Scenes from Summer Stock: Opus '73

 

Prologue

 

Vans packed tightly like cartons of eggs
the contact here is a fragile one
of errant knees rubbing in early friction—
the acting troupe caravans.

 

They wind their way through the white birches

        of New England
a respite from the treeless city;

the overtures of honking cabs and hissing buses.

Enter a chorus through no wings of praise:

         

        What are you doing with your life these days?

 

No. 1

 

Can they shoehorn “The Method”

into a pillbox of pilgrim worship,

an historic church transformed into theater?
                                Or will the craft teeter,

top-heavy and bloated? Toppling out

        into the nights, 
 

        of crickets, stars and escapades
               in brass beds but a shout
               from ancestral burial grounds...

 

        it beats back home where they’d be making the rounds.

 

No. 2

 

Up here they steal not only a summer
but the Yankee folk as well
to color the townscape of The Music Man.
And they layer them in sweat-stained costumes
at odds with the steam bath climate

        and polyester plot.

 

In boaters and bonnets all learn quickly the sonnets
of this paean to American dross,

in lieu of their hymnal praise to the Lord.

 

        Yet with the theater, the Yanks are on board.

 

No. 3

 

Oh, if that deer head mounted on that wall

in the house consigned to the cast could speak:

                                                

        of the strawberry girl
               secretly sipping her sherry each night

               retreating to her room

               to rehearse a suicide,

               hopefully the one in the play they'll be doing;

                    

        of the lady of the house
               fading in the throes of blond domesticity
                       tingling anew

              with the ripe possibility
              of the leading man slipping in at lunch;
 

        of the Alderman’s daughter
               possessed by the demon of Bohemian freedom,

                       this summer spawned;

               who quits the play to run off with the minister's son;

         

        of pixie sticks of marijuana
               sipped while sitting out back under

               the tree that got iced by lightning one night
               as if a sign from an angry god;

 

        of the fair-haired boy                   

               and the stage manager’s wife;    

 

        of the rape alleged
               by a minor cast member
               toying with her toast at breakfast one morning,

          

         a dramatic awakening absent a warning.

 

No. 4

 

A roll in the hay and then one down the hill

        into fire and brimstone

where preachers may have warned

        in frockcoat times

of "the gypsy moths hatched from the larvae of Satan

who flutter about the flames of sin"...

 

         yet the townsfolk open their doors and let them in.

 

And even if that deer head hangs mute,
can one not help but...

         

        smell the flats still damp with pigment

               and wanderlust
        as a curtain thrusts

        upward like a maiden’s skirt

               on opening night?      

 

        Snicker at the clown-white temples
               on the head of audacity;
         those stretches beyond suspended belief?
         Like the peach-fuzz Mayor—
               "right here in River City”
         too young and hung for the part?

                                                             

         Suspect...

         that the line between stage and county
         has been covered up with a layer of dirt—

        “Oh, we got trouble!”

         Lock up your daughter!

 

         And the Watergate hearings bring down the old order.

 

No. 5

 

Days following the Fourth are shot dead on TV
by a Nixon minion with a smoking gun.
 

His Grace Kelly of a wife

as if summoned from High Noon—

to play a supporting role—

entering stage right

the stunning Maureen Dean.

​

        A pull of platinum tresses

        framing a face in alabaster,

        she sits in silence and steals the scene,

        as her owlish husband hoots to atone.

​

        The cast falls in love with her; she's one of their own.

 

No. 6

 

The summer creeps on like a lost centipede...
feet dragging across the boards
        in and out of step—
though of little matter after the rape.
The rape…

it was mentioned before.

 

It happened in that house
in the gabled room wedged—

        albeit alleged—
near the stage manager and wife “Hester”
        off somewhere that very night 

winning "just one more ‘A”

with the fair-haired boy
whose part on stage called for toying with a flute, 

as she now toys with him?

 

“There were bells on the hill”
but no one ever heard them ringing.
Yet through all proclivities the show must go on,
         and so on the show went.

 

        This creed, an oak, to their contours bent.

No. 7

 

A kangaroo court bounds into order

in the dressing room— unexpectedly.

The accused sits anchored,

then shifts with a spasm of denial,

and the slow descent of a single tear.
 

The company assumes their places as if
in  accordance with a director's blocking.

 

         eyes avoiding interlocking.

 

Reawakened  are the sleeping dogs 

of Christian codes and other moral pedigree

         

        all barking in the moonlight up the righteous tree.

 

For this tiny teen girl,
a spray of caramel freckles

        and budding breasts,
with kitten claws of innocence has torn the curtain down.

         

        Lock it in the dressing room; keep it from the town.

 

No. 8

 

Time gets caught in the web of an early

        September storm,

then mercifully breaks the entanglement

as the pyrotechnics flag the summer’s end—

these lives being released—

lofting upward
        splashing outward
                against a blue-black inky sky.

                        But the sparks that fly

must fall back to earth leaving ashes in their wake.

And who might assume the role of a phoenix?

         

        One can imagine that

        that women of means,

        Mrs. John Dean could. And did.

       

        But what of the lady of the house on the hill

        and other characters with secrets to spill?

         

        From Hester to the boy toy ebbing?

        The strawberry girl enwrapped in her shroud?

        The accuser? The accused?

       

        From the Alderman’s daughter
        to the Milky Way of Yanks?

 

        The laser years to fill in the blanks.

 

Epilogue

 

The white birches go unseen on the weave back home,
eyes now focused on the upcoming season.

Life as they have known it, but a few months ago,

is to resume in the black boxes built

         

         of facades and wires and papier-mâché;

         lighting gels that in concert may

         create a forest of fantastical trees

 

         from which they will cherry pick their realities.

​

 

                                              Ron Vazzano