Broadway tickets aren’t easy to come by these days, but sometimes there is a show that changes the face of the Great White Way, a show that introduces the greater theater community and the world to knew methods of story telling. This season, Next to Normal fits the bill.
With a risk-taking pop/rock score by Tom Kitt and unflinchingly perceptive libretto and lyrics by Brian Yorkey, Michael Greif’s dynamic direction soars. Greif’s most famous credit is undeniably the groundbreaking cult-inspiring musical, Rent, but he outdoes himself with Next to Normal. The show is both articulate in staging and in design/creation. It accepts the intimacy of a five character show while fearlessly abstracting its themes and emotional character relationships. Mark Lendland’s set is architectural, functioning both as a literal home and also as housing for the levels of consciousness that operate simultaneously in the play.
The play explores the life of a family struggling with the loss of an older son. The father attempts to hold the home together as his wife experiences dangerous bouts of schizophrenia and their daughter is left feeling invisible amidst the aftershocks. The cast is commendable as an ensemble, but especially of note are the performances of Alice Ripley, J. Robert Spencer, and Jennifer Damiano.
Alice Ripley’s 2009 Tony Award for Best Actress in this piece is well earned. Her performance as Diana is vulnerable, audacious, and gut-wrenching. As always, she is a belting powerhouse and her navigation of the lyrics and music is artful, specific, and fearless.
Spencer’s 2009 Tony Nominated performance cuts to the core. He allows himself to explore both the selfless and the selfish sides of the Dan, the father, without apology. His voice is unexpectedly young and fresh, a real find.
The daughter, Natalie, as played by Jennifer Damiano is similarly fearless and for a young actress, she is a force to be reckoned with. Her voice is interesting and her musicianship keeps the audience in the moment with her, leaving your heart racing when she makes an unexpected choice or change in dynamics. We should expect great things from her in the future.
If you see one musical this season, make it Next to Normal and support new visions and methods of story telling that keep the Broadway stage truly alive.
To buy tickets to Next to Normal or for additional information about this production, see http://www.nexttonormal.com
Last night I watched Contact twice. Not once. Twice. In a row.
The movie came out in 1997 when I was 12 years old. I was in 6th grade and absolutely obsessed with outer space. I even had my own armory in my closet which consisted of space blasters, lightsabers, and Jedi armor. As a Girl Scout, I was taught to always be prepared. Let’s just say that if Darth Vader had materialized in my room, I could have easily been ready for an old fashioned Jedi showdown.
I certainly loved everything to do with Star Wars and most other sci-fi/fantasy universes, but I also knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that I wanted to be an astronaut. I was serious about learning everything I could concerning NASA, its history, and development.
It was only natural for my father to take me one Sunday afternoon to see Contact, the film adaptation of Carl Sagan’s book by the same title. As we sat in the cool, dark movie theater, I didn’t even resent him for not letting me get candy or popcorn. I was going to see a space movie and that was all that mattered.
As the story unfolded, I idolized the heroine, Eleanor Arroway, who was played to perfection by Jodi Foster. She was so brave and strong willed. She fought for what she wanted and at the end of the movie, no one even believed her story. It made me incredibly sad for her. I marveled at how the director had used well-edited clips of Bill Clinton to make it seem like he was speaking about building the alien transport system and responding to questions about the fictional events presented in the movie. There were even interviews with my favorite hosts from “The Today Show.” which I watched every morning before school. It was almost as if the whole thing had really happened right under my nose. The audience was implied as a part of the story because the movie had incorporated figures from our daily life.
I remember leaving the theater and tugging on my Dad’s arm and asking,
“Daddy, what’s a worm hole?”
“Daddy, I can’t believe that they didn’t believe she went to Vega!”
“Daddy! Which star is Vega?”
“Daddy! How long is a lightyear? No wait! What’s a black hole?”
The list went on and on and my dorky, lovable father, who is a professional know-it-all, patiently answered all of my questions. The movie had perked my interest in the mapping of space rather than its deeper themes.
Watching Contact 11 years later is a completely different experience. I’m an actress and not an astronaut. I’m a writer with a critical mind and not a child with a dramatic sense of wonder. After such a large perspective shift, anyone is bound to see things differently than when they were 12 years old. Still, I was especially struck by the difference in my point of view on this particular film.
I no longer saw a film full of whimsical science fiction and alien technology, but a story about how we as humans can reconcile faith in a modern world where science is sometimes made out to be be anti-religious. After all, we’ve gotten to the point where certain religious institutions do not want to teach evolution because they believe that its heretical.
When I was younger, faith wasn’t an integral part of my life. I’m the daughter of a Protestant mother and a Jewish father. We attended church pretty much only when my grandmother was in town and went to the synagogue only when a friend had his or her bar or bat mitzvah. I was allowed to believe in what I wanted to believe, but because of my own interests in science, I tended to side with Jodi Foster’s character in Contact.
I saw no evidence for or against God, but I did see a lot of civil limitations connected to Christianity.
I have always been very supportive of my gay family members and hearing the “religious right” tell the world that marriage is for a man and a woman has always seemed outrageous to me. My uncles have every right to same advantages my parents have. Seeing religious rallies against a woman’s right to choose abortion if she felt she couldn’t properly care for her child seemed like yet another misplaced limitation being forced on women.
As a child, I had seen religion as an obstacle and that’s how I identified it in regards to this film. I wanted Eleanor Arroway to be chosen to represent humankind on their mission to contact alien life and I was outraged that just because she didn’t have a strong connection to a higher power, that she was discriminated against. “What about that separation of church and state thingy?” I had asked my father afterwards.
Religion in the form of cult worship is demonized in the movie and made into the very the source of terrorist acts and the backbone of the suicide bomber who disrupts the alien machine’s first test, killing the initial candidate for the mission and destroying the entire aparatus.
What I wasn’t mature enough to recognize in 1997 was that “faith” can be separated from religion. To me, faith is an odd mixture of trust and determination. In Contact, there is a communal sense of faith in God that Eleanor Arroway doesn’t identify with. However, she experiences faith in the unknown throughout the whole film, even when no one believes in her project or in the end, her journey. She heads a project that is running out of funding which requires her to sit alone for hours, listening for a signal from beyond that may never come. Despite the odds, she knows she has to be there if it does. When others want to give up on her project, she insists that it’s necessary, convincing them of its importance despite the fact that she can’t provide a foreseeable result of her studies. When the other scientists want to add a chair with straps to the alien design for the pod, Arroway questions them. “Shouldn’t we have a little faith?” When she is offered a cyanide tablet, she refuses it, retorting that she didn’t come this far to bail out on the Vegans who sent their message across the stars. She intends to see it through to the very end and directly as instructed by the message she received. She trusts their plans for her with no guarantee of success or survival.
When the movie ended back in 1997, my 12-year-old self was most interested in the fact that no one believed that Arroway’s pod had traveled to Vega. I revelled as the president’s adviser stuck it to the movie’s “villain,” announcing that there although there was only white noise on the whole video recording of Arroway’s journey, it lasted for exactly the amount of time Arroway had claimed to be in transit form Earth to Vega.
“Ok to go,” Arroway states over and over again as she readies herself for that epic journey. She trembles as the terror takes over. She has no idea how this machine will work. She has only been able to speculate up until this point. Yet Arroway presses on. She has planned for this moment her entire life. The fear keeps her from being able to fall back into the comfort of her precious logic. She must simply be vulnerable to the experience.
As the pod moves through space, she can see through its walls,racing through worm holes and floating amidst gas formations only seen before in the form of Hubble Telescope images. Her eyes are wide. There isn’t even a hint of analysis or calculation in her gaze as she unstraps herself from the chair, looking out into the starry masterpiece. “So beautiful… It’s so beautiful,” is all she can muster.
When she finally arrives on the beaches of Vega, she is greeted not by an alien life form, but by her father, the man who inspired her to begin her work with audio analysis in the first place. She reconnects with the origins of her life’s journey, while at the same time she is meeting with the unknown, making contact with both past and future simultaneously. The Vegans never appear to Eleanor in their true form. She must decide for herself whether to believe she has had and encounter with an alien life form or merely hallucinated a meeting with her dead father.
“This is just the beginning. This is just contact,” Her father says to her, tenderly brushing her cheek with his fingertips.
Listening to that line, I think of all of those times I’ve heard people say, “That’s when I found God.” Arroway is given a precious, life affirming experience, something she cannot deny whether the experience was real or simply a vision.
Even though I’m not sure if I believe in God in the Christian sense, I can I identify with moments when I’ve felt something more, or gained a sense of the unknown. This film suggests that our great human need for discovering and connecting with the unknown is not only present in the ritual of daily prayer, but in our scientific reach for what lies beyond our star system. Science does not have to be anti-religious and at the same time we don’t have to believe in a higher power to sustain faith. We can sustain faith simply by believing in something great than ourselves, whether that lies in Heaven or beyond the reaches of the Milky Way.
I really am filled with hate right now. I tried to update my iPhone with 3.0 software and AGAIN it went into recovery mode and is in this odd loop hole where the computer tells me to restore it and then says there is an error and it can’t be restored. This happened once before and I took it into the store. They managed to restore the phone so that I could use it, but I’ve never updated it to the new software again for fear of having this very thing happen. I wanted to try to download it today so that I could download the Wordpress App, but it seems I have entered this annoying “You-need-to-restore-but-we-are-unable-to-restore” vortex again.
I made an appointment with the Apple Store, but there’s not an available time until Saturday, two days from now, at 5:50 PM. Even though that’s an inconvenience and it may ruin my plans for the 4th of July weekend, I HAVE to go on that day because my phone has to work. I can’t live without it.
I had forgotten what this is like. I actually feel naked. I’ve grown so accustomed to all of the tools on my phone, not to mention its run of the mill ability to, you know, make phone calls. I have plans to hang out with two people this weekend and without my phone, that may not happen. If it doesn’t, I’ll be a sad panda.
Ugh, who am I kidding? I’m already a sad panda.
I’m also pretty disgusted with how reliant I am on my iPhone. A few posts ago I wrote about how I was addicted to my iPhone and its different bells and whistles. Now I’ve progressed to going through actual withdrawal. I’m not kidding folks. I’m restless and I keep pacing around the apartment and trying to sleep this awful feeling in the pit of my stomach off. I keep wondering how people will contact me.
Would it kill me to be incomunicato for a few days?
Maybe I should just… move to the jungle and live off of fish I catch with my bare hands and water tempered with iodine tablets. I could even fashion a spear out of a branch and hunt boar. Maybe I’ll meet John Locke from ABC’s Lost. Ah, let’s face it. I’d never make it.
I used to be way more outdoorsy. I have taken several “adventure” trips in the course my blessed life. I went horseback riding with my parents in Arizona for two weeks. I’ve camped and rafted in Alaska for three weeks and gone on glacier hikes near Valdez. I went into the Montana mountains for three weeks and stayed out in the woods on solo for one of those weeks. I visited the Galapagos Islands and took naturalist tours. I worked with the National Park Service tagging sea-turtles and living on a boat in the Caribbean. I went white water rafting in the Colorado River and hiked out of the Grand Canyon.
So now I live in New York City. Rewind. What? How did that happen?
When did I become so tirelessly urban? Where has my inner cowgirl gone?
I think she’s still somewhere inside of me. I feel her stir in me whenever I can see a large expanse of sky, even if its only over Washington Square Park. I actually felt her today, of all days, while I was sitting in Grand Central Station.
I was trying to get a few moments of escape and serenity from my boss, who was making me do all sorts of annoying little tasks like canceling her Visa card and changing her legal address, both of which are real headaches for the actual person, let alone an assistant who is trying to remember all of her boss’ personal information.
As I sat on a bench, I noticed that there was a bird twittering and tweeting away. I knew immediately that it wasn’t a pigeon because pigeon’s coo.
Actually, if you ever get a chance to hear pigeon sex, its coo-rific. It makes me die laughing. I’m not a pervert, for the record, but they used to roost right outside of my window as a child. I often convulsed in giggles when I heard them going at it in a rousing “coorus.” Get it? Coorus, Chorus? Come on people! I digress.
As I looked for the source of the sound I noticed something tiny and dark running across the floor. I almost shrieked because I thought it was a nasty New York rat. Upon further observation I realized it was a red breasted robin. Phew.
My father is obsessed with birds and he taught me long ago how to identify one. Actually, we used have a huge one that lived in our backyard in Chicago. This type of bird is also significant to me because I loved The Secret Garden as a child and Mary Lennox, the heroin of the story, was guided by a “Robin Red Breast” to the gate of her Aunt Lily’s garden and he flew around the ivy covered, overgrown walls and kept the girl company while she planted seeds. That story was so gorgeous, both in text and on stage as a musical.
So there I was, overworked, underpaid, and sitting on a bench looking at my very own Robin Red Breast. This one was singing beautifully but upon closer inspection, I realized his wing was broken. He must have flown into the building and banged into a window or other reflective surface while trying to get out. It was so tragic because you never see anything but pigeons (AKA the rats of the air) in the city. Atleast I don’t. Then again I’m not specifically looking to identify birds.
It is a fact: This poor creature that reminded me of my childhood and a beautiful story will die. I didn’t know how long he’d been there. Perhaps he was singing for his supper. Perhaps it was his “Swan Song.” He must have been in so much pain. Maybe it’s stupid, but it made me tear up a little bit as I watched him waddle about. He even hopped over to me and just looked at me for a while, completely unafraid and uninhibited. It reminded me of how the animals had acted during my visit to the Galapagos Islands. The sea lions and marine iguanas would just sit and sun themselves on the beach. They hadn’t been introduced to fear of humans because they’ve never been hunted there. That whole trip made me feel like I was living in the Garden of Eden. The guide warned us not to touch the sea lion pups even if they approached us because the mothers would stop recognizing the scent of their young and disown them. They were so adorable. You just wanted to pick one up and squeeze it so badly. I don’t mean like Lenny in Of Mice and Men. I mean a comfortable cuddle rather than a life threatening clamp of doom.
As I watched my doomed bird-friend, I felt a similar conflict. I wanted to pick him up and mend him, but as we all know, birds are ridden with disease, germs, and God knows what else. Also, who am I to think I could “mend” a broken bird wing. I have a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in theater. I’m not a veterinarian.
That thought reminded me of how when I was on my Outward Bound “solo” in Montana, I had decided to make a woven basket and failed miserably. I don’t know what made me think I would just naturally have the ability to do something like that. Did I expect it to be written into my homo sapien DNA? However, it was undeniably fun and it gave me something to do during the lonely days. I sort of remembered singing through the entire score of every musical i could remember and even the ones I was less clear on as I worked.
Somewhere along the way I traded simple pleasures and child-like curiosity for iPhone apps and rent checks. Some of that is just a part of growing up, but sometimes I think it wouldn’t be such a travesty if we all tried to retrace our developmental steps a bit and follow our silly impulses. Mind you, I’m not telling you to expose yourself to disease ridden urban creatures on the verge of demise, but a walk in the park to lie on the bedrock outcroppings and read clouds wouldn’t do you any harm.
With a risk-taking pop/rock score by Tom Kitt and unflinchingly perceptive libretto and lyrics by Brian Yorkey, Michael Greif’s dynamic direction soars. Greif’s most famous credit is undeniably the groundbreaking cult-inspiring musical, Rent, but he outdoes himself with Next to Normal. The show is both articulate in staging and in design/creation. It accepts the intimacy of a five character show while fearlessly abstracting its themes and emotional character relationships. Mark Lendland’s set is architectural, functioning both as a literal home and also as housing for the levels of consciousness that operate simultaneously in the play.
Alice Ripley’s 2009 Tony Award for Best Actress in this piece is well earned. Her performance as Diana is vulnerable, audacious, and gut-wrenching. As always, she is a belting powerhouse and her navigation of the lyrics and music is artful, specific, and fearless.
