Declaration

Guess Who's Coming For Dinner at the Huntington this afternoon: laugh aloud funny, inventive, somewhat bit dated but still relevant, well-structured, with expressive performances from almost all in the cast. The premise: a effect of a surprise announcement of a biracial marriage on two sixties families, and particularly on the two fathers, one black and angry, the other white and 'an unprejudiced liberal'. We know where the story is going  to end up but, as with a roller-coaster, the ride is everything.

Where my eyes dried up, however, was the final speech of the liberal father, not so much in what he said as  monologue rather than a conversation. Of course, it was perfect dramatic logic, and it worked, the play ending with a set of compelling and satisfying gestures.

It got me thinking about strategies for encounters such as depicted: people and possibilities profoundly unfamiliar and threatening. Inquiry, genuine disinterested curiosity, would seem most effective, providing a way to get beyond roles and stereotypes to people in their livingness. On the basis of that contact and the knowledge it provides we can understand, and appreciate Others and the context of their conflicts.

Well, suiting action to reflection, I went this evening to a garden party where several of us on the periphery (all men) vociferously discussed politics as others, mostly women, chatted quietly around the candle-lit table, Oh, the exhilaration of asserting one's convictions and conclusions, arguing, adding to the ideas of others, expressing one's feeling of dread and optimism. Not inquiry here, rather all theater on the level of a bourse.

Later on, in conversation with a music teacher, I got a tip about Bartok's 'En plein air.' Its eerie night sounds lived up to the encomium. We would have continued learning but my interlocutor was swatting mosquitoes and moved inside.

So, declamation and inquiry: the first satisfying, the other profitable. Should not our encounters include both?

Toward the end of the evening, with another fellow whose face by that time I could barely see in the gloom, there was a discussion the inestimable value of honest critics of our ideas, those who question this or that particular notion or production item and so help us think better, a dance of alternate declamation and inquiry that creates the extra space where the new ideas can arise that further our projects. The payoff is for both parties; the feedback provider often as stimulated as the recipient, because we all have projects we're pursuing.

Of course, this response or even the recognition of its possibility on the part of the characters in the play would have forced a radical revision of the dramatic arc of the play. Both patresrfamilias argued that nothing in the country would change for a century or more. But thinking about the relevance of that play from the sixties to today, we might learn a better way of dealing with the unfamiliar, the frightening, the Other: conversation of exploration.

On the other hand, considering the pathologies of thought and discourse rampant these days, maybe a hundred years is too brief.