Last Saturday, Mer and I discovered a new (to us) section of Cleveland. Shannon and Jolene had strongly recommended a play called There Is a Happiness That Morning Is – a play inspired by some of William Blake’s poetry, even to the extent that the play was written in rhyming meter. The play was being performed at Cleveland Public Theater, of which we had never heard. It is on the west side of Cleveland, in an up-and-coming arts neighborhood called Gordon Square. It was pretty great, and we had no idea it was there.
We started the evening by having supper at the Latitude 41 N cafe, which is cozy and comfortable and casual, with huge helpings of great food. I had asked Mer to dress up, and I was in my suit (why not?), but we still felt comfortable there. What a great place.
Cleveland Public Theater has at least two theater spaces, both relatively small. Happiness was either sold out or close to it, and it probably seated 150 people. Mer and I claimed front-row seats.
How to quickly sum up Happiness? The play takes place at a small Eastern liberal arts school, the morning after two English teachers have been caught having sex outside on campus. The two teachers are either husband and wife, or long-time lovers (they have been living together for fifteen years or more), and they either need to apologize to the student body or be fired. The man lectures from Blake’s Songs of Innocence, while the woman lectures from Songs of Experience, with each teacher viewing events in those lights. Later in the play, the college president shows up and reveals that he has done everything he could to provide an ideal situation for the two teachers, and the play wraps up from there.
The play was excellently acted. Most of the time I forgot the play was in verse, since the actors were speaking in such a natural way. Since I like idealists, I got a little tired of the woman’s (“experience”) tirades against love and officials and such, but that took quite awhile, and I expect we are supposed to get a bit tired of both of the teachers’ views.
The only slight downside to the play was that Mer and I both felt strongly that there was a lot of evidence pointing to the college president being a God figure. If that is the case, the play’s solution to a semi-perverse God is that God should be either ignored or actively spited. That clashes pretty directly with our worldviews, but it was still thought-provoking, if only for us to figure out why we disagreed with it.
We finished out little exploratory evening out with dessert. We wanted to try an ice cream place down the street, but it was packed to the point that there was nowhere to sit, and a long line, to boot. So, we found a nice coffee shop called the Gypsy Bean and Bakery, where we each got a piece of cake and talked about the play for some time. It was a great introduction to a pretty cool neighborhood.