The Weissman Theatre – A Temple of Art Crumbling

Have you ever been in an empty theater by yourself? Limited light, dark shadows, your eyes struggling to adjust to darkness with only the red glow of the exit signs showing you the where you can walk. In the dark there is an utter aloneness and silence that you can almost touch. There’s nothingness and yet there is the expectation that something can happen.

There is something sad about an empty theater, but there is something even sadder and it’s a theater that is in ruins and falling apart. The nothingness is still there but the possibility of life is not there anymore. It’s like a wounded animal that has crawled into the woods to die. There is an emptiness, a sense that a scream can happen, but above all there is silence and stillness. One’s mind races in a space like that.

I have a coffee table book that I like to look at. It’s a soft-covered book, so I guess it’s not really a coffee table book, but it’s a book with the title, Lost Broadway Theaters. It holds stories and photos of many of the theaters built for Broadway in the 19th and 20^th centuries that no longer exist, but that showcased the best of vaudeville, theater, operettas, and musicals. The pictures show these theaters in their glory and also show them as they were when they were converted into movie theaters, adult entertainment venues, and department stores. You finally get to see some of them in their decrepit state before they were torn down. The stories of each of these theaters is fascinating – landmark productions that breathed life into our culture and in some cases, influenced how we came to think of ourselves were on these stages. These places no longer exist or rather, they exist now only in memory. I’m haunted and touched by that book.

Years ago I used to live in Mt. Pleasant in Washington, DC, not far from the old Tivoli Theater, a movie palace created in the Italian Renaissance revival style in 1924. The Tivoli seated more than 1,700 people and it is located at 14^th Street and Park Road. When I lived nearby, the theater was boarded up and a real wreck. There was rusting and rotting canopies, and hundreds of pigeons had taken up residence in its eaves with the expected results. Sometimes, I would walk my dog by it, wondering what it looked like in side. I never had the chance to see that.

Years later the theater was declared a historical landmark and refurbished but as a mixed use venue. A friend of mine invited me to dinner at a restaurant named Rumberos that was right near the Tivoli. When we were seated in the restaurant, he informed me that part of the restaurant was built in the Tivoli and you could see parts of the proscenium arch in the restaurant. I looked around and about two yards away was the arch, seemingly growing out of the floor of the restaurant and holding on to pieces of its plaster moldings, as it thrusted into the ceiling and curved to a wall, which was where center stage must have been. I was having a drink on the Tivoli stage apron. I was relieved, disturbed, fascinated, and comforted to see that arch. I was glad to be there.

At a design meeting for Follies in July, our set designer told us of an old theater in Michigan that had actually been converted into a parking garage. The theater was not destroyed – it just had a garage built in it and the old proscenium overlooks parked cars now. It was pretty hard to believe. The set designer shared a picture of the theater with cars parked in front of a baroque arch. It’s both disturbing and fascinating to see.

Seeing our places of art turned into mundane venues or allowed to crumble borders on a sense of desecration and sacrilege, but it should come as no surprise that we feel that way or that we use religious terms to express ourselves about art. The basis of art is creating something from our imagination. The act of creating is the closest that we as humans come to touching the divine. The act of creation allows us to be what we know God or the gods to be – a creator. The act holds something sacred. And this is especially so when what we are creating is the performing arts, where our art is making stories about how we act and know ourselves to be as human beings. And the instrument for this creation is our own bodies as human actors.

Philosophers have pondered the place and power of aesthetics for centuries. Aristotle wrote of the philosophy of art and the essence of correct story telling in his Poetics. In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche wrote of aesthetics becoming the new metaphysic, replacing ethics, in the postmodern world. “Art and not morality is represented as the actual metaphysical activity of mankind.” Art is on its way to becoming the language of religion and our understanding of self according to him.

Destroying a theater really does then seem to be a sacrilege, and having a party in a dead theater is either the act of religious ritual of celebration and remembrance – like a funeral – or it could be much darker, a ritual of awaking the dead and their memories. It’s kind of like playing with a Ouija board and you invite someone from the spirit world you didn’t expect and who won’t go away. Who knew that would happen?

I think we’re doing both in Follies.

The Weissman Theatre is a living character not talked about in Follies per se, but it is as important as any human character in the piece. It lives on in those that have performed in it and is alive with those who are remembering. It harbors the pain of its coming death and it is locus for the memory of those celebrating on its deadened stage. And what better place to face self-reflection, if you are one of the former follies girls, than in this theater where you can relive your past. Only in this place could the affirmation of a good memory be intensified and shared, such as Carlotta’s “I’m Still Here,” Hattie’s “Broadway Baby,” or Stella’s “Who’s that Woman?” And only in this place would the conflict with the past be ripped open in self-discovery when the buried, forgotten or ignored memories come alive. This is what Sally, Buddy, Ben and Phyllis encounter when they come to this party.

Throughout the preparation of Follies, I keep coming back to the memory of walking by the boarded-up ruins of the Tivoli Theater and then seeing that arch years later.

Next Up: Relationships on the Rocks. Here comes Sally and Buddy Plummer, and Phyllis and Benjamin Stone.

For additional information about the production itself, go to The Arlington Players website: www.thearlingtonplayers.org.

If you have questions for the director, feel free to respond to the blog or email him at folliesdirector@gmail.com. Responses to the blog may be posted publicly; email correspondence will be private.

Quote is taken from The Birth of Tragedy by Friedrich Nietzsche

Do You Believe in Ghosts?

Follies’ Weissman Theatre is full of ghosts. They inhabit the fabric of the theater, reliving the glory of the theatrical performances that took place on its stage. The first characters that the audience experiences in Follies are the ghosts of the follies girls drifting and dancing on its deadened stage. The last ones experienced are the ghosts of our leads – young Sally, Phyllis, Ben and Buddy, saying good bye in a sense and being entombed in the theater that is poised to be destroyed. I don’t think it’s an accident that James Goldman began and ended with ghosts. Ghosts are a universal literary foil and they are definitely a foil for the ‘real’ people in Follies. They help give the musical its depth.

So, do you believe in ghosts?

I do.

 

Famed ghost hunter and parapsychologist Hans Holzer defines a ghost as a spirit that has gotten stuck in the physical world but is not part of the physical world. He also makes a distinction between a ghost and a haunting. A haunting is a ‘psychic imprint, an imprint on the atmosphere, which is energy like a television picture that is stuck in time. To the average person it looks exactly the same as a ghost. If it were observed exactly alike at the same time in the same place and a number of witnesses have reported identical experiences, then you probably have an imprint. If, from different witnesses, you have reports saying there’s a variation in what the ghost is doing, then it’s a real person.’

 

The use of ghosts in literature is extensive, and they are often used to reveal a supernatural truth or provide a cosmic warning. In some cases, they advance the plot quickly by revealing additional background information – sort of a deus ex machina in the middle of the story. Ghosts never fail to give added weight to a message since we believe that what they say comes from a source from the other side. Their messages are often interpreted as messages of grace from God or the gods, or conversely, they are messages from demons or the dark side. In either case, the feeling around the appearance and the message of a ghost is usually frightening and at minimum, anxious and tense. We’re feeling something extra-ordinary and so we should take heed.

Ghosts in literature may seek our help and may offer help. Ghosts beg to be put at peace. In the Iliad, the ghost of Achilles’ best friend Patroclus appears to Achilles in a dream, begging him to bury him as soon as he can so that he can pass into Hades and be at rest. And literary ghosts have been known to offer assistance to us humans: the ghost of Marley in A Christmas Carol is a famous example of supernatural intervention: “I am here tonight to warn you, that you have yet a chance and hope of escaping my fate. A chance and hope of my procuring, Ebenezer….You will be haunted by Three Spirits….Without their visits, you cannot hope to shun the path I tread.” And those three spirits come from the other side and guide Scrooge.

Still, not all ghosts are pleasant and needing help. Some ghosts manifest to correct a wrong. The ghost of Hamlet’s father informs Hamlet about the truth of his death and asks to be avenged. And appearing to those who have done you wrong, like the ghost of Banquo does to Macbeth, is nothing short of terrifying and reminding you that you have a guilty conscience – or should have.

Musicals are certainly not immune from ghosts. Carousel sees Billy Bigelow beg to come down to earth to make amends for the wrong choices that he made in life. The Secret Garden sees the ghosts of all those who have been in young Mary Lennox’s life appear to inspire and cosmically guide her to a new life at her uncle’s manor in Yorkshire, England.

So are the ghosts in Follies spirits of the dead, hauntings – those psychic recordings impressed on space and time, or something else?

I think they are all three, and that something else is the manifestation of one’s memory as its young self – not really a ghost but a person created from one’s mind.

Let me explain. A ghost of a follies girl could be an actual spirit living in the Weissman Theatre – a spirit interacting with the living; others could be a haunting – a psychic recording of a follies girl caught repeating a dance that she loved so much that an image of her dancing over and over is imprinted on space and time. The third is the most interesting and the most present in Follies: The memory of someone is so palpable that it comes alive as a psychic person, conjured up by those attending the reunion at the Weissman Theatre. This ‘memory person’ is not a ghost or haunting in a classic sense, but a projection of the memory.

But is it? Projection of a memory seems to put the creation of that ‘memory person’ at the behest of the person remembering. Would this mean that the ‘memory person’ lives out only what the older remembers? Or does the ‘memory person’ live the past independently of the one remembering and s/he acts out the past as it actually was, not as it was remembered from one person’s point of view?

For Follies, I think both occur. A good example is that many of young Sally’s brief appearances in Act 1 are painful moments of rejection and disappointment, but somehow Sally does not remember them or choose to remember them. Young Sally stands as a memory not consistent with what Sally’s memory. Is young Sally, therefore, her own person and not an extension of Sally’s memory? Still, in “Too Many Mornings,” Sally gives her younger self to Ben, or is it Ben remembering Sally as her young self being given to him? The fact the young Sally is in the theater before Sally comes to the Weissman Theatre seems to indicate that the memory is indeed her own person and it stands on its own.

Please forgive me about these musings that would fit better in a philosophy class than a blog about making a show. But how to create these ghostly characters – their movement, acting and internal monologue – that make up more than a third of the cast is a major challenge for me as a director. How do you guide actors to create these characters that, for the most part, do not speak and will react (or not) with their surroundings and ‘real’ people? The metaphysics of who they are is the first step to making these characters breathe on stage.

Nearly every production of Follies that I have seen has struggled with the concept of the ghosts. When ignored or not understood, it creates a mess of the piece; when inconsistent in its interpretation and execution, it creates confusion and muddies and weakens the story. And though the three types of ‘ghosts’ can work, that many paradigms on stage will also create confusion for an audience. So why not get rid of them? I know of one production that did that.

Fie! The ghosts are the heart of Follies. They are memory and haunting and they create anxiety and tension, and yes, both a fascination and fear in the audience. They let us know that the journey that we take with this story is important – so important that another reality is involved: we are not only in the natural world, but we are also in a preternatural one. And they emphasize a key point to the piece – ghosts don’t just appear anywhere, but usually appear where great emotion is involved and the Weissman Theatre this night is a place of great emotion. An old and crumbling theater is just a place for a ghost.

Next up, The Weissman Theatre: A Temple of Art Crumbling.

For additional information about the production itself, go to The Arlington Players website: www.thearlingtonplayers.org.

If you have questions for the director, feel free to respond to the blog or email him at folliesdirector@gmail.com. Responses to the blog may be posted publicly; email correspondence will be private.

The quotes and background information about Hans Holzer are taken from http://www.ghostvillage.com and http://www.cosmiclighthouse.com.

Quotes are also taken from The Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens

 

Memory Agonistes – Reunions

Several years ago, I received a call out of the blue. The person on the phone – an enthusiastic lady – identified herself as a former grade school classmate of mine. I drew a blank: I had no idea who she was. She regaled me with memories of classmates, asking if I remembered “David” or had I seen “Mary.” I felt put on the spot – most of the names she brought up sounded familiar, but I could not place a name with a face. I was relieved when she told me she had married “Greg” and I really did remember him. Of course, throughout this embarrassing stroll down non-memory lane, I really was wondering why she called.

Then came the zinger: she wanted to make sure I got an invitation to my 25^th high school reunion.

Gulp.

Before she had called, I had thought about the fact that it had been 25 years since my high school graduation. But I certainly didn’t expect her call or, just as importantly, my ambivalent feelings on thought of a reunion.

Reunions can do that to people. I’ve spoken to many people – especially since I agreed to do Follies – about their feelings on reunions. Some love the thought of getting together with people from their past; others abhor the thought of meeting up with those that they have not seen in years. Some are indifferent. The range of emotions about reunions is as diverse as those thinking about them.

Reunions present us a time to remember collectively and a time to reflect privately. That’s what we go to them for – to remember those from our past and take a look at whom they have become. And that’s what those from our past do too – they come to look at us – who we were and whom we have become. The experience makes us take account of who are – for some of us, with pride, and for others, with regret. Reunions hold both recollection and reckoning.

For all of us, memory is a powerful aspect of being human – it is a basis for how we understand ourselves as human beings. Remembering something that has taken place in our lives is the first step for toward reflecting and either reaffirming our life choices or taking action to change them.

So what’s the reason for unease with getting together with people from the past and remembering? I think there are lots of reasons. Some people that have a personality trait of not thinking “backward” but only looking forward could be an example. These kinds of people can be brash, adventurous and straightforward – a person who lives life simply while moving on through life’s challenges. Some people grow to be more agoraphobic and do not want to see others. Some too may have bad memories that they do not want to relive – there are those people with whom we never were really comfortable is another possible reason.

But I really suspect much of “reunion discomfort” has little to do with others, but more to do with ourselves. When going to a reunion, we remember, reflect, and assess ourselves. It’s the time when we remember the past, with others, and then we judge who we are, alone. Judging ourselves is dangerous – it leads to change or perhaps the decision not to. And it is pretty hard not to do this at a reunion.

The reunion is a central plot device in Follies and its focus on remembering. It dominates the first act as the dramatic underpinning of the story and it frames the piece: Follies first and foremost is about a reunion. The former Weissman Follies showgirls and their husbands come to a reunion at the Weissman Theater to visit and remember. And by this remembering, this reunion provides a context for ghosts of the past to appear. Understanding and exploring the meaning of reunion is a key exercise for the actors in building the realism – and related the preternaturalism and surrealism – of Follies.

“Oh my God, I can’t believe it’s you.”

“Is that you? I didn’t know you were coming.”

“I’m here. You look great.”

“You too. I’m so glad to see you.”

So what’s so scary about that?

Next up – things to be scared about – memories that conjure the spirit world: Do You Believe in Ghosts?

For additional information about the production itself, go to The Arlington Players website: www.thearlingtonplayers.org.

If you have questions for the director, feel free to respond to the blog or email him at folliesdirector@gmail.com. Responses to the blog may be posted publicly; email correspondence will be private.