On a rainy April evening in Paris, I went to the theater. I had a free ticket that I’d picked up at work, at the ticket office at my university where students (and teachers) can get discounts and sometimes tickets for free. I didn’t know anything about the play I was going to see. I just felt like going to the theater so I walked in and took a seat.
The lights went down. A man sitting in the front row stood up and stepped onto the stage. He began by speaking in Italian. I felt an uncomfortable rustle around me. The play was called Nous n’irons pas ce soir au Paradis, “This evening we won’t go to Paradise.” So where were we going, we asked ourselves.
In the end, we went to Hell, and to Purgatory, a voyage that transported us outside of time to a place where minutes don’t count, where the worries of daily life fall away, where nothing matters as much what is happening this very instant on the stage:
In front of us stands a man in street clothes. There are no props, no stage décor. There’s simply one man, the actor Serge Maggiani, who speaks to us about another, the Italian poet Dante Alighieri, author of The Divine Comedy.
Sounds like pretty highbrow stuff, doesn’t it? A narrative poem written in the early 14th century where all the characters, except the poet, are dead, some freezing in Hell (yes, the coldest parts are reserved for the worst sinners), others biding their time in Purgatory, and a happy few residing in Paradise (we won’t be going there, we’ve been forewarned).
But the evening is anything but that. Serge Maggiani, our guide, introduces us to Dante and points out that’s the poet’s first name. Right away we’re on a first-name basis with a man who, like us, has known suffering, disappointment and loss in love.
In fact, when Dante begins his journey, it sounds like he’s seriously depressed. He’s lost in a dark forest and with each step sinks deeper into the mire. In real life, he is an enemy of the powerful pope Boniface VIII and has been condemned to permanent exile from his beloved Florence. He has no income, no home, few friends.
He does have ink, pen and paper, however, and though he has been deprived of his birthplace, no one can take his native tongue away. Dante writes in the Italian of Tuscany at a time when no self-respecting writer would use anything but Latin. He lives in his language and makes it his home. Participating in the creation of the Italian language that will one day be spoken all over Italy, he also takes a writer’s sweet revenge when he condemns Pope Boniface to Hell before he’s even dead.
By the end of the evening, we may not have been to Paradise but we’ve met Dante, as real, as close to us as any man alive. We’ve also encountered the poet’s special genius and had a taste of eternity.
That rainy April evening, I experienced a moment of serendipity that no screen could ever give me. What I found with a group of strangers and a single actor on stage I could never find on my computer, my cell phone, my TV or even a giant movie screen. Live theater makes us more alive and this is something we all need.
In Pottsville, the people who have worked so hard to bring back the Majestic Theater understand this. They understand the importance of a community theater that makes live entertainment available at a reasonable price. Recently there have been Robert Thomas Hughes’s “A Miner’s Tale,” and “Triumph and Tragedy” to commemorate the end of the Civil War.
I remember the Majestic Theater when it was a farmer’s market. My mother remembered it from its early days as a movie theater though I don’t know if she ever knew it as a nickelodeon. That’s how the Majestic began when it first opened in 1910, four years before the great fire of 1914, which destroyed the city’s finest theater, the Academy of Music.
Rooting around in the past, I came up with the name of Robert B. Mantell, a well-known actor in his day. In New York and on the road, he played all the great Shakespearean roles and married four times, each of his brides a leading lady who played at his side. In September 1902 he was on stage at the Academy of Music in a popular play of the day, “The Cross and the Dagger.”
The following year, in the same theater, the Pottsville Musical Society put on a production of Gilbert and Sullivan’s “Pirates of Penzance.” In 1913, the year before the Academy burnt down, the Honey Boy Minstrels were on the bill. Led by George Evans, co-author of “In the Good Old Summer Time,” they sang and performed vaudeville acts.
Once the Academy of Music was gone, other theaters took its place. The Hippodrome on E. Market Street brought in vaudeville acts and big bands. The Capitol on N. Centre Street was more palace than theater. It could seat over 2,700, had thirteen dressing rooms for vaudeville stars, and its interior décor was a cross between a Moorish castle and a very ornate Italian church.
Pottsville also had dance halls and in the days of prohibition, speakeasies galore. At the Holly Roof on the top floor of the Hollywood Theater, couples danced to the beat of Paul Whiteman’s orchestra and the Dorsey Brothers of Shenandoah were regulars in town. There were also lots of clubs and bars on Minersville Street.
In the 1930’s and 40’s, Pottsville had so much live entertainment that the city was off limits to soldiers from Indiantown Gap (though this was a rule hard to enforce). A trip to Pottsville was the equivalent of a descent into Dante’s Inferno. In just one visit, a young man could lose his soul, his health, and every penny in his pocket.
It would be easy to say “those were the good old days,” but they weren’t. There was the Great Depression and World War II. To make it through hard times, people got together to dance, sing, go to a show. They had fun and we could have more too if we put our screens aside and exchanged the virtual for the live.
