4 April 2009: Goodwin, Two Men of Florence
Matinee. Huntington Theatre Company (Boston University). Directed by Edward Hall.
Brecht tried it, some years ago, in his Life of Galileo, with far different ends and different results; it is one of the best examples of his attempts to “make it strange” (the so-called Verfremdungseffekt). Brecht’s Galileo is an un-ideal character, with gross imperfections and robust fleshly habits. As in another Brechtian dramatic essay explaining the drab human truth behind history, The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, his aim was to show that society progresses only when people brave up to the challenges that face them; or to put it in more negative terms, there comes point after point when people could stand up, practice some heroism, and prevent tyrants from succeeding (Arturo Ui is a mask for Adolph Hitler); but they don’t do it. Of the two plays, it seems to me Brecht’s Galileo is more subtle, less a one-note lesson than a meditation on what it may finally take to turn the world in a more productive, humane, and intellectually responsible direction.
The different endings of the two plays are instructive, and enlightening. The last we see of Brecht’s character (in the penultimate scene), he bitterly and scornfully accuses himself of treason to his profession, and even goes so far as to speculate that he held a stronger hand than he thought he did. Over against that, his faithful student, Andrea, leaves Italy reading Galileo’s book (his ultimate defense of Copernicus’s system, which Galileo has had to disavow), but stopping at the border to prove to some young boy that a woman they taunt as a witch is not really a witch — and seeing the boy, against the evidence of his senses, persist in his delusion. That’s the ending of Brecht’s play, sardonic to the last moment.
Richard N. Goodwin’s play ends with Galileo, having recanted and having been placed in house arrest for the remainder of his life, forbidden to publish ever again, uproariously enjoying a wry joke with his faithful companion and former student, Father Benedetto Castelli, and then saying to him, “Come; let’s go. We have much work to do.” At which point they stride vigorously up stage into the descending but promising darkness. Instead of the depressing ignominy and defeat experienced by Brecht’s character, who feels he has deeply betrayed himself and all who stand for free scientific inquiry, and who leaves us nary a glimmer of hope that some good might eventually come out of this shameful defeat, we have a character who, only a few moments ago, has been harshly condemned and sent into perpetual exile by the cardinal who presides over the Holy Inquisition, and whose physical state is one of rapidly declining strength, can now show us that the human spirit is truly and ultimately invincible.
It is meant to make us feel happy and relieved — and indeed the entire play has headed itself toward this perpetually hopeful end — but the true effect of Goodwin’s last sc