What happens when the traditions and rituals that inform our lives no longer describe who we are? Or when our aversion to change means we continually replay the past rather than imagining a different future? Or when we’re so busy walking prescribed, well-worn paths that we no longer pay attention to where we’re going?
I knew where I was going Saturday – or thought I did – even as I asked these questions of myself.
It was a beautiful morning, and I was on my way to Madison to watch two World Premiere Wisconsin plays: Children’s Theater of Madison’s production of Erica Berman’s Finder and the North Star and the Madison Theatre Guild production, in collaboration with Madison College, of Karen Saari’s Bad in Bed. More on both of them in a minute.
But the questions I was mulling as I drove north by northwest from Chicago were prompted by a stimulating phone conversation I’d had that morning with Art Kopischke, whose WPW play You Don’t Deserve to Die will receive a reading at UW Green Bay’s Weidner Theatre on Saturday, March 25
Like the upcoming WPW entry from Milwaukee’s Renaissance Theaterworks – Kristin Idaszak’s Tidy, which opens on the same night as Kopischke’s reading – You Don’t Deserve to Die is a dystopian reflection on imminent environmental catastrophe.
Also like Tidy, You Don’t Deserve to Die asks some hard questions about what happens when the long-held assumptions, habits, and rituals through which we negotiate the world and define ourselves have stopped making sense. What happens when the world spins forward while we still stubbornly cling to what it used to be? How can we build a future if we’re stuck in the past?
I’ll have much more to say about my conversation with Kopischke (and about both You Don’t Deserve to Die and Tidy) in future WPW Backstage posts. I introduce that conversation here not just because it offered a thought-provoking start to my all-WPW day. It also illuminated how much the two Madison plays I would see on Saturday have in common.
Two Fairy Tales
At first glance, Berman and Saari’s plays – Berman’s myth-laden fairy tale about childhood and Saari’s self-described fairy tale for adults – couldn’t possibly be more different.
Finder and the North Star revolves around the earnest, wide-eyed journey of a small child (Finder) and her inexperienced apprentice guide (North Star) toward the fulfillment of Finder’s wish. Bad in Bed is a rollicking comedy that revolves around a middle-aged man (Charles) going through his third divorce because he’s . . . well, the title of Saari’s play speaks for itself.
Both plays involve protagonists who are stuck in ruts and unable to move forward because they’re afraid of change.
Paralyzed by the monster of self-doubt, Finder can barely see or hear herself – let alone the world around her. Trapped in his own ego, Charles is repeatedly told that he isn’t listening to the world outside himself; for much of Saari’s play, that’s a truth he can’t even hear – let alone process.
Both Finder and Charles wrongly imagine that the solution to their self-isolating loneliness involves some sort of magic formula which might allow them to change by simply following its preordained rules.
Finder’s talisman is a special map that promises to outline her journey; she learns to her chagrin that the map is a blank which she herself must chart, based on the choices she makes. Charles believes he’ll improve in the sack if a Finnish witch removes a hex, placed on him in college because he was too stuck on himself to appreciate the classmate (Betsy) crushing on him.
Both Finder and Charles will learn instead that if they actually wish to move forward, they must summon the courage to look backward, overcoming and learning from the past so that they don’t endlessly repeat its mistakes.
Both Finder and Charles also learn that they can’t make the journey forward alone.
Finder needs North Star as much as Dante needs Virgil; like Dante, Finder also encounters numerous characters along the way who help make sense of her journey.
Ranging from a humble lady bug in a field of dandelions and a Guatemalan kite maker missing his grandmother to legendary gods, Finder’s helpers shift her focus outward, while teaching her that there are many paths toward truth. She becomes more entirely herself by interacting more fully with others.
Similarly, Charles finds his way forward with the help of those around him.
College chum Jack gives him a place to stay while continually nudging him to get back on his feet. Three women – Charles’ third wife (Annie Jo), the witch who’d cursed him (Deb) and especially the woman he’d long ago dissed (Betsy) – challenge him to pay closer attention (and listen harder) to those around him so that he might thereby unlock the potential within himself.
Charles’ path forward doesn’t involve a mysterious incantation in Finnish, any more than Finder’s route is already highlighted on a map. What Charles’ journey requires instead is real-life conversations in English, involving the give-and-take through which we discover others, who in turn help us find ourselves. As Finder learns at trail’s end, you can either “stand still” or take another’s hand and thereby take a step.
An Expanding Future
It’s telling and appropriate that we never learn what Finder had wished when beginning her travels; Berman’s play makes clear that we must leave ourselves open to how that wish might evolve as one’s story unfolds. To insist upon a prepackaged goal before even beginning one’s journey is to remain trapped in the receding past of what one once was rather than walking toward what one might yet become.
“I can’t leave if I don’t know where I’m going,” Finder plaintively wails at the start of the play. But by play’s end, we’re being told that the story we’ve been watching is only now actually beginning, as Finder learns to courageously step into the unknown so that she might better know herself.
Bad in Bed also begins just as it ends; reading the concluding lines of a fairy tale she’s written, Betsy hints at the possibility of change and new beginnings in a world where people like Charles take a chance on what’s new rather than merely repeating what they think they already know.
As with Finder’s tentative first steps into a brave new world at the end of Berman’s play, Saari doesn’t tell us at the end of Bad in Bed where her characters are going. It’s enough that they’re willing to take a leap of faith into the unknown, risking new stories rather than endlessly repeating old ones.
Which is exactly what’s going on with World Premiere Wisconsin, in which theater artists and companies all over the state are bravely taking a chance on new and unknown stories – and inviting audiences to join them for the ride.
“You are part of this play’s evolution,” Saari gratefully said to the audience in a curtain speech before Saturday night’s performance of Bad in Bed (in an ensuing talkback, Saari described her own six-year journey to bring her play to the stage). “You are putting Wisconsin on the map.”
Driving home toward Milwaukee late that night, I thought about how WPW – as well as playwrights like Berman and Saari – might change our collective sense of what that map might look like as we, like Finder, add coordinates and connect dots while charting all theater here in the Badger State might yet become if we shape its topography together.
Yes, we’re still emerging from a pandemic that’s decimating theaters everywhere, including here. But in two decades of covering Wisconsin theater, I’ve rarely felt as hopeful about its future as I do while writing these words, looking back on a Saturday I’ll never forget – while anticipating all that awaits within this festival in the four months still to come.
See you at the theater!
Finder and the North Star closed on Sunday, March 5. Bad in Bed continues through Saturday, March 11 at the Bartell Theatre, 113 E. Mifflin St. in Madison. For tickets, visit https://bartelltheatre.org/2023/bad-in-bed-a-fairy-tale/.
