Secret Garden is accessible to young audiences of any age
by Leslie Wylie
As children, we walk willingly into the vacuum of literary sentimentality, intuiting the happy ending that will satisfy our most basal desire for completion. As adults, our definitions of completion change, but the desire for resolution remains the same.
In real life, however, ends seldom arrive through resolution alone. The correlation between emotion and outcome is imperfect, and so we learn to replace na�ve sentimentality with a kind of detachment that creates a rift between what we are able to experience as adults versus what we can experience as children.
The Secret Garden, as presented by the Clarence Brown Theatre, seems to want to bridge the two experiences. Based on the classic 1911 novel by Frances Hodgson Burnett (who, as an interesting side note, spent her teens in New Market and Knoxville), Marsha Norman's musical adaptation doesn't stray far from Burnett's warmly familiar original plot.
After her neglectful parents die in a plague of cholera, young Mary Lennox (Harmony Livingston) is sent from India to an estate in the Yorkshire moors to live with her reclusive hunchback Uncle Archibald (John Forrest Ferguson) and his bedridden son Colin (Jay Schaad). The characters' broken emotional landscapes are manifested in an overgrown, walled-up garden that belonged to Archibald's deceased wife Lily (Alecia White), for whom he still desperately grieves. Inspired by the free-spirited servant's son Dickon (Fisher Neal), Mary decides to nurture the plot of land back to life, a process that becomes a catalyst for her own healing as well as that of the other characters.
There are facets of the production that any aged audience will have no difficulty appreciating: the plot's Gothic intensity, the character's colorful personas, Lucy Simon's lush orchestral score, the aesthetically fantastic sets and lighting. But for adults, the challenge of getting in close enough to an inherently sentimental children's work in order to harvest something more emotionally tangible than surface satisfaction seems a difficult one. What is a happy ending if not a temporary anesthetic to our own longing for fulfillment, and what good is the ending if we don't trust the story?
The hard task of this musical's direction, then, is to re-approach the storybook romantic experience and make it true enough that its audience has something to interact with, thereby renewing the ground for old senses of completion.
Perhaps the most fragile work is prepared by Norman's adaptation, which relieves potential over-sentimentality with layers of cerebral plot fabrication that interconnect the characters' wounded psyches. Norman won the 1983 Pulitzer Prize for 'Night Mother, a play about a middle-aged woman who decides to commit suicide, precluding her willingness to pay attention to the darker side of The Secret Garden's story.
Norman magnifies the concept of love by emphasizing its absence, accenting the holes in the characters as much as she does the characters themselves. These holes, the ghosts of unsatisfied desire, are given faces and names by way of a chorus of "Dreamers" who haunt nearly every scene, representing the characters' inabilities to initiate any forward movement in their lives until they choose to cast off the past.
Motion, in every other context, is far from lacking. Subtle changes in sets and lighting are almost continuously taking place, even as scenes are in process, providing a momentum that further averts sentimental stagnation. The audience is constantly, often unconsciously, undergoing seamless shifts of time and space that mirror the characters' dual trajectories through the past and present.
Director Ron Bashford's sensitivity to developing the emotional nuances of the characters without allowing one character's situation to overshadow another is evident. Songs like "I Heard Someone Crying," in which Mary and Archibald—oblivious to each other—correctly identify the sound of pain but misinterpret its source, require attention to the delicate balance between the two characters' dramas. Supporting dramas, such as the manipulation of Archibald's brother, Dr. Neville Craven (Bill Black), demand a subtlety that could easily be under- or overdrawn.
The further the musical unfolds, the more obvious it becomes that the play is as much a story for adults as it is for children. Sometimes the imagined may seem more astonishing than the real but, in fact, the two mime each other. It requires a sense of reality to engage oneself in a children's story; it requires imagination to read the news and visualize a war on the other side of the world. Besides, what a tragedy it would be to discount The Secret Garden's validity in the adult world by its willingness to embrace a happy ending.
November 27, 2003 * Vol. 13, No. 48
© 2003 Metro Pulse
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