*4.2. Metatheatre-2*

To witness art within art or plays within plays can be analogous to revelation. To stage a drama within a drama can be an analog to creation, as when Hamlet penned a new version of *The Murder of Gonzago*. Yet the limit, there, is more about creation's limit-to than limit-of. Hamlet plays not God but detective; he contrives a theatre-place in which to observe what none can see, the *within* of another mind. He intends his murder-mystery to prompt Claudius to reveal himself, yet there are reasons to think Hamlet only sees what he expects to see. Claudius remains opaque a while longer. If there is a limit-of dimension in *Hamlet*'s playing within and without, that dimension is rather literally *us*. With Hamlet we see Claudius apparently at prayer, but *only we* hear what weighs upon his conscience. We are positioned in *Hamlet*'s limit-of, in its regions *beyond*, as if participating in a divine or Shakespearean judgment—at least until judgment turns back upon us, finding us again within the play, with Claudius and Hamlet. Yet surely the art within art in *Sunday in the Park* is not of anything so morally fraught as murder.

The story goes that Sondheim, discouraged by the flop of *Merrily We Roll Along* (1981) and swearing off theatre, met playwright Lapine and discovered they shared an interest in Seurat. *Sunday in the Park* was in effect born of conversations before a painting.<sup>48</sup> As Sondheim wrote the songs and score, he imagined Act II as theme and variations on Act I, but Lapine knew it would require a connected story. Thus, the invention of a great-grandson who makes conceptual art a century later and only half-believes his grandmother is the bundled-up baby in *Grand Jatte*. So, the musical was conceived both as a painting within a play and a play within a painting. The painting, moreover, is 'in' images the script indicates are projected by the Chromolume, whose principles of light derive from principles in the painting.

In Act I, analogs to plays within plays come when art is performed, chiefly by Seurat. He poses, draws, and paints Dot and the quarrelsome folk who frequent the park on Sundays, including his mother (who pretends not to recognize him!) and two dogs whose doggy conversation he mimics in "Day Off." His most important performances are with Dot, whom he teaches to "concentrate," and in the studio as he demonstrates pointillism. Act II begins with a tableau-vivant within a play; the figures in the painting, itchy in an eternal now, complain, "It's Hot Up Here." ("Putting It Together" also has metatheatre-2 characteristics but will better serve the discussion of meta-3.)

Dot finds posing torturous and thinks concentration is merely "the art of being still" (p. 46) while being arranged like an "object" (p. 30). A moment of metatheatre-2 involves the actor, originally Peters, stepping out of her rigid dress to strike sexy modeling poses. (In 2017, Ashford played it without the costume-prop effect and with more seductive affection for Seurat.) Dot imagines herself in the Follies as she applies powder and makeup—"more rouge"—much as he paints—"more red" (pp. 48–50). Yet when Dot reappears in Act II, she has learned that concentration is a form of discernment akin, I take it, to today's 'mindfulness' or more ancient practices of contemplation. She tells George (i.e., Seurat *and* her great-grandson) that he gave her "concentration."

At first I thought that meant just being still, but I was to understand it meant much more. You meant to tell me where I was—not some place in the past or future. I worried too much about tomorrow. I thought the world could be perfect. I was wrong. (p. 194)

We could postpone Seurat's theory of color for metatheatre-3 (the drama-theatrical, artful facets of ordinary life), but since we see him painting and explaining his painting, metatheatre-2 fits. In "Color and Light" Seurat, intermittently aware of Dot whom he loves and emotionally neglects, applies points of paint to an unfinished *Grand Jatte*:

<sup>48</sup> Secrest 1998, pp. 326–28. Zadan 1986, p. 308, reports that Patinkin in preparation spent hours with the painting at the Art Institute of Chicago.

There's only color and light./Yellow and white. Just blue and yellow and white. (Addressing the woman he is painting) Look at that air, Miss. [. . . .] That's done with green . . . (Swirling a brush in the orange cup.) Conjoined with orange. (p. 48)

*Pointillism* and *chromoluminarism* should be distinguished, though the play mentions neither term.<sup>49</sup> Seurat's pointillism used dots or tiny daubs of paint without blending them on the canvas. To suggest this, Patinkin in 1984 stood facing the audience while behind a transparent scrim (with the unfinished painting projected on it) as notes matched his staccato brush strokes. Gyllenhaal, in 20170 s staging, simply faces us as he paints, which would more emphatically position us in the painting's world of dots. If so, we 'are' both among those whom Seurat is painting—figures in *Grand Jatte—*and witnesses to his creating. And since in live theatre the audience is among the performance's creators (for we lend it our perceptive attention, without which it is not) a collaborative relation is obtained: we 'paint' Seurat, as Seurat paints us. What makes our participation in the play's limits more than an enjoyable curiosity are questions of responsibility *to and for art*, and *to and for persons*, in the present and over time, which the painting and play raise in miniature and at large. In miniature, these questions arise with chromoluminarism.

Chromoluminarism is a technique of juxtaposition. Particles of adjacent, different colors create the shimmer of a third. Seurat asks Jules about a flower on a hat, "What is the dominant color?" Violet, but look closer and one sees dots of red and blue. "So?" "So, your eye is perceiving both red and blue *and* violet. Only eleven colors—no black—divided, not mixed on the palette, mixed in the eye. Can't you see the shimmering?" Apparently not, "You are a painter, George, not a scientist!" (p. 103). George and Marie in Act II also explain:

Having studied scientific findings on color, he developed a new style of painting. He found [. . .] that at a certain distance the eye would fuse the specks optically, giving them greater intensity than any mixed pigments.

MARIE: He wanted to paint with colored lights.

GEORGE: Beams of colored light, he hoped. (p. 147)<sup>50</sup>

The conception is not only a matter of color consciousness. Juxtaposition creates space for worlds to emerge at the boundaries or in the gaps between what is juxtaposed—whether it be simply a world of color or a rich, thematic world. Such is the point of "Finishing the Hat," where the art story and the lovers' story cross. Dot leaves Seurat, who did not take her to the Follies because that evening, as on other evenings, he had to "finish the hat." She has left him for an emotionally more reliable "artist," Louis the baker ("he kneads me/I mean like dough, George," p. 95), who marries her though she is pregnant by Seurat. He is also rejected by the jealous Jules. Seurat's painting can be understood as an expression as much as impression, for when light comes together—"dot by dot"—a world emerges with the object. "Coming from the hat,/Studying the hat," you are

<sup>49</sup> *Chromoluminarism* was Seurat's term, changed to *divisionism* by Paul Signac. See Jane Block, "Pointillism," Oxford Art Online/Grove Art Online, (Block 2003), https://doi.org/10.1093/gao/9781884446054.article.T068278 (accessed July 30, 2019). Grand *Jatte* did not begin as pointillist; Seurat introduced dots and tiny marks in later phases (Herbert and Harris 2004, p. 111).

<sup>50</sup> Herbert 1968, pp. 18–20, rejects the movement's claim that colors optically and objectively mix 'in the eye' at given distances but affirms the shimmering effect for the viewer. The play's violet example is a little misleading, for the colors Seurat juxtaposes need not be primaries.

Entering the world of the hat, Reaching through the world of the hat

Like a window,/Back to this one from that.

"Like a window" can associate with religious icons, often described as transparent to the spiritual realities they represent. And this window seems a two-way passage to objects and to persons.

Studying a face,/Stepping back to look at a face Leaves a little space in the way like a window,

But to see—/It's the only way to see. (p. 94)

Do these faces precede the artist, to be encountered like living Platonic forms, or do they proceed from Seurat's ways of composing and juxtaposing worlds? Well, it's ambiguous. He shows a sketch to Fifi, a yappy dog in the park: "Look, I made a hat. . . /Where there never was a hat" (p. 95). He tells Dot that while caring "about many things" and "People too," he is "not hiding behind my canvas—I am living in it" (p. 107). Dots of color set beside other dots, and persons in arrangements with other persons create spaces for life. That what he tells Dot rationalizes his neglect need not diminish its possible truth. In "All Things Are Beautiful," when his mother fears losing the view from the park to developers clearing space for the Eiffel tower, he explains, "I'll draw us now before we fade, Mother [. . . .] You watch/While I revise the world" (p. 113). Yet the song leaves open what Tracy might view as the limit question of whether artists make, or revise, or discover a beauty transcendent to the artist's purposes in the world.

Jules is of the opinion, later retracted, that Seurat's work has "No Life," is "density/Without intensity," and "mechanical" (p. 39). These criticisms ignore enigmas in the painting, the couples and solitary persons whose stories beg to be imagined: who are they, how are they so calm, why are they here? The mechanistic critique is literalized in Act II, for George demonstrates a machine, provoking some guests to say that if his Chromolumes were ever new, they are not new now. The critique is framed by the meta-critique of "Putting It Together," which cleverly treats artistic collaboration as money-chasing expediency. This number is fun and cynical ("Every time I start to feel defensive,/I remember lasers are expensive," p. 166) and introduces tensions, even contradictions that *Sunday in the Park* strains to make productive.
