My family was not perfect in every way (no one’s is), but if they had done nothing else right, they acquitted themselves with great honor that day. If the powers that be at Penn State had half the sense of right and wrong, half the integrity that my family had shown forty years earlier, there would be several, maybe dozens, of young men today who would not now be struggling with demons whose acquaintance I fortunately never made.
And there is much melody in this ditty, especially as contributed by a deceptively simple ukelele. Hearing that plangent instrument obsessing over a C# minor 7th chord with McCartney’s sweet falsetto crooning the leading tone at the top and then swooping down through the chord to the tonic, lifts you into a sublime, solitary, and calm place.
I knew from having my ear well trained over the preceding decade what a good song sounded like. I knew what the proper approach to literature looked like. I knew that mysticism didn’t sell ice cream. And now I was in a world where no one who ran the show cared what I knew; they thought they knew better and were going to do it their way.
Is it more important for a memoirist to avoid inflicting pain on those close to him or to tell the truth as he remembers it? Is the allure of suicide to be taken on its own terms or treated with the taboo our society generally imposes upon it? Which should sway the thinking person: the less than conclusive evidence for God’s existence and meaning in the universe or the less than conclusive evidence against God and meaning? There is not going to be an objectively final resolution to these problems. Should drama therefore not “go there”? And if it does “go there,” must the dramatist furnish a right answer? Not in my book.
I was intrigued as soon as I heard that Director Eve Muson was bringing the show to a professional company. My sense was that Muson felt she could build a better product on the same platform of stars, costume and set. She was right. The end product is a modern historical tragedy that obviously speaks directly to contemporary racial and gender issues but also past them to the human condition, as all great tragedy does.
The monastery must now meet the demand for an “incorruptible,” a corpse that never decomposes, the Rolls-Royce of relics. Marie seems ready to be pressed into service over what may be her dead body. And only a bona fide miracle will save the day.
Lennon’s voice comes across as exhausted by sadness. And it speaks to me because that’s how I feel after this close encounter. I could have been a war casualty; I’m not, thank God. But I tell myself I must never forget what it felt like nearly to have been one. And I never do.
The trouble was, if both of you were growing in unpredictable ways, were busy exploring, what would happen when each of you had grown into someone new? Could a marriage sustain such developments? One could not know for certain in advance.
The folklore passed on from parents to children under the deceptively superficial name of fairy tales is profound. Fairy tales are timeless because the kitchen drudge who yearns to become a princess, the little girl vanquishing a wolf encountered on the way to grandmother’s house, the simpleton who sells the family cow for a handful of magic beans, and their kindred, are archetypes of each of us, at various moments in the trajectories of our lives. As such, there is actually nothing superficial about them.
In a play in which morally acceptable and unacceptable stances are hopelessly intertwined and might turn an audience off, there are two things that will draw us to the play anyway: these two characters, Portia and Shylock. If they are right, the play will succeed, despite all its difficulties. They are right as can be in this staging.