Adventures in Culture

I started the week by going to the opera; I finished it by going to the theatre. The opera production was mediocre; the theater one–fantastic.

I went to see a play called Skin and Sky. It starred Asen Blatechki, who, I’ve been told. makes anything he’s in worth watching. It’s the second play I’ve seen him and once again he completely inhabited his character–a mercenary in an unnamed war. Covered with tattoos, we gradually hear the story they tell. Or rather we see glimpses of it. This all reminded of this idea, which I first saw expressed in Winterson’s Written on the Body, that our body records our history, our shared intimacies, we erase them only to write a new account of our lives, just like a palimsest. In this play, the tattoos record both the character’s history and his dreams, blurring the distinction between the two. The tattoos also provide one of the most comical and most poignant line in the play about angel wings fluttering.

In a setup reminiscent of Waiting for Godot, the two main characters explore their humanity amid a bleak landscape, punctuated with sounds of gunfire, redolent of despair and “dreams deferred.” There’s a brief appearance of a third character who only serves to remind them of the cruel world, lurking in the darkness, thus catalyzing their fatal bond. The climax of the play occurs at the very end, much like in that Langston Hughes poem. Perhaps, the mark of true art is that by evoking works of other artists, it connects them in unusual ways, adding new facets to each of them, and in the process illuminates our own lives. This the play succeeded in.

Here’s the poem “A Dream Deferred” by Langston Hughes.

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore–
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over–
like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?

Advertisement