THEATREWORKS Newsletter

Ducking the truth in Norway By Murray Ross

Let's imagine a little family living together on the top floor of an apartment at the turn of the 20th century. The father is a sweet guy who likes his beer, his cheese, his wife and his daughter, not necessarily in that order. Actually he likes his daughter best of all, and she utterly adores him. Gina, the wife, is a terrific domestic manager who keeps the household together while her husband muses on his great invention, which he is sure to perfect very soon. And in the evenings after dinner, they all gather around the stove while daddy plays the flute. They are not a rich family. They are not well dressed. They are not important. But they are content with one another and happy with their time.

So what could possibly go wrong? Well, it's true the daughter is losing her eyesight— but not rapidly. All they need is a little help—their Uncle Scrooge, perhaps, turning up with a large turkey and offers of medical assistance. And in fact, unexpectedly, a fellow does knock on their door, the son of a wealthy tycoon, and he wants to help too. He was the father's best friend long ago, and when he offers to rent the spare room and takes a personal interest in the family it seems he will only enhance the general welfare. But since this is a play by Henrik Ibsen and not a Christmas story by Charles Dickens, you might have your doubts about his contributions. And you would be right to have these doubts, because this friend turns out to be almost as helpful as that notorious good old boy named Iago.

Writing a hundred years ago, when more people saw Shakespeare on the page than on stage, the great critic A.C. Bradley said of Othello that "the reader's heart and mind are held in a vise, experiencing the extremes of pity and fear, sympathy and repulsion, sickening hope and dreadful expectation." I've seen exactly this response to Iago's malevolent manipulations in our own theater. Many years ago I saw a friend, a judge, on his way out of our production at intermission. Why was he leaving, I asked? He said he couldn't stand it. "That bad?" I asked. "No— I've just seen too many guys like that in my courtroom. It's too much for me."

When I last saw The Wild Duck (in London seven years ago) I had the same degree of intense reaction the judge and Bradley had to Othello. The play begins rather slowly; Ibsen is famous for taking time establishing his characters and past history. His web is meticulous and complex.  But almost imperceptibly the play's dreadful momentum is upon us. I remember sitting in the first row of the balcony in the fourth act, leaning forward, gripping the rail, and having to restrain my urge to jump on stage and say, "STOP!"  Really, not even in Shakespeare had a play gripped me so tightly. It was wonderful.

So The Wild Duck is a thrilling play; a thriller. A crime is going to be committed, a monstrous crime, perpetuated by a villain as determined and almost as persuasive as Iago, and we watch as he puts his victims in his vise and turns. They are held and squeezed, nearly suffocated, and so are we. But Ibsen's perpetuator is not, like Iago, a gleefully malevolent villain. Gregers Werle would never confess so much of himself. He comes to the house to save the Ekdal family, not to destroy them. He is the opposite of a cynic; he's an idealist and a crusader in the cause of truth. In his own mind, he is the hero.

As always in Ibsen—and perhaps in most families—there are secrets. Gradually we learn this happy little family is floating on a muddy sea of deception that has been long suppressed. Gregers Werle is determined to bring these buried truths into the light of day, thinking in the end their revelation will only provide the Ekdals with a firmer foundation for their future. But this is a family whose capacity for the harsher light of day is limited. They prefer group denial to group therapy. Instead of facing facts, even the less pleasant facts of daily life, grandfather, father and daughter escape to their magic kingdom, a play forest they have created in their attic, filled with trees and animals, books, lost treasure and God knows what. They have a great time there, and go as often as they can, especially to look after the kingdom's most precious inhabitant, a wild duck they rescued after it was shot and wounded.

This duck is no ordinary duck; it is, as you might have guessed, A VERY IMPORTANT SYMBOL. Ibsen made sure we understood this since about every three minutes someone happens to mention THE WILD DUCK living in her basket in the next room. When I met with the play's excellent recent translator, David Eldridge, I asked him if and how he changed the original script. He said very little, apart from deleting maybe 37 of the 52 references to the bird in question. So perhaps we’d better consider this wild fowl, which our playwright thinks so much of.

In the play, we learn the duck was shot by Greger's father. The bird was only wounded, and it did what we are told wild ducks always do in these circumstances: it dove to the bottom, and hung on to some seaweed, never to rise again. But the hunter's ferocious dog went down after it and fetched it back up again. And now the duck lies quietly in state, doted on by Hedwig, who has claimed the bird as her own.

I will leave to you to work out the symbolic permutations— they are manifold. You might also guess, if you know your Ibsen, that this duck is a goner. But she will not be the most terrible casualty of our idealist's ferocious crusade for truth. Indeed the entire Ekdal sanctuary of escape and illusion will soon become a barren and lifeless pile of debris—a mere attic you might say.

Ibsen was of many minds about truth and its consequences. Three years earlier he had written An Enemy of the People, featuring another idealist, a chemist who wants to warn his town their water supply is polluted. In that play, the truth is also not welcome, since it threatens the town's material prosperity. But the truth-teller himself is clearly a man to be admired. In a final moment the hero, the enemy of the people, asserts, "the strongest man in the world is he who stands alone."

Gregers Werle is also a strong man standing alone and apart, standing for Truth. Or is that actually true? Could there be something less wholesome than the “claim of the ideal” driving him doggedly on? In The Wild Duck, truth hits home in the hardest imaginable way. Gregers in some ways reminds us of his great Viennese contemporary, Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, who also believed the truth could set us free. And while Freudian theories are still hotly contested, this basic presumption now has the force of received wisdom: face reality, and move on; you may be battered but you will be stronger. That may not be the case with Gregers’ hapless patient, Hjalmar Ekdal, who may arouse both your sympathy and fury during the course of his “treatment.”

It’s just a quiet little play, really, about ordinary people. But it’s a masterpiece, and more than that, it’s a knockout. You are likely to leave both stunned and angry—and not quite as confident in the necessity of dragging the truth, the whole truth and nothing but, into the cold light of day. Welcome to Norway. When the play begins, at a tycoon’s supper party, you will hardly know you are putting your heart in a vise, but I predict you will soon find yourself full of sickening hope and dreadful expectation. It’s a terrible thing. It’s absolutely stunning.

 

THIS MEANS YOU, EVERYMAN! By Murray Ross

When God talks, people listen—or they ought to, anyway. They haven’t been paying Him any attention lately, so He’s sending Death into the world to give them a bit more focus. And when Death knocks it’s a wake-up call. Out of the blue, he tells Everyman he’s going on a trip to meet his maker. Everyman, needless to say, has not packed his bags. He’d rather not go. Please. This is how the best known play of the Middle Ages begins: with a bang and then a whimper.

Everyman is one of five surviving English morality plays; it was probably written around 1500, and originally in Dutch. The morality play offered its audiences moral instruction through dramatic action in allegorical form. That’s a dreaded and formidable word: allegory. It means that everything which happens in concrete form also exists in another more abstract dimension. For instance, that castle on stage might be an actual stage castle—but it is also the “Castle of Perseverance,” a symbolic citadel where we see mankind holed up, fortified by faith and courage, resisting evil temptation and assault. Allegory gives a play and its audiences a double power of seeing and understanding—everything is enriched: the concrete is made symbolic; the symbolic is made concrete. Allegory was especially important to Medieval culture: it’s one way the drama can represent the invisible and deeper reality that informs all of God’s creations—it gets to what really exists, and matters.

Morality plays were set outside of historical time, with a central character representing all humanity, and other characters representing human categories and qualities like lust, knowledge, gluttony and good-deeds—all lots of fun for actors. Morality plays are always about man’s alienation from God, and their action is about his redemption and return to favor, often across the span of a whole lifetime. But Everyman is unique in its focus on the concluding and most dramatic chapter in our story.

It’s a chapter that we don’t read as much in modern life, even though the death rate continues, as I just read in the New York Times, “at a scandalous 100%.” But we have made great progress in removing the presence of death from our daily lives. We now die in hospitals, in nursing homes, in places not regularly visited by most of the living. We don’t see many people dying on television or in movies, unless they die suddenly, violently and thrillingly (the recent film Amour is the wonderful exception). We have better ways of denying and avoiding death than ever before. So the news of our own imminent demise is even more likely to come, as it does to Everyman, as a very unpleasant surprise. It was never going to happen now.

Everyman is fortunate he gets the news ahead of time, as shocking as it is. He won’t have to go to the grave like Hamlet’s father,

Unhousel’d, disappointed, unanaled;

No reckoning made, but sent to my account

With all my imperfections on my head.

O, horrible! O, horrible! Most horrible!

Morality plays almost always enact some form of journey to salvation, and Everyman is no exception. The play is the story of the road that must be taken when you have the chance to get ready to die, and the road map is the one ordained and prescribed by the church. But if Everyman were only a relic of the medieval religious instruction, it is unlikely that we would produce the play at THEATREWORKS. We are, after all, that same infamous theatre company that proudly presented the notorious Church last year, which rather unnecessarily riled up some of the faithful. It is absolutely true Everyman reflects the religious belief of the Middle Ages, and that this practice is grounded in a deep and profound faith, but the play is much more than church doctrine. When he gets the bad news, Everyman experiences almost exactly the same sequence of emotions described by Elizabeth Kubler-Ross in her classic book, On Death and Dying: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. On the road to the grave, Everyman learns that dying is about subtraction and abandonment. His instincts tell him to keep as much company as he can, but he finds, as we all must, that in the end we die alone. This dramatic discovery gives the play a stark existential power that persists even after the balm of salvation has been poured; it’s one great reason why the play has spoken so directly to audiences of different faiths (and lacks of faith) for a very long time. It turns out that dying hasn’t changed all that much in the past 600 years.

We are doing Everyman exactly as it was written; you might say we too are among the faithful; we believe. The play, as I mentioned, exists outside of history: every man is every man (and woman) at any and every point in time. The play is neither more nor less relevant now as it was then, nor then as now. So it is no distortion of the original to set it in a contemporary context. And we think that taking the audience on an actual journey will only ground and enhance the play’s allegorical dimension and dramatic power.

Thus it is that audiences for this production will be invited onto a city bus leaving from daily life downtown, from the lobby of the Wyndham Grand hotel on the corner of Pikes Peak and Nevada. You and 35 others will be in for the ride of your lives. There will be several stops on the way, and many vivid and often amusing passengers will be arriving and departing before the bus arrives at its final destination. Who says getting ready to die has to be dull? Not in the theatre, and certainly not on our bus! There are plenty of surprises en route, and though the ride is harrowing, it ends in song. You won’t forget your journey with Everyman, and we hope you will find, as audiences have for six centuries, the experience is just what the original anonymous author advertised.

This matter is wondrous precious

But the intent of it is more gracious,

And sweet to bear away.

Please be advised that while this is a journey we will all take, seating for any individual performance is very limited; we recommend making your reservations early, keeping in mind that you may not get to choose exactly when you get to go. So it is in life, and in death. Whenever you do go you will find dying is quite an adventure, and this time around, thank God, it’s only a practice run.

PROLOGUE: Anne Dobyns and Medieval Revelry by Kevin Landis

Ann Dobyns is coming in February to tell us all about Everyman and its position in the history of medieval literature, and there is no one better. Professor Dobyns joins us from the University of Denver and has plans to talk about what the theatre of the Middle Ages looked like. Do you know the difference between a cycle play, a mystery play, and a morality play? Me neither. But Ann does, and she will come bearing slides and videos and teach us all how to read and watch a classic of world literature. Everyman is an incredible play, but it is even more enjoyable once placed in context.

So, while Everyman on the Bus is unusual in that it will begin in downtown Colorado Springs, I strongly encourage you to make the trek up the hill to THEATREWORKS on Sunday afternoon to listen to this brilliant scholar. It will be so worth your time to meet Ann Dobyns, to learn from her and to hear her speak in Olde English. And, I am personally making meat and vegetable pies for everyone to try… and mead. A medieval snack to make it a real party! 

SEXYPANTS by Kevin Landis

A couple of years ago I went to New York City, specifically to see Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson. Ben Brantley of the New York Times had reported that it was the most compelling Broadway musical in years, it centered around an era that I have long been fascinated by, several of the actors were old friends of mine, and my former professor and mentor, Oskar Eustis, was its producer. It was a bit extravagant to go all that way for one show but I had to see it. 

It truly was exemplary—an iconoclastic marvel of sorts. It was written about in many publications for its daring, its catchy tunes, and its indefinable style. The theatre was lit with hundreds of thousands of red twinkle lights, there were giant oil paintings of the founding fathers covering the walls, and a dead mule hung from its legs above the audience. The cast was made up of sexy young television, theatre and movie stars in impossibly tight pants and I felt like a teenager at a rock concert. It was breathtaking.

 But I remember very clearly a text message that I received from Murray when we were chatting about it later: “Well Kevin, it sounds like you are just this side of idolatry.” “No, darn it,” I wrote, “I really do love this piece.” And I did. There were clear and good reasons why it was the critical darling of the year. But at the time, though I couldn’t figure out why, I knew that something was nagging at me. While I loved it, I was confused. I didn’t get it. Yes, it was revelatory, unique, abrasive, challenging, crass, controversial, political; all of the things I love in the theatre. But I was troubled that I didn’t fully understand the point. It compelled me to continue thinking and mulling. But, I had to put it out of my mind for a while. The students and I were working on The Inspector General and then Salome. I had other things on my plate. 

Then last year around this time Drew emailed me to tell me that he noticed that the rights for BBAJ were available. If I still wanted to do it, we would be one of the first regional theatres in the country to tackle the piece. I jumped. I knew that the students would kill me if I didn’t do a musical and this was perfect for them and for all of us. It just felt right even if I didn’t fully understand my attraction to it.

And then it struck me. A stunningly simple revelation: this musical was meant to be done in the wild west, not in that glitzy Broadway theatre. The essence of Andrew Jackson, of his upbringing and his presidency, is his connection to the rural, the local, the people. After all, he can claim to be the first president “of the people,” a mantra that every president since has claimed. Populism, baby! Tea parties!! This needed to be done in Colorado!!! This needed to be done on the wild frontier in a theatre that could accommodate a total immersive experience!!!! Then, it could be brilliant!!!!! We had to do it… we owed it to Colorado Springs and to America!!!!!! Rah, rah, rah!!!!!!!

Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson is difficult to explain since it totally upends ideas of what an American musical should be. It is crass, brash (yes, there are four letter words), sexy and provocative. Its rock music. Its political. Its an equal opportunity offender. It takes place at once in Andrew Jackson’s early 19^th century and in the minds of a bunch of college students with rock star dreams. The founding fathers are there as well as a modern midwestern mom who acts as the narrator of her children’s little play (we were able to enlist the fabulous THEATREWORKS star, Lynne Hastings).

It is a seedy evening in a town square somewhere in Tennessee circa 1830.It’s a garage band in the Midwest circa 2013.

In this world of anachronisms, we are asked to connect the eras. Is it about the real Andrew Jackson or just some kids who are starting an Andrew Jackson garage band? Yes… both and equally, and we all will have to embrace that as we grapple with grand themes. You see, the thing about Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson is that it is a fairly controversial statement on American politics and a bare look at humanity’s instinct to kill and destroy for the sake of personal comfort. Jackson is alternatively called the greatest president of the 19^th century and “The American Hitler.” That isn’t usually the stuff of musicals.

Michael Friedman and Alex Timbers have created a brilliant play that is at once a joy to behold and a troubling reflection on the flaws and foibles of material culture. In that spirit of anachronism we see a yuppie Florida couple condemning Andrew Jackson’s Indian slaughter while insisting that their move to the suburbs, made possible by Jackson’s removal of the tribes, is really ok. “Well, the weather is nice after all.” We see Dallas Cowboys-like cheerleaders in the Jackson Oval Office rooting for his removal policies. We see the founding fathers, replete with neck ruffles and brandy snifters crassly talking about their sexual exploits and their love of Twinkies. 

We are all asked to rock out, to have fun, but then to think about what we are doing and what we have done. It is in that spirit of seedy fun, of games, and revelry that Roy Ballard and I created a playground for this show. We want to put you in a town square in Tennessee in the midst of a carnival so that you can play with us. Roy and I are having a blast designing and building midway games that are more than just set dressing. We encourage you to get to the theatre early and try your hand at Whack-a-Mole, Strongman and the other carnival games that will be set up in the lobby. And, yes, of course, there will be prizes for the winners.

I love the story of our BBAJ and I feel tied to its development. I was there in the Broadway house for its opening, and Oskar Eustis was here at our theatre one week later. We talked about the show at that Prologue and I have been listening to the music ever since. But more importantly, my colleagues and I are devoted to selecting productions that first serve the pedagogical needs of our students but also provide an electrifying night of theatre for THEATREWORKS patrons who are accustomed to seeing the best theatre in the region. Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson more than fits the bill, and we are gunna rock the Bon Vivant Theatre!

Its that time of year when theatre and music students come together with the generous support of THEATREWORKS and the University of Colorado to create something truly special. To all of you THEATREWORKS fans, we appreciate your continued support of the student show and the promise of future generations of actors, directors, designers and theatre artists. Enjoy the fun. This is the age of Andrew Jackson and history just got all sexypants! Yea yea!!

Oskar and Michael: A Bloody Incredible Prologue
Well, I am out of superlatives. We have endeavored to bring the best Prologue guests in the country to our theatre this year and have had some great success. We had fascinating talks from Sarah Ruhl, Vince Russo, Ed Ferrara, Leeny Sack, Bob Rais and Elissa Auther. And now… well… ok… a few more superlatives are in order… AMAZING! INCREDIBLE! ONE OF A KIND! BROADWAY! PUBLIC THEATER! TONY AWARDS! SUPERSTARS! OSKAR EUSTIS AND MICHAEL FRIEDMAN!!!!!!!!

If you follow theatre, you know these names. Heck, if you read anything I have written here in the past couple of years, you at least know Oskar. He is the most powerful American theatre producer, the head of the world renowned Public Theater, artistic director of Shakespeare in the Park, hob-nobber with movie stars and politicians, and, I am happy to brag, my friend. But beyond that, as many of you can attest, Oskar has one of the sharpest theatre minds anywhere, and he will be with us on the occasion of our all-student production of Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson. Oskar is a big supporter of our students, and we love him for it.

And he is perfect for this Prologue since he commissioned the original Broadway musical a couple of years ago. What’s more, his buddy, Michael Friedman, wrote BBAJ, and Oskar is bringing him along to the Dusty Loo Bon Vivant Theater too. Yes, the Broadway composer, on our stage with the Broadway producer… here to talk with all of you about the making of Broadway musicals and to see our production of their show.

I’m terrified. And excited. You should be too. Don’t miss this. This is the pinnacle of Prologue. This is the perfect example of what we are endeavoring to do: connect the students of UCCS and the THEATREWORKS family with the stars and scholars of the theatre world, and to draw all of us together under one roof to discuss something we all have in common, a love of the theatre. I am happy and I can’t wait. 

Rothko Rides West by Murray Ross

The great artist came to Colorado once, when he taught at Boulder for eight weeks in 1955. It was a chance to get out of town, make some extra cash and be idolized in the provinces. James Byrnes, the head of our Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center, drove up in hopes of finding him at home. Instead he found Rothko on the road a few miles away, about to abandon an old car with steam erupting from under the hood. Rothko had just bought the car for sightseeing, but didn’t realize automobiles needed something more than gas and oil. He was a big city boy. Byrnes invited Rothko down to the Springs, and he came to our town for a weekend. He enjoyed himself, praising his excellent hosts, but he also told Byrnes to get out, and that his enterprise here was both “shoddy” and too safe. And Byrnes did get out—he directed the FAC for only two years, though in that time he managed to add O’Keefe, Marin, Dove, Avery and other modern artists to the collection. But no Rothkos, alas.

Rothko himself went back to New York where he belonged. He was not an outdoors man; he hated nature. He liked to eat, smoke, drink and paint --- indoors. He was already famous when he came to Colorado, and he was about to become even more so. Samuel Bronfam, the head of Seagram’s Liquor, was building the greatest, the most important and the most beautiful office tower in New York. At the top would be the posh Four Seasons restaurant, with a lot of designated space for large mural paintings by a great modern artist. Rothko was Seagram’s choice; he was given a very handsome fee (about $2,000,000 in today’s money) to paint more than 500 square feet of paintings. It was the greatest commission of its time.

John Logan’s play, Red, takes off from this historical moment. Rothko has a lot of work to do; he needs an assistant. A young painter is given the job and gets a lot more than he bargained for. From the moment he walks into the studio he gets Rothko exploding like a radiator on a hot day in Colorado. Rothko was not an easy man. He was prodigiously self-preoccupied, a steaming fountain of anxiety and indignation, and a titanic bully. Sometimes he was a bore, but he was always a force. The Seagram’s commission excited and alarmed him. It was an irresistible invitation for the officially designated “greatest living artist” to put his grand stamp on an eternal monument, and Rothko did not shrink from comparing the Seagram murals to the Sistine Chapel. But there were difficulties. 

Rothko was no longer a young man; he was the old champ feeling pressure from young contenders, pleasant and cool artists like the one he has just hired as his assistant. Thirty years ago he and his fellow abstract painters had taken on Cubism and triumphed. As Rothko says, he and his gang destroyed Cubism: “We stomped it to death. Nobody can paint a Cubist picture today.” But now, he fears, he and his movement are the new dinosaurs; it’s their time to go. Pop Art is ready to take out Abstract Expressionism. But Rothko is going down fighting. The Seagram’s murals will reassert his dominance and seal his immortality. Maybe. 

There are further problems. The greatest living artist dreaded showing his work to anyone anywhere. Before an exhibition he would be throwing up and taking to his bed. He liked very much being honored as a genius but at the same time feared that exposure of his work would reveal him as a fraud. He lowered the lights when showing his work in his studio. He was as protective of his paintings as we are of our little children. As he says to his assistant—and to us—in his first words of the play: “Be kind. Be a human being, that’s all I can say. Be a human being for once in your life! These pictures deserve compassion and they live and die in the eye of a sensitive viewer.” Sending his pictures out into the world was as hard as dropping your kid off on his first day of school.

Rothko dreamed of a sacred, contemplative space for his work, and he finally got one, years later in the Houston Chapel. But the Seagram’s murals were to be mounted in a restaurant, in a temple of commerce, anathema to Rothko’s purist ideals. As he revealed to a friend, he had been “commissioned to paint a series of large canvases for the walls of the most exclusive room in a very expensive restaurant . . . a place where the richest bastards in New York will come to feed and show off.” Rothko confessed to a friend that he had accepted this assignment “with strictly malicious intentions.” He said, “I hope to ruin the appetite of every son of a bitch who eats in that room.” His paintings were to be so powerful, so oppressive they would overwhelm and punish the corrupt feeders, who would suddenly feel trapped and dining as if in a circle of Dante’s hell.

Rothko’s rationale for accepting the Seagram’s commission reveals much about the man and his time. The two dozen or so New York artists who fought and drank and painted big pictures in studios as large as gymnasiums were a special breed, mostly men and a few women. They thought of themselves as titans, as saints, as rebels, as revolutionaries, as intellectuals and Promethean fire givers. In retrospect, through the lens of post modern irony and detachment, they sometimes sound full of romantic bluster, slopping the paint around while quoting Nietszche and Kierkegaard, given to orphic utterances like, “I am nature!” (Jackson Pollock, famously). 

And yet this group constituted the last heroic age of American art. Rothko and his contemporaries acted as if art actually mattered. Painting was the most important activity in the world. Art was not decoration; a real painting was not painted to be an “overmantle”---something to hang over your color-coordinated fireplace. Real painting, heroic painting, comes out of high seriousness and aspiration. It asks everything of the artist, and of the viewer. It is Dionysus and Apollo, it is red and black, it is an exaltation of the spirit; it is the blood of life itself: “Stand closer. You’ve got to get close. Let it pulsate . . . Let it wrap its arms around you; let it embrace you, filling even your peripheral vision so that nothing else exists or has ever existed or will exist. Let the picture do it’s work—but work with it. Meet it halfway for God’s sake.” 

Rothko speaks to us as I sometimes want to speak to my audiences before a production of Shakespeare, Ibsen or Chekhov: “Lean forward, lean into it. Engage with it!” There’s something truly exhilarating about encountering an artist of such high purpose and uncompromising intensity, and in Red we do. John Logan, the playwright, is also one of the best screenwriters of our time (his credits include Gladiator and Skyfall, and he has been assigned to write the next two James Bond movies). In Red Logan brilliantly weaves together much of Rothko’s own words and writings—most of what Rothko says here he actually did say. But Logan also understands how to bring old fashioned “real men” to life and put them into action; he is an action writer. In Red Rothko rides roughshod over his mild assistant and the theatre audience for about an hour. He is as terrifying and thrilling as Genghis Khan. And then the mild assistant finds his legs, and that’s reason to cheer and wonder. You will see.

Rothko never came back to “shoddy” Colorado to threaten and inspire us, like Tamburlaine, with his “high astounding terms.” He preferred the dim light of his studio, pulsating with his red paintings. So we have gone to New York to engage a director and two wonderful actors. We will be bringing them and Rothko’s New York studio here. It was located in the Bowery, in what had been the YMCA gymnasium, modified to seal off virtually all natural light. You will meet Mark Rothko in his chapel as he was: full of revelation and contradiction, oblivious and highly aware, sophisticated and naive, fearful and courageous, violent and vulnerable, pompous, sensual, passionate, and, finally, all alone in the dark. He always feared that his black would devour his red, and eventually it did; after suffering a heart attack and increased depression in 1970 he slit his wrists and was found in a pool of his own blood. He was 66. 

But here it’s 11 years earlier and all his blood is on the canvas. You won’t forget your time with him, or your journey into the molten heart of his creation.

We bought too many tickets for our London Tour. So THEATREWORKS now has a limited number of tickets for sale for two shows in London: Privates on Parade on January 7 and Twelfth Night on January 6, 8, 9 and 11. Email theatreworks@theatreworksCS.org or call 719-255-3232 if your interested. This is totally legit. We have the tickets and you may even pick them up in London (address in NW8), or we are happy to mail to you. Willing to wheel and deal!!! -Drew

You Can't Take It With You by Murray Ross

The first rehearsal with the entire cast and design team.

 

Many years ago I included You Can’t Take It with You in a survey of American Drama I taught with a colleague in the English Department. It has been called the classic American comedy. But when it came to teaching the play, we found ourselves deeply disappointed. The play wasn’t what we wanted it to be. We were hoping for an irreverent, slightly disturbing play with an anarchic steak as radical as the Marx Brothers. Instead we found a creaky and sometimes ponderous period warhorse. We were hoping for some satire that would illuminate the class inequality, materialism and conventional stuffiness of American life. We wanted something truly bohemian, and instead we got pablum. I am sorry to say we passed on our indignant academic dismissal to our students.

I wish I could meet with that class again. I would sing a very different song this time. It’s not that we were entirely wrong about the play’s limitations, only that we were entirely blind to its virtues. You Can’t Take It With You opened in 1936, and played for 837 performances. It won the Pulitzer Prize. It has been a favorite of school, summer stock and amateur performances ever since (my son played Grandpa when he was 16, and he wasn’t bad either). It has been revived professionally on many occasions. It’s now safe to say this is one of America’s best loved plays. And it’s not because it is gummy cream of wheat. It’s because You Can’t Take It With You is truly loveable, very funny, and even—so I will argue--necessary.

I learned this very recently while attending auditions for the show. I watched dozens of actors read dozens of scenes (20 very distinct characters turn up in the Sycamore home), and after an hour I realized these auditions were not like any other I have attended. Normally when casting I make an effort to mask my owl like scrutiny with minimal pleasantness, but here I wasn’t masking anything. I was smiling all the time. And it wasn’t because these actors were universally talented (though many of them were), it was because the play itself makes you smile. It comes instantly and naturally to life when good actors stand up and deliver. The lines are still fresh, well-shaped and served with perfect timing by the master collaborators George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart. But the play is more than skillful. It seems to come from a deeply warm center that permeates the entire household. It’s a household of improbable individualists. The mother is writing her 11^th play—the others are all unfinished and terrible, but her enthusiasm is undaunted. Her husband is making fireworks in the basement and playing with his erector set. One daughter has been studying ballet for eight years (her teacher says she stinks), while her partner, an amateur printer, accompanies her on the xylophone. Many exotic characters make house calls: the Russian dance teacher, a drunk actress, and the Grand Duchess Olga Katrina. Grandpa Martin Vanderhof is the patriarch of the household, but he rules with benign neglect and spends his time with his pet snakes, playing darts, or going out to circuses and commencements.

You might naturally suspect the Sycamore zoo is a portrait of family dysfunction, but the truth is quite the opposite. This is possibly the most functional family you will ever find on stage or anywhere else. Everyone likes and tolerates everyone else. Never is heard a discouraging word. Everyone is free to pursue happiness and does so without doubt or obstruction. No one is distracted by trivial matters like work, elections, success or money. Everyone is healthy. The Sycamore home is a distant cousin of the Greek Island, Ikaria, recently featured in the New York Times because it’s a place where nobody dies. There are no watches on Ikaria, plenty of naps, very little cash, lots of wine; everyone has a garden and hangs out together. The Sycamore home is much more American—less olive oil and more bounce—but it too is a kind of paradise on earth. You could say it’s also a sanctuary of terminally arrested children who don’t know the real meaning of work. You would be right, but you would be speaking in your grown up adult voice, the voice of those who no longer live in paradise and have forgotten what it is. 

As we know, paradise only works when isolated and uncontaminated—inside a house or confined on an island. The drama comes with invasions, and in this play there are invasions of two kinds. The first to arrive is that dreaded American bogeyman: the IRS. The tax man has come to claim the twenty four years of back taxes Grandpa has never paid. That’s a lot of taxes. And then Wall Street shows up, represented by the Kirbys, the parents of the nice young man who is courting Alice, the only sane member of the Sycamore family. They’ve come to dinner a night before they were scheduled, and their arrival precipitates the ensuing comic mayhem. Since this is comedy, both invasions are eventually repelled. What’s the best way to defeat the tax man? Evasion, of course. And for your enemies? Convert them. So it goes in You Can’t Take It With You, in which paradise is gloriously retained.

Seventy six years after its first performance, You Can’t Take It With You seems curiously of its time and of ours too, but not on account of the obvious historical parallels. The play was written in another period of economic recession and looming war, but the paradisiacal garden of the Sycamore home is walled off from these grim realities; they are never seen or mentioned. What is wonderfully resonant still are the twin evils of taxes and big money. In our politics these days, Republicans complain about one and Democrats about the other, but here both are the bad guys, and both are defeated. It is rather wonderful how the old dialogue flashes into new life now. Consider this exchange between Grandpa and the tax man:

Henderson: The government gives you everything. It protects you.

Grandpa: What from?

Henderson: Well---invasion. Foreigners that might come over here and take everything you’ve got.

Grandpa: Oh, I don’t think they are going to do that.

Henderson: If you didn’t pay an income tax they would. How do you think the Government keeps up the Army and Navy. All those battleships . .. 

Grandpa: Last time we used battleships was in the Spanish American War and what did we get out of it? Cuba—and we gave that back. I wouldn’t mind paying if it were something sensible.

These lines wonderfully scramble views that remain at odds today: a liberal critique of excessive defense spending which echoes the best zinger of the recent presidential debates, together with a libertarian insistence on deciding where personal income should go. With Grandpa, champion both of bohemian eccentricity and tea party resistance, we all win.

I suspect the play’s first producers knew what they were doing when they decided to open their show in December seventy six years ago. You Can’t Take It With You is not a traditional Christmas play, but it is a holiday play in the deepest and best sense. It takes us away from our grinding realities into a better, freer world, and one great reason this idyllic world is better and freer is that money is neither required nor valued. Money, in fact, is the enemy, as it often is in traditional Christmas plays as varied as A Christmas Carol and Santaland Diaries. The main thing money does in You Can’t Take It With You is give you indigestion. Its pursuit means you are spending most of your time doing things you don’t want to do. You are dedicated to your business when you really wanted to be a trapeze artist or play the saxophone. Your sex life dries up. You take a lot of bicarbonate of soda. And where’s the fun? As Grandpa says, “Where does the fun come in?” 

You Can’t Take It With You banishes the realities of making a living and brings in the fun. It brings in the pursuits of real happiness. It gives us bad ballet, candy, great fireworks, and lots of love. What’s better than that? It suggests life forms of all kinds can live very well in the same house together and can actually care about each other too. This is the alternative American dream, and it’s just as deep and just as necessary as that other one about success and opportunity and the race to the top in the greatest nation on earth. We cordially invite you to the Sycamore home this holiday season. You will be greeted by the fabulous Velvet Hills chorus singing in four part harmony. You will be ushered into a home of fellow Americans living together and living in their own rich harmony, a place where explosions are only occasions for laughter, and the nice boy gets the great girl, and even the bad guy finally has some fun too. You’ll have to leave and go home when the play is over (though not before punch and cookies), but you can take a little piece of paradise with you when you go. Happy holidays!

The Elaborate Entrance of CHAD DEITY!

And now for something completely different. You’ve come to expect that at THEATREWORKS, at least some of the time, and now would be one of those times. We’ve stowed the Shakespeare tent and packed up our glass menagerie. The next time you come to our theater you won’t find a stage---you’ll be ringside at the latest production of THE Wrestling. You’ll hear some noise—quite a lot of it. You’ll hear a loud and profane words. You’ll see a little sweat, and some flashing lights, and action on video screens. Some shirtless beefy men will be bouncing off the mats. For a moment or two you might think you’ve come to the wrong place. You went out for a night at the theatre, and you found yourself at a sporting event. You were looking for a play, for art, and instead you landed in the middle of an adrenaline rush.

But hold on. You have come to the right place, and what you will find is a real play, a very good play, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity does what Pulitzer finalists are supposed to do—reflect and explore the American experience. Chad Deity’s world of THE Wrestling stands not only for its real life cousin, World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE), but also for America itself. Not for all of America, of course, but for that very prominent engine of our culture, particularly conspicuous in an election season, which generates the myths, heroes and villains we can all wrap ourselves in. 

Your host and guide for this very lively evening is a wrestler named Macedonio Guerra, better known as Mace. He’s a good wrestler too, one of the best at THE Wrestling, but you’d never know it. He’s a professional fall guy, the guy who makes other guys look good. Mace was a Puerto Rican kid who grew up in Brooklyn and fell in love with the sport and the drama of professional wrestling. He played with action figures, worked on his moves, and finally got a job with his dream company. It was all right with him that he was never going to be a champ. Mace just wants to be part of the story; one of the people who tells the rousing and inspiring stories that grip and thrill the fans in the arena and those watching on television. Mace is Chad Deity’s story teller, but the story he tells us is not quite the same as the one that the company promotes and plays out in the ring.

Back in his Brooklyn neighborhood, Mace has met a street-rapping ball player named Vigneshwar Paduar who he thinks could be the next big thing at THE Wrestling. He’s got charisma; he could be a real star. So he takes his buddy in hand and pitches him to the boss of THE Wrestling, Everett K. Olson, a slick, snaky dude with a sharp eye on the prize. Olson knows this is the land of the free, the brave, and the prejudiced. He knows we are a nation of many ethnic identities, and that these are reliably molded into emotionally charged stereotypes. Olson is no primitive; he’s not behind the times. His current champ, Chad Deity, is a handsome black man in a limo, with swagger, bling, a flashy smile, gold trunks, and an amazing body. He can’t wrestle, but that doesn’t matter---Mace makes him look good. 

Image is everything and CHAD DEITY is all image---and boy can he make an entrance! But every hero needs a villain, every champ needs a contender. Every Republican needs a Democrat and vice-versa. And so Olson goes to work, transforming the hip-hop Indian into a new threat—a Muslim wrestler named The Fundamentalist, a terrorist with a deadly secret weapon, a kick called “the sleeper cell.” Mace is given a too big sombrero, some gun-belts, and re-named Che-Chavez-Castro. It doesn’t matter that Mace is actually Puerto Rican and Vigneshwar is of Indian descent —they both have the right flavor of dark skins; they both can be dressed up as blood rousing stereotypes. So now THE Wrestling has a story they can sell. Now they have something worthy of the sport that, as Mace says, “is one of the most profound expressions of the ideals of this damn nation.”

So far so good, at least for THE Wrestling and its rowdy fans. But as it happens, this new kid Vigneshwar (he’s called VP for short) has a secret mission, and no intention of following the company script. In other words, we have complications—we have drama. You’ll have to get over to our ring to find out how it’s all sorted out—but you may find yourself actually rooting for the “wrong” stereotypes.

The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity is certainly something more than a play. We need a real wrestling ring center stage, and we need real wrestlers in it, and wrestlers with particular sorts of skins—or rather we need real actors with particular skins who can also wrestle. For your average Colorado theater, the show is a casting nightmare. Not many Puerto Rican wrestlers turned up for our Glass Menagerie auditions, I am sorry to say. Or rap artists of Indian descent. Or black men built like gods. We also need lots of sound, video, flash and smoke you can find at rock shows and at WWE events but not normally in your neighborhood playhouse. The truth is Chad Deity is a little out of our league; it’s too big, it’s just too---elaborate. But the show is a knockout, and we wanted to do it. It’s not often you find such old fashioned robust and rollicking all-American satire these days. It’s unusual to find a play that is not only about sport, but also is sport too—and when you do find one its temptation should not be refused. As it happens we were not the only people who felt this way. Our friends at the excellent Curious Theatre in Denver were thinking like us, and when we got to talking we realized if our theaters pooled resources we might actually be able to pull off this elaborate entrance in style. 

And so we have! I am happy to report this in advance, because our jointly produced production, directed by Curious Artistic Director Chip Walton, has been playing for the last month in Denver. There’s something to be said for THEATREWORKS opening a show out of town, though it has never happened before and may never again. Not only does this mean that Chad Deity will makes its entrance here fully seasoned and in tune, it means the critics have already weighed in. And we are happy to say their verdicts are unanimous. “For the entire evening,” writes Westword’s Juliet Wittman, “the play’s mix of emotional intensity and over-the-top theatricality grabs us in a headlock and won’t let go.” “Thought provoking, blood-pumping, pulse pounding theatre” says John Moore at CultureWest. The Denver Post says the play, “calls for response throughout. Yea!” And Broadway World sums it up as “simply a delight . . . you do not want to miss.”

In fact you do not want to miss The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity. I can fairly well guarantee this is the first and only time you will see a genuine power-bomb and super-kick on our stage. Do not try these at home. You will rarely see such pectoral muscles as those rippling on the champ. You won’t often see on a local stage such ethnic diversity, both actual and entirely manufactured. And when all these are combined with a thoughtful and provocative reflection on our national myth-making, when the mind is stretched while the blood is pumped, then you will discover how you can be entertained by theatre with total impact. This is rare—and it’s a lot of fun too. This is showtime!

BETWEEN FIGHTING CATS AND UNICORNS By Murray Ross

When Tennessee Williams was eight years old his father got a job in St. Louis, and the family moved north from their home in Mississippi. He was very close to his slightly older sister named Rose, and wary of his hard drinking dad who was sometimes violent, often away, and who had only contempt for his effeminate son. His mother, Edwina, was a southern belle with social aspirations, always looking for a better address, who kept the family even more unsettled. 

Their new life in a congested city was a shock after the spacious yards and porches of their southern home. Their apartment, Williams wrote, was “about as cheerful as an Arctic winter.” There were outside windows only in the living room and kitchen. In between, the bedroom windows looked out on a narrow cul-de-sac they called “Death Valley.” Cats would fight and die there, and the scene was so ugly Rose always kept her window shade down and relieved the gloom by adding white curtains and painting the furniture white too. She also kept a large collection of little glass animals on the shelf, which managed to find the light and make the space the only pleasant room in the apartment. Williams later wrote, “they came to represent, in my memory, all the softest emotions that belong to recollections of things past. . . The areaway where the cats were torn to pieces was one thing—my sister’s white curtains and tiny menagerie of glass were another. Somewhere between them was the world we lived in.”

This world in between, touching both edges, is the world of The Glass Menagerie, which Williams calls a “memory play.” The memory belongs to the character Tom, the son and brother in the Wingfield family, who is also the play’s narrator, but it also belongs to the author, who was Tom before he adopted his professional name of Tennessee. The apartment of the play closely resembles the one Williams lived in and described. The Wingfield family has a dad too, gone missing. His presence is felt mostly by a portrait on the wall and by the black hole created from his absence.  Tom has an older sister, named Laura, who he is close to, and Laura, like Rose, is emotionally distressed. Rose was afflicted with severe depression; Laura thinks of herself as crippled, and is overwhelmed by uncontrollable shyness. They are both shut-ins.  

This family has a mom too, Amanda, and like Edwina she is a real mother of a mother. Edwina, by all accounts, was a woman of legendary volubility or, as someone who knew her said, she was “yammer, yammer, yammer.” Williams wryly wrote of her, “Miss Edwina will still be talking for at least a half hour after she’s laid to rest.” From a distance, a friend said, the talk was comical, but close up it was “absolutely destructive.” She was full of “complaint, contention and concern” and often at a hysterical pitch. It’s like that with Amanda too—at one moment she is ridiculous, hilariously so—at another she’s a monster. She’s constitutionally self-centered and oppressively devoted. You can see how foolish she is, how desperate, even how charming. She will do anything for her children, which means she nags, she cajoles, she lectures and she drives them nuts. She’s loving and she’s completely impossible. She makes you cry, she’s so awful, and then she just makes you cry. She’s one of the great roles in American drama.

There are no cats called for in the soundscape of the play’s stage directions. But we’re always aware of the harsh and mostly unfriendly world outside the small tenement apartment. Amanda is on the phone selling subscriptions to romance magazines, and she has to fight for each and every one of them. Tom works in a shoe factory, a dead end, mind numbing job. Laura is almost too frightened to go out at all. The world outside is not so nice, and inside it’s no fun either. Quite understandably, everyone is looking for an escape. The father found one. He was “a telephone man who fell in love with long distances.” The last anyone heard of him was a postcard from Mazatlan saying, “Hello--Good-bye!” For the rest of the family, getting away is not so easy. Amanda finds refuge in her genteel past, when she was courted by many beaux and made much of. Laura immerses herself in her glass collection and the occasional trip to the zoo where she escapes the humiliations of typing school. Tom hangs out on the fire escape and listens to the music from the dance hall across the alley. And he goes to the movies. Lots of movies, especially the ones with adventure and magic tricks.

Tom is the one character in the play with a real chance of getting out. It’s a chance you feel he has to take. It’s a necessary step of family separation on the road to adulthood. But it comes at a price, since Tom is the chief source of family income, and the protector of his beloved sister. Leaving home may be necessary, but it is also abandonment. For Williams, the dilemma was even more acute. Like Tom, he wanted out, and he wanted to leave home and become a writer, and he did. But Williams himself tacitly sanctioned a lobotomy operation for his mentally disturbed sister. It was designed to cure her illness, yet it left her even more passive and hopeless than ever. Williams was haunted by guilt for a very long time. Though few of us have such lurid memories, I wonder if some variation of this experience is not shared by others—this moving out, this moving on, this looking back, and looking in, which is what Tom is doing throughout the play. Tom has to get away. And eventually he does. He goes very far indeed, and yet he never entirely escapes. As he exclaims at the play’s end, “O Laura, Laura, I tried to leave you behind me, but I am more faithful than I intended to be!” The Glass Menagerie is not only his memory play, it is testimony both to his betrayal and his devotion.

The Glass Menagerie is one of America’s best loved plays. We seem to know the Wingfield family—mother, daughter and son—better than most of our neighbors and relatives. They are entirely human, and as our director says, “full of ticks, guilt trips, delusion, and love.” This familiarity partly obscures how unusual the play was when it first appeared in 1944. Though its characters and situation are directly drawn from the author’s personal experience, the play itself was a reaction to the prevailing realistic drama then in vogue. Williams came from what the critic John Lahr has called “an environment of fluency”—a rich vocabulary compounded of biblical passages, religious aphorisms, classical allusion, genteel sonorities, southern eloquence and African-American metaphors. As a writer, he began life as a poet, and he remained a poet even in his plays. The Glass Menagerie is shaped like a poem, full of saturated language, and extending beyond language into sculpted sound, light, space and symbol. This is one reason why we have gathered a young and highly collaborative design team for our new production—both the sound and the set designers will be with us for most of the rehearsal project. Our director, Anna Brenner, has a special affinity for the interplay of scenic ingredients, as well as for the complexity of character and the fluent movement of the action.

The play’s genuine poetry, its tenderness, and its filtering of memory have given The Glass Menagerie a much exaggerated reputation as a misty and elegiac night in the theatre. Yes, the play is music and memory, but it isn’t drippy at all. It’s a vivid and tightly constructed drama, often harsh, often very funny and moving towards salvation. And salvation in this play comes in the form of the character I have not mentioned so far, the gentleman caller. He is, as Williams says in his character description, “a nice, ordinary, young man.” He is also, as Tom says, “an emissary from the world of reality that we were somehow set apart from.” The gentleman caller is the promise of rescue and connection for Laura. He appears at the end of the play, and his scene with Laura is pure magic. We can guess in advance that the promised salvation is a mirage. Rescue would be a happy and false conclusion to this play, which is far too real to accommodate an ending that you would more likely find in The Home-Maker’s Companion, the romance magazine Amanda breathlessly promotes. But even so, between cats and unicorns, we still hope for a way out, and for a moment we are all so close, so unbearably close.

This is such an intimate play, ideally suited to our intimate theatre. In conception The Glass Menagerie was a radical experiment. Williams said that as a playwright he “was trying to catch the true quality of experience in a group of people, that cloudy, flickering, evanescent—fiercely charged!—interplay of live human beings in the thundercloud of common crisis.” He did exactly that in The Glass Menagerie. The lighting may sometimes be dim, and supplied by candles, and at one moment the stage goes dark because the utility bill has not been paid. But there’s not a single moment that’s not electric and fiercely charged. This is the most haunting play in American drama.

2012-13 Prologue Preview

PROLOGUE PREVIEW by Kevin Landis
In the past several months I have increasingly been hearing whispers far and wide about the Prologue Lecture Series. "Have you heard what THEATREWORKS is doing?" "I saw the greatest lecture last night at THEATREWORKS!" "Can you believe who is coming next year?!" It is great to hear, and it strikes me that what makes Prologue so special is YOU. The fact that hundreds of people come to our talks and workshops indicates a subscriber base that is dedicated to art, dedicated to learning, and dedicated to THEATREWORKS. 

And we are dedicated to bringing the best theatre artists and scholars we can find to Colorado Springs. Our 2012-2013 season may be our best ever and features an astounding array of luminaries. From Michael Friedman to Sarah Ruhl and professional wrestling's most prolific gadflies, we have something for everyone. And there is a big surprise coming in the Spring. But I can't tell you now. We have to have some suspense!

We start off with a bang in August with UC Berkeley Professor, and nationally renowned Shakespeare scholar, Stephen Booth. You won't want to miss this guy... he gives a fascinating lecture and may know more about Love's Labor's Lost than anyone around. He will talk with us in the tent at Rock Ledge Ranch and have a discussion with Murray Ross, his longtime friend. I can promise it will be a memorable evening.

I look forward to seeing you on August 4th and throughout our stellar season.

 

News & Notes From July 2012

Subscribe today (if you haven’t already)!

Subscribing to THEATREWORKS is really easy. And completely painless. And totally about you. You pick the shows, you pick the dates, and we’ll build you your perfect package. The only way you can go wrong is by paying full price for tickets, which subscribers NEVER do! You can purchase your subscription online or by calling the box office. 

Shout out to a world-class volunteer

The whole THEATREWORKS team would like to give a gigantic shout out to Terri Harrison - a volunteer extraordinaire! Not only does she help with carpentry, sewing, cleaning, painting and building, but she also brings the most delicious treats for casts and crews, and she’s a subscriber and she’s a donor! Thank you Terri, for all your hard work. We love you!

London Tour - January 3 - 13

We’re off to London for the 18th year in a row, and we hope you’ll join us! We’ll be staying in a five star hotel, seeing world class theatre, and toasting to good friends and amazing performances. Prices start at $3,850 (not including airfare). Details online or email london@theatreworkscs.org.

The tent is up!

On Sunday, July 15 the THEATREWORKS production crew set up the giant tent for Love’s Labor’s Lost at Rock Ledge Ranch. We’re talking thousands of pounds of materials - the main pole weighs 400 lbs and the top alone weighs over 600 lbs! Thanks to our technical director Roy Ballard and producing director Ryan Neely for putting together a stellar team of actors, staff and volunteers to get this project done!

Book Club

This is going to be great. We're starting a book club. The THEATREWORKS Book Club will look at the texts for the shows we're producing this season. So you'll have a chance to start right where the artists start, with words on a page. Join us for coffee, snacks, and intelligent, insightful discussion with Murray Ross. You can sign up for the first four shows now! We’ll meet the second Saturday of every show. The program is free, but you will need to purchase a copy of each text. Sign up online at theatreworksCS.org.

Garden Party

Join us on Sunday, August 12 for a gourmet dinner and scenes from Love’s Labor’s Lost at the astounding Forest Edge Gardens. Kevin Landis will be cooking (which isn’t something you’ll want to miss) and actors from the show will woo you with sonnets all through the gardens. The cost is $65 per person. Buy your tickets online or by calling the box office.

PUNS OF FUN IN OLD NAVARRE by Murray Ross

Love’s Labor’s Lost. The title alone is a bit of a tease. What about those two apostrophes, the most misused, wandering, and abandoned of all punctuation marks? Holofernes, the play’s village schoolmaster, would be delighted to explain—in fact he uses the word to mean a contraction for the very first time in English literature: “You find not the apostrophus, and so miss the accent,” he says, without making anything more clear. That’s the kind of guy he is. In fact the apostrophes of the title have been much debated by critics. The consensus is that the long version of the title should read THE LABOR OF LOVE IS LOST: one apostrophe has been deployed as a possessive, the other as a contraction of the verb “to be.” Are we all better now?

As nearly every undergraduate in the Pikes Peak Region knows, you can swat most apostrophes out of your way and still be understood. The title has become a familiar phrase, and we all get the idea: in this play love will not carry the day. That’s an odd premise for a comedy, especially a Shakespeare comedy, which nearly always ends with couples dancing off to the altar whether the audience approves or not (they do in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and As You Like It; in Measure for Measure and All’s Well That Ends Well we’re not so sure). There is certainly no shortage of love or couples in this play: four stylish and energetic young men are paired off with four witty women, which is a Shakespeare record. The play is a kind of group courting dance. There is a fifth couple too, if you count the Spanish knight and his beloved dairymaid, and you should. So what goes wrong? Why and how are these labors of love lost?

The answer to this central question should really be learned by seeing the play, which you couldn’t do for nearly two hundred years. Love’s Labor’s Lost was well known and often quoted when first performed, but after the Puritans closed the theaters in 1642, it did not return to the stage. There’s a reason for that. On the page, the play seems almost plotless, and full of fussiness, obscurity, and linguistic complexity. It abounds in puns, exactly the kind of wordplay Samuel Johnson famously criticized in his favorite author:

A quibble [a pun] is to Shakespeare, what luminous vapours are to the traveller; he follows it at all adventures, it is sure to lead him out of his way, and sure to engulf him in the mire. It has some malignant power over his mind, and its fascinations are irresistible. . . let but a quibble spring up before him, and he leaves his work unfinished. A quibble is the golden apple for which he will always turn aside from his career, or stoop from his elevation. A quibble, poor and barren as it is, gave him such delight, that he was content to purchase it, by the sacrifice of reason, propriety and truth. A quibble was to him the fatal Cleopatra for which he lost the world, and was content to lose it. 

No play of Shakespeare’s has more quibbles than this one, and for a long time Johnson’s verdict was universally shared. And then, in the middle of the 20^th century, Love’s Labor’s Lost found its way back into the theaters, and to everyone’s surprise it proved wonderfully accessible. Audiences didn’t seem to mind the absence of dramatic tension, and all those puns, verbal fireworks, and clever dirty jokes proved no more obstacles to delight and understanding than those pesky apostrophes in the play’s title. In fact, all the distracting quibbles only added to the general enjoyment. I first directed this play more than 30 years ago, and I remember being horrified when I first saw ignorant parents bringing their young children to the show. But an hour later I watched those 8 year olds leaning forward in anticipation and then leaning back with laughter; they seemed to get everything. How could this be? Partly it’s because kids don’t worry about what they miss, as long as there’s something in front of them that holds their attention. They never watch a play through a rear-view mirror, so they often take in the show moment by moment more fully than their parents. But the other reason why kids liked the play is that it is actually very funny, and very human, and very easy—and it’s that way for parents too. The verbal confectionary of its surface lays on some terrific frosting, some complicated meringue, and more than a few cherries, but it all goes down like delicious cake. 

We all know Shakespeare’s basic comic recipe: create an obstacle, quickly knock it down and then full speed ahead to love and marriage. In Navarre, a kingdom in the north of Spain, four fashionable young men have decided it’s time to get serious; it’s time to really do something. They will immerse themselves in serious study for three years, study so rigorous, so dedicated, so focused that it will make their court a little wonder of the world. They will read, they will fast, they will hardly sleep, and, most importantly, they will see no women, because we all know what women can do to serious male study. Naturally, no sooner have the oaths been taken than four young women arrive from France. The gentlemen meet the women but refuse to let them into their court; instead, the ladies are offered nice camp sites out of doors. But the poor hosts are instantly smitten; Cupid’s arrow has struck them all “under the left pap.” Solemn vows melt like the dew, and the play plunges joyously into games, disguises, and festivity, into word play and love play of the most high-spirited kind. So most of what this play is, is terrific fun. Everyone gets into the swing, including a group of villagers invited to put on a pageant as court entertainment. And these rustics are a sensational little crew: “the pedant, the braggart, the hedge-priest, the fool, and the boy.” There’s also a cop, who can’t quite keep up. They are gifted, believe me.

Word play is the beating heart of the play’s festivity. The universal passion in Navarre is a shared love of language and its unlimited possibilities. The melancholy Spaniard, Don Adriano de Armado, is welcomed at court for his astonishing, strange, and weighty vocabulary; by contrast his zippy page is light enough to move words faster than speeding bullets. The local schoolmaster is spouting fountains of Roman authors; the hedge priest drinks ink and savors “the dainties that are bred in a book.” For the illiterate but eager clown, each new word in his vocabulary feels like a brand new super-power. Everyone is reading, writing, and talking with extraordinary gusto: “a set of wits well played,” says the Princess after delighting in a verbal tennis match. Even the constable, a man named Dull, has a word game he wants to play. And now that love is in the air, the men are all writing poetry and making beautiful speeches. Love, like everything else in Navarre, turns into words. Some of the poems are good, some not, but it’s all positively infectious.

The girls, too, are more than ready to play, if not to lie down and surrender. They have some ideas and some considerable wits of their own, so they form another set of obstacles for their word charged wooers to overcome. All this makes for a series of hilarious encounters, and more than a few bumps on the way to happy coupling. But this is a comedy, and we know where it’s going, until suddenly we don’t. The scene begins to cloud. First the play within the play dissolves into a quarrel, and then the play itself stops, running out of time. The girls go home. Love’s Labors are lost. Whoa.

For the better part of two hours we have recreated in Navarre’s “curious knotted garden,” enjoying its wonders, its follies, its verbal bouquets and fireworks. And then abruptly the garden walls are breached, and we find ourselves in a larger world of spring and winter and death. Against this wider background, we are invited to see the lovers’ fun and games for what they were: fun and games, but not the deep down experience of real love, real life. The wooing high jinx of the oath breakers is suddenly viewed as if Dr. Johnson had turned on his moral searchlight. The lovers’ ecstatic declarations and sonnets look more like quibbles, golden apples of diversion, distractions from higher and more serious ground, diversions from “reason, propriety and truth.” The women of the play, always Shakespeare’s wiser gender, see this; the giddy boys do not, or rather, they only begin to see when the show ends. Shakespeare anticipates Johnson—he bakes his yummy cake and then, like his later critic, suggests it had too much frosting to be healthy. Berowne, the liveliest of the lovers, owns up to his own verbal excess:

“Taffeta phrases, silken terms precise,
Three-piled hyberboles, spruce affectation,
Figures pedantical—these summer flies 
Have blown me full of maggot ostentation.”

The labors of love turn out not to have been labors at all, merely games in which nothing worthy could be won. Yet all is not lost. The play ends when actual labors of love have been proposed, more serious oaths have been taken, and love, though deferred, might yet be found and won. The play is a comedy after all, full of continuous surprises. No wonder quibbles are at its core, since a pun is a word that refuses to stay anchored in a fixed category of meaning. Love’s Labor’s Lost is a quibble on a larger scale, a play which refuses to remain in its traditional comic box. This is one reason it is so truly marvelous. You must wend your way to Rock Ledge Ranch to find out for yourselves. Our festivities begin in the early evening. “The time when? About the sixth hour, when beasts most graze, birds best peck, and men sit down to that nourishment which is called supper. So much for the time when.” We’ll see you in Navarre.