I N BETWEEN HAMMOCK weaving, childcare, decision making, and the many daily activities required to keep this community running, Twin Oaks has managed to come up with several original and adapted full-length musical theater productions. There's no word but magic to describe how they came together, with casts and crews that represented one-fourth of our 100-person community. The shows ran for three nights in our dining room. Now they are only memories and the cherished-though-marginal videotapes with which we preserved them.
In our 29-year history we have produced several "legitimate" plays including "The Phantom Tollbooth" and "The Real Inspector Hound," and some original concoctions, not to mention myriad talent show skits, but it was the musicals that became community-wide events. Their props and staging virtually took over the dining room in the cold winter months. Besides that, there was excitement and anticipation, as most people got to hear inside poop of "how the play is going," from internal irritations to lines being rehearsed, songs practiced, and our community clothes area being raided for appropriate costumes. Not many events have such an encompassing effect for six weeks at a time.
First, there was "Amazon of LaMancha," a remake of "Man of LaMancha," with papier mache horse heads, and Dawn, the bold protagonist. Dawn was the free amazon, whose impossible dream was to defeat the patriarchy with steady and abiding feedback and a firm hand. The death scene at the end was impossible to complete without a breakdown of hilarity during rehearsals, but by the night of performance it was delivered with grace.
Later we staged "Utopia," with tunes from such favorites as "Camelot," and "Oklahoma!," about a young man who leaves the community after a number of years and a disappointing relationship, only to find that the outside world isn't particularly welcoming to a twenty-something who has various and sundry community jobs to present as his resume. On the other hand, the woman he meets and becomes involved with finds his previous life in community exciting enough to move there--even if it means leaving him! The play was a light look at relationships, leaving community, dreaming about community, returning to community, and how different things can look from the other side of the fence.
Next came another original, wordily entitled "COMMUNE! or How I Learned to Quit Complaining and Sing the Dream." This musical was about a visitor who comes to community full of anticipation, and who immediately begins putting together a whole variety show in order to pull the community out of a negative slump. The visitor and her bright idea are met with some enthusiasm, as well as a bit of crotchety resistance, especially from an uptight "process squad" member (who becomes increasingly obnoxious in a warped effort to get everybody to stop causing problems), and who is concerned that the visitor's show will affect attendance at her own upcoming workshop, "Fun with Conflict." Somehow, the visitor has more success with conflict resolution, with her bumbling innocent enthusiasm.
Most recently was "The Wizard of Iz," a remake of you-know-what, in which little Dottie and her dog Dodo, traveling to Commonland, where Dottie accidentally rubs out the Lousy Itch of the Yeast and is helped to the Amoral City by the Communikins, known for being so radically egalitarian that they don't particularly make sense. Along the way Dottie meets a Scaredy Co, who is stuck in one position with a bad back from carrying so much stuff around, but who becomes uncannily generous when the situation warrants, as well as the Black and White Cow, who tends to see any interaction as a fight, yet takes an opportunity at a crucial point to do creative problem solving. The Wizard is, of course, fabulously eccentric and unutterably incompetent, but somehow manages to make a difference in the lives of our protagonists.
Musical theater at Twin Oaks is not for the weak-kneed, the shallow-hearted, or the people with plenty of time on their hands. It's a complete experience--overwhelming, difficult, trying of the patience of otherwise already impatient people. Why do we do it? Because it's a joy.
It's a joy to watch people creating and cooperating and singing, dancing and working together to bring together a new experience, a fantasy world removed from the daily life of community and yet still a part of it. But more than joy, is the thrill, the absolutely heart-soaring experience of performing these works for our fellow communitarians and friends, of hearing them laugh at the in-jokes, and rise clapping to the occasion of this kind of magic--magic which happens for an intense fragment of time that lasts forever in our memories of our life in community.
Copyright © 1996 by Fellowship for Intentional Community. All rights reserved. Opinions expressed by the authors and correspondents are their own and do not necessarily reflect those of the publisher.
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