The Transcendentalists

While the nation has gone bonkers over the musical Hamilton, with tickets going for upwards of $1,000 on the secondary market, I saw a small production entitled Nature that featured a piece of Americana outdoors at the Morton Arboretum, a nature preserve just west of Chicago.  Nature was a celebration of the lives and works of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau.  Set in the outdoors, the play advertises itself as a “walking play” as patrons trudge off from station to station between acts with their folding chairs.  The walks are an integral part of the play and make the play an experience. 

Nature explored the ideas of both men and the Transcendental movement, a vital part of American intellectual and literary thought.  The play delved into the friendship and sometimes rivalry between the two men.  It roughly followed their lives chronologically, and even touched on the women transcendentalists—Mary Moody and Margaret Fuller.  The play was  at its best when it captured the tension between the themes of  nature and progress, an area in which Thoreau and Emerson disagreed and the play reached its climax with Thoreau’s famous importuning, “Simplify, simplify, simplify.”

Nature wonderfully used the outdoors as a perfect setting for the performance and even the sounds cooperated.  At one point, the dialogue referred to the “rustling of the leaves by the wind,” and as if on cue, the wind blew and rustled the tree leaves.  The sound and the music also carried very differently in an outdoor venue and added to the authenticity and feel of the play.  All of the music was period pieces and the costuming was magnificent—every element of the play was calibrated to capture the period.  Many of the actors stayed on afterwards for a Q&A session and we learned that the actor that played Emerson is actually the great great  great  great grandson of Ralph Waldo Emerson.

It also occurred to me that two of the greatest essayists and thinkers that had much to say about man and his relationship to society—George Orwell and Henry David Thoreau—both contracted tuberculosis and died in their mid 40’s, thus depriving mankind of decades of potential thought and writings.

The play was riveting and engrossing.   Thoreau and Emerson will always have a special place in my life.  During the summer before my senior year in college, I took an American Literature course from one of the country’s finest professors at The University of Chicago- Robert Streeter.   During July of that year, I went to Maine and wrote my paper on Thoreau and Emerson while sitting on a rock overlooking a calm pond in Maine.  It was one of life’s magic moments.  Nature brought these two enmeshed lives together for me again in a unique and inventive way.   And it reminded me that an actual visit to Walden Pond is definitely on my bucket list.

And as I write these words extolling the virtues of America’s greatest free thinkers, Yale is busy forming a committee to rid itself of “offensive” names.  Let that sink in.