No. 6 - "Defeat is always momentary"

Like ashes being spit up by a Phoenix, this silly little column now gets a new lease on life thanks to our good friends at In the Garage Productions. I did not expect it to live on after we took the Poor Artists Collective out back behind the shed and put a bullet in its head—yet here we are!

Things have been interesting since the death of the Collective. I took a trip to Nepal which ended with me being entered into the Guinness Book for having the largest amount of marriage annulments in a twelve hour period. I then found myself being beaten with large novelty crayons before luckily escaping onto the wings of an illegal seaplane headed for the Azores. This unfortunately led to me falling out somewhere in between and being stranded at sea for quite a few minutes. I was eventually picked up, miraculously, by a boat made entirely of pretzels….but before I even had a chance to question the existence of such a boat, the boat itself was eaten by really fat porpoises. As I have had experience wrangling porpoises, I managed to attach a saddle to one of them and ride it back to America. Once I got back I promptly swore I’d never go back to Nepal.

All of that was true. Enough about me.

My pal Jorge attended the Tony awards back in 2004, knowing generally nothing about theatre. When he asked me for some information about all things Broadway in 2004, I was quite happy to accommodate. Jorge was one of the more intelligent people I knew at the time—his lack of theatrical knowledge was only thus because of a lack of exposure.

He flew into work the next day high with excitement. He had a fantastic time, but the thing that really hit me was his incredible passion to go right out and see Fiddler on the Roof as quickly as possible. When this un-theatrical political brain trust from Ecuador showed such enthusiasm for going to see a tepidly reviewed musical revival about Jewish life in a shtetl, you could say my hopes for the future of Broadway became instantly rekindled.

Theatre officially became vital for him right then and there. It reminded me of the episode of Sports Night when Felicity Huffman’s character goes to The Lion King and discovers a passionate love for the theatre that she never knew existed. “I didn’t know we could do that…” she says, with such fascination and a new found wonder for the human race.

I will absolutely not be writing that this is what distinguishes us from animals. We are animals. We are arrogant animals because we think that other animals do not think or feel or create or love because we cannot see it. Just because we can’t see it with our science or our eyes does not mean that it isn’t there. Instead of celebrating how much better off we are than animals, why don’t we celebrate the fact that the animals of this world tolerate us when they don’t have to. What if a giant herd of elephants suddenly got up and decided to stampede all over Boston? It could happen, and we’re not prepared.

How do we fight this arrogance? With knowledge and enlightenment. Where do we get knowledge and enlightenment? From the arts. We create amazing icons of the animal kingdom and we let them sing and dance about animal life in Africa. We watch, we identify, and we empathize. (That said however, Ragtime still should have won the Tony back in 1998. It’s the superior musical by far.)

This enlightenment is one of the strongest spells the theatre can cast. Felicity Huffman learns about her own being by means of experiencing the majestic pride lands, just as Jorge learned about his own life by means of Tevye and Golda when he finally went to see Fiddler. In an instant he was given a communication, an entertainment, and the wonderful minutiae of life itself—all of which add up to the revelation of truth. This “revelation of truth” is, by the way, the reason I love Harold Pinter’s writing.

Through the arts we find tolerance, we dispel our arrogance, and what we learn will hopefully prevent the elephants of this world from stomping us all to death. If it doesn’t, however, we can always take comfort in a quote from my favorite film of 2005-

“Defeat is always momentary.”

The re-appearance of this column should be proof enough of that.

Keep fighting,

Brian