Blog 86 - Another moment when the theatre reminds me why it has always been my life.
This piece of writing is revised and updated from the January 23 entry in my book, Theatre Is My Life!
“The past is the present, isn't it? It's the future too.”
Mary Tyrone in Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day's Journey Into Night
I was fortunate enough to see a “Broadway preview” performance of this Eugene O’Neill play staged at Duke University in March of 1986. My former student, Sammy Ledbetter, was working for Emanuel Azenberg (whom he called “Manny”) and the company offered a soft opening of the New York production of Long Day's Journey Into Night at the private North Carolina school. The show, directed by Jonathan Miller, starred Jack Lemmon and Kevin Spacey, and Lemmon’s interpretation of Tyrone defied the traditional approach. He portrayed the patriarch as a “decent man with some indecent traits,” a departure from more traditional interpretations of the character.
When I think about the play now, it becomes very present. I recall many details of the show and the trip to see it. My 10-year-old daughter was flying to meet my then-husband and me because we had driven up to attend a theatre conference in a nearby city just before the preview. She wanted to see the play, and she especially wanted to see one of her favorite former student-friends, Sammy.
While waiting for her arrival at the Raleigh-Durham Airport, we were paged: “Would the persons who are meeting traveler Elin Olson please report immediately to the passenger information desk? Would the persons who are meeting traveler Elin Olson please report immediately to the passenger information desk?”
I can feel the panic that swept over me at this instant: weak knees, pounding heart, dry mouth, spinning brain. Did her plane crash? Was she kidnapped? Did she fall and break a leg? No. When we reached the desk, we learned that her plane was merely delayed. I remember this incident as if it were happening right now!
And the past is living in me as I look back on the time I had at Samford with so many of my students; but because of this Duke memory, I am thinking of Sammy—selling tickets in the box office, working on headpieces in the costume shop, sorting mailings in the dressing rooms, sitting in the dark auditorium watching a production grow from sure disaster to unrestrained success, bringing to life Look Homeward, Angel, The Servant of Two Masters, Pilgrim, Oedipus Rex, The First and Second Shepherd’s Plays, The Mousetrap, Oliver!, The Skin of Our Teeth, Tartuffe, Murder in the Cathedral, The Lady’s Not For Burning, The Artful Antics of the Disguised Gypsies, The Playboy of the Western World, Dracula. What a roster of classics we created together! I can hear lines, see costumes, recall lighting cues—and even bring to mind some of the director’s notes.
Frederick Buechner wrote about a quiet place within us where the past still lives, where we remember those we've lost and begin to understand how our lives have brought us to the present. He says, “The name of the room is Remember—the room where with patience, with charity, with quietness of heart, we remember consciously to remember the lives we have lived.” The plays we have done, the characters we have brought to life, the Sammys who have touched us—the past, which is the present.
I wrote those words years ago, but the past, of course, did not stay put.
In 2017, I saw Sammy again in New York. This time Elin was not the ten-year-old flying alone to meet me. She was grown, and with us was her own eight-year-old daughter, Emmeline. Three generations of us had come to New York to see Hamilton. Thirty-one years earlier, Elin had been the child coming to join me for a theatrical adventure; now she was bringing her own daughter along on one.
Somewhere in our reunion, past and present seemed to fold together: my former student, my daughter who had once flown to North Carolina to see him and a play—and now my granddaughter was sharing theatre with us.
Banner of the Slaughter of the Innocents from Murder in the Cathedral
Then, in December 2023, I had another chance to visit with Sammy in Atlanta. By then almost forty years had passed since that trip to Duke, but it doesn't feel like forty years when I call up the recollection. I can still see the theatre. I can still feel that moment of panic in the Raleigh-Durham airport. And drifting on back into memory, I can still discern Sammy sitting in the dark audience chamber at Samford scribbling notes as an assistant director, helping bring all those plays to life.
And then, to my surprise, do you know what he pulled out of his closet? Two hand-painted banners from our production of Murder in the Cathedral. Through all the years since Samford, through numerous Broadway shows to his credit and countless professional props passing through his hands, Sammy had held on to those two banners.
Maybe that is one of the gifts theatre has given me. A play disappears the moment it is over—and yet somehow it hasn't. Sometimes, apparently, it is even waiting in a closet in Atlanta to be remembered.
The people remain. The voices remain. A line spoken on a stage decades ago can come back without warning and speak to the life I am living now.
“The past is the present, isn't it?”
And, if I am fortunate, it is the future too.