Into The Woods

The giant is coming back to life. Veins, capillaries, are bulging at the tips, and I wait for this beast  whose arrival causes me such a whirlwind of feeling. I’m talking about spring. And I’m talking about a play I saw Friday night at Baltimore’s Center Stage called Into The Woods.

Spring is in a ripping tear to be born this year. I’m on the porch, of course. All the hairs on my neck stand up as I gaze lawn-ward at the writhing shag carpet under which I will some day lie buried. I howl every year in the face of spring. And every year I take her on like a dog takes on a bear. It’s a mythic struggle. I can’t win and I’m telling myself this as I change the oil in the tractor with care. The pollens, the aromas in earth’s birthing room, slip in and out of my lungs as I put in the new air filter. . . as I sharpen my blades . . . as I take a Zyrtec. . . as I face my darling enemy, that frilly, overheated, sticky messy Spring.

My fantasy is like the terrible legends recounted by the Grimm Brothers who brought to light the dark side long before Freud did. We need the wolf to be ‘the other.’ We need hates and fears to remain safely in the woods and and in stories, not up front in ourselves. Freud showed us that we are both the wolf and the flesh-eating giant as well as the innocent Red Riding Hood and the fair haired Rapunzel and Jack with whom we so identified.

Yet even after we've been shown that what we are fighting lies more within us than without, we are still all in the woods with giants. All our battles are mythic, even the silly ones, even the seasonal ones, and none of our actions are untainted by personal agenda. As Pogo says, “We have met the enemy and he is us,” yet we’re not much illuminated by the knowledge.

Friday night I drove home from the play letting the seductive air of spring blow through the car, letting echoes of the songs bounce between galaxies of synapses, treasuring the memories and associations triggered by the performance. The play is deliciously imbued with paradox. We laughed at the agony of those characters wanting the impossible. We saw how the longing for the beautiful woman, the love for dear ‘Milky White’ the cow, the golden harp, the baby whose arrival would make everything perfect, how all these things promised to the minds of the characters a Happily-Ever-After. We saw how desire threw them into the woods where bad things happened and where they often found themselves alone and on the other side of their happiness.

We laughed at the naivety of the mother who would send her little girl alone into the wolfish woods looking like a delicious morsel decked out in red. We laughed at the step-mother industriously cutting off the toes of her daughters so they could get their big feet into a glass slipper which would only fit the real princess. We laughed even as we became aware that our very theatre was in the woods and that we were all on hopeless journeys doing foolish things in search of impossible goals.

The banker on my left and the cancer survivor on my right both recognized the woods. They’d been told, as had I, that they could have that raise, that account, that five years, that beautiful view, if they could just bring back a piece of red cloak, a hank of yellow hair, five magic beans and do it in just two days, or six months, or with a positive attitude. We each entered the woods, maybe in a fuzzy haze, maybe in a white hot focus, but there we were, suddenly alone, confused, a sense of urgency driving us and danger lurking behind every tree. And losses were inevitable. Are inevitable.

So the second half of the play is about what comes after happily-ever-after. Apparently some people are so accustomed to happy endings being the last word on any struggle that they left the theatre at intermission, thinking the play was over. We thought so, truth be told. We walked out for a breath of fresh air and were gently notified by the doorman that the play was only half over.

The music got more beautiful in the second half; of course. I cried with the onstage survivors. The charming prince had not been faithful, just charming. The baker got his baby but lost his wife. Rapunzel had borderline personality disorder caused by the fact that her witch-of-a-mother had no sense of boundaries and Little Red Riding Hood had taken to carrying a large knife and had a distinctly un-childlike look on her face. The princess had abandoned the castle and it was she who sang to us the beautiful song of comfort, the song that redeemed our losses and forgave our foolishness, the fragment that played in my head all the way home:

Mother cannot guide you.

Now you're on your own.

Only me beside you.

Still, you're not alone.

No one is alone.

Truly.

No one is alone.

Sometimes people leave you,

Halfway through the wood.

Others may deceive you.

You decide what's good.

You decide alone.

But no one is alone.

It’s the princess I want to be, singing the song of redemption to the world’s wounded, looking so lovely. But of course she looked lovely. Her losses were not all that staggering. She knew she was a princess even if she’d given up her throne. She’d never been overly fond of the castle. And the prince? He had only been charming. He hadn’t had much metal in the long run. She hadn’t been heart-and-soul in love with the guy. So she didn’t look all that worn and battle scarred. She still had a song in her heart.

This princess, the one sitting in my seat, really was in love once-upon-a-time and spent a long time in the woods alone. This sleeping beauty has had to cut through eight acres of thorny briers to find the self she left behind dozing in a glass box waiting for rescue. This mother stupidly sent her daughter out into the world completely unprotected although at least she didn’t try to trim the girl’s big feet to fit someone else’s shoes. I’ll give her that. But foolishness has gone hand in hand with hope and tragedy in every step this princess has taken. And she’s hard of hearing. And her voice isn’t so pretty anymore. And one day Spring is going to roll right over her. There may be beauty in there somewhere learning to live with the beast. With another Spring.

Into The Woods is at Center Stage, Baltimore, Maryland until April 15, 2012. If I could have found Jenny Latimer online singing You Are Not Alone I’d have put the link here. I couldn’t. But this is a link to the song in another production. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5xaxP_kErTU