One of my favorite t-shirts is a dark blue one that has an all-over, stylized print of Hokusai’s The Great Wave. I’ve had it for at least 6 years and have lately only been wearing it as a running/gym shirt, which probably contributed to what cumulated in my finger ripping right through the fabric the other day. “Ripping” suggests the fabric still had a bit of toughness to it though, which it definitely did not. The thread had been worn completely thin and a huge hole opened up like a wet tissue paper tearing in half. There’s lots of Hokusai shirts out there but I’ve yet to find a decent replacement.
That’s the long way of saying I went to see a play called The Great Wave the other day at the National Theatre. Is that an earned transition? A new year of theater is kicking off and I’m already hugely satisfied with what I’ve seen. The Great Wave, so far, is my favorite. It’s about two sisters—the typical setup of bookish vs. wild child—who are torn apart by the titular great wave. One sister is swept away, leaving the other and their mother to cope with the aftermath: a whodunit police investigation and a twisting (and shockingly relevant) political scandal that unfold with a thriller’s pace. The set rotates with each changing scene. Time expands menacingly, with years ticking by from the 70s to present day.
In a way, the play is a spiritual sequel to Pachinko, which I read earlier this year. It uses intimate family bonds to tackle issues of cultural identity and global politics in a way that makes you feel completely inside of and connected to the world presented to you—as you should because, in actuality, it really is your world. It’s a brave play. The acting is astounding and even the played-straight villains have their moments of heartbreak and empathy. You see the ending coming, then you don’t, then you do, and then it doesn’t even matter and you want to see it all over again.
Then I saw another play, like, less than a week after seeing The Great Wave. I tend to go on unhealthy media binges like this (see post below where I saw Black Panther and Lady Bird in one weekend for some reason). I don’t consider myself a theater person and sometimes I’ll even say, seemingly offhandedly but usually just after seeing something, that I don’t like plays, I don’t like musicals, I don’t like tha theataaah. Yet somehow I end up seeing way too many shows not to call myself one (one in the amateur sense… not to stick my neck out too far).
The Inheritance is what I saw next. It’s another blockbuster play. It has sweeping, Angels in America ambitions and in many ways exceeds them. Its structure is ingenious and complicated: ten men stay on the stage for the length of the play, acting as a sort of collective subconscious of the modern gay man in America. They’re joined by the aged ghost of E. M. Forster, who uses his novel Howard’s End to create a narrative that interrogates the gay experience of today vs. the one of just a few decades ago. It looks back at the dangerous world in which Angels in America was conceived and asks how far we’ve come, what have we lost, what have we gained, where do we go from here, etc. It’s a two part play, of course.
It’s a credit to the writing that you never get lost in the surreality of it all. The story-within-a-story-and-then-some has clear delineations and the boys on stage are all fleshed out (emphasis on the flesh in some cases!).
I still have to go see part 2, so I can’t yet gather all of my thoughts together. Part 1 is funny, daring, and has a moving, tear-jerking, perfect finale, but it’s not without its frustrations. For a play that wants to be about a huge swath of humanity, there needed to be a female voice(es, actually). Vanessa Redgrave pops in for part 2, so I’m looking forward to where that goes. And while the methods of storytelling are innovative, the actual plot line is fairly tame, almost cliche, with kitchen table relationship drama, eviction notice drama, AIDS drama, and of course, swooning over New York. Some of the beats are lifted directly from Howard’s End and others feel cobbled together from other gay touchstones. There are shades of Rent, Angels in America, A Little Life, Dead Poets Society, and The Normal Heart. The similarities seem intentional, but not always warranted.
Comparing The Great Wave and The Inheritance is impossible, but I will say they both use up-to-the-minute contemporary life to frame their stories. However, where The Great Wave uses that to compel the plot along and keep things in context of current events, The Inheritance does something that I struggled the most with. The play stays ultra-relevant, including a scene set at a 2016 election night gathering where the stage literally begins to sink. But it starts to flounder with its commentary. At times, it’s not clear whether the play is mocking the liberal bourgeoisie or blindly engaging with it. The characters do and say things that flirt with parody and satire, but without the amount of integrity required so that the audience can clearly tell. I had a similar feeling while reading (ploughing, slowly, reluctantly) through A Little Life, which has moments of brilliant, hilarious parody… until you realise it’s not intentional.
I could go on and on, but I haven’t even seen part 2, so I have to stop myself! Maybe everything will change, who knows. I will say that The Inheritance succeeds in what it wants to feel like. It’s like a music video, in a way, where the feeling or the essence of the thing is there and the audience is clearly clued in, but the clockwork underneath isn’t exactly sensical. It knows what it wants to feel like, not necessarily what it wants to be about. Nevertheless, you instantly want to play it again when it’s over.