Explanation (NOT POLITICAL!) For My Friend

Or, Still Stage-Struck After All These Years

Last night I texted a friend out West that I am currently obsessed with “The Phantom of the Opera” (which I also mentioned in my recent “Books in Northport” post). She texted back that she never saw the show, doesn’t know the story line or setting, and is not crazy in general about drama, though she did acknowledge that the music and costumes and set in the link I sent her (“The Music of the Night”) were beautiful. 

 

My friend and the rest of you, I have never seen the show, either! I’ve never seen a performance of anything in the old Opera in Paris (but I have been inside the front doors to see the staircase and have seen photo images and one filmed performance from the more modern Opera de la Bastille; the opera part of the post comes after the livestock auction part). Until I began listening to the musical numbers in order, however, I had no more of the story line than you! And yes, opera is dramatic.

 

I didn’t care at all for opera when I was young, though my parents both loved it and had many long-playing vinyl 78rpm recordings of opera. But I loved music. And the stage—I fell in love with the stage at age 14 when (on the first date I had with the boy driving rather than one of his his parents) I saw my first live production. The play, not a musical, was “The Curious Savage,” with high school students playing the parts, and when the final curtain came down I did not want to leave my seat. I was stage-struck!

 

Luckily, I played violin in the high school orchestra, so for four years it was my good fortune to be in the pit orchestra for every rehearsal and every performance of each year's high school “operetta,” as we called it. The first, my freshman year, was “Show Boat.” Well before the last performance was over, I knew all the lines and lyrics by heart, and of course I never wanted that show to be over! The student who sang Paul Robeson’s “Ol’ Man River” was, for me, the star, and it is his performance I remember best, but the entire production was incredibly thrilling—and I was a part of it! A very modest, practically invisible part, but I have never forgotten it, and it still gives me shivers. 

 

There were other operettas and other stage plays, and in some of the plays I was onstage, most notably as the old gypsy woman in “Camino Real,” by Tennessee Williams, a production our high school took up through various contest levels, competing with other high school thespians, eventually to win first in state. That did it! I dreamed of New York and studying theatre and going on the live stage. But sic transit all that, and so I’ll cut ahead in time here….

 

(Opera still had not grabbed me.)

 

I sang blues in a club for a while and, in a different time period, earlier, studied voice with a private teacher, but time was slipping away, and I was studying philosophy and at the same time turning to quieter, more pastoral dreams. Then one day, making my bed out in an old farmhouse in Barry County, listening to the radio, I was stopped in my tracks and had to sit down to listen to the famous duet from “The Pearl Fishers.” Really! That was opera? Maybe I was ready to appreciate it.

 

So there are the pieces: stage-struck at age 14, four years in the pit orchestra, a role in my senior year in a play that went right to the top in our state competition, singing in a nightclub in Kalamazoo, hearing a duet that captured my heart, and finally seeing a Paris production on film, on a big screen, in Willcox, Arizona. No, there was more than that: there was a family holiday trip to Chicago for the stage version of “Camelot,” a school trip for “Oliver!” There was also our family participation in church choir, and there were my mother and sisters and I singing while we did dishes and cleaned up the kitchen after dinner. You see the influences. I could go on and add more. In general, though, music and stage, stage and music. 

 

Neither music nor the stage became my life after a certain point, but our past never completely vanishes, and I hope my heart is never so cold, soul never so dead that I do not thrill to passionate and dramatic songs from the best of my country’s composers and lyricists. Here are a few more numbers, in addition to those linked in paragraphs above, that give me goosebumps.

 

“All I Ask of You”

“The Impossible Dream”

“West Side Story” --the whole show!

(I can’t choose only one number.)

Another whole show: "Fiddler on the Roof"

I would love to see “Wicked,” but I could not put it ahead of seeing and hearing, on a live stage, “The Phantom of the Opera”--if I could survive the experience!

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.