2 things before I
get started:
1) I am in no way a
professional write-about-theater-er, or attempting in any way to
offer meaningful critique of works of art to which I have borne
witness. This is simply earnestness as I do it.
2) Yes, I will be
writing more about all of this in a different form and with a
typewriter. If you are someone who knows that actual first line of
the piece, worry not – this is basically the abstract.
It is summer.
The world has remembered green and now reaches for fireflies like they are stars over growing things.
There are no lights
to go down, because the lights are the sun, and it will do as it
pleases.
The crowd barely
hushes because they are not crowded or looking for assigned seats or trying to
open candy before the show starts.
There is the smell
of bug spray and sunblock.
Probably there are
ducks.
With any luck, when
the wind picks up, it lifts the action of the play you and your
beloveds are watching to chaotic heights of understanding. When the
sun sets, it may lend a difficult glow to the stage where narrative
improbability gives way to humanity and vicissitude.
Tomorrow evening in
St. Louis, Missouri, I will be outside watching a play written by
Shakespeare performed on a stage with no roof but the sky, sitting
with friends and slowly being unaware of the passage of time. Also I
will probably laugh til it hurts, feel anger, frustration, awe, and
wonder. I will walk away with #TeamPaulina as hearts in my eyes and
marvel, as one does, at how
much fun it is to be alive.
Ten years ago, in
Lincoln, Nebraska, I sat outside surrounded by friends and watched
The Taming of the Shrew. It
is a difficult play, and here is not where there is room to unpack
all of that, but it took me so far out of myself that I didn’t even
recognize my friend on stage or wonder at my joyful tears during that
final, terrible, speech. It gave me another way to think
about my world and reminded me to be grateful for the people in it.
Last week, the
setting and state were different and the play is
The Winter’s
Tale which also deals in men and
their inability to be anything but unreasonable. This time it is the
King who ends up isolated. He does it to himself, though many people
try to talk him out of it. He
is not actually alone, of course, which this production does an
excellent job of portraying.
The Winter’sTale is a kind of difficult
play. There’s a bear, a statue, a ridiculous temper tantrum that
has horrifying consequences, and an ending that is both amazing and
also, well, let’s allow as how this production has improved things.
In my mind.
(Full
disclosure, though, the folks who put this on are going to have to
fuck up pretty royally for me not to see their summer offerings at
least twice every year. I have a list, don’t get me wrong, but, you
know, it’s not nitpicky.)
This act of sitting with friends and food and Shakespeare is one that has been a constant in my relatively tumultuous life for the last decade. It is from that place, that blanket or set of chairs or bookstore table or living room couch that my best decisions are made, and where my heart gets full.
These
solitary characters, the ones we follow in their grief or happiness
or plotting or misery, sometimes they are not the ones I see so well.
They are not the ones I recognize, the ones I have been, or ever will
be.
Usually.
Sometimes they are the abused woman living with people
who dismiss her and gaslight her and she responds with barriers and
sharpness and steel. Sometimes they are a man who sees nothing and
makes it something and becomes a monster because of it. I know these
people very very well, though one is a woman I no longer have to be
and the other is a man who has no room in my life anymore.
Forgive
me if I start to cry, but there is nothing small or insignificant
about the understanding that the people on those blankets, in those
chairs and sharing those couches are the network: the physical nets
that keep us all going together. I would not be who I am without
that. I grew up watching my parents maintain their long-distance
friendships with letters and cards and visits. Their friends are
family to me. Now, every summer brings that moment that reminds me to
look around and reach out to all of the people who are family and
have been
in the glen or
in the Stables for more than ten years.
The
years are lines in a poem, each one adding to the possibilities of
the ones that came before. Tomorrow I will watch this production for
the third time. I have no doubt that I will watch it at least once
more besides that. One time I will go by myself, eat too little, buy
a mug, and take my sweet time on the night ride home.
Not
this time, though. This time I get, again, to hear the laughter of
many of my loved ones and add this time to the story that keeps us
all afloat and living.
My
gratitude and love to you.
