Dark of the Moon

We open Dark of the Moon at Dublin Coffman High School in two days...as usual, the past few days have been fraught with last minute set painting, costume adjustments, prop gathering, etc etc etc...but the kids are ready, more than ready, to get this bad boy up in front of paying customers...this is my "From The Director", my thoughts on the play...

From the Director

Dark of the Moon is a supernatural fantasy tale that is made up of equal parts of Romeo and Juliet, The Crucible, Harry Potter, and old campfire tales that travel down the years, growing in embellishment with each telling. At its core is the old Celtic song Barbara Allen, though the playwrights rewrote the story of the song to suit the action of the play. It has a dark heart—one critic said its characters were the characters of the musical Oklahoma, if their true natures were really shown. I consider it a sort of satire of the old morality plays, in which the best people in the community are the worst people in the community—rather like The Beggars Opera, in which thieves and murderers are the cream of society.

The students and I had a number of conversations early on about the human world of Buck Creek, and the supernatural world that lurks on top of Mt. Baldy. We proceeded from the position that this is a “heightened” existence, meaning that it is a fantasy, and makes certain assumptions for the sake of the story that bear little relation to the “real” world—the Christianity depicted in this play is not the Christianity that is practiced in our churches. The wants and needs of the citizens are skewed and are not always logical (witness their dialogue which echoes the repeats and refrains of old songs)—even the mythology of the witchcraft practiced in this play is unlike any other “witchy” stories. This led us to discussions of “given circumstances”, and what constitutes “ truth” on the stage—and our conclusion is simply that, for the purposes of performance, “truth” on stage always trumps “truth” in real life. This is why characters in musicals break out into song at regular intervals, or Shakespearean characters speak in iambic pentameter as a matter of course. It’s why a magical school exists to teach young Britons how to hone their witchcraft, even why three bears keep a traditional house which is ransacked by a blonde child.

The play has survived, since it was written in the 1940s, because, simply, there isn’t another play quite like it. It has been the source of controversy over the years, since a young Paul Newman first played the Witch-boy on Broadway. Back in the 1970s, high school productions of Dark of the Moon were picketed or even shut down. By the 1980s, it became a staple in high school repertories-- Dublin Coffman last performed it in 1989, roughly five years before most of tonight’s cast was born.

At its core is a love story, between Barbara Allen, whose reputation for “easy virtue” has reached beyond her town to the dark beings who live up on old Baldy, and John the Witch-Boy, who, riding his eagle one night, looked down among the human world and was instantly smitten by her. Their story is one of an attempt at redemption, a kind of reset of their lives, a belief that true love can cure all evils. But as we see, it isn’t the moonlight that illumines and defines their tale, but rather the dark shadow from its other side.