Klatch & Buzz 12-17-18

I’m sending some comments a fellow theater goer sent me after reading my review of The Piano Teacher production at KTC in early November. They are spot-on and address some of my views poignantly and insightfully. I have the written text of the play (actor’s edition) and there is no direct mention of WWII and the Holocaust in it, which does make the play’s theme of war’s effect and influence on us, especially children, broader and more encompassing. I think I saw the period reference because of the woman’s age who was telling the story and the age of her husband when this happened to him, but, of course, it could have been any number of conflicts in the world at that time or any other.

I agree that Mrs. K knew about her husband’s past. She alludes to this as she talks to us, but the degree to which she allows understanding to truly permeate her life is unclear. A thought comes to mind now that perhaps she senses that if she allows full recognition of this in her life, she will not be able to withstand the dark hold it could have on her as it has had on her husband.

The comments about my review and beyond:

…. about The Piano Teacher. I was wondering if the actual text of it, which I think you said you'd read, explicitly says that the husband's experiences were during WWII and the Holocaust. I can't recall when we were watching it whether that was said explicitly. It seemed like it was vaguer, which of course makes it even more relevant, as it could be referring to many places where oppression and torture, etc. go on.

Just before you sent me the draft [of my review] I had started reading a little book called For Want of a Fir Tree, about the Ukraine and how relatively simple political protest escalated into war. It's written as if it's an explanatory letter or piece to a young child caught in the crossfire and killed, while he was sitting in his house.  Very intense book which I didn't have time to finish, but will take out of the library again when I'm back home.

Anyway, it just reinforced the theme in the play about how young people can and are being affected by turmoil and war, and that it is often happening before they are the age to comprehend the political conflict underlying the action.  And in those cases, does the lure of the violence, the dark side have a stronger power? Or, as this teen character in the play [Michael] seemed to say, he was drawn into it, and slowly realized it's attraction. It did make me wonder about young people in war zones, where all humanity seems to be under fire, and sometimes totally absent. How do they survive? I guess it's like the camps, and Victor Frankel's theories.

As to whether the wife "knew" what the husband was doing, I would have to say she knew about his past, and perhaps even knew he was still obsessed with it. I think that is why she was so intent on saying he was only reading the paper and doing crossword puzzles. She knew on some level that perhaps that wasn't all that was going on between him and her students. I'm not sure she could allow herself to see that he was sharing those stories with her students. And if he never shared them with her, she may not have imagined him doing it with others.  But I'm going to say she saw things he drew-because didn't the teen make some mention of drawings? [He did and most emphatically.]

And how could she allow that knowledge into her life, especially once her husband was dead? It's that problem of evil people (abusers, psychopaths) sometimes seeming quite ordinary and nice. She knew him as her husband, and she seemed to be portrayed as the kind of woman who wanted a proper life, with a good, caring husband and so on.

But what do ordinary people do with this kind of knowledge of the dark side?  Well, I guess we know, given recent political events. Some revel in it. And sometimes it just gets ignored. Or shoved under the carpet.  But of course it doesn't go away. It's always there eating away at all that is positive, caring, loving.

I think of all the vets who are now struggling to live their lives after returning from war. We have created a huge population of people who have had to give part of themselves to the dark side as soldiers. And this is going on all over the world. Is it worse than it was in other centuries? I realize that cruelty and torture have always been a part of history and warfare. 

Bookshelf #2

The Piano Teacher by Julia Cho

Production, 11-5-18, 4 pm, The Kitchen Theater

Directed by Diego Arciniegas

This play hit me so squarely in the solar plexis I was floored, no, I was flattened! From the moment Beth Dixon, as Mrs. K, walked on stage, I was utterly entranced, mainly because my defenses were down—the writing and acting were so convincingly natural. This talking woman was very ordinary, so like me. And she didn’t hesitate telling me this and I believed her. I sat and listened—though I was too high up in the seats to take a cookie from the plate she offered the audience—cookies we believe she baked herself, though we find out later at least some of her sugar treats come from a box. It didn’t take long, though, before I felt something, if not amiss, was surely adrift. Was she on the edge of dementia or simply an old woman overwhelmed by loneliness, a loneliness emanating primarily from the loss of her husband? This wasn’t unusual, was it? Women of her generation define themselves by their relationship to their husbands. But whether dementia or loneliness or both, I began to sense she was inching toward something about to happen I wasn’t prepared for.

And it came through two of her students. The first was a young woman, Mary Fields, played by Amelia Windom, who let her former teacher know something was truly not right in Mrs. K’s house. The piano lessons weren’t the only lessons being learned and what was taken in was more than the students and the teacher were there for. It was going on with Mr. K as they waited for their piano lessons. But Mary Fields let Mrs. K know this within acceptable perimeters of social efficacy—compassion for an lonely, old woman. It also prepares us (or sets us up) for what follows.

The second student was one with great musical potential, Michael, played by Matthew J. Harris, but who hadn’t reached the fulfillment of that promise. He seems to appear out of nowhere, like a sudden threatening storm, who reveals that what he had hoped for when he was young had been turned on end by circumstances beyond his control, influences which had warped his chances of becoming who he could have been. Or had he been inherently attracted to that which stole his youth, hope and promise? Is he an expression of a highly disturbed old man, Mr. K’s psyche after what actually happened to him during the war or is Michael a repository of atrocious stories to which he’s been attracted, even a potential sociopathic killer now on the brink of a spree. Whether any or all of these, he definitely has come to believe that he’s that which corrupted and defiled him in Mr. and Mrs. K’s house from the stories Mr. K tells him about his destroyed youth, the only survivor of a town of innocents slaughtered by the Nazis and Mrs. K’s supposed innocence to what is happening in her kitchen.

The genius of the play is how seamlessly I was catapulted from a living room conversation into a submersion of an unblinkingly brutal experience with evil. It was like having a coffee klatch with Ted Bundy’s wife who claimed her husband wasn’t really slaughtering the innocent because of the derangement done to him. How much did she know and hide? How much did she not care to know, ever know, about her husband’s made-up stories that symbolized the real murders?

The play is a tumble of layer upon layer of guilt repression, hidden secrets and terrible memories which fills us who watch (much like Mrs. K and her TV watching), with fascination at what the world gives us to see and hear but in which we find ourselves helplessly stuck as to what to do with what we’ve learned. I walked out of the theater with questions that followed me into my living room later, when I reached for the television clicker that turned on the nightly news—which could have just as easily been my computer and any number of news venues at my fingertips.

What happens when we do not face the monsters we have created in both our interior and exterior worlds? What do we think we are doing when we make these territorial wars that place us in the middle of atrocities that we are not equipped to handle, let alone endure, but we take on in order to survive? And then what do we do when we have no models or guides for life after the survival? What do we do when we are silent witnesses to our created monsters that live on within and without? What do we do with the dragon that fuels our imaginations and creative art? Do we fight the demons? Sit with them? Keep them from overtaking us through make-believe? Fairy tales? Television shows? Movies and the stories we tell each other over daily coffees?

These questions sound like the ones a screenwriter might ask while creating a script for a Gonzilla or Jurassic Park movie. But The Piano Teacher shows us clearly that ordinary life is filled with just such monstrosities that do breed demons within. It is a story of every man and woman who lives today, who sit and watch the news on television and don’t know, perhaps don’t care to know what to do with the information of eighteen thousand murders that occur each year in our society as both entertainment and reality.* What do we do with the knowledge of all the atrocities everywhere?

The America we live in is no haven from atrocities elsewhere. Atrocity dwells in any place we live without awareness and truth and the will to act against it. And herein lies the dilemma. To work to eradicate it means a never ending battle that takes us from our ordinary lives, our personal desires and goals, our comfort zone, but without balance our resistance can eat us alive. It’s why, in the end, when Mrs. K. faces us with her resolve, we can’t with self-justified correctness tell ourselves we fight the good fight and aren’t anything like her. We are like her, but not only her. In this play we come to know that we are convincingly, horrifyingly like them all—each and every one.

*17,250 murders in the U.S. in 2016; around 11,750 violent acts witnessed on television each year by age 17.