Listen to what's in the heart of a child
A song so big in one so small
Soon you will hear where beauty lies
You'll hear and you'll recall
The sadness, the doubt
All the loss, the grief
Will belong to some play from the past
As the child leads the way
To a dream, a belief
A time of hope through the land
It's a cold night in December of 2015 and I'm in the audience at the Brooks Atkinson Theatre, transfixed. Onstage it's the last act of Spring Awakening, which I've loved ever since I saw the original production eight years earlier. Based on the 19th-century play by Frank Wedekind, it tells the story of teenagers in a repressed, conservative German town, grappling with their budding sexuality (and baring their feelings in anachronistic, but absolutely transcendent, modern folk-rock). With no good information, no guidance, no support or understanding from the adults in their lives, they fumble their anguished way towards love, sex, rebellion, and consequences. It doesn't end well for anyone, but it's all somehow elevated to heartbreaking beauty by Duncan Sheik's haunting score and the sheer poetry of Steven Sater's lyrics.
I'm already primed to love it, of course, because I've seen it all before. Except that here in 2015, it turns out I really haven't—because this new production, by LA's Deaf West Theatre, features a mixed ensemble of Deaf and hearing actors who have utterly transformed the show. Actors who are hearing express themselves in English and American Sign Language simultaneously. Deaf actors sign in ASL with hearing actor-musicians as their "other halves," supplying the voices and playing instruments. The show is kept in motion by an intricate choreography of visual and musical cues, and the result is nothing short of miraculous: a story told in two languages at the same time, equally sublime in sound and gesture, each enhancing and amplifying the other.
A summer's day
A mother sings
A song of purple summer
Through the heart of everything
And heaven waits
So close it seems
To show her child the wonders
Of a world beyond her dreams
And now we've come to the last song of the last act. The story is essentially over, and all the Bad Things have happened: the botched abortion, the suicide, the unyielding indifference and incomprehension of the adult world that compelled those acts. Now all the characters gather onstage, those dead and those left alive, to address the audience directly. And as they shed their outer clothes to reveal white garments underneath, they sing a song not of present sorrows but of a future time of renewal and hope: The old ways of thinking will be left behind. Instead of caging young minds in darkness, a mother will "show her child the wonders / of a world beyond her dreams." The children will lead the way as spring turns into summer, and "all shall know the wonder."
And I sit watching in the dark, dazzled. The music pierces the heart; the sign language is a dance. And the ending is so beautiful it stops the breath in my throat: One by one the cast departs through a doorway at the back of the stage, beyond which there's a glimpse of a garden in sunlight. The musicians go first, laying down their instruments, leaving only voices and gestures to carry the song. Then the actors leave, singing and signing, the song fading to echoes. The lead character, Melchior, goes last. He brushes past the authority figures of the show, leaving them in shadows. The doorway frames his silhouette as he signs the last lines of the song in silence. And he walks into the light—whether into the peace of some kind of nirvana, or the promise of a still-unwritten future, is left for us to decide as we exit into the winter night.
The earth will wave with corn
The days so wide, so warm
And mares will neigh
With stallions that they mate,
Foals they've borne
I see the show twice more before the end of its run.
...And now, five years later, as things fall apart, I come back to this story and this song. Still finding solace in it, and courage.
David Cole of the ACLU once said that "hope is more the consequence of action than its cause"—that it's not something you wait for, but something that you make. The poet Antonio Machado put it this way: Caminante, no hay camino / Se hace camino al andar ("Traveler, there is no road; you make the road by walking"). As I write this, young people are out in the streets, braving police batons and riot shields and tear gas and a deadly virus that has never gone away, fighting for the future. And my daughter is furiously contacting city officials to demand that they revoke police protections and defund the NYPD, and asking others to do the same. Because of her—and the protesters, and everyone resisting in ways big and small—I have hope: the hope that they make, that WE can all make, day by day. The future is still unwritten. The doorway to the garden awaits.
And all shall know the wonder
Of purple summer.
BONUS: This rehearsal video offers a better look at the ASL choreography, with slightly clearer audio:
A note on the Spotify track: The original cast recording of "The Song of Purple Summer" features the old lyrics from the off-Broadway production, before the song was rewritten for its first Broadway run. It's beautiful in its own right, but I prefer version 2.0. Recordings that use the new lyrics are hard to come by on Spotify, but I did manage to find this lovely rendition by a Finnish youth choir, which is what I'll include on the playlist.
And if you like what you've seen so far, then absolutely do check out these other gorgeous performances from the show. Here's "Touch Me," performed on Late Night with Seth Meyers. (It features, among others, Josh Castille and Daniel David Stewart, whom you may recall from one of the bonus videos in an earlier post.)
And here's a medley of "Mama Who Bore Me" and "The Bitch of Living," performed for the 2016 Tony Awards:
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Listen to the Spotify playlist here.
Watch the YouTube playlist here.