Wicked and the Limits of Freedom

When Wicked, the first part of the film adaptation of the wildly successful Broadway musical, opens this week, my ticket will allow me to revisit the land of Oz and its denizens. For years I used the musical to help my ethics students ask the same questions the show poses about how we define good and how we propose to become good ourselves. But I didn’t tell my students about my deep connections not just to the musical but also to the 1939 Technicolor movie and beyond that to L. Frank Baum’s entire series of Oz books.

At the 2-Lazy-J Ranch on the prairies of western South Dakota, my granddad Buster and grandma Luberta nurtured aspects of my developing self that had lain dormant when I was sixty miles away at home. That included a love of reading, sinking into the plot of a story, and being taken away from the realities of life in a dysfunctional, alcoholic family. My grandparents were travel agents who fostered journeys to fictional worlds between the covers of a book. I wouldn’t be allowed to open my grandma’s 1937 edition of Gone with the Wind until I was in high school, but I did have the privilege of ranging the vast domain of Oz in the collection of Baum’s books housed behind the glass of the barrister bookcase in the ranch bedroom.

Baum wrote not only The Wonderful Wizard of Oz on which the Judy Garland vehicle was based, but also a whole series of adventures that go beyond the little story of a Kansas girl finding her true self in a magical world. Baum’s Oz stories played in tandem in my brain with the movie that was shown annually on TV. To this day, streaming The Wizard of Oz without commercial breaks is a little unnerving. My brain was trained to expect a break when the cyclone drops Dorothy’s house in Oz, right before she steps from her sepia-toned normality into the vivid color of Munchkinland. As a kid I cowered in fear whenever the wicked witch appeared and threatened Dorothy and her companions (and her little dog, too).

As an adult I rejoiced in Gregory Maguire’s novel Wicked. In it he recounts the story of its subtitle, The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West. Recasting a famous story from a new angle is a common enough literary move. In Ulysses James Joyce did it with Homer, as did the Coen brothers with O, Brother, Where Art Thou? In Maguire’s novel the original story is upended. Glinda, the good witch, becomes the antagonist, and Elphaba, the green-tinged witch whom we always regarded as wicked, becomes the hero longing for self-fulfillment and recognition in a world of disapprobation and condemnation.

The musical Wicked arrived on Broadway in 2003 and advanced my connection to Oz by foregrounding the friendship between Glinda and Elphaba almost as a character in itself. The original cast recording featuring Idina Menzel and Kristin Chenoweth took up residence in our car’s CD player with Les Misérables and The Sound of Music to become our son’s first education in God’s gift of musical theater.

The world of the Wizard of Oz began in 1900 as a children’s book by a failed shopkeeper and journalist (and in at least one instance, the racist advocate for exterminating Native Americans). The book finally brought Baum success, though with diminishing returns as later volumes became more slapdash and sold few copies. In the hands of Stephen Schwartz (music and lyrics) and Winnie Holzmann (book), Baum’s story deepens and, for my money, serves as a worthy conversation partner with the book of Genesis about the nature of good and evil.

Genesis is bookended by two stories where characters must deal with these matters. In the Garden, God limits our first parents’ freedom by forbidding them from eating of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. The serpent tempts Eve and then Adam with the lure of such knowledge. In the very last chapter, Joseph’s brothers, who have dealt him nothing but abuse, grovel before him begging for mercy. He tells them he doesn’t have the wisdom that his forebears in the Garden lusted after, nor do any of us: “What you intended for evil, God used for good.”

That phrase “for good” — whether meaning “permanently” or “for the sake of goodness” — comes up in the musical Wicked, though you won’t hear it in a theater this weekend, because director Jon M. Chu has split the story into two parts. The ballad “For Good” comes in Act II of the stage version and sadly won’t be heard for another year. That this weekend’s release ends with the play’s showstopping “Defying Gravity” at the end of Act I leaves viewers with an incomplete picture of the show’s much fuller understanding of good and evil.

Wicked’s story arc parallels that of the gospel of Mark: a steady upward climb to a moment of victory (in the gospel the Mount of Transfiguration and in the musical Elphaba’s taking to the western skies to defy gravity). The main characters (Jesus and Elphaba, respectively) are shown unmasked with their full powers. The story then plummets as the forces around them bring them to destruction, Jesus at Golgotha and the “wicked” witch melted at the hands of a girl from Kansas.

While Elphaba is no savior of Oz, what the musical’s full story arc does is play with the relationship between goodness, limits, and the human response to one who claims not to be limited by the law’s parameters. In Wicked, Elphaba finds herself hemmed in by people’s judgment of her on account of her green skin and insistence on her own agency. She longs for the freedom and access to life’s good things (popularity and a hot date, like with classmate Fiyero) that come so easily to her detested university roommate Glinda. She faces her own tempter when Glinda declares, “You’re gonna be popular.” When at the end of Act I Elphaba sings, “Unlimited, my future is unlimited,” she longs for the very thing presented by the serpent in the Garden, a life unbound by restriction and access to everything her heart desires.

While Elphaba assumes her own inner goodness, that goodness leads to actions that, while she intends them for good, have wicked consequences not only for her sister, the wearer of the infamous slippers, but also for the characters who become Dorothy’s traveling companions on the yellow brick road. In the musical, it is only when Elphaba submits to her own limitations and welcomes her own demise that the wicked witch becomes the truly good heroine of the story. In Act II, when the earlier paean to unlimited freedom becomes the same notes sung to the word “limited,” Elphaba finally escapes from others’ opprobrium and enters into true freedom. As a theologian, I’d argue she shifts from a theology of glory to a theology of the cross and from a high to a low anthropology.

In Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age (2003), Bill McKibben warned presciently of technology’s aim to allow people to escape the limits of being human, particularly the limit of our mortality (back again to the serpent’s lure in the Garden). He argued that it is the very fact of death’s limitations that gives life meaning. To have a continuously existing self is to lose one’s humanity. For McKibben, finitude is less to be avoided and more to regarded as a gift.

This is exactly what Elphaba discovers beyond her “Defying Gravity” moment. She faces the dire consequences that her striving for freedom and control causes in the lives of those she cherishes. And in losing her life she gains it. At the end of part one this weekend, we’ll see Elphaba claim the wickedness others have slung her way. She will demand unlimited freedom to be her green self. But we won’t get the full breadth of the story until we see what happens to someone who declares that “nobody in all of Oz, no wizard that there is or was, is ever gonna bring me down.”

It’s what happens next in the story that now resonates with the guy who was once that kid surrounded by cattle pastures and dreaming of a life unbound in places like Oz. I’m 65 and am ever more aware of my limitations. Like Luther who declared that even if a completely free will were possible he wouldn’t want it, I am grateful for the limits that push me into the arms of one whose unlimited mercy is given at Calvary at his own most limited moment.

My life of limits and loss has made me ready to have Elphaba fly past me again. I, too, have been changed for good. For I have what no one in Oz has access to. I have a God who chooses to break in eschatologically with a word for the limited (or as Capon has it, the least, the last, the lost, etc.). It’s fine to be limited and even to be dead, because my life is not my own. As Paul says in Galatians 2:20, “I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I now live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.” The only one who truly defies gravity (including its root, grave) makes it so much easier being green.