Who has not seen that perennial emblem of the theater—the masks showing a smiling face alongside a face contorted in suffering? People have always flocked to the theater to hear stories, see outlandish spectacles, and feel powerful and concentrated emotions. The house that screams with laughter one night might be weeping the next. Katharsis, Aristotle called it.
The relationship between tragedy and comedy has been seen in terms of space, such as in Charlie Chaplin’s famous quote: “Life is a tragedy if seen in close-up, but a comedy in long-shot.” And it has also been seen in terms of time: “Comedy is tragedy plus time,” said Carol Burnett.
This week, I offer theater-goers choices — comedy or tragedy? love or death? laughter or tears? Our creatively fertile little valley tenders a repertoire of strong passions just in time for Valentine’s Day celebrations.
New Century Theater (NCT) and Happier Valley Comedy (HVC) collaborate on “Making Up Love,” a one-night performance of scripted and unscripted scenes presented at The Academy of Music in Northampton. First, 6 NCT actors play out their scripted parts on the theme of love, and then they are joined by 6 HVC actors who intrude on these scripts, improvising their parts and lines, bringing lovers to unforeseen conclusions. So similar to life, this “great lover’s leap into the unknown” (as the show was described).
On the other end of the spectrum, Mt. Holyoke College presents Margaret Edson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play, “Wit” (sometimes represented as “W;t”) directed by Maria Signorelli from this Mt. Holyoke’s 2017 graduating class. The play dramatizes the final hours of Dr. Vivian Bearing, an English professor specializing in the Metaphysical Poetry of John Donne. Interacting with doctors and nurses as she lays dying of ovarian cancer, Bearing reflects on her life-long love of literature, the relationships she has had and has bypassed, and the rewards and limits of the intellectual life.
Unmarried and childless, Bearing remembers the human relationships she fostered through her learning and teaching, the mentors and students she studied with. She wonders over the puzzle of how the heart fits into a life of the mind. Although the play shows how, in our most vulnerable moments, it is human kindness that is needed, it also draws our attention to the salve art applies to our human wounds throughout our lives.
Addressing Death, Donne says in his Holy Sonnet X, “…why swell’st thou then?/ One short sleep past, we wake eternally/ And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.” Art gives us hope and heart through so many pains until the very moment “we wake eternally.”
And this seems to be a theme in my final offering this week, as well, a performance that falls in between the two masks of theater, drawing on both sides of the spectrum to mirror the laughter and tears so many of us are experiencing at this moment in our history. The play is “Happyland,” produced by the new all-female, international theater group Til Lalezar Theatre and presented by Eggtooth Productions at the Shea Theater in Turners Falls.
Til Lalezar Theatre is comprised of women from different cultures, united in their belief that theater dismantles the walls between people. Grace Booth is a traveling theatre-maker and educator who hails from Gill, MA (her parents own The People’s Pint in Greenfield), whose work has carried her to the Czech Republic, the Caribbean Islands, Indonesia, and places throughout the United States. She has returned to Greenfield to help create the new arts space at 12 Federal St.
Linn Haldrup Lorenzen, who is the guest director and dramaturg for this show, is a Dane studying for a BA in Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of Copenhagen. She, too, has worked and studied all over the world, including Russia, Colombia, Poland, and the UK.
Tone Haldrup Lorenzen, also from Denmark, has an MFA in Ensemble-Based Physical Theater and has been living and working internationally since she was 15. She believes that, “…living in other cultures and meeting people with different mindsets is what inspires her to create. She collects souls, smells, colors, and tastes in her suitcase and opens it on stage to reveal grotesque characters put in raw surreal universes.”
Finally, Vida Tayebati is “a devised theatre maker, actor and dreamer from Tehran, Iran.” She was involved in the underground theater scene in Tehran, and like her colleagues, has also studied and worked all over the globe. It’s been 2 years since this young woman has seen her parents, who had secured visas to come see their daughter in this production. Their trip, however, is jeopardized by the Trump administration’s travel ban. About this, Tayebati wrote publicly to her parents:
“Since last month that I knew you were coming here, every day I woke up with the image of that first moment I would see you two in the airport. I went through all the details of it for more than a hundred times in my head already. That exact moment that I see your lovely faces in the crowd and run toward you. I imagined I would hug you tight for a long time. It made me deeply happy. I will hold this image and repeat it again and again every morning until a day that I see you two!”
Drama, life, and theater. Laughter and tears. About “Happyland,” Linda McInerny of Eggtooth writes, “[it] pits the Poet against the Dictator in the wild world of a Wrestling Match. […] Til Lalezar Theatre has created a comic, surreal, physical theatre drama in which the scrawny fists of Hope must battle the shadow of the System.”
We are all on the edge of our seats to see how that will play out. The best quote I could find about tragedy and comedy comes from one of the Kings of Comedy, Sid Caesar himself:
“If you have no tragedy, you have no comedy. Crying and laughing are the same emotion. If you laugh too hard, you cry. And vice versa.”
In times like these, maybe we don’t need theatrical catharsis—there are enough hysterics in the real world, perhaps. But to safely receive that moment when tears become laughter, and laughter tears, we can always go to the theater.
“Making Up Love” produced by New Century Theater and Happier Valley Comedy plays at The Academy of Music, Northampton, on Sunday, February 12 at 2:00PM, Doors Open at 1:30PM. For tickets: Academy of Music Theatre Box Office
“Wit” presented by Mount Holyoke College plays in Rooke Theatre at Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, February 9 at 7:30 PM, February 10 at 7:30 pm, February 11 at 7:30 pm, February 12 at 2:00 pm
For tickets: https://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/theatre
Til Lalezar Theatre Company’s “Happyland” presented by Eggtooth Productions at the Shea Theatre in Turners Falls on February 17 & 18 at 7:30 pm
for tickets: http://sheatheater.org/d/114/HAPPYLAND
Jenny Abeles is a writer and educator living in Greenfield. You can search her work online by including her middle name, Terpsichore.