Murray Ross

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.

 

Ed and Mary

Once upon a time a young girl named from Hicksville met a boy from Hicksville she knew she was going to marry. They were both eleven years old. It would take another thousand years for him to be interested in girls; she would wait for him.

 

Many thousand years later when they were both about 15,they went to a dinner dance,and that was pretty much that.

 

 
Later, they went to college--he to West Point, she to William and Mary.  They were married on September 23, 1961.  They went off to live in Steeple Bumstead, England.

 

On weekdays, he flew over Scotland with nuclear weapons,while she tended their thatch cottage. On weekends, they went to London to see the theatre.

 

He went to the University of Michigan to get his doctorate in Engineering,so he could teach at the Air Force Academy.  But first, he had to go to Vietnam.  He received the Distinguished Flying Cross, and a zillion other medals; he flew 213 missions, many of them dangerous.

 

Meanwhile, Mary was in Ann Arbor, working as a book keeper. When Ed got home, she gave him a check for $10,000--- his entire salary for the year, which she had saved while working for the Michigan Ladder Company. 

They moved to Colorado Springs,where Ed taught at the Academy for many years before going to work with AMI industries. Mary became the first woman CPA in Colorado Springs history.  She was an unstoppable woman, he was a high flying man.  They both did very well for themselves, and then they began doing well for others. 

They decided they would cultivate excellence, and cultivate their community--our community and our university.

First they gave $25,000 to THEATREWORKS to help buy us our Shakespeare tent, which will once again be home to our summer Shakespeare production this summer--The Merchant of Venice in Rock Ledge Ranch.  Then they gave us much more.  They helped lots of others too---Pikes Peak Hospice, Goodwill Industries, The Aging Center, the Chancellor's Fund, and just recently, with pride,  Ed decided he would help UCCS Molecular Bio-Technology!

 
 

Oh, and they they decided to give UCCS the largest gift in the institution's history. Yesterday we celebrated the rededication of our new building,  named the Osborne Center for Science and Engineering.

And last night we opened our new season with a new play, The Complete Life and Love of Ed and Mary Osborne (Slightly Reduced), starring Liam and Mallory Hybl. Cute couple,don't you think?

 

We have reason to believe Mr. and Mrs. Osborne enjoyed their play.

 

 

And we believe both Eds and both Marys deserve standing ovations.  It's about the present, and it's about the future.  Let us all rise, and thank our lucky stars.

 

 

The Costumer's last bow

While she's been a regular at our theater for 36 years, she was surprised to be called to the stage after the final performance of The Seagull on Sunday. 

 

For more than three decades Betty has begun working on our shows as early as anyone, and she has probably logged more production hours than anyone else on our staff. Her name has never been up in lights. Her work is back of backstage.  And yet there is no one who has more consistently raised the bar of our artistic quality. Betty Ross, as some of you know, has been our resident costume designer for the entire history of THEATREWORKS. And also my better half.

Some of you may think a costumer is the person who sits behind a sewing machine and makes dresses from old curtains so the show can go on.  That would be right--and wrong.  At our theatre, a modest theatre, our costumers do sit behind sewing machines for many hours.  They also are budget conscious, so those old curtains might very well become the dowager's dress.  But to stop there would be to radically underestimate the qualities required. 

A long time ago, in Santa Barbara, an Australian psychic gave Betty a reading, telling her many things she would like to have been told (strange how this happens), including an encouragement to push ahead with her painting.  In fact the psychic was right to tell her so, but in the process he allowed as how for Betty, costumes were nothing, for her making costumes was as easy as falling off a log.  Had I been present I would have leaped at his throat.  And while thrashing the wits out of him, I would have said, "Do you have any idea of how hard costume design is?  Do you know how long it takes to imagine and then create a good costume? Do realize that a costume designer must understand a play, have a feeling for character, be grounded in art and social history, have an artist's sensibility, a rich understanding of fabric and materials, possess the resourcefulness of a great scavanger, the ability to dance with whimsical,fuzzy minded directors, the capacity for working long hours, patiently forebearing actors who deliberately put on weight, who regularly tear their trousers,and who come with feet never meant for shoes?  Do you realize costume designers have to assemble teams of slave volunteers who toil endlessly and happily in sweatshop conditions? Compared to that, great oracle with the ponderous jaw, painting is easy--anyone can throw paint at a canvas. But to be a great costumer you have to have a degree in history and literature from Harvard, you have to have spent time curating at museums, collecting graduate degrees in theatre and in art history at Berkeley, you have to have spent a lifetime of looking hard at everything, and that's just for starters!  It's costuming that's hard, O clueless psycho-babbler!"

It's fortunate for everyone that I was not present at this reading  (the psychic also told Betty to beware of me; he called me too analytical, a "scapel brain"--- little did he know he might have been dealing with a psychopath).

I haven't finished my rant.  The costume designer for the theater, for our theater, is also the least publically recognized figure of our artistic team.  People sometimes applaud when the curtain goes up, looking at the set (and they would sometimes at our theatre too, if we had a curtain). Actors take their bows nightly to beating hands. Directors bask and accept congratulations.  Costumers remain largely anonymous.  So it was a fine thing when Betty Ross finally arrived on stage Sunday afternoon for the first and only time in her long life in the theater,to take a final bow after 26 years of amazing work that has produced over 1,000 great costumes.  The cast was there, wearing a few of  her clothes(she went out with a big Chekhovian bang--not a gunshot but a firework, a blaze of glory). Nancy Shanley and our advisory board was there, with flowers and gifts. And I'm happy to say that when Betty did finally get out on stage she got the standing ovation she richly deserved, including one from her not always uxorious husband.

 
 
To the psychic, I say: you had one clue--Betty should be painting, and she has been and she will be. To the many people who have sat and sewn and spun with Betty for so many years in the costume shop  (Kristin, Jan, Jean, Liya ,Barbara, Lauren, Colin, and many more), I send my highest regards and appreciation. And to Betty, speaking as Artistic Director of THEATREWORKS, I'd just say,"Thanks, doll---you're the greatest."