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.

On the Providence of Summer (And Why I Hate It)

As you read this, we are in the second day of summer, a season I appreciate (for all the life, the beauty, the cooling pool outside, the happiness of my animals) and despise all at once.

I never quite got out of the habit of thinking of years like school years. My real “year” still begins in September and ends in May and then there’s these additional three months that are supposed to be of rest. Yet, as an adult, summer means little. You must trudge on. And yet, I first knew summer as the months of rest—not so much play as many other children.

The summer also affects my writing in very negative ways. First off, though I was born and raised in Alabama, I don’t care for an overabundance of sun. When I use it as a metaphor I my plays, it is portrayed not as a beacon of light but a blinding nuisance—like the truth.

I can remember writing only one poem and one play during the summer months which, otherwise, produce little work. Even coming up with weekly subjects for the blog where I can literally let my imagination do its prairie dance, I struggle to find subjects. What movie’s turning 10 this year, 20, 30? Who died and did they mean enough to me to warrant a tribute? Boy, I can’t wait for that miserable month of August, famous for boasting no holidays of any kind, where I will struggle to not just post old material in order to satisfy a made-up deadline.

The poem I wrote was “August Night, 1972” (a fair one, I think), but it takes its imagery not from the naked light of day, but the hot summer nights of mosquitoes, fireflies, musky air, and lake water that is reminiscent of my childhood vacations on Lewis Smith Lake where my family went into a kind of time-share/condo-like situation with a double-wide overlooking the water (where now stands a $4 million mansion).

The play was an early piece of juvenilia that taught me what I write in summer is not worth reading. I happened to be acting the summer of 1998 in, simultaneously, Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice’s Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat and William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. So, I did a musical take on the old Bard but with stock characters of mine—mired in loneliness, sulking in an empty bar and grill. Needless to say, Life’s Labor’s Love was never destined for eyes to see.

Later, summers turned to the emerald coasts of Destin, Florida on an almost yearly basis. Fresh gulf shrimp, pools, night grocery store runs, dinners at a restaurant overlooking the water. Rest. No work for the weary.

Then, adulthood and the mostly insignificant summers that accompany it.

The heat and humidity, the constant pool parties, the constant yard maintenance, the constant pool maintenance, the persistence of the dog wanting to go outside more and more.

I am always relieved when, sometimes as early as mid-October, a chill comes to the air, and I am back in the season I love most because of the rather better plays, poems, and essays take their life. I can do re-writes in the summer, but those passionate, spiritual, sorrowful, and joyous nights where plays emerge that were not there the day before—those first drafts full of rambling, wild life that need pruning.

Those all emerge when the sun is more of a white light, when the heat is on, the animals are cozy, and I am left with my imagination, blissfully alone.

One never quite remembers the limitlessness of one’s imagination.