Making “Nows” from Now Matters Too

Here’s another dirty secret for you: I am as essentially indifferent to theatre as the next 21st century adult.  I like it fine, but if you were to tell me I could never see another production of American Buffalo or Titus Andronicus, I’d find a way to somehow suck it up.  And even though I spent a good part of my youth as an actor, and managed to pay for what little college I got with a performance scholarship; and even though I still really enjoy doing it, if you were to tell me that I had some strange incurable disease, basically benign but which would strike me dead if I ever again strutted and fretted, I’d still somehow find a way to live the rest of my natural days in non-thespian peace.  But I experienced something Sunday that reminded me yet again that there is one aspect of theatre I cannot and will not give up.  So if you tried to tell me I couldn’t write another play for live performance, and I thought you meant it-- well, you and I would have a bit of a war on our hands.

My wife and my boys, ages nine and six, decided late Sunday afternoon to attend the opening performance of Balagan’s Theatre’s 2011 summer outdoor offering, King Arthur and the Knights of the Playground.  It was a perfect Seattle summer day, a rare enough jewel of deep greens and blues.  About a hundred and fifty of us, maybe more, gathered on the rich lawn behind the Asian Art Museum in Volunteer Park beneath some of the most glorious old trees you could ever hope to see.  There were friends, and friends of friends, and friends and family of cast members and crew, and just plain lovers of theatre, young and old; and we all watched some truly sublime goofiness with a wide open heart at its core. I wrote the section—one of five— called “The Ballad of Balin and Balan”, and based my interpretation of these two tragically fated brother-knights on the relationship of my own two sons.  Sitting there on a blanket with my mostly oblivious models, my heart was in my throat from the beginning of the piece, and I was embarrassed to have to wipe my eyes at the corny final scene:

[They both fall to the ground, gasping.]

BALAN:  You know what this means?

BALIN:  We’re gonna die.

BALAN:  Well, yeah, but something else.

BALIN:  Yeah?  What?

BALAN:  The curse said you would kill your best friend.

BALIN:  Yeah.  So what?

BALAN:  So that means I’m your best friend.  Curses can’t lie.

BALIN:   Hey, yeah, that’s right.  And I’m your best friend.

BALAN:  That’s right.

BALIN:  Forever.

It didn’t bother me one bit that my sons were more interested in the toy light sabers wielded by the actors than the fact that I had used their sweet, easy devotion to each other as my inspiration.  I’m pretty sure that if the real Richard III had a chance to see a modern Seattle production of Shakespeare’s play about him, he would be way more fascinated in the costumes, props and actual women on stage than in any resemblance to the biographical facts of his life.  (This is, by the way, another glorious feature of theatre.  We all see something deeply different.)  What blew me away was my own awareness of a profound and magical moment, wherein the very beauty of the earth seemed to host this collection of stories, as sweet and true and fresh as life itself; that my boys were watching grown men attempting to match the matchless nobility of love that children can hold for one another.  And I was part of it.  A very small, perfectly happy part of it.  And because my job was done, all I had to do was breathe and gratefully accept the moment knowing that I can have no idea what experiencing the moment might mean down the road for either of my boys, but suspecting there’s a good chance that it might mean something.

Making plays matters.  Alas, I still have immense difficulty convincing many of my colleagues of this truth.  There’s a director in Seattle whose work I consistently admire who has maintained publicly more than once that he doesn’t believe we need any more new works for the stage because we will never have enough time or resources to produce all of the great plays that have already been written.  Many powerful decision makers in American Theatre agree, most implicitly, but some even explicitly, that the canon of theatrical literature is full: like the Bible, we cannot, should not, and even must not, add volumes to it.  I shake my head and smile at this notion, so apparently provable in the abstract, and yet so falsifiable by one deep blue green gorgeous Sunday afternoon in Seattle’s Volunteer Park.

Please forgive the geek metaphor, but if plays are algorithms—timeless software to be run on a particular time’s theatrical hardware (i.e. actors, sets, costumes, props, lighting and sound designs and, yes, even directorial concepts), then I want some of those future algorithms to be from my time.  Put more simply, if plays are “nows” thrown forward into “then”, then I need to believe that some of those “then-nows” will be from this now, if only so my sons’ daughters might know something of how wonderful their fathers were to each other when they were boys.

Comments

[Meghan]

Lovely, thanks Paul.

[Heather]

This show was amazing and so much FUN!! I love watching theatre with kids, they are so engaged and responsive to what is going on.

[kimber]

Beautiful, Mullin - thanks.