November 3, 2008
On Saturday, November 1, I saw the Pulitzer Prize writer Tracy Letts's Tony Award-winning (among other awards) Broadway Play, August:Osage County (AOC). Wow, what a terrific play! The weather was picture perfect unlike in the play where it's the month of August in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, U.S.A.
Plot synopsis (from Wikipedia)
The plot centers on a reunion of the Weston family, living in the state of Oklahoma; the play's title refers to Osage County, which lies northwest of Tulsa. The three-act play, which runs for about 3 hours, 20 minutes including intermissions, deals with such issues as drug abuse, alcoholism, suicide, death, family dysfunction, sexual harassment, aging, generational change, racism, incest, infidelity, and ultimately love.
Tolstoy's War and Peace classic opening lines: Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
These famous lines lead one to believe that there are on this earth totally happy families. This seems statistically impossible and in fact quite depressing to think this is even possible. But one cannot argue with Tolstoy. However, he himself chose to write about that dominant unhappy state of affairs that marks most people's lives.
The reason AOC has been so successful is because by mirroring the unhappy state of affairs of one family it mirrors the quiet desperate lives of many in this world. What make this story compelling is nobody is really quiet about his/her desperate life. They may gloss over it but they are certainly not quiet. Of course, then there won't be a play.
Going back to happy families, I've seen them only in Bollywood movies where all the cutout characters who seemingly represent good are idealized like the gods in Hinduism. One reason Western movies are more appealing to the thinking audience is because they try to represent reality in a realistic way. By making you think, they still entertain, deft execution being the reason. So they are more engaging and helps one analyze the challenges in one's own life and even feel better.
Though the challenges and the hardships that the Weston family faces are very different from my own, at some level they are not that different. I bet everyone in that audience felt this way. I guess this "relatability" quotient is what has made the story line so powerful and the play so successful.
The metaphysical lines spoken by Ivy, the youngest daughter, when she doesn't want to be the sole caretaker of her recently widowed mother anymore, echo such sentiments uttered by other meta-thinkers and the words in the Upanishads: Ultimately, we are just a jumble of cells randomly connected to each other, so why put weight to relationships?
On the surface, these sentiments sound cynical or like a cop-out but wouldn't this more realistic thinking be the best to deal with the loss of near and dear ones in life?
An afternoon with a deep-thinking author:
Recently, I met Pat, the author Tom Phelan's wife at a breakfast meeting and following this, knowing my interest in writing, she invited me to a talk by her husband on Sunday, November 2 at Molloy College five miles from home. in Rockville Center, NY. I declined a lunch invitation elsewhere and went to this event.
Again, it was a crisp Fall day (to some extent I do envy those who have this kind of weather through out the year--the West Coast comes to mind--then again except for a few dog days of summer and a few hazardous days in winter, New York suburbs do have wonderful weather not to mention wonderful landscape) and the campus setting was cozy and before a group of literary aficionados (maybe) Mr. Phelan spoke. His url: http://www.tomphelan.net/. He read aloud some pages from his most recent book: The Canal Bridge. Those passages were riveting yet laced with the kind of comedy that inevitably accompanies human absurdity.
What a wonderful learning experience the afternoon was! I think at some level we write about what bothers us most. From this perspective, I hazard to guess that Mr. Phelan feels tremendously bothered by wars.
I too am waiting for the day when we'll stop annihilating each other and learn to live peacefully by making time to learn about each other. Among many things I learned yesterday, what I found to be most heart wrenching was the kind of gruesome death toll the World War I trench warfare inflicted. How could one expect war to be pretty?
On the eve of U.S. Presidential Election:
The "most historic" U.S. Presidential Election is tomorrow and economy is the number one voter issue. In this context, given the present economic climate, the following is a must read: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/02/business/02view.html?ei=5070&emc=eta1
Why is it that when I say such things, nobody take me seriously?:) And more importantly, why are the experts so afraid to speak up before a calamity instead of after? Because unlike me, they have a vested interest as the article points out?
Go vote! It's a privilege that shouldn't be taken for granted. No privilege should be!
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