Column: Drilling down on Groundhog Day
We recently had an anniversary ending in zero and the plan was to hit the city, catch a play and visit a favorite steak house to celebrate.
It may not be the most original idea, but there was a back story to this trip. One of us had forgotten the actual weeknight anniversary date. Sensing a strategic opportunity, the other spouse kept quiet (but had cards ready to go) and used the misstep as leverage for the more elaborate city weekend package to memorialize the marriage ceremony, now cloaked in the mists of memory.
We got some decent last-minute tickets to “Groundhog Day,” based on the 1993 Harold Ramis movie starring the inimitable Bill Murray and the ageless Andie MacDowell. Unlike most Americans, I have only seen the movie once. But when news broke a while back that it was being turned into a musical, it seemed one of the most unlikely transformations in cinema history.
Murray played Phil Connors in the movie, a smug, burned-out TV weatherman who winds up, through some hitch in the space-time continuum, being forced to relive the same day, over and over, in the hicksville of Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, the home of the celebrity groundhog, also named Phil, whose February 2 sighting, or not, of his shadow, is said to foretell the duration of the winter.
Phil the human goes through a series of forced adjustments — anger, nastiness, wonder, godlike omnipotence, drunken exploits, suicidal experiments, resignation — before becoming irresistibly sweet, reaching out to all the townspeople he had treated poorly, and winning over his assistant producer Rita (ageless Andie) in the process.
The musical has all the expected Broadway filigree, a great score and it hums along at a steady pace with only a couple of unneeded scenes, which if they are obvious to an Everyman like me, why don’t they stick out to the director? In these crazy days, everything needs some heavy duty editing.
In the movie, Murray nailed all the shades of Phil’s personality perfectly. Andy Karl, who debuted in the lead musical role in London to considerable acclaim, came to Broadway in April and gave a star-is-born performance on opening night. But in a supreme show-must-go-on moment, 72 hours earlier he tore his anterior cruciate knee ligament in full view of the audience at a Friday night preview.
He dragged himself offstage. The show was stopped, and an announcer asked for a doctor. Karl was on the ground, in tears. But he wanted to finish the show, so he grabbed a walking stick, went back out and did, to deafening applause.
According to the New York Times, Karl, 42, said that the injury had been diagnosed as an acute, full A.C.L. tear — an injury that has sidelined many athletes, often NFL behemoths being dramatically carted off the playing field — and that surgery had been offered as an option.
He chose instead to try to treat it with rest and physical therapy. It was the right choice. Karl, when we saw him, scampered around uninhibited in a role that seemed to have him on stage 98 percent of the time. A thunderous ovation ensued.
The show was a delight, but it made me think. The idea behind “Groundhog Day,” of course, has been incorporated into American culture as shorthand for the ennui that afflicts all of us at some time or other. If you are not vigilant, the days can take on a similarity that is striking. Routines, not bad things in and of themselves, can lock in so tightly they can become literally mindless, like a cow going back to the barn.
I think I’m particularly susceptible to the lure of the barn. When I was working more, it wasn’t so obvious. But now, with more time on my hands, I am barely conscious during the newspaper-buying, post office-going morning routine. And the languid newspaper-reading interludes? These are lost chunks of time that seem particularly wasteful as I move ever onward toward the unknown endgame. I mean, who really has a handle on what exactly that will look like?
But much like Phil the human, some deep inhales of introspection can help dissolve the fog of routine and lead you to a deeper appreciation of the here and now. I don’t know if it’s conscious or inevitable, but I’m getting more adept at seeing the variations each day present, and they can be pretty interesting.
One of the classic grounding devices, for me at least, is pondering the fact that we are all hurtling through infinite black space on a speck of dust. In this moment, all concerns and worries seem petty if not meaningless and the present world seems rich. Then the moment is gone and annuities, missed gym workouts and the Taliban rush to the foreground.
Don’t be alarmed. If I happen to be in a speck-of-dust mode, I will not be accosting you at the post office to chat or making invasive small talk at Schmidt’s. Like Phil the human, I’m just feeling the world spinning, and digging the trip.
