“We are building something immense together that, though invisible and immaterial, is a structure, one we reside within—or, rather, many overlapping structures. They’re assembled from ideas, visions and values emerging out of conversations, essays, editorials, arguments, slogans, social-media messages, books, protests, and demonstrations. About race, class, gender, sexuality; about nature, power, climate, the interconnectedness of all things; about compassion, generosity, collectivity, communion; about justice, equality, possibility. Though there are individual voices and people who got there first, these are collective projects that matter not when one person says something but when a million integrate it into how they see and act in the world.”
— Rebecca Solnit
I first read Thomas Kuhn’s book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, when I was in high school. At the time it was a bold challenge to prevailing beliefs about how scientific progress is made, and it offered a new model for understanding how thinking and perceiving change. That book—along with the novels of Hermann Hesse–probably had the most influence on my teenage view of the world.
These books also comingled perfectly with the counterculturalism that was coming into full bloom in the San Francisco Bay Area in the 60s. I was infatuated with this explosion of disruptive idealism and the hope it offered for a better way to live, including the end of the ongoing Vietnam war.
The fundamental question that circled for me continuously was this: how does change take root in a culture and really shift the way we think, feel and see? In my youthful exuberance I was convinced these new ideascapes were going to replace the airless, suppressive traditions of my parents: Republican, Mormon, patriarchal, suburban.
Over the course of the history of human consciousness, there have been many extraordinary moments when ideas found their perfect terroir: Ancient Athens and Democracy; Jena and German Romanticism; The Lake District and English Romanticism; Concord and Transcendentalism. Those were the models I had in mind back then for San Francisco and these new freewheeling redefinitions of how to live. War, heartless capitalism and patriarchal abuse would be replaced by communitarianism, consensus decision making, alignment with the ecosystem and full artistic freedom.
The legacy of that era is still being contested.* But new systems of thought continue to emerge that have their root system in those disruptive years. Many are calling for a re-envisioning of how we perceive the world and our place in it, advocating for an interconnectedness between the human, nonhuman and technological. A broad consortium of posthumanist thinkers have influenced me regarding our connectedness to everything: Rebecca Solnit, Laurie Anderson, Donna Haraway, Daniel Schmachtenberger, David Abram, Timothy Morton, Taney Roniger.
Roniger, a visual artist and a dear friend, has been a strong voice for the way art can help dismantle the destructive detachment of Cartesian thinking;
“In what’s known by some as the Relational Turn, a new understanding is being articulated, an understanding that recognizes the distinctions between things but that locates the very thingness of each thing in the web of relations sustaining it – social, biological, ecological, and cosmic. “Interbeing” is Thich Nhat Hanh’s beautiful word for it, and while still largely inchoate, the vision it promises should give us much hope…out there on the axis of otherness lies an unexplored wilderness: that vast expanse of world that is decidedly not-me – human and nonhuman, animate and otherwise, spiritual, material, and however else we want to conceive it. I’m calling it an allocentric turn, away being the general direction, but above all it is a step in the direction of a more accurate worldview.”
While these intentions are adjacent to and aligned with the unified consciousness described by Thich Nhat Hanh’s term interbeing, that commonality is being approached from different directions.
“But for now we have a choice to attend,” writes Roniger. “We can cling defiantly to our unraveling separation and involution, or we can willingly, courageously, and humbly make the turn, extending ourselves outward to meet our relations. In anticipation of the latter, perhaps art will rise to the occasion and, in the role of gracious host, initiate the introductions.”
In my experience, “making the turn” means circling back to these concerns again and again. That has a particular meaning and intensity right now during the high stakes drama that characterizes a hotly contested presidential campaign. We are a nation deeply divided, at the path forward to reconciliation is not an obvious one.
So maybe art cannot be expected to show up as the “gracious host” to introduce new ways of seeing, feeling, being.
And yet.
Solnit again:
“The consequences of these transformations are perhaps most important where they are most subtle. They remake the world, and they do so mostly by the accretion of small gestures and statements and the embracing of new visions of what can be and should be. The unknown becomes known, the outcasts come inside, the strange becomes ordinary. You can see changes to the ideas about whose rights matter and what is reasonable and who should decide, if you sit still enough and gather the evidence of transformations that happen by a million tiny steps before they result in a landmark legal decision or an election or some other shift that puts us in a place we’ve never been.”
Which brings this conversation round to the new production of Romeo and Juliet at the American Repertory Theater. Under the direction of Diane Paulus, also artistic director of the American Repertory Theater, this familiar tale is being told once again, but it is being done in a manner that feels timeless and streamlined. It also feels iconic and mythic.
“‘Romeo and Juliet’ has been a favorite play of mine for years,” says Paulus. “It is often considered to be a play about hate. I am interested in pivoting that framework: Rather than defining our lives through hatred, can we choose to define our lives through love? This question opened the play up for me in a way that was very liberating.”
As has become the American Repertory modus operandi of late, Paulus has assembled a gifted team to collaborate with her on her vision. For this production she is joined by scenic designer Amy Rubin, movement and choreographer Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, lighting designer Jen Schriever, along with many others. Original music has been created by Alexandre Dai Castaing.
Paulus’s rendition of this familiar story is visually lush. The sets are monumentally minimal, bringing a sense of gravitas to the story. A singular megalith at center stage is moved and adapted with great intentionality by the performers. Even the way characters move feels sculptural. And while we all know the story and its outcome, the portentousness of this staging is significant. It feels like a story being told outside of time, one that is not tethered to any particular era or style.
Unlike many popular renditions of Romeo and Juliet (films by Zeffirelli and Baz Luhrman as well as modern story adaptations like West Side Story) Paulus does not contain her stated focus on making this a story about love to the small, the intimate, the romantic Yes, two charismatic performers are playing the famous young lovers–Rudy Pankow as Romeo and Emilia Suarez as Juliet—but Paulus’ production places their “love at first sight” relationship as a story within a story within a story. There are so many ways that love operates in our lives: with kin, with friends, with a lover, for a city (Verona) and its residents, for the human community at large as well as the vitally alive and breathing world that holds us all. Paulus’ final scene—which I will say nothing more about because it is an exquisitely conceived surprise that brought tears to my eyes–speaks poignantly to the real connections we all need, ones that are much larger than young lovers, reconciled families or a city finally at peace.
This production left me with a profound sense of our embeddedness. We are living forms who have residence in so many different realms. These lovers got caught in the crossfire between worlds that were out of joint and lacked continuity. But in the words of the poet Paul Eluard, “There is another world, but it is in this one.”
Whether it is the very intentional staging of a play, the vitriolic disagreements in the political realm, or the difficulty we humans have of envisioning what it means to truly be a citizen of the universe, these are all ways we see through to a more expansive, cohesive and enlightened sense of ourselves and our reality. We come round, again and again.
“Stories move in circles. They don’t move in straight lines. So it helps if you listen in circles. There are stories inside stories and stories between stories, and finding your way through them is as easy and as hard as finding your way home.
— From a Traveling Jewish Theatre, Coming from a Great Distance
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*There are many versions of what the era of the 60s offered and how those ideas have morphed and penetrated the cultural landscape over time. I often look for other examples in the book Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century, by Greil Marcus. This seminal work has much to say about how music, culture and storytelling evolve over time. In researching the sources of a number of 20th century avant garde movements, Marcus found that many of the key influences were actually furtive and uncharted, operating in a kind of stealth mode well outside traditional academic channels and other forms of cultural documentation.
“It would be difficult to underestimate the importance of Lipstick Traces…it placed our view of modernity on a continuum of thought. It gave alienation a historical context.” (Cameron McWhirter)