Happy Endings


In the Blood, recently put on by UW Drama, does not have a happy ending. The run is over now and the play has been published for many years, so it’s no spoiler to say that. 

The main character, Hester, ends up killing her oldest child, ruining her own life and the lives of her other four children. You sort of see it coming and sort of not. Chekhov’s gun is brandished multiple times, as Hester says, to her children and others, “Don’t make me hurt you.” But you think, if you are like me, that that is maybe the end of it, and meant to show the impact of her circumstances. The world, embodied in the other adult characters, has treated her horribly. Anyone in her place would be justified in being angry and lashing out in some way. Alas, the lashings move beyond verbal in the final scenes. 


Buried Child, by Sam Shepard does not have a happy ending either. Each character is more desperately pathetic than the next. Instead of empathy, the suffering portrayed produces distance between you and the people on stage. A family sort of finishes disintegrating, right in front of you, into a pile of betrayal, weakness and death. Not good.


But it’s different. In the middle of a conversation with a friend today about In the Blood, I said one of those thoughts you did not realize you had until you speak it. I said In the Blood has a difficult, maybe even depressing ending. Even so, you feel a call to justice. The tragedy of Hester is that the world mistreated her so badly that she took the action she did. In a better world, you think, no one would ever live in such desperate circumstances. In a better world, no one would inflict so much cruelty on Hester. Let me think about what my part is in creating the world as it is. Let me think about how to make it better. 


Buried Child is not that, at least not for me. I came away thinking that people are irredeemably awful, life is an unfunny joke, and it just keeps getting worse. And there is no way out. There was a miasma over me for days. I like to say I saw it at age 18 and I still have never gotten over it. (As an aside, I also think maybe seeing that show has something to do with my love of theater. After all, if a show could have that much impact, there must be something really special going on in there, in that dark room.) 


So I could see, I told my friend, why people don’t like plays like these two, that don’t have happy endings. But I had never really distinguished for myself that there are two (at least, I suppose) kinds of unhappy endings. One leading to hope, or maybe even action and change. And another leading to a sort of stunned stasis. I think there is something to that. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

American Buffalo in Marysville

Image
If you've taken an acting class, you might have done an Uta Hagen exercise requiring you to perform a two-minute slice of life.  Just you, on stage, silently doing something you might do on an ordinary day.  Maybe you're ironing.  Maybe you're making a sandwich.  The point is for the audience to see you acting naturally.  It's not as easy as it sounds. American Buffalo , now playing at Red Curtain Foundation for the Arts in Marysville starts out with an Uta Hagen exercise, basically.  Scott B. Randall plays Donny Dubrow, the owner of a junk store.  Before the house lights even fade down, Donny comes on stage and begins doing what he might do on any typical morning.  He has his coffee cup in hand.  He straightens up this. He looks at that.  He takes a small trash can out into the alleyway and empties it.  He goes out the front door to get the morning newspaper.  It's engrossing to watch all the things he does and guess or c...
Read more

Merchant of Venice: The Musical

Image
Key plot elements, if you don’t know the show: Antonio, a Venetian merchant, borrows money from Shylock, who is Jewish. The money is to help Antonio’s friend, Bassanio, to woo Portia, a sort of wealthy heiress. Meanwhile, Shylock’s daughter, Jessica, yearns to escape her father and her Jewish identity by marrying Lorenzo, a Christian. When Antonio is unable to pay back the money, Shylock believes he finally has the chance to have the power of the law on his side. It’s an illusion. Shylock loses everything.  My first thought, halfway through Act One was, I want to go out to the lobby at intermission and buy the soundtrack. The music grabbed me from the very first number and never let me go.  This is not Phantom or Rent, though, where you can just do that. It’s a brand new show, and I saw its first public performance. But it had that quality. I wanted to be able to shove the CD into my car’s player and listen on the way home. It's a staged reading. At the same time there are pro...
Read more

The White Snake by ReAct

Image
Last week, I read Theatre of the Unimpressed by Jordan Tannahill. The book rages – artfully – against plays that never ask themselves the question, why does this need to be done in front of a live audience. It’s a happy coincidence, then that the first play I have seen since reading the book was The White Snake , produced by ReAct and now playing at 12th Avenue Arts. The show knows exactly why it needs to be done in front of a live audience. It’s because it goe s back to the roots of theater, people telling stories to one another, to the audience, to me. It’s a beautiful story, simply told. At the top, three actors begin narrating directly to the audience, spooling out playwright Mary Zimmerman’s version of the Chinese legend, dating in written form to the Ming Dynasty. After the context is set, three other actors begin playing the parts of White Snake, Green Snake, and Xu Xian as the narrators and the rest of the ensemble begin playing various other parts, including a monk, a...
Read more