![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
x_losNext to Normal is as viscerally affecting as it is uncommercial; I have no idea how or why it’s on Broadway proper (which you’re supposed to be able to take your visiting cousins from Kansas who are religious and easily offended to), but here it is, with its dozens of uses of fuck, and it is excellent. And terrible. If you have mental illness/depression issues, I almost /don’t/ recommend seeing it, because as good as it is I straight up went through 10+ tissues and sobbed silently and violently from what must have been the third scene almost straight through.
The staging consisted of a tri-layered housing structure, furniture on trolley-tracks, a big sturdy gurney (as occasion necessitated), mobile screens and six or seven staircases. I really liked the simplicity and mobility of it, the way the structure interacted with the seating’s balcony set-up. With the band on stage and the multilateral set, it was sort of ‘theater in the round’ ish in that the very visible conditions of production challenged the automatic distance we put between ourselves and entertainment when its presentation is formulaic, ritualized and thus expected, prepared for and interacted with with due detachment. The electric-shock sequence is exquisitely, horrifyingly garish because the net of bulbs behind the entire set hadn’t really been brought to my attention at any point before—the set is used with admirable economy.
The music itself enchanted me more as the show went on—I found the first song relatively unlikable, and a poor, unsympathetic introduction to otherwise great characters. Voices were well-established in a writing sense, and the mother and daughter were especially strong singers.
The entire thing makes you question whether it’s morally reprehensible for a mentally ill person to establish a relationship with someone who's relatively normal. The solution for Diana is presented as going off treatment and completely separating herself from her husband, both leaving him and cutting off all communication, at least for the foreseeable future. It’s clear that she can’t bear the responsibility of dragging her husband through the hell of dealing with her bipolar and schizophrenic episodes, and that seems both poor repayment for seventeen odd years of supporting her through hellish cycles of medication, apathy, resistance and breakdown, and the only kind, reasonable thing to do. Clearly her attempt to kill herself and her final abandonment of her family both cause Dan pain. Dan once loved her for being bright and clever, unique and unforgettable, but as he says, these days he'd settle for a wife whose medication didn't make her incapable of driving a car. He tells Diana he's still there because he promised he would be, and tries to promise her continued support anew then and there, but it's hard to see from the narrative, what he thinks is worth salvaging in Diana as she is that isn't a product of his self-confessed bewilderment at the prospect of being alone, having been Diana's Husband for the entirety of his adult life.
The only offered alternative is her daughter’s relationship with her boyfriend Henry, but via lyrical paralleling and twinned blocking the younger man’s dedication to the daughter Natalie is offered up as a repetition of the bond that has imprisoned Diana and drained and destroyed Dan. The alternative isn't. Henry suggests that either one of them might go crazy, but a clear genetic proclivity is established. Natalie has already proved herself to be neurotic, and has already had a miniature breakdown, complete with erratic, emotionally abusive behavior, rejection, self-destructive tendencies and substance abuse. Diana even directly suggests that she is Natalie’s future. It's all the more devastating a foreshadowing because their relationship is so touching.
Artistically it’s great that the end’s hope is brittle, suggesting that people with depression and those who love/can’t extricate themselves from them are working for survival rather than happiness, and that when this spate of illness is over you’ll look back, unable to comprehend how you survived or even to connect with the feelings, problems or the mental state associated with the episode. It’s not a cop-out, which would have been an insult. Personally its devastating and makes you, if you are a fucked up person who has any shred of empathy with Diana, want to sign up for your local chapter of the vestal virgins and/or throw yourself under the nearest Times Square touristy horse-drawn carriage like you’re a suffragette and it’s Derby Day.
I really wonder when I would have cottoned on to the son being
1. dead, and
2. imagined
if the play summary from the Tony Awards Show hadn’t spoiled me for it. I did wonder, initially, if he might be alive and going to die, on top of her depression, but well before the reveal I’d groked what was up.
It’s really too bad that the original, Tony Nominated ™ son (Gabriel—to which there are many angelic allusions that make more sense when his name is revealed near the end) has left the cast for silly Gossip Girl, of all things, leaving us with his clearly less than Tony-Level Attention-Getting understudy. The weird sexual dynamic in the blocking for all interactions between Diana and Gabriel might have been less out of left field and awkward had Gabriel been able to carry it off—as a character he is, as he explicitly states, far larger than the memory of a dead infant or the projection of the young man he might have been had he lived. He is the seduction, the self-absorption of depression for Diana, Dan and Natalie alike—he is Dan’s repression of his memory, and Dan’s own repressed, denied depression, birthed by trauma, grief, and seventeen years of managing Diana and being simultaneously the breadwinner and Natalie’s only effective, attentive parent. It takes a really strong young actor to make that net of roles flow naturally—but it is this kids first night as lead!Gabriel, and perhaps he’ll get better.
Particularly strong songs include Natalie’s ‘Mozart was Batshit,’ Diana’s ‘You Don’t Know,’ and the Electro Convulsive Therapy Suite.
So miserable now that I have to go watch Spice World—you want art to rip you open, and the tragical-magical career follies/heights of Richard E. Grant are almost enough to sew you back up.
The staging consisted of a tri-layered housing structure, furniture on trolley-tracks, a big sturdy gurney (as occasion necessitated), mobile screens and six or seven staircases. I really liked the simplicity and mobility of it, the way the structure interacted with the seating’s balcony set-up. With the band on stage and the multilateral set, it was sort of ‘theater in the round’ ish in that the very visible conditions of production challenged the automatic distance we put between ourselves and entertainment when its presentation is formulaic, ritualized and thus expected, prepared for and interacted with with due detachment. The electric-shock sequence is exquisitely, horrifyingly garish because the net of bulbs behind the entire set hadn’t really been brought to my attention at any point before—the set is used with admirable economy.
The music itself enchanted me more as the show went on—I found the first song relatively unlikable, and a poor, unsympathetic introduction to otherwise great characters. Voices were well-established in a writing sense, and the mother and daughter were especially strong singers.
The entire thing makes you question whether it’s morally reprehensible for a mentally ill person to establish a relationship with someone who's relatively normal. The solution for Diana is presented as going off treatment and completely separating herself from her husband, both leaving him and cutting off all communication, at least for the foreseeable future. It’s clear that she can’t bear the responsibility of dragging her husband through the hell of dealing with her bipolar and schizophrenic episodes, and that seems both poor repayment for seventeen odd years of supporting her through hellish cycles of medication, apathy, resistance and breakdown, and the only kind, reasonable thing to do. Clearly her attempt to kill herself and her final abandonment of her family both cause Dan pain. Dan once loved her for being bright and clever, unique and unforgettable, but as he says, these days he'd settle for a wife whose medication didn't make her incapable of driving a car. He tells Diana he's still there because he promised he would be, and tries to promise her continued support anew then and there, but it's hard to see from the narrative, what he thinks is worth salvaging in Diana as she is that isn't a product of his self-confessed bewilderment at the prospect of being alone, having been Diana's Husband for the entirety of his adult life.
The only offered alternative is her daughter’s relationship with her boyfriend Henry, but via lyrical paralleling and twinned blocking the younger man’s dedication to the daughter Natalie is offered up as a repetition of the bond that has imprisoned Diana and drained and destroyed Dan. The alternative isn't. Henry suggests that either one of them might go crazy, but a clear genetic proclivity is established. Natalie has already proved herself to be neurotic, and has already had a miniature breakdown, complete with erratic, emotionally abusive behavior, rejection, self-destructive tendencies and substance abuse. Diana even directly suggests that she is Natalie’s future. It's all the more devastating a foreshadowing because their relationship is so touching.
Artistically it’s great that the end’s hope is brittle, suggesting that people with depression and those who love/can’t extricate themselves from them are working for survival rather than happiness, and that when this spate of illness is over you’ll look back, unable to comprehend how you survived or even to connect with the feelings, problems or the mental state associated with the episode. It’s not a cop-out, which would have been an insult. Personally its devastating and makes you, if you are a fucked up person who has any shred of empathy with Diana, want to sign up for your local chapter of the vestal virgins and/or throw yourself under the nearest Times Square touristy horse-drawn carriage like you’re a suffragette and it’s Derby Day.
I really wonder when I would have cottoned on to the son being
1. dead, and
2. imagined
if the play summary from the Tony Awards Show hadn’t spoiled me for it. I did wonder, initially, if he might be alive and going to die, on top of her depression, but well before the reveal I’d groked what was up.
It’s really too bad that the original, Tony Nominated ™ son (Gabriel—to which there are many angelic allusions that make more sense when his name is revealed near the end) has left the cast for silly Gossip Girl, of all things, leaving us with his clearly less than Tony-Level Attention-Getting understudy. The weird sexual dynamic in the blocking for all interactions between Diana and Gabriel might have been less out of left field and awkward had Gabriel been able to carry it off—as a character he is, as he explicitly states, far larger than the memory of a dead infant or the projection of the young man he might have been had he lived. He is the seduction, the self-absorption of depression for Diana, Dan and Natalie alike—he is Dan’s repression of his memory, and Dan’s own repressed, denied depression, birthed by trauma, grief, and seventeen years of managing Diana and being simultaneously the breadwinner and Natalie’s only effective, attentive parent. It takes a really strong young actor to make that net of roles flow naturally—but it is this kids first night as lead!Gabriel, and perhaps he’ll get better.
Particularly strong songs include Natalie’s ‘Mozart was Batshit,’ Diana’s ‘You Don’t Know,’ and the Electro Convulsive Therapy Suite.
So miserable now that I have to go watch Spice World—you want art to rip you open, and the tragical-magical career follies/heights of Richard E. Grant are almost enough to sew you back up.
