The following is a statement from your production dramaturg on: “why this play now?” Examining the cultural moment in which we are creating theatre, what does it mean to be approaching this text at this moment in time? 

WHY THIS PLAY NOW?  

by Arushi Grover 

“You must really love her. You woke me up!” – MISTRESS LUNDIE (Brigadoon, Act II, Scene 5, Page 28)

Lerner and Loewe’s Brigadoon asserts a connection between the Highland clans’ experience of the devastating Battle of Culloden and two American soldiers’ experience of the devastation of World War II. These two societies—reeling from grief, loss, trauma, and the death of a way of living for a more cynical worldview—meet our own, in our production of Brigadoon, as we reel from our own devastation: the COVID-19 pandemic. 

We have experienced isolation and a loss of community in our social-distancing. And we have experienced yearning and the loss of expectation in seeing our future change so quickly. Remember the before? Remember what we already know? There’s a familiarity and comfort in the past that roots us in the present when the future remains uncertain, just as Tommy heeds Fiona’s words and leaves Jane’s modern forward-thinking mindset for the now and been. 

We do not know how long this global pandemic will be a presence in our lives. We live out of time, an endless abyss of present, without a past to connect it to or a future to expect. Is it slipping out of our fingers, grains of sands falling through the cracks? Or is a concrete shell, encasing us with claustrophobia?

Or—is it ours to wield? The magic that allows for Brigadoon to exist for one day every hundred years seems unchangeable and inevitable, a steady march on. And yet… Tommy returns in the final scene, and Mistress Lundies remarks, “You must really love her. You woke me up!” (II.5.28). It is love, the reaching out for community, and faith that grounds us in the present, that can bend the laws of nature, the bounds of space and time, to allow for miracles… and happiness. 

And Penn State, just like the town of Brigadoon, lives in a verdant valley, a town that pops up for a while and then disappears. What happens when we feel like we don’t belong? What happens when we want to leave? What happens when someone new comes? 

Brigadoon is a chance to explore community, faith, cynicism, and desire, and we can keep in mind the final words of the musical, “In thy valley, there’ll be love” (II.5.28). We can ground ourselves and our community in the comfort of the present.