October 20, 2011

Gaddafi’s death sparked a debate in my Honors class, one student saying that it is wrong to rejoice over the death of anyone, others saying that destructive people should expect a sigh of relief, if not of joy, at their demise. I was with the latter group, wishing I could feel that all human life is sacred– I guess I do on an abstract level– but actually thinking that for some, good riddance is good enough. I used to wish, half-seriously, that Dick Cheney’s wicked heart would give out on him, or that John Ashcroft would melt when somebody threw water on him.

Opening night of Our Town. Tiny house, but the veterans seemed to think that was to be expected. I can’t tell by listening-- as I do from the ambulatory practically all three hours-- how well we are doing. I can count my own bobbles, which last night was one.

The more I think about the play the more I think it is a bitter satire, and the fact that it is “beloved” high school fare is deeply ironic. Emily’s life is wasted. She is the smartest girl in town and should have gone to college; instead she hunkers down with the local rube– because, I guess, she is supposed to–and dies young, in childbirth, and even in death can only talk about a stupid watering machine purchased in lieu of a trip to Paris. Grover’s Corners is proud of having no aesthetic or spiritual life, and hounds its one artist into drunken suicide. Not only does it have no such life, buts warily shrugs off all such aspirations to it. Only Rebecca is allowed a momentary foray into wonder, and that rhapsodizing on a fanciful address on an envelope. Thornton Wilder, a gay man, writes at least three times in the play that most everybody gets married and goes through life two by two, which is either sad, sad self-loathing, or irony so scalding nobody (in the commentaries, anyway) dares quite to get it. The Stage Manager misquotes carelessly and dismisses Poles and Canucks on the wrong side of the tracks. He –or in our case, she-- focuses on the mundane in a way that is occasionally poetic, but most often reductive and insular. The implication is that the narrow minds of Grover’s Corners are exactly the way true American should be, without aspiration, without compassion, without enterprise, without vision, without love that goes beyond a recognition of proximity. I like the play better than I did. I like everyone in it less. I like Simon and Emily; both are annihilated. I like my “son” George,” but only, I realize now, because I like the actor who is playing him. In the abstract, he’s despicable.