Critics cry: On losing it at 'War Horse'

Colleagues are still teasing me about the expression on my face during "War Horse."

It has been a month since I cried pretty much all the way through this awesome alchemy of horse love and war horror -- OK, horse puppetry and stage imagination -- at the Vivian Beaumont Theatre at Lincoln Center. As I am told by reliable witnesses, I had morphed into a scary relative of the contorted soul in Edvard Munch's "The Scream," exposed by the occasional failed attempt to suppress a sob.

This may not seem like news to most people, who freely laugh, weep, clap and even hydrate from a water bottle at the theater.

As a critic, however, I am old school on this. The critics who taught me were adamant that, as professionals, we kept our reactions to ourselves until they burst forth, in all their pent-up glory and/or dismay, to be shared in the morning paper.

This may seem quaint, even withholding, in a world where standing ovations have become a required part of the theatergoing experience. (Actually, I do stand when everyone else does, mainly so I don't appear to be expressing my opinion in a sit-in protest.)

Oh, I smile. I tear up, most recently at the harrowing revival of Larry Kramer's AIDS drama, "The Normal Heart." I've been known to surprise myself with an audible chuckle or a sniffle. I'm not a total tyrant to external expressions of natural impulses in the theater. But this is how I learned and, really, this is how I feel natural.

Until "War Horse," my biggest break with generations of critical tradition was at "Wit," Margaret Edson's 1999 Pulitzer Prize winner that follows a thorny, brainy professor of 17th century poetry through her medical treatment and death from ovarian cancer.

Since the character struggles, ultimately, with the dichotomy of mind and body, it seems somehow right that, when I walked out of the theater, the whole front of my sweater was soaking wet with tears. I hadn't wanted to make a spectacle of myself by wiping my eyes. I'm not even sure I knew how hard I was crying.

I just looked up catharsis on the web. As most of us learned and forgot in school, it was Aristotle who applied the word to art. After him, a catharsis is meant to be a release of emotions, a purification of the feelings of pity and fear at the end of a tragedy. This is aesthetically preferable to the word's previous use as medical purging and, somehow, more reassuring than Plato's idea that poetry makes people hysterical.

So if I do not openly express emotions at the theater, am I missing out on my catharsis?

I'm sure I'm not.

And yet, there is no denying the rush and the exhaustion after my unseemly display at "War Horse." How much of that came from trying to squelch the weeping, as I shared tissues from my stash to crying strangers down my row?

You see, I had guessed that "War Horse" was going to be a special challenge to my public front. As a child, I wouldn't read a book or watch a movie unless someone read or watched it first and told me whether anything bad happened to the animals. I never grew out of it.

And all reports from London, where the magical production began, mentioned that grown stiff-upper-lip Brits were breaking down over this simple story with the amazing puppetry and magnificent staging. Based on a beloved English children's book, this is the tale of a poor country boy whose beloved horse, Joey, is sold to the cavalry in World War I. The boy lies about his age to enlist and, from 1914 to 1918, the horse and the boy separately struggle through the intimate and vast agony of war.

I lost it early, at the first sight of Joey as a frisky, dark-eyed chestnut foal snuffling out his new world in the English countryside. And it was downhill -- or is that uphill? -- for the rest of the three-hour epic.

As a child, whenever I got scared or sad at movies, my mother would comfort me by saying "Puppets, Lulu. They're just puppets." I'm not sure this was great advice for a future theater critic, but it suddenly came back to me during "War Horse."

That phrase, "Puppets, Lulu," appears, at random, throughout the review notes I took during the performance. It was obviously my attempt to shush myself up. It didn't work.

And I'm shocked to admit I'm glad.