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.

Sitcom Politics

Back in the day when media guru Marshall McLuhan said, “The medium is the message,” he wasn’t kidding. The medium not only is the message, it also shapes the mind. Our expectations have been molded so thoroughly by the solve-it-in-thirty-minutes sitcom storyline (or an hour if you’re into TV dramas) that we’ve translated that mentality into real life.

Fact is, life isn’t a sitcom or an hour-long drama. Families with kids aren’t nearly as funny as those on “The Middle” or “Modern Family,” show choirs never look like the ones on “Glee,” and modern crime-fighters—no matter how high-tech—have nothing remotely as cool as the scientific and technological gadgetry on “Bones” and “NCIS.”

Yet here we are, coming up on midterm elections, with many voters expecting the multiple crises that took years to create during the two-term presidency of George W. Bush to have been solved within the first two years of the Obama presidency. The Bush presidency took the economic surplus that was the Clinton legacy and converted it into massive debt and an American-led global recession, helped along by two ill-conceived wars and lack of proper oversight of the financial and housing markets—and a lot of other things that ought to have be been seen to.

The fiction of wishful thinking so glibly purveyed by rightwing pundits and their puppets won’t change reality. But with sitcom mentality firmly in place, it doesn’t have to. Conservative politicians who have sat on their hands for two years, parroting Nancy Reagan’s “just say no” to any collaborative strategies to solve the nation’s problems, are now waving their hands in the air and, like Chicken Little, squawking that the sky is falling. Their solution: Elect politicians from the party that made the mess in the first place.

Mess? What mess? Oh, that’s right. The Bush presidency was over half an hour ago. All has been forgotten now—never mind the men and women still out of work and still dying in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In 1967 Marshall McLuhan published The Medium is the Massage, a word play on his famous saying. But it was a well-considered pun. McLuhan used the word massage to describe the effects media have on human senses. He wrote:

All media work us over completely. They are so pervasive in their personal, political, economic, aesthetic, psychological, moral, ethical, and social consequences that they leave no part of us untouched, unaffected, unaltered. (p. 26)

In some ways the media have positively reshaped human awareness, but in other ways we have been diminished. If we expect the impossible because we have seen the impossible realized so often in fiction that we now confuse it with real life, then we have arrived at a truly sorry state.

Update or Adapt a Classic?

Recently I saw a university production of George Bernard Shaw’s 1905 play, Major Barbara. Shaw’s usual themes of capitalism versus socialism and class conflict are front and center in this comedy-drama about a Salvation Army major whose father is a successful arms manufacturer.

One might think that setting this play in the 1960s—the Vietnam War era and a time of major social upheaval—would work well. However, in this updating the play was still set in England, which experienced the Vietnam conflict only peripherally. And Britain’s social upheaval of this period was centered mainly in fashion and popular music.

Leave aside the dreadful British accents and the apparent direction to the actors to speak their lines fast and loud, which rendered half the dialogue in this production incomprehensible, and what remained was a staging that jarred against the play’s central themes. Sure, the Sixties fashions were fun for both actors and audience, but in other respects Shaw’s work was almost wholly obscured, at best reduced to flash and drivel.

Shaw’s play, in hindsight, is piquant not only because of the playwright’s sharp-tongued dialogue but also because the themes in 1905 seem prescient. World War I loomed less than a decade into the future when this script first hit the boards in London. American audiences likely found the play even more pertinent when it opened on Broadway in 1915.

If the play were to be set in the Sixties, a full-out adaptation might have made more sense, moving the action from England to the United States and tweaking the dialogue accordingly. America in that era was feeling the effects of an unpopular war and a cultural revolution, the latter driven not merely by music and fashion but by the civil rights and women’s rights movements—all of which have more resonance to Shaw’s themes than what was happening in Britain at the same time.

Whether to produce a classic such as this one as it was written, to update it mainly by moving the action to a more recent time, or to adapt it more deeply presents many challenges. Will the original seem outdated? Will an updating hold too many anachronisms to be effective? Will a comprehensive adaptation go too far and lose the thrust of the original altogether? These are difficult questions.

The British Sixties setting of Major Barbara in this instance failed to consider these questions sufficiently, and so the update came off as superficial and did little justice to Shaw’s ideas, quite apart from massacring his language.