May 28, 2024

Here You Are

“It’s the end of the world,” armchair activist Fritzi says, for the umpteenth time in HERE WE ARE.

“Yes, but, today?” asks upper class socialite Marianne Brink, and the principal theme of Stephen Sondheim and David Ives’ first musical collaboration- which happens to also be Sondheim’s final work- is made clear: eventually, the end comes to all of us, and even if you know it’s coming, you’re still, almost certainly, going to be surprised. Or at the very least, inconvenienced.

On this past Sunday we closed CYMBELINE at the Live Oak Theatre in Berkeley to a completely sold-out house. I wasn’t able to watch the performance because I was guarding the backstage after a dressing room robbery the night before had necessitated it (the stage door opens directly onto the street, and an ajar portal had proved too tempting for a passing thief), but I was able to listen to the show instead, something I may have unwittingly prepped for last Thursday when several friends gathered at a fellow playwright’s new apartment to collectively hear my recently acquired copy of HERE WE ARE’s original cast recording, delivered to my door on its day of release.

Virtually a radio play, the recording makes for easy entertainment, and over an eighty-five dollar bottle of wine, gourmet cheeses and cherries and fresh baked brownies, we laughed (knowingly) at the overly-comfortable couples whose singular life goal of finding the perfect brunch spot creates the premise of the piece, while we laughed with them at the satire of wealthy social justice warriors (who need to borrow fifty million dollars to “end capitalism”) that embodies the ostensible conflict of the work. With the late spring magic hour assisting through the tall, narrow windows of the Haight-Ashbury locale, we smartly discussed the way our collectively adored maestro threaded themes from his past masterpieces and stitched them together with chords so distinctly him they are practically patented, leaving us the ultimate pastiche envelope in which his farewell letter was delivered. And though most of us were either unemployed, underemployed, or overemployed but still struggling, you might not have known that if this were the singular moment of our lives you’d witnessed. Gathered around a makeshift coffee table (“functional but very replaceable if you know of anything” the hostess informs us) and caught up in the poetry, we stepped out of the anxiety of a world on fire and basked in the light of company and art, like characters in a Dickensian Christmas story.

“Buy this day for me darling,” Marianne raptures early in Act One, when everything seems like it is going the way it should, “buy this perfect day,” and while there is a crass materialism being side-eyed there is also a sweetness and innocence to the plea, due in large part to Rachel Bay Jones’ phenomenally winning tightrope walk performance that keeps Marianne perfectly balanced between daffy and endearing. While her husband Leo (Bobby Cannavale) and their friends Claudia and Paul (Amber Gray and Jeremy Shamos) each occupy one corner of Bourgeois Archetype Square, Marianne (like many a Sondheim sleeper lead before her) seems little more than “The Nice One”, pinning down her side of the stage like Cinderella at the top of Act One of INTO THE WOODS, while The Nebbishy One (Paul/The Baker), His Brassy Wife (Claudia/The Baker’s Wife), and the Lovable Dope (Leo/Jack) hold down theirs. Along with a Feisty Youngster (Micaela Diamond as Fritz/Little Red) and a Dubious Seducer (Steven Pasquale as Rafael/Prince Wolf) they embark, like their counterparts from the 1987 musical, on a quest at once frivolous and symbolic, only instead of an enchanted forest where the path strays as often as the traveler we are given a world of comfortable luxury on the brink of collapse, as one brunch destination after another is used to heighten the impending sense of apocalypse. Everywhere our adventuring party goes, there is no nutritious food to be found, only despair or lies or garbage, and more distressingly: no water. A series of characters played by A Man (Denis O’Hare) and A Woman (Tracie Bennett) provide varying degrees of comical helplessness, as a progressively sinister series of servants who may also be double agents for the impending “revolution”.

“Will poor folks lie?” Princess Imogen wonders in CYMBELINE when, as hungry as Marianne in HERE WE ARE, she stumbles upon the cave of a family living in the mountains of Wales. By this point in the play she has been wandering two days in the countryside, self-exiled from her father’s court and then “banished from the world” by her husband, Posthumus Leonatus. His actions, motivated by an entirely hysterical assumption of her infidelity, are partly why she subsequently answers her own speculation: “Yes; no wonder, when rich ones scarce tell true,” and while the question garnered a laugh each night in our production (thanks in large part to the comedic timing of the actress in the role, Elana Schwartz), the conclusion often just as quickly elicited an empathic sigh from the audience. Listening to the show one last time on Sunday, it strikes me in this moment that CYMBELINE and HERE WE ARE have much in common thematically, as both focus on a seemingly naïve and yet unexpectedly resilient woman of the ruling class who, through confronting her own preconceptions about everything from status to mortality, transcends to become a kind of visionary prophetess, able to heal and unify everyone around her, in a dangerous and unknowable world. In CYMBELINE, Imogen symbolically “dies” and is brought back to life three times, while in HERE WE ARE Marianne falls asleep and awakes/dreams three times, and afterwards each is able to see the way forward not just for their immediate community, but humankind. Each is a Liminal Space Queen, like their common predecessor, Cinderella, and like her Imogen must go into disguise to make her journey, while Marianne, notably, wears a pair of much coveted slippers.

The man coveting those slippers is The Bishop (played with fierce desperation and gentle but infectious charisma by David Hyde Pierce), a cleric the Brunchers encounter just before the end of Act One. In a rather telling twist on the archetype of the Clergy Questioning Faith, the Bishop has doubts, but they are less about God and more about whether his Faith (and the skill set it fuels) has any place or utility left in the world (“Obviously Sondheim commenting on Sondheim,” one guest says). While the bulk of the singing in HERE WE ARE is recitative sung by the central six (Rafael has a brief ANYONE CAN WHISTLE evocative ode to Marianne, Fritz a MERRILY WE ROLL ALONG-esque pater/list arioso about the end of the world), all the traditional songs but one (we’ll get to that) are sung by supporting characters, along with two deconstructed love duets sung by Fritz and The Unnamed Soldier (played with gorgeous vocality by Jin Ha as a mash up of Giorgio from PASSION and Anthony from SWEENEY TODD). The Bishop’s song reveals that unlike everyone else in the story so far, his quest is a spiritual one of purpose, but that doesn’t stop him from joining the party and thus he, along with the rest, becomes trapped in The Room Where Brunch Happens, for the bulk of Act Two. There, in an entirely spoken scene with Marianne (whose “I want” song finally arrives just after intermission) he is able to bring about his own salvation while facilitating hers, even though the onstage piano has “died” and nobody is able to sing anymore. His purpose restored, he is ultimately rewarded with Marianne’s slippers after she in turn frees her fellow brunchers from captivity. A barefoot Cinderella, she leads them down a new road while The Bishop vanishes in another direction, and all around them the music swells, but so do sounds of gunshots, bombs, cars honking and cell phones blaring: chaos, undefined.

In the last few years it seems that so many of the artists I love have produced work about letting go of or mourning the past, be that their personal one of love and career, or the global one of a world that “made sense”, even if it wasn’t always (or even often) equitable, satisfying, or enjoyable. Somehow it was frequently beautiful, though, or at least seems so in retrospect, and that haunts the road to the future, which these days frequently looks bleak, if it can be envisioned at all. Of course, individual artists imagining the world ends just because their lives do, is hardly a new thing, and hardly restricted to artists. But it feels like I have reached a milestone of some kind: the time when many of the people I looked to for guidance and example, are fading or gone, going or at least preparing themselves and others for that eventuality. On some level, it is absolutely devastating, and makes me feel, more than ever, that I am running out of time. On another level, it is a reminder that I’d most likely feel that way, no matter how much time I had left. That there is a chance to, in these goodbyes, still learn something is, I suppose, what we should be grateful for, and the secret to getting through it and becoming the wise ones ourselves.

“There is something I forgot to do today,” Marianne wonders aloud in the opening moments of the play, and repeats from time to time when she thinks nobody is listening. Eventually we find out she isn’t sincerely wondering, but rather subtly trying to prompt her husband and friends to remember that it is her birthday. In a moment that can only intentionally be reminiscent of COMPANY, Marianne confesses to The Bishop what she has pretended to forget and is offered by him a birthday candle on a book following their discussion of not only what it means “to be”, but what one is supposed to do about “being”. Marianne concludes “to be continued” and blows out her candle, while the room miraculously experiences a snowfall, the miracle arriving to mark her recognition that, while on a very superficial level, Maryanne has neglected celebrating her birthday that day, on a very profound level, she has neglected celebrating her life, every day. At the end of HERE WE ARE she is able to guide the others to freedom (and an appreciation of what that entails) but it is a scary world into which they emerge. A road on which they must keep walking, often to the sounds of chaos around them. That caveat recognized, there is also music there too. Music which drives them forward and underscores their anxieties and celebrates their triumphs and which, one day, again, will be accompanied by lyrics, even if we haven’t had any since Marianne, halfway through the second act, sang one last word:

“Tomorrow.”

Followed by the final chord of "Beautiful" from SUNDAY IN THE PARK WITH GEORGE.

Backstage at CYMBELINE, just after curtain call, one of the actors opines, "It will be so weird on Friday when we're not here, getting into costume," and everybody nods.

All shows come to an end, even if no road ever does.

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Stuart