By Irene Glezos (Lady)
We are taught about the magic “what if” on our first day of acting class. And such “what ifs!” What if you came from Sicily and lived in a small Southern town in the 1950s where your father the Wop bootlegger was murdered some 15 or 20 years ago “for selling liquor to niggers?” What if you watched him burn alive because no one would lift a finger to help him as he singlehandedly tried to put out the fire? What if your first love (a Cutrere!) – whose child you were carrying at the time – abandoned you because of pressure from his family and you were ostracized by everybody? What if you married a “sonofabitch” and found yourself in a hell from which there is no escape? And what if into this life a Choctaw cry brings forth an Orphic boy who changes everything?
These are powerful “what ifs!” But why on earth would we go to the anguished place that suffers plights like these — except that by undergoing them, we can change the course of life somehow — bring release and banish isolation? What if by taking part or witnessing (because in theatre, the observed and the observer are always one) — all the arrows of our lives turn into flowers — the way barrenness gives way to a green fig that is discovered on a tree in springtime.
Don’t we do it to learn that nothing can take our love away if only we can remain steadfast through that terror that masks itself as death?
As we head for Provincetown to perform Orpheus Descending for a second time, let’s honor the life of its creator, Tennessee Williams, who found that he could transmute pain into beauty through the alchemy of his poetry, that there are birds who never light upon this earth but one time, and that sometimes we need to descend in order to arise.
