Everything Has to Evolve
Posted by Jon Berry on 2/11/2010
(Jon is the director of A Separate Peace)
I was taught, and have found it to be true, that when embarking on a production, one of the most important moments for a director is the first moment. The moment when we all, designers and actors and production staff, gather around the table and read the play for the first time. I always say a few words, to share where I’m coming from with this production. The words, I hope, provide the team guidance of where we are heading and why this production of this play is an important and necessary endeavor. At the same time, I hope that the talk will subtly inform actor choices so that, as we embark on scene work, the actors have a clear direction in which to run. What follows is the jumping off point for our work on the SYA production of A Separate Peace.
01/26/10
When I first started at Steppenwolf as the Artistic Office intern 12 years ago this month, the vision of my future life was very different than the future I currently inhabit. I had a performance degree from the University of Michigan, and was beginning to get work as an actor in the city in the rich and vital, wonderfully dirty off-loop theater scene that would later become my beloved home. I would rehearse late into the night, wake up at 5am to work a job at a coffee shop, then race to spend the rest of the day sitting outside Martha Lavey’s door reading scripts and doing research for Steppenwolf’s Literary Manager.
I could feel, at the time, a desire to embrace the potential of personal change that comes from the opportunity of graduation and moving on. I was in a new city, surrounded by new people, and I could decide how I wanted to be perceived - I could become a new version of me. I woke up one morning in late February and decided that, instead of my usual jeans, I would wear the black leather pants I’d purchased as a costume the previous Halloween. I’m unsure from where the impulse came, except that I wanted these new people to know that I was the type of person that could pull off wearing leather pants at 9am in the middle of February (this, to be sure, is a very small subset of the population, and most of them seem to live in Europe… or New Jersey).
I sat outside Martha’s office, trying to read a script and look as though I wasn’t deeply uncomfortable, mortified by the attention and the feeling of being one of Salinger’s “phonies.” When Martha came into the office, she walked past me, stopped, turned, looked me over and said, “Leather pants, Jonathan?… Thank you.” I won’t say that the comment put me at ease - it didn’t - but it did allow for possibility. I had presented a new version of self, and it hadn’t been humiliatingly rejected. My identity could be reinvented by simply changing my pants.
So much of A Separate Peace deals with this definition of self, this choice of identity. Who we are on the inside verses who we present on the outside, and how those two identities shift and evolve in response to outside stimulus. At no time are those seismic shifts more keenly felt than within the crucible of high school. Just when we feel our most vulnerable, our most unsure about who we are and what we may become, we are put into a system that severely punishes social missteps. When we are attempting to discover who we are as individuals, a premium is placed on fitting into the group. It can be a harrowing time when our identity seems so important and we can’t possibly know that, as we progress through life, the system grows more accepting of change and incongruity. As Knowles reiterates throughout the novel, “Everything has to evolve, or else it perishes.”
But for these boys, with the added looming presence of World War II, the idea of a malleable identity is particularly hard to grasp. Both high school and nationalism require a degree of black and white certainty, and as those shades of gray reveal themselves, the boys are thrown to the ground by the force of the shifts and must scramble to regain their solid footing. Brinker, once the embodiment of school spirit, rejects the clubs and rules and rebels against anything that, for him, reeks of fallacy. Leper tries to imagine himself a war hero, and is so unmoored by the experience that everything in his world loses its permanence. After the fall, Finny struggles valiantly to maintain for those around him the version of self they once knew, while internally he is at war, trying to discover who he will be now that the sureness of his identity has been wrenched from his hands. And finally Gene: conflicted and questioning from the start, only finds certainty when he dedicates himself to preserving Finny’s impression of him.
It is this world of shifting certainty that we will try to live in for the next four weeks. It’s a painful place, but it’s also a joyful place: one filled with contests and camaraderie and moments of wonderful release. Everything here is heightened and, for these boys on the verge of manhood, there is no more important time. They don’t know yet that evolution is essential to existence. They’ve yet to learn that, “The more things remain the same, the more they change after all. Nothing endures. Not a tree, not love, not even death by violence.”