"I always knew you wanted to hit me," Morrie Schwartz wheezes out after being repeatedly thumped on his atrophied back and then repositioned with some difficulty by Mitch Albom, to which the latter replies, "That was for the B you gave me in sophomore year."
It's in these flashes of humor in the Repertory Philippines' latest play Tuesdays with Morrie that I get to thinking that if we're all going to die anyway, we might as well have fun with it.
Humor becomes the refuge of Morrie, who is stricken by Lou Gehrig's Disease and is living out his last days in pain, but is determined to interact "normally" with the people around him — and connect with his old student in particular — despite his muscles atrophying and his lungs seizing up. It becomes a way of coping for Mitch, confronted by his mentor's deterioration and his own disenchantment with his frenetic, career-driven life.
For the audience, humor becomes the only relief in a play fraught with emotion, even if, at least in my case, one can only feel some empathy at what the characters are going through, along with a bit of embarrassment at lines that for all their sincerity tend towards sentimentality (especially when taken out of context), such as "Without love, we are like birds with broken wings... there is no point in loving, loving is the point," or "Embrace life and life embraces you back in ways you never imagined."
The Tao of Morrie
Part of what the play teaches is that people tend to hide their vulnerability and thereby limit their capacity to love and be loved back, to hold back when they should give back (or give anyway), to forgive rather than dwell on their — and other people's — inadequacies. Even so, emotional cripples (like Mitch and everyone else?) need a crutch, and the comic touch is there because life lessons are a little easier to take if the audience is cajoled rather than lectured.
Morrie may be a wise man but he must be a wise ass if we're to love him. He gets away with the aphorisms because of occasional good-natured, well-timed digs like "Have you named her yet?" to Mitch's continued avoidance of mentioning his wife, "Does he look like you?" to Mitch's hypothesis on a "friend's" inability to love, or "Ted Koppel brought a recorder too, only it was bigger than yours," to prick Mitch's self-importance, and even self-deprecatingly, "People want to talk to me because I'm not quite dead, not quite alive, I'm sort of in between."
Jose Mari Avellana, who plays Morrie, describes his character in an earlier interview as being "no Messiah, a very simple man, but he was a teacher, and he was able to teach lessons on how to live." He admits that the play is difficult due to its melancholy subject, and so it is written with a lot of comic scenes, yet it also shows "that it's human to cry, sometimes it's healthier than bottling it in, so every now and then, indulge yourself."
Cry like you mean it
The "indulgent" scenes are the moments when Morrie finds himself alone, counting down in a breathing exercise that becomes more and more of a struggle as time passes. (In the book, Morrie is said to wake up, cry, then forget about feeling sorry for himself.) His crying jags are fleeting, with the more familiar scenes being the conversations between him and Mitch, which have a natural flow.
It's not really until the end of it that the actors have an outpouring of emotion, particularly in the case of Mitch, who is the very picture of the hardball journalist always wary of the competition (in the shape of a younger "second-stringer" sportswriter) and unwilling to make excuses for anyone — not the high-salaried jocks who miss practice, or himself, someone who visits his old professor every Tuesday "to make up for being a jerk" the rest of the week.
The way it's written and played out, Mitch can be obnoxious, too aggressive, somewhat unfeeling, but he's also got a sly, wry humor that occasionally reveals itself, and you can actually hear his hardened heart crack when it comes to Morrie. It really is his transformation that the audience is seeing, starting with how the exuberant college student who plays his uncle's jazz and kisses his sociology professor — whom he affectionately calls "Coach" — on the forehead for "extra credit," becomes a withdrawn older man who no longer makes music and waits for "Mr. Schwartz" to offer him a seat.
Bart Guingona is a gifted actor — a slide of the zippered collar takes him from boy to man — and his piano-playing of Gershwin's "Fascinating Rhythm," from jaunty to frantically discordant, provides the perfect backdrop for the narration of the events that so changed his character. He works in perfect concert with Mr. Avellana, who is an old hand at the acting game, proceeding from cane to walker to wheelchair, weakening his voice and adopting the mannerisms of the sick in a physical decline that's contrasted with the emotional expansiveness and active intelligence in his discourse.
I went into the play with good intentions, and some fear at laughing inappropriately, but was relieved that I was able to laugh at the right moments. And although I didn't cry — I left that to the lady sniffling into her kerchief beside me — I must admit that I did feel a pang or two, all due to the acting tandem who make it hard to be hard-hearted.
The details of the play are exacting, from the stacked books and tissue holder meant to blend in with the ambiance of the professor's home, to the cell-phone circa 1990s (that Mr. Guingona verified by watching the TV movie). But it's really the acting and the writing that makes the play successful: "I took the food because I thought you got a kick out of bringing it with you," said Morrie in one scene, to which Mitch replied, exasperated, "I brought the food because I thought you got a kick out of eating it."
How can one not feel for two men who are trying so hard to look out for each other?
"The important thing is to play with integrity; don't play for effect, don't try to make people cry or laugh, mean it. If you do that, you tend to be less cheesy," said Mr. Guingona in an earlier interview. "It's not played for easy emotions, unlike a soap opera. It's already emotionally wrought; you don't have to push it. Human beings are beings that cope. In other words, instead of playing it out in emotion, usually you fight against it, that's what makes it poignant. This is a story of a man dying and a man trying to live his life... let the audience cry for you; withhold, and they will feel for you."
Originally published on 18 January 2008 in BusinessWorld.