Fall in Love: It's Personal

City Hall- the night that Prop 8/DOMA were overturned.

As you may have sniffed out, love is in the air this summer.  Literally, the day Prop 8 and DOMA are overturned in the courts, I arrive in San Francisco and see constantly, “Love is for Everyone”.  Having a love of my own be my in-house correspondent from the opera, I had the advantage of butting in to many conversations about The Tales of Hoffman and, in particular, Mark Adamo’s new The Gospel of Mary Magdalene.  Of course, we could strip these productions down a million different ways (and trust me, I’ve tried), my big take from the opera double-header is about their explorations of love.  Stop.  It’s about how the adages that have formed my own expectations in love are inextricable in my own interpretation of the works—and, more importantly, how that’s an okay way to experience them.

Good job, Questie, you’re brilliant: Hoffman’s about love.  But why?  For some reason, my first thought is about how many of my friends have proselytized about the Five Languages of Love.  These women that Hoffman loves—real or not—represent to him and to me, the ways that he wants to love that aren’t every really going to love him back.  Everybody’s been there (that desperate and humbling state), when that guy you swore you love (but your friends of course saw the signs all along), is actually someone who just plays the guitar really well and is an asshole.  You don’t love him, you love the guitar.  In Olympia, Hoffman loves for beauty (classic mistake).  In Giuletta, for lust (which we love to judge, but go ahead and throw the first stone).  In Antonia.  Antonia hits you where it hurts.  He loves her passion, her authenticity, but he doesn’t actually love her.  Watching Antonia, my mother pops into my head: “If you love someone, you can dislike things about them, but you ultimately have to accept them for who they are.  They are OKAY.”  Hoffman’s problem is that he knows deep down inside that these women are not, in fact, okay.  What the muse urges him toward is authenticity.  Which is actually an impossible thing to ask of yourself, in my opinion—to be entirely authentic in your search for love.  Which is why an opera can be written about it.  Which is a perfect segue to The Gospel of Mary Magdalene.

There aren’t just hundreds of ways to interpret this new Mark Adamo/Kevin Newbury concoction, it seems that there are hundreds of ways to understand it.  To the opera club aficionados behind me, it was about Jung.  Clearly, my Catholic anxiety was hitting an all-time high, but I was really interested in the handling of Mary Magdalene cast as a slut.  The show created these gorgeous, intimate moments in which the sacredness of touch trumps any validation of prudity history could provide you with.  But what was compelling to me was the exploration of the pure.  How to love purely.  And (even if you get it right) the judgment you’re bound to face for it—from jealous outsiders, from clueless outsiders, and from the very person that you love.  I love that the piece wasn’t about debunking historical accounts of people may or may not have understood this woman.  It was about rescripting what she could have possibly been.  Jesus saw in her a way to love deeper and not only accepted that, but needed it.  And yes, that includes touch.  Wouldn’t we hope that that the ‘savior of the world’ understood all expressions of love?  Like when you wash someone before they’re about to die?  Yep, and like when you hold them? 

And so I walked out of the theater and across the street to City Hall where DJs and rainbow tutus and stilettos danced into the night   And it struck me…when I see the works in such a biased way (and admit it), the pieces actually have the power to affect how I can understand something as pervasive and confusing as love for myself.