Wondering about the Fourth Wall

Yesterday I went to Oklahoma!  I’m thinking of using that sentence as part of my morning message in class to highlight the relationship between punctuation and meaning.  Of course, the shock value depends on my fifth graders’ understanding of geography. They may take it completely in stride. “Yeah. I went to the Hamptons. What’dja do in Oklahoma?”  

I’m not sure right now if this writing is headed toward a discussion of conventions or a musical theater review.  I think I’ll go toward the show right now, and I’ll save the conventions for next week when I’ve seen the reaction in my class.  Then I can either focus on geography or grammar. What a teaser!

I know that the Slices we write for the Two Writing Teachers challenge are not meant to take the form of a book, movie, or theater review, so I won’t tell you that I thought the Oklahoma! revival was way better than just a remake or update of an old show.  I won’t go into the fact that it took the musical into new territory, where it explored much more than just the way “the farmers and the cowhands should be friends.”  I won’t talk about the brilliant acting that made an actress’s wheelchair seem to fit and even enhance the scenes. I won’t talk about the lighting that completely and instantly transformed the mood. I certainly won’t give away the stunning final scene.  I’ll stick to a small moment.

We were sitting in the third row of seats in the horseshoe-shaped theater known as Circle in the Square.  But really, we were the fourth row of audience members, because some lucky patrons actually had seats at the picnic tables that ringed the stage.  The play basically takes place without any scenery changes, and it sort of resembles a school cafe-gym-atorium set up for a square dance, a picnic, a wedding and a shooting.  You know, the usual school stuff. Sorry about that. The seating arrangement has the effect of blurring the lines between the actors and the audience, a cool effect, but also a bit confusing for this audience member.

Diagonally across from us, at one of the picnic tables, sat an elderly man who looked to be on his own.  He caught my daughter’s eye first, and she pointed him out to me. He sat at a table with four other people who appeared to be together.  I say this not because the color of their skin was different from his, but because they were chatting among themselves, enjoying each other’s company, and he sat slightly apart, though he did engage them in a bit of chit-chat at one point.  From the moment we spotted him, I found him hard to ignore. Not only did he seem a bit out of place at the table, but in his baggy beige suit, he seemed like he would have been particularly uncomfortable in the land of cowboys and farmhands as well.  Throughout the show, my eye wandered his way.

Note: photo taken before the show began, not during.

Apparently the actors felt the same attraction, because they seemed to seize every opportunity to plop down on his table or to lean over and sing toward him.  At one point, Will Parker, the charming but intellectually-challenged cowboy, actually reclined atop the table, his backside toward our side of the horseshoe, but his shiny belt buckle right in the old man’s face. He remained there, propped up on his elbow, for a few awkward moments, extolling his own physical endowments, inching them toward the man, and seemingly waiting for his reaction.  

It’s here where I’m muddled about that invisible wall between stage and audience, because though we didn’t have the best view of Will Parker’s physique at that moment, we did have a most excellent view of the little old man’s face. His eyes widened, his eyebrows rose and fell discerningly, and then, slowly and oh so subtly, he seemed to nod his approval, as though admitting that yes, in his estimation, Will did possess some fine…er…attributes , even if a nimble brain was not one of them. It was a tour de force deadpan performance with no loss of composure, no laughter (from him, that is), and almost no movement except with his eyes and mouth. Could this kind of finesse really have come from a mere ticket holder like me?

I won’t say it distracted me from the deeper meaning, the social commentary, or the crucial moments of the story, but at the end of the show, I confess that I did feel the added suspense of wondering if the little old man in the beige suit would suddenly leap over the table, join hands with Curly and Will and Ado Annie, and take a bow with the rest of his cast mates.  

He did not.   But maybe they were still just messin’ with me.  

It’s been 24 hours since we returned from Oklahoma! and I’m still feeling a little disoriented.

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