But not the kind of action of interest to the young and single…I was up to my butt in culture, and spent all Saturday reconnecting with some friends from sleepaway camp I hadn’t seen since we were 13 years old!
It’s strange how you look at people you knew when they (and you) were very young: even though we’re all in our 50s now, and I could see one friend’s gray hair, another’s extra 20 pounds (hey, I’ve got those too), in my mind’s eye I still saw the girls I had played tetherball and gone canoeing with. I remember attending a 25th reunion at my high school where we all embraced and uttered variants of, “You haven’t changed a bit!” Until one friend’s husband smiled indulgently and said, “Of course you have! Michelle doesn’t look at all like the photos in your high school yearbook anymore.” He was right, of course, though I don’t think anyone (including his wife) thanked him for pointing it out.
To begin at the beginning: On Friday night, Joe, Luca and I saw Love Is My Sin, Peter Brook’s adaptation of Shakespeare’s sonnets into a 50-minute play sketching the course of a relationship, with Natasha Parry and Michael Pennington. Of course, this dramatic compression left out a lot–I particularly missed “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?”–and it was understandable given the age of the director and cast (85, 80, and 66) that the chosen sonnets focused on the passage of time, the pain of knowing you can’t be everything to a beloved; even the ones in the final section, “Time Defied,” were about love as a constant in a world of change, decay and death. An autumnal evening, in other words, but so satisfying as theater reduced to its bare essence: two people on a stage with some chairs and benches to shape the space for the different moments. I found Parry initially less engaging–though I hope I look that elegant at 80!–but I warmed up to her as the sonnets she spoke grew more emotional and often angry. Pennington was engaging from the start; he spoke Shakespeare’s verse conversationally, emphasizing the content: loss, longing, guilt, transcendence. By the time they closed with “Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments,” I was swept up in the journey they had taken, through the ups and downs of any relationship, the bitterness and joy, so that the final assertion–”Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds….Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks within his bending sickle’s compass come”–hits home as a convincing triumph of love over death. Or at least a formidable adversary!
So when I met my camp friends at the Museum of Natural History, I wasn’t as surprised as I might have been at how easily I fell into a rapport with three grown women, two of whom I last knew as teenagers. (The fourth, who’s kept in touch with all of us and went to college with me, was the force behind our reunion.) Two of us are married, two divorced; three have kids, one does not–we talked about our work, our spouses (or exes), our kids (or dogs!) as we walked through The Silk Road exhibit. Back at the hotel room the two out-of-towners were sharing, we pored over faded photos of ourselves at ages 11, 12, 13 in the woods of Vermont. It all comes back in a flash: the counselors whose names you realize you still remember, the lake where we skinny-dipped, the tags you had to turn when you swam–and you got called out at meals if you forgot to turn them back when you got out of the water–the crafts building where I sunk a linoleum cutter into my hand, the tetherball court, the barn where we square-danced with the boys from our brother camp. That was fun, but the best part for me was discovering what interesting women these girls had grown up to be: a newspaper photographer, a dentist in a poor rural community, a lawyer negotiating contracts for a music system with lots of digital apps.
After a leisurely dinner, we went off to see In the Heights, which had not been my first choice, but since I go to the theater all the time I figured visitors should get their preference. And I liked it more than I expected: a young, energetic cast sang the OK score with feeling and danced the hell out of the lively choreography. The story was predictable but sweet: residents of Washington Heights, once the heart of the Hispanic barrio but now being gentrified, try to stay true to their roots as they look for love and broader horizons. The main protagonist, played by Corbin Bleu (“If you were a teenage girl you’d know who he was,” said my friend with a teenage daughter when I asked), runs a bodega and is all set to sell out and head back to the Dominican Republic, but inspired by the death of his beloved Abuela Claudia decides to stay and fix up the place, reaffirming his commitment to the neighborhood. The girl who’s dropped out of Stanford and taken up with a guy who works at her family’s car service, to the distress of her parents on both counts, decides to go back to California and “finish what I started.” Being a New Yorker, I loved the show’s loving portrait of urban community–and I had to laugh when my out-of-town friend said she loved the backdrop of the Brooklyn Bridge. “George Washington Bridge!” I corrected.
We all embraced after the show as we headed our separate ways–two to the hotel, one to her brother’s apartment downtown and me to Brooklyn–vowing, “Same time next year!” We’ll see: good intentions sometimes gets swamped by the busy lives of middle-aged people with careers and kids. But it was a wonderful day, bridging my childhood and my adult life.
Back to being a mom on Sunday, when Luca joined me for the Maly Theater production of Uncle Vanya. Joe opted out: we’d seen it in English last season, and he’d seen a Russian film version years ago and though maybe one Russian-language version was enough! But when I saw the Maly last year performing Life and Fate (a great Soviet novel), I was struck by how beautiful and eloquent Russian is, how much savor it gave to the story to hear it in the language it was written in. Joe had told me several times how intriguing he’d found it as a teenager to see Vanya in Russian–much funnier and less melancholic than it’s usually played in English–and I wanted to experience it. I was a bit surprised when Luca said he wanted to come too, but he’s hooked on classics (as the old disco title had it), and I was glad to have company.
I’m so glad we went! Several members of the cast had also been in Life and Fate, most notably Sergey Kuryshev, who was a memorable Vanya, rolling around the dialogue in his mouth with the same explosive, exuberant relish he brought to the lead in L&F. His Vanya was no whining, pathetic figure, but a loud, difficult, highly dramatic man infuriated by the way he’s wasted his life. Ksenya Rappaport was especially good too in the difficult role of Elena, whose fatal appeal to all the play’s men is often a mystery to the audience, as bored as Elena claims to be by a woman who seems to have no purpose in life. Ignoring most of the text’s insistence on her laziness, Rappaport played a vital, energetic woman who really loves her impossible, elderly husband, even though he drives her crazy. In fact, what everyone in the excellent cast (with the possible exception of the slightly pallid Igor Chernevich as Astrov) did was to highlight the conflict between the characters’ frustrations and their equally strong love for life: the smell of the rain, the beauty of the landscape, the sheer pleasure of drinking a glass of tea or having a snack at midnight. Because you weren’t invited to feel sorry for them all the time, their disappointments and embarrassments were frequently funny. When Vanya discovers Astrov and Elena in a clinch, he freezes with a bouquet of flowers held absurdly in front of his face, while she wrenches herself from Astrov and clutches to her breast the plans he’s been showing her (and boring her to death with), as if somehow covering herself with paper will make her invisible. It’s hilarious; you don’t think about how horrible it is for Vanya to see the woman he’s fruitlessly pined after in the arms of his friend until he erupts in rage at the professor’s suggestion that the estate be sold and goes for his gun. And here too, the Russian word for “missed!” (whatever it is; I don’t speak a word) sounds way funnier than the English! I am a ferocious partisan of supertitles, which have replaced the horrid simultaneous translation headsets theaters used to use for foreign-language productions; now you can glance up to get the sense of what they’re saying, but you can hear the actors’ intonations (muffled or muted altogether by headsets). It makes all the difference. The closing monologue by Sonya is dark and sad, as it should be, but her final words, the repeated mantra “we shall rest,” have a somber majesty in Russian that gives the ending a different tone. The director, Lev Dodin, wrote a brief note for the program about Chekhov’s “amazing tenderness and desperate ruthlessness”; this production captured both.
Luca proclaimed that he liked it much better than last year’s Classic Stage Company production (which at the time he liked a lot). I was especially fascinated by his comment that the long Act II scene between Elena and Sonya was “less boring,” by which I think he meant that you were focused on what the characters were doing rather than what they were saying–which is often irrelevant in Chekhov, or at least a screen for what they’re really feeling. That to me is the essential difference between Shakespeare and many modern playwrights, beginning with Chekhov (well, with Ibsen, really). Shakespeare’s characters say what they mean; if they’re lying or prevaricating to another character, the audience always knows it. Modern drama’s characters frequently don’t say what they mean and often don’t know what they mean. Good productions–and actors–know the difference and perform them accordingly.
Tags: In the Heights, Love Is My Sin, reunions, The Silk Road, Uncle Vanya
