A Mid-Spring Night’s Reverie

This has been a week of wistfulness.

Back in Miss Wilson’s 5th grade class (one of the best, best learning experiences of my entire life) one of the things she had us do in Language Arts (as they called the study of English in those elementary school days) was choose some of our own vocabulary words we wanted to master, and as we practiced using them in sentences, she had us look up the words in the OED to discover the origins of the particular word. When the time of our vocabulary test came on Friday, we not only knew the definition of the word, but also the first time that the word had been used in the history of the English language. She had us doing that in 5th grade! That was certainly a little destiny in my becoming a historian…

Just for fun I checked out on dictionary.com what the OED origin of wistful is. Its origin can be traced to the early 17th century and meant “a quiet, attentive longing or yearning.” The site also records that it may be ”characterized by a melancholy.”

Yep. It has been a week of wistfulness. I have already recorded some of my thoughts from earlier in the week, but several other scoops of wistfulness have been added to my Wistfulness Sundae. Today is my dad’s birthday and I miss him. Never could I imagine a father so able to hold a family in such a loving grip.

I realized it has been a year since I have seen my friend Chuck. I talk to Chuck regularly, yes, and have no fear about a weakening bond in the fires of friendship, but still, there is a longing to see the great friends of one’s life.

I also had my weekend plans cancelled. I know, boo-hoo. But we have a day off school tomorrow for Jordanian Independence Day, and I had made plans with a KA family to travel to Mt. Sinai (lemme just refresh your memory about the significance of this place: remember a certain burning bush? remember some commandments etched in stone? Yep, that’s the place) to hike up into the mountains to the 1500 year old St. Catherine’s monastery and then relax at a nice Red Sea resort. But the father in the family, an eminent surgeon, has a surgery assignment today. I know, boo-hoo. The poor little international teacher-traveler has no plans! Moreover, everybody else is out and about shopping in Damascus or camping or something. Yes, I will survive. I am writing my final exam this weekend. But I am a little wistful.

And not the least of my shades of wistfulness I owe to my attendance this week to the first full-length production of a play at KA. There were maybe 30 actors, from a 6 year old daughter of a colleague, to the headmaster himself, in William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Wistful? I didn’t direct the play. Wistful? Do you know me at all?

The cast performed the play not in our auditorium, but in the biggest courtyard on campus, a place that took advantage of the lovely desert evenings. The audience sat in the playing area ¾ around the cast. Under the night sky with a cool spring breeze, the space created a holistic setting for the play that has love and fantasy at its core. They didn’t create much scenery, but they cleverly used beautiful fabric panels to set the scenes of the fancy homes and woodland fairyland. Director Tristan decided to set the play in the 1920s which allowed for perky music and beautiful costumes that sparkled under the pink-and-blue lighting design he chose.

Early in the play a character commands that we should “awake the spirit of mirth,” and the cast performed the play with a mirthful enthusiasm indeed. While I must say I am not a fan of the play, and I worry that a Shakespeare play was nearly totally lost on the audiences (Jordanians and Americans alike) and so the text was underserved, we got to watch our students put on a play! There was one boy, Mohammad, who in the beginning of the year had not seemed to be a very serious scholar. Faculty worried about his mischievous streak. But as he performed the role of Bottom, and clearly reveled in the comic machinations, it reminded me all over again why I love theater with high school students. It transforms the participants.

There’s the wistfulness: I didn’t direct the play. In the last 20 years I have directed 60 plays, and I miss it. The OED got it right—it is “a quiet, attentive longing or yearning…characterized by melancholy.”

I am not jealous of Tristan’s success—I just miss doing what he gets to do. Of course there is tremendous work in directing a play—the hours, the decisions, the hand-holding, the voids of creativity, the patience, the fretting, the disasters, the frustrations, again, the patience, but it has been one of the most wondrous, and integral parts of my teaching career.

Directing a play is a bit like being a horticulturalist—someone who loves to cultivate, say, orchids. It is painstaking work, in a special place, a hothouse, and with nerves of steel, and the patience of Job, one finally watches that precious blossom burst forth. And, as every horticulturalist knows and rues, that gorgeous, living being is ephemeral. It doesn’t last long, and soon after, as time flies, it is but a memory. But in that whole process, if you love it, it is unfettered joy.

And so as I watched the performance the other night, I coveted those rushes of emotion they were experiencing backstage and onstage. It is nice to be a spectator, but it is certainly not the emotional experience that directing provides. As the characters in the play whirred back into a fairyland, I took a trip of my own, a beautiful trip down memory lane of some of my directing experiences in the last 20 years:

First Stop: Hello, Dolly! I debuted big, with a huge musical and a cast of 60. About a week before the opening in the spring of 1988, I was frustrated over a bit of farcical business that the students couldn’t seem to master. I said to my friend Mary, “I want to sign a proclamation right now that I will never, ever be foolish again to direct a show.” Mary watched me enact my own little quasi-historical event as I signed my name to this promise. On Opening Night Mary was beside me as we peeked into that horrific gym at Gaston Day School, watching the birth of the show, tears coming down our cheeks, and she wondered if I meant to honor my sworn testimony.

Next stop: the spectaculars at Charlotte Latin School! They gave me the most money to spend on theater, and in my five years there I directed 19 shows, some of them huge! Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat was the biggest—I think every cast member had about 7 costume changes, and again, about 60 people performing (including that dear friend Mary—we had long since just laughed at my commitment to avoid theater!). When Joseph’s family reunites at the end of the show (and the supernova talent Casey as Joseph will never be topped in my mind) those were not just actor-ly tears on the faces of the brothers—we felt that moment. There was Noises Off, certainly the most ambitious set I have engineered, and the most difficult directing assignment of physical movement, but I had the cast of my dreams, and it made it all seem so easy. That buddy Chuck—it was one of the eight shows we did together during his high school days—he was in that triumph. I remember the night before we opened, and I had the idea that the curtain call should be a speeded up version of the entire plot of the play raced to Handel’s “Hallelujah” chorus.

Third stop: the smaller plays at Charlotte Latin were just as miraculous as the big budget splashy shows. It was at Latin that I honed my skills to work at the subtleties of inspiring casts to elicit great moments in acting. Four plays became signature pieces of mine: I Never Saw Another Butterfly, Twelve Angry Jurors, Our Country’s Good, and Our Town. You couldn’t ask for more dedicated, talented actors, and as we noted at the last play before I took a sabbatical in 1994, we treasured each other.

Fourth stop: the unbelievably bad stage and auditorium at Hackley! When I first saw the “theater,” I thought, this will be a challenge! But in those 11 years, in those 30 or so plays, I discovered another pool of talent, another source of life-long friendships. I remember introducing the students to classic American plays, like The Crucible and You Can’t It With You (the first high school play I did, by the way, around the time when John Wilkes Booth was a hot actor) and then moving from the chestnut plays to the experimental plays, directing them in Christopher Durang, Tom Stoppard, The Laramie Project and Oh, What a Lovely War. I worked with gifted students like Harrison, a student who elevated everything he was in. I hoped that the plays like Our Country’s Good would reveal the redemptive power of theater.

Fifth stop: the last play I directed, 18 months ago in November, 2006. I put together an evening I called “Defying Wilder” in which we looked at the work of Thornton Wilder juxtaposed with a play from the 1990s that seemed to call on Wilder-ian tendencies. I had a feeling that that would be my last play for awhile, and I invested it with a kind of elegiac quality. Each of the three works is, to me, a montage of hope and faith, and the three works together formed an expression of our capacity to recover from catastrophe and move hopefully forward again. In Pullman Car Hiawatha, a 28 character one-act set in a Pullman Railroad Car traveling from New York to Chicago, Thorton Wilder uses the microcosm of a train car to explore the pulses of life as they collide physically, metaphysically and cosmically. Beginning with a view of passengers in an overnight sleeper car, Wilder’s vision expands to a macrocosm of American towns through which the train passes and eventually encompasses the entire universe. Wilder’s inspiring message rings clear: the world may be too large to fathom, but the miracle of love guides our way through the night. In this play we also see the creative roots for Wilder’s better-known Our Town. While death was in fact a central theme in all three plays, it did not dominate the elaborate fabric of life that extends from leaky hot-water bottles and dropped suspenders up to, literally, the music of the spheres. Rather, it is the fabric of life, seen in cross-section in these three plays, that is important; but most important is the message that love renders life so much more than meaningless noise.

Wistful yes, but the last stop was a beautiful montage of smiles and tears and hugs and moments from Sarah, Eric, Michael, Kathleen, Elizabeth, Megan, Chuck, Kess, Billy, Ethan, Junko, Catherine, Greg, Will, Mandy, Simon, Elizabeth, Jennie, Erika, Ian, Eric, David, Tanaz, Millie, Adam, Stefan, Liz, Tom, Kieran, Alyssa, Alta, Alex, Katherine, Julia, Kenrick, Harrison, Becky, Dora, Kate, Jonathan, Jake, Soyoung, Michael…

These are the stars I saw in that desert sky.