The play at Stroller Scene was about romance and grief. But it was all about grief, apparently started six years ago (which implies 2020). I thought it was fascinating that the main character was a mortician, who was also disconnected from her feelings and not great at helping comfort other people, but still, a human symbol of the importance of rituals of the dead. Herself with several layers of clearly unresolved trauma. The resolutions to some relationships happen off screen. Two deaths occur metaphorically, the death of a friendship, the end of a close relationship with a father. The last moment is him on the floor of his room collapsed. And yet, we’re told that he’s just left, similar to a mother who hasn’t died but has left. In this way, symbolically, it resembles grief and the mechanism of it. For the vast majority of people, the dead never leave them. We think of our mothers and fathers as still alive, still whole, often the version of them before they died, well before, the remembered, vital, younger version of them. And we talk to them as if they’re alive, and unless or until you accept their death, they remain as a presence, still living in our memories. Our mind refuses to let them go. A mortician who says her mother and father left her is both literal (i.e., it happened as shown) but also symbolic (thinking of them as just away and available for thought or conversation) is real. The other psychological reality has to do with how people interpret and process grief. The way this is typically done in theatrical fiction is akin to the film Ordinary People (1980), where we see the pain, the misery, and the devastation heightened to the sadness. What’s missed in our symbolic representations is the laughter, romance, anger, that every other emotion exists and is heightened, with also the feeling of guilt especially strong; i.e., how can I feel happy right now when this person who meant so much to me is gone? That’s part of grief, too, and so to see that represented in this way showed a reality that I haven’t encountered as much in fiction.
As a representation of life, there was something else. The faces in the audience. Some people could laugh, because there was such humanistic absurdity. But for several people in the audience, there was a different expression. Recognition. They knew these moments, and had been in their variations of them, and in this way I don’t know if they felt catharsis, or needed it, but they may have at least felt seen.
There’s something else. It’s a big thought. It has to do with the Spanish Flu pandemic. World War I was from July 28, 1914, to November 11, 1918. It’s well-represented in fiction, as novels, poetry, essays, works of history, theater, and film, and sometimes all of the above. All Quiet on the Western Front (1928) is a book that became an epic film, translated from German to English, and speaks of the experience with a remove of a decade. It was an international hit, and connected with many people. An essentially anti-war film from Germany, just as that country was on the cusp of a full fascist takeover just 4 years later, as Germany dealt with a rise in political violence. 9 to 11 million military personnel and about 6 to 13 million civilians died in World War I. Somewhere between 15 million to 24 million people died.
The Spanish Flu pandemic is considered as a time period of January 1918 – April 1920. It overlapped with World War I. While the pandemic is called The Spanish Flu, the origination point was an army base in Kansas. Over 500 million people caught the disease, when the total population of the world was roughly 1.5 billion people. The estimate of deaths is somewhere between 17 million to 50 million people, with other estimates saying this number itself may have undercountered the deaths by a factor of two (i.e., the real death toll may have been as high as 100 million people). In context, it means more people died from the Spanish Flu than World War I, potentially as many as 2-3 times the number of people.
A year later, in Tulsa, Oklahoma, May 31 and June 1, 1921, Black people who were prosperous, living, and alive were slaughtered. 300 people, killed by a racist mob. The racism of the mob was clear, but to me, it’s as if they looked at these happy people that the white mob considered inferior and said “how dare YOU people live and prosper after so much death.” And the unacknowledged death of that time is from the Spanish Flu pandemic. I haven’t been able to find great works directly about that time in the same way that there are great works about World War I. There’s so many war movies and plays. There’s very little I’ve found in popular fiction about that time. As if the Spanish Flu pandemic was put into a memory hole, and disappeared.
In New York City, every winter in old buildings, radiators become boiling hot. People assume the radiators are broken. But there’s a clear reason of when and why these old radiators to do this in the winter. It’s because of the Spanish Flu pandemic. People are walking around masked, the doctors know that there’s nothing they can do other than convince people to say away form each other, and the popular wisdom is that fresh air will help keep people alive. But in the winter, in apartment buildings crammed with people, to open up a window in New York City is to invite freezing people to death. So, the boilers are changed, and the norm becomes to crank them up, to encourage people to open their windows to get fresh air.
The boilers have worked this way ever since, and that simple knowledge has fallen into a memory hole. You can tell people the truth, and they’ll point to everywhere but that. As if the grief and awfulness of the Spanish Flu pandemic was too overwhelming. I do consider it no coincidence that The Call of Cthulu (1928) was published the same year as All Quiet on the Western Front (1928). War is manmade, a horror we can control and introduce, that we personify as apocalyptic spirits in various religions, but all war nontheless starts with a choice between two people, and then engulfs people in organized murder. But a disease, a miasma, that emerges from nowhere, and chooses victims randomly, where the best you can do is rituals of opening windows and keeping distance, is cosmic horror. To my mind, the origin of cosmic horror is the hushed subconscious of a generation of people who only felt comfortable talking about the death of World War I, and never about the Spanish Flu. We teach the history of war, but not of that time. And that generation of people reacted to these horrors by turning the 1920s into the roaring 20s, an era of exuberance and prohibition, violence, and grand living, that crashes to the ground in 1929, on the cusp of the dustbowls that overtook the United States in the early 1930s. By 1938, the world will be engulfed in another war, and then 7 years later, that war will end. With even more propaganda about that time.
And the death count? 60-70 million people, well-remembered, well-documented, well-known, the manmade horrors catalogued. And the Spanish Flu that likely killed more people, in greater percentages? Forgotten.
Okay, what does all of this have to do with the latest Stroller Scene play? A play started in 2020, when symbols of grief about the pandemic were taken away because we couldn’t have them, the rituals of letting go and grief gone, is written where the central character is a mortician, the human manager of grief and the dead, but she herself is overwhelmed by the feelings and connection, barely able to console herself or deal with people, yet knowing the rituals of what to do, if not the why of it all. Which to me makes sense, and makes this a work that may have a cousin somewhere living between 1918 – 1928. But without that knowledge, to me, this remains a true story about the Covid-19 pandemic, without violating the cultural taboos about discussing it. A cultural taboo we still honor with 1918-1920, and now honor with 2019-2021.
I think it’s an important work for this reason. And hope it develops and finds an audience, and perhaps gives them catharsis, or at the very least, recognition and understanding.