Hello Everyone-
For this month’s Contemporary Classics Conversation subject, let’s consider Lauren Gunderson, a playwright in the top one or two spots in “the Most Produced Playwrights in America” list in 2016, 2017, and 2018, and for her return to the first-place slot for the 2019-20 season, she has had almost double the number of productions than the second-place finisher. Strangely, her Connecticut productions have been rare. Fortunately for those of us in the Greater Hartford area, Playhouse on Park presented her play, The Revolutionists, this past February/March. I hope many of you got a chance to see it and experience for yourselves what makes this playwright so popular. Her plays are inventive, imaginative, exciting, passionate, and absolutely incredibly human. In other words, the best of what theatre can and should be.
In her play, The Book of Will, “a play about the search for, the printing, and the surviving of Shakespeare’s Folio,” she includes a scene where the character of John Heminges has recently lost his wife, Rebecca. He ends up grieving on the empty stage of the Globe Theater. Upon being found by his friend and co-collector and collaborator in the Folio, Henry Condell, Heminges questions the value theatre has had in their lives. Here is their conversation:
HENRY: When my first boy died, only months old, I couldn’t imagine a loving God that would have any part in such a thing. And I told him so in my prayers, silent because I know I’d be the one in the ground if anyone heard what I thought of God and his taking and taking and taking. Then I realized the great weight of every grieving father’s prayers that must hit God every night, and must sound so much like my own. Sons who lost fathers, husbands without wives, mothers – oh God the mothers. All that grief on God’s ear constantly.
Then I felt bad for God.
Which made me laugh.
Which made me feel alive again. Funny how that worked out didn’t it.
JOHN: That’s a good story. Why do we bother?
HENRY: With what?
JOHN: With stories. Dramas. Especially the dramas. Isn’t that ridiculous? Grown men dressing up as kings and, even more ridiculously, queens. And the people come to see it. And they laugh. But they also weep. They weep with us. Why do they do it?
HENRY: Because stories are real in their own way.
JOHN: No. Real life keeps going on and on, and the villains aren’t caught and the endings aren’t right, and it’s rough seas and dark days and we sit here in this barn playing fictions for willing dreamers. We tell it over and over and over again. And I sit through it and it’s false and it’s hot air and I need it. When I have nothing left to say I need it. When I hurt so much I can’t breathe, when I’ve got a horse for a heart and it won’t stop running and pounding and running me down, I need it, I don’t even want it, but I...
HENRY: John -
JOHN: Am I godless? I look to fairies and false kings instead of holy people. Does that a heathen make?
HENRY: No. Of course not, no.
JOHN: I cannot breathe without her, I cannot breathe at home or in the street or in the yard where she now lies, I cannot breathe in this world but here. Here I am come. And I am lulled into meaning. And that is greatest fiction of all. Meaning anything.
(then with great ferocity)
And God and his angels mock us every ending we play but the tragic ones, for if they aren’t tragedies yet, they will soon enough be.
(beat)
Story’s a forged life. Life’s a tempest of loss. Why do we bother with any of it?
HENRY: To feel again.
JOHN: I feel enough.
HENRY: I said to feel again. That’s the miracle of it. The faeries aren’t real but the feeling is. And it comes to us here, player and groundling alike, again and again here. Your favorite story just ended? Come back tomorrow, we’ll play it again. Don’t like the story you’re in? A different one starts in an hour. Come here, come again, feel here, feel again. History walks here, love is lived here. Loss is met and wept for and understood and survived here and not the first time but every time. We play love’s first look and life’s last here every day. And you will see yourself in it, or your fear, or your future before the play’s end. And you will test your heart against trouble and joy, and every time you’ll feel a flicker or a fountain of feeling that reminds you that, yes, you are yet living. And that is more than God gives you in his ample silence. And then it ends. And we players stand up. And we look at the gathered crowd. And we bow. Because the story was told well enough, and it’s time for another.
Beautiful. Theatrical. Human. That is Lauren Gunderson’s work. It captures perfectly why I do and go to the theatre.
So my question for us to discuss are these same questions: Why do we do it? Why do you go to the theatre? And would you share in our Conversation any moments in the theatre that you have felt “a flicker or a fountain of feeling that reminds you that, yes, you are yet living”?
We look forward to hearing from you, and continuing our Conversation!
For more information on Lauren Gunderson and her list of plays, visit her website: http://laurengunderson.com/
Geoffrey Sheehan
Artistic Associate
Capital Classics Theatre Company
