Murray Ross

A Map of the Beautiful

 

My title is borrowed from a former teacher of mine, Stephen Booth, who gave a talk about the beautiful, using the classic children's book Go, Dog, Go! as his unlikely example.  He pointed out there is not a lot of plot in Go, Dog, Go!  The pleasures of the book come mostly from reader's enjoying the comparisons and contrasts of its repeated imagery: houses, toys, wheels, hats, and water. Some of the same pleasures are at work in Marivaux's Game of Love and Chance, which is also not an intensely plot driven play.  We can anticipate the ending from the start, when unbeknownst to each other servants and masters have changed places during a courtship visitation.  It doesn't take us more than a few seconds to know that despite all the confusions it will all be sorted out in the end with the lovers paired off happily with their own kind--this is France, 1730, well before the rigid codes of class were abolished by the revolution, and this is clearly a comedy.  But while short of plot, the play is rich in variation. Marivaux (and his brilliant adapter, Stephen Wadsworth) invite us to see the same scenes played out between masters and servants--the same, only different. In one scene the Masters, disguised as servants, fall in love.  In another,the two servants, also disguised, also fall in love.  The masters have their own joy in having their hearts opened, and then their own torments when they realize they are in love with someone they can never be with and intensely disliking their presumed partners.

 

They are all giddy in love, and yet all deeply serious. They are all wearing masks, and yet we are all seeing their faces revealing and concealing themselves behind their masks. At times the play seems to be acted out in an infinite hall of mirrors, like the famous room in Versailles. 

 

Yet in the Game of Love and Chance, it's not the visual excitement of glass and crystal that produces pleasure, but rather the experience of seeing these shimmering variations at play in the characters and their actions.  Is there social and metaphysical significance in all of this, and portents of class mutability that were to come fifty years later? Very likely. Yet in the end, as Booth points out, it is the experience and not the meaning of a work of art that matters, and that most of the time works of art are actually what they seem to be. So it is with childrens' books, and so it is with this play, which, as its title suggests, is a kind of game. And the experience of this play is a particularly rich one as we watch the game being played out--with a surprising and somewhat disconcerting turn at the end. I find it beautiful. Go, Dog, Go! Go, Marivaux!

 

Gun Control

In light of our recent recall election I offer, without comment, this passage from David Mamet's American Buffalo.  Please let us know if you think we should consider the play for our next seaon.

[Donny and Teach are planning a house break-in to recover a coin, an American Buffalo nickel.

Teach takes out a revolver and begins to load it.]

DON: What's that?

TEACH: What?

DON: That.

TEACH:  This "gun"?

DON: Yes

TEACH: What does it look like?

DON:  A gun.

TEACH:  It is a gun.

DON: I don't like it.

TEACH: Don't look at it.

DON: I'm serious

TEACH: So am I.

DON: We don't need a gun, Teach.

TEACH:  I pray that we don't, Don.

DON: We don't, tell me why we need a gun?

TEACH:  It's not a question do we need it . . . Need . . . Only that it makes me comfortable, okay?  It helps me to relax.

So, God forbid, something inevitable occurs and the choice is (And I'm saying "god forbid") it's either him or us.

DON:  Who?

TEACH: The guy.  I'm saying God forbid the guy (or somebody) comes in, he's got a knife . . . a cleaver from one of those magnetic boards . . .?

DON:  Yeah?

TEACH: . . . with the two strips . . . ?

DON: Yeah?

TEACH:  And whack, and somebody is bleeding to death.  This is all.  Merely as a  deterrent. 

All the preparation in the world does not mean shit, the path of some crazed lunatic sees you as an invasion of his personal domain.  Guys go nuts.  Don, you know this.  Public officials . .. Ax murderers . . . All I'm saying, look out for your own.

DON: I don't like the gun.

TEACH: It's a personal thing, Don.  A personal thing of mine.  A silly personal thing.  I just like to have it along. Is this so unreasonable?

DON:  I don't want it.

TEACH:  I'm not going without it.

DON:  Why do you want it?

TEACH: Protection of me and my partner.  Protecttion, deterrence. 

DON:  I don't want it.

TEACH:  I can't step down on this, Don.  I have to go with it.  The light of the way things as they are.

DON: Why?

TEACH: Because of the way things are.

 

 

Way out west

We're just about midway into rehearsals for CYMBELINE, and really the play is giving me a second youth (others might say I never left my first childhood).  As usual, exploring a Shakespeare play, especially one you have never done and don't know, is like going into a cave that keeps opening into other rooms (and a cave figures prominently in this play).  You think you have arrived and then another room beckons.  As usual, Shakespeare is playing tricks with us.  He introduces us early on to his hero.  He is modest, poor, manly, gentle and much beloved, as we are told again and again.  He is the perfect fairy tale hero, despite that odd name of Posthumus.  Not a romantic name.  Posthumus and Juliet?  Maybe not. But he is much beloved of his lovely bride, Imogen, who only has eyes, heart and soul for him. So far so good.  But then watch Posthumus carry on:  he makes a rash bet about his girl, which he is tricked into thinking he's lost--as a result he puts out a contract on his unfaithful wife, and has her murdered.  Or so he believes.  Then later he feels really badly about this, so badly that he wants to die--which he plans to do fighting, first against the Britains, then against the Romans.  When he finally openly confesses his guilt and crimes, he is absolved by his wife--whom he promptly smacks to the ground.  This Posthumus is a dangerous character--clumsy, impulsive, violent and not very bright.  In fact he looks quite a bit like his foil and opposite, Cloten, the "harsh, noble, simple nothing" of the play--they can wear the same clothes, and actually do.  And yet, Shakespeare is not finished with his tarred and much tainted hero--at the very end of the play Posthumus for once acts just as he should, as we hope he would, and for the first time appears to be a prince indeed.  Too little too late? Decide for yourselves.  It's only one of the many mysteries awaiting you way out west in Ancient Britain, soon arriving at Rock Ledge Ranch.

Naked in Paradise

I went to see Paradise Lost last night.  Just saying that sounds ridiculous, since Milton's poem has defied theatrical representation for nearly 400 years, and understandably so since  the epic is the mother of dense poetical verse, a supertanker full of pipe organs.  Impossible to stage, especially on a budget of $600, the grand total of theatre 'd art's production resources.  But I am happy to say I was mostly surprised and delighted, was never bored, and often deeply  engaged.  Every one of the many young actors gave me pleasure, Jon Margheim had some inventive directorial touches (creating a terrific tree of knowledge), and Jeff Keele did a splendid job of wrestling Milton's leviathan into a two hour eventful evening of theatre.  Was it a revelation?  Not quite.  Even on $600 you would hope to get past plastic flowers for paradise, bad hair and magic markers for hell, new age music in heaven.  I don't think the worlds of the epic-- heaven, hell and Eden were deeply imagined or reinvented into theatrical life, though that's a daunting assigment for anyone.  But hell, this was still heaven and earth in Milton's grand style.

The bravest and most abiding image of the production, besides undertaking it all all,  were Adam and Eve.  They were entirely naked.  And not naked far off upstage, or whirling in strobe lights, appearing and then vanishing in a flash.  When they appeared they waked naked on stage, took their place in the warm garden, sitting happily together, as Milton says, "under a tuft of shade."  They stayed naked for nearly the entire production, and walked around comfortably through the audience in this promenade staging.  It was remarkable, and partly because it became unremarkable very soon.  I remember how this worked from my time at a hippy spa in California, in those edenic days of the late 1960's.  You arrived and realized everyone was naked. It was a fabulous shock---and then, in about 5 minutes, the shock wore off, and you might have paid less attention to the nude bathers than you would to a small beach of bikinis, and you were naked too.  There was simply nothing more to see (desire, remember, is wanting what you have not got, and when everyone is naked you get it all).

This is exactly what happened in Paradise Lost. After the first greedy shock of naked Eden, we accepted Adam and Eve as characters; their nakedness was their costume.  In very little time the staring stopped and we paid attention to what they were saying, and within 15 minutes a naked Eve standing two feet away from me seemed just as normal as the customer behind me at Seven Eleven (well, actually maybe much more normal). 

Nakedness is of course required in Eden--anything less (or more) would be completely wrong.  Milton writes about it, and the scene of our first parents is iconic. Nakedness in Eden spells innocence, purity. as well as the complete absence of fear and danger---now that's Paradise.  All praise to theatre 'd art and to the actors playing Adam and Eve for getting this exactly right.  Both were lovely, and yet neither were supermodels--it is the tenderness of their flesh,and the softness of their bodies, that impressed, not their allure.  And there is everything to be said for nakedness, for seeing us as we are, made, as Milton says, in God's own image--this is a genuinely lovely thing to contemplate, especially, perhaps, in Adam and Eve, both young and possessing bodies nature is still interested in.

When Satan arrives in Eden, with his smoldering mind bent on total destruction, "the Fiend," as Milton says, "saw undelighted all delight."  But something different happens when Satan sees the naked Eve, "Her heaven'ly form/ Angelic, but more soft, and Feminine."  Eve's innocence and grace  "overaw'd His Malice" and he stands suspended:

" . . . the Evil one abstracted stood

From his own evil, and for the time remain'd

Stupidly good, of enmity disarm'd,

Of guile, of hate, of envy, of revenge"

Satan's response to naked human beauty is momentary, since he is always burning with hot Hell.  For the rest of us, the absorbtion lingers.  Nothing is more lumenscent than lovely, simply human flesh.  My thanks to Milton and to theatre 'd art for giving us an alternative to the nakedness of advertisements and porn, and returning us to paradise, where, for a moment, we could all be stupidly good and natural together.

 

Beige Men

I was invited by college classmates to write about our 50^th reunion, and since reunions are theatrical occasions, I include some fragments here to fill the not very wide gap of time between now and Cymbeline, coming soon to a ranch near you.  Here’s my report on returning to a small potted ivy league school 50 years later.  It was all boys then.

                                                                * * *

The reunion costumes were bland: vanilla pudding polos and khakis, confirming what a preppy homogenized crowd we are.  I showed some reunion photos to my adopted god daughter and she said, “You all look very buttoned down.”  And Patti Seidman, looking at our class photo in the gym, said, “You all look the same.”  We are beige men.

And that might be the largest truth of our 50^th reunion. Though not always keeping each other’s company, we belong together, and I suspect now more than ever, having many of our edges rounded off, sloping gently into old age.  I think we might have assigned ourselves George Valliant’s recent book about the Grant study, The Triumph of Experience, since it correlates fairly closely with our collective histories.  The Grant study closely followed the lives of 268 Harvard men for 70 years—they are a short generation older than us, and probably better and brighter too.  But the parallels are close, most notably in their surprisingly high levels of happiness after they turned 70.  They were generally intelligent and healthy, fortunate in having had privileged educations and financially secure.  Alcohol was their enemy—as it has been ours.  Most had career satisfaction, and most enjoyed long and happy marriages.  They look like us, or at least the us who came to the reunion.  They too probably wear khakis and are men of beige.

                                                    ***

It was wonderful to run into people I hadn’t seen or thought much about in a quarter or half a century:  Bill Sittig, Doug Maxwell, and Clark Hobbie, now a marsh rat in South Carolina.  I almost burst into tears seeing my freshman roommate, Elliot Urdang, now fully in bloom.  Standing below Steve Weinstock on the Baxter steps took me back to the last time this happened, when the lights went out in the dining hall freshman year and he rose up next to me and hurled a plate of chicken a la king across the room.  He was a god.  I wonder if I was the only guy at our Saturday dinner half wishing history would repeat itself, but a room full of flying lobsters might have taken quite a toll.  Besides, there were ladies present. And that, we all agree, was a good thing.

                                                ***

This reunion was noticeably low on drama, but women figured in the closest thing to it, when at group therapy Gordon Davis rose out of nowhere to remind us of our collective abuse of females fifty years ago, recounting the revolting “pig parties,” the forlorn dumped dates of women’s weekends, and the notorious mattress-filled Fiji room in the basement of the Phi Gam house.  I have since heard from one reliable source this room was a myth, which is both a relief and a pity; The Fiji room has a grotesque and lurid allure, as well as the indelible imprint of urban legend (my son tells me there was rumor of a similar room at Harvard).  Thankfully Gordon’s speech occasioned the confession from Al Mondell that he had never gotten laid at Williams, and this in turned was greeted by a chorus of sympathy and dispelling laughter, and the wives of Williams climbed over desks to hug and console him, and kiss his fair and well shaped ears.

                                                    ***

A week after the reunion by happenstance I drove with Betty through Williamstown, and we stopped at the Clark Museum, which always seem to be the artistic equivalent to Williams: small, personal, privileged and the best of its kind.  I was surprised at how well I remembered the collection, more vividly than most of my classmates.  There is the Napoleonic Hussar on horseback, and there is Homer’s heroic and well cut men rescuing drowning damsels—it’s a great collection of boys’ art, among other things.  Not on view but unforgettable was Bouguereau’s glossy painting of the callipygian nymphs dragging a hairy satyr into a cold shower, the one painting in the collection I am sure we all remember. It hung for years in New York’s most exclusive gentleman’s club.  I am thinking of proposing an installation at Mass MOCA to coincide with our 55^th reunion: it will feature only this painting and all the mattresses from the Fiji room.  It will blow your mind.

                                                             ***

My daddy always told me two was the best company, which is not really part of the reunion dance for anything more than 3 minutes.  But a highlight for me was the chance to see one of my best friends, David Larry, a further instance of reunion irony.  David and I had talked about our mixed feelings over the reunion costs, which seemed rather high for people who were not instinctively drawn to four day rain dances of Eph elders.  In the end I caved and paid, and David did not, opting to spend time with friends but not joining the formal occasions.  This meant I could skip the Friday night dinner to have time with him at what was reviewed as the “best Mexican food in the northeast.”  I will not reveal much about this evening except to say there are things that can be said over an indifferent tamale in Williamstown between two friends and classmates of 50 years that could not be duplicated anywhere. As part of our trip down memory lane Dave brought a few signs and bumper stickers  from his gallant campaign for a weed tolerant Sheriff of Eugene Oregon a thousand years ago, and these started showing up everywhere:  one was slapped on my rental car, another appeared in our commemorative Morgan photo, and another was posted by our class saint, Jules Quinlan, below what we think was our sacred class tree , planted when Dave, our class poet, read his class poem as part of our graduation ceremonies.   So the friend who decided not to join the reunion festivities became its poster child. I love this.

 

 

                                                                ***

We are a lot closer to death now, and I imagine most of us think about it more.  It is a simple truth to say most of us won’t see each other again—well maybe not after our 60^th.  A Boston billboard I saw returning my rental car said one out of every three babies born today will live to be a hundred.  That won’t be me, or most of us.  I was stunned by Sandy McPeck (I hardly knew him) dying between his bio and our reunion, but of course this kind of thing happens now, and increasingly.   I was moved by how Bill Whitney arranged to gather and print a collection of Sandy’s paintings.  I sat next to his widow Susan at the Saturday dinner and she showed me how to crack lobster and told me she cried every night.  This is how it goes.  I went to a funeral the other day:  a tiny lovely Vassar girl, 10 years older than us, city council woman, bookstore owner.  The funeral went on in the usual Episcopal way.  And then someone got up and quoted Yeats:

Think where a man’s glory begins and ends,

And say my glory was I had such friends.

That’s not bad, I thought.  And then they played Ella singing “Every Time We Say Goodbye.”

                                                            ***

There was some talk of diversity at this reunion, beyond noting  the presence of Mexican food in the purple valley, especially at the gathering at the newly named Davis Center,  in honor of Allison and John Davis, two truly heroic black graduates of the college, and parents of our of own Gordon and John.  It was heartening for all of us to learn how much times have changed since our day: more than half current Williams students are women, and 30% are of color. This is truly great news—and brings new challenges (including getting the students of different colors to connect to each other, which is one mission of the Davis Center).  I suspect we still have a long way to go.  A few days after the reunion I was riding the New York subway, taking in the sights.  Standing across from me was a young black woman wearing a skin tight fuschia body suit which advertised every one of her considerable charms and put a spell on every man in the neighborhood.  Further down the car the child of an Asian woman was smiling at a man with a long beard and a shaved head seated across from her, and next to him was a  Muslim woman holding her baby, also smiling.  Would this one day be the future of our immaculately manicured Williams College?  A smiling old white man in a beige cap with Roman numerals (hate the shirt, love the cap) really likes the idea, and knows (having reached Erickson’s age of wisdom) it is only pretty to think so.

                                                                            ***

I’m in North Adams, at the Holiday Inn, possibly the most remote reunion outpost.  My room looks east over North Adams, and it’s a beautiful sight.  Does anybody remember North Adams?  Did anyone ever go there?  It’s a real town. It has texture.   It has Mass MOCA (an alchemical transformation of Sprague Electric), and one of the largest groups of Chinese Americans in the Northeast.  Who knew?  I think if I had a million dollars I’d rather give it to the Massachusetts College of the Liberal Arts---or UCCS or Pikes Peak Community College.  Williams has enough; it always wants and always will get more, and the worthy North Adams  school will never come close. One of the genteel and unacknowledged facts of Williams life is that we are nearly all (personal company excepted) one percenters, and we take care of ourselves—to a fault I would say, even though we are also genuinely good citizens. I’ve made this argument to our class president Jim Blume, who nods and shakes his head in agreement, and says, “I know, but I just love the place.”  OK, I have to admit I do too. I whined about the parade and the uniforms and then was so happy when we entered the gym and the applause rained down on us sweetly for no good reason at all.

                                                            ***

Saturday after lobster.  The chimes have rung at midnight.  Gordon and Peggy and I are sitting in a booth in Baxter:  two Williams men are slurping purple cow gelato.  It’s just like old times—sort of.  I am checking my text messages, the woman law professor is working, and Gordon is trying without success to book a Paris hotel.  I walk out into the night air and hear the sound of something I missed the entire reunion: the sound of music.  It’s coming from the Class of ’93 tent perched in the freshman quad.  I stroll over and find there is an actual rocking band, very little diversity and some real dancing.  I walk back into Baxter and tell Peggy what I’ve found, and ask her if she wants to dance.  She looks up and smiles.  Silly boy.

            ***

So much for the past: now, onwards into the future of Ancient Britain and Cymbeline!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Duck Primer

The Wild Duck is the most complex and thought-provoking play of our season, and it has raised more than a few questions from our audience members.  Many of these cannot and perhaps should not be answered with complete certainty, but here are two things you might want to know.

What's all this about "the thirteenth man" at the table?  

This turns out to be a very old superstition, dating at least as far back as Jesus when Judas was notoriously the 13th disciple at the Last Supper.  Since ancient times, 12 has always been a good magic number: the 12 Gods of Olympus, the 12 Knights of the Round Table, etc.  Adding another is not only odd, it upsets dining arrangements (a large table will comfortably seat 5 on each side and 1 at each end).  But more than this, the addition of a 13th person in a group of 12 was seen as a portent bad luck, and even of death. An old Norse legend tells how the gods sat down to dinner and a  13th uninvited god (Loki) turned up, which led to a series of apocalyptic unprecedented very bad disasters.  

So Hakon Werle, at the beginning of the play, is distressed to find there were 13 at the dinner party he gave for his son and fiancee.  He is an old man, going blind, with a guilty conscience, very aware of his imminent mortality.  He implies that it is son's guest, Hjalmar Ekdal, who is the 13th man.  But at the end of the play, we learn the 13th man is someone else entirely.

What's the big deal about "sacrifice"?

Gregers Werle, the play's crusading idealist and the man with a mission, tends to talk about the importance of making a sacrifice at critical moments in the play.  According to Arnold Weinstein, the author of the fine book Northern Arts, the source of this can be found in Kierkegaard's most influential work, Fear and Trembling, which discusses the radical significance of Abraham's decision to sacrifice his own son-- a decision which Kierkegaard suggests was deeply irrational, unnatural, and made in immense anxiety in defiance of all standard codes of behavior.

Yet such a radical commitment is exactly what real faith demands, and radical behavior is what is required if we are to annihilate old forms that close us in and keep us from being truly free.  When Gregers invites young Hedwig to sacrifice what is most precious to her to demonstrate her love, he is following in the philosopher's footsteps. So yes, it is a big deal, none bigger!

IBSEN IS #2!

We all know who is #1--in theatre, in literature and almost everywhere else.  William Shakespeare is way out in front, has been for some time, and will be for the foreseeable future.  No one else is close.  But the fellow running solidly in second place, the dramatist whose work is performed throughout the world more often than any one other than Shakespeare, is this guy.

He's not a man to cuddle up to.  There are dozens of Ibsen portraits and photos and not one of them contains the ghost of a smle.

 

Henrik Ibsen's reputation in America is almost as forbidding as his portraits. He's not the first fellow who comes to mind when we think of a great night out. It's like partying on a cold foggy beach full of jagged rocks with something dying in the weeds. And yet.  And yet he is the second most performed playwright in the the world! The Doll House is actually the most performed play, according to Pravda anyway.  I went back to our records and found that Wild Duck is our fourth play by Henrik Ibsen, which actually makes him second with us too (previous productions include Hedda Gabler, Doll House and, memorably with the symphony, Peer Gynt). 

So it turns out people actually do want to party with Ibsen, and for good reason too.  He's actually great theatre--and by that I mean he's exciting, mysterious, and completely accessible.  Ibsen arrived on the scene at the end of the 19th century.  The high tide of melodrama was still running strong, but the new wave of realism was about to replace it.  Ibsen has a reptutation as one of the fathers of realism, and also of modernism, and the reputation is deserved.  But this should not obscure his melodramatic heritage and roots. Most Ibsen is melodrama!  There are heroes, victims, innocents, corruptors of virtue, secrets, dark pasts coming to light, loaded letters in the mailbox, daring rescues and sudden knocks on the door.  There is passion, excitement, discovery, pathos and excruciating tension.  Now this is great stuff to begin with, but with Ibsen it gets better because he brilliantly gives melodrama new twists, turns and dimensions which had never been seen before, and which have never been bettered since.

The Wild Duck is rarely performed in America, even thought Ibsen considered it is masterpiece.  In the middle of rehearsals now, I am finding out why.  We have the rare luxury of being able rehearse days as well as nights,and we are finding we need all the time we can get: the the characters are rich and particular, the action is detailed and complex, and the power is cumulative and astonishing.  This is a time when I feel I am the luckiest man in the world, and i don't even mind if i look a little more like the playwright every day.  But I don't mind, because Ibsen is not just another pretty face: he's #2!

 

 

 

He's so that guy!

Andrew Jackson is in town for a a few weeks, and I can tell you in person he doesn't look much like the president on your $20 bill.  He looks more like this guy---younger, tougher, more crazed and charismatic.  Actually, he's kind of like this guy updated, with his skinny jeans, metal and better dance moves. The student theatre has thrown everything they've got into Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, and that's a whole lot.  Besides a writhing, whiny, soulful rockin' presidential studmuffin, there are pretty girls who cheerlead and make out on executive order.  There's a girlfriend wife who is at least as beautiful as this tarted up sappy portrait of Rachel Dolson, the nice woman who committed bigamy to marry Andrew.  Only in this show, she likes to cut herself with her new hubby.

 

Besides Andrew and his girls, there are also several presidents and senators (most of them east coast eltitist News York Times reading twits), many anonymous indians (some killing, many more being killed), and enough paraphernalia and dead animals to fill a Smithsonian basement. The whole wild west show is presided over by a gee whiz idolatrous narrator, at least until she is put aside in a particularly decisive moment. At the Bon Vivant theater the cup of our manifest destiny truly overfloweth!

Don't go if the celebratory indulgence of the f word offends you.  If you are a native American you might not like it (the play makes much of exposing Jackson's racial genocide, yet the indians remain as much objects of satirical reduction as everyone else in the show). But if you like your theatre rowdy, exuberent, rocking and very very American, with quite a bit of wiki-history thrown in, you're likely to have a very good 100 minutes in a 19th century country that looks an awful lot like the one we live in right now.

It's a great show for those of us who put bumper stickers on our trucks.  It's a great show for those of us who care about the second amendment.  It is full of angst, gusto and anger.  It smells of tea and good Kentucky bourbon. Its juts the thing for the vigorous, the  determined, and the confused who are going to reclaim our great nation:

 . . . it's the early 19th century
And we're gonna take this country back
From people like us who don't just think about things
People who make things happen.
Sometimes with guns
Sometimes with speeches too.
And also other things.

And bloody bloody Andrew Jackson, the seventh President of the United States,is the man for this job. He's so that guy!

 

 

Night Ride

Medieval theatre was not quite theatre as we know it. It was created at time when theatre was emerging from the womb of the church, and it remains deeply bound to its mother.  But it occupies a space of its own, a zone between religious ritual and secular show biz.  It works on its audiences in quite a special way, quite differently from today's entertainment.  I began to understand this the other night when I went out for a ride on my own.

Everyman, as we know, is a play about the journey of a man (who represents all men and women) going to his death.  Death of course was everywhere in the 15th century, just as it is now, and even though it was much more visible it still often came as a surprise--as these famous Holbein woodcuts of death's dance illustrate. 

Like the woodcuts, the play asks us to be intensely aware of death, but more than awareness it lifts us into another plane of reality.  We watch Everyman confronting his own death, and in doing so our vision changes--or at least mine does.

I went out on Saturday night about 9 o'clock to drive the route our bus will take during the route of our show--I hadn't seen it when it was dark. The bus will take us down a few streets I rarely travel, and many of them are very quiet.  I also wanted to listen to some of the music we'll  be playing on our bus, which Alex Ruhlin has wonderfully refitted for sound.  Listening to the music, imagining riding with Everyman, watching the small houses on the dark streets, thinking always of death--it's not the sort of thing I do every day or night. Driving past a desolate city park, three boys were playing basketball on a lighted court:they looked like ghosts.  On Platte avenue I saw the school band walking down the sidewalk after a game; a tuba gleamed in a street light.  I looked at the signs lit up downtown and the north end: so many banks!  So many churches!  Really at night it's not so different from the 15h century, with the Norman tower of Grace Episcopal glowing, and the cross lit up high on Penrose hospital.  Lights in the dark. With the play running through my mind, as it has been doing for the last several weeks, the world seemed close yet far away, something I was floating over, on the way to leaving.  600 years between the 15h century and now disappeared; I felt like I was feeling the play in a way not so different from its original audience. I believe that this is the space the Medieval theatre wants to usher us into, considering the world in a new way, as something temporal, and more illusory than the eternal but often invisible realities which inform it.  

Considered as a play, Everyman might seem crude by contemporary standards.  The language is often repititive, the verse is simple and sometimes clumsy. But its effect can be remarkable.  You might think contemplating death is a grim prospect, but in this play, where we are taught "how transitory we be all day,"  I felt strangely peaceful, an in-and-out of body experience.  And indeed, as the play's Messenger informs us, "this matter is wondrous precious, and sweet to bear away."

 

Seeing Red

Many years ago I got a very mixed review for the first original work of theatre I wrote for the stage, a play about the notorious Scopes Monkey trial in Dayton, Tennessee.  The reviewer said my play didn't give my good actors enough to do.  The line went in as easily as a stiletto,and cut to the quick.  I liked my play, and still do, but there was some justice in the observation.  A really good play gives good actors something good to do.  Hamlet springs to mind . . .

And so does John Logan's new play, Red. I saw it in London 3 years ago, where it was a smash hit. I got a standing room only ticket and stood high up holding on to a rail at the Donmar Warehouse, and its 90 minutes flew by. We had the good luck to meet with another playwright shortly afterwards, Sir Tom Stoppard, and he was just as enthusiastic.  "Did you see Red," he asked.  "Wasn't the acting marvellous!"  It was marvellous, but it was so partly because the playwright was throwing some very good meat, red meat, to his two hungry lions.  Logan gave these guys lots to do.

You might not think so on first reading.  The play takes place entirely in an artist's studio, and what they do is talk.  Well, really, Mark Rothko talks--and talks, and talks.  But his talk is a kind of doing, since he is taking on the universe, the entire history of art, his place in the firmament, the meaning of painting, his fellow contemporaries, public taste, Frederich Nietzsche, and the color red.  For starters.  Mostly his young and awed assistant listens, but then we learn he has a story to tell of his own, and finally, very late in the play, he confronts the Great Man directlly, and believe me, that takes some doing.

To give one example of talk as action, there is a moment in the play where the two artists trade variations of the color red with images, as if they were tennis players volleying at the net.  The conversation goes like this:

Ken: "Sunrise is red and red is sunrise."

Red is heartbeat

Red is passion. Red wine. Red roses.

Red lipstick.  Beets. Tulips.Peppers.

ROTHKO:  Aterial blood.

KEN  That too.

ROTHKO    Rust on the bike on the lawn

KEN  And apples ... and tomatoes

ROTHKO  Dresden firestorm at night

 

The sun in Rousseau,

 

 

The flag in Delacroix, the robe in El Greco

KEN    A rabbit's nose.  An albino's eyes.  A parakeet.

ROTHKO     Florentine marble. Atomic flash.

 

Nick yourselfshaving.  Blood in the Barbasol.

KEN     The ruby slippers. Technicolor.That phone to the Kremlin on the President's desk.

ROTHKO  Russian flag. Nazi Flag. Chinese Flag.

 

KEN    Persmimmons. Pomegranates.

Red Light District. Red tape. Rouge.

ROTHKO  Lava. Lobsters. Scorpions.

KEN Stop sign. Sports car.  A blush.

 

ROTHKO    Viscera.  Flame.  Dead Fauvists.

KEN     Traffic lights. Titian hair.

 

ROTHKO:  Slash your wrist. Blood in the sink.

 

KEN  Santa Claus

ROTHKO  Satan.

(Beat). So. . . red.

KEN Exactly.

As you can see there's a lot of red bouncing off these walls.  And there's a lot more red on our set. Rothko's reds. You can find out more about them here:

http://theamericanscholar.org/seeing-red/

And you can come see some very red blooded actors in this very passionate play, too. We strongly recommend it.