All Over Creation: Die Another Dad
Puzzling out the meaning of the theatre's Summer of Dead Dads
By Robert Faires, Fri., Sept. 2, 2011
I'm not dead yet.
That declaration may strike you as a tad obvious, but after a summer spent immersed in plays featuring a father's death as a fulcrum for drama, I'm feeling a need to check my pulse. See, all season I've been more than usually sensitive to my role as a dad, what with my one and only daughter's graduation from high school in June and her imminent departure from the nest in August. Now, it didn't faze me when I directed Austin Shakespeare's spring production of Love's Labour's Lost, even though this comedy ends with one of the ingenues getting the news that her poor papa has passed. (Actually, the play's last-minute swerve into solemnity after four acts of froth and frolic is the thing I like best about it; it's a gambit that pays off with some emotional weight for its airy, too-clever-by-half young lovers.) But when I visited the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in July, I was a little thrown when four of the seven plays I saw turned on daddy dyin'. And that was compounded when I returned from that holiday and caught three similar productions in the space of a month. From the OSF premiere of Ghost Light, about the murder of San Francisco Mayor George Moscone and its effect on his son, to the Austin premiere of Hillcountry Underbelly, with its brood sent wandering after pops plops down a well, to Shakespeare at Winedale's latest staging of the granddaddy of dead-dad plays, Hamlet, I have witnessed patriarchs being offed offstage and on, in royal beds and mayoral offices, tossed from rooftops and poisoned in gardens while napping (note to self: wear earmuffs for the next postprandial snooze), and dispatched to join the choir invisible in verse, prose, and song. It's all left my own fatherly hand, like Lear's, smelling of mortality.
The experience was not unlike listening to the radio after breaking up with your first love – you know, when every sad song sounded like it had been written just for you, describing all that you were suffering through in precise detail. This was theatre doing much the same thing, speaking to me about this particular passage in my life, with my child on the verge of leaving home and the fatherly protection I've given her every day since her birth. The more I listened, though, the more I came to feel that, despite the recurring theme of the paterfamilias cashing in his chips, theatre was not signaling me to go on and book my passage for the undiscovered country. Turns out it didn't really matter whether the dad was Shakespeare's regal Henry IV or Urinetown: The Musical's down-and-out (and desperate to pee) "Old Man" Strong. It didn't matter how the dad died – by his own hand, as with Beverly Weston in August: Osage County, or by another's, as with good old Hamlet Sr. In the end, it didn't even matter that the dads died. What mattered – and what bound together these very different dramas of paternal termination – was the separation of father and child and the offspring assuming the mantle of independence as an adult. In those events I grasped that, rather than telling me it was time to fear the reaper, this message was about it being time for my daughter to come into her own. She didn't need to ascend the French throne like the princess in Love's Labor's or to lead a populist revolt over corporate-controlled toilets like Urinetown's Bobby Strong. She could just start her freshman year at the University of Texas. She'd still be stepping away from me and becoming her own person. I needed to recognize that, to accept this progression of generations, this turning in the cycle of life. So that's what I'm trying to do.
I like that this came from listening to the theatre. I've said this before, but it bears repeating (alternate title for this column: "Color Me Blowhard"): Art has the power to address our lives in very personal ways. We tend to forget that because the culture we live in treats so much art as distraction and our reflex is to judge it on how well it succeeds in that regard – it's good, or it's bad; it rocks, or it sucks – and move on to the next thing. While I relish a good distraction as much as the next guy, I believe we're all better served when we attend a little more closely to what a work of art may be saying, where it may be describing some part of our lives. We all have so much to puzzle out about our existence, and the arts – theatre, dance, visual art, music, comedy, design, whatever – can help. You might do well to pay attention. After all, you're not dead yet either.
The Miró Quartet plays its first official concert with its newest member, violinist William Fedkenheuer, before a hometown crowd in Bates Recital Hall on the UT campus this Friday, Sept. 2. You'll be able to hear how he handles Haydn, Brahms, and Glass with the noteworthy ensemble. For more information, visit www.miroquartet.com.
Everything you always wanted to know about code compliance issues for Austin artists and their home studios but were afraid to ask will be covered in a free Frameworks seminar sponsored by the Austin Creative Alliance with the city of Austin's Planning and Development Review Department and Development Assistance Center and Solutions Studio architecture firm. Get the lowdown Friday, Sept. 2, 3:30-5pm, in Room 325 of One Texas Center, 505 Barton Springs Rd. For more information, visit www.austincreativealliance.org.
Mexic-Arte Museum Artistic Director Sylvia Orozco is getting a little more help to run the institution she helped found. Frank M. Rodriguez has been named to the newly created post of managing director. He knows his way around the museum already: The former budget director for the city of Austin has served as Mexic-Arte's board president and director of finance. For more information, visit www.mexic-artemuseum.org.
Austin playwright Allan Baker has cause to be filled with pride: Pride is filled with him. Dallas Pride, that is. The new Dallas Pride Performing Arts Festival, running Sept. 9-17 at the Kalita Humphreys Theater in Big D, will include his one-act plays "A Midsummer Night's Conversation" and "Click," which were also produced as part of Austin Pride in 2010. For more information about the festival, visit www.uptownplayers.org.
