The Artist as Impresario

For some reason one morning, I thought of my beloved David’s Shushy-Cats, an imaginary troupe of young performers he modeled somewhat after the wholesome Young Americans but without the nonprofit educational slant. In a long-running soap opera of ad-libbed episodes, his story unrolled between the two of us over the years – never publicly or even with friends, just between us. If only those episodes had been recorded! I don’t even remember the first, unexpected “Opening Night,” but the Shushy-Cats put on stage shows at an Up North resort, much like Boyne Mountain, musical reviews with choreography (their signature number was “Hooray for Youth”), even as years went by and many of the cast became long in the tooth. (Isn’t that a wonderful phrase? Think horses.) Once the Shushy-cats came into our life, they never went away. We might be riding in the car or sitting over coffee somewhere or lying in bed of an evening – I never knew when another episode might come my way or what outlandish schemes and revelations it would entail.

 

Whenever I overheard the Artist leaving messages on a friend’s answering machine, I was always amazed that he sounded so conversational, as if he were really talking to another person. It was hard to realize he was only recording. Similarly, when he launched into a tale of the Shushy-Cats, making it all up as he went along, he managed to make those stories sound like real life. “I’ve got an idea for a new number,” he might begin, just as he might start to tell me he had a new idea for rearranging his art gallery, and I could see in my mind the "new number" as he described the staging and named the roles each key performer would fill. Because the cast members all had names and personalities, like the members of the old Micky Mouse Club, personalities built up over months and eventually years of unscheduled, impromptu installments. Sometimes I jumped in to make an observation or protest that the stage number he had in mind was doomed from the start. “You have to consider your audience,” I would remind him, or “How are all those costume changes going to be done so fast? You’re asking a lot of the kids.” 

 

Because he always referred to them as “the kids.” The company had its ups and down, of course, and times only seemed to get harder and harder as time went by. Brian had back pain and trouble lifting girl dancers over his head. The girls – I should say “girls,” maybe – had complaints about their costumes, and it was true that they didn’t look as slim and lively in their cheerleader skirts as they had years before. Younger audiences expected different kinds of entertainment, too: more special lighting effects, a faster pace, sexier moves. The Shushy-cats were “old school,” good, clean family entertainment.

 

Not that “the kids” were angels. Oh, far from it! All believed, in principle, the adage, “There are no small parts, only small actors,” but naturally there were rivalries and jealousies, and one female cast member in particular was never happy if not the star. That was Brie – or Bree – we never wrote down anything, so I never thought about how it might be spelled. Brie (or Bree) could be counted on to complicate every situation, personal or professional, in which she played a part. She even followed us out West, settling in a New Mexico town with a little boy she tried to convince people the impresario had fathered! Can you imagine that? We could! We knew that little vixen Brie! There was nothing you could put past her!

 

Once at a party -- in real life-- a young man commented to me, “Now that we’re living together, it seems we don’t have as much to talk about, because we already know everything the other has been doing.” I told him, “Just make stuff up! That’s what David does,” and I told him about the Shushy-cats. He was delighted and enthralled. I wonder if that young couple ever developed an imaginary life to live alongside their real one.

 

After a while the Shushy-cats disbanded, gone their separate ways, but the story continued, and the impresario couldn’t give up the dream of a reunion. Onstage, of course. It seemed unrealistic to me. They had families now and lived all over the country. How could they afford the time to travel back to Michigan to put on a show together? And would anyone come to see it? 

 

Ah, but now, wouldn’t I give anything to have the whole gang together again, even that little trouble-maker, Brie? I miss them all. 

Look Out Above For What's Coming Down!

When I was in high school, about 14 or 15 years old, I went on my first date that was not a double date with some boy’s father or mother doing the driving, and the evening should have been memorable for that reason. The boy who asked me out had his driver’s license and picked me up at home, all by himself, after my parents gave permission because the boy and his family were members of the church we attended. Wouldn’t you think I would remember what I wore and what kind of car the boy drove, if we went out for ice cream after the main event and, if so, where? But I don’t recall any of that, because the main event was a stage play and that evening the first time I ever saw live actors on a stage. I I was powerfully stage-struck!

“The Curious Savage” is a gentle comedy with a quiet message and a touching conclusion. Other inmates of the cozy insane asylum where the main character is committed for the period covered by the play cannot tell her in so many words that they love her, but each of them has some indirect means of expression, and she understands them all. I still remember that she is told by one of them, in the last scene, to carry an umbrella, in case of rain. Hardly King Lear, but it moved me deeply.

The performers were high school students, mostly juniors and seniors. This was not a professional production, by any means. Nevertheless, as the final curtain fell, after the cast took their bows, I sat transfixed, unwilling to acknowledge that the magic spell had come to a close.

Inspired, I soon began to try out for one-act plays and to discover the intoxicating world of backstage. The focus of that monumental, hundred-year-old, three-story, limestone-block castle of a school, two or three blocks long, a school with tall Gothic doors and inner stairways of solid marble -- the focus for me became the auditorium with its heavy proscenium curtain, orchestra pit, onstage trap door in the floor and soaring space above for flying rigs. The smallest bit part sufficed to fuel my dreams or, failing that, a place on the props crew.

My theatre love persisted, and in my senior year our cast of “El Camino Real” (I played the old gypsy, mother of Esmeralda) climbed successive levels of competition to first place in the state of Illinois. Heady stuff! I then began a checkered undergraduate career -- three schools, three or four successive majors before graduation 20 years later -- in speech and theatre at the University of Illinois. “Read plays!” urged professors of acting classes. Fine! I would read plays! No one needed to twist my arm to make that happen! There were also technical classes, such as costume design, and challenging beginning work in directing. All the world may be a stage, but it’s just as true that the stage itself, wherever it is, is its own world, with its own language, traditions, and a history going back at least to ancient Greece. And I loved every aspect of it.

I’m getting to my point, truly I am. If I were younger, I would have gotten to it sooner, but at my age memories take up more and more of my conscious mental life.

Look up the phrase deus ex machina, if it is unfamiliar to you. The idea dates back to those early Greek and Roman dramatists and had originally a material reference. Even that long ago, you see, staging (think “production values”) was sometimes elaborate and complex. For example, marvelous machinery could bring a “god” down, unexpectedly, from on high, to thrill an audience and resolve dramatic action. Like all special effects, however, after a while it was no longer surprising and began to be seen instead as rather a cheap trick. Was the playwright unable to wrap up his plot no other way? Too bad!

As audiences, along with critics,  became more and more sophisticated, the term deus ex machina came to be more generally applied, as it is today, to any last-minute introduction of a new, often unconvincing character or development brought in near a story’s end to bring an otherwise hopeless mess to a tidy conclusion. Moderns use the phrase in literature discussions as well as in drama, and film criticism in our household is particularly scathing when we feel a scriptwriter or director has resorted to a deus ex machina resolution.

I approach my point ever more closely.

The now-familiar insomnia, waking not from but into a nightmare, recognizing inevitability but being unable to believe completely in what is clearly coming down the tracks – the overwhelming experience of the last two months and more – waking, that is, into a new world that has become frighteningly unreal, I thought in the dark of one recent morning of the deus ex machina, and my first thought was, isn’t that just what we need? There is no other way out, is there? We humans have made a horrid, irresolvable mess on our world stage, and no playwright on earth, no team of the wisest of world leaders can possible sort us out at this late stage. Not in my lifetime, surely.

Quickly, however, a second thought followed: wasn’t it precisely the irresponsible longing for outside rescue . . . combined with the emergence of someone claiming to possess the godlike powers of a world rescuer . . . combined with a fearful audience desperately willing to believe, desperately longing . . . that brought us to this state?

No, we should not wish for it, and we should not allow the cheap trick to be put over on us. There is no way around this mess other than through it, and through it we must slog, one foot in front of the other.

Do you need a weatherman to tell you there will be storms ahead? Take an umbrella. Someone else is sure to need it if you don’t.