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