Poetry of Pizza ran from February to March of 2010 in the Cal Rep Theater.
Hello, fellow seekers of life and truth,
That's a nice opener, isn't it? I think I'll start using that, now. It adds a little more potency to the opening. Anyway, I've got another play-related post for you. This one is multi-dimensional, just like last night's was. Do you remember any moment in your life when things clicked, and your life was taken in a different direction? It may have been a big moment, where some dramatic event turned your life in a 180. Sometimes, though, there are small moments, where you just do one thing, and that one thing changed the way you look at life. After that, everything begins to shift. Two years ago, today, in fact, going to see the play The Poetry of Pizza did that for me.
I remember very clearly the night I went to go see this play, 2 years ago. It was a Wednesday night, March 3, 2010. Yes, I do remember the days of the week that most things happen. Why I know this is a whole different story. Like I was saying, though, I remember that very clearly, because that was the first play I saw as a student in Theater Arts. That evening, I was excited to go down to this theater, located on the permanently-docked Queen Mary. I remember getting going early, having eagerly anticipated this time out. Back then, I lived a much more solitary existence.
Now, I didn't know what to expect from this play. However, it turned out that this play grabbed two parts of me that I didn't know could go together. First off, the action in this play happens in 1998, three years before, well, you know what happened. I remember that time period. Back then, the only people who tweeted were birds, and the only facebook you could find was the one your grandparents were always showing you. Ah, but enough of my waxing nostalgic.
Anyway, Sarah Middleton, who was played by the woman I was studying under, is a 40-something, jaded professor of fine poetic works who has just relocated to Copenhagen. She is under the persistant guidance of her American friends, and the constant eye of a seedy Danish professor. One day, she walks into a pizzeria owned by a colorful group of Kurdish refugees. Sarah finds one in particular, Soran, who is an artist when it comes to these pizzas. When Sarah samples one of these delights, she is taken with this man.
Now, when she talks to him again, she finds out his troubled back story. Even though she is ten years older than he is, as Soran puts it he "feels older than his 34 years." It turns out he and his friends fled from Northern Iraq (an area called "Kurdistan" that encompasses parts of Iraq, Iran and Turkey) when Saddam Hussein began carrying out a murder campaign by poison gas attacks, and many other gruesome methods. This changes Sarah's understanding of Soran's depth. He has not been dragged into the pit of cynicism or nihilism, in spite of the terrible things he has witnessed in life.
As the two grow closer together, a variety of characters, American, Danish, and Kurdish, play out many bizarre antics, Seinfeld-ian in their humor and vulnerability. Sadly, one day, Soran asks Sarah, one day, to shave her, well, bush, as per Kurdish cultural custom. Scared of this, Sarah and Soran mutually decide they are just too different from each other to make it. Their friends are seen telling them to just "let it go." They both feel a hole in their hearts. In the end, Soran and Sarah decide they love each other so much, working through their differences is worth it to them. In the last scene, the two are getting married in the Kurdish custom, and Sarah samples a very special slice of pizza. All the other characters, and evenly split cast of men and women, discover each other, and none of them are lonely.
Now, normally, this kind of "happy" ending does not work for me. It just leaves some part of the human experience out most of the time. Here, however, it was not blindly overlooking life. It was very life-affirming, and heartwarming. It was something I thought, "Well, that could never happen in real life." Maybe it could, though. People often believe that you need an ending that is as dreary and grey as possible, that takes any hope in your heart, and just squashes it, in order to get people to think. To me, this is not always true. I think The Poetry of Pizza really made that warmth in spite of the darkness and the division apparent.
Now, the woman you see in the photo at the top, was my first teacher at this school that I go to now. She told us that the man who had acted opposite her as Soran had lived in Kosovo back when the War and genocide were still going on in the late '90's. He didn't have to stretch too far to figure out his motivations as a character. Anyway, I only began to realize later how this play had subtly affected me. Theater suddenly became a place of community, of humanity, where you could explore all the pains and heartaches going on in the world, and tell truths in no uncertain terms, but with all the compassion toward a person standing exposed, vulnerable, on the stage. That night, I came to understand what the theater was really about, for me.
I'd like to show you a tribute drawing I did for this play myself, a few months later:
Sarah Middleton boards a flight from the U.S. to Denmark, shortly before the opening of The Poetry of Pizza.
You may notice I have a lot of aircraft and flying machines as subjects in my art. When I was younger, I was simply fascinated by air travel, and dedicated many a visual work to airplanes, helicopters, and such. Anyway, Sarah's looking out into the plane is meant to connote the beginning of a journey into the unknown. It is supposed to be slightly dated-looking, but close to our time, and reminiscent of memories I had of that period.
So my question is this: do works of art (especially plays, books, and movies) have to be dark in tone to convey a meaningful message? Or could it be (at the risk of asking a rhetorical question) that some happy discoveries in plays and films can change our understanding of life, and shift our sense of what is possible to do? I want to finish this post on that note. I'm sorry it took longer to get done than I anticipated; I was fighting off a fever yesterday and today. I will be back up to speed soon, and hopefully, I'll get some time to blog. Thanks for listening.
See ya, and keep wondering, folks!
No comments:
Post a Comment