The 'Danse Macabre' Gets a Chorus Line

Most students and faculty agree that there is simply too much going on at Princeton, that the place is "overscheduled." For faculty the crunch hour is often 4:30 p.m., when on many days we must choose among a nonnegotiable department meeting, two "important" committee meetings and four special lectures or seminars that it would be a shame to miss, and probably rude as well.

Overscheduling extends to weekends. In recent years I've made a habit of taking in the moving Memorial Service held on the afternoon of Alumni Day, at which the community solemnly remembers its dead among the alumni, faculty, students and staff. Naturally, after forty years of service, I find each year among most categories a longer list of names personally known, and sometimes very dear to me. This memorial is one of the rare events in which we remember our organic institutional catholicity, as opposed to our engineered institutional "diversity," and our spectacular chapel, a kind of cadet Amiens, exercises its intended grandeur.

It was my inward intention to go along to this service on Saturday; but the intention had been recorded in no outward book when on Friday I ran into an old friend and student from the Class of '69. This man and his wife have been good friends of Princeton and great spiritual and material supporters of one of Princeton's undergraduate treasures, Theatre Intime. We had a cup of coffee, during which they invited me and my wife to a special benefit performance, the following day, of Intime's production of "A Chorus Line."

The show was scheduled for 2:30 p.m. on Saturday, the Memorial Service for 3 p.m. Only on Saturday morning, after I had accepted a gift of tickets not negligible in value, did I realize that I was double-booked. Since the theater is hardly a hundred yards from the church I could hardly anesthetize my guilty conscience as we squeezed into the "will call" desk at Murray Dodge.

In general I am indifferent to the cute solipsism of art that is all about itself, of novels that are about a novelist who is writing a novel about a novelist who is . . . but in "Chorus Line" there is more Geoffrey Chaucer than André Gide. As in the "Canterbury Tales" there is a linear plot. Through a process of interview and audition a director makes his final selections for the chorus of a Broadway show, choosing eight dancers from a pool of candidates twice that size. This is interspersed with the "roadside drama" of the "tales" of individual stock characters — the ditz, the sensitive gay, the middle class brat, the ethnic aspirant, the once-and-future girlfriend, etc. — and their bilateral interactions. The music is uneven, but there is only one really disgusting number, and the finale was dynamite. Mainly there was a great deal of very energetic, competent and well-choreographed dancing, the incrementally disciplined exercise of gorgeous young bodies.

Theatre Intime has its name for a reason. The "space" is compact, not to say tiny. The idea of staging a blockbuster musical within it struck me, in anticipation, as about as promising as launching a major Rockettes' review on the platform of a freight elevator. But the directors, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins and Ashley Soloff, handled the challenge ingeniously and made the world their stage. The student players were beautiful and talented. Their energetic performances were vigorous, vital, vibrant, vivacious — all those "V-words" that connect, etymologically, with life itself.

What makes being a college professor the greatest role in the repertory is actually the theatrical backdrop, always changing yet ever the same, of succeeding generations of vital, beautiful, promising young people. To gaze upon that gently meandering river of youth, in vacant or in pensive mood, as upon its high-speed sequel in the annual P-rade, invites thoughts poignant as well as happy; but seldom have I been more aware of the web of community between the quick and the dead of Princeton than on this Alumni Day.

Death is almost always sad, and youthful death tragic. After the show, which ends with an ironic number in which the dancers, having earlier been sketched in their individual personalities, twist and turn in the utter anonymity of a well-rehearsed conformity, I did get a copy of the printed leaflet for the memorial service. The undergraduate necrology ends with the names of two sophomores, one a suicide, the other snatched away in a capricious accident, who were actually younger than some of the dancers on the Intime stage. That of course was a reminder, if one was needed, that "in the midst of life we are in death." But to enjoy the high-strutting, gold-spangled dancers was to appreciate also the observed truth, that in the midst of death we are in life. John V. Fleming is the Louis W. Fairchild '24 professor of English. He can be reached at jfleming@princeton.edu. His column appears on Mondays.