*3.3. Metatheatre-1 (Framing Metatheatre-2 and -3)*

Wilder did not find credible most English language theatre he saw in the 1920s. Consoling to an insecure middle class, it was theatre with surface verisimilitude but lacking the "real." Turn-of-the century drama smothered itself in "box sets" behind curtained prosceniums, and so became "a museum showcase" that "devitalized the theatre."<sup>33</sup> Yet one may reach reality through all sorts of theatre, from naturalism to symbolism to Brecht to the absurd. While Abel speaks of metatheatre aiming for life as dream, stage, and imagination in contrast to the real, he implies that the contrast is itself real, as are dreams and theatrical illusions.<sup>34</sup> Moreover, a distorting funhouse mirror is still a mirror and can show us how we are. Here, I follow a distinction between naturalism—imitative of nature in acting style and scenography—and realism, a broader category for any dramatic mode that attempts to discern truthfully, even via oddity, surrealism, or farce. An ancient myth or avant-garde fantasy whose actions and motivations appear humanly plausible could have more realism than one without such plausibility.

In metatheatre-1, a play or performance pointedly refers to itself. It makes apparent its edge, with the audience situated just outside its expressive and material world, a participant, strangely, both in the world's 'beyond' (limit-of) and at its edge (limit-to). The Stage Manager is also outer and inner; he not only talks about *Our Town* but enters its world, taking parts as needed while serving us (and Emily) as a Virgilian guide to time out of time ("that element I merely took from Dante's *Purgatory*," Wilder wrote, xii). As he and other players directly acknowledge us, we help them define the play's boundary, at once definite, porous, and real. Whenever theatre—through living players, material objects, and stage space and time that overlaps our space and time—mirrors its own limits, it makes us participants in those limits. We, players and audience, lend our bodily materiality, emotions, and thoughts to the world-domain of the play and its edges. What was an abstract limit achieves concreteness via corporeality, perception, and expression, yet remains an abstraction. *This much would be true of all drama*, of great naturalism especially (Ibsen, Stanislavski). But Wilder's way of metatheatre-1 doubles-down on making the edge explicit, as the Stage Manager manages the bare stage.

No curtain. No scenery. [. . .]

This is our doctor's house,—Doc Gibbs'. This is the back door.

Two arched trellises, covered with vines and flowers, are pushed out, one by each proscenium pillar.

There's some scenery for those who think they have to have scenery. (pp. 5, 7)

By minimizing scenery, by insisting we think anew about scenery, and by intensifying our awareness of this or that person/actor, Wilder attempts to *heighten* our sense of material things that are also types or ideal things. This, I take it, is what his metatheatrical realism attempts: the 'merely' imaginary or illusory is *realized* by our 'being shown' the illusion's 'being made.' A few props, a defined space, and actual, intending persons all lend bodily credence to the imaginary.<sup>35</sup> The unveiled illusion (which should remain an interesting illusion) becomes like a practical 'argument,' saying: this world

<sup>33</sup> Wilder 1957, Preface, pp. x, xi.

<sup>34</sup> Abel 2003, pp. 179–80, on Chekhov.

<sup>35</sup> See Scarry 1985, on "analogical verification," which might also be termed "bodily substantiation," pp. 13–14, 21–22. On similar issues, see Gillespie 2019, "Drama Alone Is Credible."

is plausible (perhaps real), not only because you have seen the making of it, but because you are participating in its making and its limits, at its edges and beyond.

Philosophically or theologically, the limit-of for *Our Town* would be the "something way down deep" that is confusing at the wedding and anguishing when Emily visits her past. The Stage Manager asserts (to us) near the beginning of Act III, "We all know that *something* is eternal [. . .]." The *what* is left unstated. Not houses, names, the earth, stars, or identity—yet "that something has to do with human beings. [. . .] There's something way down deep that's eternal about every human being." At the cemetery, the dead—another 'audience,' in chairs facing us (or among us, in Cromer's staging)—are waiting and being patient (pp. 89,90), for what we are not told. They sit, losing interest in the past. The Stage Manager explains:

Gradually, gradually, they lose hold of the earth . . . and the ambitions they had. . . and the pleasures they had. . . and the things they suffered . . . and the people they loved.

They get weaned away from earth—that's the way I put it—weaned away. (p. 81)

When Emily appears among the dead, she is already in temporal transition. "It seems thousands of years since I. . . " "Oh, I wish I'd been here a long time. I don't like being new here" (p. 88). "Live people don't understand, do they? [. . .] I feel as though I knew them last a thousand years ago [. . . .] Mother Gibbs, when does this feeling go away?—Of being. . . one of *them*?" (pp. 89,90). Emily is becoming distant yet also still attached to the living—"Mother Gibbs, George and I have made that farm into just the best place you ever saw. [. . . .] My boy is spending the day at Mrs. Carter's" (pp. 88, 89)—and realizes she can visit her past. The dead and the Stage Manager warn against it: "you see the thing that they—down there—never see. You see the future. You know what is going to happen afterwards" (pp. 91, 92). In her in-between state, her seeing will be finite, like our seeing, but from a vantage point nigh eternity unavailable to the living—except as we share her place, now, with the ancestors.

Mrs. Gibbs says that visiting the past is not pertinent to the dead, who are "to forget all that, and think only of what's ahead" (p. 92), which is never revealed. Yet effective productions create the impression something *has* been revealed, partly depending on what we can read into it: Paradise? Judgment? Fulfilling insight? Harmony or love? Wilder suggests that the eternal way-down-deep is a superabundance of "value" (xii) immanent in the quotidian moment. Yet this "wonderful" nexus of value and meaning is so distant to ordinary sight that to perceive it retrospectively prompts anguish akin to grief. Wonder becoming anguish is what Emily feels when she returns and *sees*. "I can't look at everything hard enough" (p. 97). "I can't go on. It goes so fast. We don't have time to look at one another. [. . .] I didn't realize" (p. 100). Such lines risk sentimentality yet express anguished insight. Penelope Miller found a near perfect balance in the potentially maudlin but luminously devastating farewell, "Good-by Grover's Corners": "Oh, earth, you're too wonderful for anyone to realize you. [. . .] Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it?—every, every minute" (p. 100).

We in the audience are to undergo an apophatic or *via negativa* discernment like Emily's. We, for a moment, are to see with her. We are to see the invisible *by seeing how the living do not see*. She and we see the *whole* of persons' lives-in-time (a limit-to dimension) in individual moments of their lives. This intense perception is not just knowing "what's going to happen afterwards" (p. 92), though is partly that. It is also the effect of temporal and spatial layering: particular past moments seen in light of other past and future moments which, *sub specie aeternitatis*, are already part of the nexus of meaning. The living see only a little of this polyvalent nexus. Emily discerns it via contrast with the living and supposes them willfully blind. "Oh, Mama, just look at me one minute as though you really saw me" (p. 99). It is not that she sees everything or they nothing. The living do see—"open your eyes"—and the weaning dead see much more but remain limited, as when Mrs. Gibbs rebukes Stimson: "that ain't the whole truth." We now are in a similar predicament as Emily, *seeing more of the very much more*. The anguish is not exactly grief, if grief entails decathexis, or loss of connectedness. The pain, rather, comes of *reconnection*, via extraordinary discernment that is more than finite spirits can withstand, except "the

saints and poets, maybe" (p. 100). A question remaining is why the dead should be "weaned" from the content of this pain. I shall consider that, after comments on other productions that have enhanced this discernment.

Effective realizations of *Our Town* must be compelling, in respect both to the via *negativa* mode of discernment and the play's polyvalent disclosures of value, time, and eternity. Lori Ann Laster reports on bunraku puppets, vocalized by actors to stylize and distance the townspeople and which are later sprawled lifeless at the cemetery, "corporeal symbols for the hopeful spirit that swiftly dwindles when one passes over into death." Another company staged Act I as a 'table read' rehearsal led by the Stage Manager, until the moment he turned and explained to the audience that the Grover's Corners bank will deposit *Our Town* in its time capsule. "By breaking the fourth wall here rather than at the beginning of the play, Amster [the director] made the trope of direct address powerful and immediate."<sup>36</sup> Laster also comments on a 2007 production at Connecticut's Hartford Stage, which brought back veteran Stage Manager Hal Holbrook, then 82, who captured "the play's occasionally dry melancholy." All his words about mortality—"you make some decisions; then whissh! You're seventy" (p. 60)—reflected back on him, no matter how understated. His age was layered over the timeless part. Ben Brantley wrote similarly of Paul Newman, 77, in the 2002 Westport (Connecticut) Country Playhouse production. Again, memories of a long film career overlaid his wry, rumpled Stage Manager, who seemed to be "inventing his lines on the spot," without the direr ironies of Spalding Gray.<sup>37</sup>

Timelessness cannot directly be represented by finite, temporal art. A very old Stage Manager can do so indirectly: the more years, the more timelessness. However, in 2002, the Transport Group did *Our Town* in New York, which I saw. Director Jack Cummings III cast against age: George and Emily (Tom Ligon and Barbara Andres) were in their sixties, with a Stage Manager played by Emma Orelove, age 12. Music and a prologue were added, of quotable lines from the play's wisdom; lighting effects and projections created a cool, autumnal, abstract space. The play kept to Wilder's minimalism, so the major innovation was the actors' ages.

From reviews, my guess is that old George and Emily were better received than the child Stage Manager. Anita Gates saw George and Emily much as I remember, having "within them the middle-aged couple they're destined to be, as if the gray-haired adults can fulfill the dream of being with their parents in their youth and vigor again but knowing what they know now."<sup>38</sup> Not only do we see them as they *might* have become but, more subtly, we see two superimposed lifelines, as if both had reality. Simultaneity of this sort may or may not have been anything Wilder anticipated. Even so, given how he played with Augustine's and Dante's views of *the presence of eternity to past, present, and future*, juxtaposed with a modern picture of the *future as unrealized possibilities*, a 'real' simultaneity may be implied in his vision of superabundant value in the unseen eternal.<sup>39</sup> Some thought Orelove could not credibly deliver the crusty nuances of a Gray or Holbrook, but this was to miss the point. Rather than speaking from worldly wisdom, she spoke from ageless simplicity. Or so was my impression, and I still find her interpretation valuable. Yet this is a time to take up a question hinted earlier about Wilder's vision of near infinite value layered in every moment.

Why would it be good for the dead to be weaned from meaningful, albeit earthly attachments: ambitions, pleasures, "the things they suffered. . . and the people they loved"? Why should they become "indifferent" as they wait "for the eternal part of them to come out clear?" Because of the anguish of such knowledge? (Best to "forget all that," says Mrs. Gibbs, among the dead.) Because a

<sup>36</sup> Laster 2008, highlighting 2007 productions by the Two River Theatre Company of Red Bank, New Jersey (directed by Aaron Posner—with puppets); the Indiana Repertory Theatre of Indianapolis (directed by Peter Amster—as if a table reading); and the Hartford Stage (directed by Gregory Boyd—with Holbrook).

<sup>37</sup> Brantley 2002, review of *Our Town* as directed by Mark Lamos.

<sup>38</sup> Gates 2002, review of the Transport Group production of *Our Town*, directed by Jack Cummings III.

<sup>39</sup> Konkle 2018, p. 21, notes the Stage Manager is simultaneous to all times in the play, 1899–1913 (and 1938 and the date of any performance). Temporal simultaneity is not just biblical-medieval but reappears as a poststructuralist view of semiosis synchronically levels discourse into the intertextual all-in-all. See Mark C. Taylor 2004, "Betraying Altizer."

fuller perspective on the past would distract from preparing for "what's ahead"? Moreover, should not the Stage Manager know what is ahead? He should, if we take him to be a God-figure.<sup>40</sup> There may be aporias here, forgivable given the impossibility of answering such questions; Wilder may have been simply (or way-down-deeply) inconsistent.

However, Wilder's reference to *Purgatorio* leads me to think the Stage Manager is more a Virgil-figure, who in Dante knows *that* there is redemption but has only a vague notion of *what* redemption is. The analogy breaks down, of course, for the Stage Manager is among the living ("we're coming up here ourselves when our fit's over," p. 81), and Wilder suppresses references to Christian atonement except in the hymns. *Our Town* is a better play, however, if the Stage Manager, like Dante's Virgil, knows a lot but not everything, with more of a grasp of limit-to than limit-of. He may not know for what clarity the dead await, nor whether "weaning" is the best metaphor for their waiting. Might he be just a bit of an unreliable narrator? In any case, old men with silver hair are reminiscent of a folk picture of God Wilder would never endorse. Whereas, a red-haired twelve-year-old evokes no such cozy familiarity and might for that reason be a very appropriate guide.

#### **4. Sundays in the Park**

If there are God figures in Sondheim and Lapine's *Sunday in the Park with George*, they are not the artists who make aesthetic worlds, but "Sunday," the song that soars from the tableau-vivant of Seurat's painting before each act ends.<sup>41</sup> There is, however, a Beatrice-figure, Dot, who answers a limit question left begging by Emily and the Stage Manager: *why* should the dead be "weaned" from what the living do not really *see*? Her answer to George and George, from a theatre-magic place at once present to past and future, is simply that we, the living, *do* . . . see. Dot sings, "Give us more to see . . . " (p. 198). She invites us into such a place of participatory discernment.

Although conventional God figures can allegorize conceptions of limit-of (the 'beyond' of a horizon of discourse and experience), as *conceptions* they are arguably limit-to. A conception of the divine or ultimate may, at the level of experience, imply a question of boundary without participating in a movement of mind and feeling beyond it, as a symbolic, aesthetic, or ritual process might. Are there religious premises and questions in *Sunday in the Park* analogous to *Our Town'*s? There are no sacred hymns, rituals, sermons, or prayers. Implied weddings and funerals occur outside the scenario (though testimonials to Seurat in Act II are like eulogies), and there are few religious words (a reference to "Ascension Day 1884," when Seurat began the painting). Even so, *Sunday in the Park* evokes limit structures related to creation and revelation and to discernments that transcend time. So, when the 1884 Dot appears to the 1984 American artist George on an island in the Seine, she is also appearing to her lover, Georges Seurat (died, age 31). Speaking and singing with Dot (whose old grammar book he carries), the postmodern George is also conversing with his grandmother Marie, Dot's daughter, who kept the book and has just died, at 98. When he ritually reads Seurat's words of transcendental efficacy, much like Platonic aesthetic forms—Order, Design, Tension, Composition, Balance, Light, Harmony, which Dot copied in the book—it is as if Seurat, Dot, Marie, and George become simultaneous. First played by Mandy Patinkin and Bernadette Peters, they sing of "parasols" and "People strolling through the trees/[. . .] On an ordinary Sunday" (pp. 201, 202).<sup>42</sup>

Up to this point of intergenerational hyper-connectivity, Act II has been problematic. It competes with the amazing set pieces of Act I, where Neo-Impressionist masterpieces come to life, principally Seurat's *Sunday Afternoon on la Grand Jatte* (1884–1886), also *Bathers at Ausnières* (1884) and *Young*

<sup>40</sup> As does Von Balthasar 1988, pp. 351–52, and Konkle 2006, p. 142.

<sup>41</sup> The artists are the fictionalized Georges Seurat (1859–1891) and his entirely fictional great grandson, George, in 1984 (the year the completed musical opened; Act I was performed in 1983). No character in Act I refers to "Seurat," always "George," but to avoid confusion I usually refer to this character as Seurat.

<sup>42</sup> PBS broadcast this production on *American Playhouse* in 1985. I am indebted to comments from Austin Bouchard, whom I saw play George at the University of Mary Washington in 2014, directed by Gregg Stull.

*Woman Powdering Herself* (1888-90). Act II also competes with stories imagined from figures in the painting: earthy and finer folk, some at odds with each other and Seurat, who studies and corrals them into his composition. What Dot calls his "mission to see" (p. 109)—theorized as pointillism and chromoluminarism—is in conflict and contiguity with his inarticulate feelings for her—mistress, model, and unacknowledged muse. By contrast, the George of Act II is an electronic sculptor-inventor whose Chromolume series would fulfill, he hopes, Seurat's dream "to paint with beams of colored light" (p. 147)

Any production of *Sunday in the Park* must deal with how Chromolume #7, though important to George and indeed intriguing, is not clearly compelling as an artistic "invention." On one hand, everyone except Marie doubts it, including eventually George himself. Should productions make the device better than it is, or bring it 'up to date' with electronics unavailable in 1984, they risk overshadowing the final, theatrically simple appearance of Dot, or else contradicting "Putting It Together," a number that while cynical makes some astute judgments. Recall that Seurat had employed materials, paint and brushes, used for centuries. Whereas whatever gadgets George uses, be it lasers or "a new state-of-the-art Japanese microcomputer which controls the voltage regulator" (p. 149), a Chromolume will date itself the day it switches on. The electronic music accompanying it, and briefly shorting it out, may also date it. And while Act I imagines a variety of near archetypal figures—mistress, elegant artist, rough boatman, soldiers, animals, baker, fisher girls, mothers, nurse, dandy, children43—George in Act II must hobnob with dubious brokers from the modern art racket.

On the other hand, we must not miss George's serious intent with the Chromolume, not only for his life and art but also for thematic connections to Seurat. A 2017 New York revival, directed by Sarna Lapine (James' niece), approximated pointillism by trading laser beams for firefly patterns from many small, suspended lights rising, falling, and changing color above the audience.<sup>44</sup> We learn in Act II that Seurat lived only a few more years, leaving us to imagine his work, had he lived, overlapping Kandinsky, Braque, Mondrian, and Picasso. We may glimpse in Act II's George, then—as with the older Emily and George in the Transport Group's *Our Town*—unrealized possibilities and limit dimensions of Seurat's life, art, and love. Sarna Lapine also believed "the piece itself was about transcending time."<sup>45</sup>

When *Sunday in the Park* moved from Playwrights Horizons to Broadway's Booth Theater in 1984, directed by James Lapine, its design was quite literal. There were flying and sliding flats approximating the park—painted trees, water, grass, sky, later the modern buildings—and life-size cutouts of figures not enacted, including two dogs, a monkey, and the Soldier's Companion. In Act II George, bored with guests at the museum reception (the same actors from the painting in Act I), "raises up" photographic cutouts of himself for them to talk to, which added jaded fun to an already satiric scene. (The cutouts are specified in the published text.) The 2017 revival evolved from a 2016 concert production at New York City Center with Jake Gyllenhaal as the two Georges and Annaleigh Ashford as Dot and Marie. Of the full production at the Hudson Theater, Sarna Lapine describes decisions to remain minimalist with a small playing area. The scrim with projected impressions of the painting also allowed audiences to see the orchestra; the effect suggested a canvas in a park for some simple performance. Gone were the cutouts (except for the dogs). Acting choices also made for a more integrated story, in respect to the character links and contrasts between the acts. With such possibilities in view, let us see how metatheatre configures 'limits' in *Sunday in the Park with George*.

<sup>43</sup> On the painting's history of interpretation, many coalescing around class differences, see Herbert and Harris 2004, pp. 152–69. Had it come earlier, Herbert's own interpretation, pp. 170–75, of "fashion and irony" in the painting could have informed the play's metatheatricality.

<sup>44</sup> I am unsure of this device, though some liked it; see Brantley 2017, reviewing the Sarna Lapine directed revival. On a YouTube video of the whole show, shot obliquely from the audience, the effect seems disconnected from the production's otherwise intimate staging; it did provoke an enthusiastic reaction.

<sup>45</sup> Myers 2017, interviewing Sarna Lapine (accessed 31 July 2019). *The Interval* stopped publishing on June 20, 2019. I will keep available this interview for anyone interested.
