"And, I Know Things Now": A Tribute to Sondheim

Abstract

"And, I Know Things Now"A Tribute to Sondheim Gina Masucci MacKenzie (bio) When I first started directing musical theatre, twenty years ago, I decided that directing Into the Woods would be a fun challenge. I was working on my PhD and wanted local actors to have the same passion for Sondheim and literature that I did. They did not, but they were talented, and we learned a lot from each other, about life and about Sondheim. On instinct, my "Little Red," a very talented and very innocent young actor, decided to carry the knife given after she killed the wolf, in her corseted top, between her breasts. The Freudian imagery was lost on her and most of the cast. It was so very Sondheim though. His work does many things, but what it does best is teach us to trust our instincts, our deep-seated, dark feelings, as truth and to follow them, even when we know they will hurt, because the hurting is better than numbness. As Joyce's short stories demonstrate his mastery of the epiphany, so Sondheim's musicals all have that "Aha" moment, where not only the characters, but the audiences realize how little they have known, how much they still do not know, and how much they might not ever want to know. That liminal space that Sondheim creates in every musical is the one that should be mourned the most. For some that is the space of grief, and Sondheim shows us that. For the Witch, again in Into the Woods, her life is devastated by her daughter's insistence that she knows everything. Since the ancient Greeks, that kind of hubris always leads to demise, and here it is no different. Rapunzel, the Witch's "adopted" daughter, dies at the foot of the giant, running from her mother who tried to keep her from all knowledge. Before her death, the Witch sings to her: Stay with meThe world is dark and wild.Stay with me [End Page 189] While you can be a childWith me. There is an implied connection between childhood, order, innocence, and ignorance, while adulthood has knowledge but is solitary and a bit unhinged. If left in that dichotomy, nearly all of Sondheim's musicals would be less-than-intriguing non-spectaculars. That, dichotomy, however, does not hold. It is complicated by the liminal space where we know that we don't know and that is good. It is uncomfortably good. Because the greatest lesson that Sondheim teaches both actors and audiences alike is how to be comfortable with discomfort, that pain itself can be the resolution. West Side Story, A Little Night Music, Sweeney Todd, Follies—none of those pieces give the audience a satisfying ending. The protagonists in them are either dead or defeated at curtain's close, but they are good endings, for Sondheim. For each character left alive, there is knowledge and some, more intangible recognition that there is still a profound lack (of knowledge) that has to be lived with, and that lack will actually make living better. Will Maria be better without Tony? Will the audience be? Maybe not individually better, but universally, yes, because there is knowledge now of the profound racial and ethnic hatred in their community. Can it get better? That is unknown, and Sondheim doesn't fall into the happy-ending false hope trap. There is no resolution, only the knowledge that the audience doesn't know what happens next in our racially charged and torn society. They didn't know when the show debuted in 1957, and we still do not know. That lack of knowing is disconcerting, even terrifying, as we face the injustice surrounding us, but it also motivates us to work toward change. Sondheim's work does that; it pushes his audiences to change. Some might consider that space of the unknown the space of motivation. Lacan would say it's the movement toward jouissance. It's uncomfortably stimulating, delightfully painful, oxymoronic, and exquisitely jarring. Jouissance and Sondheim's work seem to have much in common. In Passion, it is the only explanation for how Giorgio, a young solider, can prefer Fosca, an...