*4.1. Metatheatre-1*

Although both Seurat and George manage stages (Seurat poses people and shows his work to Jules, a rival artist; George publicly introduces his Chromolume and cajoles patrons at the reception), neither directly breaks the fourth wall like Wilder's Stage Manager (though they may carry scenery such as cut-outs). The two Georges remain in their fictive worlds, except for the play's first lines, where Seurat is in lecture mode: "White. A blank page or canvas. The challenge: bring order to the whole" (p. 21). Then he intones a litany of aesthetic principles—from design to light and harmony—and with each word, the park's trees, sky, landscape, and water appear. A perennial conundrum in aesthetic epistemology is whether artists *find* new worlds or *create* them, or find them through creation. Are Seurat's aesthetic principles eternal forms beyond the mind or Kantian a priori that live within? The question goes to Tracy's distinguishing limit-of from limit-to—that is, the inferred ontological ultimate from the experienced, ontic boundary. *Sunday in the Park* will not resolve this question but keeps returning to it as it articulates and crosses metatheatrical edges and limits.

Musicals break the wall with their 'numbers,' listed by title and character in the program. Even when integrated with the plot, numbers can be showstoppers, necessarily sung to *us* as well as to other characters. Numbers are as much commentary as story, establishing themes and ranges of emotion. As if to say to us, "We are *at* a musical" and indeed we are *in* it, for our applause affects the show's momentum. All this is true in Sondheim: people burst into song and tell you how they feel and what is going on. Yet the boundaries of his numbers are harder to demarcate, especially on the printed page where, in *Sunday in the Park,* they read smoothly together with the unsung dialogue.<sup>46</sup> In this way, Sondheim's numbers *are* like Wilder's Stage Manager, who talks to us and to various characters.

Dot, however, frequently does speak retrospectively to us in Act I, and so is more a metatheatre-1 presence than Seurat. Her first number, "Sunday in the Park with George," comments on the world the song establishes and values: "there are worse things" than posing in the summer for your artist-lover "On an island in the river on a Sunday" (p. 30). By the first act's end, her appreciative complaint has become "Sunday," hymn-like in emotion and which articulates Seurat's method of color juxtaposition. Colors mix not on the canvas but "in the eye." And despite the stasis of these figures 'living' forever in a painting, the song suggests liminal passage toward a verticality within but not of the limits of 'ordinary' time.<sup>47</sup>

Sunday,/By the blue/Purple yellow red water On the green/Purple yellow red grass, Let us pass through our perfect park [. . .], Through arrangements of shadows Toward the verticals of trees/Forever . . . [. . .] On an ordinary Sunday . . . (pp. 127, 128)

Then, at the play's finale, before the stage becomes a blank canvas and George says, "So many possibilities," "Sunday" reprises as he reads Dot's note in the grammar book about *her* George, "So much love in his words . . . forever with his colors . . . how George looks . . . he can look forever . . . what does he see?" (p. 201). "Sunday" frames the simultaneity Dot and the two Georges share with each other and with Marie. And the song frames us in the limit dimensions of the play, 'beyond,' 'at,' and 'within' its world (especially if we happen to be enjoying a Sunday matinee).

<sup>46</sup> See Sondheim 2011, *Look, I Made a Hat*, pp. 6, 17.

<sup>47</sup> The play's Sundays are during summer. Gillespie and I wonder if Sondheim and Lapine were alert to the Christian liturgical meaning of 'ordinary time' after Pentecost in the spring.
