Sunday, I saw a provocative and brilliantly acted play at Hubbard Hall, our local arts and education center, The Velocity Of Autumn. This play is traveling around the country.
It opened on Broadway in 2013, the critics there called it gentle, funny, but slight.
Christine Decker plays 79-year-old Alexandra, an aging and retired painter, seemingly flirting with dementia – she sometimes forgets where she is – and unlikely urban terrorist.
She may have memory issues, but she has no trouble amassing an incendiary arsenal, but she is sharp enough to figure out how to blow her home up with Molotov Cocktails, that is if Michael and Jennifer, her helicopter children in Brooklyn, don’t stop trying to force her to give up her house and move into a nursing home.
The acting was brilliant, especially for a small upstate New York town. We are fortunate to have actors like that her and to have Hubbard Hall.
I found the play compelling but yes, slight, in some important ways. It struck me that it was as much of a fable, a fairy tale for the elderly, as it was a penetrating look into aging and death in America, a timely and powerful subject.
Alexandra’s third child, Christopher, fled years earlier to get away from her.
People with Alzheimer’s or Dementia are often irritable and confused, even angry, but are rarely as cruel as Alexandra is when she talks about her children, It is clear right away why Christopher fled.
Alexandra hates everything about getting old, she claims her mind is going and her body disintegrating – she says she can no longer even walk through a museum – but she makes for a persuasive terrorist – she is feisty, eloquent and quite incredibly empowered, a combination I’ve never witnessed in people believed judged incompetent to care for themselves.
She is not going quietly into that good night, she rages and shouts about the toll growing older is taking on her, she feels she is disintegrating right into herself. She doesn’t want to go outside. She no longer paints, nor can she stand to have her paintings up on the wall. She is full of hate and complaint but reads, cooks, cleans and takes care of herself.
Her brownstone has become a fortress, dozens of wine bottles and jars filled with flammables. Her daughter and son are threatening to call the police and have her forcibly removed if she doesn’t agree to voluntarily leave her home and enter a nursing home. I understand this is good drama, but it took the play over the top for me at the outset.
Alexandra’s bunker is penetrated by her son Christopher, an estranged gay men living a lonely and disappointing life in New Mexico, called home urgently by his siblings to talk his mother into leaving. There is this idea that only he can communicate with her.
Christopher has to crawl through a second floor window to even get in, and his mother tries to push him right out of the window.
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The very sad reality about growing old and dying – I have been witnessing this process close-up for a decade now as a volunteer in elder care facilities – is that there is no simple, noble, pain-free way to do it or feel about it.
Nobody wants to get older, nobody wants to die, we all will do both. Many things may divide us in America, but even the left and the right can’t deny that together. I’ve seen much meaning and love and joy in my work, but there are no happy endings.
According to recent studies, the process of active dying in America takes about six years on average, costs hundreds of thousands of dollars, and invariably involves, thanks to medical “progress,” considerable prolonged pain and suffering.
If you spend time in most assisted care facilities, you can witness a never-ending parade of ambulances, hospital surgeries, doctor’s appointments, expensive and numerous medications and a steadily declining quality of life.
This is because people are there to begin the dying process, they often become passive and depressed as they age, it is simply not fun.
I have never heard anyone asked at any such facility if this is the life they wish to lead. It is the life they must accept.
Modern technological and medical science has profoundly altered the length of our lives.
But science has also turned the process of aging and dying into a medical rather than a spiritual experience, something to be totally controlled by health care systems, government bureaucrats, feckless politicians, bureaucrats and insurance companies.
Doctors are increasingly helpless, and admit it freely.
This reality has been largely hidden from public view, as death becomes more and more distant from most people in our country. As recently as 1945, writes Dr. Atul Gawande, in Being Mortal, most deaths in America occurred in the home.
By the 1980’s, just 17 per cent of Americans died at home, the number is most certainly higher in 2018. We die in hospitals and nursing homes, out of sight of the world they once lived in.
Most of those who die at home die suddenly – strokes, heart attacks, fatal falls – and were too far away from hospitals to get to help. Increasingly, they are seen as the lucky ones. Across the industrialized world, the experience of advanced aging and death has shifted to hospitals and nursing homes.
As our culture turns cruel and indifferent, and the elderly vanish from public consciousness, government is withdrawing from its long-held responsibility to help them age and die well.
The elderly have lost a voice in their own destiny and death.
The costly and increasingly lengthy burden of caring for the elderly now falls more and more on children and family. Where else can the Alexandra’s of our world turn? They are too frail to live alone, too healthy to die.
The drama of aging has become an agonizing moral dilemma not only for the aging but for the people who love them and worry about them, yet have their own families to raise and lives to lead. What an awful choice to have to make: between caring for sick and dying people for many years or living your own life?
Some people make this choice freely and openly, some to do not. More and more, it is not really a choice.
If you spend time in elder care facilities, as I have as a volunteer, you encounter horror story after horror story of people who wish to stay in their homes, and sons and daughters struggling with hard questions about their safety and well-being, and with the emotional and literal cost of the caretaker, and their own right to live their lives and care for their children.
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To say the least, Alexandra is having none of this “help” from her family, or this growing older stuff, raging, spitting venom, insulting him and her daughter and son, we never see them, they are on the phone and calling every few minutes, vowing to call the police.
Alexandra has a gift for striking at her children in the most personal ways, repeatedly demanding that Christopher get out and return to his miserable life as she holds a cigarette lighter to the bombs she has scattered all over the apartment. There is something quite selfish about Alexandra, she doesn’t worry much about who else might get blown up.
But then, her threats are not really convincing. This is not a play that is going to blow people up..
The first iteration of Alexandra that we see is simply deranged. She says she can’t think clearly or walk. Her children seem to be quite justified in their concerns. If she lights a match the whole building will be destroyed, taking all of her unsuspecting neighbors with her. In our world, this means a SWAT team and certain imprisonment.
The acting in the play I saw blew me away, the actors could not have done better with this emotional material, but the story left me uneasy and wanting.
The fundamental question raised by the play – the audience who watched it with me loved it and gave the actors a standing ovation – showed a creative woman of keen intelligence wrestling with the unforgiving reality of old age: people hurt and get sick and are diminished, their bodies beginning the long and irreversible process of disintegration, helpless and death.
I found the play had a kind of Hollywood sensibility about it, the New York critics likened it to a Neil Simon play, it was written By Eric Coble. It never descended to hopelessness, bloodshed, or real fear.
Alexandra, played by a gifted actress, doesn’t really ever seem old or helpless, she is powerful and in control almost every minute, despite a few lapses of memory common to people over 50.
We never really believe for a minute that she’s going to light those firebombs or be hauled out of the room by a counter-terrorism unit live on TV.
She never loses sight of her intention, to die in her own home. She is no candidate for a nursing home, rather an assisted care facility. They are two very different things.
Christopher, also wonderfully acted by Oliver Wadsworth, is eager, almost desperate to engage with his mother, he is in almost as much pain as she is. He confronts Alexandra about her failings as a mother, and he is confronted by his unyielding mother about his troubles and flaws, which are similar to hers in many ways.
In Hollywood’s notion of therapy and reality, dialogue is almost supernatural, it accomplishes in seconds what it takes years of therapy to do.
Over the course of the play, Christopher, who has avoided h is mother for 20 years, seems suddenly able to recover his love for her, even as she trashes him in the most hurtful ways, and he returns the favor. Somewhat inevitably, and after a series of anguished recriminations and catharsis – at one point, the two change roles and he wants the two of them to blow themselves up together – they are reconciled, and now it’s Christopher screaming over the phone at the arrogant and overprotective daughter and son.
This did not strike me as a happy ending, rather the adding of a another victim to this sorry family drama. Before flying to New York to talk her mother out of committing suicide and murder, Christopher had his own life – goodbye to that – and we are supposed to feel good for him?
Milan Kundera writes that people who want to flee their own lives and homes are, by definition, unhappy people. The problem with moving, I often found, is that I come along.
The two issues raised but never fully explored are: what right do the elderly have to determine their own fate and destiny?
Can they really choose to avoid being forced into depressing and confining nursing homes against their will and in the face of their declining abilities?
And what right to children have to live their own lives and fulfill their own destinies, and not be drawn into the long, expensive and brutishly painful roles of caretaking, a role the government and health care system is forcing upon them as social services and subsidies are cut back or eliminated so that enormous tax cuts can be given to corporations and the wealthy.
People worried about taking care of their elderly parents will not be cheering about the tax cuts for long, that is already becoming clear.
I’ve met very few people in my volunteer work who wished to live long past their natural time, many have voluntarily turned themselves into nursing homes and elder care facilities because they can’t bear to burden their children’s own lives.
“They had their turn,” one woman at the Mansion Assisted Care Facility in Cambridge told me in October. I came here because I wanted them to have theirs.”
This ethical woman spent the next three years in pain and discomfort, going back and forth to hospitals and nursing homes as her body began to fail, where no one could really help her but everyone could keep her alive. I was deeply touched by the sacrifice she made for her family.
Alexandra, who surely has a right to her freedom, seemed a good candidate for some kind of assisted care, oddly enough. It would not only free up her family, but provide trained help her deal with those painful legs and failing spine.
And she had the resources to get to a very good one if she would only sell her brownstone rather than blow it up. That may not be the best option for people to have, but it is the best deal with offer in this country, and it is offered only to people with money, which Alexandra have had a lot of if she sold her home.
Was it really fair, I wondered, to ask a child to give up his (or her) life to come and be near her and care for her, and be responsible for her happiness, or were their better choices for her and him?
Why was this assumed to be the only possible happy ending, or even a happy ending at all?
I felt by the end that I was watching a Disney fable about aging in America.
I won’t give the ending away, but I never had a doubt that it would not be a sad or violent one.
This is what made it a fable. There are few miracles among the elderly, their children do not have magical powers to transform the reality of life and death. We have to face death in our own way, but there is no avoiding it.
I wonder if I was the only person in the theater who wished for Christopher to get back to New Mexico and rebuild his life there. Could this really happen by coming to live with his mother on the other side of the country?
By his own admission, he never felt comfortable in Brooklyn, or anywhere near his mother.
The truth is that dying is a difficult and painful thing, there is no simple and graceful way to do it, apart from keeling over dead from a heart attack or deadly stroke. Our culture does not seem to want to deal with the true drama of aging – people are being kept alive by all means at any cost. And for too long.
People love fairy tales, and this one was in many ways gentle and funny and thought-provoking. It certainly was wonderfully acted.
But even though it presumed to explore the truths about getting and and dying, it mostly sidestepped them. Ultimately the play wanted to be touching but didn’t want to push the audience too far.
Once again, our culture says it wants little to do with real life or the profound challenges, emotional and physical, that people face on the edge of life.
As I mentioned, this play will be moving around the country, and I recommend seeing it. It makes us think about a subject we need to talk and think about. I realize that most of my readers do not live near and around me, but if you are local, the play is running for another week at Hubbard Hall, you can get tickets here.
