My early teens was when I think I started wondering about grand mysteries of the universe: life, love, death, God, and the whole she-bang.  I remember staying up late and discussing these things with some of my best friends.  There must be some clock position, long past when someone probably should have already gone home, when conversations routinely turn towards the heavy stuff.

And I remember having my first long-term girlfriend and spending hours on the phone.  Lord knows what we had to talk about when I was fifteen, but I’m sure we drifted into questions about the whole she-bang.  What I’d pay for transcripts of any of those talks.  Even if just to reacquaint my modern self with my teen self.  I wonder what he’d have to say about how I turned out so far?

In college, everybody was gaining some years, but I remember still sometimes having those “she-bang” conversations.  Usually a little boozy and late at night.  I still can hear my older brother talking about a graduate school friend of his and how every discussion they had always inexorably led to the topics of sex and death.

I unfortunately don’t often have those discussions anymore and I wonder if many adults do – outside of emergency circumstances.  So far as I can tell, other people my age pretty much seem to believe what they believe and don’t typically want to discuss it with anyone who doesn’t believe pretty much the same thing.  But I regularly miss those discussions.  Exploring the questions, for me, may be more important than the answers.  Why don’t we do this anymore?

Which serves as my introduction to the Birmingham Festival Theatre’s production of Cormac McCarthy’s The Sunset Limited.  Cormac McCarthy is recently famous for writing No Country for Old Men, which was made into a darn good movie.  The play generally concerns a New York City white guy, named White, who attempts suicide by throwing himself in front of a train, the Sunset Limited, but is instead saved by a black guy, named Black, who takes him back to his Harlem apartment to protect him from further mischief.  I had a hard time taking my eyes off Robert W. Hill, who plays Black, although McCarthy’s play maybe seems structured to give him the lion’s share of meaningful and interesting dialogue.  They spend the time discussing life, death, God, and “the lingering scent of divinity” – just two guys who barely know one another alone on a theater stage.

The show is strikingly different and may be worth seeing solely for that reason.  If you want action, explosions, and a chance to not worry too much about a plot, go see the Star Trek movie (It’s good, too).  For me, though, I walked out of this play with a pretty decent scratch-down of my itch for some solid, metaphysical discourse.  Plus, it can be whoppingly funny in places; it’s not all weight and darkness.  I’ve recently been trying to read Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and the Sunset Limited feels crafted in full to address and respond to Hamlet’s most enduringly vexing questions – worth exploring here.  In fact, I could envision the character of White himself contemplating similar words:

To be, or not to be, that is the question -
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them.  To die, to sleep -
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to – ’tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wished.  To die, to sleep -
To sleep, perchance to dream.  Ay, there’s the rub,
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause.  There’s the respect
That makes calamity of so long life,
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
Th’oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely,
The pangs of disprized love, the law’s delay,
The insolence of office, and the spurns
That patient merit of th’unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin?  Who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscovered country from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will,
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Then fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all….

Thanks to Carl Sosnin and the Birmingham Festival Theatre for both letting me into the show and helping me battle the parking authority.