I explore that use of water-as-place in “Roots in the Water”, my newest post at No Unsacred Place. The results are all wet–in the best possible way.

Yes, I consider some productions overpriced. But I recognize that as a personal valuation: I know what I want and need from an evening or afternoon of theater, and I know or can extrapolate from past experience that a particular production or company won’t give it to me. I likely wouldn’t go to these shows even if the tickets were free, while their fans might argue that no price is too high for that experience. I assume that, for other shows, our positions might be reversed.

Tianjin Grand Theater Concert Hall, 2013, via Wikimedia Commons.

About other shows I’ve said, “That production is worth every cent they’re charging for it, but I can’t afford it right now.” I suppose I’m making a value judgment there, as well: for some shows I rearrange the monthly budget or tighten the purse strings to make it affordable, and for some shows I don’t. Again, though, I make those decisions on a show-by-show basis. And I stand up and cheer for approaches like Pay What You Can nights, sliding scale tickets, Mixed Blood’s Radical Hospitality and Walking Shadow’s economic accessibility tickets–concepts that continue to increase the availability of theater to us struggling plebes.

But I feel devastated when a person–any person, but especially one who write plays they would, theoretically, someday like people to pay money to see onstage–indignantly declares, “$X for a play? I can’t believe they expect anyone to pay that!” I don’t care whether X=$15, $50, or $500. I object to the argument that theater has an upper limit of worth, above which any reasonable person should simply refuse to pay.

It’s a fine needle, keeping theater accessible across the income range while simultaneously providing theater companies with enough money to remain solvent. But I like to think that, so long as we all acknowledge and celebrate theater’s inherent worth, we can thread it.

Paganicon3 2013

Intrafaith Relations at Reclaiming by Doing.

Tierra2 by Memomiguel, 2012. Via Wikimedia Commons. Some rights reserved.

In my latest “Restorying the Sacred” post, I follow the abrupt end of the travels of Theia–though not of hir adventures.

The Adventures of Theia.

Photo by Leora Effinger-Weintraub, 2009, under Creative Commons license. Some rights reserved.

Happy Campers (even when it’s hard)

Limosa lapponica landing - Orielton Lagoon by JJ Harrison via Wikimedia Commons. Some rights reserved.

Today I’ve compensated by posting “The Pull of Home” at No Unsacred Place. It’s a story about an urge to move so strong it pulls millions of animals thousands of miles every year. Turns out there’s even a German word for it, Zugunruhe, meaning “migratory restlessness”. We call it cabin fever. I think the result is the same: we turn toward a far horizon and move, not entirely sure where we’re going, not entirely caring. Just needing to move, perhaps to remind ourselves we still can.

The plot in a nutshell: Timothy is a beleaguered gay teen in a conservative small town. His casting as Robin Goodfellow in the class production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream initially just presents one more opportunity for homophobic classmates at his elite all-boys school to harass “the fairy”. But tunes change when Timothy learns how to make Puck’s love potion and uses it to turn half the town gay.

(I’ll be talking about the plot, including its resolution, at length, so if this sounds like something you want to see and you don’t want to be spoiled, best stop here.)

The movie struggles on both plot and ethical fronts. I believe the latter could’ve been resolved with better care for the former.

The movie is ostensibly about a guy running amok with a love spell, yet the spell and its consequences don’t appear until past the halfway mark. The credits inform me that the movie is based on the 2003 short film Fairies. If I had to guess, I’d imagine it focuses on the spell and its aftermath, with added exposition and character development comprising the new stuff. I am all about this! Unfortunately, the scriptwriters lumped the expository material gracelessly at the beginning. As a result, this feels like two films sewn together: the first your standard earnest teen drama (Dead Poets Society with more overt queerness); the second an urban fantasy with wacky gay hijinks. Weaving the spell aspect in earlier would’ve given time for more subtle revelation of character and background while also allowing fuller development of the “crazy gay-town” aspects, which is what most of us came for.

Any sense of consequence suffered most from the film’s abrupt ending. People experienced heretofore unknown same-sex attractions, left their spouses to marry folks they’d barely known the day before, got gay-bashed and condemned by the still-straight half of the town, and engaged in sexual and romantic activity they wouldn’t have otherwise. Yet, after Timothy administers the antidote, we see no fallout whatsoever.

What do you do when you realize you’ve thrown over your devoted spouse of many years to run off with the random dude in the next cubicle or the nice lady next door? If a father “teaches his son a lesson” upon finding said son in bed with another dude, which dangers does the son’s restoration to straightness warn of–homophobia (Don’t beat up your son! Maybe he’s not really gay!) or homosexuality (Gay love gets you a whuppin’!)? When the mayor wakes up gay, his first act is legalizing same-sex marriage. Couples from around the state pour in to marry; what happens to their unions when the mayor realizes “the love spell made me do it”? What damage was done to efforts for marriage equality by the lesbian “couple” interviewed on the local news, who’d only been nodding acquaintances the day before? Message to straight America: queer folks are capricious sluts who will cheapen the sacred institution of marriage!

Focusing on the (unaddressed) aftermath in the school, the unanswered ethical questions become more distressing. Only Timothy’s schoolmates know for sure what’s been done to them and by whom. Yet, not one is upset with him. Did the antidote restore goodwill as well as baseline orientation? Has spending a single day in the shoes of a formerly loathed minority cured the school of homophobia? How does everyone so easily accept that Timothy and Jonathon (SPOILERS!!! FOR REALS!!!) remain together after the spell ends? Who’s going to deal with Jonathon’s cruelly dumped girlfriend, who probably expects him to return to her now that normality’s been reestablished?

I usually favor ruthless culling in scripts and not saying what’s obvious, but it’s definitely possible to cut too much. Some might argue that Jonathon insisting “I feel like me” after the spell ends says plenty about his prior feelings for Timothy. I argue that nuh-uh. It wouldn’t have been hard. Three additional lines of dialogue could have resolved the Timothy/Jonathon issue; ten could have resolved everything else–or at least assured viewers that someone off-screen was dealing with the problem.

One last thing: Timothy’s mother contends that, in this town, being the parent of a queer kid is as difficult as being a queer kid. “You’re not the only one who has to come out, Timothy,” she tells him. “I come out, too. Every day.” A fair point. Unfortunately, the first time we see her do this, there is no reason for her to do so. I’m an out-and-proud lesbian, but discretion has its place. Though it chafes, concealing queer identity is simply the wiser (and safer) path in certain instances. So what’s supposed to read as a set-upon mother whose social and economic stability suffers because of her gay son reads instead as a woman blaming acts of self-sabotage on her actually set-upon son.

Probably I’m overthinking this whole thing, but I’m a harsh critic of LGBT film and theater. Add in elements that smack of witchcraft, and my hackles go to 11 (to mix a metaphor). I want “my” minorities well-represented. Not that we have to be portrayed as morally upright angels, but if we’re going to “fall”, I want to know that someone on the creative team is considering the consequences of that fall. Were the World Mine gives me no sense of that.

Also, it’s a musical. Warn a girl next time.

But last night I did a thing! Of awesomeness! Which was awesome! I went on a date with a very special lady: myself. I took myself to dinner at a hole-in-the-wall “Asian fusion” restaurant near work (”Asian fusion” goes in quotes because, as near as I can tell, that phrase means they serve both Thai and Vietnamese food, which I think a lot of places do and just don’t label it because they think us gringos [what's the Thai or Vietnamese equivalent of "gringo"?] are too dumb to know the difference. Which, OK, we often are). My date and I shared a plate; it was very intimate.

Then we betook ourselves to downtown St. Paul to watch the Minnesota Opera’s world premiere of Doubt (can I say I was at the world premiere? This is the world-premiere production, but it was the third performance, so I wasn’t at the world premiere. It’s all very complicated. And overcaffeinated). Whatever! My date and I were practically in each other’s laps for much of the performance, and she held my hand during the second act.

I enjoyed Doubt, which I wasn’t sure I was going to, because I have Personal Issues with opera in English. Certain conventions of the form only work for me if I don’t know what’s being sung. But this one, by composer Douglas Cuomo, based, of course, on John Patrick Shanley’s play, works well dramatically. The music isn’t the most…operatic ever–I doubt anything in it will go in a collection of “best loved arias”–but the instrumentation is spine-tingling, and the dramatic tension balances on a near-perfect knife edge.

Denyce Graves! with Elmo and sheep

Here is what I learned: Denyce Graves! carries a bubble of gravitas everywhere she goes. It’s a personal force field of class. If anyone were to try to tackle-hug her (not that anyone would even think of doing such a déclassé thing! ::shifty eyes::), I bet they’d bounce right off, and Denyce Graves!’ dignity wouldn’t even be ruffled. When she came on stage, I wondered for a split second why everyone hadn’t leapt to their feet in thunderous applause out of sheer joy at the sight of her. And then I realized! The gravitas shield! We were all classier people just by her presence in front of us! That’s a superpower, that is. Denyce Graves! is a superhero. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

My date got a little handsy when she dropped me off at home, but I’d still like to see her again. We have a lot in common, and she didn’t mind my schoolgirl crushing over Denyce Graves! How long should I wait to call so I don’t seem desperate?

Confession: although Il Trovatore has long been one of my two favorite operas (sometimes my very favorite, sometimes supplanted by Offenbach’s Les contes d’Hoffmann, depending on my mood), and I’ve listened to it more times and from more productions than I can count, yesterday’s Minnesota Concert Opera performance was the first time I’ve actually seen it on-stage in any form. The performance transported my by turns to rapture and agony. Rapture because no recording, no matter how good, compares to being there in person. Even in a stripped-down concert format, interactions between the performers (not to mention the sassy way tenor Hugo Vera flipped pages) and the fact of being surrounded by people who love this opera (or opera in general, or another opera lover) as much as I do and wanted to be there, connected me to the story in a way I’d never experienced in all my listens. Agony because, in public and surrounded by performers and fellow opera-lovers, I had to act like a grown-up and not do any of the inappropriate things I might in the privacy of my own home, like swooning during the Miserere or chanting “Boogie, boogie, boogie” at mezzo Colleen Brooks during “Stride la vampa” (I confess I couldn’t stop a quiet giggle at the point where the overture would have turned into “Take Me Out to the Ballgame”, and I did swoon a little during the Miserere, under the guise of leaning on Leora’s shoulder). That, I suppose, is the price I pay for meeting this operatic masterwork via watching Harpo Marx climb a backdrop.

This morning I was struck by a recollection of my junior year of college, when Il Trovatore played as part of the Met’s Saturday broadcast schedule. I’d planned to listen in my room while I studied for finals, but my best friend and I were going through a strange period of separation anxiety, and he convinced me, with little arm-twisting, to listen in his room. I’m not sure where the disconnect happened–whether when I said “my favorite opera” he pictured something other than opera, or if he simply didn’t think through the fact that he’d invited me to fill his room with 3.5+ hours of full-throated Italian melodrama–but I will forever treasure the dumbstruck look on his face when Ferrando and the soldiers appeared on the scene.

In contrast, yesterday I was again awed and humbled by the amazing woman I married. I’ve hauled her to a few opera in our years together, but when a woman with little interest in opera, suffering from a migraine and still in a lot of pain from recent back surgery, braves freezing rain and Metro Transit just because this is my favorite opera, I am reminded how incredibly fortunate I am to have such an amazing person in my life. I know she doesn’t do it for payback, but I still owe her big-time. Maybe some pajamas with really big buttons.

Walter Woolf King, playing Rodolpho Lassparri, playing Canio from Pagliacci in A Night at the Opera. Photo via Wikimedia Commons.