Lachen und Weinen

Tonight, I got to see the final dress rehearsal for the black box theatre operas that are going up tomorrow through the weekend. The evening was a double bill, and it really was "Lachen und Weinen" - or more like "Weinen und Lachen".

The first piece, For a Look or a Touch by Jake Heggie, is incredibly powerful and incredibly anguished. Gad, now an old man living alone in Germany, is visited by the ghost of Manfred, his lover when they were young. During World War II, both were persecuted by the Nazis. Manfred perished in the concentration camp. Gad survived but buried his experiences under shame. Homosexuality was still a crime after World War II. Unlike the other Holocaust victims' experiences, his suffering was not immediately recognized. Manfred returns to help Gad remember, to open the floodgates and help him make peace. Very simple in its conception and staging, this work is unbelievably intense and had me sobbing. Manfred was played by a guy in my voice studio, and his performance was astonishing. It may be one of the top five performances I've seen ever. In my lifetime. And I'm not just thinking of the operas I've seen -- I mean any performance from film to straight theater to musicals to opera. Just stunning.

The second piece is a complete inverse. The world turns topsy-turvy in the absurdist work The Breasts of Tiresias by Poulenc. Bright, almost gaudy colors in the costumes, bizarre storylines, dialogue and acting that are deliberately over-the-top all meld in this strange, weird, hilarious mocking of the post-World War II command to "go forth and procreate." In the prologue, the singer talks explicitly about how the moral of this play is to encourage everyone in the audience to "go make babies." The last line of the show, sung by the entire chorus to the audience, is "Go right home and make babies now!" In the work, a wife becomes fed up with her wifely duties, cuts off her breasts which are depicted as balloons -- not a violent gesture, more a weird, funny mugging as she snips the strings of the helium balloons which float out of her costume to hover above her head. She renounces her husband, grows a beard, and changes her name from Therese to the male "Tiresias." Tiresias throws a rope around her/his husband, who now is in a housedress, and pulls him along. He rebels and decides that, since she won't do it, he'll make babies for the entire town. He constructs this vast babymaking machine and creates thousands of children. The town starts to starve from the population growth, but he insists that the children can increase the wealth instead of eating away at it because "This one is a published author. He's already sold 750,000 copies!"

The story of Poulenc's opera doesn't even fully give the flavor of how bizarre it really is. I read the synopsis in the program and thought it would be odd, but I had no idea until I actually saw the stage interactions and the costumes and heard the music and text. Unbelievable. The whole audience was guffawing throughout.

Definitely an interesting night at the theatre. The two pieces are deliberately associated through their World War II linkages as well as their questions about "what makes a person a valuable contributor to society?" According to the director's program notes, one of the justifications for persecuting gay people in Nazi Germany was that they were "depriving Germany of the children they owe her." Chilling.

Besides the obvious questions the shows raise with respect to society and societal values, there's a directorial question as well: Does it enhance or detract from theatre to have two such wonderful yet vastly contrasting pieces juxtaposed? Is the Heggie piece more powerful if it stands alone? Or does the Poulenc provide much needed relief and release? Is the Poulenc more powerful because we're so surprised by laughter at that point, so astonished to find that we want to and can laugh after such a wrenching subject?

Absolutely phenomenal productions. The performers just have me in awe. I'm stunned and oh so grateful to be here, able to see professional quality productions from a front row seat that's only a few feet away from such stunning performers. Just amazing.

~Hope

PS The title of this post means "Laughing and Crying". It's the title of a German art song by Schubert.