theatre – The Emily Project

LIKE mighty footlights burned the red
At bases of the trees,—
The far theatricals of day
Exhibiting to these.
’T was universe that did applaud
While, Chiefest of the crowd,
Enabled by his royal dress,
Myself distinguished God.
~Emily Dickinson

Ah, that autumn light. It’s different this time of year. Sunsets are sharper somehow, the clear blue line of the Alleghenies hard and crisp against the watercolor sky. The light is different all day. As I write this, it’s still pitch place outside. A month or so ago, the sun would have risen by now. Now, we wait in darkness for the sunrise, rise and begin the day without light.

The afternoon sun is different, too. It feels more golden, more precious, the light pouring down as if to make up for the fact that it will be leaving us sooner.

And then, the sunsets. They creep up on us. It seems that much color in the sky should make a sound, but you can miss it completely in its silence if you’re not paying attention. The red of the sunset is like footlights summoning us to a show that is the lights themselves. It’s noiseless and over quickly.

These days, the light hoards itself. We begin to light candles, fires, make our own tiny suns in the cold dark.

XLIV

The show is not the show,
But they that go.
Menagerie to me
My neighbor be.
Fair play—
Both went to see.
~Emily Dickinson

This is a tiny little gem of a poem, and I adore it. I had never encountered it before. In its concision is its brilliance, and every facet sparkles. “The show is not the show” has the ring of a paradox and an aphorism in one. It is not the ostensible show that the speaker is interested in, but the informal, unintentional show that is human behavior. She watches the watchers. Her singular “neighbor” becomes a menagerie–such is the infinite possibility within a single soul. In the penultimate line, the speaker breaks with the meter of the rest of the poem to hit hard with just two words of equal emphasis–“fair play”–which is a fantastic play (haha) on the word “play”. Dickinson begins with difference and contradiction: “the show is not the show,” the watcher becomes the watched, the neighbor and she have different motivations and aims. But the poem ends, in its very last line, by uniting the opposites. Both, after all, are there for the same ultimate purpose–“to see.”

A few days ago, going through shelves and shelves of books, I ran across my copy of a script from a college production of Come Slowly, Eden, a play about the life and poetry of Emily Dickinson. It is a weird, magical, disorienting experience to look at myself, my notes, from a distance of a couple decades–and then to read this poem. The show is not the show–or not always in the ways we expect it to be.