Avenue Q

Avenue Q at the San Jose Center for the Performing Arts, January 16, 2010 ****

My whole family went to see this performance together. Our section of the audience ranged in age from 72 (my mom) to 24 (my youngest nephew Zach) with cultural tastes as divergent as Sinatra and Sigur Rós. Everyone got something out of the show, though unfortunately the acoustics and sound weren't great, so mom had trouble hearing it.

It's always something of a thrill to partake in a cultural production that captures some kind of essence of what I consider to be "my sensibilities." Having been born in a particular time and place, 1972 in the United States, I straddle the fence between Gen X and Gen Y, not old enough to remember the Vietnam War, but a student marcher against George Bush, Sr.'s invasion of Iraq. Old enough to have written real, paper letters to my friends through high school and college, but also an avid blogger, chatter, texter.



Avenue Q gave me the same sense of, "Yes, that's it, exactly!" as did Douglas Coupland's Generation X, Richard Linklater's Slacker, Roche Troche's Go Fish. These works made me bask in recognition, "This is me, these are my friends, this is my specific experience!" Avenue Q, with its broken fourth wall (floor?) puppeteering, takes on issues both timely and timeless (racism, queerness, internet porn, being unemployed with a humanities degree, finding life's purpose). It eagerly inhabits stereotypes while smashing them at the same time. My only critique is that the major narrative thread (boy meets girl, boy and girl fuck, boy hurts girl, boy tentatively wins girl back), a structure that may hold all the outrageous action in place, is still maddeningly conventional for such an iconoclastic production.