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Sounds and visions.
Some people came to Lazarus for David Bowie, others for Michael C. Hall. I went for Walter Tevis. I didn't stick around long after it was over - it was cold, and I didn't know anyone to talk to or follow somewhere else - so I don't know who else came for Tevis. But I know that I did, and what I got was something inestimably haunting and very evocative of the book I love so much. Drawn from Tevis' work and Bowie's songs and sensibilities, I couldn't have come up with what I saw tonight, and in that respect it was an astounding piece of art.
Michael C. Hall was almost always on stage - obscured by a curtain for a little bit, sometimes huddled off in a far corner - and it made me glad I hadn't sat up front. First two rows, I'd have gotten whiplash looking back and forth, the stage divided up into three sections with a giant screen in the middle, flanked by two windows and a bed to the left and a fridge to the right. Last two rows, I couldn't have seen anyone's faces, and the show did a grand job of using the actor's whole bodies, Hall doing a thing where he jumped while flat on his back like a beetle or arching off the bed with his face to the rest of the stage, other actresses and actors dancing like teenagers in their rooms or sincerely putting on an act as their characters. I was in a good seat to see it all.
The story was about memory and ghosts and hope. It made perfect sense for an alien trapped on Earth to be befriended by a ghost, such perfect sense nobody but a genius could have come up with it. It's about reaching out for something more than peace. Not even strength to endure, or persist, or persevere. To sustain, to continue, to keep going. To accept there is, if not a future, a suspension and extension of the present to be seen and experienced, and the worth of doing so.
There was a serial killer. There was a caring husband who saw his wife subsumed by the memory of the alien's old lover. There was a loving couple ripped apart. There were spirits directing the action and there was a man who had put the actions into play. There was an alien, and there was a ghost. And in the ghost, the alien's memories of his family and his lost home. It was almost a shame there was so much more in the play, when that simple idea - the simple images of a grieving father taking a surrogate daughter into his arms, the intimacy provided by their shared loss and dwelling within the same in-between, fallen-to-earth space - could have worked for the whole two hours. Not that I minded the music quite so much. If anything, the wide-reaching plot and images were exactly in the spirit of both Bowie and Tevis. When it was over, I sat back and knew it couldn't have ended any other way.
And it made me want to go and tell a story of my own, and by that simple measure, it worked.
Michael C. Hall was almost always on stage - obscured by a curtain for a little bit, sometimes huddled off in a far corner - and it made me glad I hadn't sat up front. First two rows, I'd have gotten whiplash looking back and forth, the stage divided up into three sections with a giant screen in the middle, flanked by two windows and a bed to the left and a fridge to the right. Last two rows, I couldn't have seen anyone's faces, and the show did a grand job of using the actor's whole bodies, Hall doing a thing where he jumped while flat on his back like a beetle or arching off the bed with his face to the rest of the stage, other actresses and actors dancing like teenagers in their rooms or sincerely putting on an act as their characters. I was in a good seat to see it all.
The story was about memory and ghosts and hope. It made perfect sense for an alien trapped on Earth to be befriended by a ghost, such perfect sense nobody but a genius could have come up with it. It's about reaching out for something more than peace. Not even strength to endure, or persist, or persevere. To sustain, to continue, to keep going. To accept there is, if not a future, a suspension and extension of the present to be seen and experienced, and the worth of doing so.
There was a serial killer. There was a caring husband who saw his wife subsumed by the memory of the alien's old lover. There was a loving couple ripped apart. There were spirits directing the action and there was a man who had put the actions into play. There was an alien, and there was a ghost. And in the ghost, the alien's memories of his family and his lost home. It was almost a shame there was so much more in the play, when that simple idea - the simple images of a grieving father taking a surrogate daughter into his arms, the intimacy provided by their shared loss and dwelling within the same in-between, fallen-to-earth space - could have worked for the whole two hours. Not that I minded the music quite so much. If anything, the wide-reaching plot and images were exactly in the spirit of both Bowie and Tevis. When it was over, I sat back and knew it couldn't have ended any other way.
And it made me want to go and tell a story of my own, and by that simple measure, it worked.