In 1949, for my 17th birthday, my parents changed my life. They took me to see South Pacific, the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical that had opened on Broadway earlier that year. Mary Martin sang the part of nurse Nellie Forbush, and a 58-year-old opera singer, Ezio Pinza, became an unlikely American hero as the French plantation owner, Emile DeBacque. Based on James Michener’s Pulitzer-Prize-winning collection of 19 short stories, the music, the acting, and the words knocked my scruffy argyles off.
There’s nothing like real theater (although, as one of the songs tells us, “There’s nothing like a dame,” either). Jeanne and I are movie fans, too, but the vulnerability of real actors on a stage gives theater an extra intensity compared to the distancing permanence of film. South Pacific was the first play I’d seen outside of high school, and I was hooked. (If someone had told me that 40 years later James Michener would have dinner at our house, I would’ve fainted. In 1990, still a fierce liberal at 83, Michener was a popular and gracious “helper” in Eckerd’s fiction-writing classes for a semester.
Theater, especially in big cities, can be expensive, so Jeanne and I limit our New York theater visits to one yearly splurge, last year seeing a quietly moving play, The Weir, by the Irish playwright Conor McPherson. This reminded us of the first NYC production we saw together, in 1958, a year after we were married: another Irish play, Brendan Behan’s The Hostage, about the Irish civil war, which takes place in a very weird brothel. We’ll never forget the end, when the “hero,” a young British soldier who’s just been killed, jumps out of his coffin and sings, “O death where is thy sting-a-ling-a-ling?”
A different kind of transcendent conclusion came when we saw Ibsen’s Ghosts in an off-Broadway production. It was an “in the round” production, and we had seats on an aisle about halfway from the stage. In the end, when Mrs. Alving’s son died, she — I forget the actress’s name — staggered off the stage and down the aisle, weeping inconsolably the whole way, right past us. We wanted to reach out and comfort her. This was a matinee, and the actress would have to repeat this agonized performance in a few hours. Actors have to be tough.
Even in other languages, theater works its magic. When we saw Hamlet in Warsaw, performed in Polish, it was still powerful, even though we hardly understood a word, barely recognizing “Byc´ albo nie byc´” (“To be or not to be…”). But onstage, Hamlet can transcend even Shakespeare’s poetry. The swordfights helped.
In South Pacific, great songs abounded: “Some Enchanted Evening,” “Bali Ha’i,” “Younger Than Springtime,” “Bloody Mary,” and others, but the one I learned by heart was “Carefully Taught.” In 1949, as a senior in an all-white high school who’d never thought much about race, it struck me immediately as beautiful and true. And in today’s vitriolic political climate, it still speaks right to the point.
Over the decades, we’ve been lucky to live here as the Tampa Bay theater scene has blossomed. We love theater because it’s physical and moving. But, as in the two shows playing in St. Pete right now — August Wilson’s Jitney at American Stage and Thornton Wilder’s Our Town at FreeFall — it can also show us America from the inside, not as a lesson or a lecture, but how it’s actually lived.
“All the world’s a stage,” the Bard tells us. Let’s do our part: support our actors and get those tickets.
—Peter Meinke will read his poetry at the Gulfport Public Library on Thursday Feb. 11, at 8 p.m.
This article appears in Feb 4-10, 2016.