#muselee

In “887,” belonging is deeply tied to place: physical place, social place, the place Robert Lepage called home. And, in Lepage’s conversations with his friend Fred about the cold cut that will be televised after his death, he also seeks to understand his place in other people’s memory. 

“Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812″ features a character who yearns to be part of the outside world, but admits that he is too afraid to do so. “Life and love/I don’t deserve,” sings Pierre in his big aria.

These lines may as well have been sung by Evan Hansen, the lonely high school student who frequently expresses fear that if other people truly knew him and his struggles with mental illness, they would turn away from him in disgust. This is a character who not only doesn’t belong, but also, like Pierre, feels deep down that he doesn’t deserve to belong. He is self-admittedly “on the outside, always looking in.” “We start with stars in our eyes,” he sings. “We start believing that we belong.” 

While Hansen eventually comes to realize that he does deserve belonging, Yank in “The Hairy Ape” travels the opposite arc. Yank begins the play by repeatedly asserting that he belongs, and ends it by lamenting that as a laborer despised by the upper classes, he doesn’t belong anywhere--except, cruelly, in the sense that he belongs entirely to the industry he works for. He despairs, "Steel was me, and I owned de woild. Now I ain't steel, and de woild owns me.” (Well, maybe Yank does eventually find that he belongs somewhere, but that would be spoiling the play. Hint: look at the title.)

So, how do we claim belonging?

I think one answer is storytelling.

For telling a story is asserting your right to tell it. Telling a story is asserting your right to be “part of the narrative,” as Eliza Schuyler says in “Hamilton,” a musical which concludes with the questions, “Will they tell your story?” and “Who lives, who dies, who tells your story?” Telling a story means taking ownership of it--even if the story isn’t yours, for better and for worse.

I think that all the characters mentioned construct inner narratives about belonging, but let’s use Lepage and Evan as our main examples. Lepage, through performing his own memoir, and Evan, through inserting himself into a narrative he never inhabited, quite literally assert belonging through storytelling. These two characters also do so in ways that aren’t so literal: the former through protesting the way media will represent his life, trying to alter the story that will be told about him after his death, looking for his place in collective memory; the latter through using social media as collective memory and as collective storytelling. 

Evan repeats the following refrain throughout the show: “When you're falling in a forest and there's nobody around/Do you ever really crash, or even make a sound?” If it isn’t recorded online or over the airwaves, did it ever really happen? If your story isn’t told, was it ever even real? Thus unmoored from reality, from memory, how can we possibly belong?

Theater, too, is undoubtably a form of memory. And theater is an arena where questions of belonging are especially tricky. Is theater truly a place where all identities are represented? What about accessibility, theater history, and public perceptions about the art form--who really belongs in a theater? Whose stories are being told, and who are they being told to?