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The Fantasticks: Plato’s Allegory of the Cave

The Fantasticks: Plato’s Allegory of the Cave

In 2008, six decades immediately after the closing of Tom Jones and Harvey Schmidt’s Off-Broadway generation of The Fantasticks, the beloved musical returned to New York Town. Forty-two several years, it appears to be, was not a lengthy sufficient operate soon after all for this record breaker, and on top of that, no a single appeared sad with the conclusion.

When in the early 1960s the musical initially arrived to fruition, the defeat technology saw itself in the play’s pressure of opposites–the ideology of the younger compared to the ideology of the in excess of-30s–and the dissonance brought on by the present political unrest of that time. The perform reached out to the generational demands of the ’60s and continued even beyond. But now in 2012 we are going through a unique type of turbulance and much has improved due to the fact The Fantasticks was written. So why has this musical endured? Why are unable to we get sufficient of its traces and lyrics? What is our connection? Why are we so in love with this enjoy?

A Common Plot

The reply may possibly lie in the underlying archetypal plot of the script. Act I opens in the sweet innocence of moonlight Act II opens in the harsh actuality of day. The boy Matt and the girl Luisa thrive on their illusions in the first act but face a agonizing awakening in the 2nd. El Gallo, “the rooster” and skilled abductor hired by Hucklebee, ushers in the mild of day, actually but also symbolically. He has come to direct Matt and Luisa on independent journeys in which they will leave their innocence powering and turn out to be initiates into the planet of expertise.

In Moonlight

Matt’s and Luisa’s fathers construct a make feel feud and create a wall among their residences in order to motivate their young children to fall in love, relying on the outdated temptation of the forbidden to do the job. It performs, and when the two fans meet up with in top secret, in moonlight of system, they pledge their like to each other. To create the illusion of settling the feud, Matt’s father Hucklebee engages El Gallo to phase the abduction of Luisa, making it possible for his son Matt to rescue her heroically and close the ruse. Luisa’s father Bellomy agrees, but a delighted ending in moonlight are unable to be authentic.

In Daylight

“Their moon was cardboard,” El Gallo tells us. In the daylight, life can take on a a lot less delicate tone and fact casts a severe glare. All four sing, “What at night appears oh, so scenic may be cynic significantly also quickly.” Suddenly dissatisfied, the boy and girl component ways to come across a answer to their restlessness. Matt ventures off to consume and gamble and uncover a shining globe comprehensive of adventure even though Luisa longs to be kissed upon the eyes by El Gallo who will get her on a journey to see the world, dancing for good and eternally. To do so, she will have to place up a mask to avoid her from seeing the reality. When Luisa refuses to take this world as only an illusion, the trickery of smoke and mirrors, El Gallo exacts the regular cost for self-deception: she ought to give up what is most precious to her, in this situation the necklace that belonged to her mother. Sacrifices rendered, Luisa eventually satisfies Matt, a type of Prodigal Son, on the highway back home, and he, also, admits he has been silly. The female and the boy have been deeply hurt but they have also witnessed the gentle of wisdom by their losses. They sing, “All my wildest dreams multiplied by two… they have been you.” The boy and lady return property from their journey to locate their desires had presently been fulfilled from the start. With this new consciousness, it commences to snow, a image of new beginnings, new daily life.

The Allegory of the Cave

If the plot appears common, it need to. It was borrowed from the fifth century B.C. allegory of the cave, E-book VII of Plato’s Republic. Plato describes it to his university student:

Human beings are chained from birth inside a cave illuminated only by a hearth burning near the entrance and casting shadows on the back wall, which the prisoners feel to be the only reality they have at any time identified. The moment launched, they reluctantly depart the comfort and ease of their illusions. They are led out by a figure who teaches them about the earth outdoors the cave, dragging them up a steep hill so that, acquiring been prepared little by very little to alter their eyes to escalating sources of mild, they may possibly at last glimpse specifically at the sunlight.

Lifestyle/Loss of life/Rebirth… Once again

The allegorical character of El Gallo in the engage in is not human at all but a symbol of the selling price of our individual hamartia, the choices we have made, not understanding at the time by means of ignorance or maybe a absence of consciousness that they were faults. As Plato so wisely instructs, building faults in judgment is usually the only way we will improve up and facial area the real environment, on regardless of what degree that may well be. This everyday living/demise/rebirth motif reminds us all over again and yet again of the hero’s journey, the cycle of the seasons in which Persephone emerges from Hades in the spring to deliver new everyday living to the land, and the healing of wounds in the five phases of romance that gives hope to all of our relationships. The plot isn’t new–some say it is genetically encoded in us–however we will eternally be intrigued and even astonished by its familiarity.

Most likely we really like The Fantasticks mainly because, in our personal naively narcissistic way, we recognize ourselves in the characters’ each and every pleasure, their each individual mistake, and in the conclusion their humble gratitude for next probabilities. Each individual time we view the play or even hear to its delightful score, we are reminded of where we have been but also of where we are heading. It is not astonishing that Homer expressed these pretty ideas generations back: “Even his griefs are a joy long right after to a person that remembers all that he wrought and endured.” El Gallo, too, opens and closes the engage in with the lyrics, ” Deep in December it truly is great to try to remember… “

The Film

For the significantly less lucky who have hardly ever observed a phase effectiveness of The Fantasticks, Tom Jones and Harvey Schmidt wrote the screenplay as effectively, which was released in 1995. Only a slight departure from the participate in with a more comprehensive and versatile location, the film necessitates significantly less creativeness but does contain all but a single of the similar musical quantities and some extra lines, though the poetic good quality has not been retained. In the film, El Gallo is the grasp of a carnival, the darkened tent which parallels Plato’s cave really effectively. What the screenwriters do carry out, to their credit history, is a heightened edition of the symbolism. For illustration, when Matt and Luisa sing “Shortly It truly is Gonna Rain,” they are sitting down underneath a tree while superior in its branches previously mentioned them, El Gallo stands, orchestrating almost everything from sound effects and a choir to the magical fairy dust he sprinkles on the enthusiasts below. The tree is El Gallo’s daily life, so it is ideal that, when he must lead Luisa out the allegorical cave in Act II, the classes he teaches her commence when she climbs up and sits beside him in this quite identical tree. Simply because she wants the thrilling, a bit unsafe lifestyle she thinks he has, she asks him, there in the tree, to consider her with him and dance without end and at any time.

For Pupils

Symbolism abounds in the course of the film in the tree, the eyelid kiss, the necklace, the two residences and the wall involving them, the aged Romeo and Juliet movie flickering on the wall of the dim carnival tent, the street leading to the carnival and property all over again, the mask, the close of smoke and mirrors magic, and the dances of life and illusion done throughout. College students as youthful as middle faculty age who look at this film have an option to study about the allegory of the cave and the myriad of archetypal symbols that pervade the screenplay in a way that no other piece of literature can introduce pretty so efficiently. Bawdy carnival humor in one particular short scene, having said that, need to be omitted for its lack of propriety as perfectly as its pointless contribution to the perform. Yet, students who see this movie will in no way check out one more one yet again with no noticing the secret language of symbolism, and at the time symbolism communicates to learners in movie, their understanding of archetypal literature is one stage absent.

For more facts about The Fantasticks, see the following:

Hamilton, Edith. Mythology. Boston: Again Bay, Minor, Brown and Co., 1969.

Jones, Tom and Harvey Schmidt, The Fantasticks. New York: Applause, 1964.

Plato. “The Republic II.” Trans. Benjamin Jowett. The Portable Plato. Ed. Scott Buchanan. New York: Penguin, 1977, 327-28.

O’Connor, Susan. Dance of Language. Bloomington, IN, 2008.