"Opening Night" at BAM

The phrase Opening Night -- it's a noun, right? An occasion. An event.
Is it possible to think of opening as a verb?

To me, any art that's worth something leaves an image burned on your retina, and in the case of Ivo Van Hove's brilliant and daring "Opening Night", that image is the fantastic Elsie de Brauw's (Myrtle's) face.

Cinematically projected, full-screen and high above the audience, it's possible that we're seeing what she sees when she looks in the mirror -- her eyes, crinkled, sensitive and knowing; her porous powdered skin; and the baggy jawline-destroying beginnings of what my dear departed 84 year old mother-in-law enchantingly called her "wattles." This ecstatic and lonely face encapsulates all the production's emotions, nuance, humor, bravery, conflicts, bawdiness, brooding, passion, pouting, turmoil, consolation and humanity. Whew!

Working from John Cassavetes's 1977 screenplay, Van Hove and company use live video projection on and offstage, rolling props, curtains, cloth, paper and tape combined with genius physical staging to break down physical and symbolic barriers of stage and emotional space. As audience (in fact, there are two audiences) we're both witnesses and participants in this fictional/actual theater company's previews of "The Second Wife."

It's immediately apparent that Myrtle is the epicenter of this strangely functioning dysfunctional group. Myrtle is a woman. And, being a woman, naturally, we can view Myrtle's behavior as "hysterical", indulgent, and just plain irritating and counterproductive.

What concerns me just now is my own response: I found her behavior perfectly acceptable, touchingly familiar, almost lucid. Having recently been through my own 50-something mini-crisis of addlepated despair upon arrival at the inevitable youth/age threshold I say, "Let 'er rip, Myrtle. Use the only voice you have just now, the Diva pressure-cooker voice, to announce yourself as the current living representative of midcenturions everywhere."

To me the character of Nancy is real. She's the weight, figuratively and literally, that women hoist around throughout their lives and the perfect visceral embodiment of that hoisting. Taunting, amusing, rhapsodic, pleading, as a character, she lodges in the throat, the brain, the gut, and the groin. At least, in Myrtle's and mine.

I want her to lodge in everybody's so that they can bloody well understand what it feels like to be a perfectly competent, sane and relatively content human female being suddenly beside herself because she's finally noticed the tiny scratchings around her own upper lip that quietly repelled her when she noticed them on her beloved aunt twentyfive years earlier.

With its Coney Island funhouse atmosphere, the production gains strength as barriers keep breaking, fourth walls tumble, reasonable constraints fly away. Myrtle's professional etiquette is subsumed by a maddeningly insistent existential questioning. It matters. It matters deeply to her.

Ultimately, disorientation is freeing. Myrtle, the actress, a great artist, has built her career on that simple truth. By the end of the play, she emanates her own light. She is translucent.

And it becomes clear that, all along in this beautiful and insightful production, she has been in the process of fearlessly "opening" her own inner "night."