*4.3. Metatheatre-3*

An implication of chromoluminarism is that color and retina cooperate, or that nature and spirit are mutually implicated—one of the "Romantic principles" (p. 145) George says Seurat superseded through "scientific" understandings of color and light. However, that the mind brings to proximity red and blue (nature) to make and reveal violet, and that the violet discloses value and meaning (spirit) remain broadly Romanticist ideas though classically staged (in *Grand Jatte's* ancient Egyptian stillness and harmony). A corollary would be that violet emerges from a *collaborative performance* between blue and red, and between artist and viewer.<sup>51</sup>

So, if the cynicism of "Putting It Together" implicitly assumes that authentic art could only arise from individual, untainted genius—and thus doesn't really arise at all—then it undercuts the play's premise, namely that art and life, at once internal and external to one another, cannot happen alone but are inherently collaborative. The jaded spirit of this long number (about eleven minutes) may pander to an antitheatrical nostalgia for a 'being not seeming' it knows it can never have. Art generally and theatre especially requires people, money, and criticism; "Putting It Together" knows this but risks casting it as a slur. The "antitheatrical prejudice" is part of an anti-aesthetic bias that would

<sup>51</sup> See McLaughlin 2016, p. 159.

favor purity, authenticity, and sincerity. Inasmuch as forms of these biases occur throughout cultures, notably when they comment on their arts, it is crucial that art and theatre explore and revise these prejudices and pre-understandings.<sup>52</sup>

The stories in Act I masterfully show this exploration. Does art disclose common life or cover it over? Does it distance us from the real or find the right distance to *see*? When the one-eyed Boatman calls "hypocrites" the upper crust people visiting the park, the kind who pay for fine paintings, he repeats an ancient trope. (In Greek, the term was idiomatic for actors.) Yet for a moment, he finds common spirit with Seurat. "You and me, pal,/We're the loonies [. . . .] 'Cause we tell them the truth [. . . .]You and me, pal,/We're society's fault. (pp. 82, 83). Whereas the German coachman Franz doubts artists really work. "Artists work," his wife Frieda counters, "I believe they work very hard." "Work is what you do for others," Franz sings, "Art is what you do for yourself" (p. 79). Nearly all the Act I characters comment on art, class, and their tasks and status in life. The point is that Seurat (the musical painter) succeeds in bringing them into uncomfortable yet ecstatic collaboration, as they sing "Sunday" and take us to and beyond the temporal and spatial limits of ourselves.

By contrast, the cross section of George's acquaintances at the Act II reception is rather narrow; in one fashion or another, they are from the art-business world. Act II is less of the art than the artist, and about whether George can overcome disconnectedness in his circle of relations. The "state of the art" partygoers patter on about the "new" and trivialize it. They even trivialize Seurat: "the painting's overrated" (p. 177). Yet a few make valid points, especially George's technician Dennis and the art critic Blair Daniels (played the actor playing Seurat's mother). "You were really on to something with these light machines—once. Now they're just becoming more and more about less and less." A danger is that her judgment, if not played with nuance, will also apply to this section of *Sunday in the Park.*<sup>53</sup>

In the 1984 production, George sang over Blair's sentence and set up another cutout of himself for her to criticize: "Not that you couldn't succeed by doing Chromolume after Chromolume—but there are new discoveries to be made, George" (pp. 174, 175).<sup>54</sup> The parody may deflect validity from her critique. However, in 2017, Sarna Lapine spent much time developing character links between the acts, including Marie and Dot—as muses to the two Georges—and between Blair and the idea of "mother as first critic."<sup>55</sup> Dispensing with cutouts, the players merely froze in place during George's asides in "Putting It Together," but Blair (Penny Fuller) did not freeze, so her perspective came through. She softened the satire yet deepened it, giving it personal and felt validity. Dennis and Dot will speak similarly. Dennis has decided the Chromolume on the island will be his last. He knows George is repeating himself and George knows too: "I just want to do something I care about" (p. 190).

Of those at the museum reception, only Marie has unqualified praise for her grandson's Chromolume. Fatigued from the presentation and seeing that George is "blue," she discerns value in his creation. From her wheelchair, she turns to Seurat's *La Grand Jatte*, which hangs near them, and sings as if to her mother.

I don't understand what it was,

But, Mama, the things that he does—

<sup>52</sup> On common prejudices against theatricality, see Barish 1981. On the positive significance of "prejudice" and revision in understanding, see Gadamer 1989, pp. 265–71.

<sup>53</sup> McLaughlin 2016, pp. 160, 166, implies that despite their sophistication, the partygoers share with Seurat's critics a naive bias, namely that for art to be authentic it must correspond to privileged reality. If so, their portrayal of art as merely an illusory power game contradicts their incipiently realist assumptions. They cannot reconcile how it is through artifices and social collaborations that art—and theatre—can "revise the world" and make it "beautiful" (as Seurat says in "Beautiful"). They are antagonists to the art trends they chase and as unable to *see* as Jules was unable to see *La Grand Jatte*. My worry is that if *Sunday* invites us to be too cynical about these cynics, it may inadvertently join their cynicism and short circuit (like the Chromolume).

<sup>54</sup> In a 2005/2008 London/New York revival directed by Sam Buntrock, which used digital animation for paintings and scenery, the cutouts became video projections of George (played by Daniel Evans). "With all these "multiple George-representations seeming as real as George, it is no wonder he becomes confused" (McLaughlin 2016, p. 164).

<sup>55</sup> Myers 2017, interview with Sarna Lapine.

They twinkle and shimmer and buzz—

You would have liked them . . . /It . . . /Him . . . (p. 184)

Marie (like Dot) is a muse of relationality who connects the new of the now with "Children and Art." ('You know, it is all you really have," p. 181.) She sees her mother in all the painting's people. "Mama is everywhere,/He must have loved her so much . . . " (p. 185). "See how she shimmers—/I mean from the heart" (p. 186) As did Wilder, Lapine and Sondheim juxtapose daily relationships with the artistic and natural sublime—and with the theatrical sublime, if we regard both *Sunday in the Park* and *Our Town* as making the commonplace disturbing or astonishing. Just as Wilder risks pathos with Emily's "Goodbye Grover's Corners," Sondheim risks cliché with "Move On," but allows music and voice, with emotion and intelligence, to lift truism into insight.

DOT: Stop worrying if your vision/Is new, Let others make that decision—/They usually do./Move on. (p. 197)

George, despairing of his vocation and missing personal "connection," goes to the island in Paris with Dennis to present one last Chromolume. Marie was to have come too but has died. Dot, dressed as in the painting, appears and thanks George qua Seurat for what he "gave" her and asks, "Are you working on anything new?"—the old query but here asked with love. She knows striving for the new risks contradicting ordinary beauty and light. To my eye, "Look at what you've done/Then at what you want,/Not at where you are,/What you'll be" (p. 197) makes only a little semantic sense. Is not "where you are" something to be discerned, attentively? Yet the dialectic of the new and the ordinary is resolved and exceeded by Dot's "Anything you do/Let it come from you./Then it will be new./Give us more to see" (p. 198).

Recall the question left by Wilder: why should the liminal dead be weaned from associations, memories, and relations layered in each moment, which in life we cannot really see? Well, we are finite. Superabundant possibilities, which in all relationships are real yet unrealized, would be anguishing to see at the limit betwixt time and eternity. Sondheim and Lapine answer that we the living can and do "see." In transformed moments, we discern the flecks of light, sound, and meaning, here approximated by music, lyric, stage, and the story's superimposition of Seurat, Dot, and Marie with George. These graced times of seeing together return us to the metatheatre-3 of chromoluminarism. If colors in nature are juxtaposed and mixed in the "eye," not just the palette, then we are all dramatists of color and life, with responsibilities there entangled. Every perception sets for us a mission of feeling, thought, and connection. Even in such tiny moments of perception, we are offered the gift of an *obliging*, so to speak, a call to respond or give attention to whatever sense of spirit (*Geist* or *pneuma*) we face before or beyond Tracy's limit-question, "Why be ethical?"

I think that is why the last seconds of *Sunday in the Park* will move us, if we too can see "so many possibilities. . . " that George sees in a "blank page or canvas" (p. 202). Mandy Patinkin played this as an instant of insight, Jake Gyllenhaal as a moment of perplexity, perhaps of regret like Emily's. A regret I have is how the final tableau is specified, as the "characters from the painting" promenade again and take their places in "Sunday." I wish they were also their modernist counterparts from Act II, in 1980s-2000s dress but with the same slow movements and settling into their same positions in the painting. The isle of Grand Jatte and people there today are not without value; the greens are darker, the sky greyer, and the water muddier, George tells the spirit of Seurat's mother. "But the air is rich and full of light" (p. 200).
