Relationships on the Rocks, Part II: Phyllis and Ben

Phyllis and Ben. Where to start? For those of us in the Washington, DC area, the high-powered couple is something that we recognize. Many of us have seen the super-sophisticated couple that is charming and innocuous, enjoys a pun, talks around an issue, communicates through nuance and metaphor, and ah, but underneath, is simmering and seething with their own reality.

That’s what we find when we meet Phyllis and Ben at this reunion. Phyllis Rogers Stone, Sally’s contemporary in the follies and former roommate, comes with her husband Benjamin in tow. They communicate around an issue with quips and barbs. The intimacy and honesty of their relationship went astray long ago and though they seem to be the couple everyone wants to be, they are shells of human beings. And, from at least Phyllis’ point of view, they are not who they expected to be.

Phyllis comes to this reunion at crossroads and with purpose. In her first conversation in the play with Ben, she talks with him in a rather direct way – something that she does not do often – and tells him honestly why she is here: “I’ve been devoting my attention to beginnings lately. I wanted something when I came here thirty years ago but I forgot to write it down and God knows what it was.” And then comes Phyllis’ MO: every time she reveals something slightly vulnerable or honest, she lashes back with a caustic comment.

She comes to this reunion to find something she lost. She is looking for a new beginning. She thinks that it has to do with remembering and going back to her roots. Like Sally, she comes to this night with change on her mind. She suspects, as we watch the story unfold, that it will be about leaving Ben, but she’s still figuring out what it is she needs to do to change. Like those who successfully make a change in their lives, Phyllis understands on some level that she needs to look back and reflect in order to make a change that means something.

Of the four leads, Phyllis – with all her sturm und drang – is following a path of discovery by remembering in a fairly healthy way. She wants to know her past and learn how she became the unhappy woman she is. Buddy didn’t plan on coming to this reunion to remember: he’s unexpectedly remembering after he followed Sally to New York. Sally is trying to make the past the present – not a psychologically healthy thing to do. Ben claims that he never looks back – what’s the point? – and his approach is the most dangerous one of all. Phyllis, of all of them, understands on some level that to change is to look back at what you have done, understand the how and the why of those actions, and plan a change. She’s subconsciously doing cognitive therapy.

Of course in the midst of her revelations, which swing between being direct and clamming up, she finds that she is not thrilled that Sally is going after her husband. It will be really interesting as a director to develop the subtext with the actor playing Phyllis on this point. Phyllis increasingly becomes concerned with Sally’s attention to Ben. At the same time, she confronts Ben and lets him have it, telling him that she’s leaving him and revealing her affairs with younger men. Phyllis’ emotional journey is a rich one, classic in its desires and irregular in its path. Her struggle to integrate the purity of her youth with the jaded and bitter sense of herself is the point of her folly in the second act, ‘The Story of Lucy and Jessie.’ At the end of the night, we’re still not sure how successful her discovery is. Years of behavior do not change in one night.

One final point on Phyllis. Of the four principals, Phyllis is markedly different from her younger self. Young Phyllis portrays hope, sweetness, and love so openly. These are qualities Phyllis yearns for but we certainly don’t see; somehow and somewhere, are those qualities still there?

Benjamin Stone probably does not think so. Successful diplomat and former successful philanderer, Ben accompanies Phyllis to this reunion thinking that it will have nothing to do with him. Why does he come? For his ego would be a good answer. He wants to be praised by all those who knew him as a struggling law student – those who were glamorous showgirls – and they will now know and see that he’s an international figure and a player in the world. That ego gets a major boost with the Sally’s fawning attention. It’s exactly what Ben wants on this night, but he gets more than he planned for. That attention – Sally’s acting out of the past – pulls Ben into the past.

Because he does not like or plan to remember, he is on strange and dangerous ground. Sally is remembering and acting on it. Phyllis is remembering and acting on it. Buddy is remembering and acting on it. Ben has to remember and act on it. He’s pulled into the memory vortex. Without the skills to remember or to reflect, he is confused and threatened by the actions of Sally and Phyllis in particular on this night. His psychic break in ‘Live, Laugh, Love’ ends the follies vaudeville sequence and pushes the story back to realism. There’s nothing that propels us into our life’s metaphors (in this story, the follies vaudeville sequence) than a psychological crisis. And there’s nothing that destroys life’s metaphors better than a psychological crisis, too.

I like Ben. I see a lot of myself in him. I have found that the way he views the past to be tempting for me: it seems so much harder to integrate our past with whom we are in the present and look at ourselves. Isn’t it better just to start a new day fresh without reflection? “Today is the first day of the rest of your life.” It’s a maxim for forgiving the past. It also could be a maxim for ignoring it.

I was fortunate to be able to have a reading of Follies this past weekend. I enjoy holding readings of scripts that I am about to direct. For me, there is nothing more refreshing than hearing the words out loud and not with my own voice. The reading was held so that the production staff could hear the script out loud and feel the rhythm of the piece. What struck me on hearing the script was how harsh the words of the four principal characters are to each other and how different the words of their younger selves are in relation to them. How easy it would be to make these characters one dimensional. Then there is this huge, rich chasm of silence in the script that centers on actors acting off the line and the presence and actions of the silent ghosts on the stage.  Mixing all these together will form the foundation of the complete story and reflect all these characters’ humanity.

I’m taking a break on blogging as the director for the next post. There will be a guest blogger: the choreographer. He’s pretty different from the director.

Next up: Vaudeville at its Best – Let’s Dance.

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.

Relationships on the Rocks, Part I: Sally and Buddy

When I first started writing this post, I thought of commenting on all four principals in Follies: Sally, Buddy, Phyllis, and Ben at once. As I starting writing it, it became clear to me that I could write a lot on each, so I am dividing this into two posts. There are many possible ways to discuss these four – by gender, by couple, by possible couple, by their follies sequence – among other possible mental mixings. I’ve decided to talk about them as the couple they are at the beginning of Follies. So, let’s look at Buddy and Sally.

Sally Durant Plummer is the first to arrive at the reunion of the Weissman Girls, nearly flying onto the theater stage with a determination to not miss a thing. She looks like a nice lady, anxious to meet up with her fellow follies chorines for this big party, but it becomes clear that she is on a mission: she wants to meet up with the love from her youth, Benjamin Stone. Benjamin left her thirty years ago for her friend and roommate, Phyllis Rogers, and though devastated at that break up, Sally is still in love with him. She hopes that Phyllis comes to this reunion and bringing Ben, for she wants to see if Ben thinks he made a mistake marrying Phyllis. She hopes so, because that is a mistake she wants to correct.

How did Sally get to this point in her life? And why has she harbored this hope for the love of her youth? She married Ben’s friend, Buddy Plummer, a man who was crazy about her and loved her fully. Here she is – 49 years old, perky, seemingly optimistic, a not-so-stylish, suburban housewife who has raised her sons, hoping for her lost love to return to her. She has been with this desire for thirty years and not acted on it, but she sure has thought about it. No matter who you are, that kind of Walter Mitty dreaming is going to affect your head and how you see the world.

This party at the Weissman Theatre is filled with hope for Sally. She can finally get on with her life, a life that has been tolerated – or wasted, would we dare say? She has lived comfortably, both emotionally and financially, with Buddy, but she has not had passion for him. And that discussion is one that is avoided in the Plummer home. Still there are hints of emotional cracks and distress in her. As a character, Sally ranks right up there in drama where seemingly functioning women that, in the right circumstances (or perhaps it is better saying the wrong circumstances), become unhinged because the reality they must face is not acceptable. Sally does not have the coping skills to handle it. Nor will any of us if we hold onto a memory and read into it our present hopes and dreams, and then start acting on it.

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” I’d rephrase that saying: Those who cannot remember the past correctly are condemned to repeat it even worse.

I love words and their meanings, as you probably know if you read my first post. I looked at Sally’s name and thought about her maiden name – Durant. Is there more to it? It looked like a French name to me, so on a whim, I looked up the meaning of “durant” in a French dictionary. The meaning of the French word “durant” is during, whereas, while, whilst. It’s a preposition – not even a noun or a verb – indicating doing one thing at the same time you are doing another. Can you believe it? Sally is the beginning of a prepositional phrase between Ben and Buddy. It’s a stretch of linguistic analysis for teasing the meaning of her name into understanding who Sally is, but the name doesn’t seem to be an accident. Not in a Sondheim piece.

Of course this leads to the name of Buddy Plummer. Buddy is, well, a buddy… to Sally. He’s a pal, a confidante but he is certainly not a lover. There’s affection but not passion. And the meaning of Plummer is interesting too. One meaning of the verb “to plum” is to displace or take the place of something. Buddy is a buddy who takes the place of someone. In Sally’s mind, that someone is Ben.

Buddy is a kind man, passionately in love with his wife for all their thirty years together, even as it is clear to him that she does not feel that way about him. To handle this lack of affection, he’s engaged in extramarital affairs and when this reunion takes place, he has had a regular mistress named Margie who really loves him. He, on the other hand, is still in love with Sally. It’s this emotional workaround that is the basis of his comedic folly.

He embodies the classic qualities of a good salesman. He’s affable and outgoing with strangers. He talks easily and he is a good listener. Of the four leads, I get the sense that Buddy really does listen to what the others tell him. And he is not afraid to remember the past since he’s more afraid of the future. He’s smart but not deep and has the hide of a salesman; he can take no and not believe it. He’ll just come back wanting it to become a yes the next time he sees you.

While Sally is looking to accomplish something at this reunion, Buddy is on his own mission: he comes to make sure that his wife does not leave him. To do that, he is willing to go through all the pain his happy-go-lucky self has to face to make sure. It’s going to be fascinating creating the history of this couple with the actors playing Sally and Buddy, because it will require determining the degree of how much has been said and done in their life about Sally’s holding onto Ben. Has this come out in marital spats or when they have drunk too much? How much has been said about Ben’s place in Sally’s heart?

When Buddy completely loses it, after seeing Sally and Ben embrace – which motivates his singing of the ‘The Right Girl’ – what is new about this that triggers his emotional outburst? It’s tied to the fact that he actually sees this thing that he has feared come to life. It’s a challenging staging moment too, because, ‘The Right Girl’ is the only time in Follies that dance is used to communicate the emotionally conflicted state of a ‘live’ person. All the other dance in Follies is tied to ghosts, the re-enacting of stage memories, or part of the follies vaudeville sequence. I think Goldman and Sondheim are telling us something about Buddy – when he hits his limit, the salesman’s words fail him and he has to become physical to express himself.

By contrast, Sally heads the other way. When confronted with the hope of having Ben in ‘Too Many Mornings’ and then being immediately rejected by him, she freezes, becoming nearly emotionless and almost catatonic. Sally is the one lead whose story is nearly complete by the time of the follies vaudeville sequence happens. How the actor playing Sally handles the fight between the four of them (and their young selves) and her famous solo, ‘Losing My Mind’ will be fascinating to develop in rehearsal since she’s already shell shocked and reeling. She’s a ghost of the person she was when she came to this party when she leaves the theater at the end of the night.

The story lines of Sally and Buddy are disturbing for many of us that are in comfortable relationships in our middle age. Sally and Buddy look an awful lot like many of us. Does it make you wonder if your spouse is thinking of the passion of a past lover when you are looked at? Would they act on it if given the chance? Would you?

Next up: Relationships on the Rocks, Part II: Phyllis and Ben.

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.