When "The Fantasticks" ended its legendary New York run in January, I was among the millions of disappointed fans.
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| | | Susan Jacobs is a Post-Gazette staff writer (sjacobs@post-gazette.com). | |
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The story is a fable about a boy and girl who live next door and fall in love, but are kept apart by a high wall built by their fathers, who espouse a deep hatred for each other. The boy and girl meet clandestinely, exchanging kisses and fancies across the wall.
When the lovers are not meeting, the fathers gather at the wall, and reveal that their feud has been manufactured so their children, like Romeo and Juliet, will fall in love because they know they shouldn't. The fathers hope that their children will marry so they can combine their farms. But that is just the beginning of their scheme.
The fathers hire a team of actors to "abduct" the girl so the boy can save her, thus becoming a hero and ending the feud. Once this is hilariously accomplished, the fathers tear down the wall, and it seems that everyone will live happily ever after. Only it's not quite that simple. That's just the first, moonlit act.
The second act takes place beneath an unrelenting, flaw-revealing sun. Everyone is happy until the fathers begin arguing about gardening strategies and the children find out about their fathers' scheme, making their union a marriage of convenience.
The boy goes off to see the world in all its pain and glory and the girl stays home to be romanced by her bandit -- the lead actor from the abduction. The fathers rebuild the wall -- this time with real enmity between them. After heartbreak and hurt, the young couple find their way back to each other, and it all works out as it should, only this time they are wiser. And this time, the wall remains standing, in Frost-like fashion, to make good neighbors.
The play is full of metaphor -- the wall, the moonlight and September -- the perfect time to be in love. Scriptwriter Tom Jones wrote in an essay published in 1990 that the play was intended to "celebrate romanticism and mock it at the same time."
The first time I saw "The Fantasticks" I was 12 years old. I have seen it several times since, learned the lyrics by heart and own a copy of the script. In December, I had my last chance to see the longest-running musical in the world in its home, The Sullivan Street Theatre in New York, before it closed Jan. 13.
It is the sort of play that properly follows one through life. There is innocence and idealism (if not silliness) in the first act, followed by experience, cruel reality and, finally, happy resolution. It turns out in all the right ways that we hope life will, even if we have to stumble along the way.
When I first saw the play, I didn't understand the need for the second act, in which the young couple's illusions of love come undone. Still, I could overlook the complications because in the end, the love story works out. I sang the songs, I dreamt of September, and slowly I grew up.
When I left home to go to college, I was very much like the boy in the story -- heading off to New York City -- that shining world beyond the road.
It took me a while to get my bearings straight -- so much concrete and steel, and so little sky. It was weeks before I rode the subway.
For my 19th birthday, I went with three friends to see "The Fantasticks" in its Greenwich Village home. Despite having spent years delighting in the music, I had forgotten some of the events of the play. I began to be bothered by the complications.
In his essay about the play, Jones writes that the theme behind the Fantasticks is that "one must give up one's youthful illusions and romanticism and move into the season of maturity and reality."
In the first half of the play, the girl and the boy are mesmerized by illusions of a more exciting life. But in the second half, they find out how painful the world can be. When the couple reconciles, they are far less giddy and dramatic -- they have been bruised by experience -- but they are also more grown-up, and more able to love each other from the fullness of their hearts, rather than the shallowness of teen-age infatuation.
So, too, in the 13 years since I first saw "The Fantasticks," I have grown up quite a bit, seen some of the world, and come back fundamentally the same person, but one who is wiser.
Like the girl in the play, I used to dream of a dashing young suitor to save me from looming dangers, and mundane reality. Someone to make my worries disappear and set all the wrong things in my life right. Someone who would understand the exciting, passionate me beneath the ordinary exterior.
Experience has taught me that no suitor, no matter how perfect, will solve all my problems. In the almost three years since I've been out of college, I've found myself constantly forced to make decisions about things that I always hoped would magically fall into place. Where to live, where to work. Somehow it doesn't feel like happily ever after, or the calm steadiness and certainty that was supposed to descend upon me when I became an adult, whenever exactly that was (if it has even happened yet).
Just like those of the girl and boy in "The Fantasticks," my life hasn't always worked out just as I imagined it would, and there have been hardships and disappointments that I would never want to relive. But I am less hollow for each of my experiences. When it's all said and done, my life has been far less fantastick, but a great deal more interesting than I could have ever imagined.
Much to my surprise, I have felt empowered by the burden of choice -- knowing that, rather than just submitting myself to a predetermined fate, there are choices that I can make that will affect my immediate happiness, if not my destiny.
But that doesn't mean that I have abandoned romanticism entirely.
Once or twice a year I play my recording of the music and allow myself to dream again of the boy next door who never lived next to me, and the high wall in the garden to separate us, and allow us the delight of secret meetings.
And though I live in serious reality, there is time yet for moon gazing and dreams of September, even in the midst of dreary March.
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