Diva – A French Film takes me back in time to 1981.

Psychoanalysis of Diva, Psychology of Diva, Diva Cinema Du Look 

The summer before I left home for college, I remember sitting in the locker room of the cafeteria where I worked after a long shift and trying to listen to my thoughts.  I was going to a college that promised to “teach students how to think” and I wanted to capture the experience of my mind before college to see if it would change after having had a college education.

I wasn’t successful at recording what my thought process was like.  In that moment, it seemed like there was a big empty space inside my head – not as if there were nothing there, but as if there was a potential space that could be filled with… I don’t know what.  I can still access that experience, but it really wasn’t what I wanted to register.  I wanted to register my mind in action – a much harder thing to do.  Writing is an approximation of that, and certainly I could compare my writing now with how I wrote then, and I could see a significant difference.  But what was I thinking?

Last night the reluctant wife indulged me and, through the wonders of streaming video, we watched the film that I dubbed “the best film ever” four years after that moment in the locker room.  I only vaguely recalled a few moments from it, but I sensed (especially since, though it was well reviewed, no one else that I know of ever put it on a best of all-time list) that my enjoyment of the film would have much more to do with the state of my psyche (not quite how I was thinking – but a good analogue) at the time that I was graduating from college.

Well, guilty as charged.  The film stands up pretty well to time.  It is still a thriller.  It is more violent than I remembered, and it is action and image rather than language based.  The linguistic component is primarily in the form of opera arias.  As I write this, I am aware that this probably describes my thinking – both before and after my college experience of reading my way through the great books.  I think that I was (and still largely am) a visual thinker – and someone who is action prone (not exactly the ideal psychoanalyst – yet another reason I am a little reluctant…).

But the movie taps into my psychic structure – especially at the time.  It is as if it were a direct copy of an undreamt but essential dream that described as much of my psychology as any dream could.  It is eerie to feel this closely connected to a director (Jean-Jacques Beineix) and his work.  Did he and I share the same family?  Is he my long lost twin who was invisible as I was growing up?

In the film, Jules (Frédéric Andréi) is a postal carrier.  He rides a motor scooter to deliver the mail.  He lives on the top floor of a garage behind swinging plastic doors.  He is a nobody.  But inside his apartment, which is filled with fantastic paintings on the walls, floors and ceilings, is a collection of music and the high tech stereo equipment to play it.  He is an opera aficionado.

In the first scene in the film, Jules is listening to, and surreptitiously recording a particular Diva’s public recital, Cynthia Hawkins (Wilhelminia Wiggins Fernandez).  Behind him are two gangstery looking Asian men with really bad sunglasses on.  After the recital, he goes back stage to get his program signed, and steals the robe that she sang in.

Hawkins, despite being a world famous Diva, has never allowed her voice to be recorded.  In fact, she believes that if someone were to record her voice, especially against her will, this would be tantamount to rape. 

The recording of the Diva’s singing sets in motion one of two John Grisham-type plot devices that overlap.  In this device, an ordinary person (who usually has unknown incredible powers) falls into a web of mystery entirely innocently.  In this case, Jules, a true fan, is making the recording exclusively for his own use.  But the Taiwanese want the tape in order to blackmail Hawkins into signing a record contract. 

The second Grisham-like plot device also involves a tape.  In this case, a former prostitute in a drugs for prostitutes ring drops a cassette tape into Jules postal bag just before being murdered by the ring’s enforcers.  In addition to being a prostitute, she was the former lover of the ring leader, who just happens to be the chief of the homicide division of the Paris police.  In the tape, she implicates him and he is in charge of the investigation to find the tape.

Each of these incidents has an incredibly low likelihood of happening.  How did Jules get the machine to record into the concert and take it backstage afterwards without getting detected?  Why didn’t the Taiwanese guys record the concert themselves?  Why are the police chasing Jules as the same moment that the Taiwanese guys are?

And then it gets even more farfetched.  Jules sees a young Vietnamese woman, Alba (Thuy An Luu) steal a Jazz album at his favorite record shop.  He follows her to chat her up and find out about her techniques.  He thinks he is building the relationship with her and, when he asks her out on a date, assumes that he is in the lead.  In fact, she is “collecting” him for the man she lives with – a zen master Frenchman, Gorodish (Richard Bohringer) who lives with her in a cavernous loft that has a bathtub, a sleeping area, a kitchen area, and a great sound system – and enough floor space for her to roller skate on and for him to complete a 100,000 piece puzzle of a wave.

So, how did this film connect with my 21 or 22 year old psychic structure?  What can I see in it now that I didn’t see then?  First of all, I identified with Jules.  I, too, believed myself to have an untapped potential.  I believed myself to be an empathic and compassionate person who had deep interests – though they were not as narrowly defined as Jules’s.  I also naively believed that I could connect with women who had great talent, like Hawkins, and help them realize that in a way that they had not to this point.

I also admired Gorodish.  I wanted to be someone who was wise and a strategic thinker, but even more, I wanted someone who, like Gorodish, was a wise and strategic thinker on my side – a kind of guardian angel who would provide just enough savvy to grease the wheels so that my plans – and my goodness – could show itself and positively effect change in the world – without, by the way – and this is more than a little embarrassing – having to change myself; without, in a word, having to grow up.

I’m hoping that you can see that, despite the ways in which I am ill-suited to be an analyst, I am also keenly oriented towards such a profession, and this film helps articulate that these aspects of me, which I did not at the time appreciate as being uniquely mine (I really thought, at the time about the nature of being human; not about the natures of particular human beings), were in fact pushing me towards a profession like this one.  I resonated with this film because it presented a version of myself that I thought was attainable – and I didn’t pay attention to the complicated plot that was necessary to support such an identity.

This film is considered perhaps the best example of the “Cinema du Look”.  The director creates arresting visual images – the chase scenes are marvelous – the architecture is divine – and the dialogue is almost non-existent.  When Jules convinces Hawkins that he is her biggest fan, they spend an eternity together, but they don’t talk.  They simply exist together in a kind of weightless, tender, close but formal way that allows them to admire each other and their mutual love of opera.  They can just be together.  We can focus on the surface, and in doing that, sense the depths without plunging into them.

Gorodish knows the depths.  He, unlike Jules, is worldly wise and gets how people can be cruel because he is cruel.  But he is also a thinker.  In the only scene that I remembered, he is cutting onions for dinner.  And he is wearing a mask and snorkel.  Naturally.  He thinks things out and plans for them – and this means he doesn’t have to weep.  Jules, in our first meeting with him, as he listens to Hawkins sing, cries a tear.  We know that he can feel – and it is safe to do so because there is a masculine world that is protecting his ability to do that.

This film’s gender politics are very much frozen in the time.  Women are two dimensional objects – and even though there is some reference to this as problematic – the truth of the current state of affairs is all too visible all over the screen.  And so, of course, my 1981 objectification of women – intended as a veneration, but certainly something that RGB and others of that period would point out were shackles – is on display.

Happily I have worked on personal development.  There are certainly aspects of my 22 year old self that are still operative – I did, after all, follow the career path.  If my own analysis taught me nothing else, it clarified that I had more depth, and could put words to that depth, than my 22 year old self – that was focused on and concerned about “the Look” - could ever have imagined.  It also has helped me to look for that depth in others – though, to be fair, I was doing that then.

In the final scene in the film, Hawkins, who has never heard her own voice, is allowing Jules to play her singing for her.  Despite this being the one thing she did not want to have happen – as an artist and as a woman – the one thing we analysts would say she is most defended against – she is allowing Jules into this forbidden space.  Jules – and we – share with her the wonder of her hearing her own tremendous voice –the voice we have been admiring throughout the film – engulf them, together, in what has previously been Jules’s solo pleasure.  How did we get to be so lucky?

 

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Pavarotti – Ordinary tragedy is not always operatic

Pavarotti, the new documentary by Ron Howard, was not well- reviewed and so didn’t make it to the top of the movies for date night list for the reluctant wife and me this summer, even though the rest of the movie world has felt like pretty slim pickings.  But we decided, on a particularly bleak movie weekend, to brave it.  I’m glad we did – though I might have preferred to wait for it on video – some of the other audience members seem to have thought it was already being screened in their living room so they chatted about their memories of the big events and, worse, sang along with the best arias – out of tune.  I really felt that the advantages of a good screen and great audio were somewhat wasted.

Luciano Pavarotti was born with a great voice and he studied the art of singing as a tenor.  This film does a nice job of filling in a little bit about what that means without becoming too technical or preachy.  Pavarotti became an opera star for the masses, and this film follows in that tradition.  And it is a tradition that was established long before Pavarotti – the film starts with a grainy video of Pavarotti going upriver in the Amazon to an perform – unannounced – in an opera house that Caruso performed in on one of his many world tours.  And Pavarotti clearly desires to, quite literally, follow in his footsteps as he sings to an almost entirely empty house just to say that he has filled the house that Caruso did with sound.

Pavarotti’s father was a baker and tenor in Modena, a small Italian town not far from Florence.  He has inherited there the mantle of the renaissance, which continues to flow from and support the growth of the individual spirit throughout the world – and Pavarotti’s life oddly mirrors that flowering – and some of its decay – or sprouting new wings and losing its way.

Pavarotti only came to realize himself as a great tenor after he already was one.  And he seems to have kept some of his boyish charm and a great deal of his fear of being out of place as he developed wings that took him far from his roots.  Many of the criticisms of this film include aspects of his character that are not highlighted here – that he failed to show up for performances at the Chicago Opera almost as frequently as he performed there.  That he failed to live up to his promise.  That he failed to learn how to read music.

I think this film allows Pavarotti’s failings to be read between the lines.  It is a celebration of him, but there is also a fair amount of appreciation for his failure to have stayed within the lines of a career.  Instead, he seems to have strayed away – to have been seduced by a variety of sirens.

First and foremost, Pavarotti was seduced by the siren of fame.  He shifted from a primarily operatic career – and we could see this as a career where he would have been performing for the moneyed and cultured elite – using his talents to keep alive a tradition of emotional expression that they would have enjoyed in their cloistered spaces – where all the trappings of wealth are dripping from the walls and ceilings.  And he would have been a kind of lightning rod for emotional experience - a kind of vicarious bringer of catharsis to those who, one might argue, need it most as they have to live lives that are regimented enough to be able to dress for the opera...

Instead, Pavarotti was lured by a Rock and Roll promoter to sing to the masses – to become a rock star.  Which he did.  He sang in outdoor concerts that attracted tens of thousands - including the reluctant wife and her BFFB (Best Friend From Birth) who saw him and the two other tenors perform in the old Detroit Tigers stadium.  And what attracted those who came, over the course of his lifetime – 10 million people – was more than just his phrasing of classical arias – though that was part of it – but his bigger than life persona – a persona that is poignantly portrayed here of a gregarious, happy man who is also tremendously needy and insecure.  Someone who says, before he performs, that we are going on stage to die. 

So Pavarotti’s second siren is that his neediness and ability draws people to him, including Princess Diana and Bono, and he joins the ranks of the transcendent stars – the people who, in the wake of Elvis – have a worldwide following.  But he makes use of this in interesting ways.  He travels to China where he both performs and teaches.  He starts to invite rock and roll stars to an annual event in Modena where they perform and raise money for causes – most all involving children.  And he shows up – much like Princess Diana – to connect with these children.  To fold them into his bigger than life persona.

The third siren, that of women, is one that is treated with a kind of protestant discomfort which I find a bit odd in this movie about a Catholic man.  Yes, Pavarotti had affairs.  How can you imagine that he did not?  He was a needy guy, with the voice, who spent most of his time far from home – pining for it – making pasta everywhere, but also pining for the contact – the intimate contact – of home.  That he had the two long time lovers that were interviewed – and I’m sure there were others who were not so long term – but that he had positive and ongoing relationships with two women is, I think, healthy - though they were both younger than he and dependent on him.  But he was devoted to them.  What was a problem in Catholic Italy was that he sued for divorce in order to marry one of his mistresses, I think, more than that he had dalliances.  While the women may have been disgusted, the eldest reluctant stepdaughter's experiences as student in Italy suggest that the men would have been cheering him on. 

In one of the revealing moments of the film, an older record executive tells of his first foray as a much younger man, into the world of being a record exec.  He was charged with confronting Pavarotti about the fact that he was not living up to his recording contract – he was recording for another label – the label owned by his wife.  Pavarotti asked the young exec if everything was OK.  The exec said no.  He said that Pavarotti had signed an exclusive agreement with Decca records.  Pavarotti wanted to know what exclusive meant.  After the exec explained it, Pavarotti’s response was, “Life is too short.”

Now the particular problem was solved by having Decca buy Pavarotti’s wife’s record company from her.  But the issue of exclusivity is one that is central but not attended to in a direct way through the rest of the film, though a red thread connects it to the elements in Pavarotti’s life.  He fails in fidelity to his wife, to the record company, but also to the Operatic community.  By doing this, he brings into his life regrets – chiefly about the schism that is created with his wife, but especially with his three daughters from the first marriage.  It is clear that he loves these girls and now women deeply.  He also creates a rift with the operatic community.

Finally, he uses his gift to take operatic arias to the masses – in addition to the 10 million who see him live, he sells 100 million records.  Wow.  And he teaches others how to sing.  But he does not take Opera to the masses, he takes himself – and the arias that he lifts out of context - and he promotes himself as a Rock and Roll star.  He doesn’t explain how the arias work – he doesn’t bring opera to life – he connects with his fans through his voice.  He provides catharsis for all.  And the masses become familiar with “Nessum Dorma” through him – and this leads, perhaps, to an unknown cell phone salesman in the UK performing that work on Britain’s Got Talent and bringing the house down – but it doesn’t lead the masses into the opera houses, nor does it lead to a proliferation of opera beyond the traditional venues.  Even though Pavarotti performed on the first live opera television show, beamed from the Met, it wasn’t something that “took”.  His solo performances were much more engaging and watched.

The film talked about Pavarotti losing focus – and this is, I think, what I mean by his losing fidelity.  He lost track of what brought him to the party – and he found the party so enticing that it was hard to keep on top of it – to use his position in the broadest way to organize his life rather than to be organized by it.  Bono, whom Pavarotti pestered into becoming a friend, characterized his later performances, which were marked by vocal breaks – not as the signs of a diminished capacity to sing, but as bringing his lived experience into the opera house to play the parts not just by being able to sing them, but by having lived them.  Bono was, in a weird way, echoing the eldest reluctant stepdaughter who has maintained that scars are souvenirs of life.

Pavarotti’s tragic end was not that he was shot, nor that he was poisoned or stabbed, but that he was hospitalized with cancer.  He was able to connect with all of this family members at the end of his life, and there is some solace in the realization of his having been loved as well as having loved - not just broadly, but intimately and closely, by mistresses, a wife, and four daughters.  My own protestant complaint about his lack of fidelity – something that has interfered in some of the analyses that I have conducted – becomes a judgement of his character – that he is not able to retain fidelity of character.

 

I think my criticism of Pavarotti’s character is harsh, though I think there is some truth to it.  I think it is harsh because his character was exposed to forces that were profoundly and powerfully disruptive.  He was adored by millions, travelling far from his home base – both in Modena and in the operatic scene – and he expressed his love in the life that was too short for him – for any of us – in the best way that circumstances allowed.  The critics would have had Howard take a more critical position regarding Pavarotti.  I, at least, was able to see, in the film itself, the person whose fidelity cracked.  I was also able to deeply empathize with his experience of his life becoming dearer as the room left to live it became shorter.  I found this, despite my fellow audience members, to be a deeply moving and instructive film.

  Bravo!

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Porgy and Bess – A hopeful tragedy

Who doesn’t know the song Summertime?  If you can’t conjure up a feeling state just by thinking about that song, click the link above or below to a Youtube rendition and sit back and relax into a kind of lassitude that is right next to delirium.  My gosh, the Gershwin brothers could craft a tune.  I remember hearing a story about George losing a trunk full of their songs when they were travelling.  Someone asked him about the magnitude of the loss.  He said something like, “Not to worry, there’s a thousand more where those came from.”  Wow. 

Though I have known that song, and a couple of others – I Got Plenty of Nothing – and Bess You is My Woman Now – for as long as I can remember, I have never seen Porgy and Bess, the opera.  The reluctant wife was travelling for business and not excited about seeing it, so I called up an enthusiastic opera loving friend whose partner eschews opera and tagged along with him.  Wow. 

I was afraid that an opera about an African American community in Charleston in the twenties would be dated – and racist.  Would that it were dated.  Oh, the language was dated.  But the themes were current.  Including the power imbalance between the white police and the black public and the power imbalance between men and women.  As a white male, I don’t know that I can speak to the racism and sexism as a member of either club, but I didn’t find that the cringeworthy moments were because of outdated or passé attitudes.  Instead I found they were uncomfortably current.  I also found a story of individuals, a community, and of feelings that feel as timeless and intimate and immediate as opera should feel.  And the music.  Wow.

The music was operatic – this was an opera.  But the songs, as written, were intended to mirror folk songs and spirituals.  Justas Edelweiss is not actually an Austrian folk song, so Summertime is not actually a spiritual, but gosh it feels like it when Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong sing it.  Not so much when opera stars do.  The familiar music is filled with trills and enunciations that Jazz and Folk versions do not contain.  And it takes a little while to get used to folk-like songs getting so gussied up.  But it is a treat to hear an unamplified voice fill a hall with beautiful sounds.  Bring on the gussiness. 

It also feels at moments less like an opera and more like a Broadway show (which it has also been) because the chorus and minor characters have significant parts and there are dance parts that the opera stars look a bit uncomfortable doing.  But the inclusion of more of the company makes it, I think, true to the subject.  Unlike most operas, this is not about the ruling class, but about the lower class.  The king’s or the duke’s chorus are the people – people whose off stage and unacknowledged work allows for the king’s or duke’s life to be one that is apparently self-determined.  

The members of the lower classes are tangibly dependent on each other to survive.  And their collective grief allows them as a group to bear what no one of them could individually bear.  They ante up to pay for each other’s funerals – and they gather together in times of threat- they don’t retreat into the inner sanctum or to the highest vantage point while their minions secure the gates or fight under their direction.  That said, some of these were the moments that felt closest to a potentially racist experience of the play – I think because blacks have been ridiculed for their interdependence.  I think the ridicule is based in fear.  It is threatening to the ruling class to see the connections between the oppressed because it creates strength in a group they maintain power over.  But when this is viewed from a position of connection – when, despite the fourth wall, I was able to experience it not as voyeuristically as I feared I might – I, at least, felt allied with the players in their lives - though I was also aware of the ability to see them as objects - not fellow subjects.

This also doesn’t feel like an opera in the way that the plot is laid out.  Porgy and Bess have enough clock time to actually fall in love.  The emergence of stage romance is frequently incredibly compressed.  This is true not just in opera (I found the speed limit of love to have been violated in the opera Romeo and Juliet earlier this summer, but I think that is the case in the play as well), but also in films (Love Actually condenses a lot of love into a very few weeks before Christmas).  I found myself idly wondering, as I noticed that this opera allows time – not enough, but more than usual – for love to develop, to what extent the quick flowering of love (sometimes in the middle of a song) is a result of the compressed format (though at four hours this opera is not super compressed), and to what extent it mirrors the dramatic culture – groups come together to create magic on tight schedules – they accomplish this – and they manage to deeply engage with each other very quickly as they are doing it (and not infrequently to fall in love with each other while doing it).

In any case, on Catfish row, after Bess is left without a man because Crown, her tough guy, fast talking boyfriend has, in a drunken brawl, killed a man and gone into hiding, she turns – not to Sportin’ Life, who offers to take her in and provide magic dust (heroin or cocaine?) to boot – but to Porgy, the big crippled man who is kind to her and who had never expected to be loved by anyone.  It isn’t necessarily romantic at first, but after a couple of weeks, which is not portrayed, but passes in the context of the play, it has taken a turn in that direction, and Bess, You Is My Woman Now becomes a heartfelt expression of their growing love for and commitment to each other.

At this point, we could have a lovely romantic comedy – but this is opera.  It is also a play about sex, gender and power and how all those things impact love and self-esteem.    We have seen, with the song I Got Plenty of Nothing, how love transforms Porgy’s self-esteem.  He is now proud and happy in a life that was dark and all that has changed is that he is in love.  But Bess’s love is much more complicated.  Though she is clearly smitten with Porgy and their parting before the picnic is laden with the sweet sorrow of their shared and genuine love, she is cornered by Crown on the island where the picnic takes place.  He demands that she return to him, she demurs, he insists – and then he rapes her.  She spends two days in the jungles of South Carolina before returning, delirious, to Porgy, who divines what has happened after Bess is returned to her senses through a group invoking "Dr. Jesus" to help her.

The version of what has happened that passes between Porgy and Bess is at odds with what we have seen.  Bess sings of wanting Porgy to protect her – not from Crown, but from her desire for Crown.  Wait.  Didn’t we just see him rape her?  What the heck is going on?  Well, I think a lot.  First of all, there is an implicit support of a rape culture.  What does a woman find attractive?  A man who is strong and uses his strength not just for a woman’s protection, but against her.  That is the male version of the interaction.  The “Me Tarzan, you Jane” version that is so frequently central to the portrayal of love on the screen in the last century. 

There is a female version of this primitive mating ritual that seems dated in our post-feminist world.  It goes something like, I don’t like being taken, but I am in need of protection – if Crown won’t care for me, should I rely on Porgy or on Sportin’ Life – because being on my own is not an option.  This would seem quaint, except that #metoo movement has exposed the number of women in the show business world who have been dependent on casting directors and producers to support their careers and the behavior that they have had to put up with in order to have those careers develop (and the secrets they have had to keep to avoid losing their status).  And, of course, the independence of women and girls is recent - and far from absolute – so the #metoo movement extends far beyond the bastions of vast power to the places where everyday power imbalances exist – which is pretty much all over the place, especially including Catfish Row.  We could then see Bess’s behavior as a kind of cruel calculus.  Who will protect me best?

This calculus, though, seems to apply later in the plot.  At the moment when she is with Porgy after having been with Crown again, she wants his help in stemming her desire for Crown.  That is coming from a different and, to our post-feminist ear, foreign place.  I think that place has to do with a desire to be loved in a particular way – a way that feels very different from the loving that she gets from Porgy.  I think that she feels herself to have a different kind of power in her relationship with Crown – the power to excite him – the power to elicit desire.  This is, I think, a masochistic love – which is a complex and multiply determined love – and one aspect of that love can be the sense of power that the love provides.

I think that the visceral power that Bess feels in the arms of Crown is like an antidote – in much the same way that the magic dust is - to the powerlessnees of her life as a Negress (as she would have been referred to then) in the deep south in the 1920s, but also – and here I am wildly speculating – we have no backstory on Bess – as a child who did not feel loved – who did not feel herself to be part of the community that is portrayed on stage.  Here her sense of belonging and being cared for by Crown – even when he cruelly cared, feels good.  She became a member of the outcast but superior subculture of drug users, alcohol drinkers, and bar denizens – scathingly portrayed in Sportin’ Life’s song It Ain’t Necessarily so – that disdains the dominant and life giving subculture of Catfish Row that embraced a much more family oriented and deeply spiritually based approach to life. 

The last paragraph suggests a deep division between these two cultures (and within Bess), but the opera clarifies that they are deeply entangled.  Porgy is a master crap shooter.  The most upstanding men tear themselves away from their wives to go to the crap games – and probably the bars – and then they go to church on Sunday and help prepare for and enjoy the picnics.  Though the leads represent white hats and black hats, the chorus helps us see that we are all torn between wanting to lead a life of nurturance and caring, connected to those we care about, and that we also want to express our independence, as it were, from everything – church, state, and even our mortality, by grabbing onto something that will allow us to transcend the tawdriness of our everyday lives.

Bess finds with Porgy something different from that power – she finds a caring relationship (though the idea of belonging – being the property of – Porgy is still very much a part of that) and a different kind of joy – a joy that is not illusory, like the joy of the happy dust, but one that allows her to become generative.  She and Porgy take in a newly orphaned infant and become a family together – a family that gets ripped apart when Crown returns to claim his Bess – only to have Porgy and Bess unite to fight him- with Porgy killing him.  For the second time, the white law man from Charleston comes into Catfish row to root out a murderer, and Porgy is hauled off to identify the body of Crown, but he knows that if he does he that he will be found out as his murderer, so he refuses, and then he is jailed for contempt.

So Bess, once again, does not have a man.  Into this vacuum steps Sportin’ Life, still ready to snatch Bess up and now he plans to take her to New York.  He tempts her with visions of the apartment he can secure on Fifth Avenue with her on his arm, and with happy dust, which she is vulnerable to now that Porgy is not supplying the kind of love that has staved off that desire.  She sashays off with Sportin' Life to New York, leaving the infant, and Porgy, to be cared for by others.  Porgy is able to get out of jail shortly after she leaves (not in the ten years that Sportin’ Life suggested was likely) and he returns to a community that is loath to tell him that Bess has gone.  Once he finds out that she is gone to New York, he wants to hear where it is.  When he discovers it us up north, he heads out to get there, to win his Bess back.

The tragedy of the human condition that seemingly every opera portrays are the ways in which we each butt up against our own limitations in ways that are particular to each of the characters – and the characters are able to sing about their individual and collective grief at this state of affairs.  The tragic endings resonate with the audience members because we are, in fact, infinitely more complicated than any character portrayed on stage, and we have threads that connect with each of the players and we feel their individual and collective grief simultaneously and their grief resonates deeply with our grief – the grief of being human. 

Freud is an uneasy bedfellow for me in part because of his tragic view of life.  Gershwin’s tragic view is subtly and not so subtly undermining of a tragic world view while simultaneously acknowledging it.  Catfish row could not be a more tragic spot.  And yet, it is possible to enjoy Strawberries, Crabs and honey on Catfish row, and to luxuriate in the joy of summer time, when the living is, indeed, easy.  This easy living will inevitably be followed, when the water temperature rises about the air temperature, with hurricanes.  And living in Catfish row is hardly edenic – or is it?  Everyone’s life there is hard – but the strawberries! 

Bess’s external tragedy – like that of the community – is her powerlessness – as a woman and as an African American.  Her gifts include her joi de vivre, her sultry beauty, and her consequent ability to attract men, each of whom wants to take care of her in their own way.  She chooses three different paths at three different moments.  We admire her ability to overcome her “desire” to be dominated by Crown.  We admire her affectionate relationship with Porgy, but we never are quite convinced by it.  We cringe when she is seduced by Sportin’ Life, but I, at least, don’t judge her too harshly – even though I wish it were otherwise.  Her tragedy is that she is vulnerable to the illusion of power and doesn't have the strength to hold out for the real thing when the real thing isn't there to support her.

Porgy is a tragic hero who somehow gets a pass.  He is crippled.  He is a beggar.  He is the bottom rung at the bottom of the heap – but he finds love, and this makes him richer than the richest man.  He has this love pulled out from under him, but this does not cause him to despair – this opera leaves us not knowing his – or Bess’s – fate.  We fear that his quest it quixotic – but he was able to connect with Bess before – will he again?  Will Sportin’ Life’s promises pale in the neon lights of Broadway?  Will Porgy be able to find Bess?  We leave this opera not feeling the despair of the limits of life, but feeling its possibilities, without quite knowing what those might be, even when the deck is stacked against us.

Yes, our life is limited.  But within the limits of that life, we can follow a path that offers much – not just the sweetness of strawberries and honey, but of love.  It may not last – it may not protect us from all the winds that blow – but even if we are at the bottom of the heap, life can be a gift, and we live for the promise of that.

All that said, I feel a much more jaundiced taste in my mouth after writing about this opera than I did walking away from it humming Bess, You is My Woman Now.  I think that there is a divide within our culture - one that mirrors the divide in Catfish Row.  The movie industry - the dream factory - appears to be reflecting back to us what life could be like, but it is, underneath, run by a system that reinforces brute strength over nuance and appearance over substance.  We have, again, a creature of that culture at the head of our country, and I think he is portraying, in code, the forces that are present in this play - and jeering at the citizens that he is governing as objects, and avoiding engaging with them as subjects.  I think he is very much like the producers and the casting directors of the industry that he comes from - and his vision, like that of the entertainment industry generally, is suffused with the not so hidden agenda of subjugation and division while he mouths words that appeal, on the surface, to the spiritual sides of ourselves, while also, in the code, appealing to our darkest angels.  Would that his being crippled in the ways that he has been had led him to Porgy's path, but I fear that it is much more frequent that crippling factors lead us to vindictive and mean paths - paths where we look out for ourselves - and don't connect with those around us.  That is the true tragedy that lurks in the shadows of this uplifting opera.  Despite Gershwin encouraging us to hear our better angels - well, if we are Porgy and we are going off in search of a life that is better because we believe it will be that way, well, it ain't necessarily so...

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Romeo and Juliet – Star crossed lovers or emblems of the essence of romantic love?

Charles Gounod’s Romeo and Juliet – an opera that we saw last night – boils a familiar play down to its essential elements and presents them in a straightforward way.  How can you not know that Romeo, a Montague, goes to the costume ball of his sworn enemy – the Capulets, with his trusty friend Mercutio?  While there, he falls deeply in love with Juliet, the daughter of Count Capulet, though she is being betrothed, by her cousin Tybalt, to Paris.  Romeo woos Juliet, first at the ball and then, when he is kicked out, beneath her window in the famous balcony scene.  Then, the next day, after being secretly married to Juliet by a priest who imagines decreasing the warring tensions between the families, Romeo is confronted by Tybalt.  Romeo, who cannot say the real reason, refuses to fight his new secret brother-in-law.  Tybalt calls Romeo a coward at which point Mercutio takes up the challenge to defend Romeo's honor.  Romeo, intending to stop the fighting, disarms Mercutio just as Tybalt attacks, killing Mercutio.  To avenge Mercutio, Romeo kills Tybalt – and runs to Juliet, his new wife, after killing her cousin and being exiled from Verona by the Duke.  They have their wedding night – she forgives him for she knows that his murder was an act of passion.  They plan to escape Verona together and part with sweet sorrow after the dawn arrives. 

The next day, Juliet discovers that she is to marry Paris and the priest who wed her to Romeo concocts a plan where he will give her a potion that will make it look like she has died and her funeral will prevent the second marriage and she will wake up in the tomb and escape with Romeo, whom the priest will inform of the ruse.  Romeo, distraught at hearing of her death, heads straight to the tomb (picking up some poison on the way) without receiving the intended message from the priest.  After he takes the poison, he sings again of his love, and Juliet awakes (unlike in Shakespeare, the two have one last moment together).  When Juliet realizes that he has taken all of his poison and is dying, she kills herself by plunging a knife into herself.

This play – and the opera and the many other art forms (Shakespeare in Love and West Side Story spring to mind) is so familiar – and so frequently billed as the tragedy of star-crossed lovers, that I found myself wondering, as I listened to it, whether it wasn’t really just the tragedy of romantic love period.  The first moment that this occurred to me was in the balcony scene.  The beginning of this scene in the opera involves Juliet ruminating out loud about her new found love for Romeo – not knowing that Romeo himself is hiding in the dark beneath the window, and when she discovers that he is there, she is not overcome with joy, but with fear.  She worries what he will do with the information that he has surreptitiously received.  I realized how we protect ourselves when we truly feel romantic love.  To let anyone else know that we have feeling for someone is scary business.  We feel, and the music wonderfully portrayed it when Juliet discovers Romeo listening, vulnerable.

Now, there is a bit of a double standard here.  Romeo was loudly proclaiming his “love” for Juliet earlier in the evening – without acknowledging the least bit of vulnerability.  We could chalk this up to gender differences, with men traditionally having less to worry about in pledging their troth – they won’t become pregnant and they are the empowered members of the pair – but I think that, while that can fall along traditional gender lines, the issues are actually shared by both lovers.  There is a bravado to sharing our feelings for another – to letting the world know of our love – and in doing that, we are vulnerable, but also prepared to protect ourselves if that love is not returned.  But when we let the other know that we are not just casting around, but actually feel something profound for this particular individual – particularly if the other has already expressed interest, we are suddenly standing on the edge of an abyss – everything will be different if we cross that divide.  The divide is concretized in the play and the opera because marriage is a necessary outcome of love at that time between these people, but I think the feeling of crossing a divide is an important component of romantic love.

The chasm that separates the Montagues and the Capulets – enmity between these two families – has been the explanation for the dividing line between Romeo and Juliet – but, just as with the gender differences above, I think there is a potential that a more universal experience is being covered up by the particulars of the families.  I think that allying with another family – any family – is a foreign experience.  Even if you grew up next to each other, the habits and traditions of the family next door are slightly different than your own.  And each of the members of the marriage will experience the traditions of the other family as foreign.  So that loving – and especially marrying – another is moving into foreign territory.  From this perspective, all marriages are cross cultural.

But it is not just that the traditions are different; marriage – at least a romantic marriage – is a kind of death.  At its best, it is the (partial) death of one’s selfish regard for oneself.  We have to give up being the cared for one within our family – the one whose cousin Tybalt will find a suitable marriage partner for – and we have to become executives in the family.  But we also have to take our lover’s needs into account.  Indeed, we strangely want to put them at the forefront (in the best of loves), even if that means that our own needs don’t get attended to – that our own needs become dead to us.  And we revel in this.  In moments of true love, we feel good giving something up for someone we love (O. Henry’s Gift of the Magi comes to mind here).  Romantic love has, at its base, a kind of selflessness.

Now, whether a lover is, in fact, moved to be selfless – well, there’s a rub.  Many of our romances don’t turn out to be so romantic.  But when our cultural expectation is that romantic love will result in something like the experience of Romeo and Juliet, if our lover isn’t willing to split with his or her family for us – if our lover isn’t willing to commit suicide at the thought of not being with us, then we question whether they really do love us.  And this becomes the source of endless bits of friction in the marriages and the relationships of so many people.

Perhaps that has something to do with the treatment of dreams and sleep, daytime and nighttime in the opera.  In the opening scene, Romeo is hesitant to go to the party, and Mercutio makes fun of his anxieties by essentially calling them the product of a nightmare.  We know that he should be wary, for we know what the ultimate outcome of the night will be.  The scenes between Romeo and Juliet happen only at night - at the party - beneath the balcony - early in the morning when they are wed - their wedding night - and then in the crypt.  Daytime is filled with the nightmares of murdering Tybalt and Juliet being pushed towards marrying Paris.  The two lovers play with extending the night - it is the place of dreams and also of love for them - and welcoming the day, when they want to cut short their interaction because it is going in unwanted directions.  Romeo at one point commands the day not to come - essentially telling the earth to stop revolving - so that he can have more time with Juliet.

But their time together is dream time - it is, on some level, not real.  They don't really know each other.  They have barely met.  They are attracted to each other - and imagine each other - and discover, in the little time that they have, that they are as the other imagined them - but they don't spend time outside of the night together - they don't leave the world of dreams to discover the realities of the world.  When those realities intrude - when Juliet discovers Romeo has killed her cousin, she quickly forgives him, even before he has asked for it.  They are each who the other imagines them (dreams them) to be - and they are, together, who we dream them to be - the legendary lovers.

A little discussed aspect of the psychoanalytic relationship with a therapist is that this is one of the few places where the form of the relationship is not just fair game for discussion, but it becomes central to the work.  Further, there is an emphasis of the experience of the relationship from the perspective of one of the partners in that relationship – the patient or client.  Their experience of the relationship is privileged.  The therapist’s experience of the relationship, while important, is used to better understand the experience of the patient or client.  If the client is disappointed because the therapist did not act in a particular way, the client’s disappointment becomes a focus of discussion – why and how was the patient disappointed?  This doesn’t necessarily lead to changes in the relationship – but it does lead to being able to talk about what the expectations in the relationship are.  In love relationships it can be hard to talk about those expectations – for among other reasons because to articulate something like the belief that the other’s actions betray their lack of love; well, that is putting the complainer in the position of Juliet letting Romeo know that she loves him and fears that he does not return that love– it makes her vulnerable and gives him power.  So those thoughts stay underground.  In good psychotherapy, those thoughts surface to be discussed and, when things go well, to be understood and worked through.

I once joined a group of men in monthly discussions.  We called ourselves a men’s group, but, though two of us were therapists, we didn’t have a “leader” and we didn’t really have an agenda.  We got together to talk about the things that were important in our lives.  I found it oddly gratifying to discover that one of the other members, not a therapist at all – in fact he worked on the grounds crew of the local parks board cutting grass – noted that relationships were the hardest things in life to navigate.  It helped me realize that people outside of my profession get that what it is that we do is both difficult and very important.

As a side and ending note, I once attended a workshop by a group of family therapists who were demonstrating how their family therapy suicide prevention plan worked with families who had a suicidal teenager, and they used the Capulets, with Juliet as the suicidal teenager.  It was a fascinating model and a fascinating demonstration, but it was also the case that it came with a disclaimer – they wanted people to know that great art – in this case tragedy – would not be prevented by their therapy.  I would disagree and agree with that statement.  First, I think that some kinds of tragedy, teen age suicide among them, can be prevented by discovering and addressing the forces that are leading towards that as a viable option.  I think that, as upsetting as it would have been for Count Capulet to welcome a Montague – especially the murderer of Tybalt – into the family – he would prefer that to losing his daughter.  How that would be navigated, I don’t know.

But I agree with the other side of the coin.  I think that marriages – truly romantic marriages – and then those that aspire to be but aren’t – are tragedies.  They involve the deaths of the lovers – who end up on a funeral pyre together.  In the best of those tragedies, a new pair of people emerge – a couple that has been transformed – for good and ill – by the process of loving each other.  And we continue to hold out hope – more than 400 years after Shakespeare first introduced them to us – that we, like Romeo and Juliet, can be transformed by love.

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King Lear – What folly it is to grow old.

King Lear, Glenda Jackson, Into the Wild, The Marriage of Figaro, Psychoanalysis of Shakespeare, Psychoanalysis of King Lear, Trump

We decided to see a version of King Lear that was being staged in New York.  It starred Glenda Jackson and the write-up in the Times emphasized what an amazing actress and then labor party leader she was.  We YouTubed her lambasting of Margaret Thatcher and were excited to see her.  After we had made our travel plans, the play opened to mixed reviews and was to close the day after we saw it.  Oh, well… perhaps we should have waited until the reviews came out?  Actually, it was good to see a flawed version of the play – I think it revealed some of the fault lines in it.  And, flawed though it was, there was some very fine acting and it is, after all, one of Shakespeare’s great plays…

The first lines of the play involve the Duke of Gloucester introducing his bastard son Edmund to the Earl of Kent.  In his introduction, the Duke pays particular attention to the pleasure he received in fathering the child, but the excruciating quality of the introduction rankles Edmund (no surprise) and he reacts by providing the first soliloquy of the play.  This particular Edmund was played by Pedro Pascal whose read on Edmund is that he is exasperated in an adolescent way about his forever being libeled for something that he did not participate in – his parent’s coupling.  He swaggers through the play, gleefully playing at pitting this person against that person in order to achieve his desired ends, but there is no moment when he seems to really feel what it really means to be a bastard – to hate himself for that (I imagine) and, as a result of this hate, to hate the world that cares most about this aspect of himself that he had no part in forming.  I think that this part could have been played with the gravitas as well as the absurdity of the bastard perspective more in mind.

In prepping to see the play, I read Harold Bloom’s criticism of it.  He said that he has never seen a good version of the play because there are three critical roles – not one.  And he has never seen the other critical roles – Edmund, Gloucester's bastard son and Edgar, Gloucester’s legitimate son, well played when there is a good Lear.  That was certainly true in this performance as well.  But, if this is always the problem, could it be that the roles rather than the players are the problem?  Or, even more deeply, is there something about this play that is too deeply disturbing about us for us to be able to enact – certainly it is the case that Lear is among the least self-aware characters in the Shakespearean canon, and, despite Edmund’s and Edgar’s soliloquys, they don’t seem particularly self-aware either, though each in different ways.

After this play, we saw a presentation on a very different book and film, Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild.  The book is an account of the life and death of Christopher McCandless. The film version of the book is told from the perspective of Chris’s sister Carine McCandless whose position is that Christopher chose to leave civilization because of his discovery that his parents never married.  His father was married to another woman, when Chris was born to his mother and his father had a child with his wife after Chris was born.  Though the father ultimately left his wife, he never divorced her and he never supported his other son.  Christopher was mad at his father both for making him a bastard and for failing to provide for his half brother, and was distressed that he was illegitimate.  The irony of the comparison is that Edmund tries to heal his wound by grabbing for legitimacy, while McCandless tries to erase his wound by leaving civilization and its judgement of him behind.  Neither of them is successful.

The thesis of the presenter at the Krakauer event, Alex Menrisky, was complex, but included the idea that going into the wild represented a reversal (in fantasy) of the developmental arc articulated by Freud in Civilization and Its Discontents.  Essentially the fantasy is (and here I am committing a sin – Dr. Menrisky worked very hard to avoid reducing ideas to two dimensional pastiches) that the damage done by civilization to the individual – the destruction of the primal person that we are – can be reversed by leaving civilization and going into the wild.  The idea is that nature is a better parent than any we can find in the human world.  Menrisky was suggesting that Krakauer saw this as a long standing fantasy played out by various nature writers in our American history – going back to Thoreau.  If we want to carry it even further, Lear might be the first example of this, with his wandering madly onto the heath when the humans who professed love for him failed to follow through on that love within two weeks of his bestowing his kingdom on them.

But I am getting ahead of myself.  In that first scene, after we are introduced to Edmund, we are introduced to Lear and his three daughters.  Lear is most connected to his youngest daughter.  He promises, pretty much out of the blue, to reward his three daughters with lands proportionate to their praise of him as he has decided to retire from being king.  The elder two daughters, Goneril and Regan, falsely praise him, and he gives them their lands, each after their respective speeches (which undercuts the proposed apportionment strategy – he decided ahead of time who would get which lands and simply expected them all to say he was wonderful), and then when Cordelia, his youngest and the only child who actually does love him, refuses to make false claims about her love and explains why not, Lear becomes enraged, divides her portion between her sisters, and asks her two suitors if they still want to marry her.  The Duke of Burgundy backs off, but the King of France, one of the few stand up guys in the play, accepts her and she is whisked off to France.

So, Lear becomes a king without a kingdom.  He expects that his two daughters, who have professed their love for him, will support him, and his party of 100 knights, as she shuttles back and forth between their homes.  Well, that lasts for about two weeks, then Lear is out in nature – who turns out, just as she did for McCandless, to be a cruel mother and not very hospitable.  Lear survives her which, (spoiler alert) McCandless does not.  Lear seems to misunderstand that a king is loved not for himself – not because he is such a wonderful guy – but because he embodies the state.  In psychoanalytic terms, the people project onto him something of the paternal – something about taking care of them – and love him because he is doing that – he is caring for them.  I suppose in the same way, daughters (and sons) care for their fathers – love their fathers – because they are loved by them.  Lear loses the love of his country and the love of his daughters when he abdicates from his role as their king and as their father - as the one who loves and cares for them.

By chance, we have also recently seen a wonderful production of Mozart’s opera The Marriage of Figaro.  In it, the Duke has rescinded the law where he had first right to have sex with any woman who was married in the Dukedom (before her husband would).  This may sound strange to our ear, but it was a right in various places – including a right exercised by priests in some places.  The Duke gets it that this is a bad law, but he also lusts after Figaro’s bride to be, Susanna.  Serious hijinks follow as the Duke's wife ends up dressing up as Susanna to catch him trying to woo another woman and the Duke, who is really the cad in this play, asks forgiveness of his wife – something that seems out of character – and something that fixes the rupture between him and his wife – but also between him and Figaro, who is his servant, and, most broadly, between him and those he governs.  He returns to being a Duke of integrity.

Reparation is part of what is missing from a tragedy.  Acknowledging a wrong doing and setting things straight does not occur.  Cordelia tries – she returns from France to fight Regan and Goneril who, before she showed up, intended to fight each other, and do fight over Edmund as each has fallen more in lust with him than the other.  The sense of entitlement that each has – Lear for affection unearned – and greater than is warranted, as Cordelia points out; Edmund for the love that he has never received – but (I think because he did not know true love from his father) can’t recognize that the sparring sister’s lust for him has nothing to do with love; Gloucester, who feels entitled to fealty from Edmund despite his abuse of him, so that his being blinded in the play is a playing out of his being blind to the impact of his treatment of Edmund and to Edmund's not surprising duplicity; Goneril and Regan, who feel entitled to love in much the way that Edmund does – and who, like Edmund, have not felt their father’s love, and feel entitled to look for love wherever they might find it and to break the oaths that they have made to their fathers, and even Cordelia, who feels entitled to tell her father the truth even though she knows he can't hear it – things end very badly for all of them. 

Lear’s time upon the heath, unlike McCandless’s romanticized time in the Wilderness (especially in the movie, but apparently by the readers of the book), is brutal and he is saved from the savageness of nature only by the love and caring of Kent, the fool – who also despises him, and Edgar – who knows the value of a father, perhaps because, as the legitimate son, he did feel loved by Gloucester.  But Edgar cannot reveal himself to Lear or to Gloucester, when he comes upon him, nor can Kent reveal himself to Lear.  Both Lear and Gloucester have rebuked and disowned Kent and Edgar respectively – turning against those who genuinely love them to depend on those who would abuse them.  After they have lost their power to harm their caregivers, they are pitiable, and it would be shameful to them to have their state be known by those who love them; so, out of love, Kent and Edgar keep their identities hidden and help as they might.

Unlike the Duke in Figaro’s marriage, the realization that they have done wrong comes to Lear and Gloucester only after they have lost their power to repair things, so they are doomed.  Unfortunately, they bring down those they love as they do this – Cordelia is sentenced to death by Edmund, acting in Goneril and Regan’s name, and Edmund’s repentance for having ordered the death of the legitimately loving daughter comes too late to save her.  Lear dies of a broken heart after finding her.  Edgar is left (along with Regan’s husband) to reign over a kingdom whose concept of ruling has been corrupted.

Menrisky, in his interpretation of Into the Wild, maintains that what is underlying the romanticization of McCandless is the idea that undergirds psychoanalysis: that the process of civilizing us – the process that leads us to have an ego – is undoable.  We can return to a natural state and rebuild ourselves.  Menrisky sees this as a false promise.  But it is a promise – a promise that I felt and wished for in my own analysis.  I remember a supervisor commenting that the people she saw coming out of psychoanalysis (co-workers at a psychoanalytically oriented hospital – people she knew well before and after their analyses), were more like themselves after the analysis than different.  She saw them as better versions of themselves - but still very much themselves.  The analyst and the analysis do not erase what has come before and start over with a blank sheet – going back somehow to the beginning of time and (despite the claims of some treatments) reparenting the person in a new and healthy manner.  Our task is to figure out how to take who we are and become better at being ourselves.

Lear and, I think in the mind of Menrisky and Krakauer, McCandless abdicate from the responsibility of being themselves, of becoming the executives of the lives that they were meant to live.  The fool was played wonderfully in this (and other productions) by the same actress who played Cordelia (Ruth Wilson – the only Tony nominated element in the production).  Doubling the role allowed us to see that the love that Cordelia holds for Lear is filled with disappointment as well as reverence.  The fool is downright disdainful of the king, who seems to be too self-involved to be aware that he is being made a fool of – or more accurately – that he has made a fool of himself.  But I also think the fool is the tiny voice of self-awareness that we sometimes hear but disregard. I think this play, not unlike Hamlet, may be hinting at something about the arduous process of coming to know oneself – and the tragic character of that process inevitably involves significant pain – and despite Edgar’s trying to protect Gloucester from that pain, it will come home – despite Cordelia’s love, Lear will despair – and despite his best efforts, Edmund is still a bastard.  Accepting our role and playing it, accepting what life has dealt us, is difficult – and we rail against it.  But all of our ranting and raving doesn’t change the paths that are open to us.

The exception to this, of course, is the path laid in the comedy, The Marriage of Figaro.  Here the Duke recognizes the corruption of his position – the ways in which it imperils others – including his wife, whom he loves – and his citizens – whom he ultimately cares for and about – to a certain extent in spite of himself.  Mozart seems to be telling the Austrian King that if he wants to avoid the fate of Lear – and that of his sister Marie Antoinette – he needs to value the lives of those he rules.  This caution is an important one as the governments of the world made the transition from despotic, Middle Ages rule to a rule that the enlightenment would ultimately make possible, the rule of the people.  But the people would have to step up.  So: a couple of notes about this particular production of Lear.

King Lear in Trump Style Gold Leaf...

This Lear was set in Trump Tower – the set was floor to ceiling gold paint.  If the point wasn’t driven home by that, the fool pointed to his American Flag socks when delivering a soliloquy on the corruption of Lear and the country and the blood money in Act five were ruble notes.  OK, we get it, when we are hit on the head.  Trump is Lear – he has abdicated from responsible governing and all kinds of malarkey is going on when his hand is off the tiller as he wanders from Washington to Palm Beach to enjoy games of golf, and even more goes on when he shows up to “govern”.  And we get it, the American people abdicated their responsibility when they elected this Lear.  We are the Gloucesters of the world who are blind to the foibles of those we serve who should be serving us – we are the Gonerils and Regans who offer the fawning message of false love and then proceed to do what we need to do to have the government serve our needs.  Will Trump wake up, though, and realize what he has done and mourn the death of Cordelia?  Who among us is Cordelia?  

I found it much more compelling, in our conversation about McCandless, when a fellow conversant noted that while McCandless imagined the wild as a nurturing presence, it really was a repetition of – not a replacement for – the hardships that he suffered at the hands of his father – hardships that went beyond fathering him out of wedlock – hardships that included locking him in a closet with his hands bound above his head for hours at a time.  The speakers point was that the European taming of this continent is written as if we were all Daniel Boone’s who loved the challenge of the wilderness when the wilderness was, in fact, a traumatic place to live.  So, when we say “Make America Great Again”, we are asking for a return to a time when we had to be brutal in order to survive – and thrive – and we were brutal to each other.  In this sense, Trump is the return of the father who never has to say he’s sorry – the return of the unapologetic – the man who will be neither a tragic hero – nor a comic one – but one who will simply continue a tradition, not alter it – in the ways that both tragedy and comedy can do that.  He is, then, artless.  I think this play fails as a referent to him because we have no evidence that he will ever realize his folly - though of course we had no evidence that Lear would either.  But I do wonder if Jackson's Lear here was less sympathetic than the Lear she played in London to rave reviews because she was also playing a man for whom she has nothing but disdain.

The second point is that the cast included a woman as Lear – and also as Gloucester (and, yes, as the fool, though that is not so unusual).  Maybe there is something about our aging that makes us less gender bound.  Both actors were convincing in their paternalism without pretending to be men.  But certainly we are discovering that we can be less gender bound than we have led ourselves to believe.  And, perhaps, as we emerge from a gender bound past, we can become able to be blind to ourselves (and discover those blind spots) in manifold new and interesting ways…

The third point is that this casting included a deaf actor as Cornwall, Regan's husband.  This necessitated including an American Sign Language translator on stage.  In a play that includes blindness - it was interesting to have that blindness instigated by a deaf man - one who was deaf to the true nature of his wife.

Finally, to return to the beginning, I think that portraying our blind (and deaf) spots; whether we are Lear and don't realize how pompous and vain we are, or Edmund and don't realize how our sense of being uncared for has made us uncaring, or Edgar and we don't realize how our fear of doing the wrong thing keeps us from doing the right thing - are difficult to portray.  We are beings with an unconscious for a reason - we need to not know.  To ask three different actors to portray to the audience who they are without somehow knowing themselves and to do this simultaneously and in different ways, may simply be asking too much.  And, since each of these characters springs from the mind of one man (or perhaps a small group of men with a lead author), that these aspects of known and unknown should reside simultaneously in the mind of that one man and interact with each other on the stage (or not - Edmund and Lear never actually communicate directly with each other) becomes a representation of just how complicated it is to be human - to try to transcend that which we are and, in the process, to discover that who we are limits our very ability to do that thing that we would most desire being able to do - to become something greater - something or someone that is not bound by our own nature and by nature itself - and to fail at that in not just one arena but several simultaneously - perhaps that is just too much for us to take in at one moment. 

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