Seafaring

Last night I saw Conor McPherson’s The Seafarer at the Booth Theatre on Broadway. It’s one of those wondrous plays that tosses its audience back and forth between helpless laughter and starkly serious suspense, and then back again, often from one moment to the next. But beyond its enormouse entertainment value, I liked the message I got out of the play. If you see it, you might not get the same message, but that’s one of the great things about the theatre!

To sum up what I learned: In life we are always dealt a much better hand than we think. But the cards are only useful if we can see them. So the problem is not to change your luck, or make the world around you fit your notion of how it should be, but rather to learn to see clearly, since all the good fortune we need is always right there in front of us. If we can just figure out how to see it.

And the first and most important bit of that good fortune is the miracle of getting a chance to be here, to spend yet another day on this planet, and to enjoy relating to all those other people that are here with us, in all their crazy, messy, dysfunctional glory.

I know that all sounds platitudinous and a bit sentimental, but McPherson makes the case most eloquently, and without a hint of sentiment.