Two is the Loneliest Number

Harry Nilsson’s song “One,” most famously covered in two distinct but perfect recordings by Three Dog Night and Aimee Mann (the latter used for the title sequence of Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia) is a song that has been in my head for several months now and I couldn’t quite figure out why. It is not simply that it is an earworm. It is not that I am a die-hard Nilsson fan (especially given his awful songs for Robert Altman’s Popeye). I think it might have to do with the fact that loneliness has naturally become one of the more prominent themes of my writing life. As far back as my first one-act play, betrayal and deceit in relationships has been a standard theme and the resulting, crushing solitude a given in plot points and the subject of many poems, yet I’ve refrained from dealing with it in essay form until now.

Most of my life I have lived with people, but the essential loneliness of life stays with me. It’s perfectly captured in a song from Stephen Sondheim’s musical about marriage, Company. Multiple husbands answer Robert’s question, “Are you ever sorry you got married?” One of the lyrical replies is, “You hold her thinking, 'I’m not alone.';/You’re still alone.” Which is so horribly, horribly true. I have never been married, but I have observed marriages my entire life and there is still, at the core of them, two lonely people who have found each other but still know, at any time, their connection is ephemeral, can be taken away at any moment or could be a complete sham.

There is a part of me that craves solitude and a part that detests it. As a baby, there was a 24-hour period where I screamed bloody murder. My mother gave me everything she could to satisfy me—food, toys, diaper changes, etc. Finally, throwing her hands up, she put me in my crib and shut the door. Within seconds, my screaming stopped and I was happily playing by myself, swatting at whatever contraption hung above me. I think that’s a very large part of who I am and, given that writing is a solitary profession, it is a useful aspect of my life. Yet, there are times when I hunger for connections which have almost always been out of reach. However, in the relationships I’ve had, I come back to Nilsson’s song: “Two can be as bad as one./It’s the loneliest number since the number one.” That’s the line that really troubles me because, like Sondheim’s, it has great truth and truth can be hard on the soul.

Until fourth grade, girls were always my best friends. As soon as I started seeing them in a romantical way, I have had almost zero close friends who are women except for wives of friends and, even then, we don’t tend to be as close as I to their male counterparts. I’m not entirely sure the reason for this phenomenon. It is just another fact of who I am. My subsequent history with women has been muddled, to be sure. My first kiss was one given out of self-pity. The giving party cared about me because I was vulnerable; she was older and wiser. It was a “gosh-that’s-so-cute-of-him-kiss.” It meant something, just not what I’d intended. My first girlfriend was another older woman (eighth grade when I was in seventh) and there was virtually no connection at all except many boring phone calls, though I am glad she introduced me to the overlooked romantic comedy Only You with Robert Downey, Jr. and Marisa Tomei.

My high school experience was uncommon, of course, attending a performing arts school. I had no time for interpersonal relationships much. I was too focused on my burgeoning acting career. Nevertheless, there were two relationships of note. I had one public girlfriend and one secret one (for reasons I shan’t discuss at this time). Both were fellow actresses. Neither were such negative experiences as to scar my life or anything, but they had tremendous highs and treacherous lows particularly with the secret one. Those were the first days I experienced what I now know is depression.

My first real relationship was in college. It was the longest lasting, clocking in at two and a half years and, though I posture sometimes, the break up was something I never quite got over. We will call her Dawn. We will call her "replacement" Malia. I’ve never told this story in anything but allegorical ways (see my play The Summer Bobby(ie) Lee Turner Loved Me, originally produced under the title And They Heard the Thunder of Angels), so bear with me.

Dawn and I met acting in a workshop of an original musical. I was much too embarrassed to say anything to her up front, but as my freshman year was concluding, I called her dorm number and left a voicemail expressing how much I had enjoyed working with her. I never received a call back. Summer came and my determination to have someone nagged at me quite a bit. A friend who was soon to enlist in the Air Force drove me to Vermont for my sophomore year. He, my roommate, and I were having a discussion. I would either pursue Dawn or another person. We all chose Dawn. Dawn was receptive. We officially began dating on the first anniversary of 9/11 and decided that date didn’t have to mean doom for all time. I bought her a bouquet of roses that lasted longer than any other flowers I’ve ever bought and everything seemed so perfect in the beginning.

To everyone else, we were inseparable and insufferable—had no sense of our PDA bothering others. We all just figured everyone else was jaded, wrong, and jealous. Still, with all the meetings of families in the burgeoning relationship, something nagged at me in the back of my mind. She was Jewish and I was a committed Christian. It seems such a ridiculous thing now, but I worried about this as far as the future was concerned—raising children, etc. She had interest in Christianity because I had interest in it and, during our time together, we visited probably over forty different churches in an attempt to find something we both liked.

She stayed in the little college town after she graduated so we could remain together. Two years later, I was nearing my graduation and something had grown stale between us that we were not acknowledging. We were together and alone, isolated from everyone else in an apartment off-campus (really the former slave quarters of a historic home) and isolated from each other in our minds. I began regretting (stupidly) that I had not dated more people during my college experience and the seven-year itch came five years too early.

I had met Malia in my first year. We were the same age and the same religion. We had crushes on each other, but nothing ever materialized…until Dawn took a trip to DC in March of 2005 and Malia and I found each other growing close. To be clear, nothing was ever consummated—even in the resulting relationship we had—but I was cheating in my mind already, so I held the burden of being the cheater once we connected.

The immediate feeling was guilt. I could not truly enjoy whatever was happening with Malia because I knew Dawn had sacrificed two years of her life and career for me, had been loyal and faithful and, even if our relationship had become a bore (which we didn’t admit until after it was over), it was as if the same person were being rent in two. I also fully expected Malia to be as good and as understanding and as warm and as helpful and as loving as Dawn. This was not to be the case. The deal I made with the Devil resulted in a halted existence. In a sense, I have felt my life ended there till this day. The rest feels like something of a non-existence.

It was the summer of 2005. Dawn and I had said goodbye as she took up with someone twenty years her senior and I was already missing what we had (even made a couple of attempts at getting her back a year later). Two could clearly be as bad as one. By the fall of that year, I was without money and stuck in Alabama because Malia told me not to come to the new life she promised me. My life was in boxes scattered about the living room, ready to move. I had my car on a vehicle to transport it to Oregon. I had a non-refundable plane ticket. Somehow, my family intervened and I was able to at least get back the non-refundable things, but a hate set up in my heart that was astonishing. Was I blaming her or myself? Who’s to say?

These two relationships impacted my life in a way that was not clear in some ways until now.

Which is worse? One or two? In my experience, both. One is most certainly the loneliest, two a close second. Do I still hold out hope there is someone for me? Not in this day and age. One can barely tell who is male or female anymore, after all. I’m too old to find someone my age to deliver children safely. I’m too young to give up entirely or, at least, that's what they tell me.

Perhaps, one day, I will be delivered from this trauma, but it has held me a mental prisoner for so long, I can't say that I will ever be free from the guilt and the image of a life I could have had and never will.

My 4th of July Tradition (Revealed on the 5th)

I suppose most people have burgers and hot dogs and pools and fireworks and I enjoy all those things, but my 4th of July tradition is to always at least attempt to watch one of my favorite musical movies. It is not the best movie musical. It is not based on the best stage musical. But it is affecting and funny and witty and sharp and largely historically inaccurate and yet, there is something about Peter H. Hunt’s 1776 (1972) that strikes a chord with me and makes me proud to be a part of the American experience.

When I was in high school, a friend begged me to come see a musical they were producing at a local Methodist church. I think he was afraid it would fail and they would have no audience, but as the show neared, it started to pull together. The show was 1776, the 1969 Broadway musical about the struggle for a Declaration of Independence. Featuring the Founding Fathers singing, arguing, posturing, and reciting the words of the greatest musical libretto there is (the score is okay, but Peter Stone’s book is really something). I was profoundly moved even though I know the show was a typical community theatre effort—for example, it was unfortunate the actor playing Rutledge had a lisp which made “Molasses to Rum (to Slaves)” funny instead of frightening, but they made it—they pulled off a show that I’ve come to learn you would have to try to ruin to deny the audience a good time.

It is an unusual show for many reasons. There are only two female characters and yet it has a cast nearing forty. The songs make up not even a third of the three-hour running time. It has no intermission, so you are left in the consistently heating crucible of the trials of adopting independence in the 2nd Continental Congress. It would seem hard to revive and yet this was done successfully in 1997 with Brent Spiner taking over the role William Daniels made famous—the obnoxious and disliked John Adams (who, in real life, was neither during the historical period). A more recent politically correct revival played exclusively by LGBT actors and women of color failed miserably as it was clearly a gimmicky stunt to try to preach to a choir who has already paid their tithes.

Thankfully, it is faithfully preserved on film with a screenplay by the original librettist and directed by the same stage director and featuring nearly the entire original Broadway cast. It was produced at a time when movie musicals were beginning to hemorrhage money and so it was cut rather disgracefully by studio executive Jack Warner and this was the version I first saw on video in the early 2000s—an unqualified mess. Finally, however, the director’s cut was released on DVD, and it is a delight, perfectly capturing Daniels and Howard Da Silva’s original performances as well as that of Ken Howard and Blythe Danner who are perfection personified as Thomas and Martha Jefferson.

So, while everybody else is basking in the sun and barbecuing, I’m cuddled up with a slice of American history told in a jaunty way with marvelous dialogue and some catchy tunes from Sherman Edwards, the writer of “See You in September” and other pop songs. It also realistically shows the bravery of the men who signed the declaration in an ending that is heartfelt, moving, frightening, and a good lesson to those who think the American experiment is nearing its end. It may be, but 1776 gains fans all the time and it’s high time that was the case.

On Political Theatre

In this year where everyone is on their tiptoes awaiting one form of political turmoil or another, my thoughts have been drifting toward political theatre which, like politics itself, often drives me crazy. I have been re-reading some of the works of Harold Pinter, England’s leading playwright of the 20th century. Early in his career, he publicly shunned any sort of political protest and barely proffered much of his political thought, but his later career was almost solely devoted to political activism. While his early work, his “comedies of menace” such as The Caretaker and The Dumb Waiter, were about power and subjugation, he still (in the ‘60s) did not consider himself a political person.

As time went on, however, he was more known as an activist than as a writer, much like Arthur Miller. Unlike Miller, Pinter wrote some fine plays in his later period, especially Mountain Language, Moonlight, Ashes to Ashes, and his final original work for the stage, Celebration, which is criminally underrated. Though Pinter became a political firebrand, he knew the deeper the idea was buried in character, plot, action, and theme, the more his ideas would take flight in the lives of theatregoers, especially after they left the theater and had time to mull them over. Still, he used his 2005 Nobel Prize lecture to denounce both the US and the UK for their involvement in the invasion of Iraq (though he, rightfully, gave a bit more bile to America). Well, the problems in the Middle East have not gone away, but Bush and Blair have. We still have Pinter’s plays, but his Noble Prize lecture is, for the most part, passed its “sell by” date.

It has always been my in my nature to avoid politics. It doesn’t take a lot of involvement to realize once you go into those waters, you rise out muddied and riddled with leeches. As far as politics in dramatic genres, it seems to me television is the only fair form for political satire. My generation had Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show and South Park. They responded, in real time, to real-life situations. The effect was immediate and worked because television is ephemeral, but some episodes of Park make little sense today outside of their original context because the news is always focused on something else by the next day. Stage plays, on the hand, are meant to be immortal so it’s the immortal themes they should focus on. If one writes about a specific political engagement at a very specific point in history, there is no guarantee it will be even understood in latter times.

This is not true of all political theatre, however. Some significant plays have achieved immortality but only because they advance an idea without being preachy or polemical and if they still tell a human story. Some of the great examples are Sophokles’ Antigone, Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, Miller’s The Crucible, Hwang’s M. Butterfly, and a few others. Yet, most political theatre has no future destiny. I remember a play running Off-Broadway in my college years with the title George W. Bush is an Idiot. Without even having to go to the show, which I wouldn’t have anyway, I knew the tenor and tone of the evening and I knew I wouldn’t walk out of the theater enriched.

Many of the plays being produced in New York now are, if not directly political, take one side or another on matters. Given NY’s cultural status in the world and the people who can afford to go to the theatre, these pieces are almost always preaching to the choir. If the subject is politics, one would think the writer would do the most to provoke and subvert what audiences are expecting, but audiences have become more homogenous, expecting to hear something specific now—they want their herd mentality validated. Such an evening sounds intolerable to me, but I suppose I’m not the only one alive.

I can think of no other more pointless act among human endeavors than writing, for example, an anti-war play. I can’t think of a single one that achieved its goal. The play will run a couple of months and the problem it addresses will resolve itself and that’s the end. As sincere as these plays might be, they are akin to most political protests of this day, which also fall on deaf ears and disappear rapidly. In today’s protests, there is none of the intelligence of Gandhi’s Salt March or Martin Luther King’s marches—there are only half-thought-of posterboard signs and a lot of anxiety bubbling over into violence.

However, if one uses metaphor or allegory or myth to get their point across, one can be moved by a political play. I mentioned The Crucible and others to contrast them with the polemical works of Bertolt Brecht and others of his brood who certainly entertained the theatre-going public, but always had a sermon somewhere. I’ve wrestled with Brecht since college and, I don’t know what it is, but it’s hard to think much of a playwright who, in his final years, admired Mao and even adapted Coriolanus to preach Maoist principles. It is true some of Brecht’s work have outlasted his theories and politics. People seem to be moved by Mother Courage, though Bertolt himself would have despised that.

No, television is the place where you can best do that sort of writing because of its immediacy. The theatre is also ephemeral, but plays do get published and revived. Like the news, there is always more copy the next day for satirical television. The great playwrights, on the other hand, are great because they are writing for eternity, prosperity. In other words, they’re writing about the things that matter in the larger sense—the things that aren’t going away such as God, birth, death, sex, taxes, and war (the general fact of war, not specific wars). These themes are givens on this planet, and they shan’t ever go away despite who’s in office.