” . . . life
poverty
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Now, the music was certainly beautiful and the singing was accomplished, but those facts in and of themselves don’t account for me weeping into my keyboard. What got me was how the musicians transformed the scene at the mall—or, maybe more accurately, how they brought out what always lay hidden inside it. Singers in street clothes, percussionists pounding tympani on the balcony, shoppers gone silent and attentive as a medieval Latin poem about fate echoed across Bebe and Burberry storefronts—suddenly the plaza was shot through with the knowledge of life and death. I’m tempted to quote Yeats’s line about a terrible beauty being born. But it’s more like a terrible beauty was rediscovered.
At its best moments, which are frequent, the American Theater Company’s world premiere production of Dan LeFranc’s The Big Meal offers a similar sense of rediscovery.
