With millions of Americans now apparently unable to discern fantasy from any but the most immediate, concrete external reality, prey to endless simulations in which “news” shows promote fiction and “reality” shows strut their performance of actuality –
I want to say. . . I understand.
I had the same experience. Once.
On stage at the Metropolitan Opera, summer 1983, during American Ballet Theatre’s annual season. Mid-afternoon, the stage was set for Tudor’s Pillar of Fire. A dress rehearsal must have just happened or been about to happen, because gloomy Pillar is never an opening ballet and so it wasn’t a pre-performance set up.
But the stage was dark, making the evocation of small-town lanes and destinations all the more moody and mysterious. Oliver Smith’s 1942 design was still being used.
There was the house across the way, its walls designed to turn translucent to reveal for our benefit the happenings within–or the speculation thereof by Tudor’s heroine Hagar.
It’s a house of erotic abandon, a house of ill repute, a house that perhaps exists only in Hagar’s imagination.
A masterful set design.
I wandered around the stage, enjoying the way the ballet’s set was now the momentary property of only me. I turned the door of the house –and what do you know?
It opened. It was veritably a functioning door amid this theatrical realization of now opaque, now transparent planes, conducive come the performance to spectator omniscience–spectators in the audience, spectators on stage.
But what I can’t remember: did I dare to go in?