There’s nothing like a good performance that sends you home with a glow of satisfaction. I’m thinking about plays here, but the same can be said of musical performances, that either tickle your funny bone or activate your tear ducts or – even better – both.
That was the case on a recent night for Eureka Day, a play about a progressive school whose sense of community is shreddedby a lack of consensus on vaccination policies. It was painfully funny in ways that cut close to the bone, while also raising its characters above the level of parody.
On the way home my mind was buzzing with memories of past theater experiences at so many different stages of my life and in so many different places I’ve landed along the way. The story begins in the sixth grade at my Brooklyn elementary school where our visionary music teacher decided we were up to staging a full performance of Gilbert and Sullivan’s H.M.S Pinafore. I vaguely remember trying out for one of the “real” parts, but my distinct lack of musical talent relegated me to the nameless crew. Nonetheless, the idea of performing in that auditorium where, dressed in my boy scout uniform, I carried the flag at our weekly assemblies, was like dreaming the proverbial impossible dream. I can still reel off the lyrics for most of the show’s songs, no small feat, if you recall how complex G&S’s words are.
But my future in the theater was in the audience, not onstage. My lack of talent, combined with an adolescent desire for invisibility, dictated that fate. My first experience with “real” theater was a huge leap beyond PS. 189’s stage. In my junior year of college, I was sitting in the balcony of a Broadway theater watching the original Broadway production of The Diary of Anne Frank. It was in the days before actors were miked, so the voices and gestures were big, demanding attention. What was happening onstage was, at once, divorced from reality, but truer than anything in real life. I was obsessed with the Holocaust, so the content of what was unfolding reinforced the magical impact of the performance. Rosellen remembers from her early viewing experiences the heightened sounds of the actors’ feet as they moved across the stage and I share that memory as well. If you’ve ever sat close to the floor of a professional or college basketball game, the squeaking sound of the players’ feet scraping across the court has that same heightened quality.
In my second year of graduate school, a friend introduced me to Rosellen. We had several phone conversations before I, unschooled in the logistics of dating, invited her to see a play with me. Our conversations had been filled with literary talk– I knew that she was a writer – so I assumed that the idea of a play would appeal to her. How I chose this particular play I don’t recall. It was two one-act plays by Edward Albee performed in a tiny space in downtown Boston, so spartan that it didn’t even have a bathroom. We were both desperate at intermission; the house manager suggested a bar next door. We were both giddy about these strange circumstances, which somehow created a bond between us right from the start. The play opened my eyes to a very different kind of theater from the hyper-realistic staging of Anne Frank.
Our years in Mississippi brought us in contact with a kind of theater that was light years from Broadway and Boston. The Free Southern Theater, an outgrowth of the ferment of Movement activity in the early 60s, was devoted to bringing theater to rural Black audiences who had never experienced it. The unlikely repertoire included works by diverse authors from Garcia Lorca to Beckett. The richness of Black theater material was not yet available to artists and audiences. The curious viewers unschooled in the conventions of theatergoing drew on their experience with the call-and-response style of Black church services, so the crowdshouted their outrage or delight right back at the actors. The audience’s immediate and vociferous responses. There was no need to wait for the reviews in the next day’s edition of the New York Times.
When we returned to New York after our three years in Mississippi we were greeted by weekly issues of The Village Voice, bursting with ads for scores of theaters large and small, from The Brooklyn Academy of Music’s energetic and acrobatic rendition of Midsummer Night’s Dream to the exciting productions of the Negro Ensemble Company, born in 1967, just before our arrival and still going strong today. We were inhaling as many plays as we could, but our pace finally slowed as we came to realize that there was nothing more depressing than attending a bad play. It’s uncomfortable to be there in the same room with earnest performers who were not succeeding, often through no fault of their own. They just couldn’t elevate the material they were assigned and in deference to that discomfort, we stopped attending live theatre for a while.
New Hampshire brought us two different theater worlds. There was summer theater by The Peterborough Players, where actors from New York, Boston and elsewhere camped for a few months every year to deliver what was mostly a predictable repertoire from Our Town to Noel Coward, generally low risk fare. In contrast, our children couldn’t wait for the start of the season at Andy’s Summer Playhouse, where the work was fresh and creative thanks to Dan Hurlin, an award-winning director, who grew up in New Hampshire but now lived in Greenwich Village. His innovative productions drew a loyal audience from across the Monadnock region.
It was here that I returned to the stage for the first – and last – time since H.M.S Pinafore. One year Dan scheduled an imaginative adaptation of the children’s classic The Phantom Tollbooth. The casting called for only one adult role, that of Dr. Cacophonous A. Discord. Since I often hung around after dropping the kids off, I was drafted. I will confess that among these young people with brains like sponges, I was the only member of the cast who struggled to memorize my lines. In the actual performances, I hung on by my nails and vowed to return permanently to the audience.
Andy’s was the setting for other memorable theatrical experiences for our family. Rosellen and a colleague produced a script and music for their adaptation of The Secret Garden long before Broadway mounted a popular version of the show.For a novelist who works in isolation, the experience of collaborating with a creative team was intoxicating. Andy’s was also the setting for Adina’s first writing project. One snowy day, stuck at home in front of the woodstove, she adapted Natalie Babbit’s classic Tuck Everlasting, one of my all-time favorite books, from which Andy’s produced a staged reading. What better way to launch a writing career?
I have a lot more to report about our years in Houston and Chicago, which I think I’ll save for Part 2 next week, since this is running longer than my readers’ patience. I just want to underscore here the way theater in its many forms has been a throughline in all the many twists and turns our lives have taken. I’m writing this thank you note to all the writers, directors and actors who have added, and continue to add, so much spice to our lives.
