Love at First Set

As a thirteen-year-old seventh-grader in Germany, I had my first experience of live theater when a USO troupe brought Guys and Dolls to our military community. I was spellbound. The sets! The costumes! The lights! The music! Real live people performing right in front of our eyes. It was pure magic. And so it has been for the past half century.

The immediacy of live theater—or any live performance—produces, at its best, a miraculous humanity, a connection between viewer and performer that cannot be replicated with images on screens. Whether it’s comic, tragic, or something else scarcely matters. That it’s real people beneath the greasepaint is what counts. And the first time is enough to hook a person for life. At least it was in my case.

A few years ago we took my very skeptical fourteen-year-old godson and his family to the Broadway production of Billy Elliot. My godson, who had protested going, turned to me after the first dance number, eyes full of stars, and whispered, “This is great!” Yes! Exactly! Just yesterday, my partner took two of the grandchildren, ages eight and six, to a local production of Shrek, the Musical. They are likely to remember the experience for a lifetime.

Over the years I’ve seen a great deal of theater and dabbled at being more than a viewer. In high school I designed the set for our production of My Fair Lady, in which Eliza was played by future Oscar-winner Dianne Wiest; she was a senior, I was a sophomore. A decade ago I flew to Wisconsin to watch a high school performance of my own play, Writer’s Catch, that was staged by the school where I’d taught a decade before that. But I’ve always been thrilled simply to be in the audience.

The key factor has not necessarily been who was on stage. I remember vividly seeing Hal Holbrook as Mark Twain, James Earl Jones in a New York production of On Golden Pond, Peter O’Toole in a London production of Man and Superman, Yul Brynner in The King and I, and Carol Channing in Hello Dolly. (Actually I first saw Hello Dolly when Dorothy Lamour played Dolly Levi in a touring version that played Emporia, Kansas, during my undergrad years.) But I have been equally thrilled by local and university productions.

All the world may well be a stage, as Shakespeare opined, but when the house lights go down and the play begins something special happens. We are transported from the ordinary to the extraordinary by that magical, very human connection between the individuals on stage and the individuals in the audience. Curtain up! And I fall in love all over again.

Scandalous Behavior

Two performances this past week called vividly to mind the perpetual theatrical theme of scandalous behavior. People behaving in ways contrary to accepted norms of society—usually in a sexual context—is a staple plot device of both comedy and tragedy. This week it was comedy, with scandalous behavior in the enchanted woods in Midsummer Night’s Dream and scandalous behavior among the aristocracy in Der Rosenkavalier.

The Indiana University production of Shakespeare’s enduring comedy, Midsummer Night’s Dream, was set in a 1934 Hollywood movie studio. Oberon, the king of the fairies, swung in on a grapevine with a finer set of chiseled abs than Johnny Weissmuller could ever boast of. One couldn’t help being disappointed when he later appeared fully clothed. Three sets of lovers—intermingling while enchanted—essentially behave both badly and scandalously (a fine distinction): Oberon and his queen Titania (whom Oberon enchants and causes to fall in love with an ass), Hermia and Demetrius (whom Hermia does not love, to the consternation of her father Egeus), and Lysander and Helena (who are thrown together mistakenly by Oberon’s jester Puck).

It’s a confusing plot, of course, following the standard devices of disguises, enchantments, and mistaken identities, all familiar in Shakespearean comedies. Ultimately, it all boils down to love and sex, generally of a scandalous nature. In the end Lysander and Hermia unite, true love winning out. Demetrius claims Helena as a newly rediscovered true love, and Oberon reunites happily with his queen, Titania. All’s well that ends well—but that’s another play.

Der Rosenkavalier, by Richard Strauss, was a highlight of the Indiana University opera season. Those unfamiliar with the opera might well have wondered at two women in bed at the opening curtain. One woman, however, is a man—well, a boy. The role of Octavian traditionally is played by a mezzo soprano, which even though Octavian is supposed to be seventeen is a stretch. But Strauss was inordinately fond of sopranos, and so he managed to populate this opera with several.

An openly lesbian plot would have been too avant garde in 1911, when the opera premiered in Dresden. (A little girl-on-girl apparently went down well.) Opening with the much older (and of course married) Marschallin, Princess Marie Thérèse, cavorting in bed with her seventeen-year-old lover was scandalous behavior enough. There’s bad behavior, though scandalous as well, from the lecherous Baron Ochs, who schemes to marry the nubile, and much younger, Sophie. The Baron avers that scandalous behavior is what sets an aristocrat apart from the common herd.

When the lovestruck Octavian is reluctantly set free by the Marschallin, with the comment that he’ll turn to someone younger sooner or later, he promptly does. With Sophie and Octavian it’s love at first sight. A good deal of comedic mischief follows, involving Octavian disguised as a servant girl—a girl playing a boy playing a girl, shades of Victor Victoria! Octavian’s servant girl persona, “Mariandell,” entices Ochs to an illicit rendezvous, where the Baron is exposed as the rogue he is. With the Marschallin’s blessing, and Sophie’s father’s, Octavian and Sophie are united in the end.

Ah, scandalous behavior! It’s almost as good on stage as it is in the newspapers.