Prologue

Aren’t we fools?

I’ve been wanting to write about clowns for a while, but post-election week here in the U.S. seems like as good a time as ever.

In the arts, clowns embody everything from comedy to horror to tragedy to derision to distraction from someone bombing onstage. Stephen Sondheim nods to this last vocation in his iconic standard, “Send in the Clowns,” from the 1973 musical A Little Night Music.

“It’s a theater reference meaning ‘if the show isn’t going well, let’s send in the clowns’; in other words, ‘let’s do the jokes,’” Sondheim explained in an interview circa 1990. “I was writing a song in which [character] Desirée is saying, ‘aren’t we foolish’ or ‘aren’t we fools?’” he added in 2003.

Today, a similar question of collective folly, among some groups at least, hangs in the air. For me, as for countless others, this moment is tragic and horrifying; we’ll need clownishness — in all its most diverting and galvanizing and unifying forms — to steel us for what’s next.

So, uh, let’s send in those clowns.

Yours in a red (raw) nose,
Delaney

Delaney Rebernik
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Act I

Send in the clowns

I got to see Cabaret on Broadway with a friend exactly a month before the U.S. election.

God, does it feel even more relevant now.