Post 748 - April 17, 2025

Life seems to be going on.

We had a memorial for our dear friend Frank Schiro the other day. People flew in from across the country to be there and celebrate his life. Michael, along with Frank’s sister Sally, put the whole thing together. Frank was a wonderful composer with Broadway aspirations, so it only seemed fitting that the celebration of his life happen in a rehearsal room – his happy place.

Frank wrote some beautiful music throughout his life. It was full of love and gentle hope. It was beyond lovely to hear some of it sung by his students and friends.

Michael and I have been seeing a lot of theatre over these last days. We both find ourselves somewhat between gigs with a lot to catch up on. There’s plenty we want to see, but also much we feel we should see to support some of our friends who are involved in some way. Between the two of us, we’ve been working in professional theatre for eighty years. We’ve met a lot of people.

The other night, we saw a British production of Chekov’s The Cherry Orchard at St. Ann’s Warehouse out in Brooklyn. I couldn’t help but make connections between the family in the play refusing to face the impending loss of their beloved family home, and all that we are reading about in the news. I’ve seen the play many times, but it has never landed with me in quite the same way before. That sense of doomed inevitability hanging over everything was palpable in a way that has never before seemed that immediate.

In several places during the play, Chekov indicates in the stage directions that there should be the sound of a string, maybe a harp string, breaking. That sound serves as a metaphor for the collapse of the old society occurring beyond the action of the play. Russia, at the time the play was written, was going through profound changes. The old order was falling away, and something new was taking over.

Twang.

Whether or not the characters onstage hear the sounds or not is up to the director. In the production we just saw, the team chose a jarring blare like you might hear from a klaxon horn on a construction site warning of an imminent explosion. The characters heard it and were momentarily startled, but shrugged it off and kept going.

Twang.

We seem to have reached several political stand-offs.

The United States Supreme Court has ordered the Administration to return the wrongly deported man from the hellhole of a prison he is in down in El Salvador. Kilmar Albrego Garcia was deported without due process. The Republicans are refusing to comply with the order. The El Salvadoran president is also refusing to cooperate.

Democratic Senator Chris Van Hollen traveled to El Salvador in the hopes of meeting with Garcia, but was denied entry to the prison. The Republicans are claiming that Garcia is out of their grasp, that they are powerless to act. Van Hollen met with the vice president of El Salvador, who told him the Republican Administration is paying them to keep Garcia imprisoned.

Twang.

The Republicans are going after our universities. They threatened to withhold government funding to Columbia unless the school made some sweeping changes. Columbia agreed to the changes, but now the Republicans want more. Many of the first round of the mandated changes, Columbia claims it was about to make on its own anyway. After their disastrous handling of the pro-Palestinian encampment on their campus, they had to do something. The backlash against the danger they let their Jewish students experience had roiled the institution to its core.

If Columbia was going to make alterations to their policies, they should have made them on their own, not in deference to the federal government, which has no jurisdiction over them.

The Republicans have now targeted Harvard University. Harvard, for the moment, is resisting. If Harvard caves, then so much for our university system.

Twang.

After the government fired countless qualified women from our space agencies and scientific institutions, Jeff Bezos sent his fiancée and several clueless female celebrities into space for eleven minutes. The stunt was meant to celebrate the accomplishments of womenkind, but instead, all it celebrated was the privilege of women who’ve managed to marry successful men. Many women could have engineered that trip themselves, but they weren’t asked. Instead, women who are happy to live off the largess of the men in their lives were blasted off into a brief orbit and returned to earth in time for a nice spa day at the end.

Twang.

This seeming collapse of our society is not inevitable. We are at a crossroads where we could choose to move forward in another direction.

Tuesday, April 22, is Earth Day. On Saturday, the 19^th, 50501 is again organizing protest marches throughout America. This one is in support of migrants and the health of our planet. In New York, people will be gathering in Bryant Park behind the New York Public Library at noon. There are similar actions being planned in hundreds of other cities.

We aren’t powerless. The family in The Cherry Orchard wasn’t powerless either; they just refused to look adversity in the eye and fight it.

Make some noise. The squeaky wheel gets the grease.

Need some inspiration? There are museums everywhere showcasing the works of people who paid attention to what they saw around them. We aren’t the first people who have ever faced anything like this, far from it. We are merely the latest. We don’t have to invent anything new to combat this rise of neo-Nazism from the right, people before us have already left us blueprints.

I just got an email from the Emily Dickinson Museum in Amherst, Massachusetts. They just lost a federal grant of about a hundred grand that they were going to use to help archive some of their materials. That may not seem like something pressing enough to divert our attention, but protecting the work of visionaries should be near the top of our action lists. It is in this kind of work that the answers we need today are already laid out.

We don’t have to sit idly by while the strings snap in the distance one by one. If Chekov thought there was no hope, why would he have gone to all the effort to write about these people? He wrote so that we would sit in the audience and become angry at his characters’ inaction and resignation.

I don’t know what the weather’s like where you are, but here it’s sixty degrees and sunny. The cat is bound and determined to keep me on the couch, however, so that he can sleep through the day in warmth, oblivious to everything else.

Sorry cat. There’s an old instrument out there somewhere whose strings are snapping. I’m tired of just sitting here listening to it fall apart. Maybe there’s something I can do to stop it from completely disintegrating.

I do like the sound of a nicely tuned harp.