The (Mis)Shape of the Liturgy

On the topic of liturgical change, be it dubbed "renewal" or "experimentation" I am on record as being conservative. I'm perfectly happy with liturgy that maintains a specific shape, and even specific texts or a small set of texts. Others prefer a cornucopia or cafeteria of seemingly endless options to be mixed and matched like one of those childhood flip-books that pieces together four different parts of clowns, firefighters, nurses, bricklayers and fashion models to produce comical chimeras. Amusing, but not edifying, to my mind, but clearly otherwise to other minds.

I was conversing with the deacon who serves in my parish, and it struck me this may be a personality trait. I am very familiar with it from my years in the theater. Some actors (such as myself) were and are perfectly happy playing the same role night after night, and finding the "new" in each iteration without changing the text beyond perhaps a different inflection, but being present in the moment, moment by moment, as the fiction slowly emerges into reality -- or as real as the stage can be. (As a side note, that is certainly my experience of reading the Scriptures in the Daily Office for over 40 years. Every reading brings a new insight, but the text hasn't changed; I have.)

But back to personality: some other actors grow bored and start "playing" and making changes either to the text or the blocking, only rarely to good effect. At worse they being to violate the reality of the play and commune with the audience in sly contempt for it. Zero Mostel was a classic example of the downside, and I had the sad experience of seeing him perform in one of his last runs as Tevye; it was deeply embarrassing, and all the more so as he knew it. I saw him after the performance and spoke with him briefly. I was with a company performing The Tempest in the National Parks around Washington DC. Mostel sighed deeply, "I wish I could do that." He was desperately wanting to be able to do that sort of work, but imprisoned by his own need for constant self-amusement at the expense of the other actors and the play -- brilliant on opening night but an embarrassment as the run went on. He walked away a shrunken man, sadness brimming in his eyes, a prisoner in his own self-constructed cell.

I think some clergy and some liturgists are the same -- they can only find excitement in change, not in iteration. The same may be true of congregations. But it seems that imposing variety on those who want constancy and regularity is not a good course. In our hectic, revolving world, the church may be best at offering a still point.

Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG

Prospero’s Island: Fantasy for Orchestra

Images from the 1976 National Parks Service production of The Tempest, outdoors on tour of the parks in the DC area, including battlefields and the Ellipse opposite the White House. The accompanying music is a composition I wrote in the late 70s, realized here by our friends at Garritan. The cast of the play included Tony Tanner (Prospero), who also directed, myself as Ariel (complete with peach jumpsuit), Sara Rice as Miranda, Richard Niles as her love interest, Richard Lupino as the tipsy mariner, and Jon Polito as Caliban. It was an interesting summer of '76!

Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG

R I P Wally Coberg

The Internet is a funny thing. Particularly given the emergence of social media. I've found myself connecting with folks I've not seen or been in touch with for thirty or forty years. A case in point is Wally Coberg, whom I first met in the early seventies when I was part of The Electric Shakespeare Company performing outdoors in the Baltimore summer at Towson State College. We reconnected via Facebook last summer, and had planned to get together on my next trip to Baltimore, but then early this week I received word from another old colleague, director Paul Berman, that Wally had died. Today his obituary appeared in the good old Baltimre Sun.

The Electric Shakespeare Company performed two plays that summer, with the same company on the same set — which was Wally's design. Both plays were of a post-apocalyptic sort, about the collapse of society: Troilus and Cressida and Lear: A Rock Musical. Yes, you heard that correctly. I played Thersites in the first, which was set in a sort of pre–Mad Max world of motorcycle gangs — the Greeks — and cobbled together sports and military equipment — the Trojans: Priam looked like Alec Guinness in River Kwai. In Lear, I was one-half of the Fool (look, it's complicated: there was a young Fool and an old Fool). In any case, Wally's set was marvelous, especially in the outdoor setting of the natural amphitheater of Towson's "Glen." It resembled a half destroyed relic of the Globe theater, with many levels suitable for Thersites to clamber about on — which made the famous "spy scene" in T&C especially effective as there were literally three levels of action and commentary going on. The photo herewith is a picture which I didn't have, but which Wally sent me last fall, from that production, which I hope gives a tiny glimpse of his wonderful set. That's me on the left and the late Dennis O'Keefe (as Pandarus) on the right, in the closing scene of this dark comedy.

Wally's career had taken off in new directions recently, including work on Edgar Allan Poe, who used to live right around the corner from where I now abide. Small world. And smaller, in many ways, for Wally leaving it, though he did much to enlarge it with his art. God bless him.

Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG