Grey Area

I watched Liv Ullman's 2014 production of Miss Julie the other night. It was compelling in a way but also deeply flawed.  Not the play itself-- but the chemistry between the players seemed lacking.  Two very great acting talents... Jessica Chastain, one of my favorites, did as well as she could have, but Colin Farrell was awkward in and out of clothing and spoiled her performance. 

It brought me back to my high school introduction to drama; we are all spoon-fed Shakespeare in middle school in the form of Romeo and Juliet... and we are initiated via Hamlet to more serious theatre and language. But Strindberg?  I remember so well reading this play-- as well as Ibsen and Beckett and even O'Neill.  I'm not sure this is still part of the curriculum.  There is something about experiencing these tragedies when one is discovering one's sexuality but has little opportunity... that makes it all that much more 'dramatic'.

The summer season of Shakespeare in the Park has just begun. People were lining up for tickets at 3 AM yesterday.... it's super popular and for many the plays still have a kind of familiar discovery. I imagine the actors reciting these lines every night, like a kind of repetitive theatrical rite of passage.... somehow Shakespeare holds up. Not that Strindberg did not, although there is the translation issue... and Liv Ullman's cinematographic choices were very good... it was just somehow the delivery. 

Lately I've been reevaluating tastes... the novels I've loved can let me down at this age... some were perhaps innovative enough to feel dated now-- disappointing.  Last week I read an Italian late-80's novel which was raved about in the Paris Review.  While it brought back to life the terrible tragedy of the AIDS crisis, much of it seemed predictable... even the soundtrack seemed clichéd-- Morrissey, Smiths, Pet Shop Boys...One wonders if old crushes would have the same deflated appeal. The films of memory-- some are still brilliant and fun-- others cringeworthy.  

But I'm feeling a bit harsh and judgmental.  Woody Allen has been boring me.  My own massive bedside reading offers a daily struggle to finish a project that seems less worthy than weighty. Yes, I'm aging and jaded. As a kind of social experiment, over the past few months I've stopped coloring my hair.  It's given me an opportunity to see where I physiologically am in this process, and also to experience full-on the agism of our culture. In the mirror I wonder if I am simply a discerning, educated adult, or a cranky old so-and-so. Still on the fence, lol.

One thing that follows me-- color or no color, is the constant ebb and flow of grief... perhaps the universal common denominator.  I have celebrated so many birthdays, so many anniversaries... and yet I have logged a complementary accumulation of 'years since'.  Reunions are celebrated by collegians but more of my 'landmark' occasions have become memorials... observed not by ceremony but often merely the privacy of a simple notation. I had the terrible task of notifying a sector of people about a friend's recent death. Among the replies were two in-absentia emails from children, letting me know the person I contacted had passed.  This is more and more common.

And among the griefs and mortal losses which are unprocessable are the abandonments and relationship dissolutions... those whose spouses or paramours have moved on or given up, who have become unhappy with and less unhappy without, leaving their partner desolate. These narratives are fairly consistent in dramatic production... they are perhaps secondary to death but for some, equally painful.  

Looking harshly in daylight at one's face without makeup, without expression or hair color... one feels a bit more unlovable, a bit obsolete and unappealing. The reality of aging-- one of the natural progressions of life-- has a kind of purpose.  While culture spends a huge market share in its defiance, its reality makes the prospect of an exit just a little more bearable.  We have traded passion for wisdom, hopefully... and the price of a long wonderful warehouse of years is our increasing fragility-- our withering beauty and our vulnerability.  

Are we less sensitive?  We are not.  We don't cry like babies but our griefs pile up like sacks of grain and some days it takes effort to keep things from expressing themselves as tearfulness.  We are quiet, most of us... we have not suicided or overdramatized like Miss Julie but we have assimilated sorrow.  We have faded. 

I can still play rock and roll... I still feel my internal motor rev when I hear the opening chords of AC/DC.  But I am leaning toward listener more than player; I am well aware of my chronology. Will I tough it out and let the greying takes its place?  I actually looked up Liv Ullman who was 76 when she made Miss Julie.  Knowing her persona, she surely accepted her natural hair color and facial processes. She is not just beautiful but glowing with talent even now, at 87.  

My son doesn't like the natural hair; it ages him.  As I said, it's been an experiment. Some people have been kind and complimentary; my very honest girlfriend yesterday told me to run-not-walk to the nearest drugstore and buy any box dye, that she cannot bear to look at me.  Am I mirroring the harsher version of herself? I'll probably concede... for today, I'm still hanging in the grey area.