Good Housekeeping Play

Recently a man came to this school and rocked it to its very core. This man is Aron Cowen. I tried to uncover his mystery last weekend. After hearing there was a play, called Good Housekeeping: A Play about Bad Manners, about and starring him, I had to go.

The show was held at the strikingly beautiful Berkeley City Club. The theater looked more like a hotel lobby, which had been redesigned for shows, complete with theatrical lights and seating along the walls. Unfortunately, nothing new about Aron’s life came to light. The show was set in Berkeley, picking up on the day after rally day. I did get a fictionalized look at Aron’s extracurricular life which, according to the show, is next to nothing. The true fiction of the show was Aron’s creepy, lustful, stalker–esque relationship with his adoptive Aunt who despite her Goth appearance, acted like a normal twenty year old.

The best aspect of Good Housekeeping was Aunt Zelda, or as I like to call her crazy Aunt Zelda. Crazy Aunt Zelda did some whacky stuff. She waved her cane and talked about her crazy play. In an offstage side plot, she hacked into a big corporation’s data base for environmentalist reasons. Crazy Aunt Zelda added life to the main story, which was somewhat droll, uninteresting and pretentious beyond belief.

The plot of Good Housekeeping is that a playwright came to Aron’s house to work on the play that we were watching: Good Housekeeping … that’s the whole plot.

If there is a handbook for being pretentious, the extremely auteur writer, director, producer, star (playing the playwright) James Keller, must have it autographed. For one thing, he’s British, and not an endearing chimney sweep British. He seems to be a cross between Sherlock Holmes and a professor of fine literature. British-ness and pretentiousness go together like fish and chips. Secondly, it took place at The Berkeley City Club which is brimming with class in the same way that Keller’s cup brims with tea. Most pretentiously, the show was only about the writing of the show. As the writer, doing this can make everything about you and give everything your character does a sort of inorganic importance that epitomizes pretentiousness. Furthermore, a play-within–a–play makes things too easy for the writer. You can have parallels between characters and their counterparts in the play–within–a–play. When a character of the play–within–a–play is described, it’s actually the writer describing the character of the actor playing that character. Writers should not be allowed to do this. It’s unfair to the actor because he or she doesn’t get as much of an opportunity to explore their character. It’s especially unfair to the audience who must experience characters based on their ins, outs, ups, downs, back-stories and motives, and how they change throughout the show. Unless done extremely well, plays within plays make experiencing the depth of characters nearly impossible.

Aron has become a legend at our school. Some are intrigued by his mystery. Some are appalled by his mischievous antics. This said, very few know the real Aron. I don’t know his soft side, his back–story or his motives. I wish that Good Housekeeping could have given me a more three–dimensional look at Aron.