Theater | Relationships | Endings and Beginnings
Why ‘The Last Five Years’ is Still One of My Favorite Musicals
A Love Story That Ends Before It Begins
A young couple moves to New York together; he, to follow a writing career and she to become a professional actor. He succeeds beyond his wildest dreams, while she gets very little work and ultimately comes to see her career as a failure. As so often happens in such situations, the couple goes through a few years of angst and then breaks up.
This is the premise of The Last Five Years, one of my favorite musicals, which I only saw a few years ago and which is told with an impressively innovative structure. The lead character Cathy starts her story at the end, singing “Still Hurting” after the couple has broken up. As she works her way backwards, her husband Jamie tells his story more conventionally. They meet up once in the middle, during their wedding.
So much for the tried-and-true rule that says we always need “a beginning, middle and end” in that order. This show proves we do not.
I was especially drawn to Cathy’s structure, which reminded me of other plays or movies and books that open at the end and take us back to how things began. Betrayal, by Harold Pinter is an ingenious look at infidelity.
While the early scenes occur after the affair is over, the final scene ends when the affair begins. Between the years shown in these two scenes, the action proceeds chronologically. I’ve only seen bits and pieces of Betrayal, but plan to read it soon, as I doubt I will be able to see it any time soon.
Other works that play around with time include Michael Ondaatje’s book The English Patient (later becoming a movie); the television series Damages by Daniel Zelman, Glenn Kessler and Todd Kessler; and Chronicle of a Death Foretold by Gabriel Garcia Márquez (still on my reading list).
There are no doubt many more, but The Last Five Years (which won a Drama Desk Award in its early years) has stayed with me. For one thing, the story resonates deeply, because artists walk such a fine line most of the time trying to carve out careers, and most days bring stumbles you expect but don’t need.
When you do get a job or a career-changing break (and I’ve been fortunate to have some), you don’t know how long it will last. Unlike many other professions, you are also only as good as your last project, as the saying goes, and often have to pretend everything’s fine and dandy, thank you, even when success is eluding you and has been for a while.
There’s lots to relate to in both Cathy and Jamie’s stories that takes us through the New York arts scene in the early 2000s and now. You can see Jamie hoping for Cathy to get cast in something that will give her confidence and propel her forward; though she does find work here and there, she never reaches the heights she wants so much. (See “A Summer in Ohio” as Exhibit One.)
At the same time, we notice that while Jamie’s success is lifting him higher, the women around him at a party are much more interested in his career trajectory than who he is as a person. We also see how hope can hurt us more than despair at times, when the success we crave soon bounces off after a short visit — and like a ball thrown down the road, gets farther and farther away the more we chase after it.
I can hear you ask, doesn’t knowing the ending spoil it for us? But going backwards from an ending we know in this context is as far from a “spoiler alert” as it’s possible to be. We understand instinctively that many young couples break up, and the couple in The Last Five Years meet in their twenties. What is more interesting is how and why the breakup happened.
The Last Five Years allows us to see the dynamics that led to destruction — through scenes of longing, ambition and frustration mixed with hope, excitement and tangible chemistry between the two leads. We also see the business of show business winding its way around their necks and taking them down, in Cathy’s case; up, but twisting, in Jason’s; and apart in both.
I remember being unable to turn away from the film, while being overwhelmed with sadness watching it — because being an artist in a relationship and trying to “make it” are just the kind of roller coaster you don’t need in your twenties; If you are an artist, though, roller coasters can often be very hard to avoid.
Cathy and Jamie continue their journeys, and they become more and more separate, as “Goodbye Until Tomorrow” shows, to heartbreaking effect. The writer Jason Robert Brown spares nothing in his examination of the relationship’s breakdown.
According to various sources, Brown was apparently sued by his former wife (an actor) who felt he was mirroring the relationship too closely. Knowing this, in my view, shows the underlying truth of the story, whether the details are the same or not.
Because many of our best stories are based (however loosely) in fact — and everything I’ve written here shares something about why this particular story made such a deep impression on me. But it’s the opening and ending scenes that accomplish the most, as we see the relationship end and start and end again.
While the opening shows us the sorrow of losing an extraordinary and intense love, the ending takes us to a time when everything both people were looking for stood like an evergreen in front of them; when doors kept opening and the sun warmed them up — and when every single thing they dreamed was possible.
Isn’t that the kind of connection we all are seeking? When we can affirm and support each other’s potential, and believe the person we’ve chosen is as much a part of our happiness as we ourselves are.
What would happen if we could see how our love stories ended before they began? Would that make it easier to understand how fragile they are, and allow us to try and avoid the pitfalls that take them down? If we could keep finding new ways to love and believe in each other, could we believe more in the promises we make?
I can only tell you I think The Last Five Years asks us to think about those questions without preaching — in its music — and its words.
Thank you for reading this! And — I am not a critic, nor is this a review. It is just one writer’s impression of a play I wanted to share with you.
