Next Act's "There is a Happiness Where Morning is," Plays with Language and Love

Photo by Ross Zentner.

William Blake was an 18th century English poet, artist, and advocate of free love. Largely unacknowledged for his writing in his lifetime, he is now lauded as one of the most important artists of the Romantic period. He was also, evidently, considered a little crazy by his contemporaries. 

Even with this briefest of biographies, it’s clear that Blake was the perfect historical and literary figure for playwright Mickle Maher to hang his play on. Next Act Theatre’s current production of Maher’s verse comedy, There Is A Happiness That Morning Is, is a funny, lyrical play that presents poems – and events in real life – from several completely different perspectives. It questions how we make meaning and how meaning can shift in an instant. It also shows that discovering the truth of a situation can be dizzying, complicated, and disappointing, but that after teaching the same texts – or being in the same relationship – for decades, new things can still be revealed. 

Adeptly directed by accomplished theater artist Mary MacDonald Kerr, and delightfully brought to life by Cassandra Bissell and Neil Brookshire, this piece is challenging, refreshing, surprising, and in the end, affirming of both life and love. Playing through March 19 in Next Act’s home space, it is also a little crazy, like Blake himself. But in a good way. 

The rhyming comedy begins in a classroom at a small ivy-covered liberal arts college, where the audience/Intro to Poetry students are about to hear lectures from two Blake scholars. Wrapped up in the analysis of word choice and meter, the academics are trying to sort out some big ideas about Romantic love alongside the big emotions they feel for one another. As they explicate Blake’s “Poems of Innocence and Experience,” it becomes clear that these two professors may have taken Blake’s free love philosophy a bit too far during a picnic the night before. They both admit that after exchanging a few rhyming couplets on the college’s green, they celebrated their love by having sex outdoors, in clear view of the student body and the college president. 

The next morning, things are awkward between the two lovers. And between the English department lecturers and the administration, which is asking them to apologize publicly and resign. Things are also a bit awkward between the students and their profs, who are supposed to be giving their last classes of the semester today, and collecting the dreaded “yellow forms.” 

As a former English major, I admit that my pulse raced a bit as I followed along with the lessons. Not only did I feel the overwhelming urge to take notes, I also felt terribly unprepared. (It’s only been 30 years. That feeling will eventually go away, right?) Fortunately, during the first class the overly enthusiastic, celebrate-the-sunrise, former folk singer Bernard (Brookshire) wrote the poem “Infant Joy” on the extra long blackboard that dominates the stage set. He even decorated the verses with flowers and vines in colored chalk to express his exuberance. 

Photo by Ross Zentner.

Bernard is the kind of professor you hope will lead you through centuries-old poems; passionate, inspired by the material, and excited to share the beauty of language with an audience. (And collect yellow forms, of course.) With tousled hair, bits of leaves and flowers tucked into his pockets from the previous night’s splendor in the grass, and the wide-eyed determination of someone who hasn’t slept in 24 hours, but is determined to make it through this workday, Brookshire is an overstimulated, exposed nerve, flailing through his material with overflowing verve. Channeling Walt Whitman, he adds his own “barbaric yawp” to Blake’s words and believes that he has reached literary nirvana by becoming one with a poem. 

Photo by Ross Zentner.

The afternoon class on the same subject has a decidedly different tone. Ellen is looking at her partner, her teaching, her subject – Blake’s “The Sick Rose” – and her public sexual exploits from a place of regret and bitterness. In light of a recent cancer diagnosis, she is disillusioned with everything. She brings that energy of pain, loss, regret and heartbreak to the chalkboard and it is all she can find in the text. On what could be her last day in the classroom, she is blunt about her many disappointments. As Ellen, Bissell is the academic who has been pushed too far, once too many times. She is also someone who made plans. Who viewed her work and her marriage as the bedrock of her life. Bissell brandishes Ellen’s disappointment – making lunges at hurting others as she, herself has been hurt. It is as if she is throwing off an old coat and is suddenly exposed to the elements. The shock has sharpened both her senses and her tongue. 

Both Bissell and Brookshire handle the rhyming stanzas of their own lines and the meter of the works they are analyzing with aplomb. Instead of falling into a sing-songy, Dr. Seuss type rhythm, they focus on the intentions of the lines so we’re only occasionally reminded of the rhymes. It is a credit to the actors and the author that the play’s poetic style can so easily elevate the material while incorporating both the mundane (yellow forms!) and the profane. (With a more dour outlook, Ellen has many well placed expletives.)

All of these heightened emotions couched in heightened language are played out in a Romantic, pastoral color scheme (organic greens, dusty pinks and earthy browns) in Jazmin Aurora Medina’s costume design. And the drama literally takes place on top of one of Blake’s paintings – Lisa Schlenker’s scenic design utilizes graphics from the title page of “Songs of Innocence and Experience” on the stage floor. It all feels like characters from a book of poems coming to life.

And then there’s the twist. 

Next Act Theatre has gone to pretty great lengths to keep a major twist in the plot a secret from audiences and so I will preserve the element of surprise. But I will say that I was absolutely gobsmacked by the sudden left turn in the play’s final fifteen minutes, which is fun. The writing and plotting in this final mini-chapter of the play isn’t as tight as the rest of the show, but just when you’ve gotten over the shock of the first twist, there is another, which is satisfying and brilliant. The final scene of the show is worth all of the lead up which, like poetry, can sometimes veer towards too cute, too labored, and too enamored with its own cleverness. 

But the ending excuses all

and sweet joy, on us befalls.