MerryMerry Twelfth Night

Epiphany!
Let the joyous news be spread
The wicked old witch at last is dead.

Epiphany. No, not that one, this one. As all Catholics and theater folk know (thanks to Shakespeare, in the latter case), Epiphany is more than a maudlin soft rock song. In the West European tradition, January 6 is the twelfth and last night of Christmas. You know—the evening when, according to the Bible, wise men from the East (probably astrologers) were led by a star to the infant Jesus in Bethlehem, arriving twelve days after his birth to present gifts of gold (for a king), frankincense (for a priest), and myrrh (as a prescient symbol of suffering).

Historically a lot of quaint and bizarre traditions pertain to the holiday, such as placing three crosses lined with garlic and holy water on the lintel of doors to ward off god-knows-what. In our ostentatiously secular time, the more popular tradition is that you’re legally allowed at long last to rid your home of all holiday frippery.

It’s also the time when employers can legitimately remind us that they party’s over and we can hie ourselves back to work any time now. For most of us, that means hitting the ground running. The past two days have both been endless rounds of meetings and emails for me, but with some fun stuff in there, too: the Continuum reading (which went very well, thank you), a run-through of Apollo (fabulous), and an inspiring meeting of Willamette Writers.

But the biggest epiphany may be just around the corner: the maiden voyage of Portland’s Fertile Ground Festival of new work for the stage. Stay tuned for more about that.

“Epiphany!”

Wild night this past Friday, as the storm that slammed into North California and Southern Oregon arrived in Portland. What we had up here was nothing like the apocalyptic weather they had down there, and of course in Portlandia you rarely notice the rain anyway. But this was eerie, with winds tearing at your face and shrieking like banshees. I was on my way to an art opening at Studio 2507, and for a large swathe of the city’s southeast quarter, the power was out. My headlights were the only source of illumination, and visibility was low anyway because the rain was racing this way and that, like a colossal, sodden will-o-the-wisp. But I made it to the opening, where Alec Egan presided calmly over the opening of enthused, wall-to-wall art patrons admiring his latest work.

Alec’s famous parents were there, too: Robert Egan, from Los Angeles, who recently had a huge success with The Word Begins, a spoken word piece he developed and directed, and the glamorous Kate Mulgrew, here from New York for the occasion. Bob and I talked about L.A. and what an exciting, infinite, unknowable megalopolis it is. “But you,” Bob said, “get to participate in all this,” and he indicated the Friday night Clinton Street scene going on outside the gallery. I looked outside at the restaurants and the bars and social swim happening in the middle of this riotous rainstorm, and I thought: yeah, he’s right. I do feel fortunate to be here in Portland, where there is street life, where there are public spaces, where people are still curious about other people.

A bit of an epiphany, for me.

Now tonight is the historical Epiphany – the fabled Twelfth Night. The last evening of Christmastide, when traditionally the three wise men are supposed to have arrived in Bethlehem and inaugurated our custom of gift-giving. As a child, the story always puzzled me – what was the Baby Jesus supposed to do with a box full of myrrh? – but it did make a nice story.

At Portland Center Stage, we are about to tech our rep productions of Amy Freed’s The Beard of Avon and the Bard of Avon’s Twelfth Night. Which reminds me that traditionally Twelfth Night was often a wild time – the end of a holiday season that began with the Feast of All Hallows and extended through the Church-sanctioned Epiphany. Notwithstanding the Catholic Church’s efforts to realign the pagan origins of all this was Christian mythology, sometimes the evening was turned into a saturnalia, of sorts. In some communities it merged with the medieval Feast of Fools holiday, where the Lord of Misrule reigned and the normal order of things was topsy-turvy.

You can read about this on the marvelous blog Upstart Dramaturg, where production dramaturg extraordinaire Kim Crow investigates the party-like atmosphere of Shakespeare’s play that his original audiences would have expected from its title alone.

So even though it’s Sunday night and tomorrow morning means the “holiday season” is officially over, light a candle against the retrenchment of normalcy. We still have two more months of dark, dank nights. Make the most.