August 21, 2011

Yesterday was a farce of unending, petty-- but cumulatively dispiriting-- mishaps generated by the Cosmos. I would accuse the Cosmos of gratuitous mischief– way past the point of being funny–if I knew how to get its ear. Evening culminated in another viewing of Vance, this time with Zach and Karen, excellent company and perceptive theater-goers. They came in at the end of an exacting day, so I pray they did not note the testiness which underlay every syllable I uttered. Their airy house on a hill in Weaverville is envy-inducing. Z has a peculiar physical affect. Sometimes he looks like a regular happy kid. Sometimes his dark, blue-eyed beauty is piercing, overwhelming.

I’ve seen the play as often as I need to for a while. What I noticed last night–what I indeed could not stop noticing– was how the actors, having memorized well, machinegun their lines without thinking about them. Whether an actor is alive in the moment is instantly evident, and they weren’t. They were reciting lines they had learned, with that enraging trick actors have of unintelligibly bunching together half the line so they can get to the part they have worked on. The first scene is jetted through as though they were about to run out of air. Quirks and bad readings and passages of ham that were disturbing the first night have become stakes upon which I burn in my darkened seat. MM is the exception. Ability is not the issue, but attentiveness, mindfulness. Yet, all is well. My guess is that nobody notices but me, and I might not had I quit after the first few nights. The crowds are huge (or at least space-filling) and so far as I can tell they go away pleased.

The most solid lesson of this experience: people do not go to plays because they’re good, but because they’re about something they’re interested in. Vance is not even in the good top 20 of my plays, but it has had whopping audiences, because people around here are interested in Zebulon Vance. The Beautiful Johanna is better by levels of magnitude, but by the time its plot is summarized to someone who has asked “What’s it about?” you know the battle is already lost. I have relied far too much on, overestimated grossly, an audience’s sense of adventure. This is not even a complaint. It is, now that I think of it, perfectly reasonable. My judgment is thrown off by my own odd nature. I love going to plays I know nothing about on topics that I don’t even inquire about beforehand. It was wrong to generalize this peculiar trait into a prospective audience.

Night. Forty minutes left of this day. I cannot say why, but all turned in the course of the day to a kind of unexpected joy. The annihilating, bottomless exhaustion I had been feeling left me. I did not have to lie down every hour. I wrote exuberantly, and had plans for more writing than I could get to. I met Justin in Mars Hill, and we attended the matinee of Vance, when a miraculous thing happened. The performance was wonderful. Almost perfect. I was moved twice in soul, once during Burgwyn’s scene and once during Hattie’s lamentation for her shawl, as though I had never seen the play before. Something in the performers was transfigured, and the performance I thought would be a weary duty for Justin’s sake became, for the first time, exactly what theater should be. Holy theater. Abundant and enriching and unexpected theater. Professor McKinney–my historical source-- was there, and we sat on stage before the audience and discussed history and the stage, and he seemed to like the play, as I feared he might not.

In the evening, then, at twilight, the most magical thing of all happened. The sky filled with purple martins, their twittering, swooping, veering shapes dark against the darkening sky. For whatever reason, the sight of them feeding above my garden was most inexplicably blessed. I watched them a long time, blessing them in my heart as they fluttered so close I could reach out and touch them. Evening must be my holy time, for the most holy moments I remember– the rising of the moon over an Irish road, the gathering of herons at sea’s edge, the thronging of martins in high summer, the deep peace of the shadowed mountains-- have been at evening, just before it edges over into night.

The rebels are in Tripoli. What I thought was a lost caus seems suddenly won. A blessed night, whatever comes at morning.