Theater companies across the United States are readying productions of Richard III, An Enemy of the People, and other shows that can be pitched as a gloss on current events. Unfortunately, the show that offers the best response to our frenzied times is closing this weekend: Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812.
Great Comet is a strange show. The musical covers only 80 or so pages of Tolstoy’s doorstopper tome. The two title characters share a scene only at the very end of the musical. The comet of the title is referenced only in the final song. Great Comet has the structure of a big, crowd-pleasing Broadway show, with raucous numbers and (semi-clad) chorus members bounding through the aisles. But all of its artistry is mustered to tell a very small story.
There’s plenty of drama in the section of War and Peace that David Malloy and his collaborators chose to adapt. The show includes a duel, an interruptive elopement, and a suicide attempt. But none of these moments are placed at the center of the show.
Natasha begins the show betrothed to the absent Prince Andrey (off fighting Napoleon). She is seduced by Anatole (an infatuated rake), breaks her engagement, plans to elope with Anatole, is prevented, and is jilted by Andrey. Meanwhile, Pierre is unhappy, cuckolded (by his debauched wife—Anatole’s sister), and fairly drunk.
As a synopsis, the show sounds conventional enough (though Pierre doesn’t appear to merit his place in the title). But Natasha’s story doesn’t have any of the endings that might be anticipated. Once Anatole’s elopement with Natasha is foiled, he never shares another scene with her. Although Andrey returns, embittered by Natasha’s betrayal, he directs Pierre to return the letters Natasha has written to him, and doesn’t exchange a single line with her.
Instead of a final rupture or reconciliation with either her former fiancé or her reprobate lover, she receives Pierre, who has come to return Andrey’s letters. Pierre confides to the audience that “till then … he had tried to despise her, but now he felt such pity for her that there was no room in his soul for reproach.”
Natasha is wretched, and tells Pierre that, “all is over for me.” In response, Pierre then delivers the only spoken words of the sung-through show, “If I were not myself, but the brightest, handsomest best man on earth, and if I were free—I would get down on my knees this minute and ask you for your hand and for your love.”
But even after this declaration, the show doesn’t come to a conventional climax. Natasha and Pierre’s marriage is hundreds of pages away (and Andrey will reconcile with Natasha and die before that comes to pass). The change in Natasha is simply this, as she describes it, “For the first time in many days, I weep tears of gratitude, tears of tenderness, tears of thanks.”
Nothing has been solved for Natasha or Pierre, but in their encounter, they are both touched by grace. The noise and excitement of the show falls away, and they are both filled with a reverent awe as they each see the other clearly.
Great Comet has set itself the task of imbuing an internal movement of the heart with the same dramatic weight as a marriage, a murder, or any other more conventional climax. Malloy and his team are re-enchanting their audience, inviting them to marvel at the smallness and gentleness of forgiveness.
It’s easy to lose the knack of being fascinated by these quiet moments. In Orthodoxy, G.K. Chesterton writes, “Boys like romantic tales; but babies like realistic tales—because they find them romantic. In fact, a baby is about the only person, I should think, to whom a modern realistic novel could be read without boring him.”
At Doxacon, a Christian conference on science fiction and fantasy, I heard similar sentiments from the members of a panel I was moderating on “Unbeautiful Truths.” I asked my panelists (two authors and a creative writing professor) to talk about what truths they struggled to share with others (in their writing or in their friendships) out of fear that their audience would not find that truth attractive. The panelists first mentioned chastity, but then they wound around to storgē, one of the four classical loves.
Storgē is the love we would describe as affection or fondness. It grows not from an erotic passion or an exalted, Christ-like love, but through simple familiarity. It’s the warmth we feel for a classmate or even for a tree that you pass every day on your walk to work.
It’s an undramatic kind of love, and the Doxacon panelists thought it was undervalued, particularly in fiction. It doesn’t lend itself to storytelling, and that can lead us to leave it out of the way we understand our own lives. Storgē is generous because it is arbitrary—it is a love that isn’t born out of the merit of the beloved, but from the simple presence of it.
What Natasha and Pierre share isn’t really the fondness of storgē, but it’s a similarly humble love. All the bombast of the show, all the ripped fishnets on the dancers, all the dumplings tossed into the audience are all meant to catch our attention and redirect it.
The show offered audiences the chance to turn away from the churning energy and decadence of Anatole and his lecherous friends to the small, still love shared between Natasha and Pierre. In an increasingly noisy world, it’s necessary but difficult shift. As the curtain comes down, it falls to us to restage Great Comet’s climax, looking at each other with tenderness, prepared to be startled by the beauty we see.
Leah Libresco Sargeant is the author of Arriving at Amen: Seven Catholic Prayers Even I Can Offer.
