In the last few weeks more than a handful of friends, family and acquaintances have told me in many different ways that they could never have imagined what passes for politics and news in the U.S. these days.
As is usual for these types of conversations, talk kept going back to the former US president, meaning the guy before Joe Biden, and the deviously gluttonous way in which he manages to devour everything and everyone in his path.
How is it that this happened???…they all eventually ask in various forms.
I know it’s important but if I hear one more word about Him, I’m going to scream… so many confess while simultaneously admitting they find themselves tuning out the news.
Every single day I wish he was dead.
Why doesn’t he just have a heart attack and die?
The fury of those last thoughts often come with an apology for wishing or even imagining them.
Until I interrupt and confess I feel exactly the same way.
But more so.
At which point I mention all of the ingenious ways that my imagination manages to… well, you know.
When they beg me to elaborate I mostly decline.
Though I must admit a few of them are so good that they scare even me. And, after a particularly heinous news day…
Make me smile.
But see, that’s the thing with imagination. It’s an incredible balm to the soul. If you allow yourself to think it up, it can feel real.
It doesn’t have to be real. But it can help you think and process your innermost desires and demons and other stuff that you can’t quite yet categorize and comes from who knows where.
Or it can simply get it out of your head. Maybe never to be heard from again but perhaps to be sorted out.
I’m a writer so I often write it down. And very occasionally, but not often enough, it spawns a good idea for a script or story of some kind. Or a new way to think about an old story I’ve been telling myself for years – either on paper, or in everyday life, or way, way in the past.
This weekend a good friend invited me to a filmed play of what was billed as a radical new version of Anton Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya.
And playing ALL EIGHT PARTS in this retelling of a 125-plus-year-old Chekhov story was none other than the actor Andrew Scott.
Netflix’s Ripley.
The tortured gay heartthrob from last year’s All Of Us Strangers.
The hot priest from Fleabag.
Moriarity from the long-running BBC series Sherlock.
Among others.
You watch this guy nimbly jumping back and forth from one character to another, sometimes in mere seconds and other times in minutes, or monologues, as he quips, cajoles, argues, eats and occasionally even, with the use of his hands, shoulder, neck and breath, simultaneously portray two different male and female characters making love to each other, and all you can think about initially is….
How?????
How is this possible? How is he able to do this?
And then… who imagined it?
Well, it was adapted last year by the playwright Simon Stephens, who a decade ago theatrically shed light on and likely helped change the way we thought about autism in the groundbreaking play The Curious Incident of the Dog In The Night-Time (Note: Adapted from the novel by Mark Haddon, it’s won most major playwriting awards).
And he is billed as co-creating it with both Scott and Sam Yates, a 40ish British stage and sometimes television and film director known for his unusual approach to both new and classical material.
Okay.
But then you ask yourself…
Why????? Why do this?
Why do we need this? Why do it at all?
Well, because someone, or a handful of ones, thought of it and needed to think of it. Something about the world they lived in, or events they were personally experiencing, prompted them to think of it. And then move forward with recreating something (and a bunch of fictional someones) from the past that would allow them to understand their present in a different way.
It’s not as if before seeing this filmed version of a play done last year at the National Theatre I was excited about seeing Uncle Vanya done as a one-man show.
Or frankly, any production of Uncle Vanya at all. Nor, I venture to say, is the average person.
But watching Mr. Scott (Note: I so want to call him Andrew, or even Andy)… okay Andrew… throw himself so fully into instantly becoming so many people – with no wigs, no costumes, only a trajectory of mangled feelings, conflicts and eventually emotional outcomes, denials and realizations – well, it was about as contemporary as it gets for me.
It seemed that this film, of this play, had nothing at all to do with Uncle Vanya, or even the playwright himself.
What it addressed were the myriad of emotions, sometimes life and death ones, we are ALL trying to manage as best we can these days. Only to be shown there is no managing.
There is only being truthful about how and what we feel, taking the actions we believe fitting and holding out some hope for a better future when they don’t work out.
And, well, to keep trying.
It might sound a bit trite, but that’s what this new version of Vanya, the one I didn’t think I needed but some other people imagined I might need, did for me.
It made me realize once again that navigating what we call the politics of today is not much different for our generation than it ever was.
And that, lucky for us, back then Chekhov was quite an imaginative fellow himself.
The Temptations – “Just My Imagination”
notes from a chair 