SEPTEMBER 13, 2015 LAST UPDATED: SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 13, 2015, 1:21 AM
BY JIM BECKERMAN
STAFF WRITER |
THE RECORD
Say hello to Happy and Weepy.
You know them: twin masks, one the smiling face of comedy, the other the grimace of tragedy. They’ve been the official Emoji of theater for more than 2,000 years — ever since the days of the ancient Greeks, when actors did in fact wear outsize masks.
Consider them the mascots of the fall theater season in North Jersey.
Because happily, there are dozens of plays and musicals coming to our area in the next few months — from the lavish professional productions at Millburn’s Paper Mill Playhouse, to the dedicated amateurs who perform in a church basement.
And tragically, you’d be hard-pressed to get to them all, even if you wanted to.
There’s no disguising — with masks or otherwise — the sheer amount of theatrical activity that goes on in this part of the Garden State. They say that every clown secretly wants to be Hamlet — but so, apparently, does every accountant, lawyer, teacher, dentist and sales rep. How else to account for the proliferation of “neighborhood” theaters with their casts full of “shopgirls, schoolteachers, and counter-jumpers” — as Maurice Browne, in 1912, described the habitués of his Chicago Little Theater, the granddaddy of all community theater groups?
And that’s just for starters. What about the student theater groups, with ties to schools like William Paterson University and Bergen Community College? And the professional, Equity actors who appear in venues like Paper Mill and the Garage Theatre Company?
Any more actors in Bergen and Passaic counties, and they’d have to buy tickets and watch us.
Until that day, we local ticket-buyers can avail ourselves of the busiest theater season this side of Broadway. The choices are so many, and bewildering, you may not know whether to laugh or cry.
But then, that’s what the masks are for.