THE LENNON PLAY: IN HIS OWN WRITE
Yes, I cried when I heard about John Lennon’s assassination. I remember that moment very clearly, though it’s not a what-were-you-doing-when-Kennedy-was-shot sort of memory. That is, it doesn’t seem especially historical to me: my way of sharing in yet another McLuhanite mass trauma. To the contrary, it seems like a personal memory of a personal loss. As incredibly, snivelingly hokey as it sounds, I feel as if Lennon was a friend of mine.
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He wasn’t, of course. I never met the guy. But even so, it isn’t too much to say I grew up with him. From 1964, when I was 10 and he was 24, to 1980, when I was 26 and he was dead, Lennon and I carried on a lively if one-sided correspondence through records and movies, books, magazines, and news items. He was always my candidate for favorite Beatle, his playful, raw, experimental music always more exciting to me than any McCartney croon. I absorbed the bed-in, the visit to India, the psychedelic years, and the house-husband phase. I noted the primal screams, the tentative radicalism, Sean’s birth, and all the albums. I was embarrassed for him over junk like “Glass Onion,” and that smarmy little joke about passing the audition at the end of Let It Be. I even liked Yoko.
The basic problem is in the structure. Faced with the technical challenge of turning Lennon’s coy, clever, aggressively frivolous writings into a unified piece of theater with some kind of motion to it, the adapters decided to treat those writings as autobiography: Lennon appears here as a character called “Me,” growing up absurd in post-blitz Liverpool; his stories about fat budgies and maladjusted broomers’ sons are presented as the coded confessions of a talented, tormented kid on his way to becoming a rock ‘n’ roll genius.
