Choose your own reaction
If/Then co-creator is suspicious of theatre that tries to elicit identical emotions from its audience
At 38, Elizabeth, a newly divorced city planner who has just moved from Phoenix to New York, is looking to revitalize her life. Standing in Madison Square Park, she faces a dilemma. Should she: start calling herself Beth and follow her old friend Lucas to meet some community activists? (Go to paragraph 2.) Or call herself Liz, and follow her new friend Kate to get coffee and listen to a “sexy” busking guitarist? (Go to paragraph 3.) Or should she do both? (Read on.)
2. Beth and Lucas end up at a demonstration and get arrested. But she also gets a call from her ex, Stephen, who offers her a job as a city planner. She takes the position, hoping she can make a difference.
3. Liz and Kate’s subway train gets delayed by Lucas’s demonstration. She misses Stephen’s call — and hence the job — but meets a cute doctor in the subway car.
Both of Elizabeth’s timelines appear in the musical If/Then, written by the lyrics/music team of Brian Yorkey and Tom Kitt (whose Next to Normal won the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Drama).
It runs at the Princess of Wales Theatre until May 8.
The same actress (Jackie Burns) plays Beth and Liz and, through costume changes, musical hints and other subtle cues, we’re led in alternating scenes through her two lives. At a time when few Broadway musicals are based on an original story, this once goes out on a limb.
Kitt, who composed the music and devised the story, was a fan of Choose Your Own Adventure books as a boy. He recalls “always skipping back when I perished.”
But If/Then, he explains, owes more to the O. Henry short story “Roads of Destiny,” published in 1909, in which a budding French poet walks up to a crossroads. Should he take the left path or the right, or turn back? The story includes all three timelines, every one of which — spoiler alert — ends up with the hero dying from the same gun. It’s as if Henry is commenting on the irony of fate and suggesting there are limits to free will.
If/Then, meanwhile, is more invested in the possible impacts of our choices. Elizabeth is facing down middle age and questions abound: Should she be safe and responsible or pursue her dreams? Should she settle down and have children or remain fancy-free? Her friends face similar problems and the stakes are high: one character, for instance, is in the army and faces danger on an overseas tour.
“It felt to us,” says Yorkey, “we should go right to the heart of some of the brutal and life-changing choices that some people have to make.”
Sliding Doors, this isn’t; not only is that tale of two Gwyneth Paltrows (one blond, one brunette) rather fluffy, but it also hinges on chance, not choice. In one timeline she misses a subway train as a girl stands in her way; in the other, the girl moves and she catches it. If/Then’s forked narrative allows us to imagine the effects of our own choices on the lives of those around us and also, potentially, on a grander scale.
But why don’t more works use this strategy? Outside of video games, many-worlds science fiction stories and comic books, a few novels go there (e.g., Lionel Shriver’s The PostBirthday World or John Fowles’ postmodern The French Lieutenant’s Woman) and Yorkey cites an episode of Frasier. The Madness jukebox musical Our House is an alternate time line precursor to If/ Then.
Generally, though, we expect to be told one story at a time, with linear cause and effect, and they’re often designed to push specific buttons. Yorkey says he’s “suspicious of shows, particularly musicals, that strive to get the exact same reaction in all 2,000 people in the theatre.”
Admittedly, some If/Then reviewers complain it can be a challenge to figure out which narrative we’re in at any given time. Others have noted that challenges can be a virtue.
Says Yorkey: “I’ve always loved theatre that makes you lean forward.”