Anew

Summer ended yesterday when I landed at the Charles de Gaulle airport outside of Paris. I now spend a good deal of time in this airport every year. So far, in the last four years that I have come in and out of the Charles de Gaulle airport I have yet to actually go into Paris! I land at the Charles de Gaulle airport on my way to and from Cincinnati or Amman for my summer breaks. When I land there in late June, this signals the beginning of summer, and when I land in August it is the reminder that summer has ended. I have a 5-8 hour layover every time (and by the way, it is just enough distance outside of Paris not really to make the ride into town worthwhile!) and it gives me time to make the mental preparations to put work out of my mind, or to access the work files in my brain yet again.

When that plane touches down in Amman, I am back at work. I wait until the last minute to return, always hoping to keep the jet lag at bay, and I dive into the many, many meetings. Yesterday was a nearly 8-hour spate of meetings with the senior staff, and today I met for several hours helping prepare for the teacher orientations in the next week.

As we began our senior staff meeting yesterday, our leader, the wonderful head of school John Austin, reminded us that each year “we have the chance to create the school culture we seek anew.” Yes, indeed-y, that is one of my favorite things about the school world. You have this break, you shake off the travails of the year, and then you get that chance to start fresh, to begin anew.

But before we bask in the newness of the year, let me just enjoy the summer one last moment as I put it in the memory book.

What was the best part of summer? What did I do? I mentioned a number of things in my blog entry about 10 days ago—remember, the portals I would open into the past/present/future of my life. Besides my encounters with friends and family—simply wonderful and meaningful, the best thing I did this summer was go to a performance of the Broadway play, Warhorse.

Now I don’t want to dwell too long on the dearth of theater in Jordan, but I gotta tell you, when I hit New York, I gobble up theater like a fat kid gobbles up chocolate cake. I try and go every day, and I try and see as much variety. The Broadway stuff is expensive, but there are still ways to go and see many things. Four mornings this July I went down to a Broadway theater to wait in line for a few rush tickets to be sold at $30 (remember the going rate is now $130!!!) and I still got the half-price line available, and Christy still has one of those great services that offer some shows at $4.50 (those are like the remainder bins in department stores, but hey, theater is theater!).

But Christy had gone ahead and paid full price for one show, the British import Warhorse. What did we know about it? We knew it had won the Tony Award for Best Play for 2010-11, and we knew that it had puppets. Oh, gosh. Puppets? Puppets. I mean, I did love Lion King and I found Avenue Q clever, but as a general rule, I am not excited about puppets. But I had read a review that called the play, “swoon-inducing.” Well, now. And it was produced by Lincoln Center—a sign of class and pedigree. So she plunked down the money for us for full price for Warhorse!

This was the most magical few hours of my summer, apart from time with family and friends. Warhorse was stunningly theatrical and charismatic and captivating.

The story is a pretty simple narrative—it comes from a novel for teens set around the Great War in England as Albert Narracott, the son of a ne’er-do-well, liquor-loving Devon farmer and a hard-working mum, yearns for a horse. When Dad, drunk as usual, buys Joey at an auction — an act of sibling rivalry toward his hoity-toity brother — young Albert takes on the animal’s care and feeding with deep enthusiasm. You probably guess one of the pleasures of this story—Warhorse speaks, cannily and brazenly, to that inner part of adults that cherishes childhood memories of a pet as one’s first — and possibly greatest — love. This is a show for people who revisit films like “Where the Red Fern Grows,” “The Yearling,” and “Old Yeller.”

But this is not just a play that registers as agreeable children’s entertainment. Joey, our half-thoroughbred horse, is a puppet. That sounds so one-dimensional, to just write, “Joey… is a puppet.” Joey is summoned into being by a team of strong and sensitive puppeteers. It is a puppet—yet this “puppet” is full of substance and soul. You watch this horse Joey, and admire the love Albert shares with Joey, and then your heart breaks as the father sells Joey to a World War I cavalry regiment.

So what is this Warhorse about? It is about imagination and majesty and love and adolescence and growing up and cold realities and hope and determination.

As the play unfolded, I did what I love to do during live performances—I watched the audience as often as I could. This was a matinee crowd and looked like a typical New York crowd—not the tourist crowd. I saw tears. I saw men take out handkerchiefs and choke back tears. Now come on—let’s get real. For a moment I admonished my inner self to stay observant and see the play for what it really was—a group of well-made, very large horse puppets. Two men can stand inside the puppet, one at the shoulders, and one under the hips and hind legs. A third man is at the side as if leading him along on a stafflike object resembling a lead line. I reminded myself that there were humans operating these beautifully engineered, lifelike horses. But as I watched, the cold reality melted away, and instead it was brilliant how the staff of Warhorse could move these staid New Yorkers to an emotional state.

The show’s storybook sensibility is enhanced by projections of drawings on what looks like an outsize strip of torn paper, which fluidly convey shifts of time and setting. After Joey is sold by Albert’s father to a cavalry regiment bound for France, the production’s look segues from idyll to nightmare, with harrowing images of walking corpses, enveloping shadows and death-machine tanks and guns. And of barbed wire, on which many a good horse met its end during World War I. Though human characters repeatedly bite the dust, it’s the horses on which our deeper hopes and fears are focused. And it’s the visions of their being fatally tangled in wire that are the show’s most unsettling. Albert goes in search of Joey through the hellish trenches of France. I won’t tell you how the story ends—Steven Spielberg has done a movie version of Warhorse which premieres in December.

But it’s not the actual narrative that is so breath-taking. It is the theatrical imagination to take an ordinary thing and make it far more extraordinary that it could have been or should have even been. Every so often, a pair of balladeers show up to sing about how we all “shall pass from this earth and its toiling” and be “only remembered for what we have done.” The implicit plea not to be forgotten applies not just to the villagers, soldiers and horses portrayed here, but also to theater, as an evanescent art that lives on only in audiences’ memories.

And also to the summer where precious evanescent reconnections are made with family and friends.

And also to the fragile beauty and ordinary-ness of school. Warhorse and school seem to intersect in quite a few ways for me, but perhaps in one important lens by which to view the unfolding of life’s adventures: both are about how the dirt that gets kicked in our faces sometimes gets transformed into magic dust.

Here I am—back for year 5 in Jordan…fresh from a summer and ready for the untold miracles of a school year, evanescent memories, cold realities, hope, determination, ordinary things transformed…I’d say that is “swoon-inducing” indeed.

Let’s begin anew!