Right now, during this not quite aftermath (or only the end of the beginning) of our four years of butchered truth and smug corruption, the best artistic expressions take me back to the individual in all of his or her complexity, striving to make the world a place where human beings make beautiful things with their bodies and voices. Beauty is more than a relief from monsters and their works. It is the virtue and choice of hope made present. It is the life force in opposition to derangement and lies and hatred. Right now, of course right now, it is especially compelling.
In the last week I’ve been reading Look, I Made A Hat by Stephen Sondheim where he presents his lyrics and their process of composition and describes how he put his shows together. And, I’ve watched Giving Voice, a documentary about the 2018 August Wilson Monologue Competition, where high school students, mostly kids of color, step out and deliver a speech from one of Wilson’s Century Cycle of plays.
It took Georges Seurat two years to paint A Sunday on La Grande Jatte. It measures 7 by 10 feet. Sondheim became fascinated by the painting when he was a young man. His musical Sunday In The Park With George grew out of that fascination. The essential plot of the play describes not only how Seurat painted the picture but also shows the audience how such an endeavor comes to dominate his life with all the losses and gains that two year development entailed.
One song, one scene, is most important to me now, the finale, “Sunday”, when Seurat completes the painting, the figures within it moving to their places and making up the chorus. The song describes a communion, a harmony, the hard earned ecstasy of creation itself. Seurat summons all the elements of the painting’s architecture. He becomes the humane sorcerer, using his genius of eye, stamina, and composition to make a picture that transcends its physical matter. Sondheim imagines that moment with a melody and choral harmony of such beauty. It breaks my heart every time I watch it:
“Sunday,
by the blue purple yellow red water
On the green purple yellow red grass
Let us pass through our perfect park
Pausing on a Sunday
By the cool blue triangular water
On the soft green elliptical grass
As we pass through arrangements of shadow
Toward the verticals of trees
Forever ….
By the blue purple yellow red water
On the green orange violet mass of the grass
In our perfect park
[George]
Made of flecks of light
And dark
And parasols
Bum bum bum bum bum bum
Bum bum bum
People strolling through the trees
Of a small suburban park
On an island in the river
On and ordinary Sunday
Sunday
Sunday.”
I think we first respond to beauty emotionally. For me, as a teacher, when I watched young men and women of high school age prepare monologues from August Wilson’s plays, their efforts and enthusiasm reached into me to the old primal desire to encourage. When they spoke of their lives and their dreams, I felt the familiar soaring inside me I so often felt in the classroom, the little prayer, the chant I felt of “Yes. Go. Please. Yes.” When they presented those monologues to strangers and cameras, acting under great pressure, and without exception showing hunger and grace, I felt tears come to my eyes. “Kids are everything good,” I thought, everything not monstrous, everything not cynical. 
Nia Sarfo, performing
Talent is a mystery. You see it and you know it. The recognition is often instantaneous. Watch Nia Sarfo, Cody Meredith and Callie Holley perform and you see it, and to me, what makes it even better, is that they are so young, their talent just budding out, just discovered. When they step into their characters, they not only do Wilson homage with their talent, they show the audience and those of us in rooms far away, what striving to be someone else looks like, what these other lives look like, these humble lives, and that’s when the transcendence occurs, when their expressions make us understand how beautiful a human life can be. It occurred to me while watching them perform, and while watching “Sunday”, that I was present for a rescue mission, the man plucked away from an abyss, by acts of heartfelt, superb creation.
