The Sound of Flapping Wings

The sound of the flapping wings serves as

The sense memory of what I recall, when I think of Angels in America.

How is it that it's pull and and it's push

Can still be so profound decades later?

Perhaps the power of epic theatrical art provides 

The ability to still bowl me over. To stop me in my daily tracks.

You forget your everyday-ness with some degree of confusion,

The way you forget where you put your glasses.

And in that way, sometimes—without your glasses—

You see more than you do when you have them on.

And you experience with new senses

Emotions and feelings you forgot you possess. 

Oddly, the experience can be so rare, so important and valuable

That you realize theatre—to be valuable and meaningful—can be more than

The written word, the kitchen sink drama.

Theatre can aspire to the supernatural and the expansive possibility of what could be.

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Subsequent Performances

*to Jonathan

Once when I knew so little,

My boyfriend said to me he was reading about Subsequent Performances.

You see a performance and the art evolves over them

Over the Subsequent Performances.

So you see a theatrical expressio—be it singing, dance, theatre—

And you see more in it the next time you see it. 

Not more meaning, necessarily, although that can happen too.

You see an extension of the original work, reimagined in time.

Before your eyes, through subsequent performances

You find new meaning and new light in the darkness where art evolves.

Subsequent Performances by Jonathan Miller

From the Publisher's Weekly review:

• "he examines the resonances that a play or opera presents to later generations of theatergoersthe period of its 'afterlife'''
• "Miller's advocacy for the virtues of live theater is passionate..."

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