Rand Old Time

As the lights dimmed at the Brooklyn Academy of Music on Friday night, the man sitting next to me leaned in my direction.

“See you in four hours,” he whispered.

And with that we settle in for the BAM’s mammoth adaptation of Ayn Rand’s turgid potboiler

The Fountainhead.

Two days have gone by and I still don’t know how the hell I feel, but after suffering through this thing I feel like somebody owes me either an apology or an explanation, but I’ll settle for a t-shirt.

For the record, I despise Rand and her crackpot views on individualism with a passion.

She peddles a particularly virulent strain of horseshit that magically makes mythic figures out of self-centered, money-grubbing assholes, which explains why Paul Ryan, Donald Trump and the rest of the Republican scumbags jizz their shorts at the mere mention of her name.

In addition to being a five-star fraud, Rand, who is also responsible for that other literary slagheap, Atlas Shrugged, is a terrible writer who deposited reams of mind-numbing prose on a defenseless world.

I never thought I’d have anything to do with her, but then the BAM announced back in September that the incredibly talented director Ivo van Hove would be mounting a production of Rand’s story of renegade architect Howard Roark making his way through a world full of pesky humans.

My family and I had the pleasure of seeing van Hove’s brilliant staging of Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge and The Crucible and his adaptation of Paddy Chayefsky’s Network is currently lighting up the London stage.

The guy’s vision is so original, so outrageous that his name alone is enough to have me lining me up at the box office. The gentleman with whom I had been speaking at the start of the show was also a big fan.

Ivo, Ivo, It's Off to Work We Go

And van Hove didn’t disappoint. The production is stunning and van Hove employs all kinds of wild effects, including video screens that give us aerial views of the action. If I were making a recommendation solely on stagecraft, I’d be telling everyone I know to hightail it down to the BAM with all due haste.

But it’s still Ayn Rand and I’m still somewhat perplexed that such a talented director would waste his gifts breathing life into such shockingly substandard material. The characters are little more than clunky hand puppets who exist solely to spew Rand’s rancid ravings.

It’s like having Luciano Pavarotti sing “99 Bottles of Beer of the Wall.” Yeah, I’m sure he could do it, but why in God’s name would he want to?

In an interview, van Hove said he liked the book “because it asks the question of the essence of creation,” but other writers have asked the same question with much better results.

I’ve been having trouble lately with my knees as they start hurting if I sit for too long, and “too long” is the optimum phrase for this event.

When intermission finally arrived, I got up for some much-needed relief and when I returned I found that my companion and his lady friend had vacated the premises, leaving me alone with Ayn Rand. I guess even Ivo couldn’t keep them in their seats.

Things went to hell quickly in the second half of the show. I alternated between nodding off and wishing someone in the theater would pull the fire alarm.

The monstrosity finally ends four hours and change later with the hero standing on the stage and giving a lengthy harangue about the pursuit of happiness. The only happiness I wanted to pursue was getting the hell out of here.

So, what’s the verdict? Well, I’m still a van Hove fan and while I’m glad I experienced this, I wouldn’t want to do it again. I said the same thing after getting a colonoscopy, but I’m sure that’s just a coincidence.

Now where’s my t-shirt?