Something There Is…

Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun,
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.

Menders is inspired in part by “Mending Wall“, perhaps the most famous poem by that most American of poets, Robert Frost. Aimes (my character) recites it piecemeal during the play, providing a scaffolding on which the play rests — rather ironically, given the poem’s increasingly ambivalent tone towards construction. As we’ve moved off-book, the poem has been very much on my mind and on my lips. Indeed, last night’s rehearsal was dedicated almost entirely to figuring out just how those poetry sections work in a dramatic context, how they arc over the course of the play. Why this poem? What does Aimes hope to accomplish by its recital? There must be some action or epiphany he hopes to elicit in Corey, his fellow Mender; some path she is on that needs must be altered. But what?

And then I got home and saw this on my Facebook Wall Newsfeed: an MFA photography student went to our mutual hometown in the Catskills to document the remains of the resort industry there. Sullivan County’s Dirty Dancing-era heyday, when over 500 hotels and resorts sustained the local economy, came to a crashing halt in the early 80’s when suddenly-cheap airfare to the tropics obliterated demand for regional tourism. Now the resorts of our parents’ generation — and if your parents were Northeast upper-middle-class Jews, they almost certainly came here for many a summer in their youth — have been left to that frozen-ground-swell and boulder-spilling sun.

Lower Lobby, The Pines Hotel, South Fallsburg, NY, by Marisa Scheinfeld

Notably, while at first the images seem to show only decay, there is in fact abundant greenery here. This is in stark contrast to images of abandoned urban sites, like the (now demolished) Revere Sugar Factory in Red Hook, Brooklyn, which sit in a palate of faded grey insulation and inky-black shadow. There is beauty in this, no doubt, but it is a cold, stark kind of beauty — a beauty built of loss and destruction, of the lack of what was once there. It is not the organic, vital, almost deliberate undermining — the replacing — that we see in the poem, or upstate. There, grass sprouts beneath a beach chair at the (once-)indoor pool at Grossinger’s; elsewhere, two-foot-tall weeds have shot up from the tiled floor. Trees have reclaimed the tennis area at the Laurels Hotel; it is now more forest than courts. Some items of value have been hauled away, some spay-painting vandals have had their way with the pool plaster, and the venerable Concord Hotel itself (1,500 rooms!) was razed in 2008 to make way for a casino, but mostly the resorts have been left to quietly fall into ruin amidst the mountains; where they have, new life has emerged.

Something there is that doesn’t love a wall
And wants it down. I could say “Elves” to him,
But it’s not elves exactly…

In the regimented post-American society of Menders, “Mending Wall” is forbidden knowledge (as are all frivolities: novels, non-patriotic music, different kinds of fruit) yet its title lives on, shorn of the poem’s subversive context, as one of the most prestigious jobs in the community. Like Frost’s wall, and these abandoned resorts, the poem has crumbled until only its barest outlines remain.

But still, poking up between the tiles left to rot, there is growth. Or at least, the possibility of it.

Does Aimes succeed? Will Corey be the factory, or the resort? Once you’ve seen the show, which opens for previews on the 19th and for performances on the 21st, I hope you’ll come back and share your thoughts.

– Isaiah Tanenbaum