Murray Ross

Veterans Day

I flew to a farm in Massachusetts last weekend to see some good theatre (more about this soon), but the best scene I saw was coming home, in the Denver airport, where just ahead of me on the escalator was a soldier in his desert camoflauge uniform. A small guy, unprepossessing,modest--I barely noticed him in the crowd heading for the exit.  I was thinking about the drive home and apple pie. But at the top of the escalator, in the terminal arrival area, I heard a gasp and then there he was, and there she was--his wife or partner--together in a deep embrace.  Not as quite as flamboyant or glamorous as this one, from England, but close.

 

The crowd stopped as one: it takes a lot to stop an airport crowd on their way out, and usually it's something much less pleasant. We stopped, and looked, and we cheered. The guy next to me, also a soldier I think, but not in uniform and not yet met, said, "that home will  be rocking tonight."  And I said "it's rocking now."

During Our Town, there's a moment when Emily rushes into the arms of her fiance, George.  We worked hard on that moment, making it full and truthful---and on stage it was a good moment too. But it was nothing like what I saw in the Denver airport on Sunday night.  Sometimes there's nothing quite like the truth--the truth a only tour of Iraq and a trip up the airport escalator into the arms of someone who loves you can deliver.

Here's to our vets, at home and abroad---we wish them all such a homecoming, and soon, too.

Women's Work

Last night doing the dishes I realized I had messed up a few moments in Our Town, the ones with the women in their kitchens.  As you know, Mrs. Gibbs and Mrs. Webb spend a lot of time working there, without actual kitchens.  There's not a stove, sink, shelf, pot, knife or coffee mug on the premises.  All the women's work is done in mime (with the exception, in our production, of stringing the beans):

We thought we got the mime part down pretty well.  In rehearsals we started with mock-ups of actual kitchens, and started subtracting the set and props when the women had got their routines figured out.  We simplified some things too when we realized that people in the audience were not meant to focus their attention on things like Mrs. Gibbs' exact recipe for French toast. 

All this business has a payoff at the top of the second act, when the stage manager pays the two mothers a famous tribute:

"I don't have to point out to the women in the audience that both these ladies they see before them,both these ladies cooked three meals a day, one of them for twenty years, and the other for forty--and no summer vacation.  They raised two children apiece, washed, cleaned the house, and never had a nervous breakdown."

My friend and colleague Leah Chandler Mills says these lines are potentially patronizing, but thinking of my own mother I never found them so.  In performance, the speech always got appreciative chuckles, just as it's meant to.

Washing up the dishes late last night after dinner with friends, I was thinking that if anyone looked in my kitchen window they would see a scene from Our Town --- someone working in the kitchen--yes, the genders had changed and there were actual dishes, but the actions were the same.  And I realized I had got them slightly wrong in the show.  That's because, like Mrs Webb and Mrs Gibbs, I have done several thousand dishes in my time.  I stack the dishes to the right of the sink, rinse them in the running faucet, stash them in the dishwasher. Like most dish doers in their own homes, I have my routine down. Nothing is wasted when I am doing my dishes, if I am just doing the dishes, as I was doing them last night, the difference being I was also watching myself doing them, just as we watch Mrs. Webb and Mrs. Gibbs doing their's.

I had made the mistake of telling these ladies that the pressure was on in their kitchens--they had to get their breakfasts made and their kids fed before the school bell rang.  So there was a lot of anxiety and tension in both households, and in creating that I had missed the point. The point is that making breakfast and washing dishes is something many of us do but something we rarely look at someone doing.  And if we were to look at that work, we would see something ordinary and remarkable-- small dance routines, little marvels of efficiency, economy and fluidity ( I admit I was thinking this after a half bottle of wine).  It's the sort of thing that can only come with a thousand repititions.  I should have encouraged those women just to do their work and nothing more.  That would have been more than enough.

10 top reasons to see OUR TOWN this weekend

10) Gordon Hinds. He's 89 and has been around a very long time (he played "Old Adam" in As You Like It fifteen years ago). This may be his last performance.In the third act he talks about how his son knew all the stars. "He'd set on the porch even's 'n tell 'em all by name.  Yes, sir, wonderful."  When Gordon says this, you feel the line comes out of his whole life.  I am not kidding.

9) Mallory Hybl. She's 9 years old making her THEATREWORKS debut. She's a genuinely radiant girl. Those of her who know her family will take special pleasure in the moment where Rebecca Gibbs tells us what she loves most in the world, but she's even better when she's just looking at the moon.

8) Mark Arnest.  Not a professional actor, never will be.  But the music he's created up there in the church loft is all his own, and no one could have done it better even if and because it never calls attention to itself. And when he shows up drunk but hermetically sealed late night in Grover's Corners, you don't feel good about this.

7) Jean, Jinn and Dick.  Older folks who all showed up just to sit in the town cemetery.  They are very beautiful too. Real faces on every one of them.

6) Addison, Hela, Sean, Jeremy, Richard, Ashley, Silas, Mark, and Michael.  And anybody else I somehow forgot to mention in Grover's Corners.  Worthy citizens, worthy citizens!

5) Steve Wallace and Tom Paradise. Steve was 19 years old when he appeared as a fireman in the very first ever THEATREWORKS production in 1975.  He's still a fireman.  He's also a terrific Doc Gibbs--watch him give his son a late night talking to.  Tom has been doing amazing work on our stage for three decades with no sign of stopping. Watch him talk--or try to talk-- to his future son in law in Grover's Corners. These guys are real treasures.

4) Stephen Weitz. You can call him Steve, but he'd rather you didn't. Smart guy and decent too. He played Hamlet last summer and came down here to stage manage in Grover's Corners. I think you'll like listening to him talking about everything from Babylon to all of New Hampshire. I do.

3) Emily Paton Davis and Leslie O'Carroll.  Two of Colorado's, finest actresses.  Watch Mrs. Webb at the wedding; Watch Mrs. Gibbs in the cemetary.  Watch them both string beans together. Beautiful stuff.

2) The soda shop scene. Ben Bonenfant and Chrissy Bakkin do more than justiice to one of the best loved--and best--scenes in American drama. This is the way love goes when love goes right.

1) Our Town.  It's a great play -- the only great play in our town at the moment.  And you only have this weekend to see it before we turn the lights out.

Sunday in the park

In Chicago last weekend we visited the south side on a bright Sunday afternoon, and stopped at the Allison Davis garden.  It's a modest stone circle ringing a lawn dedicated to the memory of the man who was the first African American faculty member to receive tenure at the University of Chicago in the 1940's (though his appointment also specified he would not seek admission to the faculty club). The small park is sited at at a racial dividing line where the professor walked every day on his way from his African American neighborhood to his office at the university.  Around the circle are four tablets which contain a brief biography as well as some quotations from Professor Davis. 

http://www.hydepark.org/parks/washington/DavisGard.htm

The park is designed partly so visitors might have a better of view of the adjacent  "Fountain of Time", Lorado Taft's enormous scupture dedicated to the heroic forward struggle of humanity.

All very inspirational, no?  Yes, yet also something else. One of the tablets quotes Professor Davis writing that  "If people of different cultures cannot associate freely, they cannot learn one another's special form of the American language,manners, morals and psychological goals."  Very moving, and yet the park which commemorates these words and its author bore no evidence of such association. The bare little park had an aura of desolation about it.  The gap between the white and black neighborhoods on Chicago's south side is as great as ever--one of Professor Davis' sons noted at the dedication ceremony in 2005 that the mean annual income of the black neighborhood to the south was $13,000, while it was $126,000 in Hyde Park just to the north.  The most direct moment of cultural free association we experienced that morning in the black neighborhood next door was a well thrown egg that landed square on the passenger window of our cruising rental van.  In the park itself, the most visible sign of human interaction  was a small defacement in one of the tablets, which noted that "in 1994 the U.S. Postal service had issued a stamp" honoring Professor Davis for his accomplishments. The word "stamp" had been neatly chisled away--- "stamp" had been stamped out, so to speak. A darkly humorous gesture from an anonymous poetic vandal.

Meanwhile, next door the monumental "Fountain of Time," is showing signs of distress.  It was created in 1922 out of reinfoced concrete aggregate, a new and cheaper alternative to marble. The aggregate has eroded, and Taft's heroic figures have already begun to lose their distinctive character. Grass leaps up at the base.  The large fountain basin was empty.

I'm standing in the middle of the circle of the Professor Davis' park in Chicago's south side, but I'm thinking of what Our Town's Professor Willard says about the early history of man in Grover's Corners: "Early Amerindian stock, Cotachatchee tribes--no evidence before the 10th century of this era--now entirely disappeared."  Not so long from now the marching heroic figures in the Fountain of Time will be amorphous rounded lumps, and all the ringing words of Professor Davis will have faded away. You can watch all of this happening right before your eyes in the Allison Davis park. And yet, for awhile at least, the park and its honoree remind us, there's still life on this earth,  life "straining away, straining all the time to make something of itself."

Out of here

You can understand why people often leave Our Town speaking of what a sweet play it is.  And it is.  There's a first act celebrating American small town values: friendliness, family, good neighbors, etc.  All values worth celebrating too, and Wilder manages to do with ease and gentle irony.  About the worst thing that happens is a son forgets to do his chores---all families should be so lucky.  It's a nice play,presided over by a benign rather laid back stage manager (Stephen Weitz) who makes a point of not preachingtoo much.

 

But Our Town IS something else too.  First thing we learn about the characters we meet is they are no longer with us. Doc Gibbs coming down Main Street now, he died in 1930--hospital is named after him.  His wife, Julia Gibbs, she died before her husband. Newspaperboy, Joe Crowell there, the very bight kid, he got killed in the first world war.  Almost as soon as you meet someone in this show you are reminded of their mortality.  P.S.: they're dead. You hardly notice these postscripts, but they are everywhere. The play is all the time telling us to get life while we can, even as we just smile and let it go by.  And then, in the last act, when we stop smiling, we learn you can't go back, even if you could.

There's your sweet show for you. It's just like like the morning star, "wonderful bright before it has to go."  Sweet show--but it' has to go.  It's outta here--and so are we.

Our Town Weddings

It's a tricky business inviting our audiences to see that Grover's Corners, 1899, is also our town--because of course in many ways it's.  Few of us get our milk delivered on our back porches any more, and I don't think anyone has a horse driven milk truck.  We don't cook as much on wood stoves.  Dogs don't sleep in the street. Michelle's is closed and it's not so easy to get strawberry phosphates after school.  And so on. Our town does not sit on old pliocene granite and our population is no longer 2,642.  Even so, there are some distanct parallels: we may not be quite 86% pecent republican, but El Paso County is not that far away.  We still have a whole lot of churches. Culture?  Well, ma'am, you're right--there ain't much.

But these are not the details that matter.  What matters is that the fundamental things still apply: just like they did in Babylon and in Grover's Corners. Most people eat breakfast, do homeoiwrk, eventually grow up and they get married.  Why this last month alone I went to two weddings---my son's in Philadelphia, and our very own stage manager's right here in Colorado City.  Perfectly lovely weddings, as Mrs. Soames says.  They were good weddings, and as many of them are. and nearly always they make you cry. The wedding now playing nightly in Grover's Corners is a good wedding too.  My favorite moments in the production are when the stage manager is telling us that "every time a child is born into the world it' sNature's attempt to make a perfect human being" and we see Rebecca Gibbs (Mallory Hybl) coming down the aisle to take her seat. She's 9 years old and a very plausible attempt at making a perfect human being so far as I can tell. And then, just afterwards, the Stage Manager  is telling us not to forget the ancestors,millions of them, and we see Framer McCartney (Gordon Hinds) oming down the aisle taking his seat too. Gordon is 89 years old and this may well be his last show.  He's not an ancestor yet, but he's getting there, and with his great age has come the deepest appreciation of the play of any cast member. Listen to how he appreciates looking at the stars at night later on in the cemetary:  "yes sir, wonderful," he says.  To my ears this is the most resonant line in the show.

But back to the wedding in our town.  Here it is, snapped from my Iphone on Friday night:

 

There was some popluar sentiment for staging the wedding further upstage--so we'd all be looking at the bride and groom, and the wedding party would have their backs to us, more or less the way it happens at real weddings.  But I wanted to put the bride and groom in the center of the stage, surrounded by everyone, audience and cast alike.  George and Emily r us. Their wedding is just about the same in our town as it was in Grover's Corners at the turn of the last century.  The same words are being said. The same feelings of fear, grief and joy are spread around the room. The music is familiar. And the whole affair, almost completely predictab;e and very simple, is always moving.  It's a sacrament--and even if, as the stage manager says, we don't know what that means exactly, we know a sacrament when we feel it.  In our town.

full moon

Last night at Alvarado Campground, 9,000 feet, moon rising over the Wet Mountains.  The moonlight was just "terrible" as Emily Webb says.  Choir practice going on down in the Westcliffe Lutheran church. And you could hear the train all the way to Pueblo.

Life Show

The day after opening Our Town I flew to California for my 50th high school reunion. Unthinkable, but there it was.  Spending a month in Grover's Corners is a good way to get ready for an event like this, since the play is so much about the whole arc of life, and of things past, passing and to come.  I went to John Muir High School in Altadena, California.

http://www.johnmuirhs.org/

 It was a big high school (class of 750), quite diverse ethnically, and pretty much everything you'd expect a high school to be in 1959. Our school has produced a colorful gallery of graduates, including Jackie Robinson, Sirhan Sirhan (a quiet classmate of my sister's in remedial math), Bobby Hutcherson, Herbie Lewis and Rodney King (a Muir dropout).  In my day it produced quite a lot of successful white people, many of whom were gathered in the Pasadena Westin hotel ballroom on Friday night, most wearing the recommended Hawaiian shirts. (These are a bad idea, BTW because they make everyone look the same---a crowd of old cruise line passengers waiting for the buffet).  In a sea of old faces I managed to find a few people I knew, some I wish I had known better and some maybe not so much.  Not so much a former high school idol who once looked great in his letterman's jacket and had gone on to found an HMO in St. Louis where he now lives on a golf course with fair round belly and much talk of himself. But then there was Woody Foster who went salamander hunting with me in Millard canyon, and who now teaches mosquito psychology at Ohio State, spending two months a year in Kenya figuring out how to fight malaria.

The next morning, some of us went back to Muir.I hadn't been there in a half century. The school looked mostly the same.  The halls were beige and lined with battered lockers. The water pipes were tied overhead. The quad of  grass and trees was gone--the nicest part of the school and the only grove of academe had been replaced by a squat concrete block. The wooden auditorium seats were still there, several falling apart.  There was the stage where I had fidgeted through many an assembly, and where, in my proudest high school moment, I was awarded the Harvard Book Prize, given to the graduate most likely to attend Harvard (I was wait listed, and the book was unsigned inside).  We spent a while talking to the resident stage manager--a lifer and former graduate who had been at the school for 15 years, and looked like the house muskrat. From him we learned the sorry story of the school's last decades. Thanks to political gerrymandering and redistricting and the tide of recent social history, the school's demographics have greatly changed.  The student population is now 40% hispanic, 40% black, 99% white, 3% asian and the rest indifferent. The rich white kids now go to school east of Lake avenue or over in Flintridge or La Canada.  When I was there, 25 kids were accepted at Stanford; this year one student got in.  Only about half the class graduates. There hadn't been a drama production in years (this is always a reliable sign of decline). The academic scores were pathetic.  There were reports of occasional defecation in the hallways.  John Muir High had joined the ranks of America's failing schools. A lot can happen in 50 years. It seemed almost criminal. It IS criminal.

The night I came home I watched an episode of the PBS show on National Parks.  The one that featured John Muir speaking noble words in a Scot accent.  I was, for a moment, proud to have gone to a school named after John Muir, and I thought, really, saving our schools is a task as monumental and as important as saving our natural  wonders, and even more difficult.  It will take money and more than that (see the story of Geoffrey Canada and the Children's Zone in Harlem: http://www.hcz.org/). In the school hallway there was a picture of the homecoming queen. She was black, and flanked by a latino and an asian princess.  They looked very beautiful and radiant, much more so than our girls of 1959, one of whom (Anne Hyde) I had a great aching  crush on and who was a no show at the Westin ballroom.  Those girls, and their boyfriends, and their nerdy admirers are all worth saving.  They were then and they are now.

Meanwhile, if Hawaiian shirts are required at our 51st reunion, me and my friends are going to work up "The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly" on our ukuleles, and I'm going to suggest we play it in the Muir auditorium at a school assemby.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V3gp7B8WC4Q

I'm going to make sure Ann Hyde is there, too.  If my Harvard book didn't catch her eye, my ukulele will. I'm going to start a fund to provide ukuleles to all the students at John Muir High so they can play along with us and add Jay-Z to their repertory.  This could turn the whole thing around fast. Yes we can!

 

You are here

We all know Grover's Corner's, New Hampshire--or at least we think we do.  It's the best known fictional small town in America.  We know what it looks like and what it feels like. It's a cozy,modest place, quiet, ordinary, population at the moment of 2,642 with the recent of arrival of twins over in Polish town.  The town is very specifically laid out for us: five churches, a railroad station, a main street, a town hall, a bank, post office, a grocery store and a drug store most people stop in every day. Very nice town if you ask me.  And we know what the town feels like too: there's a general ongoing easiness about the place that comes with people doing the same things every day and in no great hurry.  There's an abundance of good will, good feeling and good humor.  Grover's Corners, in fact, is as detailed and as benign as a Norman Rockwell illustration--he seemed to have spent his whole productive life painting our town. But as familiar and specific as Grover's Corners is, Our Town has something quite strange about it.  There is actually very little there.  Almost nothing.  Mrs Gibbs and Mrs. Webbs come down to fix breakfast of every morning of every performance of the play, and they are lighting their stoves and setting their tables and making coffee and bacon without a stove, plate, knife, fork or coffee pot on the premises.  The families who sit down to dinner together every evening lead double lives.  They look simultaneously entirely recogonizable, down to every last detail, and also like ghosts, impermanent and temporary.  They represent themselves and also all the families who have ever taken meals together, millions of them, and without leaving a trace behind.  Grover's Corners, likewise, is a very particular little town, just over the border from Massachusetts. But it is also nowhere, barely a speck in the galaxy, a light in a vast dark universe that's going to go out one day. 

To my mind it is this juxtaposition of the small the large, the known and the unknown, the here and now and the eternity of time past and future, all of them present simultaneously, that makes OUR TOWN such an extraodinary theatrical experience. Very quietly, and without any hint of aggression, Thornton Wilder has managed to create a world that is both comforting and supernatural.  It seems to me the play, like nearly all great plays, is an expansive one.  We find ourselves in a place that is our home that we've never seen quite this way before. You are here.

"Be cheerful, sir. . .

says the magician Prospero, after his son and daughter have witnessed his violent dispersal of theatrical masque he had arranged to celebrate their engagement.   He continues, famously,

Our revels now are ended.  These our actors,

As I foretold you were all spirits, and

Are melted into air, into thin air;

And like the baseless fabric of this vision,

The cloud capped towers, the grogeous palaces,

The solemn temples, the great globe itself,

Yes, all which it inherit, shall dissolve;

And leaqve not a rack behind.  We are such stuff

as dreams are made on, and our little life

Is rounded with a sleep."

So it goes in life, and so it goes in the theatre---and in the theatre the ending of revels is almost always followed by a spasm of violence as the scenery is cleared, making way for the next new show. Here is what our theatre looked like 24 hours after our last performance.  The remains of a dream.

 

But no such violence will follow the end of our next show in the Bon Vivant.  That's because our next show is set in Grover's Corners, where there are no no cloud capped towers, no gorgeous palaces, no solemn temples, no white woods; not even a patch of green astroturf.  In Grover's Corners there is no set at all.  BBut it is quite a place all the same.  Here is it's address:  Grover's Corners, Sutton County, New Hampshire, United States of America, continent of North America, Western Hemisphere, the Earth; the Solar System, the Universe; The Mind of God.