Pensamientos Acerca de Obras de Teatro (Thoughts About Plays)

Avenue Q Vs. Cabaret
La Vida Es Mentira Y Las Mentiras, Mentiras Son
Thoughts on Anton Chekhov's The Seagull
Thoughts on Cabaret

La Vida Es Mentira y las Mentiras, Mentiras Son

My father once told me that Eugene O'Neill's 1939 play The Iceman Cometh was the one thing I should read if I really wanted to know more about people. And indeed, the play taught me more about the way people really are than a dozen Hollywood movies.

Granted, it wasn’t a nice lesson. We all like to think that we are a lot better than we are. That we don’t delude ourselves with lies and illusions. That we don’t continually put off attempts to improve ourselves. And yet we also know that deep down there are worse things we can do than trap ourselves within our self-made myths.

For often our attempts to make others face the truth prove to be just one more way of hiding from the unpleasant truths of our own existence. Or so O’Neill would have us believe.

Thoughts on Anton Chekhov's The Seagull

Konstantin Treplev, c'est moi. At least back in 1987. And I too had a Nina in my life and I used to think about her every day.

The first time I read Anton Chekhov's play The Seagull, I was in my late teens and I had a hard time understanding why all the play's characters chose to live the way they did instead of rearranging their lives in a more logical fashion. Since I had never really dated in high school and had never seriously explored the idea of romantic love, I had difficulty understanding why a person who had been romantically rejected by one person wouldn't just simply go on to another person, especially if said person obviously liked him or her a lot more than his or her original choice. I thought that the protagonist Konstantin Treplev was more than a bit foolish in his pursuit of the young would-be actress Nina -- especially when he ignored another woman named Masha, who had a crush on him -- and that Nina was more than a bit foolish in her attraction to the older man Trigorin, an established author who, within the course of the play, would seduce and abandon her. True, the ending in which Nina went mad and Konstantin killed himself was tragic. But I could not help thinking how easily it could have been avoided.

When I read the play again in my mid-twenties after I had had my own bouts with unrequited love, I understood far better the actions and motives of the play's characters. It didn't hurt that for a brief time I myself had unsuccessfully pursued a Nina of my own -- and had even seen an older, Trigorin-like person as my would-be rival for her affection. Of course, the rivalry proved to be mostly in my imagination. It had become increasingly obvious to everyone save myself that the Nina in question was never going to be romantically interested in me. And like Konstantin Treplev, I seriously considered resolving my dilemma with a self-inflicted gunshot. Fortunately, I eventually changed my mind. But it was not a decision I made lightly. Indeed, I had contemplated suicide for more than a year afterward, only abandoning the notion when it became increasingly clear that I was more likely to hurt my family with my suicide than to accomplish anything else.

Perhaps all young men of a literary inclination like to think that they're Konstantin Treplev, forever in love with a person like Nina, who will eventually reject them for someone else. And we like to cling to that belief, even if we grow up to be more like Trigorin.

In many ways, I see Chekhov's The Seagull as an allegory about the writer's relationship with society. Like Konstantin, the writer likes to believe that his beloved -- i.e., society -- will eventually return his love and cease expending her affections on unworthier targets. Yet time and again, the writer ends up disappointed when his beloved proves to be all too human and chooses to go with the exciting and prosperous older man who will eventually break her heart rather than go with the younger, less experienced man who truly loves her.

Yet if I had won the love of my fair Nina, I would have been a very different person than I am today. And I'm not entirely convinced that I would be a better man. For knowing what it's like to be rejected has given me more sympathy for a lot of people with whom I'd not normally sympathize. And made me more emotionally generous toward the few women in my life who have professed love for me.

I won't pretend that it made me perfect.

But I hope that it did make me better.

Avenue Q Vs. Cabaret

Sometimes I wonder if the most apt comment on racism comes not from the “Everyone's a Little Bit Racist” song from the Broadway musical Avenue Q (which always seemed kind of banal to me) but from the setup for the “Tomorrow Belongs to Me” number in the play Cabaret.

Specifically the part just before the song in which we discover that the charming businessman who has been helping out the play's protagonists, Cliff and Sally, is actually an ardent Nazi Party member, and that the cute little German streetwalker with which we the audience have been encouraged to sympathize is actually a hardcore anti-Semite.

In the movie version, of course, the filmmakers choose to omit this part, preferring instead to have “Tomorrow Belongs to Me” sung by a random crowd of strangers whom the audience never really gets to know the same way we get to know the streetwalker and the Nazi Party member in the play. The result makes for a powerful moment, that's true, but alas, it's not as powerful as the same moment in the play in which “Tomorrow Belongs to Me” (the ultimate hymn to Nazi superiority) ends up being sung by people who are not strangers. People whom we the audience have come to know throughout the play. People whom we have even been encouraged to like.

True, the notion that Nazis were people too is not a new message, but it's not a popular notion either. After all, Nazis were in a sense the ultimate racists. People who took the notion of racial superiority to the ultimate limit and killed millions of people because of it. To see them as little more than fellow human beings (as opposed to devils incarnate) and worse yet, as likable human beings inevitably implies that we the audience might very well end up acting like them if we're not careful.

And yet the song makes an important point. After all, racism and other murderous prejudices have rarely been held in real life solely by unlikable misanthropes who have absolutely no appeal at all to their fellow human beings. They have been more often than not held by people that even most liberal people would find to be quite likable under most circumstances. Indeed, the notion that racism and other prejudices are only held by “bad” people is itself a dangerous concept because it implies that “good” people -- and it should be noted here that many of the Nazis did consider themselves to be good people -- have no need to examine their prejudices. That bigotry in a sense is only a valid problem for other people, preferably strangers. And that, sadly, is just not true.

I must confess that there have been many times when I've encountered real-life bigots who nevertheless proved to be every bit as likable as the characters who sing Cabaret the play's version of “Tomorrow Belongs to Me.” And, of course, such people have inevitably forced me to examine my prejudices as well.

In many ways, I consider this a good thing. For one cannot realistically deal with a problem unless one realistically examines how it exists in the real world. And one can't realistically examine such a problem if one insists on treating silly little ditties like “Everyone's a Little Bit Racist” as if they were genuinely meaningful.

In a sense, the Avenue Q song is correct. Everyone does tend to have their share of prejudices, racial and otherwise, and everyone does tend to favor or dislike certain racial groups for reasons that aren't exactly logical.

But there's more to it than that. Some people are more apt to act upon their prejudices than others, some are less inclined to examine or contradict their prejudices than others, and of course, some people are more inclined to use their prejudices as motives for genuinely antisocial actions. To blithely dismiss all this by singing “Everyone's a Little Bit Racist” ultimately trivializes racism.

And trivializing racism ultimately assures the type of people who would sing a song like “Tomorrow Belongs to Me” the ultimate victory.

Thoughts on Cabaret

I've been spending a lot of time recently listening to the 1999 Broadway soundtrack for Cabaret. Perhaps because its blend of dark cynicism and hopeless romanticism just seem to suit my mood right now.

“Maybe This Time” seems the perfect theme for any single person like myself who has a history of -- shall we say -- dysfunctional relationships. And, of course, “Money” has an universal appeal, even to those of us who aren't Republicans.

And yet I don't quite have the same affection for the movie version that I do for the Broadway play.

After all, I saw a local version of the play this past summer and fell in love with it instantly. Then I rented the 1972 movie version and found myself curiously underwhelmed.

It was not just that a lot of my favorite songs -- “Perfectly Marvelous,” for example -- were cut from the movie. Nor do I have anything against Liza Minnelli, who is quite a talented woman who deserved far more musical roles than she has had.

But the movie seemed to miss the whole point of the play. And worse yet, it reshaped itself to fit the needs of Ms. Minnelli than vice versa. Thus, a rather daring piece about a poor showgirl named Sally Bowles became a rather pompous piece about a spoiled Daddy's girl named Sally Bowles. Instead of being a thinly veiled allegory about the rise of Nazi Germany -- with Liza representing the more apathetic elements of the West and his boyfriend representing the more idealistic elements -- it became the story of a poor little rich girl slumming in a Berlin nightclub whose story only occasionally concerned itself about the Nazis.

Some bits were inspired. Joel Grey made an excellent MC, Liza, of course, was great at singing and dancing, and the very lovely Marisa Berenson made an interesting contrast to the ape used in the “If You Could See Her” number to mock non-Aryans.

But it just wasn't enough.

I know the film is supposed to be a classic, but for me, it was just okay. And Cabaret deserves to be a bit more than “just okay.”