The Big Picture and the Closeup

I reflected that Moses could never have had a business plan when he left Egypt either. You had to be crazy enough to count on some parted seas and columns of fire and manna and burning bushes and water flowing out of rocks. As a wiser Jiminy Cricket might have said, Always let your anger be your guide.

Our one-year-old son Matthew had a “language tape,” a VHS video transcription of the first three Muppet movies that I had made in the previous decade for his older brother and sister during a Muppet marathon on old Channel 45. It was complete with commercials and station breaks and really, really bad video, but it was perfect for Matt.

Some plays are born strange, some achieve strangeness, and some have strangeness thrust upon them (or upon their characters, at least). We consider one of each type herein.

The answer to critic Michael Billington’s question how you award aesthetic points to a 75-minute suicide note is, you award aesthetic points to a suicide note the same way you award aesthetic points to anything else: Is it well-written, does it show you something new, does it move you? The answers to these follow-up questions, with this piece (which is admittedly impossible not to view as a suicide note) are yes, yes, and yes.

How well one likes this production depends very much upon how appealing one finds the constant morphing and switching place of characters. If shifting psychodynamics are your thing, this version caters to your taste.

It’s hard for me to stop saying wow. Wow to the theater, a three-tier structure that echoes the layout of Shakespeare’s own Globe (albeit with the modern convenience of a roof – and some others including two bars and ergonomic seating that assures there is no standing for today’s groundlings). Wow to the play, one of Shakespeare’s funniest. Wow to the acting, the direction, the staging, the lighting. The audience is assured of over two hours of being in stitches.

The story of why and how Salieri did Mozart in (this is not necessarily historical) is encumbered – there is no other word for it – by Salieri’s narration. Nor is this a “just the facts, ma’am” narration; this is the tortured but ploddingly literal tale of Salieri’s failed relationship with God himself, of God’s betrayal of a bargain Salieri feels God made with him, by giving Mozart a divine talent that should have been Salieri’s. It is also a sort of greatest-hits retrospective of Mozart’s compositions, especially his operas. That’s an awful lot of freight for a single play to carry.

That all does not end well is a given with personalities like these; that Huey is on the side of history we also know. Working to the uneasy compromise between these two dynamics is all we really ask of the plot, and we get it.

Both the play and the play-within-the-play preach the same sermon: You may be trying to do something that attains meaning by being witnessed and judged, but in truth no one will ever see you or judge you. As an understudy, you are condemned to eliciting what meaning you can from what one frustrated character in A Chorus Line summed up as “dancing for my own enjoyment.”

I had to get to know my plaintiffs. I know, my client was the defendant. But in order to try to defend that client, I still had to know the plaintiffs, these machinists and brakemen and engineers and firemen and maintenance-of-way workers, and I thought of them as mine. I had to get to know about their individual asbestos exposures, their individual careers, their medical histories, their hobbies, their tobacco use, their families, their non-railroad occupational exposures to asbestos. Of course they were not being honest about asbestos disease; I daresay most of them knew that. But I’m sure they viewed the litigation as a way of getting a little bit of their own back against an employer which, if it didn’t exactly inflict asbestosis on them, had still completely let them down. I did my duty by my client, but I was glad it was so ineffectual.