Last night we went to see the penultimate performance of Cyrano de Bergerac with Kevin Kline in the title role. Not surprisingly, he was excellent. His movements were as agile as his speech. An unbeatable swordfighter and a poet.
The theme of honor ran through the play - first, the "fop" from Scene 1 would rather duel with Cyrano than lose face after being criticized by him. Later, Cyrano doesn't tell Roxane that he was writing Christian's letters because he doesn't want to spoil the idea she had of her perfect husband. Roxane herself clings to honor as she mourns her unconsummated marriage for the next 15 years after Christian's death. Understandably, her chaste life in a convent was snipped from the Steve Martin version we all enjoyed years ago.
When someone we love dearly dies, it can be so hard to reintegrate. The romance of loving a dead person is so unmarred. It's the gritty annoyances of daily life with our living loved ones that grounds us in reality and keeps us from idealizing them. There is a certain kind of honor associated with putting a deceased person on a pedestal - not wanting to speak ill of the dead, for example.
But the honor Cyrano's contemporaries felt was more the kind of honor that Dinah's brothers used to justify killing the men who raped her, or the "honor killings" in the Islamic world. This seems to me a far cry from the natural state of things.
I prefer the honorable nature that Kevin Kline demonstrated after the curtain call: A member of the cast had lost everything during the week to a disastrous fire, so to help recover the costs, Kevin auctioned off his makeup chair, which the whole cast signed onstage, to the highest bidder - $3000.
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It's a great play. For me, the theme of accepting love was the strongest.
Cyrano's tragedy is that he denies himself his own happiness.
For all his panache, he's good enough for Roxanne, good enough for his Gascon company of soldiers, but never for himself.
I recognize his character in myself, and my high-achieving, hardworking, talented peers.
Sometimes, we're not so much prodigies, as we are addicts of the 99th percentile. Deep down, we suspect that unless, like Cyrano, we "excel at everything", we aren't really worthy of love.
These days I try hard to notice when I'm blocking out love from family, friends, and Rebecca - and I realize it happens a lot.
Cyrano only realizes moments before he takes his final journey, that there was love for him in the world, if he could bear to accept it.
May none of us have to wait so long.
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