All about Love may sound more like Cole Porter than Greek dialogue, but underneath it is still Plato, a condensed and slightly modernized retelling of The Symposium, the most influential discussion of love in all classical literature. Plato, of course, never intended his dialogue to be staged--in fact, he was an eloquent enemy of all things theatrical. If he'd had his way, all actors would have been crowned with myrrh, anointed with fillets wool and firmly escorted out of town. Yet paradoxically, he wrote philosophy as a playwright writes plays: The Symposium is a dramatic conversation, carried on by characters based on actual human beings, full of dramatic irony, wit and surprise. Seven men gather at a friend's house to drink and talk, and they decide to devote the evening to love, or rather to talking about love. They each take turns making the best speech they can in praise of love, waxing as rhapsodic as they can. Was there ever such a set-up for a musical? These guys are all dying to burst into song, and finally, in All about Love they actually do. We updated the setting to Manhattan, c. 1930, and Mark's score propels the dialogue forward; it's carefully orchestrated to lead us from up from earthly into heavenly love, from relatively cheerful simplicity into something rich and strange. The original conversation is conducted by upper class urbanites with a gift for poetry and lyrical flight; the tone in both the original and in our updated version, is sophisticated---Plato's clever sophists and Porter's witty playboys live in comparable worlds 2,000 years apart.
Once you put Plato's words into the mouths of actual people you are struck by something often ignored: all these people are either gay or bisexual, and the love under consideration has a clear basis in homoeroticism. For most of the last two millennia, commentators have failed to point out that the largest, most wide-ranging discussion of love in western history is carried on by a group of homosexuals; in dramatic production the fact is simply inescapable. There are two couples in the party. Agathon, the glamorous host who has just won the Athenian play writing contest, is the beloved of the older Pausanias. Eryximachus, the medical man, is the lover of Phaedrus, the young enthusiast who makes the first speech in praise of love. Aristophanes is a solitary figure; his public charm masks an interior loneliness, and he is conspicuously alone. Alcibiades, whose dramatic entrance late in the conversation is a real coup de theatre, seems to have a boundless appetite for sex and power in all forms; like Byron he's charismatic, witty, and excessive, "mad, bad, and dangerous to know." And Socrates is of course Socrates; pedestrian, homely, always the observer, and yet with the seductive power of a flute-playing satyr. It's a very lively group, and a very particular one, which partly explains why Mark has made each voice so musically distinct (every singer has almost a genre all to himself).
Plato is notoriously the most accessible and the most elusive of philosophers, and The Symposium has delighted and vexed readers for two millennia. The discussion of love is notably pre-Christian, and so it remains even stranger now than it was in its own time. Most of us would not use "love" in the large sense that it is used here, where it may refer to attraction and desire in all its forms. We are used to separating thought from feeling, whereas Plato likes to keep them together, continually informing and playing off each other. Perhaps no one has been more keenly aware of pleasures of thinking, the erotics of reason. We do not pretend to have solved any of The Symposium's many mysteries. But we hope to have given a new dimension to its great vivacity and charm; with Mark's music and Lauren's lyrics, Plato's dialogue has been given a radiant new life.
I would like to thank our Theatreworks staff, my colleagues and co-conspirators, for encouraging this project. The Gill Foundation has been particularly generous; so has the Colorado Council for the Arts. It is a distinct privilege to conduct such a rare and classic experiment as All about Love.