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.