Spring and then Autumn in the Blink of an Eye

“My Life is a Sonnet” and a cool sip of “Limonade”

If one is over the age of 40 and is or was patriotic, there may be a sense of mourning – not for the country that ever was, but for the promise of a country that could be. This may feel different next summer, but for now, the anxiety that some treasure is being irrevocably lost, or looted, runs through the nation’s bloodstream like leukemia.

If one is over the age of 40 and not particularly engaged politically or patriotically, there is nonetheless the sense with the passing seasons that something, like time itself, is being irrevocably lost, or looted, regardless of how robustly we strategize our accomplishments. I believe the word for this is mortality.

I saw two stage productions over the weekend, each at their closing performances. Well, that’s a slight mislabeling of one show, Eric Daniel Weiner’s solo performance of My Life is a Sonnet at The Broadwater, as part of the Hollywood Fringe Festival. Weiner’s performance will rise from the ashes in August at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Not so, Charles Mee’s Limonade Tous les Jours: A Paris Love Story at Santa Monica’s City Garage which, like the vast majority of theater productions, like the vast majority of all of us, vanishes into the ether shortly after the last breath.

The larger point being that each of these productions grapples with the arts of aging and vanishing, the mourning of ourselves while we’re still alive. If this sounds maudlin, it’s not, nor is either of these shows. Yes, they each contain regret, and sadness, but they also convey a love of life that grows ever-sharper, or can, as the end draws closer.

In the closing moments of Sonnet, Weiner’s central character, a 66-year-old lawyer and divorcé named Charlie Katz, runs into Sally Templeton, his first crush from Blackstone Academy in New Hampshire, a prep school which they both attended when they were teenagers. (Like the name of the subject, this is apparent creative license, since the only Blackstone Academy on record is in Rhode Island.) They haven’t seen each other in decades. He was smitten with her when she first walked into their poetry class, auburn hair (now silver) piled up, freckles now faded into creased skin. They rubbed legs under a seminar table then, almost 50 years ago. She let him know she was fond of him, but he was too awkward to make sexual advances.

When one day Charlie walked into class, jealous to find Sally screeching with laughter at the comedic antics of a classmate, he turned on the silent treatment – as his own father used to do with his mother – a behavior he vowed he would not replicate. He promised himself then that he would not succumb to temper tantrums, an oath he imagined was possible to sustain. His façade became temperate, his rage subterranean. Perhaps as part of the same oath, he could not express his love for Sally. That would just be unseemly, embarrassing: the kind of thing cads do for effect.

The same weekend as this closing Fringe Festival performance, The New York Times published an editorial by 85-year-old essayist Roger Rosenblatt, called “Why Old People Cry.”

Rosenblatt writes:

So many things lost in a life, my life, yours. So much left to articulate yearning. The proposition of “If I Loved You” [from Rogers and Hammerstein’s “Carousel”] is that, in fact, I do love you but I cannot say it. I don’t have the words or the nerve. In Jane Austen’s “Emma,” the stoic Mr. Knightley says to the meddling heroine,“If I loved you less, I might be able to talk about it more. . . ”

Why do I tear up so often? I think it has to do with the past, how much past has built up inside me all these years. I first saw “Carousel” when I was 10 and was frightened by Billy Bigelow’s violent death. I saw it again when my granddaughter Jessica appeared in a school version of the play and I heard “Soliloquy,” which includes the recurring phrase “my little girl,” not long after our daughter Amy died. Yet these days I may tear up not for the play specifically but rather for all the years the play has rested with me, and whatever I’m feeling is both gone and remembered.

 

In a different episode in New Hampshire, Charlie caught a female classmate kissing Sally, throwing him into even more adolescent confusion.

Charlie and Sally’s tryst was a platonic first love. One day, he followed her and the aforementioned classmate to an old church yard. In front of both of them, he thrust out a yellow, autumn leaf that he’d found on the ground. Sally took it. That leaf was in tribute to Shakespeare’s Sonnet 73 that they were both studying at the time.

 

That time of year though mayst in me behold

When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang

Upon those boughs which shake against the cold . . .

In class, Sally had recited this very sonnet in a black cloak. Theatrically, she had wrapped herself behind their teacher, a bald man. They both understood “When yellow leaves, or none, or few . .” referred to thinning hair. The teacher was bald. The teacher praised Sally for her comprehension before weeping. Nobody but he knew at the time he was dying of cancer.

And now, at the age of 66, Sally, herself divorced, is not dying of cancer, but she’s endured the surgical removal of both breasts, she confesses to Charlie. Later, sitting in her home with Charlie, she pulls out a hardbound diary, and from within the pages of that diary, that yellow leaf, preserved for half a century.

The silver-haired Weiner presents himself as an upbeat, amiable, unpolished Charlie Katz, matching the ambiance of a bare stage and a couple of chairs with jackets hung upon them that he’ll wear. This is not a star turn but a community meeting, a gathering where a story unfolds, and some local guy has been asked to get up and say something; and within the folds of that story emerge shards of irrefutable, allegorical truth. I liked it a lot.

Charles Mee’s Limonade tumbles onto slightly more generic turf with an aging man, Andrew (David E. Frank, similarly amiable and silver haired) taking a respite from his failed marriage in the U.S. by visiting Paris, where he randomly meets, at a café (where else?), a young, audacious, and confused young Frenchwoman and nightclub performer named Yaya (a dynamic and entrancing performance by Nicolet Anton). It probably should go without saying that she has daddy issues, while he is no lech; rather he aims to reflect upon his life, and perhaps its passing, in solitude. Yaya is having none of that.

This too, is a play structured around confessions lodged within scenes, but here the man’s lost youth is conflated with this instance of a youth he just found. Sonnet is comparatively rarefied.

Yaya dangles Andrew around an array of mixed signals, insisting that she couldn’t possibly date another older man (she too is divorced; everybody is divorced in these two plays, it’s the thing to be), since she wants to be in control and older men don’t permit that, she finds, and yet she also wants to be taken. And taken she is, to bed, in short shrift, because everything and nothing either of them say is to be interpreted at face value.

Their behavior is everything. She teases him, he’s drawn in. She baits him, he bites. She bites him, he reflects upon what he’s doing and why. This isn’t Epstein Island, where older men impose themselves sexually on children; Mee’s Paris is more like a brothel for the thinking man.

Andrew does nothing without Yaya’s consent, and her consent is habitual. As is her deflection, as is her rejection of him, as is their mutual agreement that their age difference is ultimately impenetrable, even while their attraction is as impassioned as it is fleeting.

Death in Venice. Death in Paris. There’s one constant at play.

There’s a third character who shows up as a waiter, a dancer, and a night club performer named Madame Josephine. In this role, Cruz St James serves as choreographer for their own dance routines and those with Yaya. St. James is a chiseled and accomplished dancer, whose cavortings provide a level of aggressive sleekness I’ve never seen on this stage. Frédérique Michel’s staging in tandem with Charles A. Duncombe’s production design delivers a French ambiance that’sfully fleshed out with backdrop black-and-white projections of Paris, and cabaret songs performed live that punctuate the action – no not action, but discourse about everything and nothing, discourse about possibilities and barriers in such romances that we’re likely already thinking because this territory has been so widely visited in literature (Jane Eyre, Lolita, The Thorn Birds, The Great Gatsby, Death in Venice), and in several plays (Antony and Cleopatra, The Rose Tattoo, Moon for the Misbegotten, The Country Girl, and A Little Night Music).

Neither Yaya nor Andrew is particularly defiant or even confident in whatever it is they think they’re doing. “How can I possible introduce you to my parents?” Yaya asks him at one point, also mentioning, as a reason to cut things off, that in a few more years, she’ll still be in her prime when he’ll be sliding down the bannister of physical decline.

This is precisely what her parents, and most audiences, would be thinking too, rendering Yaya both impetuous and sensible in almost the same breath. As for Andrew, he’s just adrift, conceding to wherever the tide lands him.

There’s something gently comical and trite about the entire affair, which is also very French. To be fair, there’s an anguish in Andrew’s face when the couple parts way, as though he’s just lost something heart-felt, though neither he, nor we, know quite what that is, or what it means, because Yaya has made such persuasive arguments against it.

And so, the songs and dances strewn across this saga feel much like an apology and a diversion from an affair that’s so, well, trite and comical, if one is to be judgy. Because if the evening were dedicated entirely to this fling, without diversion, it might just pop like a soap bubble.

Let’s keep this as a pleasant memory, Yaya concludes – her version of a yellow leaf to be preserved in some album. The meanings of that leaf in each play, however, are worlds apart.

MY LIFE IS A SONNET, written and performed by Eric Daniel Weiner at The Broadwater Studio, Hollywood Fringe Festival, 2026, closed.

LIMONADE TOUS LES JOURS: A PARIS LOVE STORY, by Charles Mee, presented by City Garage, Santa Monica. Closed.