There Must Be Happy Endings: A New Book By Director Megan Sandberg-Zakian
Niki Hatzidis, Features Editor
Do we need happy endings? In life, in theater, in the stories we tell? What is behind this thirst, this need for satisfying closure? How can we rectify this urge to tie everything in a neat little bow with the complex and grim realities of being human, especially now, in a time of tremendous uncertainty and grief and loss? Megan Sandberg a theater director who has written a series of ten essays all about our collective need for happy endings, and how we can reconcile that need with a not so perfect and happy world. Sandberg-Zakian’s book, There Must Be Happy Endings is the type of book we all need to read right now, an honest consideration of how hope drives the stories we tell; even perhaps, how hope is the whole point.
Megan describes her book as an artistic coming of age story, drawing on both professional and personal experiences. She began to write these essays during her transition to freelance work as a grad student at Goddard College nearly ten years ago. Megan explained to me how writing these essays was an opportunity for her to sit back and reflect on her work and personal experience. She describes the fast pace required of a career in theater-making, rehearsing and opening a new show before jumping to the next production and then the next. “There’s so little time to reflect on what we’ve made together or even to really sit with it and see it,” Sandberg-Zakian told me, “essay-writing allowed me to stop and really look at what I’d made, process and product.” During this global lockdown, most of us are finding ourselves somewhat forced to self-reflected and evaluate. But this could be the very thing we need. “It’s funny, this moment of quarantine feels weirdly like the writing process to me — the enforced quiet and stillness can be incredibly generative, can catalyze acts of creation, but is also very difficult, very painful, very lonely.’
Sandberg-Zakian’s book emphasizes that it is not vital to have happy endings, but rather to have honestly happy endings; the endings that are raw and truthful. In order to understand this fully, we have to look within our own experiences and the personal ways we were exposed to art. “One of my favorite essays is about the balance of light and darkness in the Batman movie The Dark Knight and Brecht’s Good Person of Szechwan,” Megan shared with me. “Another is about what Hedwig and The Angry Inch taught me about telling stories about genocide.” Megan’s essays run the gamut between her personal experiences directing off-broadway productions, to examining her love of musical theater as a queer woman, to the problematic messages of board baby books from her childhood, to her fear of the Disney record of Peter and the wolf. Art affects us all in exceptionally different ways, the reflection on those experiences can’t be anything but personal.
The question pertaining to the dependence of happy endings also extends to the need for theater and art as a whole. Why should we continue to make theater in such a chaotic world? Megan says it’s in the imagining that we can make things feel more possible. “I think that the exercise of imagining hope, or repair, or connection, is an exercise in ‘what if.’ It gives us practice,” she said. “In writing the book, I learned that I really believe there’s only one way that there will absolutely never be a happy ending: if I do not persist in imagining one.”
Theater has always felt like a mechanism capable of creating and giving us hope. Something about a gathering of strangers for the sole purpose of telling or hearing a story encourages a specific energy. The point of theater is to show us all that deep down, we are more alike than different. Our fears, love, desires, and woes, at their very core, are the same. It all stems from the longing for connection and community. There is something about the “power of the live — how theater is an even more powerful empathetic exercise than other creative mediums because it places us all in a room together, which in my experience is an inherently mobilizing and connective act,” Magen said. “We can practice imaging a happy ending through a painting or a poem or a movie, but the isolation in which we typically encounter those artworks stands in contrast to the liveness and the collectivity of theater-going.”
Theater, more than any other art form, encompasses and drives this connection for the very reason that it is live. When an audience, actors and production team gathers to tell a story, that story, told that particular way will only exist in that same time and place ever again. That is the magic of theater, a shared world that is built up and then torn away. This very notion is what makes it special and unique.
But for us who are story-tellers, who are creators and performers of the theatrical medium, we are finding this time very threatening to our livelihood and hope. We are questioning and worrying whether theater will survive this. Will an art form, so dependent on the gathering of people, of the forging of a community, make it out of this global pandemic unscathed? “These days we are all having to re-imagine our relationship to the live,” Sandberg-Zakian told me. “I don’t have any answers yet but I am noticing how different my presence is in “live” versus recorded digital spaces. I have been watching recorded theater performances as well as livestreams.”
We should find hope that there will always be a need for stories, and because creatives are in nature extremely adaptable, we will find a way to tell them and share them with our communities. “Though I deeply miss the feeling of breathing with a roomful of people — gasping, laughing, sniffing,” Sandberg-Zakian said. “I am exercising the imaginative capacities of my own body, as I breathe/gasp/laugh in my own home and know that many others all around the world are doing the same. To me, this kind of connective, empathetic imagining is deeply hopeful. The idea that we are all reaching out, trying to connect, and that there are always others reaching out to us.”
As far as happy endings go, Megan wants us to think of the happy endings we need as the truthful happy ending. “I think we need honestly happy endings — not dishonest ones, that paper over reality with false cheer, but endings that earn their happiness with full truth, with clear-eyed presence, she says. “I’m not talking about an ending where nothing bad happens. Rather, I think we need a compassionate space where grief and loss can co-exist with hope and joy.” In the stories we experience in live theater, we are encouraged to feel all our range of emotions openly, we laugh and cry out loud, we feel and process it all together. And that is what makes all the difference; letting it all exist in one sacred space. “Theater with this kind of ending, I think, can offer us an alleviation, a space of relief, where the weight of the world’s terror abates momentarily; it can be a restorative, a tonic that refreshes and rebalances,” Megan said to me. “It can also sometimes be just an opportunity to rejoice, to feel pure delight. We need all of these things so very badly.”
I asked Megan what her favorite ending to a play was and now I must go and read her suggestion. “The title of the book comes from epilogue to Brecht’s Good Person of Szechwan, which I love. In the play, the Gods have come to earth to try to find a “Good Person.” They find one — the prostitute Shen Teh — and give her a bag of gold, telling her to abandon her profession. Shen Teh tries, but she is not able to survive and remain “good.” At the end of the play, the Gods ascend back up to heaven on a pink cloud as she screams after them, asking for help. After this disturbing, decidedly not-happy ending, the actors come forward to speak an epilogue directly to the audience, asking for their input on what the ending of the play should be. “What’s your answer? Nothing’s been arranged. Should men be different? Should the world be changed?” They finally conclude that they will leave it in the hands of the audience to take the appropriate action to ensure a happy ending. I love this ending because it places the responsibility for re-making the world in our hands, reminding us that if we want happy endings for our families, our communities, our planet, we have to work hard for them every day.”
There Must Be Happy Endings is not just for those who are in the theater industry or those who go to see shows frequently. Megan wanted to write the book she longed to read, the one she really felt she needed. “When I was writing the book, I thought a lot about ‘what was the book I needed to read in college, in grad school?’ — not as a theater person, but as a person struggling with how to reconcile my desire for hope and possibility, connection and transformation, with an authentic witnessing of darkness and despair, hate and violence,” Megan told me. More than anything it is a book for people who strive to take an honest look at the world around them and question whether hope is possible. “I wanted to know whether it was possible to be both honest and hopeful,” Sandberg-Zakian told me. “I say in the introduction to the book that although I write from the viewpoint of someone making theater, I believe that this balancing act is one that all sensitive human beings must at some point attend to. It is the essential question of how to, as Walter Lippmann wrote, ‘live forward in the midst of complexity.’”
Megan’s book, There Must Be Happy Endings, is available now. “I hope that it might catalyze an honest, vulnerable conversation around what the art we love teaches us about ourselves — as makers and as audience members,” she said. “I hope that it inspires young directors — especially those who are women, and/or queer, and/or of color — to feel that their voices are necessary in the American theater and in their communities. And I hope that it opens up some space — space for complexity, for things that are hard and wonderful and confusing — but also just space, available for whatever might arrive to fill it.” Megan loves discussing hope and happy endings. “I mostly really want to have a cup of tea and talk for hours with everyone who reads it! This is the fun part, where I get to be in company with other people,” Megan said. “I can’t wait to hear your responses, I’m looking forward to hearing what you disagree with and arguing with you about it, and to hear about the shows you’ve done and seen and what you think about happy endings.”
As a theater performer and creator, Megan’s book gives me hope that the hunger and need for stories, for the shared community theater creates, will always be a vita necessity. I think the best thing we do as humans is to tell stories; we crave honesty and a connection with one another, and yes, happy endings. It has been this way since we painted on cave walls and gave words to the feelings and objects around us. This will never change. Theater will be back, in one form or another, we will gather together, look at the stranger next to us and understand them better, perhaps because we had cried and laughed together. Or maybe because now you have a story in common. There will be honesty, truth, and hope. There will be happy endings.
Niki Hatzidis is an actor, writer and award-nominated playwright based in New York City. NikiHatzidis.com