Murray Ross

Moments to Remember

On the last night of The Lost Boys I sat next to a gentleman who had seen many of our shows in the distant past. He reminded me of a play we did about 30 years ago, The Nerd, and of how funny it was.  He said he and his son have never laughed so hard, and they still talk about the moment when the nerd (the hilarious Leonard Riley) emerged from the bathoom, trailing a long strip of toilet paper in his shoe.  I too can recall this moment vividly, always with a laugh, and it occurs to me that long after a show has been swept away there are still moments that remain in the heart and the mind's eye, even decades later. 

So thinking back over this last year at THEATREWORKS, what moments, what images abide from this year's season?  Here is my list, show by show.

Boeing Boeing: This was one of the most popular shows in our history, but thinking back no specific moment jumps into my mind--instead I recall lots of pleasant sensations, indeed a continuous wash of pleasant sensations without one surmounting another.  But when I close my eyes, what do I see?  All right, I confess: it's the girls. All three of them, Air Italia, Lufthanasa, and TWA.  They were sensational to look at, especially in the beautifully tailored air hostess outfits Jan Avramov put them in. No wonder that Lothario Bernard could not give any of them up. Who can blame him? No man, I say, no real man!

The Inspector General: There's a lot to remember from the stylish and energetic student production, but there is only one image that is firmly imprinted above all: the final tableau when the entire compnay froze into mannequins of astonishment after learning the real inspector has just arrived. Our production followed the famous direction of Meyerhold by sustaining this freeze for 90 seconds, a very long time in the theatre, almost as long as a sixties foreign film.  Long enough for the audience to wonder, laugh, squirm a little nervously, and feel almost as trapped as the characters themselves. Great stuff.

The Seagull:  This beautiful play is composed like a painting, full of resonant pictoral moments: Nina in the moonlight, as the earth spirit in Konstantin's play; three women on a bench on a hot summer's day; a dead seagull dropped at a girlfriend's feet.  But for me the image that stays most in the mind occurred in the last act, on the Russian estate, with the wind howling outside.  Nina has come in from the rain, and she hears the laughing voice of the lover who adandoned her in next door. And immediately she flies, she flies like a small bird, to the door, pressing herself against it to hear everything.  Jamie Ann Romero was so lovely, so delicate in her mouse gray travelling dress, and with her hands and face pressed against the door, saying nothing in the darkness with light gleaming under the door in the next room, she spoke volumes.  She was a seagull.  One of the most beautiful moments ever on our stage.

The Merchant of Venice: Another play studded with vivid verbal and visual imagery.  I'm tempted to say most memorable were the signs I posted full of biblical proscriptions against usury, since they were the source of some unusually vehement protest.  But inside the tent you can hardly forget Shylock, and especially the entire trial scene, wonderfully and forcefully acted by the whole company, led by Christopher Lowell and Jane Noseworthy.  It's one of Shakespeare's most lucid and thrilling set pieces; it makes the audience completely reverse their opinions about nearly everything. But the moment from this production I most treasure was the very last one.  The lovers are dancing to a hot Charleston in Belmont,and Launcelot Gobbo is spewing out money from a money blower all over the stage.  The tent is raining money, the joint is jumping, everyone is so happy excepting the lonely Antonio, alone on stage as someone nearly always is at the end of a Shakespeare comedy, and then Jessica sees on stage her father's yarmulke---she stops dancing, she picks it up, and looks at it.  Blackout.

Church.  There's a lot to remember about this play, but most of it was what happened afterwards--it was easily the most controversial show in our history.  And that's rather surprising when you consider it consisted mostly of four earnest if slightly odd ministers preaching the Word of God, and telling stories. And yet I venture to say that everyone who saw it will remember the final  image that the entire play was pointing towards: the arrival, one by one,  of a full gospel choir singing "Ain't Got Time to Die."  The music was powerful,and even more powerful than the music was the feeling of joy and faith written on the faces and hearts of the choir members. You just can't beat that.

Women of Will. Tina Packer is a force of nature, and when powered by Shakespeare she is titanic, as she demonstrated over and over in her one woman show dedicated to Shakespeare's women.  But the image that abides with me comes not from her potent performance, but from her workshop with our theatre students, and particularly one instance where she took in hand a young man who was rather timidly mouthing a few lines from Hamlet. In the space of five minutes she coaxed him, lead him, mauled him, and beat him--using his body like her putty to remold, like her drum to beat, and suddenly this mousy young actor was speaking Shakespeare from the center of a new being.  Astonishing.

The Lost Boys. Another show studded with images bursting from Roy Ballard's remarkable set, which in effect converted our entire stage into a vet's nursing home.  I won't soon forget the flying scene on scooters and trapezes, or Tinker Bell almost dying, or the parade of boys, pirates and redskins, or Hook swimming to his ship, or little Wendy and Peter shaking hands as they say goodbye in Neverland, or Pan flying on his wheelies, Peter standing heroically on the rock, or an old man staring into an aquarium, or the fight on the lagoon with trays and toilet plunger.  But my favorite, I confess, was the dance the lost boys did with Peter and Wendy on their last night on the island:  "Such a deliciously creepy dance it was, in which they pretended to be frightened of their own shadows."  Our wonderful old lost boys will never make it to the finals of  Dancing with the Stars, but that's just that show's loss. They put a spell on us with charm, gusto and semi-precision timing.  You had to love Melvin Grier shaking his booty (in rehearsal I asked him if could dance, and he said, "I'm black, of course I can dance!"--and he could).  You had to love Peter and Wendy's rock star entrance, he with his aviator glasses, and she flipping like a flying fish over his shoulders.  Speaking as a lost boys myself, I loved it, and was ready to jump up and join them.

 

So that's my list.  It was  kind of a tough year all round in many ways--but rich on our stage.  If you have other moments from 2011 you remember and want to share, please do!

 

Happy New Year to one and all!

 

 

 

 

Second to the right, straight on till morning!

The Lost Boys and Wendy fly away this week with final performances Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.

You needn't worry about the boys too much; once Wendy is there to tell them stories, all will be well.  Except for Peter, of course. He hates to hear stories about people who actually grow up.

Poor Peter, he doesn't even understand what it means to be thimbled. After all, he's only a boy.

But he does know that a boy who gets bit by a dastardly grown-up (happens all the time) is never the same again:

Meanwhile, the pirates have designs on Tiger Lily (fools,they want to leave her on the rock to drown).

And Peter does know that to die will be an awfully big adventure.

So come fly away with us!

 

 

 

 

Moms in Neverland

As everyone knows, Peter Pan is a story about a bunch of lost boys who fell out of their prams in Kensington gardens, and so went off to Neverland to fight pirates, indians and beasts.  They are so happy to have found a mother at last.  It doesn't matter that in our version she is six times younger than her boys, and has had very little experience.

Boys of all ages need their moms--this is something every good mother knows; and our Wendy's limited resume is not really an issue, since, as Peter says, "what we need is just a nice motherly sort of person."  And that, Wendy feels, is exactly what she is---so in no time she is getting her boys out of their damp shoes and mending their socks.  James Barrie had considerable experience with two moms--here's one of them, Sylvia Lllewelyn Davies, with two of her five sons that Barrie befriended and who became inspirational (he would say co-authors) in the writing of Peter Pan.  She's lovely.

But Barrie had a mother of his own, Margaret Ogilvy, not so much like Wendy Darling, at least on first view.

Barrie wrote a lovely memoir about her--the book is long out of print, but strangely the UCCS library has two copies, printed in 1896 and 1897 respectively. The Barrie family lived in the weaving village of Kirriemuir, Scotland. The family was hard working and Calvinist, and Margaret Ogilvy, rather like Wendy Darling, assumed her motherly responsibilities in her own family before she was 10.  One of her boys, David, the oldest and her favorite, was tragically lost in a skating accident when he was 13.  Margaret, who was always physically frail, never recovered from the trauma though she lived on another 29 years. James, who was six at the time of his brother's death, did everything he could to comfort and amuse her---indeed, that was his primary occupation for many years.  Still, Margaret managed to be a mother in all the best Barrie ways.  She was a real reader,and together they exhausted their local library for stories (spurning The Arabian Nights when they learned the title referred to evenings,not men in armor).  She tucked him in.  And she identified with other mothers.  When she read popular exploits of famous explorers, she sympathized with their mothers, who got no news for months.  And on the day when a great man returned home victorious, after reading all the heroic reports, she would say only, "She's a proud woman this night."  It's worth noting, that at the end of Peter Pan, when Wendy grows up, she has a daughter called Jane, and then Jane too has a daughter--- called Margaret. Barrie hoped in his old age he would remember his mother not as the woman whose skirts he had clung to, crying, "wait till I'm a man, and you'll lie in feathers," but instead "as a little girl in a magenta frock and a white pinafore, who comes toward me through the long parks, singing to herself, and carrying her father's dinner in a flaggon."

Of course our very own little mother, too, Mallory Hybl, also has a mother, named Sally, who just happens to be playing Wendy's mom in our production. Sally showed up at one rehearsal a month ago looking just a little worse for wear, you know, and when queried she allowed as how she hadn't got a lot of sleep that night because before dawn her two sons and daughter had decided to join their parents in bed.  "Hybls are very small," she explained, "so we can all fit in." Exactly like it happens in Neverland. On this occasion, Sally might well have quoted Wendy, saying "Oh dear, I am sure spinsters are to be envied." But if she had, her face, like Wendy's, would have been shining when she said this.

 

 

 

 

 

The Lost Boys then and now

Here are the originals---The Llewlyn Davies boys, Jack, George and Peter, armed and ready in 1901, as documented by James M, Barrie in a special book he made for the family he grew to love and play with.  The boys were the inspiration for his stories, and his stories evenutally became Peter Pan.  There are pictures of lost boy gangs in nearly every boy's family album. Here's one from mine, about 1951.

I'm the deadeye Dick, shooting center.  We had no need of Peter Pan, we could fly down the wild arroyo right outside. And we all had mothers to bake us cookies, read us stories, tuck us in, and make sure none of us ate too much rich damp cake. We were gone from sunrise to sunset, which never happens to kids anymore.  We were gay, and innocent, and heartless.

Not much has changed, actually.

 

 

 

Approaching Neverland

How to get there?  Fly out the window, then  "second to the right and straight on till morning,"  according to Peter Pan.  But as James Barrie points out, not even birds, consulting maps at windy corners could have found it with these directions.  Peter, as usual, just said whatever came into his head.  Really, you don't need find the Neverland--it is already looking for you. The proper way, as every lost boy knows, is to fall into it through hearing a story told by a nice motherly sort of person like Wendy Darling.  See for yourselves.

Closing the Church door

My great thanks to all who attended our town meeting about Church last Sunday, and who have written to us with their varied comments on this blog and elsewhere. Once again you have demonstrated you are the the most intellectually diverse group in town,and what's more, you are a group that can actually tallk to each other. The play was certainly a one of a kind experience, unique in our history.

Below I offer a summary of my own comments and thoughts about the production, for those of you still interested and who were not able to attend last Sunday's meeting. Again, thanks to everyone who shared.

Perhaps now would be a good time to explain why I chose to stage CHURCH here. I had heard of Young Jean Lee, of course--her reputation is considerable across the frontiers of experimental theatre, where few of our patrons have ever gone. So I read this play, and I liked it immediately, and I still do. It was like nothing else I had read or seen (and you may have no idea how rare this is). I liked that it directly addressed one of today’s taboo subjects--- the religious experience. I say taboo because the world we live is divided between believers and non-believers, with an infinite number of subdivisions. As a result we have a culture of tolerance which amounts mostly to not talking about religion to each other unless we are with people who think pretty much the way we do. There is good reason for this. Belief (and unbelief is a kind of belief too) is strong, personal and if not intractable is usually subject to only very gradual change--the recovery, loss, or change of faith. CHURCH violates all these tacitly accepted boundaries by subjecting its audience, none of whom are devout members of its particular congregation, to an impassioned and peculiar hour of ministry. It acts like it’s a church service, but it isn’t--it’s a play being performed in a theater which looks like it could be a church, and the ministers are not preaching to a group of believers with a common history of worship or a shared faith. Indeed, the play was written mostly to preach, as the playwright herself told us, largely to an audience of un-believers, which is yet another reason why some of the faithful find its messages irrelevant or misguided.

Is CHURCH a parody of evangelical church preaching? When one of the ministers starts telling us, very seriously, a story of mummies who excrete cotton balls, we might think so. When another talks about waking up after a drug trip with a swastika on her forehead and one leg shaved, you might think so. When another asks for help in her struggle to conquer her obsession with self-help books, yes, you might think so. I mean this testimony is weird and it’s funny--chances are good you are likely to laugh more and for different reasons than you do in actual church. Unless, of course, you are offended.

But these ministers also have something to say. The Reverend Jose (who is not Latino) begins with a story of a man whose “brain swam around in a fishbowl of worry.” How’s that for an image of our anxiety? His exposure of the way we delude ourselves is often on target: “the fight between good and evil is a spectator sport. All you have to do to be a hero is root for the right side. If injustice makes you angry and suffering makes you sad, then you can be a good person without ever having to leave your couch.” The common message these ministers share is that sin is denial and self-absorption, and surely this is a message for our times. The audience laughs when a preacher in the audience paints a picture of the assembled audience trapped on “the hamster wheel” of their repetitive lives. But the portrait is funny because it is also accurate. The preachers invite us into an alternative world of service, humility and faith-- a surrender into mystery and relief and love. Is this so different from the message repeated every Sunday all over Colorado Springs?

Of course sometimes these good reverends do talk a little crazy. But the wild nonsense spiraling from Young Jean Lee’s lectern can be astonishingly, absurdly, vivid--it’s almost as good as King Lear, and far more interesting than many of the heartwarming stories smoothly polished for Sunday sermons. And just when you think these preachers have become completely unmoored they are likely to say something direct and revelatory. Jose gives us his bizarre parable of the mummies, and then acknowledges that his stories, like those in the Bible, might look like unbelievable magic. And of course this is true, because many Bible stories told anywhere else do look just like unbelievable magic stories (and then the wizard turned the stones into bread . . . ). But then Jose says, “the truth is that you are magic. The blood pumping through your veins, the thoughts pumping through your head, are all magic, and even the most brilliant scientists agree that most things about us are a mystery.” He invites us to consider the existence of magic at the deepest level, and this doesn’t sound so crazy anymore. It sounds like the truth. But just when you realize Jose is actually on to something, as I do at this moment, there he goes again, warning us against the poisons of caffeine and good company and the excessive love of our children.

CHURCH oscillates between theater and religious service, between parody and sincerity, between direct statement and surreal poetry, between excoriation and embrace, between sanity and wild irrationality. It never settles down for long to become one fixed entity. It seems to me that those all too ready to say exactly what this play is will almost certainly shrink the play to something less than it is. For many this is frustrating. We are used to plays that have firm destinations, that arrive, that clear up the mess they have made. The Denver Post review embodies such frustrations--after tracking the play’s shifts and vicissitudes, John Moore complains that the genuinely soul-lifting finale leaves everything unsettled and that THEATREWORKS has failed to make the play’s “ultimate intent” more obvious. But, obviously, this playwright’s intent and particular achievement is not to preach so directly. In fact, it is not to preach at all, but to re-present salient manifestations (the stories, the testimony, the confessions, the messages, the moving music, the joy, the long path to redemption) of Christianity, and then leave the rest to us. Young Jean told me that when the play was performed in New York, before an audience of mostly young atheists, the laughter at first was loud, but that many were weeping by the end. The play had opened a surprising door to the wonder of faith. I too laughed a lot, and I too was deeply moved at the end, by the women singing, by Jose’s final parable, and by the extraordinary final coup de theatre. Some of our audience have treated the surprise appearance of a large gospel choir as a separate event--but it is actually a final vision and incarnation of faith. In Joe’s last parable he tells the story of Joanne, a girl who works at a nursing home with very little reward for her dedication--finally she goes home to her dingy apartment and lies down and has a vision, and the last thing she sees are the faithful coming over the hill, and then she sees Jesus, “and the delight she knew thereafter is not ours to comprehend until death. Hallelujah.” And it is then that, for the first time, Church becomes a visionary space because in our theater the faithful actually do come over the hill, and down into the theatre, radiant with song. The choir is heaven. Or so it seemed and felt to me. And I too wept.

Obviously everyone did not feel the way I did--some have left the show elated, some baffled, some disturbed and some offended. Actually, I can’t think of a wider range of responses to any show in our history.

I don’t enjoy seeing good friends of ours upset by what we present. No doubt I should have known better--I’m learning that what happens in an avant-garde theater in New York is not necessarily what happens in Colorado Springs. Many of our audience come with entirely different attitudes and backgrounds. Even so, I do have a prayer request. A prayer request, as one of the good reverends explains, is “basically just a request that everyone here pray for some issue you’re struggling with.” And the request I have is, as we all struggle with the challenges of CHURCH, is to listen to this remarkable work as well as to judge it.

My thanks to all who have attended, who have listened, who have spoken, and who have participated in the CHURCH of Young Jean Lee.

 

CHURCH BURNING!

We knew our production of CHURCH might be provocative--after all it is the work of one of America’s most provocative playwrights.  But CHURCH has succeeded beyond our expectations.  We have had an outpouring of responses, ranging from delight to dismissal. Some people have even walked out in the middle of the show, and that never happens at THEATREWORKS.  CHURCH may be the most controversial production in our history.  So it seems only right that our Artistic Director, Murray Ross, should stand up and face the music for including this play in the THEATREWORKS season.  He will do so this Sunday, November 6, at 2:30 p.m. in the Bon Vivant Theater.  He will talk about the play, about Young Jean Lee, and about the responses CHURCH has provoked, and then open the floor for group discussion.  If you loved CHURCH, or if you hated CHURCH, or if you were just plain baffled by CHURCH, you are particularly invited to this THEATREWORKS town meeting.  Beverages will be served, and we will check all rotten fruit at the door. Remember that while light will be shed, this is also the day Daylight Savings ends.

No More Adventures in Wonderland

A lament from Maria Tatar, chairwoman of Harvard's folklore and mythology program, published in today's New York Times. But I promise at THEATREWORKS we are going to do our best to keep Wonderland alive this holiday season. The Lost Boys will take you there.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/10/opinion/no-more-adventures-in-wonderland.html?_r=1&ref=opinion

Great Day for a Play

Rain, sheets of it and steady. Fog, mist, a damp chill in the air. We need a nice little fire. Let's have the kettle on, and biscuits. An armchair, the smell of coal, a good book---a classic mystery with pages that have the musty, sweet smell of pepper--you found it in a used bookshop in London, one of the original Penguin paperbacks.What could be better on a day like this? Only one thing. Being in the theatre and seeing this book come alive on a small old fashioned stage with red curtains and boxes and footlights, and, of course, mist, rain, some sheep, and more fog. The wind is up, the game's afoot, and the chase is on. And it's all managed by four genius actors, the hardest working quartet in show biz. And why you might ask? I myself have asked this question, idly prodding a lazy coal with a brass poker in my left hand---a hand, I might add, that still has all its digits intact, unlike one sinister character in the Scottish Highlands. Why only four actors when the book and then the movie have dozens of them? And in a blinding flash the answer came to me. Four no good reason! Four because that's six less than the barely imaginable minimum and three dozen fewer than you actually need. Four to prove this ridiculous thing can be done with extra thrills-- the real derring do required to pull an absurd caper off with charm, flair, and grace (mostly). Go ahead, stay by your fire with your plaid blanket, doze into the evening. A perfectly sensible thing to do on a dark wet night. But if you want something a little more trivial and useless and diverting, hie thee to the theatre where you will find more mist, fog, and a comfy chair to snooze in, while there just in front of you a small fire blazes up, trains race across the moors, a young woman is impertinately kissed by a wanted man, and only Mr. Memory knows the secret which will save the civilized world. I cannot promise you will find yourself handcuffed to a woman with a fine pair of legs in damp stockings. But there will be a pair of lovely legs in damp Scotland. And there will be tea.

Signs of the Times

People coming to our production of The Merchant of Venice at Rockledge ranch follow a lovely winding path from the parking lot to our tent. On they way they may see and read four small signs in blue letters on white boards. I had them made and I put them there. The signs were meant to be provocative, but I confess I had did not know they would be the hottest buttons pushed at Shakespeare's button pushing play, but so it has proved. At a very lively discussion with members of the Jewish community, the signs were a principal reason for a gentleman accusing me of being "morally reprehensible." This morning I have had two long phone calls from people asking me to remove them, and a message from from Rabbi Glazer telling me he has already received six very angry calls from congregants about my insensitivity.

What do these signs actually say? Each one is a Biblical injunction against moneylending. Here are the quotes:

"If you lend money to any of my people . . . you shall not be like a moneylender to him"--Exodus 22:25

"And Jesus entered the temple... and overthrew the tables of the moneychangers" Matthew 21:12

"Lends at interest and takes profit; shall he then live? He shall not live"--Ezekial 18:13"

"You shall not charge interest on loans"-- Deuteronomy 23:19

The signs are designed to introduce the audience to the world of this play, whose social and religious values are incarnated in the play's title character, Antonio, the Merchant of Venice. Antonio is not only a Christian, he is a Christian vehemently opposed to lending money at interest. You don't actually hear much of that these days, at new Life Church, First Pres, St,.Mary's or anywhere else. It seems to me that any reasonable person reading these words might be struck by how oddly they ring now. Should we really eliminate the people who charge interest, as Ezekial suggests? Are banks, credit unions, credit cards, and home mortgages evil because they charge for lending money? How many venture capitalists these days carry picket signs in front of the banks asking, rhetorically, "when did friendship take a breed of barren metal of his friend?" These are Antonio's words, the Warren Buffett of Venice, violently opposed to using money to make money. He is a character almost impossible to imagine today. In this respect Venice is not us. These Christians read and value a different Bible from the one we read now. The signs are there (as if placed by Antonio's congregation) to introduce the audience to a Biblical injunction we now largely ignore and dismiss, but which is actively present in Antonio, and which indeed is responsible for his radical anti-semitism (The Jew, as we all know, is the moneylender, and because of this--not his religious belief--Antonio finds him worthy of being kicked and spat upon).

But obviously, at least in some quarters, my design seems deeply flawed. The signs have been seen and taken as further expressions and even sanctioning of the virulent anti-semitic stereotyping still all too present today. That this involves a clear misreading (the antiquated injunctions are not simply Christian,they are Biblical--three are from the Old Testament) is perhaps irrelevant. The Merchant of Venice is rife with anti-semitic feeling, and the signs have been seen as adding insult to injury since the play already features a greedy money minded Jew, a real villain. The play is more than suspect. It understandably makes Jews very uncomfortable, and the signs have made it unbearable.

I will now risk further insult and injury by suggesting that Jews may not be this play's ideal audience. Certainly they were not when it opened at the Globe since there were no Jews, not even Sam Wanamaker, attending. The play was not written to be seen by Jews, any more than Huckleberry Finn was written to be read by black people. But this does not mean that the play promotes, foments or encourages anti-semitism. Quite the contrary. What the play does is represent a world of pervasive and casual anti-semitic expression and feeling. the word Jew ricochets through the play, its u sound echoing in "choose" and "use"--two other words sounded over and over Jews are devils, they are dogs, they are Jews. The habit of Jew mocking may easily extend itself to the audience, who may find themselves laughing along with the jokes, as many of us have at jokes made at the expense of people not of our race, gender or culture (lots of good--I mean funny-- jokes are exclusionary--made by "us" about "them"). Shakespeare begins with a stereotype familiar to his audience and he fufills their expectations of the part the stereotype was created to play. Shylock is indeed an incarnation of the greedy evil Jew. If Shakespeare stopped there, his play would indeed be morally reprehensible.

But he does not stop there. After fufilling our expectations he does what he always does, he goes beyond them. At the midpoint of the play, when everyone has become almost too comfortable with the play's anti-semitic feeling, Shylock is given the most moving and most indelible speech in protest of anti-semitic stereotyping ever spoken on the stage. The play stops. The air changes. His indictment extends beyond the play to the audience, to those of us who have been complicit with the pleasures of its cheerful dehumanizing generalities. It is a truly astonishing event, and the play doesn't stop there. Shylock's forced conversion in the trial scene again fulfills our hopes and expectations to a point that makes us uncomfortable---you want to see a villain defeated: watch this! It's what we were hoping for--but suddenly this is not what we wanted. Not at all. The villain we wanted to lose has become the victim of a brutalizing society, a society rather like our own. Jews don't need to know this. They already know it all too well. But the rest of us, well, we learn.