"And all shall fade – the flowers of spring" – 'The Song of Purple Summer', from Spring Awakening
Every morning, on my way into work, I take a couple of minutes to listen to a song from my MP3 player – it's a way of easing into the day, entering into the world on my own terms. I keep the player on shuffle, never knowing what's going to come up next. This morning, the player kicked up 'The Song of Purple Summer', the closing number from the new musical Spring Awakening. It's a sweeping, slow-building number, emotionally affecting (if you're familiar with the show), but it got me thinking, as I listened, about making new art from old materials. A matter close to my heart.
(A little background – back in January, when we were in New York, I found myself alone and ticketless ten minutes before showtime. C & X were off to see The Drowsy Chaperone again – having won front row tickets in the lottery – and I was planning to wander up Broadway, spend a little time at the Barnes & Noble at Lincoln Center before returning to the hotel and getting an early start on our packing. For some reason, I decided to stop at the box office for Spring Awakening to check for standing room tickets, knowing they were long-since gone. Surprisingly, I was wrong – I walked into the lobby at 7:57, bought the last SR ticket and walked into the theater just as the houselights were going down. Two hours later I walked out, rocked by a theatrical performance in a way I haven't been since we saw Rent with the OBC more than a decade ago.)
Spring Awakening is one of the hot musical on Broadway this year, a clever synthesis of the classical and the modern. The drama – a coming of age story set in a small, cloistered German town in the 1890's – is drawn from Frank Wedekind's often banned 1891 play, but the character's internal lives are set to contemporary song by Duncan Sheik and Steven Sater – thus, a realistic, nineteenth century classroom scene is interrupted by the rocking "The Bitch of Living". It shouldn't work – it should come across as contrived and obvious, but it DOES work. Wonderfully.
With the fiction I've been writing lately, I've been taking something of the same approach. Readers of Before I Wake will be familiar with my use of classical source material (I won't specify, for the sake of those of you who haven't yet had the pleasure), but my new work, including the new novel, takes that usage even further. My recent stories are all contemporary, and strictly realist in nature, but threaded through with elements from more… traditional… storytelling. Ghosts haunt these stories. Figures from fairy and folk tales walk among the contemporary characters. The action of the stories is shaped by these … otherworldly … elements, but never for their own sake – they are incorporated for the sake of the contemporary stories, for their influence and impact on the characters. I could write strictly contemporary, realistic fiction — I have done, and will certainly do so again — but incorporating these older elements, these archetypal threads, lends the work a certain power, a power that resonates somewhere deep within our primal selves. These are stories in a continuum, stories that are at once new and familiar.
New wine in old bottles? Old wine in new bottles? Somewhere in between. Reading these stories, there's a timeless quality that co-exists with a world of MP3 players and cell phones…
"And all shall know the wonder, I will sing the song, of purple summer…"