Curtain

We closed the show last night. I am of the opinion that the whole cast did this final performance justice. Up until the very end, actors were finding new things and the exploration did not end until the lights went out. It was beautiful like that.

After the applause died down, it all ended quietly. Much of the cast and crew met for drinks, and talk, and cameraderie. There was no single goodbye. Everything drifted apart a bit at a time, organically, over the course of the entire evening and into this morning. We struck the set this morning and, even before we had finished, the next group for the next production was waiting expectantly in the house, watching us erase a world that we had created and that will never be seen again, awaiting their turn to build their world.

Maybe poetry on paper is superfluous when it exists all around us all of the time. Maybe there is something redundant to the point of vulgarity when it comes to art when, in everything, it lives. For hundreds of years in Japane, the preparation of tea has been held as almost divine. Chop wood, carry water. We built a world, that world ended, and we helped to dissipate the rest. The stage is empty, the props are gone, the lights are out, and the actors have left.

Even the giant ocean evaporates into the sky and falls to Earth in a million different pieces.

I have been very lucky to work on such an amazing show with such colourful people. The audiences were generally smaller than I might have liked and I am not sure if we ever received a standing ovation. I like to think that this was not the sort of show in which one should ever receive a standing ovation. I like the idea that people were too busy digesting things to stand up. I talked to a man last night who had seen 'The Tulip' weeks before and he exclaimed that he was still trying to figure it all out. A man came to the show and, two weeks later, he was still pondering it. To me, that is success. People saw it, and left, and took it with them. It has stayed with them in one fashion or another.

I have a strong dislike for listening to artists explain their works when they are not asked. One of the foremost examples in my mind was at a poetry reading where, before every poem, the poet explained to us, the audience, how she came up with the poem. She told us the story of the birth of every poem she read. It made me irritated. There seems to me to be something counterintuitive about a person explaining their art. Once you make something and the world sees it, then it becomes the world's and any meaning that you may have attached to it ceases to be. It belongs to the world and the world will makes its interpretations. The individual artist grows old and dies, and all of his mysteries and secrets eventually parish with him but, if he is lucky, his art remains. It remains without stories, without the handicap of explanation or defense by its creator. It simply is and develops its own history, its own legends: the Mona Lisa, La Guernica, the Venus de Milo, ad infinitum. Intent gives way to truth?

And so the world premiere of Kevin Lawler's 'The Tulip' at the Blue Barn in Omaha, Nebraska has ended. But, as grace allowed me to discover last night, it is going to stay around this city for a long time to come.