I just found this site as part of your recent email. How wonderful and I wish I could have responded to you immediately after the play.

I do remember just how spellbinding the play was, and how completely my friend Jan and I were engaged with the characters. Unfortunately the winter solstice season and life have intervened to fill my brain as well. Good for Chaya to see the play again! Such wisdom!

What I do know is that thinking is hard work. A new to me poet, Haki Madhubuti put it this way: “Believing has always been easier than thinking.” And it seems culturally the U.S. one can see more “believing” rather than thinking.

You have stretched me again even this long after the play! Bravo to this “little engine that could” theatre! I look forward to the next one.

Gratiaas, mucho, Mary Rose

I just found this site as part of your recent email. How wonderful and I wish I could have responded to you immediately after the play.

I do remember just how spellbinding the play was, and how completely my friend Jan and I were engaged with the characters. Unfortunately the winter solstice season and life have intervened to fill my brain as well. Good for Chaya to see the play again! Such wisdom!

What I do know is that thinking is hard work. A new to me poet, Haki Madhubuti put it this way: “Believing has always been easier than thinking.” And it seems culturally the U.S. one can see more “believing” rather than thinking.

You have stretched me again even this long after the play! Bravo to this “little engine that could” theatre! I look forward to the next one.

I saw the play again. Just as good as first time. Everybody is excellent, but Brenda Barrie is beyond words, the best I have seen!

If you haven’t had enough of me, would you help me understand the meaning of Mindy’s role. Please make no mistake, I thought her acting was excellent, but I’m just not sure what her role represents in this play— society’s violence? decadence? greed? blind lust?

Why is it over tomorrow? This play should go on forever.

Chaya

Thank you for engaging me in this exchange. It has intensified the impact this excellent play has had on me.

I agree with you that people should try to listen and think for themselves instead of blindly leaving these functions for others.

However, I vary with your statement that people in the “gray” “work hard” at listening and thinking, feel “lonely” and “scared,” while struggling with their “doubts.” This has not been my observation. I have watched the people in the “gray” hold their “doubts” as a shield against necessary actions. They are forever in the state of debate, while the world around us is on fire, our environment melts away, and our poor suffers.

To their defense, we should note the real difficulty in sorting out the flood of information coming at us in print and online from all sources, some of those are unsound if not outright illegitimate. To expect people to have the time and expertise to sift right from wrong is perhaps unrealistic, but to romantecize the hesitation of many as a sign of profound free thinking is just as inaccurate.

Matthew, let me thank you again for this discussion. And while we have not agreed completely on the lesson here, it certainly has served to prolong my profound experience with this outstanding play.

Perhaps I’ll see you tomorrow when I see the play again.

Sincerely and respectfully,
Chaya

Are Lemon’s thoughts logical and truthful? Yes, they are. Are they dangerous? You bet they are. Is she evil? Certainly not. But her thoughts contain the seeds of “evil.” What we do with those seeds? In fact, what do we do with someone like Lemon?

What does living in the gray lead to? Careful consideration. Attentive listening. Personal revelation. People may argue that living in the gray is too scary, too lonely and that it requires too much work. I say that we have let others do the work for us for far too long. If we don’t want to do the work that living in the gray requires, then we are willingly sacrificing the best of our democracy to the politicians, the pundits and the talking heads. We must relearn how to answer big questions for ourselves, to resist the temptation to let others formulate our answers for us, and to carefully consider ideas that may give us pause. Unless we learn how to do that, we simply draw deeper and deeper lines in the sand until those lines become chasms that we we are unable to cross.

This is the kind of gray area that I believe the play asks us to step into.

Thanks again for your participation in this conversation! This is exactly the kind of engagement we were hoping to get from our audiences.

Warmly,

Matthew

Thank you for your thought-provoking response.

Here is my question: would you consider this play in the “gray”?

Is it Mr. Shawn’s intention to change the political stances of those in attendance? I don’t think so.

What is so remarkable about the way this play was written is that the playwright builds compelling and convincing arguments against the very political ideologies that he himself holds dear, and then never challenges them. By creating affable, engaging, intelligent and educated people who hold very well-reasoned, very compelling and very dangerous political ideals, Shawn makes it much harder to simply point fingers at demons. Neither Dan nor Lemon are demonic figures of recognizable evil, as are the archetypical figures of Adolf Hitler, or Mussolini or Saddam Hussein. In Shawn’s play, rather, we are seduced by personalities who seem to be very much like us or very much like people we know, and are then asked to listen carefully to the things they say and to sort it out for ourselves. As I said in my earlier post, I think we are losing our national ability to listen and to make sense of the world on our own. We are learning to recognize dangerous or frightening ideas by being told about them. We don’t need to pay attention any more, because Glenn Beck and Rachel Maddow are paying attention for us, and clearly telling us how to feel before we’ve had the chance to sort it our on our own. I find this trend to be exceptionally disturbing and firmly believe that this is why the current political state of this country is disintegrating at such a rapid rate.

No one really listens any more.

And I believe that you are right. Deep listening and careful consideration often leads to doubt. Doubt is an indication that something has gotten inside of us and is setting small fires to our foundation. But I also believe that, in most cases, doubt is not passive and does not lead to impotency. Doubt leads to reexamination; reevaluation and hopefully to reinvention. There is a famous anonymous quote: “Any belief worth having must survive doubt.” Indeed. Doubt may be terrifying. It may lead to crisis. The experience of doubt is certainly difficult. But doubt, as a crisis of belief, often demands that one examine the foundations of those beliefs, and either strengthen them or rebuild them completely. From any viewpoint, I cannot see that transformation as anything other than an intense positive.

We are living in an increasingly black & white world. And I firmly believe in the power of the “gray” area. I feel that the gray area is where real conversation, real growth, real transformation happens. It is where good, honest debate happens. Without the gray area we are laying grounds for divisional, civil war. When one side cannot see the other as human and can only plug its ears and cry “evil!” then the doors of progression are slammed shut and we are most certainly doomed.

Lemon never asks us to like or agree with her views. She simply asks us to listen to them. If she does make us listen, really listen, and we are able to carry our listening ears out of the theatre and back into the world, then she has done us an enormous favor. And Wallace Shawn, by providing no textual counterargument to Lemon’s controversial thoughts asks us to counter her thoughts on our own, provoking internal debate and setting those tiny fires to our foundations. It is a challenge to either strengthen ones own arguments or reinvent them. I, for one, am thankful for that challenge!

Thank you so much for sharing your thoughts. Discussions like these are the reason why we do shows like this.

All my very best,

Matthew Reeder
Artistic Director
BackStageTheatre Company.

1. I have always been confident about my views, this play humbled me, made me doubt my certainty.

2. Admittedly, to some extent, I identified with Aunt Dan’s conviction that people like Kissinger have a job to do, and their actions are aimed to keep us on the winning side, so that we can indulge in endless pontification about the rightness of Kissinger’s (or others in his position) actions.

3. But then, what if Kissinger (and others in his position) is wrong? What if he is mistaken in his analysis and his actions are downright wrong? What if he (and others) are not only incorrect in their analysis, but also evil, criminal, selfish and cruel, and have no intention to serve the “best interest” of their people.

4. Then, what if plays like this one, which is so effective and spellbinding, cause people to become even more passive, less certain. Our culture has already become so split in its thinking, so timid to take a stand about any topic, so gullible to any ideas no matter how far-fetched and unreasonable, so vulnerable and cowardly in general. So many people don’t want to think, they just want to have fun.

5. Does an excellent play like this make people think more? I don’t believe it. If they go to see it, it will cause people to doubt more, not others because it’s politically incorrect to judge others, but rather they will doubt themselves even more. They will dare even less to state their ideas, stake their stands, or hold firm to any set of principles that may unite us a society of people.

6. Take the Ten Commandments. Are we in agreement about them? Certainly not. No more. Is killing wrong? Depends. Is lusting your neigbor’s wife unacceptable? Certainly not today. Is stealing, robbing, cheating is wrong? Perhaps. Certainly common. Few kill themselves in shame when they are caught, some even go free.

7. Yes, this was an unforgettable play. I’ll see it again next week, it’s that good. Has it affected me? Greatly. Did it give me some food for thoughts? For sure. But I’m not at all clear how this lesson could be implemented, or how this play can lead us to peace between nations, better life for our poor, and more sensitive and sensible citizenry.