Can you count to a million billion trillion?

[sovay]

Let us all agree that I would make the world's worst theater critic, at least in terms of timing. But if you have no plans for tomorrow afternoon, I strongly recommend you catch the last performance of Carole Braverman's The Margaret Ghost as performed by Theatre@First, because I went with no expectations but historical curiosity and good memories of last season's The Winter's Tale and what I got was as smart as Stoppard and reminded me intermittently of certain webcomics I love. The play is a three-act semi-fantasia on the life of Margaret Fuller; it is subtitled A Transcendentalist Love Story and indeed there is a triangle of emotions at its heart, although really it's sort of a pentangle, or maybe it has nine points, one for each actor in the cast. If you have ever wanted to see Ralph Waldo Emerson, poet-prophet of Concord, saint of the Transcendentalists, utterly and completely wrong-footed by a woman who's got a classical education and isn't afraid to use it, this is your play. This is also your play if you want to hear Horace Greeley talking socialism with Nathaniel Hawthorne, a chair-throwing argument in Italian, the world's least informative crash course in sex ed, or just if you want complex relationships between fully human beings, meaning that none of them are without moments of sympathy and all of them are flawed, including the heroine. Quite a lot of it is quotably funny. ("Then the Dark Vision is a blabbermouth!") It even passes a kind of reverse Bechdel test—when two male characters talk, they are just as likely to be talking about Margaret as about politics or philosophy or art. She shouldn't have died at age forty, but neither should many extraordinary people at the ages they did. I am sorry her writings were censored; I am glad enough survived to attest to her brilliance and incidentally to construct this play. I think I am about to continue my long tradition of fiction-inspired research. And I also think that I may have to pick up a subscription to Theatre@First, because I was told after the show that their upcoming season will include Christopher Fry's The Lady's Not for Burning. Maybe I'll even get to see it not on the next-to-last night . . .

Comments

[zdenka]

I loved the play the first time I saw it, when T@F first put it on several years ago. I'm glad you like it too.

Though at the musical party I went to last night, someone sang Bunthorne's song from Patience, and at the lines "you must get up all the germs of the Transcendental terms and plant them everywhere" my mind went straight to " . . . people who think the Transcendentalists are a kind of railroad!"

I have been gleefully re-reading my copy of the script ever since I got it. I very much hope there's a video.

[sovay]

I very much hope there's a video.

They were filming last night, so we can hope.

(I was told they always make archival copies, but given this production was part of the Margaret Fuller Bicentennial, the video might be made more widely available. Which I would approve of.)