The Moonlight Sonata of Beethoven Blatz (Act 2)

At intermission I'm standing in the lobby talking to a friend. I'm a bit in awe of it actually. I say to her that there's something about Armin's "West-side" style that sets it off from the "East-side" writers. And I start to list the differences: One, it relishes in our agrarian roots (Armin's not afraid to joyously detail the dirt and shit of good farm-work.); Two, it is happy in its "vices" (Characters joke and laugh out loud about dancing, drinking, and sex.); Three, the females are fecund and in control (Think of Oata on the couch, or in the motel, or in the truck.); Four, the characters move forward without looking back (They understand that what they do will have consequences, but they steel themselves for them, and live on. They are unstuck because of it). Without naming characters I can identify more than three significant examples from East-side writers that live in a near diametric opposition to these characteristics; they leave (or have left) the land, feel guilt and conflict about the "vices," have lost, or struggle to find, control, and are stuck between looking back and moving forward.

There's history at work here. The West-side Mennonites from the Halbstadt Altona area initially landed on the East side, but after a short stay there they took the opportunity to move to the more fertile land of the West side (The land on the East side is rocky and less productive, which has resulted in a more mercantile economy.). On the West side the top soil runs as deep as three feet in places. It's rich like the Russian steppes. It would have felt more like home, so they left the East to farm in the West. The "low" culture agrarian social systems - drinking, dancing, mummering - continued more or less unabated on the West side. That, and the church culture of the Sommerfeld Church (West), as compared to the Kleine Gemeinde (East), was different - leaving the week to itself, and the holiness to Sunday.

All this you can feel in the smiles and laughter of Moonlight. For in the midst of the weighty reality of whether or not a child will be born, there's no ceiling, or rather, the ceiling is only the heavens, the moonlit night, and there's liberation from the heat of hell. The heat rather comes from the loins, from the centre, from the urgency to dance in the rhythms of living.

So how do you continue after an act that's ended with a transgression that's necessary, even permitted? Well you reconsider the permission. Not the necessity, but the possibility that the humanness of doubt, of jealousy, of propriety, of gossip and innuendo, of shame, and so on, take over. We move from the transported ecstasies of wild abandon, to the buzz-kill of the gaze of others - from epic mythic power to petty proscription and in-fighting. The action could turn lousy here. We could so easily dive into tragedy. Susch could succumb to Teen and Obrum's sudden case of the guilts, but she does not. She leans to the music, to Blatz. She wonders in her mind, but knows in her heart. But she does not keep these things to herself. She knows she has moral ground to stand on, and she knows that the rules men make, and fret about, have less weight than the imperatives of the wind and the soil and the music of life.

And so this small woman becomes indomitable. More than Mary in the stable, she gives life and then directs the traffic. No bystander Madonna, she manages life and love, and the house too. This is the arc of Wiebe's project. The music rings in our ears from within the spheres of our own genetic code. The music is the religion of the atoms and molecules and the spinning star wheels. The orbit of the moon, the rising and falling of tides, the cycles of day and night, of waxing and waning, of fertile and arid. The tensions crescendo and then fall away. The play has to be about music and composition because it is about those largest, most inexplicable of movements when the muse visits. Sitting on a plow, at a piano, or reaching for the wash, this sonata needs composing. If only we all had the schwunk of Susch, to do it even in the face of moral rectitude.

Ride report

in: 2'C wind 10 ks W

out: 6'C wind 10 ks W