Everyone Needs Something Impossible to Live For.

There are many ways to make a dream a real thing. In Navajo culture, weaving and loom work is said to have begun when the deity Spider Woman gave the Navajo the first loom, made from sky and earth cords, and the first weave of sunlight, lightning, crystal, and white shells. Although history points us towards Pueblo records that show them teaching Navajo artists to create handwoven textiles and blankets, this essence of a gift from the beyond is rooted deep into the tradition of the loom, and to the creation myth of the Navajo. Navajo artisans, unlike the Pueblo, were also part of a matriarchal society: the women owned the sheep, and thus, the wool and thereby the looms. Some early pieces were dresses, consisting of two identical blankets sewn together, which eventually became single blankets called mantas, which grew into Chief’s blankets, door coverings, serapes, saddle blankets, and then the myriad styles and designs of blankets and rugs that we can see today. 

The Navajo, these first Americans, the indigenous people of the Americas, were non-literate, telling their stories through what they wove. The geometry of dreams is recorded with each weft and weave. Navajo weaving is singular in its use of an upright hand-loom, with one continuous warp—wherein each strand of woolen yarn is placed into the warp by hand—a single stand at a time. There is no machine on earth that can replicate this handmade technique. The continuity of yarn serves as a protective measure—if the cut of a blanket is at all compromised, it will not unravel. 

The blankets were and continue to be prized possessions, sold for high value as the Santa Fe Trail rose to prominence in the 1850’s and as railroad service expanded to the Southwest in the 1880’s. Wait! I know what you’re thinking: but why did the railroad expand to the Southwest in the 1880’s? A dream. The “American Dream”, so told and sold to each of us that it is the ethos of the very country, woven into the story of every American. The commercial connection to settler Americans reveals the dynamic of the burgeoning relationship that exists between these communities up to today: the Navajo way of living, working, breathing, and dreaming became irrevocably tied up into those of the settler Americans. These blankets were not cultural items created and distributed internally; they became a symbol of the rapid confluence of two cultures. 

About halfway through GYPSY, we see Mama Rose and her troupe piled into a sleazy motel, celebrating Louise’s birthday as they find out their vaudeville act has, at last, been booked into the Orpheum circuit. Mama Rose has been working towards this her whole life, and all of her childrens’ lives. It’s her dream come true. Towards the end of the scene, she leans into Louise, wrapped in a bright Navajo blanket, and says: this would make a nice jacket. It’s a nice nod to the audience that this beautiful, vibrant jacket is fashioned and worn by Louise, the one who achieves success on Mama’s terms and who goes on to be the final keeper of dreams in the show. It’s a nice visual metaphor, intentional or not, costumed by the incredible Toni-Leslie James, that pokes its head in and out of the scene work throughout Act Two. 

Mama Rose opens the show by presenting us with her dreams. She makes clear that the visions she sees are guiding forces, pushing her to achieve them at all costs: “some people have got the dreams…but not the guts,” she winks at us, gutsily, before telling us those very people “don’t know they’re alive”. It’s only the dreamers who are rushing headfirst towards the object of their dream who are truly living. Everything and everyone beyond this is “dull”. She feels exasperated when questioned: “They’re REAL dreams,” she retorts when pushed, acknowledging their fantasy with a shrug: “Everyone needs something impossible to live for”.

I thought about the Navajo people, who sold their woven dreams for economic stability and integration on the literal frontier, and the similarities to Mama Rose whom Herbie affectionately calls “a Pioneer woman without a frontier”. I thought about what went into weaving that blanket that Louise turned into a jacket, a literal wrapping of dreams, Mama’s symbol of economic prosperity. By leaving the book and changing the cast, Gypsy revels in a uniquely American story that is so rarely told. The story of Black American entertainment during the vaudeville era shares a similarity to that of all Indigenous American culture: an insular society, a minority group, coalescing by force into a settler nation around them….But Mama has a frontier, and a uniquely American one at that: the entertainment industry, Hollywood, and fame at any cost. 

Prior to vaudeville, movies, radio programs, and later, TikTok dances, minstrel shows were the popular culture of the day and a point of osmosis for Black and White American culture. Sometimes it was the only window each had into the other’s lives. Mama Rose would certainly have seen minstrel shows as a young girl, she would have understood them as a means of survival for some artists, and as a means to an end. But Rose wanted bigger than that. She was “born too soon,” of course, for TikTok fame, but “started too late,” for true vaudeville success as a woman between entertainment eras. The Vaudeville Era, which historians generally say was around the 1880’s through the 1930’s, was both segregated for Black, Italian, and Jewish Americans, and an opportunity to bring their culture to the melting pot. When we meet Mama Rose in this production, she is in Seattle, which had seen rapid settlement in the early years of the twentieth century. [1] Black Americans moved to the Pacific Northwest by the promise of economic prosperity of work from the war, especially in shipyards, and greater social freedoms, away from the white supremacist terrors of the Jim Crow South. [(https://specialcollections.ds.lib.uw.edu/SeattleGeneralStrike/the-black-community/)]

Now how would a Black woman born in the Reconstruction Era make it in showbiz as we understand it today? How far would a woman so hellbent on achieving the American dream go? And how do the cyclical nature of dreams, of womanhood and maternal cycles, tell us how to live now—like June, like Louise, or like Rose? Let’s dive in. 

It’s easy to connect with the story of Gypsy if you’ve ever had a mother. It’s even easier to connect with the narrative if you’ve ever been a daughter. The weight of parental expectations is perhaps the oldest burden placed on children. And what do our parents want, what is folded into these expectations? The most fervent hope for every new parent is that their child’s life will be better than theirs. This alone is an impossible dream. This rocky ground sets the literal stage for Mama Rose, who wants the world for her daughters, June and Louise. We’re not told explicitly why Mama Rose sees the most promise in June initially, just that she has the talent, although the casting of Jordan Tyson and Joy Woods, lends a certain credence to colorism. Rose, looking to escape minstrelsy and the Chitlin circuit, focuses her intense dream weaving on June, that she alone could “pass” on the Orpheum Circuit. While June’s talent abounds, the act that Rose has programmed falls out of fashion. In this production, the conflict is heightened such that Mama Rose must reckon with a society that dismisses her and fight against the burdens of time itself. She wants to keep June and Louise as young as possible for as long as possible–the only way she knows how to defy time. 

When we’re introduced to ‘The Act’ it is one song: ‘May We Entertain You’, a cloying, repetitive song meant to ingratiate itself upon the listener. At first, Rose programs the piece with a patriotic bent, perhaps a nod to her belief in the equalizing notion of the American Dream, perhaps a showy way of establishing herself as an patriot, an American herself, in a land that refused and refuses still to recognize the Black community as Americans. I believe both are true to her. Audra’s Rose says: ‘They’re so un-American’ when they take the act to the South, a sharp line that stuck out to me like stepping on glass. The South would have been incredibly racist towards her and her daughters, especially on the Orpheum circuit: especially when confronted with the image of a Black Abe Lincoln. 

So why say that? It’s a fraction of a beat showing her resilience in staging the show across the country, to sometimes hostile audiences, in a dying art form, but it underscores the fact that–within the framework of the American Dream–America should belong to us all. She sees the industry for what it could be, rather than what it is, which helps to further the plot like an apparition of a Ghost of Vaudeville Yet to Come. 

June is able to see through the act more easily than Louise, telling us of her mom: “she can make herself believe anything…she believes the act is good”. She is one divergent voice, like the Ghost of Vaudeville Future, a naysayer speaking for what would eventually come: movies, radio, TV, and later, Fubo and Roku City. Her departure in the first act of the show is less a willful act of defiance than an exiting of the dreamscape, the fight against time, and the desire for “fame”. She cannot resist the machinations of society, of stability. It is a certain inevitability; a tacit reminder of a ‘those who don’t study history’ type-beat. Mama Rose, who was abandoned by her mother, is then abandoned by her daughter. She exits the cycle that Rose has created for her, of matrilineal control and expectations, in order to strike out on her own. Rose is steel in her convictions, shredding the letter that announces June’s elopement seconds after reading it. June then becomes another greyed out member of “dull” society. Those who don’t aspire to fame are somewhat boring, the show seems to shriek. The aspiration of celebrity is more important than the surety of stability. 

Louise is the Ghost of Vaudeville Present and a dreamer in her own right. She is deep within Rose’s dream web, unaware even of her own age (‘Little Lamb’). She sees hope in Herbie and believes the dreams of Rose, although she and June sardonically mock Rose, she stays. She is loyal to the vision that Mama Rose provides, although she longs for the stability and comforts of family life, she stays to complete her duty as a daughter, trying to make a future for herself within the framework that Mama Rose has provided. She is not only the artist who makes the blanket into the jacket, but the one who gets to wear it: the utility and the dreams in one. When the opportunity to strip emerges, it’s Mama Rose who places her in the light, and then Louise who commands it. 

Many of us feel like we were born in the wrong era, that we were born too late or too soon. I can’t help but defend Mama Rose, so like myself in her dedication to a dying craft. After all, desperate people do desperate things. Desperate people rarely give up. Desperate people become blind. We see Audra’s Rose become increasingly desperate even though she never unravels. 

To live fully is to choose the dreams that nourish us, and to discard the ones that don’t. In this revival of Gypsy, Mama Rose is haunted by the ghosts of past successes and future failures, grasping at an industry she feels destined to conquer but is forever just out of reach. Yet, for all her power, her dreams are confined by the structures built to reject her. June’s departure signals one way to live—by cutting free of the cycles imposed on her, embracing assimilation and stability at the cost of bigger dreams. Louise, however, breaks the pattern in a different way by transforming what is offered to her into something new, something radiant, a glittering rejection of her mother’s desperation. She alone spins gold from straw, the only one to turn the blanket into the jacket, and to wear that jacket forward. She reclaims her agency through reinvention, and in doing so, offers a glimmer of possibility to all who dream within systems not built for them. Audra’s Rose is a woman locked in a battle against time, but GYPSY tells us that to break the cycle is not necessarily to abandon the dream—it is to reshape it. We can live now like June, like Louise, or like Rose by deciding for ourselves what we’re willing to sacrifice and what we’re willing to reclaim. The dream is alive, the question is how to fashion it to belong uniquely to you.