by Kirk Woodward
[In his first contribution to Rick on Theater since the start of the year (“Keeping Up with Mr. Dylan,” 1 January), my friend Kirk Woodward is taking a perhaps surprising look at two popular plays by two esteemed playwrights—and finding profound commonalities between them.
[Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s Sunday in the Park with George, a musical about a renowned 19th-century painter and his 20th-century descendant, and Neil Simon’s The Sunshine Boys, a comedy about two aging comics, are not only two different plays, they’re two different kinds of plays.
[Kirk’s been contributing to ROT since the earliest days of the blog—I started it largely at his suggestion—so I’ve gotten used to his proclivity of looking at things from unexpected perspectives. “An Odd Coupling” is no exception. You will find here an interesting and provocative look at art, artists, and personal relationships.]
Sunday in the Park with George, of course, is the 1983 musical with a book by James Lapine (b. 1949) and music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim (1930-1921). The first act of the musical dramatizes the efforts of the painter Georges Seurat (1859-1891) to create his large (6.6 feet by 9.8 feet) pointillist masterpiece A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte.
The second act of Sunday presents a contemporary art scene and the efforts of one of Seurat’s mistress’s descendants to make his own mark in the world of art.
The Sunshine Boys is a 1972 play by Neil Simon (1927-2018) about the efforts of a pair of mostly retired vaudevillians to work together after an acrimonious breakup eleven years earlier.
From these brief descriptions, connections between the two works may not be obvious. Since Neil Simon wrote plays based “odd couples,” mismatched relationships, we might think of these two pieces as an “odd couple,” or perhaps an “odd coupling.”
However, there is a theme common to both shows (or, more accurately, to one show and one act of the other), a theme presented in the poem “The Choice” by Wiliam Butler Yeats (1865-1939), the first four lines of which read:
The intellect of man is forced to
choose
Perfection of the life, or of the work,
And if it take the second must refuse
A heavenly mansion, raging in the dark.
In both plays discussed here, an artist finds his (all concerned are men) life so impacted by his art that relationships with other people, particularly with those closest to him, are almost impossible to maintain.
In Sunday, the relationship in question is between Georges, the painter, and Dot, his mistress. She would give anything for an affectionate relationship with him, but he is obsessed with his painting, for which she is modeling. Ultimately she leaves him; he doesn’t seem to understand exactly why, but he is so wedded to his craft that he is unwilling to do anything about it.
In Sunshine the two former vaudevillians, Al Lewis and Louie Clark, once the team of “Lewis and Clark,” are so wedded to comedy patter that it’s no longer possible for them to have a conversation without resorting to gags and punchlines.
In the process they have gotten so tired of each other that when offered an opportunity to perform together again for money and prestige, they can’t manage to work together at all. Insults are pretty much the sum total of their communication with each other, and with everyone else.
Both plays raise the question of whether it’s worthwhile to sacrifice life for art. We can ask, is this a genuine choice? There are a number of ways to look at this question. A starting point might be a comment that the poet W. H. Auden (1907-1973) made on Yeats’ poem. Auden questioned whether “perfection” was possible in either art or life. He doubted that it was.
His question seems relevant to say the least. Is Yeats saying that perfection is possible, either in art or in life? What does “perfection” mean – perfection in terms of what? What would perfection look like? Since we are – I would say – imperfect people, how would we even recognize perfection if we saw it?
In
A Midsummer Night’s Dream, William Shakespeare (1564-1616) has a
character say that
as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the
poet’s pen
Turns them to shapes and gives to
airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.
Art makes “local” – it brings to a particular time and place – the material that it draws on. Under those conditions what could “perfection” mean? The artist who aims for some kind of abstract success is almost certainly headed for disappointment. George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), for example, intended his giant five-play series Back to Methuselah (see “Re-Reading Shaw – Plays from 1918 to 1933” by Kirk Woodward, 23 August 2016) to be a “world classic.” Some of his plays are; those particular five are not.
If “perfect” art isn’t possible, surely on the other hand “good work” is not only possible but is frequently created, possibly even without the artist’s “raging in the dark.”
The playwright Noël Coward (1899-1973) surely spoke for many artists when he said, in his introduction to the first collection of his works, Play Parade (1933), that his aim in writing was to do work of which he could be proud, and, by so doing, to earn his living. The relative modesty of those ambitions lacks the drama of Yeats’ formulation, but is achievable.
Mentioning Coward leads to another way of considering the question of the roles of art and life, and that is to consider the question from the point of view of the artist’s relationships, not to art, but to people. Coward, to continue with his example, was a sociable, companiable person, with too many friends to count.
Not everyone is Noël Coward, of course – probably a good thing for all of us, as I’m sure he’d admit – but his career does demonstrate that the split between life and art in the characters in Sunday and Sunshine is somewhat hyperbolical.
In both Sunday and Sunshine the choice between art and life is absolute and drastic. Are there no artists who are able to maintain good relationships with others, including those closest to them? Or – as I suppose some would argue – is no one (other than Coward) able to maintain such relationships?
I don’t know the answer to those questions, and any answer surely would be a matter of opinion. Clearly choosing to do any one thing means choosing not to do something else at that moment – if, say, I want to play the piano for half an hour, in that time frame I won’t be able to play with the dog.
However, there’s some degree of difficulty in any relationship, and people handle many of those difficulties successfully – otherwise there would probably be few of us around. Both Sunday and Sunshine present either/or cases – they seem to suggest that one utterly succeeds with a relationship, or utterly fails.
And there’s something else in the situations presented in the two plays that gives one pause. Are we talking about art in this discussion, or are we simply looking at psychological states? To be specific, isn’t Seurat obsessive, as described in the dictionary: “Having an idea or thought that continually preoccupies or intrudes on one’s mind.”
His obsession is his pointillist style of art: “A technique of painting in which small, distinct dots of color are applied in patterns to form an image.”
Such a style of painting would be attractive to someone with obsessive tendencies, and they could easily take over that person’s life – one estimate is that the Sunday Afternoon painting contains some 220,000 dots! How much of Seurat’s accomplishment is simply due to an obsessive temperament?
The question, of course, is unfair; all art works are created by somebody, just as all artist works are something (even if that “something” is nothing more than a thought, as in Conceptual Art), and everyone has human traits. The point is, though, that Sunday presents Georges entirely as an artist dedicated to his art, where another observer might advise more time off, or less coffee.
And aren’t Al and Louie, in Sunshine, compulsive in their need to turn every action, every sentence, every thought into comedy? The dictionary says that compulsion is “an irresistible urge.” Louie (and Al, but to a much lesser extent as we see him) simply has to verbally slap anybody he talks with, at the expense of anything else, including career, money, and personal relationships.
Neil Simon might agree with this diagnosis, although I doubt that he would emphasize it; as mentioned earlier, his principal concern is to present people who simply can’t get along with each other, and yet have to somehow. But, again, one can ask if we’re not dealing, not just with art (in this case comedy), but with severe neurosis.
Or are they the same? Laura Thipphawong, in her article “Art Theory: Freudian Psychoanalysis” (artshelp.com), writes that
To view art not as material, but as evidence of the most inaccessible features of the mind, transcended art into the realm of endless philosophical possibilities, as complex, frustrating, and challenging as the mind itself.
It would be pointless to name painters and comedians who, as far as we can tell, have maintained at least outwardly successful and apparently happy relationships and marriages. No one can really know what’s the actual state of a marriage – sometimes not even of the state of one’s own.
Still, I am reluctant to generalize from Sunday and Sunshine to a general admiration of people who end up sacrificing everything for their art (or for anything else – one can find such behavior in business, in social relationships, in hobbies – in practically anything, actually). In fact, neither of those shows actually end up doing that, although they come close.
Many plays present a protagonist who makes a choice that flies in the face of convention, law, family, or many other things. Sunday and Sunshine are not alone in that. Both those shows focus on artists; art is not the only arena in which people act in ways that may be considered heroic or, alternately, obsessive or compulsive or both.
As a matter of fact, when discussing Sunday, we’re only talking about its first act. In the second act, as I interpret it, the theme of art versus life is barely touched on. We hear that George, Dot’s great-grandson, is divorced, and we see his wife, but that relationship is not presented in any detail.
Instead, George, in Act II, is primarily focused on something to create art about. There is a suggestion that he will find his inspiration in life if he looks for it. However, this suggestion is at most peripheral to the large conflict between art and life presented in the first act.
And in Sunshine, Louis and Al at the very end of the play manage to achieve at least a working arrangement – they will continue to joke and jab, but they will talk. This, and the faint suggestion of a new path at the end of Sunday, are the only signs in the two shows that perhaps art and personal life don’t need to be such complete opposites after all.
In Sunday Georges never gets to evaluate his choice (and in fact he died abruptly when he was only 31), but a later George at least begins to. In Sunshine it’s almost too late for adjustments, but maybe Louis and Al have a chance.
Artists have to take their own paths; none of us has any business telling them what they ought to do, and in return we are free to make our own decisions about the results. The relative values we put on work and on personal relationships in our own lives, of course, are choices we have to make for ourselves.
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