A Tale for Many Summers...

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.

Thanks, Flatwater Shakespeare of Lincoln, Nebraska and Shakespeare FestivalSt. Louis. There are many people in both of these places and around the world doing work that brings us together and gives the past a way to get into the future.

My gratitude and love to you.