Google.

As we sat down for Paperboy, a suspicion swept over me that this was not going to be a success. We had just come from an amazing show, and were now being seated in a tiny room with us and only five other people making up the audience. The lights dimmed, and I tried to put my skepticism aside as the actor came onto the stage.

Paperboy is a one-man play about, well, a paperboy. Bobby Jones lives with his crippled father and his life ambition is being a master paperboy. Only he isn't very good at it and tends to get himself into trouble a lot of the time. Take, for example, the morning that the play starts off with - he delivers some papers, breaks some windows, chats to some neighbours and knocks the urn of a recently deceased neighbour off of a shelf. Wracked with guilt, Bobby plots to break into the house while the owner is away so that he can gather up the ashes and fix the mistake.

Please note that I have no hesitation telling you what this play is about. And there is good reason for that. Most of the time when I decide not to tell people what happens, it is because I want them to be pleasantly surprised. In this case, the play was too bad to recommend to anyone. Suddenly I understood why there were only 7 people in the audience. While the actor tries his hardest and does nothing particularly wrong, the play is supposed to be a comedy. I didn't find it funny in the slightest. It is supposed to be a mystery. I suspected what was going to happen from the start. It is a one-man show, and the singular actor attempts to play a number of characters and play into a number of stereotypes that I found just didn't work well. Overall, Natasha and I agreed that it was a waste of our money and our time.

We left Paperboy feeling extremely disappointed. We made our way around the building, getting a little lost, up the steps and around to the car. Only to find the gate to VG closed, with our car on the other side. Oops. We walked back to Vicky's in the pitch black, with me freaking out more than a little on the way, and managed to find an exit onto a street that I didn't recognise. Thankfully, I quickly realised where we were and we managed to walk back to the car constantly checking behind us to make sure that no one was following. My nerves were also higher than normal because this was the street where, four years earlier, I had come close to being mugged in broad daylight. The fact that Natasha was walking with me didn't make me feel particularly safe either - two women are just as easy to attack as one.

Either way, we ended up getting back to the car safe and sound. No harm, no foul. Plus I got a little adventure to tell in the process. So what is the moral of this story? See The Table; don't see Paperboy and never park your car outside VG before the 10pm show apparently.