It is already over two weeks ago that we decided to buy tickets for a performance by Oedoen von Hovath's "Judgment Day" and the play does not leave my mind. So it's better to write it all quickly down. I was familiar with this author, Jay was not, but I only knew him from my school education and most probably I saw also a play or two in the theaters in Hamburg. I also remember that I did not appreciate von Hovath a lot then and found him complicated and always hard to decipher. But anyway, I was willing to try it again and off we went. I chose a motel in Kingston, NY — a town which I had bypassed many many times on our various Catkills adventures for hiking or skiings. This time though it was the middle of the summer and Kingston was a great surprise to me, an old town consisting of two parts. The older part is situated at the Hudson and named Rondout. I fell in love with the old houses, the old marina, everything there had the slight misfortune of having been abandoned a good while ago. But there were tries again to lift the town of its depression — new lovely restaurants at the river have sprung up, galleries, stores displaying sharp looking fashions, real old houses with fresh paint, and a certain trendiness has suddenly appeared among the shabbiness. How great it was to walk alongside the Hudson and we immediately scheduled a Hudson cruise for the next day, a trip three hours long, peeking at many light houses, at all the old mansions and the splendor of the Catskills. The Vanderbilt mansion impressed me the most with its 79 rooms, only to be lived in for two weeks per year. Well! Kingston (the new part) was rather old also and had these lovely roofed sidewalks uptown with a wild menagerie of bookstores, galleries, pawn shops, and restaurants of course. A nice discovery of a town that I had by-passed so many times before and never paid any attention to.
Saturday night it was off to Bard College at Annandale-on-Hudson where the play JUDGEMENT DAY was staged at Gehrig's Fischer Hall, an incredible steel covered and spectacular modern building sitting in the middle of the lush and green scenery of the Catskill mountains. Seating in the theater was arranged around the movable stage and on account of this everybody had good seats and got fine close-ups of the actors. The stage setting was modern and simple. The story took place at a small town train station and the focus is on the unhappily married station master, Thomas, who is distracted for a moment by a young woman and seconds later 18 people are dead. The townspeople want to find the guilty party of course, there is lots of finger pointing and everybody gets mixed up into the malicious situation. The perfect station master cannot face the situation and falls apart; the woman he flirted with cannot silence her guilty feelings. And the pointed finger remains up in the air to the very end. And this air is full of chill and not only because of the horrible disaster, but also of the time in the thirties; loud mouthed Nazi officers in their brown uniforms march around; the good town folks and the horrible disaster mix up the question where guilt starts and how it possibly can be all loaded on one single person.
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