The Consequences of Denying Love
In my career as a Broadway producer, I work amongst artists, craftspeople, writers, performers, and any number of theatre professionals who literally pour all of their passions – and their love – into their work. My latest project is a rock musical entitled BARE, a show rooted in probably the most well-known and romantic tale of love ever written, William Shakespeares’s Romeo and Juliet.
However, in BARE our star-crossed lovers are a high school jock named Jason, and a nerdy kid named Peter; the feuding families of R&J are replaced by Jason and Peter’s surroundings – the pressures and expectations of a modern-day, co-ed Catholic boarding school. Yet Jason and Peter’s love, like Romeo and Juliet’s, is still as timeless, passionate, pure – and ultimately as tragic – as Shakespeare’s story.
BARE is a tale about true love – and at its core – how we react to giving and receiving love, regardless of its form.
When we share or deny love, we enter a physical, emotional, spiritual and psychological process that is as natural as breathing; it is an automatic life force, a biological and chemical process that takes hold of us, and elicits a response. And our response to love is where life can become tricky.
In the musical, our lovers are caught off guard by an innocent and natural moment of a sudden, unexpected kiss between them. It is this moment that unleashes their love for each other, and sets them off on a path towards one accepting their love – and one denying it.
So why are we telling this story of love in 2013? Certainly, our modern world and fast-paced society have surpassed the subject of denying love, yes? I hardly think so.
All four Gospels give accounts of Peter’s denial of Christ. “This very night, before the rooster crows, you will deny me three times”, states Jesus. Peter does exactly as Jesus foretold and denies Jesus each time, and sometimes vehemently so. Peter’s denial of love towards Jesus causes him great strife, pain and fear; he was loathsome of himself over his denial. For centuries now, this tale has been told and retold, again and again, from Shakespeare to BARE, like a reminder to us all that denying love is as harmful as death itself.
Many of us deny love. I know that I certainly have at times in my life. Whether it be refusing to forgive someone, or denying a person who loves you, or by not saying the right words, or even by holding back tears when you’re emotionally moved by something as seemingly silly as a touching TV commercial, we’ve all chosen to hold back love at certain times in our lives. For many of us, denying love is sometimes our first reaction to love – a “fight or flight” reaction, if you will.
In BARE, the character of Peter is often denied love by Jason, yet Peter always responds by returning love anyway, without any fear or second thoughts.
Peter is bullied, mocked, condemned and beaten by other characters in the play, simply for refusing to deny his love of Jason. As the character Mercutio states in R&J, “If love be rough with you, be rough with love”, and Peter takes that literally, by embracing love in all of its beauty and ugliness, and by accepting love as part of the natural process of life. In the song “Best Kept Secret”, Peter sings about his love to Jason, and questions why they can’t be open about their love:
All I ever want I found in your eyes
They tell me I’m all right and I realize
I was waiting for you
All the feelings that I never showed
It was a quiet kind of lonely road
I looked up, you were there
You answered a prayer
You, me tonight
It feels as right as breathing air
And when I take your hand
I wonder why we can’t share
The best kept secret
Jason, on the other hand, constantly searches for ways to deny his love of Peter, and is thrown into a downward spiral of hate and fear that ultimately leads to his tragic undoing.
His response to Peter in the lyric above is “It’s best kept secret,” which denies Peter, and shows that Jason is not willing to commit to the full power of giving and receiving love publicly. Further, in the song “Role of a Lifetime,” Jason sings an explanation of his tormented feelings and his inability to love:
Spending days in silent fear
And spending nights in lonely prayer
Hoping that one day
When you wake
Those feelings won’t be there
And it is exactly the choice that each of these characters make that decide their respective fates. Peter decides to tell the truth – to reach out to a progressive-thinking nun named Sister Joan, who does exactly what Jesus would have done. She doesn’t judge him, nor banish him for being gay and loving Jason: she comforts him with love. Sister Joan sings to Peter in the song “You’re Not Alone,” stating:
You’re created in His image
You’re a perfect Child of God
And this part of you
It’s the heart of who you are
It’s who you are
Sister Joan, despite what the dogma of the Church and its teachings have taught her, chooses to get to the heart of the matter: the heart of love, pure and simple. And it is this act of sharing love that gives Peter strength to never deny his love, and moreover, to find ways to express that love, and live in love, just as Jesus told us we should do.
Jason, unfortunately, succumbs to his fears, to societal pressures, and the demons of denying love, and spirals out of control until it is too late. In their final moments together, Jason and Peter sing to each other, a final acceptance of their respective truths about where they are and what they each need, in the title song “Bare”:
Jason: I’ve never been this bare
Peter: I’ve never been so scared
Jason: I’ve never felt such honesty
Peter: Doubts that will never go away
Jason: A moment of such peace
Peter: Each of us standing bare
Jason: Knowing what you meant to me
Peter: Knowing who we have to be
Jason: Know as you hold my hand
Peter: I hope and pray that you understand
Jason: We’re forever you and I
Peter/Jason: I know you’re here in my heart
Jason: Please understand that I tried
Peter: Try to see it’s not goodbye
And it is in these words that the lovers in BARE suddenly break apart – and the light of love is dimmed, and the tragedy of why, becomes all too clear: because one chose to love; and one chose to deny it.
Jesus made it his mission, and his ministry, to share love, preach love, show love, and stress that LOVE is not only a cornerstone of our faith, but a fundamental building block of the human condition. Taking a cue from BARE, Romeo & Juliet, and from Jesus, I’m going to work very hard at never denying love again. Denying love has too many bad consequences.
And I’m thankful to live a life where love is at the core of what I do, and who I am as a gay man, a producer, and as human being.
Lyrics, © 2013 by Jon Hartmere, and Lynne Shankel, respectively.