Here Lies Love

By Mark Alpert

Last night my wife and I went to a show called “Here Lies Love.” The musical was written by David Byrne (of Talking Heads fame) and it got a good review in the Times, but it turned out to be even better than I expected. And the reason has everything to do with the staging. If the show had been produced in a more conventional way, I probably would’ve hated it.

It’s a musical about Imelda Marcos, the former first lady of the Philippines. The story is similar to that of “Evita” – a beautiful young woman marries a dashing politician who turns into a heartless dictator. Imelda became a figure of fun in 1986 after her husband Ferdinand was deposed and her cache of 2,700 pairs of shoes was discovered, but the show treats her story seriously. The actress who plays Imelda is a wonderful singer, and she does an excellent job of showing the character’s transformation from naïve beauty queen to imperious dragon lady. Still, the treatment is kind of simplistic, cramming forty years of Philippine history into ninety minutes and a dozen songs. If I were watching it in a typical Broadway theater, I’m sure I would’ve been underwhelmed. My inner critic would’ve huffed, “I already know this story! Can’t you tell me something new?”

But I wasn’t sitting in a typical Broadway house. “Here Lies Love” is staged in a smallish room in The Public Theater that’s decked out like a disco, complete with mirror balls and artificial fog. The audience stands around an oddly shaped platform on which the actors sing and dance, and you don’t stand in one place for very long either, because after every scene the stagehands shift the platform to a new position and shepherd the crowd to another part of the room. And on every wall are video screens that display historical footage of Imelda and Ferdinand. When the actor playing Ferdinand Marcos makes his entrance, he’s accompanied by a cameraman who shoots video of Marcos mingling with the audience, shaking hands and slapping backs. At one point, Marcos put his arm around me and together we smiled for the camera, and when I saw my complicit face on the video screens I felt a weird sense of guilt. Through the magic of theater, I got a brief glimpse of what it’s like to support a dictator.

In other words, the story came alive. The historical figures became three-dimensional, full of energy and sex appeal, their skin glistening with sweat.

I want to do the same thing with the characters in my novels. I need to think of new ways to make them come alive.

7 thoughts on “Here Lies Love

  1. My wife was born and grew up during the military dictatorship of Park Chung Hee in South Korea. When chatting about what it was like growing up in a despotic dictator’s regime she simply said that it was all she’d known, and her sympathy was with government at the time. I think that whatever governmental, political, or societal norms we grow up under the vast majority take that side that is most commonly accepted as the norm as their own philosophy and live with it.

    Therefore, whether a person is raised under the auspices of US capitalism, Soviet communism, or Islamic jihadism they are convinced that they and their co-philosophists are the ‘good guys’ and everyone outside of their sphere of worldview are the bad-guys. In our writing we need to convey that same sense, for both the good and the bad guys in our stories.

    In the end, in real life, only God can sort us all out. Our job as writers is simply to tell the tale, and let the understanding of good guys vs. bad guys fall where it may with the reader.

  2. Ah, Imelda Marcos. I was a trial lawyer back when she went on trial in federal court in NYC, so I went there for a few days to watch Gerry Spence, the famous Wyoming lawyer, in action. Now that was a show. I recall, too, how the prosecution and the judge treated Spence like he was some overpraised country bumpkin come to the big city. They were going to show him! Spence, of course, bumpkined all the way to a not guilty verdict.

    • Spence is a master of being underestimated. Also of sartorial creativity.

      So was the great Texas lawyer Percy Foreman. (I’m just a country boy, maybe you could explain how my client used that knife and didn’t leave a fingerprint.)

  3. When I was in high school, I was involved in the theater. We had a very talented director who garnered national attention for his innovative stylings. We even were featured in Life Magazine. I mention this because we did adaptations that often combined two different plays into one and used various visual media, actors in the aisles, multiple and moving stages (some at an incline), and audience participation where they roved through the story. Theater experience really changed my life as a kid.

    Great post. This play sounds AMAZING.

  4. I’ve never experienced anything like that but it sounds really exciting for its innovation!! I think I would love to go to a show like that. Helps us ADHD folk to keep on the move. Lol.

  5. “I want to do the same thing with the characters in my novels. I need to think of new ways to make them come alive.”

    The format and the delivery of what you described seems very appealing and unique. Maybe that’s one method to make characters come alive by changing up the delivery in some way or by the readers experiencing the five senses of the characters in a somehow different style, format.

  6. There’s a YA novel called THE BOOK THIEF about a 14yr old girl during the time of the Holocaust who teaches herself how to read by stealing books. The narrator of the book is Death. The New York Times called it “a life changing book.” Definitely true. But your play staging description, and your desire to translate that into your writing, reminded me of this book. The outside narrator allows the reader to see the characters–and mankind–in a different unique way, but there is a subplot of the girl’s family hiding a Jew that adds another layer of complexity. The Jew and the girl write a book together and their drawings are on the pages of this novel, like a book within a book. So beautiful. Your post and the staging of this play reminded me of this unique book, my favorite read in a very long time.

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