“The Play’s the Thing”

It is Hamlet, that muffy-headed Danish prince, who speaks this line that every theater-lover has stolen at one point or another to express his or her devotion to the stage. In Shakespeare’s play, as I learned in Mr. Justice’s class my senior year of high school studying Hamlet for the first time, Hamlet does not actually use this line to extol the virtues of “the wicked stage.” In fact, Hamlet says, “The play’s the thing in which I’ll catch the conscience of the king!” hoping to use the ruse of a dramatic dastardly act to uncover whether or not the king indeed has a black heart.

It has been thirty months since I directed a play, and it has certainly been the thing that I have missed the most from my previous academic life. In fact, thirty months is a longer period of time than any in my entire adult life not directing a play! When last I directed in the autumn of 2006 the notion of coming to Jordan had just presented itself, and even then, the evening of theater had a valedictory feel to it. That weekend in November I put together three disparate dramatic works, and entitled the evening, Defying Wilder. I took a one-act play by Thornton Wilder, a 1996 play by Jane Anderson entitled, Defying Gravity, and then ended the evening with Act III of Thornton Wilder’s chestnut, Our Town. It just felt like the right combination of dramatic challenges and celebration of human life.

I had seen Defying Gravity a decade before in a small, off-Broadway theater and immediately was smitten with this piece. I filed it away in my brain—it would be perfect at the perfect time. The play dealt with the 1986 national crisis of the space shuttle Challenger. I remembered back in 1985 and 1986 the interest and growing affection over the selection of one Christa McAuliffe, an elementary school teacher, for that mission. Still youngish, brave, strong, and pretty, she was an American icon and a media darling—the first civilian and one of but a few women to journey into space. “I watched the space age being born with the Apollo landing,” she said on her application, chosen from among 11,000 others. “I want to participate.”

She was both ordinary and extraordinary; she was amazed but not distracted by her celebrity, and in her gratitude for this opportunity she reached through the television cameras to take each of us along with her, as far as we wanted to go. On the morning of January 28, 1986, we were surprised. As a nation. And we were devastated. For my generation, the Challenger space shuttle disaster is one of our most defining moments as young Americans—much like the assassination of President John F. Kennedy is for my parent’s generation.

Seventy-three seconds into that perfect take-off, billions of people saw something no one wanted to see: a bright flash of yellow followed by billowing clouds, pure white fingers of vapor snaking back down to earth rather than up toward the stratosphere.

Jane Anderson’s play Defying Gravity, is about much more than the tragic shuttle disaster that occurred in 1986. It is about the human ability to dream and to overcome tragedies of all kinds. One must continue to reach for dreams although they fail. This play is highly appropriate at this time in the life of America because we are still dealing with another of those nation-galvanizing tragedies. Defying Gravity urges us to keep dreaming and to keep reaching.

Jane Anderson inserts the 60-years dead French artist Claude Monet into her free-structured play. Monet symbolizes the continuity of time regardless of life’s tragedies. He is a comforting presence and makes things easier for the characters in the midst of these events. Moreover, Monet's connection to this adventure is his vision of a world without horizons. The motif of the medieval Cathedral is also a constant, a metaphor linking the past with the future as the Teacher lectures to her class about man's eternal desire to defy gravity. From the 13th-century buildings that seemed to reach heaven to the latest NASA engineering—the Heavens are viewed as a vast house of worship and the people who blast off into them as pilgrims in search of a new religious order among the stars.

It seemed to me as I watched that play during my first few months at Hackley way back in 1996 that playwright Jane Anderson had channeled Thornton Wilder as she created Defying Gravity, and so I decided in that fall of 2006 to juxtapose Anderson’s work with two works of Wilder from the 1930s. Each work 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, 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. This work of a young playwright captures both the triumphant cacophony of human life and the delicate lessons of human experience. The Porter is shy, the Stout Amiable Woman is stout and amiable, the Hours collide with the Planets, a woman dies and Archangels appear, as messengers from heaven, calm and transcendent.

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, so the chance to experience this theatrical building block is a rare opportunity.

Thornton Wilder worked to re-imagine and re-define theater—indeed he made that his mission. That nobody blinks at a thousand things done on Broadway stages today that the pre-Wilder theater would have called avant-garde, is a testament to Wilder's success. In fact his innovations have become so accepted, so much a part of what people think of as ”theater” to day that current worshippers of the avant-garde “tradition” scoff at him as old-fashioned.

While death is in fact a central theme in all three plays, it does 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.

So, thirty months later, I am finally directing a play again! It is a play familiar to me, one that I also discovered in 1996, the last play I did with Charlotte Latin students, and a play I directed twice at Hackley. So I am back in familiar territory, happily revisiting meaty dramatic scenes, remembering delightful actors of yore who have inhabited these same characters, people in my own hall of fame like Megan and Liz and Mandy and Will from Charlotte Latin, and David and Nicky and Giselle and Jennie and Stefan and Katharine and Alyssa and Alex and Harrison from Hackley.

The play is Our Country’s Good, a play by a playwright otherwise unknown to me, but with a cool, cool name: Timberlake Wertenbaker. The narrative is about a group of hardened, dirty, brutish criminals. These convicts fall victim to a system in which the British government feels it is for the “country’s good” to get rid of them and expel them to far-off Australia. But the play is really about overcoming, or transcending, difficult circumstances. It also happens to be a true historical story. The play focuses on British 2nd Lieutenant Ralph Clark and the shipful of convicts he accompanies to the new British penal colony in Australia in 1788. Clark actually believes that one way the convicts might behave better is if they had the chance to put on a play! Seriously! Clark meets with opposition from his naval officers—they simply think the convicts are born bad and should be whipped more often. Clark, however, gets the go-ahead, and works with these convicts on a play. Clark comes to have an entirely new understanding of the concepts of power and powerlessness from his work with the convicts. Finally, one of the great things about Our Country’s Good is that it is also about the value and power of theater itself.

So I cast the play about a month ago, and rehearsals have been spotty due to the school’s predilection to cancel co-curriculars around here (they need a good German who understands the need for schedules and planning, and anyway…) but it is just wonderful to be directing again. I will speak of this again in future entries, I am sure.

But recently I faced an interesting headache—one afternoon several of my cast faced a disciplinary hearing. Evidently, some of the actors I had cast as convicts had been a little bad outside of school. Indeed, one of the scenes of the play actually read like the transcript almost of our disciplinary committee hearing. One of the actors had written a statement that the impulse to shoplift actually helped the actor understand the character in the play. Oh my! The actor hoped the KA Disciplinary Committee would redeem him or her much as the character earned redemption in Our Country’s Good. I repeat: oh my! As it turned out, none of the actors had to lose his/her part in the play (well, yes and no—another young man in another incident did have to withdraw from the school, so I did lose one actor in the spring fever of bad behavior) as a disciplinary consequence.

In fact one of the actors confided something very interesting to me in the wake that this particular student might be asked to withdraw from the school. The student said to me, “I was asked why I want to stay in the school, what I found meaningful, or was there nothing here that mattered to me.” The actor looked at me and said, “Mr. John, I realized there is one really important thing to me here—the play. Our play really matters.”

Billy Shakespeare is so often right—it really can be, the thing.