Seasons of love

Relationship wisdom from the stages

Performance is a distillation zone for human interaction. Every moment onstage results from dozens of behind-the-curtain exchanges, not to mention the multidimensional interplay out front between artist and audience. Good theatre gives us a delicious meta-experience: We watch the performers work out their characters’ stories while working out stories about ourselves.   

Actor Peter Story, soprano Karin Wolverton and tenor Nathan Granner are three very different performers in two very different shows this month: a comic adaptation of Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus, and Puccini’s opera La bohème. But they agree on one thing: It’s all about relationships. 

Originally from Jenks, Story came to Men Are from Mars as an accomplished stage and screen actor hungry for the challenge of a one-man show. Playwright Eric Coble turned John Gray’s 1993 self-help classic into the 90-minute event that’s part stand-up, part storytelling. (It lands Off-Broadway later this month.)

“It’s all about the Yin and Yang of relationships,” Story says. “We tend to bond with a person who is usually a yang for what we’re a yin on. Problems arise when we stop seeing things from that person’s perspective, regardless of gender. This is all coded in a lot of humor. We end up just asking, ‘Aren’t we idiots?’” 

“I’m not up here to say I have the perfect relationship,” Story says. But in the 215 times he’s performed this piece around the world, he’s seen “ladies elbowing guys in the ribs, and guys doubling over in laughter, when I share a story of something I do [in my marriage],” he says.

“It’s the universalities that make the show so appealing.”

Within its generalizations about how men and women “are,” Gray’s bestseller contains some not insignificant wisdom: 

“By gradually releasing your judgments and blame and persistently asking for what you want, you can create the loving relationships you want, need, and deserve,” he writes.

But, he warns, “to keep the magic of love alive we must understand its seasons.”

La bohème takes place in winter. Granner says his character, Rodolfo, and his ebullient band of intellectual friends live “a hipster lifestyle,” in which even poverty can’t hinder their sense of adventure. (Granner himself has led a similar life, for instance playing classical music in rock venues with collaborator Beau Bledsoe.) 

Into that creative squalor comes Mimi, whom Wolverton describes as innocent, but not naïve. The story of their love affair—sensitively mapped in the composer’s music—turns tragic as he pushes her away, knowing he can’t support her once it’s revealed that she is dying. 

Their friends Musetta and Marcello represent tempestuous summer, but there’s no restful autumn here. 

“Mimi and Rodolfo have the winter, and I don’t even know if they make it to spring,” Granner says, unknowingly echoing Gray’s language. “But they have the spring of their relationship, which is sometimes the sweetest part of it.”

I’d love to give some of Gray’s relationship advice to the bohemians. (“This would never have happened if you’d just talked to each other!”) But Wolverton notes that without misunderstandings, there would be no tragic theater, no catharsis, and thus no chance to learn from what we’re shown. 

Gray’s counsel might apply in rehearsal, too. 

“If you have the baggage of the last time you performed [the opera], it cannot work,” she says. “But if you’re open and honest and willing to fight for what you think is the best way, people typically respond, ‘Yeah, let’s try it.’ Then sometimes you might realize, ‘I’m totally wrong!’”

Wolverton says her biggest challenge is keeping her own emotion detached from what’s happening in Mimi, who keeps her composure amidst the tumult. For Granner, who lost a girl he loved to a car accident in high school, the maelstrom of Rodolfo’s feelings is very real. 

“You have to lean into the emotion however far you can, but not so far that you destroy yourself,” he says. “All the technique and magic could be lost simply from the fact that you care too much. It’s 90 percent acting, 10 percent letting the emotion come through.” 

He remembers Wolverton reassuring him:

“‘You do whatever you need to do. It’s just good for me to be able to prepare for it.’”

Relationship goals, right there.

Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus LIVE!
7:30 p.m. Tues., Oct. 13-Thurs., Oct. 15
$50
John H. Williams Theatre, PAC

La bohème
7:30 p.m. Fri., Oct. 16 and 2:30 p.m. Sun., Oct. 18
$25-$115
Chapman Music Hall, PAC

For more from Alicia, read her review of Theatre Tulsa's Miss Saigon.