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Post-Apocalyptic, Classically-Imagined Tragedy: THIRST at Contemporary American Theater Festival

Posted on BroadwayWorld.com July 10, 2018

C.A. Johnson’s Thirst, receiving its world premiere at the Contemporary American Theater Festival in Shepherdstown, WV, feels a lot like a Shakespearean tragedy. In a Southern county, Terrance (Ryan Nathaniel George) has restored order after a national war over natural resources, and because of his command of the communal well, he is effectively the local warlord. It is good to be king, and Terrance’s community is on the verge of celebrating the first anniversary of the peace Terrance has restored. But there is a thing he can’t let go of, like Lear, like Othello, like Richard II. And if you’re a tragic hero and you can’t let go when you ought to, then bad things will happen to you and those you are close to.

In this case, what Terrance cannot let go of is his claim on Samira (Monet), his wife who left him for another. That the other, Greta (Jessica Savage) is female and white, while Samira and Terrance are black, is not of great significance to Terrance; that Greta stands in the way of an imagined reunion with Samira is the only thing that matters. Terrance should know that his pursuit is hopeless. His war minister Coolie (Justin Withers) tells him: “[S]he was gone Terrance. Even before she run off into them woods and leave you, she was long gone. Wasn’t nothin’ for you in her eyes.” But Terrance clings to the insane notion that the mere status of husband endows him with a right to her, even when there is no longer a legal system either to establish or enforce any rights, and when the trauma of losing their children in the apocalyptic times has fully severed Samira’s bond with him.

Nor is Terrance the only one who can’t let go. Samira, who has begun a new family at a clearing in the woods with Greta and an orphan named Kalil (Jalon Christian), clings to her notion that she can completely avoid dealing with Terrance, even though he controls the water and is the most powerful person in the vicinity, and is seeking a confrontation with her.

Terrance and Samira’s obsessions, and their separate failures to acknowledge realities and balance their obsessions with other considerations, will cost everyone, not just themselves, dearly. And though most of the play is in African American dialect, and the story numbers among its concerns contemporary things like race relations and same-sex relationships, the dynamics are pure classical tragedy. And the classics are the classics for good reason; they have discovered much of what works in the theater. Thirst‘s power largely derives from an underlying classical structure.

At the same time, Johnson has appropriated some potency from a more modern mythos, that of social breakdown. After a century or more of imaginings of a world where law and order have broken down, of Sarah Kane‘s Blasted and Lynn Nottage‘s Ruined and the Mad Max movies and A Clockwork Orange, not to mention the real-life example of failed states like Yugoslavia and Somalia, we expect that kind of breakdown to be accompanied by nearly meaningless violence. There is a good deal of that here as well, and it is the more horrifying because it and its consequences are graphically depicted (kudos to fight director Aaron Anderson and assistant Joe Myers), and because Terrance, the one who has the potential to continue protecting his entire community from it, is the one who brings it back in again with him.

Dramatic works about social breakdown generally incorporate a story about the efforts of individuals to restore or at least to hang onto the vestiges of civility and order, even if it is only on the family level, motivated by a yearning somehow to return to the way things were before. We see that here as well, including the efforts of Terrance’s brother Bankhead (William Oliver Watkins), an unexpected protector of human decency (pictured above with Jessica Savage).

There is much more to say about all of this, but it would require too many spoilers. I would merely observe that the resolution is credible and disheartening, but not entirely without hope. Audiences will find Thirst, like its classical predecessors, harrowing but also cathartic.

Naturally, a work of the ambition of this one will not come off properly without first-rate acting and direction (a hat-tip to Adrienne Campbell-Holt), and great technical support. The Festival, as is its wont, supplies all these things.

If you are not doing all of this year’s Festival, this is surely one of the shows not to miss.

Copyright (c) Jack L. B. Gohn, except for production photo. Photo credit: Seth Freeman.

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Great Recall During the Great Terror: MEMOIRS OF A FORGOTTEN MAN at Contemporary American Theater Festival

Joey Parsons and David McElwee

Posted on BroadwayWorld.com July 9, 2018

The reported genesis of D.W. Gregory’s Memoirs of a Forgotten Man, now at the Contemporary American Theater Festival on the first stop of a rolling world premiere, was serendipity. The playwright came upon a Russian neurologist’s report of a savant who possessed a limitless memory and was affected by a tendency toward one form of synesthesia, the perception of sounds in a visual way. Of additional note was that the case report concerned and was written during the era of Stalin’s murderous purges, when former leaders, now newly-minted enemies of the state, were not only killed but eliminated from the historical record. The savant, of course, would have remembered things and persons the State was trying to force people to forget. The play emerged from this notion.

In the play, the savant Alexei (David McElwee) is also afflicted with an inability to dissemble, a dangerous thing in a totalitarian state, where the power to lie is an important survival tool, especially if one is burdened by a recollection of the actions and words of erased enemies of the state. Alexei has sought help for his complex of problems with Natalya (Joey Parsons), a psychologist he enlists in pursuit of forgetfulness. (Parsons and McElwee are pictured together above.)

As it happens, Alexei is not the only character with inconvenient memories. A different sort of unwelcome obsessive memory afflicts Kreplev (Lee Sellars), a state functionary apparently in charge of politically vetting Natalya’s report on Alexei’s case before it may be published, meaning that Kreplev has the power to destroy Natalya’s career simply by denying approval.

Natalya ends up helping both of them and herself. It emerges that Kreplev’s painful memory is real although his relationship to the report has levels that are not immediately apparent. Kreplev’s memory, we learn, cannot be cured, though he may be educated as to come to terms with it. Alexei’s memory, on the other hand, may be an entirely different matter. In the world of the play, forgetfulness may be entirely possible.

As the two stories unfold, we meet Alexei’s brother (Lee Sellars again), his mother (Erika Rolfsrud), and a nosy neighbor, Madame Devidova (Joey Parsons again), whose intrusive curiosity may be as dangerous as memory in a totalitarian world where secrets are another survival skill. We also hear lyrical descriptions of synesthesia that have an almost poetic impact.

After seeing the show, I found myself engaged with numerous other attendees in a debate over whether this mix of memory issues cohered dramatically with the tale of state erasure of history. Few of us hewed consistently to any one position on this; it is difficult for some reason to say. If the two themes do synergize, then one would expect them to add up to some kind of whole greater than the sum of the parts. And obviously, the mere perception that erasures of nonpersons are terrible Orwellian things is not that greater sum, because it’s something everyone already perceives, not just intellectually but viscerally. But there may be something else; the themes feel as if they come together, though we couldn’t quite say how. We know this much at least: the Orwellian background serves as a plot device to motivate each of the two interrelated stories, akin to the Paris Commune uprising serving as a mainspring for plot developments in Les Miz. And everyone loved the synesthesia.

As is always the case at the Contemporary American Theater Festival, the production values are superb. The set, by the reliable David M. Barber, rose to the unusual challenge of taking a large space, the stage at the Frank Center on the Shepherd University campus, accommodating a large feature (a bank of windows through which back projections like Stalin’s Big Brother countenance or Soviet apartment block prospects could be seen), and still making the rooms in front of it feel small. Part of the trick was to turn the areas abutting those windows into openwork changing spaces, important since three of the four performers had multiple roles, requiring changes of costume, often followed by speedy returns to the field. In other words, the set made a virtue of necessity.

Joey Parsons and Lee Sellars by now also qualify as reliable. They have not only memorably acquitted themselves in previous seasons at CATF that I’ve witnessed, but each is holding down demanding roles in other plays in this season’s Festival. I think it would be overstating the case to say that their current parts in Memoirs posed the same level of challenge as these other roles, but I can say these parts demanded and showcased these performers’ range. Parsons, whose role in another play calls for her to be living a life of quiet desperation that degenerates into explosively tearful noisy desperation, gives us here a Natalya trained by life in a repressive world to be always controlled, and to give little or nothing away. And of course Parsons also does fine with the stock type, the babushka prying into neighbors’ business, apparently a fixture in every apartment house in the old Soviet Union. Similarly, Sellars, who in another current show portrays an agreeable working man with a marriage in slight disrepair, here provides a bureaucrat exuding a silky and sometimes brusque menace mixed with a slight note of vulnerability.

Festival newcomer McElwee probably faced the greatest demands, reconciling character traits not often found in nature, alone or together, and showing, along with those, a human face. His bewilderment and desperation were at times funny and at times moving. But because of the uniqueness of the character, you cannot call them topical.

The playwright openly announces her hopes for the topicality of the play in notes at the head of the script. The play, she writes, “forces the audience to consider the fragility of democracy itself in an era when facts are fungible and history is whatever you say it is.” I don’t think it actually does that. The constantly revised lies we hear today, for instance, over whether someone was fired for one reason or another, or whether a payoff to someone was known to someone else, do not rise to the level of affront to good governance that occurs when official government and media records are revised to give the appearance that former government officials never existed or spoke. The former lies may be on the same continuum as the latter, but the latter ones were parts of campaigns in which millions were slain. The current body count is not comparable. And numbers matter. Lethality matters.

If you come to this show, then, do not expect to participate in a truly topical think piece. You will witness instead a pair of entwined tales about a rare mental abnormality and a somewhat overexposed aspect of totalitarianism. It is the telling of the tales, the acting and the scenery and, oh, yes, the synesthesia, by which Memoirs will work for you, or not.

Copyright (c) Jack L. B. Gohn, except for production photo. Photo credit: Seth Freeman.

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Resurrecting Teflon Ron: A LATE MORNING (IN AMERICA) at Contemporary American Theater Festival

John Keabler

Posted on BroadwayWorld.com July 9, 2018

It is a reasonable guess that most theater-goers who remember Ronald Reagan or have educated themselves about him will think of him as one who did great harm. Under Reagan, the Republican Party accelerated a drift toward racism and reflexive hostility toward all uses of the government to foster the common good; the Iran-Contra deal took place, a marquee event in a program of sponsoring of right-wing militarism and attacks on indigenous populations in Central America; steps were taken toward breaking unions, marking a decisive turning of national policy against the middle class; public health policy took a backseat to homophobia as the AIDS epidemic was ignored for as long as possible; and trickle-down economics, a destructive voodoo that never has worked but has remained Republican orthodoxy, was embraced. A show about Reagan that does not explore how his personality gave rise to such destructiveness is not going to satisfy any well-informed theatergoer.

Yet such a show is unfortunately what playwright Michael Weller has given us in A Late Morning (in America) With Ronald Reagan, receiving its world premiere at this year’s Contemporary American Theater Festival. An interview with Weller published in the CATF website makes clear Weller himself understands the dramatic urgency of the question.

Weller nonetheless re-creates Reagan’s well-known bland agreeableness without doing much to reconcile it with the dissonant malignance of Reagan’s political program. Through his careers in radio, Hollywood, television, and politics, Reagan and his backers fashioned a persona for him, a kind of Teflon shield down which all criticisms were intended to slide. The question that persona often provoked then, and provokes to this day, was and is the extent to which there was any true personality under that Teflon front. Weller seizes on one of Reagan’s most famous movie lines (“Where’s the rest of me?”) to encapsulate it. And it would be the right question, were Weller to ask it more fully – were Weller to ask where was the part of Reagan that allowed him to live with the sheer meanness and regressiveness of his politics.

Nothing prevented Weller from doing so. The show is structured as an end-of-career interview with Reagan. Interviews are by their very nature confrontations in which the interviewee is put to some kind of test. But there is no test here. Whether the interview (with an unseen interlocutor) is actually taking place or is merely an incident of a perimortal fugue state or a figment of Reagan’s disintegrating imagination as he loses his mind to Alzheimer’s or a combination of them remains open and not very important. But to the extent there is in the world of the play an actual interview, it is telling that the interviewer comes from the “Wyoming Horse Breeder’s Monthly,” a fictive publication whose very name amounts to an assurance that Reagan will not be challenged much by its emissary. The non-political focus of a narrowly-focused trade publication would render journalistic curiosity about the bigger and more important questions, particularly those going to the core of a subject’s personality and politics, most unlikely. Weller could have confronted Reagan with a (real or imaginary) true political journalist. As a result of his failure to do so, there is almost no room left for the important questions to intrude.

About the only place the Reagan character is asked about his actual policies, it concerns the one area in which audiences may be inclined to give Reagan credit: standing firm against the Soviet Union and wringing out of that country as it drifted toward dissolution a nuclear disarmament treaty and the end of the Berlin Wall. Whether these really were accomplishments or merely inevitable events that happened on Reagan’s watch I leave to others to decide. My point here, however, is that this is almost the only point in the play where Reagan addresses policy and connects it directly with himself. In other words, the character gets a pass on everything tough, and talks substantively only about the creditable parts.

Reagan is even allowed to let slide the tough parts of his personal life. Here he is on his first wife: “Yes, I married Jane Wyman in 1940. She was a contract player at Warners. Two wonderful children resulted from that union; Maureen and Michael. Jane Wyman was an ambitious Hollywood actress who put career ahead of family. We divorced in 1948. What more is there to say?” Obviously, this is a lie, because there is always plenty to say about any union that resulted in two children.

So, yes, the production surely gives us an afternoon with Ronald Reagan, as charmingly unilluminating as that might be. And the audience enjoyed it; tellingly, though the biggest laughs came when Reagan was making disparaging jokes about the Berlin Wall, calculated to evoke the Trump would-be wall. But audience enjoyment should not mask the lost opportunity; in faithfully depicting a person who provided so few insights into his character, A Late Morning disables itself from providing any insights of its own. That there was no “there there” (as Gertrude Stein put it) is, one supposes, an insight in its own right, but only a small one.

This is not perhaps the most animatronic Reagan possible. This production was originally supposed to star Tim Matheson, who has played Reagan in 2016’s Killing Reagan, and who looks a lot like the mature man who served as president. For some unspecified reason, Matheson dropped out of the project, and the much younger-looking John Keabler was swapped in. This was in keeping with the directions in the script: “The actor can be any age, and needn’t resemble the ‘real’ Ronald Reagan.” I’m not sure why Weller would put such a self-defeating direction in the script, but there it is. Still, Keabler, with his lanky body, does manage to remind us of the way the historical Reagan moved. When I saw the show at the opening official performance, Keabler still seemed a little tentative in the role, rushing some of his line readings and apparently stumbling on certain lines. But one assumes those problems will go away.

I cannot end without mentioning Luciana Stecconi’s masterly set design depicted above: a series of filmy screens that strongly evoke the veiled (even from himself) nature of Reagan’s character, and also accommodate projections.

I hope Weller will continue to work with this script, and will go ahead and try piercing Reagan’s veil.

Copyright (c) Jack L. B. Gohn, except for production photo. Photo credit: Seth Freeman.

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Venue Problems Aside, Stillpointe’s URINETOWN Flush With Possibility

Posted on BroadwayWorld.com July 1, 2018

Every so often a production comes along that has an enormous amount going for it, but you cannot enjoy it much because of technical problems that tend to overwhelm an audience’s capacity for pleasure. Unfortunately that is the story with Urinetown, a musical now being revived by Stillpointe Theatre in a space in the United Methodist Church at Mount Vernon Square. Here, at least on press night, both problems were consequences of the space in which the show was being staged: the acoustics were unspeakably bad and the air was almost unendurably hot.

In the high-ceilinged upper-floor auditorium, the voices of the performers could ricochet off hard surfaces, die out long before they reach the ears of the audience, and/or be drowned out by the orchestra, which was frequently too loud. There were whole minutes when I could confidently identify no more than one of three words sung. I checked with other audience members to be sure it wasn’t just my aged ears doing their aged thing, and I was assured that others were having the same problems. I greatly missed the soundscape of the room at St. Mark’s where Stillpointe’s Trouble in Tahiti played just a few months back.

This is not the first time a local company has confronted sound issues trying to play in unconventional spaces. Baltimore’s Cohesion Theatre Company had a similar stretch where it staged plays upstairs at Church on the Square, and all that can be said is it was a mercy they later found a venue without audibility issues. I suspect the Baltimore Shakespeare Festival went out of business because of St. Mary’s Church in Hampden, where intelligibility goes to die. Conversely, Compass Rose Theater in Annapolis, without its regular stage, recently put on A Chorus Line in a hotel ballroom and it worked perfectly.

Just as bad as the sound in this case, moreover, the room was stifling. We were assured when we came in that there would be air conditioning in the performance space. I don’t know whether there simply wasn’t any air after all (at one point there also appeared to be a power outage on the stage lights circuit) or whether there was some but it was just not remotely adequate. All I can say for sure was that the audience and the performers were all drenched in perspiration. It may or may not have been a coincidence that the programs came in the form of paddle fans. And it would have been even worse for the audience were the bar not selling vodka-infused lemonade.

Apart from that, Mrs. Lincoln, as the joke goes, how was the show? I think I would have loved it. Urinetown is a much-celebrated (three 2002 Tonys) riff on the conceit that in a water-starved future environment, the water supply might need to be protected by tightly controlling urination, which would be allowed only upon payment of a fee. Owing to an unholy alliance of politicians and plutocrats, “it’s a privilege” – no longer a right – “to pee.” Transgressors, those who eliminate in forbidden places, will be hustled off to “Urinetown.” This destination is only vaguely understood at the beginning of the action but is quite evidently ominous.

In other words, this could be an exploration of how evil corporations exploit natural resources and trample human rights in honor of the almighty dollar, and it would probably be quite effective as the vehicle for that simple message. It is something of a truism, however, that in a drama of ideas, the disputants should be evenly matched, so that at the end either party could plausibly be said to have won the argument. For most of its length, the “good guys,” the ones who regard peeing as a human right, seem to have the best of the dispute. Then, surprisingly, in the last ten minutes, the “bad guys” get a potent response, although it arises from the unique factual premises of the show. Still, the audience is left with more to think about than might have seemed likely through most of the going.

Not only was the premise intriguing, then, but the treatment, and particularly the talent Stillpointe brought to this performance, seemed quite promising. As hard as it often was to work out exactly what was being said and sung, the characters certainly had the capacity to intrigue us. We started out with Officer Lockstock (Danielle Robinette), who doubled as the narrator and the chief constable charged with maintaining urinary law and order, whatever moral compromises that might entail. Lockstock carried out exposition duties (“Too Much Exposition”) with the assistance of Little Sally (Caitlin Rife), a streetwise urchin with a comically sunny disposition given the grimness of the world depicted. (Comedy in the face of outrageous injustice, not to mention Kurt Weill-ish melodies, are the traits that quickly got this show described as Brechtian.) I could argue that the nontraditional casting of female performers as Lockstock and Lockstock’s sidekick Barrel (Meghan Taylor) and putting them in “uniforms” that somewhat resembled clown costumes, complete with fright wig hair, marred the also arguably gendered political message of this production, but there is no denying that Robinette especially had the physical and vocal wherewithal to convey Lockstock’s weary menace, and much of it came across despite the ludicrous costume. And she certainly could deliver “Cop Song.”

To this mix add two characters apparently imported from The Cradle Will Rock, evil industrialist Caldwell B. Cladwell (Christopher Kabara) and corrupt politician Senator Fipp (Robert Harris), the love interests Hope (Sarah Burton) and Bobby (Brice Guerriere), and a sardonic keeper of the urinals who seems like a close relative of warden Momma Morton from Chicago, Penelope Pennywise (Caitlin Weaver). The creators of the show, Mark Hollmann and Greg Kotis, knew enough to take these intentionally stereotypical characters and still endow them with enough personality to keep us invested in them as characters (even without understanding every word they said). And, so far as I could discern, they one and all sang admirably to boot, especially Hope and Penny, who each had some belting to do, and did it well. Burton also impressed me by spending some of Act One and much of Act Two bound and gagged – and managed to churn out a steady stream of hilarious physical comedy nonetheless.

The production I attended, then, was one in which everything seemed to proceed swimmingly, except that it was inaudible and everyone was sweltering. If only a show with these possibilities had been in a better venue! I am sure director Grace Anastasiadis had much to do with the swimmingly-ness of it all, and that she deserved much credit. And I can only hope that when it comes to venue, Stillpointe will follow the advice of Bobby as he assumes control of a people’s uprising: “Run, Freedom! Run!” Where to run to for freedom from these problems might not be such an important question; almost anywhere else would be better.

Copyright (c) Jack L. B. Gohn, except for production logo.

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Straight Theatergoer, Closeted Plays

Published in The Hopkins Review, New Series 9.3 (Summer 2016)

I review theater in Baltimore. It recently came to me that the three productions I had most recently covered were all gender-bending or queer in treatment or subject matter. Specifically, over a one-month stretch I reviewed: 1) a somewhat lumbersexual all-female As You Like It; 2) Hick, a dramatization of the lesbian affair between Eleanor Roosevelt and newswoman Lorena Hicks; and 3) a revival of Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart, a memoir of life at ground zero as AIDS hit the gays of New York. I had not set out to focus on gender-bending or queer plays; these were simply what came around and hit this reviewer’s plate.

To put it mildly, it was not always thus.

Not At All, Or Very Carefully

I started my theatergoing on my seventh birthday in 1956, when my mother and stepfather took me to see The Comedy of Errors in an open-air production at the Toledo Zoo. I immediately wanted more. As fate would have it, I was growing up in Ann Arbor, a theater-besotted town. I was also fortunate enough to have a Broadway aficionado father whom I often visited in his apartment on the Upper West Side or at his Catskills vacation home near an old-fashioned summer stock theater. This all created a perfect setup to pursue my theater obsession, and I took full advantage.

Right from the start, I kept every program. Going back and reviewing each of them now, as I have recently done, I am struck not merely by the absence of explicit GLBT subject-matter but by its paradoxical abundance under the surface. In retrospect, there was a huge closet at work: a closet that obscured or concealed not merely gay theater creators themselves but also the work they did. But being a young straight boy in a society that granted scant official recognition to queer sexuality in any form, the emanations from the closet either did not register with me at all, or, if they did, they merely confused me.

Virtually none of the performers or creators in my youth self-identified as gay or lesbian. Even when it was really known to the cognoscenti, as in the cases of Tennessee Williams and Noel Coward (not the same thing as being known to a teenaged Midwestern boy, let me add), there was no explicit acknowledgment, at least not in the years I’m speaking of. (Williams, his guard perhaps let down because he was drunk at the time, finally sort of came out in 1970 on David Frost.)[1] But if you’re a creative soul, particularly a playwright, and you’re in the closet to one degree or another, how do you write without referencing a central issue of your life or showing where you stand with relation to it? Either not at all, or very carefully.

The “not at all” camp included Cole Porter, Noel Coward (in this period at least), William Inge, and Terrence Rattigan. You can see Anything Goes, Hay Fever, Bus Stop and Separate Tables and never once be confronted by even the thought that there might be such a thing as homosexuality. Some strange versions of heterosexuality surface in Bus Stop and Separate Tables, perhaps, but not homosexuality.[2] These then-omnipresent theatrical creators had completely erased the subject of gayness as such. There might be little things implicit in the margins of their work. For instance Porter in his lyrics is openly scornful of monogamy; that kind of unconventionality might imply openness to other things. Maybe.

Those who did decide to speak in any way to homosexual life or concerns did so with extreme care. There were various degrees and modes of careful.

Dog Whistle and Sleight-of-Hand

There was, to begin with, the “dog-whistle” technique. The classical instance for me is West Side Story. Like most kids my age, I got acquainted with the musical first via the 1961 movie. I caught a student revival of it at the University of Michigan in 1966. Much later, I came to understand it had been the product of four gay or bisexual men: composer Leonard Bernstein, book writer Arthur Laurents, lyricist Stephen Sondheim, and choreographer Jerome Robbins. Given the era and my own naïveté and inclinations, I saw and was entranced by the updating of the straight love story of Romeo and Juliet. Someone I later understood to have been a budding lesbian in my high school class was entranced by something else: the character Anybody’s. I knew she wanted badly to play that role, and (so I heard) lobbied our school to stage the show. I just did not get it. To me, Anybody’s was a tomboy whose name implied heterosexual availability, and not a very interesting role. To my classmate, I’ve come to realize, Anybody’s was a young woman working hard to make sense of a sexual identity essentially opposite to what the name implied. The classmate was right, of course. Read the clothes and the hair and the mannerisms, and you get the message. But that was a communication in a code young men like me were expected not to be able to read. It was on a need-to-know basis only, then.

Times change.  A recent blogger refers to Anybody’s simply as “a pugnacious lesbian.” For that blogger it’s not even an issue today. (He also says, again as if it is obvious, that the choreography of the gang members is all about repressed homoerotic energy.)

Sleight-of-hand was a close relative of the dog-whistle. Here you showed a little bit of it, but in such a way that the audience probably didn’t register what it saw, and if it did could sort of ignore it. My mom and stepdad nevertheless chose not to ignore an instance of this that they did flag in a 1963 professional production of The Merchant of Venice at the University of Michigan, staged in light of the then-recent (1960) success de scandale of La Dolce Vita. At the conclusion of this rendering, with all the happy Fellini-esque newlyweds headed indoors, vowing to talk but making bedroom eyes, Antonio, the eponymous merchant, is left standing alone; then, in an instant before the final curtain, he crooks a finger at a handsome young bellboy. I hadn’t even noticed it, but my parents felt, correctly, that this clear indication that Antonio is gay implied the very real possibility that Antonio’s attachment to Bassanio, which is, after all, the mainspring of the plot machinery, might have been similar. That little gesture was therefore completely unacceptable to them. If Antonio was that way, then Bassanio would probably have been that way too, at least in part, and then what would that make of Bassanio’s newly-solemnized relationship with Portia? Instead of an all-consuming passion leading to “happily ever after,” it might be merely a lately-assumed half of a bisexual’s involvements, vulnerable to disruption by any resurgence of Bassanio’s very recent connection to Antonio. That crooked finger, therefore, killed my parents’ buzz. They wanted to believe in Portia and Bassanio.

My parents had taken similar umbrage at another professional production under the same auspices the year before called We Comrades Three (by one Richard Baldridge),[3] a look at the poet Walt Whitman at three stages of his life. So far as I can recall, no one ever said that the play explicitly acknowledged Whitman’s gayness;[4] but there was plenty of material there that was consistent with Whitman being gay and nothing there inconsistent with it. (I think not much was said to me about this because my parents had limits on what they felt appropriate to say to a teen regarding the whole subject.) Call this technique the I’m-not-saying-anything-definite-and-you-draw-your-conclusions approach. To be fair, it seems to have been Whitman’s as well.  That said, my parents’ indignation was more clearly misplaced here. Shakespeare may well have thought of Antonio as straight, no matter how strangely his passionate friendship for Bassanio chimes with modern understanding, but Whitman was indisputably, in real life, gay. And what’s more, my parents almost surely knew this about Whitman; they just weren’t comfortable with a depiction of gayness, however conditional.

At least with the above approaches, what is being hinted at is definite. Either you pick up the hint or (like me then) you don’t, but if you do, you know what the playwright is talking about. More frustrating and self-defeating, I believe, were other playwrights’ mystifications. These sparked real confusion during my early theater-going years. Granted, this was an era of confusion, the time of the Theater of the Absurd, of Eugene Ionesco and N.F. Simpson and Samuel Beckett and adaptors of Franz Kafka, who in their various ways could generate obscure or impenetrable texts without there being a homosexual subtext. But those obscurities had a very different feel from the obscurities I’m writing about now, the obscurities about sex.

Mystical Twaddle and Indirection

Consider a play I actually performed in as a juvenile (with the now-defunct Ypsilanti Players), Tennessee Williams’ 1951 play The Rose Tattoo. Not a recognizably gay character in the play, even if you can read the coded signals; The Rose Tattoo ostensibly concerns heterosexual sexuality, that of the fleshy, sensual Serafina delle Rosa, a Gulf Coast seamstress. But even as a boy, I had a sense that the whole thing was overheated and unbelievable. In barest outline, Serafina spends much of the play in a three-year spate of hysterical mourning for a husband who has died, suppressing the recognition that he had cheated on her, and trying not to succumb to her attraction to an alive and available but faintly comic truck driver who would force her to live in the present. Ultimately the truck driver, and sex, win. The proceedings are drenched with symbols, including the eponymous tattoo, escaping goats, and a flaming red shirt. Serafina was not recognizably like any woman I’d ever known. Williams was not trying to deal with gay sexual issues here, but he was trying to talk about passion. But the unwillingness to address the subject in a context where he knew and understood it drove him ridiculously far afield. In consequence the play can only be called mystical twaddle.

Williams got much closer to what he did know about in later plays, most especially Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955), which I saw in 1969. The engine that moves the plot is the memory of a homosexual relationship between Brick, son and potential heir of a Southern plantation-owner, and his dead friend and former football teammate, Skipper. But Williams cannot bring himself to posit that premise straightforwardly (so to speak). So he equivocates as to whether the relationship was ever physically consummated. Maggie, Brick’s wife, had slept with Skipper, and Brick has stopped sleeping with her, assertedly because of her “mendacity” concerning Skipper. These facts stand at the threshold of the dance Williams performs with what actually had happened between Brick and Skipper, and how Brick, Maggie, or the audience view it. To reiterate a highly ambiguous exchange I have quoted before in these pages:

BRICK:            One man has one great good true thing in his life. One great good thing which is true!–I had friendship with Skipper.–You are naming it dirty!

MARGARET: I’m not naming it dirty! I am naming it clean.

But in a Bill Clinton-esque turn, the meaning of the exchange turns on what “it” is. Is she saying she knows “it” was “clean” because nothing explicitly sexual happened? Or despite the explicitly sexual things that did happen? A huge – and censor-evasive – distinction. One interpretation makes Maggie trusting, the other makes her tolerant. Either way, Williams is not really talking directly about what most informs the play. As I’ve gone on to say in these pages, the play is full of critical and central ambiguities; Williams refuses to be pinned down, and this is the worst of it. It is completely understandable why the play continues to fascinate us, what with the titanic characters of Maggie the Cat and Big Daddy, but it remains a thematic train-wreck. It certainly left my 20-year-old self nonplussed.

Or consider Edward Albee’s Tiny Alice, a play I saw with my parents and our broad-minded young parish priest in 1966. It is a powerfully evocative piece, all right, and an intellectual puzzle that kept me, the priest, and my parents up till late at night arguing about it after returning home. The plot concerns Miss Alice, a fabulously rich woman, and what amounts to her purchase, in exchange for stupendous donations to the Church, of unlimited access to a fragile lay brother named Julian. She uses that access to compromise Julian’s sense of vocation, seduce him, marry him – and finally see to it that he is killed when he balks at a final level of sacrifice. This odd undertaking plays out in the presence of a scale model of Alice’s mansion in the mansion’s sitting room. But is the mansion “real,” or is it only a “replica” of its own scale model? (A fire occurs in the model, and only then in the mansion, for instance.) It emerges that “Tiny Alice” resides in the scale model, not the mansion, but that she is nonetheless the real Alice, the Alice of whom the Miss Alice Julian thought he was marrying is merely the visible and outward sign. Julian is informed that he has wedded the real Alice and must now surrender himself to her; his rebellion against this demand is the point where he is shot. He dies alone, but for the overwhelming and numinous presence of Tiny Alice, with whom it seems he is united at last.

Equipped with the hindsight of fifty years, I have come to see this as largely a disquisition on being gay in a straight world. Julian begins as celibate, something in which none of the other characters share, somewhat paralleling the nonconformist status of gays in a heteronormative world. And it is noteworthy that the leaders of that world, that is, Miss Alice, a cardinal, a lawyer, and a butler, conspire to make a sacrificial end to that celibacy. And organized religion leads the pack of sacrificers. They persist even after Julian has sought to bring his nonconforming sexuality more in line with conventional mores by marrying Miss Alice. For him, that effort proves a misconception, and a deadly one at that.

But this is very much my unauthoritative read. I do not for a moment maintain that the play is at all clear about this, or about anything else. In his Author’s Note to the published text, Albee declines to explain anything, despite what he acknowledges as “the expressed hope of many” that he would do so. Instead, he asserts that “the play is quite clear.” Uh, no, it’s not. With all the mystification about replica and reality and God and religion, it is very deliberately obscure. And what it obscures, I am now convinced, is Albee’s protest against heteronormativity, a rebellion I’m guessing he felt he could not wage openly.

Falseness and Implausibility

A musical that approached the same subject (gay nonconformity) in almost as deep disguise was Stephen Sondheim and George Furth’s Company (1970), which I knew for many years only from its brilliant original cast album. But even from that, the contrivedness of the stated problem was evident to me, though not, at first, the nature of the contrivance. The central figure, Bobby, a New York bachelor, surrounded by married friends, does not join them in their married state. Why is he a bachelor? Not, the musical establishes, because he’s gay; au contraire, we meet some of the women he takes to bed, fully reaping the benefits of the Sexual Revolution (in full swing at that historical moment). Rather, his hesitancy to commit is owing in part to the jaundiced view of marriage he has developed based on what he’s seen of his friends’ marriages, and purportedly because of some obscure resistance to the sacrifices that true intimacy requires – a resistance whose overcoming constitutes the “happy ending,” though notably one without a leading lady to make it complete or concrete.

I loved and still love the musical, but there is a falseness and implausibility at its core. Straight single guys didn’t and don’t hang out, especially exclusively, with a crowd of married people the way Bobby does. And supposedly obscure resistance to heterosexual matrimony by agreeable and marriageable young men of that era usually turned out, in retrospect, to have been because the men were unwilling or unable to declare their true orientation. As screenwriter William Goldman commented concerning Sondheim’s suggestion that Goldman write a screenplay of the musical: “I remember seeing Company five times and I loved it, and I had a huge… problem which was that the main character’s obviously gay but they don’t talk about it.”[5]

Indeed, they affirmatively talk about the wrong things. The musical proffers a non-solution to a non-problem. In the real world, a straight guy who holds out against emotional and physical monogamy claiming to be motivated simply by the sight of the shortcomings in his friends’ marriages would justly be accused of rationalizing. Nor would we expect him to change, if at all, simply by having scales fall from his eyes, which I think is a fair characterization of what happens to Bobby at the end. Meanwhile, the real problems that must have inspired the show, how to be a gay friend to straight couples, given the blocks to free communication in such friendships, remained firmly unexplored.

The closeted nature of these shows made for needless and mostly artistically damaging obscurity. What if Williams had openly gloried in gay sex, or spoken out for its dignity? Or if Albee had felt free to attack religious hypocrisy on the subject of homosexuality? Or if Sondheim and Furth had addressed the difficulty of communication between gay and straight people about love and marriage? I think we would have had better plays. And I am absolutely sure that I, as a young theatergoer, would not have been unnecessarily mystified.

How It Could Have Been Done

It’s not as if clarity had ever been impossible. In 1951, the same year as The Rose Tattoo, there was a beautiful example of what candor would have looked like. I speak of The Price of Salt, Patricia Highsmith’s novel about a lesbian romance, recently recast as the movie Carol. To move from the confusing, elliptical, ambiguous, unfathomable and just false works we have been considering and enter the world of The Price of Salt is to walk out into the sunlight. Highsmith tells the story directly and unflinchingly. Not only is there no obscurantism; there is no concession to melodramatic cliché resulting from moral condemnation. As Highsmith wrote in the Afterword to a reissue of the book:

The appeal of The Price of Salt was that it had a happy ending for its two main characters…. Prior to this book, homosexuals male and female in American novels had had to pay for their deviation by cutting their wrists, drowning themselves in a swimming pool, or by switching to heterosexuality (so it was stated), or by collapsing – alone and miserable and shunned – into a depression equal to hell.

It is not that Highsmith pretends that everything is all right, and that everyone approves. The lovers, Therese and Carol, have to go through a lot because their love is regarded by so many as beyond the pale. And Therese has to work out her sexual orientation by hit and miss, and it is not clear-cut, maybe not even at the end. But the reader will understand everything as it is happening, and will be moved by things that can best be presented matter-of-factly.

Of course, The Price of Salt is a novel, not a play. It was originally published under a pseudonym, and doubtless sold largely in ways that allowed the sellers and the customers a degree of furtiveness. Given the forces marshaled for “decency” at the time, I do not know how possible it would have been in 1951 or even 1960 to mobilize investors, actors, and theater-owners to present anything as straightforward as The Price of Salt on the stage.

But the times did finally change, bit by bit.

First Out

I believe that it was when I was a newly-minted graduate student, in 1972, that I first saw on the stage a play that was explicitly and unambiguously about homosexuality. This was Staircase, a strange little British import about two barbers, one of whom shared a name with the playwright, Charles Dyer, the other’s name being an anagram of the playwright’s. In my misty memory, however, that play was affected by a certain degree of gay self-deprecation if not self-hatred. It was not possible for the protagonists to separate their self-images from the image that society had of them, expressed via a criminal proceeding against one of them for performing in drag. It was queens as a sort of freak show.

Much the same issues plagued Mart Crowley’s The Boys in the Band (1968). I never caught it on stage, but did see the 1970 film on a campus screen shortly after its initial theatrical release. As critic Elyse Sommer justly summarized, it was full of “self-homophobic, low self-esteem characters.” I remember coming away from the screening, as I did from Staircase, with the feeling that, whatever one felt about gay people as a moral or legal matter, they sure did tend to be screwed up and bitchy.

We had already moved some distance from dog-whistles and sleight-of-hand, but there was still a lot further to go. Stonewall happened the year after The Boys in the Band. And little more than a decade later came AIDS. And what became possible to put on the stage changed irrevocably. I started this piece with The Normal Heart, Larry Kramer’s 1985 play about AIDS; let me end there. A lot of points get made in this very talky play. I wish to focus on two of them only. Ned Weeks, the character based on Kramer himself, makes them repeatedly. Gays must stand up and be counted, he says, because they cannot influence public policy from the closet (and public policy at the outset of the epidemic was informed by a fear of doing anything that might be perceived as helping gays, with the result that funding for life-saving research was shamefully neglected). Hand in hand with the imperative for gays to exit the closet is the need to exit what keeps them there: the perception on the part of both the rest of the world and also themselves that there is anything “abnormal” about homosexuality, that it results from pathology or psychological trauma. To the contrary, Weeks insists, it is simply another way of being human, and he breaks with his mostly supportive straight brother until the brother can embrace that perception, as he does very nearly at the end of the play.

Though of course it was not Kramer alone who made it happen (Harvey Fierstein’s Torch Song Trilogy was being created piece by piece in the preceding decade, for example), after everyone saw that a play like The Normal Heart could be a hit (294 performances off-Broadway), the playwrights’ closet pretty much emptied out. Increasingly, the thing to be ashamed of was not coming out; Kramer resoundingly won that argument.

This tectonic shift forever transformed, among many other and more important things, my experience as a theatergoer. It led to the new normal, the one in which, plays with LGBT creators, themes, performers, etc. were no longer remarkable. And it spelled the end of the weird indirection and obscurity that had marred or misdirected so many of the plays of my youth.

Where We’ve Arrived

After a spell of plays like the ones I mentioned at the beginning, there may even be moments when I wonder if we’ve reached the point where the love that dared not speak its name has become the love that never lets any other love get a word in edgewise.

But I would not go back for a moment.

_________________

^[1]. There’s a very interesting discussion of this interview, in context, here.

^[2].  It can certainly be argued that the misbehavior of Dr. Gerald Lyman in Bus Stop with young women and the similar misbehavior of Major Pollock with young women in Separate Tables are typical of the kinds of loitering and solicitation charges gay men were often facing in that era. But there is very little support in the text of either play for the notion that this was somehow a suggestion of gay behavior. In each play, the possible next involvement of each character is with a woman.

^[3]. This seems to be Baldridge’s only play which has left any Internet trace that I can discern. I believe I heard that the playwright committed suicide shortly after that production, but I have not been able to confirm that rumor either.

^[4]. The New York Times review of the production said not one word about Whitman’s sexuality as revealed in the show.

^[5]. Quoted in Chris Gore, The 50 Greatest Movies Never Made, St Martins 1999 p. 186, according to a citation in the Wikipedia article on Company, reviewed March 5, 2016.

Copyright (c) Jack L. B. Gohn

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Living With What Lies Between Us

Published in the Maryland Daily Record August 2, 2018

It seems that you and I have a problem communicating, my friend. You have been inspired by a man I and most of my associates regard as a demagogue, a racist, a religious bigot, and an enemy of treasured national institutions and of international order itself. And when I try to tell you why your hero and his policies are horrible, I find you and your friends are like the Terminator: You can’t be bargained with. You can’t be reasoned with. You cannot be brought to acknowledge obvious facts or relinquish obvious lies. When it comes to people your leader treats as the Other, you don’t feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And when it comes to trying to persuade me that I am wrong, you absolutely will not stop… ever.

So, my Terminator friend, we have a problem. Unlike the Terminator of the movies, who is sent from the future, you are sent from the past. You are the classmate I went to high school with, my long-term colleague at the office, my fellow parishioner, a member of my social club, my cousin, my barber for a decade. We have a history, you and I, ties that bind us. And yet there is this … thing … between us now.

It does not help at all that your hero models such pride in offensive behavior. Based on his example, you are learning to be unapologetic for rhetoric that decent people had spent generations learning to be ashamed of. Despite the fact that your group’s current political preeminence comes from gerrymandering, voter suppression, non-majoritarian provisions of the constitution and foreign interference, you strut and gloat as if you truly represented the majority, going right back to the lies your leader told about the crowds at his inauguration. Your policies frequently seem to be motivated mostly by nothing more complicated than the desire to evoke “liberal tears,” whatever the predictable damage to our economy or our environment. Your gibes at those among us we regard as most desperately in need of empathy may be the worst of it. It makes talking with you quite difficult.

Yes, I know that you and your friends look on me and my friends as misguided and in need of correction. Your view of us evidently mirrors somehow our view of you. And so you should know that you have no chance of convincing us, either. Our view is we are the proponents of logic and reason, mental habits you seem to us to have abandoned, and of compassion, which your rhetoric seems to make manifest you do not possess. We shall not be convinced by people like you. We enrage each other, and our minds are not destined to meet. That is the thing that has come between us.

Staying civil

But the assurance we should each have by now that we are not going to convert each other should also be key to our coexistence. If only because of our shared past, I do not want to lose our connection to each other, and I sense that you do not want to lose it either, no matter how angry we make each other.

To that end, my plan is to go on being civil with you, even when you are not doing the same. This is not for your benefit but for mine. Incivil exchanges between us would do further damage, and to no good end. Frequently, to maintain civility, I shall not engage when you try to draw me out on the things that divide us; as I’ve said, we know we can’t convince each other. But you will also find that civility does not always mean passivity; when your talk “displaces the mirth” (as Lady Macbeth put it) of a social gathering , I shall say what needs to be said to protect the party from your incivility. I may even engage you briefly on the issues, where I judge it to be safe, not in the hope of convincing you, but just to make sure my side is represented. Mostly, though, I shall focus on the common things: the lives and deaths of our friends; our children’s accomplishments; our work; our travels, our businesses; our sports teams. And I would beg you to do the same.

I am not naive or patient enough to think that what we refrain from saying face-to-face will go away. In the public sphere, in the press, in social media, where we speak with our keyboards rather than our tongues, we can all be somewhat freer. And in our current straits, I am relieved to be able to outsource much of my anger to late-night comedians, who can articulate better than I the way I feel and the reasons for those feelings. But my resort to those comforts will remain a matter between me and my TV screen.

If there is to be a victory of my side over you and yours, I know it will not come from winning you over; we shall have to beat you, that is all, with what tools our faulty political system still affords us. Never doubt that my dollars and my votes and my pen will be at the service of my side. But I pledge that for my part, our struggle with you and yours will still skirt fratricidal tactics or rancor. I shall try to manage my actions so that at the angriest moments, you and I can still shake hands.

In time, perhaps common political ground will reappear; I cannot predict how that will go. But I am determined not to lose you, and I hope you will match my determination. As angry as we make each other, we must remain larger and more connected than our tribalisms would have us be. As long as we retain some connection, a vital hope will remain. So I intend to try to preserve it, and I hope you will as well.

Copyright (c) Jack L. B. Gohn

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Recalled for the Right Reasons

Published in the Maryland Daily Record online July 5, 2018 and in print July 9, 2018

California voters’ recent recall of Judge Aaron Persky has provoked a lot of distress among those worrying about judicial independence and the possible politicization of the judiciary. California voters are not often moved to remove their judges; the last successful popular judicial recall in California had occurred 80 years ago. Judge Persky had, however, given a shockingly mild sentence (six months, with only three actually served) to the so-called Stanford rapist. This drew the wrath of many concerned about sexual assault itself (the state dropped the rape charges because it could only prove digital penetration, although most non-lawyers would consider what happened rape and I shall continue to refer to it as such).[1] There was also an obvious concern as to the issues around it, including the credibility many judicial and administrative decision-makers give to men accused of rape, the burdens and standards of proof victims have to surmount, and the concern shown for offenders, as opposed to care for the victims, in assessing sanctions.[2]

Are We Really at a Point?

It would be a mistake to denigrate the sincerity or understanding of those horrified by the recall, who may well simultaneously share the recall proponents’ dismay about rape and the surrounding issues. The politicization of the judiciary is always a legitimate concern, and particularly in times like these, where judicial independence is under direct attack from the highest places. And Judge Persky’s defenders have pointed out that the choices he made in determining the sentence imposed on the Stanford rapist were within his statutory discretion.[3] Are we really at a point, they ask, where a judge operating within the proper bounds of his discretion is to be removed for doing so?

I would argue, however, that it is precisely the fact that the judge was operating within his discretion that made this particular recall appropriate. It is often within the margins of discretion that the most important decisions of a judge fall. And there exist few mechanisms to correct such decisions when they are wrong. Trial court decisions as to the law, if incorrect, may be reversed by an appellate court. But most laws authorizing sanctions set minima and maxima, and so long as a judge stays within those guidelines, appellate courts generally will not review the judge’s choices, on the basis that the decision rested within the sanctioner’s so-called “sound discretion.”[4]

Now it is of course possible to argue that as a result acts of “sound discretion” cannot meaningfully be characterized as wrong, and hence any such decision must be accepted as correct. But this is nonsense, and the Stanford rapist’s sentence proves it. Beyond any reasonable doubt the decision betrayed Judge Persky’s faulty understanding of the seriousness of the life-long trauma rape typically inflicts upon victims,[5] not to mention his excessive solicitude for the impact of sanctions on the life and career of the defendant.

No Other Sanction

No, “sound discretion” is not the absence of error, only the protection of a category of potential error from appellate reversal – and unfortunately in a context where no other reversal or review or sanction usually exists – as here, where Judge Persky had withstood complaints to the California Commision on Judicial Performance to censure him, the legislature had failed to impeach, and he had just won a retention election. In other words, without recall, Judge Persky would “get away with it.”[6]

The solution is not to broaden the scope of appellate review. Appellate courts should not be second-guessing such judgments because of (in the oft-used phrase) “an absence of judicially manageable standards” for them to apply. The concept may best be understood by observing its opposite: a clearly-worded statute which establishes the law in ways both trial and appellate courts can easily apply. Perhaps an intermediate point of comparison would be existing common law rulings; they may not be precisely on-point with the new issue a trial judge must confront, but they are close enough so that both the judge and the appeals courts above the judge can extrapolate from them, and the appeals courts can still intelligently determine if the judge was wrong in conducting that process.

But errors like Judge Persky’s, issuing a sentence that fell between statutory minima and maxima, lie more in the category of political choice. Appellate judges can’t manageably evaluate it, but the public can, and should. Most of the time, the ways in which the judge sentences will reflect the consensus of the community on questions that are inherently political, for example the extent to which drug consumption is a punishable criminal act as opposed to being a treatment-worthy manifestation of “drug abuse syndrome.” Frequent application of such inherently political community consensus is unavoidable, particularly at the trial court level.

The People’s Sound Discretion

Political choices in our society are generally effectuated by elected public officials and political appointees of those officials. But the legitimacy of those choices depends finally upon the public will, as expressed at the ballot box through the initial elevation of and later potentially forcible retirement of the officials and their appointees who make those choices. Such electoral accountability is attenuated or absent for most judges. But when judges make political choices that are out of step with the community, choices for which other sanctions are nonexistent or impracticable, is electoral accountability such a bad idea?

It could well be objected that the cure of a recall election is potentially worse than the disease. Voters at a recall election are not required to give their reasons; they could be voting to protest the law a judge applies, or because the judge is a nasty person or belongs to the wrong party or ethnic group. That may all be true, but where, as here, recall is already lawful, and the reason for the recall is obvious, namely a judge’s complete, and worse, apparently oblivious revolt against the political consensus of the electorate on the culpability of rape, it is hard to characterize the recall as an attack on judicial independence. The voters removed Judge Persky as was their right, where the system left it to their sound discretion, which at least in this instance seems to have been soundly exercised.

_______________

[1]. See the analysis in Michael Vitiello, Brock Turner: Sorting Through the Noise, 49 U. Pac. L. Rev 631, 636–37 (2018).

[2]. See, for example, many of the comments in the Voices section of the website for the Recall Judge Aaron Persky campaign, https://www.recallaaronpersky.com/voices, viewed June 16, 2018.

[3]. See California Penal Code § 1203.065, noted by the California Commission on Judicial Performance.

[4]. See, e.g. People v. Surplice, 203 Cal. App. 2d 784, 791, 21 Cal. Rptr. 826, 831 (Ct. App. 1962).

[5]. In the statement made by the victim in the Stanford case, the lasting impact is well-stated. Judge Persky cited and quoted that statement in his summary of the reasons for his sentence, but seemed unable to grasp its importance.

[6]. Michael Vitiello, in the article cited above at 650, citing Wilbank J. Roche, Judicial Discipline in California: A Critical Re-Evaluation, 10 LOY. L.A. L. REV. 192, 193-95 (1976) notes that California’s constitution contemplates impeachment of judges, as well as judicial removal in periodic retention elections. But only two state judges have ever been impeached, and Judge Persky had just won a retention election.

Copyright (c) Jack L. B. Gohn

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Handing it to the Devil: Stillpointe Presents HAND TO GOD

Michael Paradiso

Posted on BroadwayWorld.com March 3, 2018

The play Hand to God, being presented for three weekends by Stillpointe Theatre, is a violent, obscene, sacrilegious attack on everything that reportedly formed playwright Robert Askins. Southern fundamentalist Lutheranism – check! Didactic sock puppets – check! A mom who runs the sock puppet program – check! Deceased dad – check! And – one assumes, untidy libidinous impulses that could not be squared with the conventional morality, leading to contempt for the conventional morality, leading to contempt for the kind of theology that, at least in southwest Texas, undergirds it.

It is a truism among Christians of all stripes that we are all sinners, and, though Askins might have a problem with using the word “sin” to describe anything worse than conduct that makes us unwelcome around the communal campfire, we certainly see a lot of sin (however defined) in the approximate hour that it takes for Askins’ fable to play out. There is teacher Margery (Valarie Perez-Schere), who, in the wake of losing an (admittedly uninspiring) husband, is also losing her grip on her son, although she is all too ready to come to physical grips with her son’s classmate – and her student – Timmy (Parker Damm), a readiness Timmy shares. There is Pastor Greg (David Iden), who also clearly lusts after widow Margery, and is not above a little sexual harassment, not to mention overbearing conduct in the matter of scheduling a puppet performance. There is young puppeteer Jessica (Liz Galuardi), who may be a bit young for the hyper-sexualized proceedings that seem to be par for the course in Cypress, Texas, where the show is set, but is ready for her sock puppet to engage in all manner of erotic expression. And most of all there is Jason, or should one say Tyrone, Jason’s sock-puppet alter ego who may also be the Devil (Michael Paradiso), guilty of telling hurtful truths – and mayhem (the nature of which I shall not give away, except to suggest that spectators in St. Mark’s Church basement, where the show is presented, might wish not to sit too close to the floral lamp).

As far as Askins is concerned, then, a religious congregation is no less and no more sinful than any other group. The point seems to be the same as was made at the end of Candide: “We’re neither pure nor wise nor good” and the best we can aspire to is to “make some sense of life.” And part of the sense Askins thinks we should make is that what we call Jesus and what we call the Devil are but two atavars of identical human impulses.

It helps that this attack on sanctimonious pretensions is put across by such a spirited ensemble, game with lascivious behavior, violence, f-bombs and sock-puppets, and blessed with considerable talent, including the manual dexterity to bring socks to life. It also helps that the show is presented in the round, in the intimate space of a church basement (at one dialectically critical point, Tyrone makes the circuit establishing whatever in the sock-puppet world corresponds to eye-contact with each spectator). And finally, it must be said, it helps that in this environment (i.e. not Texas) Askins is probably preaching to the converted; the catchment demographic for Stillpointe here in Baltimore is probably not heavily stocked with evangelicals, prudes, or the easily offended. If you’re none of the above, this show will probably make you laugh through the winces. If you are some of the above, come all the same, and see how the other half thinks.

In short, this is good, dirty, thought-provoking fun. And it won’t be here long. So make plans to go right now.

Copyright (c) Jack L. B. Gohn, except for production photo. Photo credit: Rob Clatterbuck.

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Wrestling with Authentic Inauthenticity: CHAD DEITY at Cohesion Theatre

Christian Gonzalez and Jehan Sterling Silva

Posted on BroadwayWorld June 2, 2018

Is pro wrestling a form of theater? That is one question Kristoffer Diaz‘s The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity, now being presented by Cohesion Theatre, uh – wrestles with. As the show chronicles, a wrestling ring, like a theater, is a place of infinite artifice, where nonetheless, if an audience is lucky, something real happens, or at least something real can be learned. That is the pitch the play makes for the “sport.” (It has to be in quotes because there is no actual competition; that is the genius of the artifice.) I, knowing too little of wrestling, and perhaps too dazzled by the hall of mirrors the play provides, left neither convinced nor unconvinced. But I certainly left both provoked and entertained.

Artifice first: on the evidence of the play, marshaled by narrator and participant Macedonio Guerra (aka “The Mace”) (Christian Gonzalez), the ritual wrestling enacts is one of pre-designated heroes and villains, excessively and absurdly delineated, and the “sport’s” audience knows this full well. The outcome of each match, as the audience also knows, is fixed, and while there may be a series of matches over a period giving shape to a story arc, at the end of the arc, the hero will beat the villain. It is a ritual of scapegoating, of the bullfight, in which the anxieties and sins of the community are concentrated in a character who is first hated and then defeated.

The Mace is one of those fake villains, and his soliloquies, like those of bona fide villain Richard III, are mini-lectures which inspire much appreciation of the art and craft of villainy. We learn that in pro wrestling the villain, the one who sets up and takes the falls, is actually doing most of the work, and must be much better at what he does than the hero. Case in point, the eponymous Chad Deity (Tim German), a handsome devil with a great smile, but not actually much of an athlete despite the ornate belt he wears to enter the ring, not to mention the also eponymous elaborate entrance by which he arrives there, an honor denied The Mace.

What is the reality underlying this artifice? At least in this play, that the spectacle is enacted by a crew of young journeymen with deep roots in urban ethnic communities located in places like the outer boroughs of New York, where a sort of patois, part hiphop, part Spanglish, part god-knows-what, reigns. The Mace, of Puerto Rican extraction but designated to wrestle under a Cuban/Mexican identity (see photo above), leaves his home in the Bronx to visit a baskeball court in Brooklyn and there meets Indian-American Vigneshwar Paduar, V.P. for short (Jehan Sterling Silva), who will in due course be presented as The Fundamentalist, a turbaned Muslim villain (also in photo above) of an indeterminate Mideastern nationality. Intrigued by V.P.’s social fluency, highlighted by his effortless ability to flirt with young women in six languages, The Mace sells the unctuous Everett K. Olson, impresario of THE Wrestling (based apparently on WWE) (Jason Hentrich), on working V.P. into the lineup.

And the reality that this artifice is supposed to teach? Here a reviewer must tread lightly to avoid giving too much away. But it starts with the manner in which the mythos of pro wrestling is designed to hold a mirror up to its audience. The bad guy is supposed to proclaim how much he despises American values, and to be himself despicable for that very reason. But when we boo him, what are we booing? The foreign, the unknown, the threatening, the challenge to our self-righteousness. We don our Make America Great Again hats. But in a world where more and more of us are from the Outer Boroughs in one way or another, can the viewpoint hold? That is the question we are left with at the end.

I called the play a hall of mirrors, and it is, because in one way or another, every character is thoroughly coopted by the joint enterprise of selling this hokum, as is the ringside audience, whose participation is equally vital to the final product. When everyone is both deceiver and deceived, though, what moral responsibility can reasonably be assessed for an only nominally deceptive spectacle, and, if so, against whom? Where so much hard work is required to stage that spectacle, should we in the theatrical audience admire or be appalled merely because of the ugliness of the bigotries and shoddy thinking to which the spectacle caters, or should we still give credit to the workmanlike and even loving way the spectacle’s surface is curated? If we condemn it, are we being righteous critics or effete snobs? You can get dizzy thinking about these issues.

There will be no confusion at all, however, in assessing the vitality and interest of this show. In its four years in our midst, Cohesion has been remarkable for the scope and ambition of its programming, especially on what are evidently shoestring budgets. Almost every show, whether it entirely works or not, seems to bring us something we haven’t seen before. (Graphic novels brought to life! Romantic absurdism! Dadaistic storytelling! Shakespearean history, Appalachian style! Anorexia contests! All in a day’s work.)

This play is no exception. Presented mostly in an apparently realistic ring with apparently authentic wrestling moves (authentic inauthenticity, if you will), this is a drama whose physical setting is no more unconventional than its social setting or the questions it (sorry!) grapples with. And, while this play enjoyed considerable esteem in Chicago, where it originated in 2009, and Off-Broadway, where it appeared in 2010 (winning, among other things, the Lucille Lortel Outstanding Play award), and in numerous productions around the country, I had never heard of it, and I’ll bet most of Cohesion’s fans hadn’t either.

And this production does it all in style. Devoid of the questionable casting decisions that have weakened some recent Cohesion productions, in this show, where ethnicity matters, the representation is believable, and the performances are spot on. In particular, Christian Gonzalez as Mace seems to explore the full limits of his part, reflecting each ambivalence the play raises. (In his Nuyorican-ness, both less and more typical of the nation in this demographic era. Cynical about wrestling’s phoniness but exultant in its artistry. Pining for an elaborate entrance of his own but proud of his importance in the real work of the wrestling industry.) For all the fractured quality of his passions and his allegiances, Mace always comes across as a real, tortured person, not a mere cobbled-together narrative construct, as he might in the hands of a lesser actor. And the direction by Daniel Douek, lighting by Serafina Donahue, costumes by Helenmary Ball, and especially fight choreography by Jonathan Ezra Rubin, are all outstanding.

Only here through June 17, so hurry!

Copyright (c) Jack L. B. Gohn, except for production photo. Photo credit: Jaelyn Shae Photography.

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Children Will Listen

Jackie Burns in Wicked

Published in The Hopkins Review, New Series 11.2, Spring 2018

In recent Broadway forays, I have observed lobbies well-populated with excited children, mostly but not exclusively girls, typically dressed up a little, under the charge of parents and grandparents. It is interesting to consider the kind of show that draws this demographic.

Not Children’s Theater

Let me distinguish what I’m not speaking of here. Somewhat older children, tourists in the world of more adult theater, may come in self-organized packs or be brought by teachers, and might worry about being thought immature if they came to the shows under consideration.

Nor is this kind of show which goes under the label “children’s theater,” a repertoire filled with bowdlerized versions of adult shows, and/or shows written or adapted for juvenile performers as well as audiences. (Most grownups attend these only because their children require supervision or an audience.)

The shows I’m addressing now, however, are ones that adults might well attend without their kids, but which they enjoy experiencing en famille. In terms of what’s playing on Broadway as I write, this would certainly include the Disney musicals The Lion King and Aladdin, and Wicked and Anastasia.

Powerful Information

Until I read Changed for Good, Stacy Wood’s interesting feminist take on Broadway musicals and in particular Wicked, I had not seriously considered what it means to take a child to a show and share the experience—let alone what it means in today’s connected world where young people can then ruminate on the experience among one another. After reading that book, I realized there was a lot to think about.

When you walk into a theater with a child, whatever else occurs, you are telling the child that the world depicted in the play or musical encompasses possibilities, if not in literal reality, then at least in someone’s imagination. Continuing with Wicked for a moment, no child is going to be confused about whether Oz exists or ever did—but the child will know, without anyone explicitly saying it, that the human transactions depicted there (ostracism of unusual children, racism, hypocrisy, caste systems in the schoolyard, but also countervailing forces like the love between friends, the transcending of social barriers, and rebellion) are potentially real. Children will inevitably realize in consequence, if they had not done so before, that these things are up for discussion.

This can be powerful information for a child. My own parents, who threw me in the deep end of the theatrical pool before I was 10, made me aware that there were such things as madness and straitjackets (Strindberg’s The Father), alcoholism and self-defeating tendencies (Odets’s The Country Girl), and countries where priests were shot (Greene’s The Power and the Glory)—not to mention all the myriad things that one could witness in Shakespeare or could infer of the Victorian world by reverse-engineering the parody in Gilbert and Sullivan. It wasn’t that I understood all the context or depth of these works at eight or nine, but whatever I could make out of their contents was open for consideration and discussion. And I certainly did consider and often discussed.

As Stephen Sondheim emphasized in his key song in Into the Woods, “Children will listen.”

Mythoi of Spring and Summer

So what are we usually welcoming them to listen to? The key element, I think, is what Northrop Frye in Anatomy of Criticism called mythos, the reduction to story form of socially agreed insights into the processes of life. Mythos is seldom presented pure in any art form, but these days the shows to which children are taken tend to mash together several of them to what I would consider an unprecedented extent, precisely because we are increasingly torn about what we impart to our children.

Frye supplies the nomenclature for two of them prevalent in these shows, what he called “the mythos of spring” and “the mythos of summer.” The spring mythos, as Frye describes it, runs like this:

What normally happens is that a young man wants a young woman, that his desire is resisted by some opposition, usually paternal, and that near the end of the play some twist in the plot enables the hero to have his will. . . . At the beginning of the play the obstructing characters are in charge of the play’s society, and the audience recognizes that they are usurpers. At the end of the play the device in the plot that brings hero and heroine together causes a new society to crystallize around the hero. . . . The appearance of this new society is frequently signalized by some kind of party or festive ritual. . . . Weddings are most common.

The summer mythos, also known as the romance, Northrop sums up this way:

The complete form of the romance is clearly the successful quest, and such a completed form has three main stages: the stage of the perilous journey and the preliminary minor adventures; the crucial struggle, usually some kind of battle in which either the hero or his foe, or both, must die; and the exaltation of the hero.

Traditionally, either male or female characters could be the heroes of spring stories, but only males could be the heroes of summer ones. This is no longer a socially-approved division of labor, and today’s musicals consequently struggle over what gender message to embody when touching on this sort of material.

The taxonomy of another pair of mythoi, intertwined with the spring and summer ones but distinct from them, owes more to psychology than to literary theory.

Mythoi of Separation and Maturity

One mythos, I would contend, is separation anxiety, too important to be considered a mere plot element. The encounter with that fear, and the process of calibrating the closeness but also the distance one should maintain with parents and community, tends to spark the extremely fraught encounters with parents, step-parents, and substitute parents through which the heroes of these shows must often go. Bruno Bettelheim’s influential if now somewhat discredited book, The Uses of Enchantment, brought Freudian concepts to bear on the world of fairy tales. (Fairy tale being such a predominant component of so much of the theater under consideration, it is hardly surprising that mythoi from fairy tale literature loom large there.) I would resist some of the hoary Freudian categories in which Bettelheim frames his analysis of these stories, but his attention to separation anxiety is spot on. And I have no hesitation in pronouncing the process of encountering it a mythos.

It is of course quite common in drama for a character to develop knowledge, skills, and insight, but such development is not usually the heart of adult drama; rather, the knowledge, skills, and insight that come to the hero in such shows do so as incidents or consequences of the heroes’ participation in deeper and more elemental transactions. In the specialized kind of show under consideration, on the other hand, the growth of insight may be the fundamental activity, to which everything else is secondary. Call this mythos Bildungsroman.

When you recognize spring, summer, separation anxiety, and Bildungsroman, you have, I would contend, the keys to what is being imparted to children in these shows.

Aladdin: Discomfort on the Other Foot

Aladdin’s plot places it within the mythoi of spring and summer. But at the outset it should be acknowledged there is much to its appeal that has little to do with a plot. A major reason to attend is the sheer verbal dexterity of the script, and in particular the delivery of the same by the Genie, James Monroe Iglehart being a worthy, Cab Calloway-esque successor to Robin Williams in the movie on which the show is based. The Genie provides what amounts to a running standup act full of topical humor, terrible puns, and shameless musical quotes from earlier Disney musicals. This is topped off with copious quantities of slapstick and spectacle from the Genie and everyone else in the large cast. Because neither that dexterity, that slapstick, nor that spectacle is my subject here, I shall simply acknowledge them, and say further that one could be unmoved by the mythos and have a wonderful time at this show nonetheless—and pass on. But we are on the quest for mythos.

It might be argued that Aladdin is a spring story, since it certainly centers on the courtship of a young man and a woman, and their union at the end reconstitutes the society of the mythical Arabian land of Agrabah where the show is set.

But if Aladdin is a love-and-marriage story, it is also a romance as Frye uses the term, since the marriage is, from the perspective of the hero, the only possible route to the object of his quest, status and respectability. Of course the eventual marriage is also based on love, but there is no denying the self-aggrandizing nature of Aladdin’s quest. He is introduced to us as a street rat, surviving by shoplifting, his amorality qualified by his stealing only what he “can’t afford,” a qualification itself immediately qualified by the admission “and that’s everything!” He is an orphan, without parents (though he recalls his mother), and he yearns to make these imagined parents “proud of your boy,” a yearning eventually transmogrified into a yearning for the regard of his inamorata, Princess Jasmine, as well as that of his companion the Genie, when the reprise of the song Proud of Your Boy becomes about them. Up to that point, however, Aladdin has been using the Genie’s powers to achieve a faux royalty, parading immense, Genie-conjured wealth and the imposture of a Prince Ali as a way to impress her and her father the Sultan. And indeed he does not deal with the truth of the matter until after he is involuntarily exposed. Then and only then does Aladdin address the flaws in his integrity. And even then, his objective largely remains marriage, which by no coincidence will lead to his becoming the sultan in due course.

This is likely to be problematical for all those adults sitting in the theater, whose own aspirations for their offspring in the adjacent seats will doubtless include some status, but will probably be weighted a lot more toward integrity. To the parents, given the reluctance in the hero’s embrace of character and its lack of depth, Aladdin will therefore probably remain a lovable scoundrel. What he may be to the kids is not so clear.

Might the female lead, Jasmine, ameliorate that problem? Alas, she comes equipped with one of her own, the problem Stacy Wood points to: what achievements are the female characters modeling? In traditional musicals of the time of Rodgers and Hammerstein, as the world knows and as Wood documents, younger female characters’ quests were heterosexual love and marriage; that is, in Frye’s terminology, spring and summer fused. Where happy union with a man was not the objective, it bespoke, at least potentially, something seriously wrong with the woman’s personality. (Think Mama Rose in Gypsy.) Men, meanwhile, got to have their own non-marital quests.

But feminism has altered the perspectives of the generation who are now the parents and grandparents in the audience. Now the discomfort is, so to speak, on the other foot. The generation that buys today’s tickets is, by and large, not opposed to love and marriage. But at the same time it is not desirous of seeing its daughters subsumed into and consumed by those institutions, and wishes young women to have their quests parallel to its sons’. The Disney Company understands this; the movies Mulan, Frozen, and Brave certainly cater to this perspective. But while a Frozen musical is headed for Broadway at this writing, it is not there yet. And in Aladdin the princess’s quest fundamentally remains marriage. Her independence and spunk are organized around this quest; she demonstrates her independence by refusing to be dictated to by her father in the choice of a spouse, not by, say, becoming the mistress of her own lamp and genie. And Aladdin wins her heart with razzle-dazzle, fraudulently presented at that, when he takes her on a magic carpet ride as if it were his own magic carpet rather than the Genie’s.

Anastasia and Parental Esteem

Anya, the heroine of Anastasia, has a newer-style female quest: to be recognized as the long-lost and supposedly deceased tsarina Anastasia Romanova. The musical in which she appears is stated in the program to be “inspired by the Twentieth Century Fox motion pictures,” to wit, the 1956 live-action film with Ingrid Bergman and Yul Brynner, and the 1997 animated Disney-style film musical with some songs that made it into the musical. One can easily take this attribution of influence too far. The plot-points and the characterizations differ quite a lot between either movie and the stage musical, yet on one crucial point all three works agree: Anya actually is Anastasia. We in the audience may well know that the remains of the historical Anastasia have been found under circumstances that conclusively negate her survival much past the date of the assassination of the rest of her family. But within the realm of the musical, she is what she purports to be. That means that, diametrically opposite to Aladdin, she is pressing a bona fide claim to status.

Despite this difference, the mythical materials in the two shows converge a bit.

Some background for this claim. In all three renderings of the Anastasia story, the pretender (albeit one who is actually the real item, as pretenders sometimes are) is on the verge of acceptance into the status that was the object of her quest—and turns aside from that long-sought acceptance to pursue a private life as the lover and presumably wife of a con man who had assisted her under the mistaken belief she was a fraud.

There are two ways of taking this. One could view it as a self-blunting of a woman’s quest for status and wealth, turning towards the conventional happy ending for a female character: marriage and domesticity—a betrayal of feminist hopes for portrayals of a heroine willing to seize the kind of brass ring formerly reserved for male heroes. Alternatively, one could view it as a morally sensible rejection of worldly things for more important ones. And significantly, in each case the former con man she wanders into the sunset with has also rejected these vain things first, before Anya does. I suspect that the creators of the musical (book by Terrence McNally, music by Stephen Flaherty, lyrics by Lynn Ahrens, direction by Darko Tresnjak) hope we view it in the second light.

And maybe we should. The impediment is, the musical positively drips with glamorization of the life Anya ends up rejecting. It is hard to overstate the effect of the lavish staging which stunningly conveys the dreamlike glitter of the ancien regime in St. Petersburg as seen through a child’s eyes, and then goes even further with the glamor of 1920s Paris. For instance, there is the moment Anya comes over a rise and sees Paris, projected on the rear scrim with near-photographic realism with lights ablaze, a visual quote from the animated film that just about takes the spectator’s breath away. And while Anya’s social target, the circle of White Russian aristocrats huddling together in Paris, is clearly shown as being a little pretentious and a little too unwilling to accept the reality that Russia is permanently outside their grasp, even they are given an opportunity to shine, in a scene punctuated by energetic folk dancing and more glittery clothes.

The things that might serve as dramatic justification for Anya’s rejection of the world of moneyed aristocratic exile—the blindness that six centuries of privilege enabled within the Romanovs and the Russian aristocracy, or the well-documented shortcomings in the Tsar himself, like virulent anti-Semitism and a dotty adherence to the doctrine of rule by divine right—are not presented. Instead, we have the magnificent, ballroom-centered vanities. Even the interesting character of Gleb, the Red Army’s assassin who seems to be a true believer in the Revolution and makes it attractive, to a point, fails to make much of a dent in the overall picture in which the Revolution is bad and the world of the aristocracy is good.

So there is no denying that the dramatic arc of Anya’s story, which seems to be taking her to princess-dom, instead settles at the last moment for making her a happy wife, the mythos of spring charging up from behind to edge out the mythos of summer. This would be the contrapositive of Aladdin’s story, which does end with him (a true fraud) becoming a prince, though that arrivisme is tempered with a dollop of true love.

There is another mythos at work here, however. Anastasia is a separation anxiety story par excellence. In both the animated movie and the musical, we see not one but two difficult separations from parental figures: the first and surprisingly more consequential being from the grandmother, the Dowager Empress, who promises a reunion in Paris, and the second the assassination of the family, though that event is more suggested than shown. With the parents gone, the Dowager Empress is the only parent left—and her acceptance and protection means everything to memory-impaired Anya, raised in an orphanage and working as a street sweeper. It means an identity, and memories, and love—and money too. And the entire action, up until nearly the final scene, is structured around a scheme to win that acceptance against the staunch resistance of the Dowager Empress herself. Winning a parent’s esteem can sometimes be terribly hard, a juvenile struggle Anastasia plays excruciatingly well. And, by no accident at all, the exact dramatic climax of the show is the moment the Empress’s icy demeanor melts after Anya sings a song whose significance only Anastasia would know, and the Empress responds, simply: “Anastasia.” Their embrace seals that moment.

The reunion with her grandmother is the real object of Anya’s quest. And, speaking in terms of the Bildungsroman, Anya has integrated her psyche, reclaimed her memories, and firmed up her moral world-view, as have her partners in would-be crime, the con men Dmitry and Vlad. And there is more: she faces down Gleb and his pistol; her sheer moral force (and Gleb’s waning self-assurance, somewhat like Javert’s at the end) saves her. Given all these achievements, Anya’s rejection of royal status and wealth cannot reasonably be seen as such a capitulation to theatrical conventionality, after all. They are the reasonable choices of a mature and fulfilled woman.

Outgrowing One’s Teenage Friends: The Lion King

Bildungsroman is the heart of The Lion King, the tale of yet another monarchical pretender on a quest to reclaim a throne that is rightfully his. The rightfulness—and much else—is established by perhaps the greatest opening number in the history of musicals, The Circle of Life, simultaneously a dazzling display of animal puppetry, a stirring blend of South African choral music and Western balladry, a philosophical statement, and an iconic enactment of the young hero’s consecration to leadership and of the community’s commitment to nurturing him. Simba, the princeling lion cub, the stand-in for every child in the audience, is told that, though he is still small, great things await, that there are adults standing around who acknowledge those things, and that it is right, naturally ordained, that the child will attain them, eventually replacing his or her parents in the process—because that is the way of the Circle. In fact, not just the parents but all the deceased ancestors, are extended parts of that community (They Live In You).

Of course, the development of every child is bound to be rocky at times, and every child will have his or her jejeune moments; that is the point of the Michael Jackson-style number, Simba’s first musical outing, I Just Can’t Wait To Be King. He views the prospect of kingship as a delightful exercise of ego assertion, without any understanding yet of the more difficult demands monarchy will make.

I’m gonna be the mane event

Like no king was before

I’m brushing up on looking down

I’m working on my ROAR!

This is delivered in counterpoint with steady interpolations of censorious commentary by Simba’s father’s hornbill servant Zasu.

If this is where the monarchy is headed

Count me out!

Out of service, out of Africa

I wouldn’t hang about

This child is getting wildly out of wing

Naturally, Simba’s lack of judgment lands him in serious trouble. First, his penchant for exploring takes him into the territory of hyenas, and his tactlessness provokes a potentially deadly situation with them, from which his father must rescue him. Then he makes the mistake of trusting his evil uncle Scar. To Simba’s shame his father this time dies defending him. Then, Simba takes Scar’s advice to flee his ignominy, leaving the throne open for Scar to usurp.

The second act traces Simba’s process of maturing and readying himself for true kingship. A way station is his coming under the unlikely protection of Timon, a meerkat, and Pumbaa, a warthog, roughly analogous to a youngster’s teenaged friends, who teach him the philosophy of Hakuna Matata (no worries), a kind of anesthetization which helps Simba cope for a time with the traumas we have seen him undergo, but which will not properly prepare him for the things he must face to reach full development or succeed in his quest.

This of course is also a separation anxiety story, so Simba must also deal with the loss of his father, accomplished in a reprise of They Live in You focused now on his father in particular. There is a tradeoff in Simba’s recognizing that he is now, in effect, his father; on the one hand, it forces him to face an irredeemable diminution, but on the other it connects him to the power in his heritage. Then Nala, Simba’s childhood friend and love interest, confronts him on the limits of Hakuna Matata, forcing him to accept the pain from which he has been running.

This sets up an ending in which Simba returns and rescues the land from Scar, becomes the rightful king, and marries Nala, a trifecta of accomplishments that shows us that he has grown and developed. He has become what the children in the audience will hopefully want to be.

The Potency of Wicked

One more show, Wicked, remains to discuss, and it is the outlier in this group, in many ways. Let me start with the quality that most intrigues Stacy Wood: what she takes to be its “queerness.” I take issue with the terminology, because the show is not about homosexuality nor about non-gender-conforming characters, unless one views strong friendships and alliances between female characters as themselves non-gender-conforming (I do not). Wood is correct that the corpus of musicals in which the central story concerns a strong affinity between two women is indeed thin. Wood is also correct that the presentation of the development of the relationship, and the sequencing of the songs surrounding it, echo the way heterosexual romances have traditionally been presented in musicals. But all this nonconformity has to do with the conventions of musicals, not those of gender or sexuality. And in the world of this musical, the character of Fiero, a heterosexual love interest for both leads, comes between them for a time. His character may be secondary, but his role is neither perfunctory nor pro forma.

Moreover, the twin heroines, Elphaba (who will become the Wicked Witch of the West) and Glinda, are engaged in quests which resemble those of the heroes we have been considering. Both, starting out as schoolgirls, are striving for positions of power in Oz—not perhaps the paramount power which comes from the title of monarch, the Wizard being the closest thing to a ruler—but great power. For Elphaba, the quest is multiple. She wants to “be with the Wizard,” which is incidentally also a quest to be reunited with her actual father (though she has no idea he is her father, and he does not learn of it until late in the action). She seeks the ability to work magic. And she seeks simple acceptance, since her green skin sets her apart from her peers. She will attain wizardry, but the acceptance she seeks will elude her, though it does come for her disabled and wheelchair-bound younger sister, initially marginalized. Glinda at first pursues a softer form of power, the power that popular and good-looking girls have in their peer group. But with time she seeks, and achieves, the Wizard’s power, with the explicit aim of doing good with it. At the end she is the ruler of Oz, though secretly broken-hearted by the loss of Elphaba’s company.

From these summaries, it is clear that they are on different trajectories. One of the great lessons of the show is that though this is sad, because it will ultimately drive their life courses so far apart they will not be able to maintain contact, the survival of their unity remains the deeper reality for them both. And they will have achieved something concrete: the uprooting of the Wizard’s regime, under whose auspices genocide against speaking animals turns out to have been conducted. And Glinda, who started out as mostly a pretty face, ends up a woman of substance, not unacquainted with grief, vested with political powers, while Elphaba continues a wild original course that the young audience-member who witnesses the exuberant and high-flying spectacle of her flight in the first-act closer “Defying Gravity” can only imagine.

This turns out to be quite potent stuff for the young women who flock to the show year after year. Wood’s study includes a chapter largely concerned with the fan websites devoted to the show in its earlier years (it came to Broadway in 2003). The sites she cites are now apparently shuttered, but in her description it seems that the essence of the show’s appeal to the website-posting audience was what she speaks of as the performance of diva-dom, the assertion by young women of the right to an audience’s attention and admiration, deemed revolutionary and revelatory. That assertion, enacted and sung, partakes of each of the mythoi considered here except that of spring.

Whatever the name for it, when parents take their youngsters to shows such as these on today’s Broadway, the mix of images and messages the children will be exposed to will be different from what might have prevailed in earlier times. As always, children are learning about what it takes to grow and become fully developed, and as is frequently the case, that struggle will be framed in terms of succession to a monarchy of some sort. But today, there is a definite movement, for female characters especially, away from the mythos of spring and onward, in a greater spirit of gender egalitarianism, to quests, Bildungsromans, and assumptions of adult distance vis-a-vis one’s elders. It does not hurt, either, that these tales are embodied in some unusually splendid shows which tend to stick around long enough that they can entertain more than one generation for at least a generation.

This, in sum, is what I take to be much of the explanation for those excited young people in Broadway theater lobbies, lucky enough to have grownups with the means to take them there. Whether these youngsters have come for the laughs, the spectacle, or the myths, by the time they are finished, they will have been exposed to all of them.

And, as we know, children will listen.

Copyright (c) Jack L. B. Gohn, except for production photo. Photo credit: Joan Marcus. Source: https://www.broadway.com/photos/gallery/372/show-photos-wicked/93091/

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