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Exclusives: Essay December 11, 2003
Ah, to be a young Princeton graduate! To see your future before you, stretching beyond the horizon! Life is as bright and as clear as, it would be safe to say, a sunny morning. So as a Princetonian still wet with dew from Commencement a year ago, I felt a shiver down my spine when, while sitting in the Off-Broadway Vineyard Theater this past spring, I heard the following song: "The sun is shining it's a lovely day / a perfect morning for a kid to play." It was the opening to Avenue Q, the new puppet musical that transferred to Broadway in July after a glowingly reviewed Vineyard run. Its puppet protagonist is a recent college graduate trying to find his purpose in life, but who can only afford a run-down apartment on Avenue Q in Brooklyn, or perhaps Queens. His name: "Princeton." Coincidentally, another fictional Old Nassau grad, John Pace Seavering, just hit the Great White Way as the protagonist of The Violet Hour, written by Richard Greenberg '80, which opened November 6 and closes December 21. For most members of the audience, these shows appear to give the school little more than a glance, a nod, and a thank- you for the character-placing reference. But for a real-life "Princeton" like me, these shows demonstrate an impeccable understanding of the life of a young Princetonian, and the conflict between the school's sunny optimism and the harsher reality of the world around it. Princeton, perhaps the tallest and whitest of all ivory towers this side of the Atlantic, likes to plug its bucolic suburban setting, distinguished alumni, world-class athletics, focus on undergraduate education, and multi-year tenure atop the U.S. News and World Report rankings. The two most telling indicators of Princeton's optimism are that it has both the largest endowment per student and the highest alumni giving rate in the country. And we've all heard the joke that graduation day is always sunny, because God is an alum. The opening words of Avenue Q reminded me not only of this Princetonian ethos, but of Princetonian songwriting, which happens to reflect the school's sunny outlook. For example, much of Avenue Q, including its opening line, parodies Sesame Street, whose theme ("Sunny day, sweeping the clouds away / on my way to where the air is clear") was written by Triangle Club writer Jeff Moss '63. (Triangle Club's most famous song,"East of the Sun, West of the Moon" from 1935, was recorded by Frank Sinatra among others.) But only one of our colors is orange. The other is black. Not every Princeton morning is as bright as its students. Sometimes, when you awake Sunday and look out the window of your neo-Gothic dorm, the New Jersey sky — or the debaucherous night before — can seem a bit cloudy. Nassau Street may be Sesame Street, but Prospect Avenue is more Avenue Q, demonstrating that we're only human, with bouts of laziness, procrastination, drunkenness, and depression just like everyone else. This theme of optimism undercut with a dose of reality pops up not only in Avenue Q but in many musical comedy works by and about Princeton students. For example, one of Avenue Q's closest Broadway ancestors is You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown, a series of songs and sketches in which Charlie Brown's friends try to boost his self-esteem. Conceptually, the two shows both use kiddie techniques (cartoons, puppets, simple melodies, and a whimsical tone) to portray characters who talk and act like adults. But while Charlie Brown, ultimately takes pleasure in life's simple joys, Avenue Q grapples with larger, more troubling issues like bills, careers, and love. Strangely enough, Charlie Brown's music, lyrics, and book are by Clark Gesner '60, a Triangle Club alum and trustee who died two years ago. Gesner was the opposite of his characters: he was an adult with an endearingly innocent, childlike demeanor. As a Triangle member myself, I heard countless renditions of the group's classic song "What A Morning," which begins "What a morning, what a beautiful day / The sun is gleaming through the trees." (It was co-written by Charles Stone '76, now a partner in the Manhattan architecture firm Fisher Marantz Stone, which specializes in — appropriately enough — lighting.) In its staging as the opening number in Triangle' s annual freshman week show, the female soloist is as perky as can be, while the rest of the cast runs back and forth behind her, reenacting the seedier aspects of college life, from keg stands to a no-holds-barred demonstration of the Nude Olympics. In my senior spring, I performed in a Triangle song called "Princeton Morning" (repeated in last year's McCarter production), which began: "When the faintest little breath of sunshine / Hits the top of Blair Arch across the way / When the morning hue lights the ivy dew / It's the dawning of another Princeton day." Downtrodden characters intermittently trudged on stage to interrupt this exuberance with their problems, but the perky chorus cheered them up: "Don't worry! You're at Princeton!" The problems built until I entered wearing handcuffs, reciting, "I just got arrested for indecent exposure." Similarly, in the opening song of Avenue Q, each character explains why "it sucks to be me." Other aspects of Avenue Q ring as true as the bells in Nassau Hall. Another puppet, Kate Monster, Princeton's neighbor and love interest, is a kindergarten teaching assistant who eventually wants to start a special school for monsters. A Princetonian like me instantly makes the connection to Teach for America, the program that began with founder Wendy Kopp '89's senior thesis. Princeton administrators drum the Teach for America story into us from day one. The program, which trains aspiring teachers for the perils of inner city classrooms, is a perfect combination of Princeton's sunny morning optimism and do-gooder motto: "in the nation's service and the service of all nations." Whether the Avenue Q authors were conscious of these parallels or not, the decision to name their protagonist Princeton instead of, say, Yale — lyricist Robert Lopez's alma mater — was a stroke of genius. My brother, who goes to Yale, agreed that this Triangle Club brand of comedy wouldn't work there. The stereotypical Princetonian is a blue-eyed, WASP-ish, country club jock, looking much like the confident Hitler youth who sings "Tomorrow Belongs to Me" in Cabaret. Yale, by contrast, has fewer athletes and more minorities per capita, and is located amidst the oft-ridiculed urbanity of New Haven as opposed to a golf course. Yale isn't a shabby place by any measure, but the school's Edenic aspirations are toned down enough to defy satire. On the other hand, Harvard's sense of its own greatness is perhaps more inflated and insular than that of Princeton. As a result, the humor of Harvard's Triangle equivalent, the Hasty Pudding Club, eschews campus critique in favor of witty puns and garish costumes, at least from the few shows I saw. Last year's Harvard Law School parody show, however, was more Avenue Q-like, featuring a protagonist named Jurist Gump, a wide-eyed first-year law student from Alabama, who becomes corrupted by the school's cutthroat intensity and law firms' desperate recruitment techniques. Themes of sun and hope carry over to the notably Princetonian film A Beautiful Mind. Protagonist John Nash meets his fellow math grad students at a sunny outdoor cocktail party. Nash's imaginary roommate at first invites Nash to the roof for a smoke as they admire the campus below. But for the rest of his Princeton career, Nash spends his time holed up in his room or the library as he scribbles equations on the windows, thus shutting out the sunlight. How appropriate for a Princeton story about youthful potential colliding with life's unexpected obstacles. The Violet Hour also dramatizes this push and pull between optimism and reality. In 1919, soon after John Pace Seavering graduates from Princeton, his father gives him enough money to start a publishing company, but only enough to publish one book. One possibility is a memoir by his lover Jessie, a Josephine Baker-like African-American singer. The other is by Denis, a clear stand-in for F. Scott Fitzgerald '17, whose fiancée Rosamund's father won't let her marry him unless he gets a book deal asap, much like how Fitzgerald's wife Zelda only agreed to marry him after This Side of Paradise got published. (In that book, Fitzgerald counterpart Amory Blaine's girlfriend Rosalind dumps him to marry a wealthier man). Seavering is a reference to Max Perkins, the famous publisher of Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and others who worked at Scribner's starting in 1914. Events come to a head when (spoiler alert) a mysterious machine arrives and begins to spout books from the future, projecting, among other things, Denis and Rosamund's troubled marriage. Appropriately, 1919 is a pivotal year, when the country was on brink of the Roaring Twenties but still reeling from The Great War, which sowed several seeds of the century's discontent. "There was a quality of those post-World War I guys that was self-conscious and romantic, and world-weary but also wildly ambitious, which is pleasantly contradictory, I think," Greenberg said in a phone interview. The era has a special meaning for those who attended Princeton, where you can't go a month without hearing a University-related quote from This Side of Paradise. The Cottage Club, Fitzgerald's old stomping ground, hosts a yearly 1920s-themed, Gatsby-like party on Fitzgerald's birthday. And the president of the U. S. in 1919 was, of course, Woodrow Wilson. Greenberg doesn't claim to be making any statement about Princeton or Fitzgerald, but simply says that "I just use Princeton because I can, because I know it, because that's where the model for that character at least went, and because it has a certain aura that's useful in the play. Princeton at that time had an aura of class, that idea that it was a southern gentleman's school." The playwright resists comparing himself to Denis or Fitzgerald, despite writing a novel for his senior thesis (about a college student intimidated by his "super-cool, glamorous roommate," his adviser Stephen Koch recalls) and, like both Denis and Fitzgerald, growing up in humbler circumstances than his rich classmates (Long Island's public East Meadow High School, in Greenberg's case). In the play, the unabashedly preppy Robert Sean Leonard plays the unabashedly preppy John, who at one point tells Jessie, "No one is ever appalled by me" because "I'm what's wanted." He proclaims with a quaintly unbridled confidence that, despite his impending decision, "I feel so sure about things" and "I haven't a clue what will happen, but I know it will be right" and "I have this amazing sense of destiny." That's before he encounters the books from the future, one of which lists his friends who die of alcoholism, and others that read complex postmodern undertones into his life story, thus drowning him in uncertainty. The Violet Hour reflects on what came of the great promise of Fitzgerald's generation, which represents the promise of the dawning century. Avenue Q is about the promise of Generation X, Y, and Z for the 21st century, but is without a clue as to what happens next. Both shows dramatize not only the lost innocence of a generation, but the lost innocence of a medium. The Violet Hour tells of the beginning of modernism and postmodernism in literature and the arts. And Avenue Q itself is an example of how children's television techniques, such as puppetry and animation, are increasingly being used in adult works. Comedy Central and Spike TV are creating animated adult shows such as Kid Notorious and Striperella, and comedian Robert Smigel uses his puppet creation "Triumph the Insult Comic Dog" for vulgar comic effect. Perhaps it's no coincidence that Gesner, Moss, Jim Henson, Charles Shultz, and Fred Rogers — all of whom breached the boundary between child and adult programming in more innocent ways, and defined the cultural landscape of our childhood — passed away within the last 15 years. Avenue Q dramatizes my generation's conflicted outlook on its past — we can't figure out whether to view it with ridicule or nostalgia, and we sometimes can't tell those two reactions apart. After graduating from Princeton on a sunny June 4, 2002, I moved to New York to lead a life much like Princeton's in Avenue Q, living in Brooklyn on the equally nebulous corner of 5th Street and 8th Avenue, trying to find my purpose while paying the bills. And yes, at times "I wish I could go back to college" as the characters sing in one touching ballad. Like John Pace Seavering, at times I'm confident in my own sense of destiny, and at others I'm not so sure. On many nights, while walking home from the subway, I have experienced The Violet Hour, which refers to the New York sky around dusk, when "the night rewards you for the day." But the term also reminds me of one dinner at Forbes College when I looked out the windows across the golf course to see the sky a blinding shade of purple, which sent students scurrying to their rooms to find cameras. Be it sunny mornings or violet evenings, Princeton always seems
to top the real world. But to go back to that fantasyland, all I
need to do is pull out the photo albums, put on the old Triangle
Club CDs, or hop the New Jersey Transit to reunions. Or see a Broadway
show. You can reach Zach at zacharyp@alumni.Princeton.EDU |
