Into the Words
Into the Woods, the fairy-tale musical written by the award-winning team of
James Lapine and Stephen Sondheim, is one of Sondheim's most frequently
performed works, which should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with
the play. There is an ensemble cast with excellent parts, beautiful music,
a compelling and engaging story, and, perhaps best of all, a feel-good
ending. For these reasons, among others, Into the Woods has become a
standard among school, community, and regional theaters. However, in the
formulation of this fantastic quest of a Baker, his wife and many other more
familiar fairy-tale characters, Lapine and Sondheim have crafted a show that
still manages to strike very close to home. There are messages and motifs
throughout the show that go beyond the framework of a typical flight of
fancy, and continue to stay with us long after we have left the theater.
The temptation exists to forget about these sobering themes in the pursuit
of light-hearted entertainment, but these are lessons that cannot be easily
dismissed, and they provide the backbone of this piece. At its core, Into
the Woods is not so much about fantasy as it is about reality.
It is difficult to encapsulate all of the disparate messages of Into the
Woods into a single theme, but the engine that drives everything else in the
show is the absence of absolutes. There are many smaller issues, such as
tolerance and understanding, which fall into the greater category of
challenging the assumptions we make about ourselves and others. A vast
majority of the characters in the play are definitely not what they seem,
despite our instinct or desire to neatly categorize them. Who are the good
guys? The Baker prepares to leave his son out of his own self-pity and
insecurity, Little Red Riding Hood kills the wolf and makes a spectacle out
of wearing his skin, Jack kills the giant stealing a golden harp that
neither him nor his mother particularly need, the Baker's Wife commits
adultery, etc. etc. However, these are done in such a way as to make these
actions acceptable and understandable, and sometimes, even sympathetic.
A major indication that our assumptions about characters are being
challenged is the treatment of the princes. Very little is placed into a
Sondheim show without careful deliberation, and one of the strongest and
most interesting decisions made in the show is the casting of the same actor
to play the Wolf and Cinderella's Prince. The juxtaposition of the Wolf and
Cinderella's Prince in Into the Woods is one of the most crucial character
decisions in the show, and a barometer of how much a particular director and
production staff understand the work. Double-casting in Into the Woods is a
conscious choice that is made to enhance the script and to create
intentional links between characters in a show, and the Wolf and
Cinderella's Prince are linked together in a number of different ways.
Little Red Riding Hood thinks of herself as a tough adult, and she has
always had a fascination with taking care of herself. This independence is
manifested her insistence on going through the woods by herself and the
absence in the show of a physical mother who directs her. That autonomy is
mirrored in another one of the female characters, the Baker's Wife, who
believes in her own ability to get through the woods unharmed. Her
self-confidence is so profound that she tries to guide the Baker on his
quest, because she feels that he will only be successful with her
assistance. The Wolf and Cinderella's Prince provide opportunities for
Little Red and the Baker's Wife to live out their fantasies, to disastrous
ends. The methods of the Wolf and Cinderella's Prince are the keys in this
equation because of their similarities. Both encounters (the Wolf/Little
Red and Cinderella's Prince/Baker's Wife) are essentially seduction scenes,
done from a very selfish perspective (the wolf does it to glean information
about the grandmother and the little girl, and the prince does it to have
another "moment" for himself). These scenes are also textually linked by
the line "one would be so boring", which is spoken to both Little Red and
the Baker's Wife.
By linking the Wolf and Cinderella's Prince in these ways, Lapine and
Sondheim are playing off of the audience expectations for the wolf, as a
predatory being, and then using those expectations to subvert the
expectations of the prince. The prince from the first act is, for the most
part, a fairly noble figure, and in the absence of a second act the
splitting of parts may make some sense. However, starting from Act II
Agony, we begin to realize that the Princes are not the noble, essentially
good people that we had envisioned, but self-aggrandizing young men. This
transformation becomes complete when Cinderella's Prince seduces the Baker's
Wife, when the wolf aspect of the prince's character must come out, and all
vestiges of nobility are lost. That does not make them bad people, but it
brings us down to earth about our expectations about princes. The union of
the prince/wolf reveals how they are two sides to the same coin, and that
our desire to make them an object of our wishes is to place our trust in
false ideals. The songs sung right after Little Red's and the Baker's
Wife's realization of what happened, "I Know Things Now" and "Moments in the
Woods" are both rife with uncertainty, and though morals are being stated,
these morals are not clear for either one - "I should have heeded her
advice, but he seemed so nice...Isn't it nice to know a lot, and a little
bit not" or "Why not both instead, there's the answer if you're clever...Let
the moment go, don't forget it for a moment, though". It is part of the
breaking down of absolute rights and wrongs.
On the flip side, who are the bad guys? The Witch is the obvious choice,
but most of that comes from her having the clearest vision of anyone in the
piece. She hides Rapunzel away because she wants to protect Rapunzel from
all the evil forces in the world, forces that eventually lead to Rapunzel's
death (though the Witch's overprotection cripples Rapunzel's coping skills,
and compounds the problem). The witch also wants to turn young so Rapunzel
will love her, and she wishes to throw Jack to the Giantess because
otherwise the Giantess will kill them all. In the second act, after
Rapunzel dies and leaves the Witch devoid of emotion, she is the voice of
pure reason that cuts through everyone's emotional defenses - telling the
stepmother that there is nowhere to hide, confronting Little Red about how
the wolf's mother feels, weighing the life of one against the lives of many.
The Witch's key line - "you're so nice, you're not good, you're not bad,
you're just nice. I'm not good, I'm not nice, I'm just right."
What about the Giantess? She comes down and threatens to kill everyone
until she finds the boy. But the unasked question is why was she down there
in the first place? The only reason she returns is to exact vengeance on a
boy who she took in and treated like her own child ("She gives you food and
she gives you rest, and she draws you close to her giant breast") because he
betrayed her trust by stealing her gold, her hen *and* her harp, and then
killed her husband. In the tree, Jack demands to kill the Steward, who
killed his mother, because "what he did was wrong, and he must be punished".
That double standard exposes our prejudices towards hoping that there's a
right and a wrong, and because of that often goes unnoticed. The Baker's
response says a lot about the Baker's personal growth - "Wrong things, right
things, who can say what's true". This revelation is especially salient
after the Baker's own experience with the Mysterious Man exposing the
Baker's own failings. However, who does she actually kill? She kills
Rapunzel, but that was because Rapunzel ran under her feet (I'm making the
assumption that since she was near-sighted, she would not have been aware of
a little woman running underneath, and therefore killed her maliciously),
and she kills the Narrator because she was deceived by the group into
thinking that he was Jack. She does a great deal of damage to property and
completely uproots several homes, but very little actual malicious damage to
people, and certainly not much more than the Steward or the
Baker/Granny/Little Red or even the birds that blinded the stepsisters.
And, that destruction actually assists Cinderella's awakening, for if her
tree had not been destroyed, she would not have been forced back into the
wood and then been exposed to her husband's deception. We deceive ourselves
so much by our emotional self-righteousness and our insistence on clear-cut
black/white that we lose sight of the gray. This is not to say that they
should have done what the Witch demanded, but rather to establish that pure
evil, like pure good, simply does not exist.
The key to accomplishing this goal is not only by knocking down the prince
or the giantess or the witch to our level, but by realizing that that we are
all on the same level. There is a constant attempt by the witch to equate
wolves and humans, not only in "Stay with Me", but in her accusation of
Little Red in the second act - "Since when are you so squeamish, how many
wolves have you carved up? (Little Red) A wolf's not the same. (W) Ask a
wolf's mother!" This humanizing of the wolf (why else is the wolf
anatomically correct?) has the effect of moderating a lot of the evil that
we normally associate with wolves, even though we don't really know a whole
lot about them. That is, after all, the big problem with wish fulfillment,
we often make wishes about something without realizing what exactly we are
wishing for. Then, there's no way to tell what is going to happen if and
when our wishes come true. The wolf cloak that Little Red shows off to Jack
is an attractive accouterment from her perspective, if you forget the fact
that the skin over her shoulders used to be a live creature. Her cape also
has the effect of numbing her to violence and inciting Jack to go get the
harp, which ends up in the death of the male Giant and the coming down of
the Giantess.... Obviously, the whole thing is interconnected. But, the
same can be said of the Prince, who is an object of the wishes of Cinderella
and the Baker's Wife. Let us not forget that Cinderella's Prince falls in
desperate love with Cinderella after only a short meeting ("we did nothing
but dance"). That, while a nice romantic concept, really is not the basis
of a long-term relationship, and explains not only Agony II, but his
infidelity in the wood. His explanation of his behavior says it all - "I
was raised to be charming, not sincere. I did not ask to be born a prince,
and I am not perfect. I am only human." In other words, he plays the
exterior part of ideal prince, but no one could possibly live it all.
This leads to the further examination of wish fulfillment. This biased view
of others also affects our view of ourselves, and what we perceive we need.
We cannot dream for ourselves as individuals, we must wish for what is good
for everybody, otherwise our desires become counterproductive. And it is
not as simple as saying "be careful what you wish for, you just might get
it", it is being cognizant of the fact that what we wish for are things we
truly do not need - and the more we pursue our wishes, the greater the
tendency to ignore what we possess in the search for what we want. If we
start thinking that there is just one piece missing from our lives, one task
left unaccomplished, then we fall into the dangerous trap of risking
success. What happens when you achieve that "final goal"? You're left
wondering "is that all" or "what next". After all, "wishes come true, not
free".
This does not mean that disaster has struck because the characters in the
play have 'strayed from the path'. The implications of that statement are,
as far as I can tell, that a) there is a "straight path", and that b) that
"straight path" is a superior one. Since we're getting into realms of
symbolism here, there's no way for any of us to be certain that we're
correct, but I would argue that the giants represent the fact that the
"straight path" which we THINK exists truly does not. The giant is not just
an obstacle to happiness and a plot device to make things interesting in the
second act, but a force that makes us realize that we cannot operate in
isolation. It is only by realizing that we are not alone, that we need
others to exist and survive, that the characters in the show are enabled to
defeat the giant. If there were a "straight path", we could exist alone,
each following our own independent paths, calling on others for help if an
obstacle suddenly impeded out progress, but then resuming the journey. The
giant causes a collision of their fates, intertwining them. That is the
reason the giant is down there in the first place. Everyone sought their
own private end in the first act, and everyone's independent actions
combined to make this disaster happen. Jack's killing of the first giant
would not have been possible if the MM hadn't climbed into the witch's
garden, causing the witch to curse the family, causing the Baker and the
Baker's Wife to seek a potion, causing the first deception of Jack, causing
the baker to kill the Wolf, whose skin Little Red showed off to Jack, who
had gone up a second time to get more gold because he wanted to get Milky
White, and if there were no sixth bean then Cinderella couldn't have thrown
it over her shoulder which meant that there would have been no way the
second giant could have come down, etc. etc. Their fates are already
intertwined, they just don't know it. Truly, no one is alone.
This song is the culmination of a number of vital themes, and resolves a lot
of issues that the show has brought up. Many people have dismissed this
song as Sondheim's descent into a Hammerstein-esque moralism (please don't
get me wrong, I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing). 'No One Is
Alone' definitely has that surface element of reassurance in there, with the
older, more experienced Baker and Cinderella comforting Jack and Little Red.
However, historical precedent indicates that Sondheim would not write a
simple "it's okay, I'm here so everything is all right" song. When he writes
a song like that, it tends to be laced with such irony of lyric or of
situation that it stings a nerve as opposed to merely uplifts. Other songs
that come to mind are "Not While I'm Around" from Sweeney (which for some
reason I find absolutely terrifying) and "Our Time" from Merrily. In 'No
One is Alone', there are several plot developments that give the song
additional significance.
First of all, at that point in the story, everybody *is* alone. The Baker
has lost his wife and his father, Cinderella has lost her tree and her
prince, Little Red has lost her mother and her grandmother, and Jack has
lost his mother. Plus they're all about to face the giant, a position from
which they are not certain they will escape alive. So when the Baker and
Cinderella sing this song, they are trying to strengthen themselves, as well
as the younger ones. The lyric is laced with this kind of self-awareness.
Cinderella sings "Mother cannot guide you/now you're on your own/only me
beside you/still you're not alone/no one is alone". That word, *still*,
coming after 'only me', is absolutely vital to the tone of the song. She is
not saying that 'since I'm here, you do not have to go through life by
yourself', she is saying 'despite the fact that I'm the only one who is
presently here to share your grief, you have not lost everything, because
nobody is completely alone'. She then continues with "sometimes people
leave you/halfway through the wood/others may deceive you/you decide what's
good/you decide alone/but, no one is alone." Cinderella is trying to
convince herself of the rightness of what she's saying to Little Red. They
are both drawing strength from each other. The same thing happens with Jack
and the Baker, where the Baker takes the responsibility to teach Jack that
he can't kill the Steward. This is the lesson he learned from his father,
not to run away. Finally the song ends with "someone is on your side" which
is left unresolved because of the arrival of the giant. Sondheim makes use
of this mystical "someone" throughout his work, most notably in 'Being
Alive' from Company. The first verse of that song mentions "someone to hold
you too close/someone to hurt you too deep", etc. There is a distance in
the use of that word "someone", which lends it a safe impersonality and
noncommitment. They don't say during 'No One Is Alone' that I'm on your
side, they say someone is on your side. It is not until after the song, and
their victory over the giant, that they commit to one another.
That is one of the other major purposes of 'No One Is Alone' - the idea that
you're not alone because all of your actions affect everybody else, and you
can't escape responsibility for those actions. People, like it or not, are
inextricably interconnected. We cannot act in a bubble, like the characters
in Act I and even the Baker's Wife during her 'moment in the wood' tend to
do. The scathing commentary made during Your Fault is especially powerful
because every single thing that is said is true. Everyone is at fault for
the events that have befallen, but the point is, who cares? At that point,
blame is irrelevant. That is what the Witch understands, "well if that's
the thing you enjoy/placing the blame/if that's the aim/give me the
blame/just give me the boy". Action needs to be taken. However, there is
the extremely positive message that it is only by working together, and
forming a community, that problems which are much too large for us
individually to overcome can be conquered together. Collective blame, but
also collective solution.
Tolerance and understanding come when individuals stop putting some people
down and others on pedestals. We cannot act in isolation, nor should we
want to for we can accomplish individually only a fraction of the things we
can accomplish communally. Appreciate what you have, realize what you want,
accept what you can't have, but discover what you are capable of. It is
only when we start accepting each other's faults and acknowledging each
other's strengths, then we can join together to combat the giants that face
us all.
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