Ordinary Days that Are Anything but Ordinary!
The Scene Shop at Parkway Playhouse
In a song in Ordinary Days, one of the characters conveys this idea while standing in front of a painting: the beauty of a piece of art or object comes from someone contemplating it and making a connection with what she sees.
Warren sings to Deb in the Metropolitan Museum of Art “The Space Between” in Adam Gwon’s musical Ordinary Days (listen to it in your own library, on YouTube)
I hadn’t been to Parkway Playhouse in 50 years, but Roger and I recently saw Ordinary Days at this historic theatre in Burnsville, North Carolina. The front of house staff told us that there would be no intermission in the 90-minute show, and that it was “a sung-through musical,” with almost no dialogue. The music and lyrics for its 21 songs were crafted by American composer Adam Gwon. Four characters — Claire, Jason, Warren, and Deb — discover that their unremarkable, commonplace lives intertwine in surprising ways. Set in New York City, the play was originally directed by Marc Bruni with the Roundabout Theatre Company at the Harold and Miriam Steinberg Center for Theatre.
As we sat and watched these lives unfold in front of our audience, the play and the characters grew on us. Having never seen the show, we had no preconceptions about what to expect from the music or the story. Ordinary Days explores how even in a huge bustling city, people can develop extraordinary interrelationships. The touching tale is told through melodious songs as the characters grapple with their emotions about their situations. And the lyrics and melodies catch the essence of our ephemeral human existence as the young people begin to see a clearer picture of who they are and what they want to be. Time Out called the original production, “A heartfelt and often clever look at life in modern-day New York.”
Since I spent a large portion of my 47 years of professional work in the theatre or associated avenues, I am infatuated with playgoing. Roger has gotten to be an aficionado himself, and last Christmas, he gave me tickets to a show at Flat Rock Playhouse in the Hendersonville area of North Carolina. Since we would be so close, I chose a summer play there on a weekend we could also attend a production at Parkway Playhouse in nearby Burnsville.
Parkway, this barn-like institution, was originally established in 1947 by Dr. William Raymond Taylor, a professor of drama at Woman’s College of Greensboro, North Carolina (now the University of North Carolina at Greensboro), along with third generation local innkeeper Rush Wray of the Nu-Wray Inn. My undergraduate theatre professor W.T. Chichester was on the original staff of Parkway since he taught at the Woman’s College before coming to the University of Montevallo. Until the 1990s, the Playhouse operated as a summer stock venue and a sponsored extension of the drama departments at UNCG and, at some point, the University of Miami.
The two years I was a graduate student at UNCG, I spent my summers and about 18 hours a day lovingly and sweatingly creating six plays in seven weeks upon its noble boards. No longer affiliated with a college, Parkway proudly calls itself “the oldest continually operating Summer Theater in North Carolina,” and the staff still produces mainstage productions in June, July, and August, with theatre education opportunities year-round.
I wrote about several of the productions we created at the Playhouse in my book Theatre Is My Life! A scrapbook, a few photos, and some 50-year old memories lingering in my mind still evoke for me the joyful camaraderie we all had in that beautiful spot that sits in the shadow of Mount Mitchell, the highest peak in the Eastern Continental United States. Hysterical staff meetings with faculty from Monmouth College in New Jersey and Chipola Junior College in Marianna, Florida. Close bonding while building sets and costumes. Icy cold tubing in nearby streams. Getting to know locals who flocked to the shows.
So, I was expectant when a few weeks ago we drove up the mountain and parked on the square and shopped around the quaint little town. We met the new owners of the extensively remodeled NuWray Hotel and got a tour of the lobby and restaurant area still under construction. Nearby, the lunch at the Carriage House was made even more delicious by a conversation with some Burnsville residents.
At the Playhouse, we took photos that mimicked ones from the early 1970s and we met the front of the house crew who welcomed us heartily. It was all very pleasant, and heartwarming to see the box office area where I worked and sold concessions, and I felt a hazy, but homey link to the place. Ordinary Days unfolded in an interesting way, and I pondered the above quoted idea from Warren about how beauty comes from contemplation and connection.
After the final bows of the actors, and as the stage crew was picking up hundreds of colored paper bits that Warren had thrown about the platforms, I asked one of them if I could go backstage. She said she had heard a longtime friend of Parkway was in the audience, and of course I could go back. So I exited the side door stage left and went outside, walked a few yards up the street, and then meandered down the steep stairs into the scene shop.
As I stepped into the space, I unexpectedly burst into tears and by the time Roger found where I had disappeared to, I was sobbing. There was my connection to Parkway. There was Warren’s beauty from reflection: contemplation of a beloved room that had been crusted over in my memory
I guess I had expected the shop to be modernized and sterilized, changed and improved. But no. It looked as if I had literally stepped back into 1973 or ’74. New scenic pieces were hanging here and there, yes. The smell of slowly simmering animal glue paint had been replaced with cans of acrylic, yes. But if I had seen Jerry or David or Jimmy walk in from the dressing room area, I wouldn’t have been surprised. I thought I could hear Woody (Lauren K. Woods), one of our directors collapsing into laughter over a rehearsal scene gone awry. I seemed to see our dear seasoned actor and photographer Mutt Burton looking for that best shot of me sitting in the middle of the charming chaos.
In the consciousness work I teach, we coach people to travel back to their childhoods to remember the essence of their true Soul Child. And we ask folks to be aware of themselves during the day; to observe their own behavior, their mind chatter, their emotions, their bodies. I’ve become pretty good at such work. But walking into that Playhouse scene shop caught me off guard. I wasn’t expecting such an immediate interconnection to the past, nor such sudden and present heartfelt fellowship with those precious co-creators of a dozen incredible summer shows from 50 years before.