MOMENT 6: the reconciliation. Fiyero gets fed up enough to explicitly point out Elphaba's moral superiority compared to the two of them, though he doesn't mention her by name. as he stalks away, Glinda makes one more effort to paint them as a united front, this time in missing Elphaba (she doesn't say her name either). Fiyero reacts derisively until Glinda points out if Elphaba hasn't been found by now she does not want to be found. this point seems to wound her as much as it was meant to wound him, but it does the trick: Fiyero balks and admits Glinda is right, gesturing helplessly before he goes back to Glinda and comforts her.
i distinctly remember saying to Leah, when we watched this for the first time: "oh, they have NEVER talked about this." and i stand by that instinctive reading tbh, though time and repeated viewings have helped sharpen what exactly "this" is that Glinda and Fiyero have never talked about.
Elphaba is not named for the entirety of Act II's opening, though the scene is about her from pretty much every angle (the first person who refers to Elphaba by name in Act 2 is Nessa, when she's telling Elphaba to shut up, which is certainly...something). during the public facing moments it underscores the core theme of the show: by this point there is no more Elphaba, only the Wicked Witch of the West.
but Glinda and Fiyero don't mention her by name either, even though Fiyero outright rejected the "Wicked Witch" moniker to Morrible's face earlier, and even with their relationship with each other at stake here. i honestly don't know what the original intent was behind this choice: Fiyero is being weird about Elphaba because of emotional adultery or whatever, and Glinda is...being weird in the same way because she knows about it too?? and is?? afraid to bring it up?? why are we in Marriage Story when three minutes ago these characters were fighting with their boss, a seventy year old woman in clown drag
it's only due to the iterative tendency of live theatre that this part of the book (MANY parts of the book, lbr) evolved into something less all-over-the-place. any semblance of emotional restraint was jettisoned before Norbie and Cheno even left; the love triangle stayed, but changed its tone so that by the time the OBC's successors hit their stride the dynamic wasn't so much infidelity and ~fighting over a man as it was equally wounding breaches of trust for every relationship permutation.
one of the results of this cuddlier interpretation where everyone loves everyone and they're all just having a really hard time right now uwu is the approach to this part of TG has (for the tragically few Gliyeros who care at least) been flipped on its head. Glinda and Fiyero no longer talk weirdly and excessively about their friend from college because suddenly they're repressed WASPs in a motherthriller; Glinda and Fiyero talk weirdly and excessively about Elphaba because they are weird and excessive people who never shut the fuck up, and Elphaba's kind of an important person in both their public and personal lives. the stilted fumbling stems from having talked about this topic to death--what Elphaba would do, where she might be, what she would think--over the course of five years, and both of them are somewhat aware of this even as they cannot help but bring her up again and again (that's love, bitch).
you can see this so clearly with Katie and Ryan, where Glinda barely even lets Fiyero finish his "you KNOW who could, and who has!" before jumping in with her rebuttal. for the two of them it's an old and worn refrain: Elphaba would do something different. Elphaba isn't here, and we have to move on. the problem this read always runs into, though, is where the conversation goes from here, because the stakes still have to ramp up. it has to go from just one of the many, many fights the two of them have had over the past five years to The Fight that matters. for Glinda and Fiyero the people, it's their umpteenth time circling the wagons; for Glinda and Fiyero, fictional characters we are watching onstage, it is the last time they ever talk about Elphaba with each other.
i've talked about TG simultaneously showcasing and dismantling the status quo, but to discuss it from the perspective of story structure makes it sound like the dismantling occurs due to like, a conspiracy of impersonal circumstance when the actual forces driving these tectonic shifts are, as is appropriate for a tragedy, the characters themselves. so we have here another instance where Katie and Ryan are exceptional because they are exemplary: they telegraph the exact point Glinda ups the ante and escalates the conversation to an area neither of them have been willing to touch before this. she doesn't want to be found. they've been talking about Elphaba nonstop, conjuring her presence, projecting her co-existence with them in the future, because the thing neither of them can bear to think about is the alternative.
and to be clear, the alternative is not JUST that Elphaba hates them 5eva now and "doesn't want to be found." that might have been the worst thing Glinda and Fiyero were capable of imagining in Act 1, but not anymore. Glinda and Fiyero both call Elphaba by name for the first time in this act after Wonderful, and what Glinda says specifically upon seeing her best friend is Elphie? oh, thank Oz you're alive. i don't think it's a stretch to imagine that Glinda and Fiyero have learned a lot about the fragility of life during the act break years. they'd been trying to ward that idea away from Elphaba: the one they think of as larger than life, the one they know would give her life for a greater calling, the one whom neither has seen for five years. she doesn't want to be found is the gentlest, most timid way Glinda could have phrased it, but--as Ryan's reaction demonstrates--it sends Fiyero reeling anyway, because he understands the implication. that Elphaba cannot be found. that she is irretrievable, dead, because another thing both of them learned during the act break is fascism does not need its enemy to live, to be real, to sustain itself.
this is what they've never talked about; the possibility both knew and feared so much that giving voice to it felt like sacrilege. but Glinda brings it up now, finally, and Fiyero takes heed in much the same way Glinda had at you can't leave because you can't resist this. all they have for each other now is the pain which comes with truth and the truth which comes with pain. it's a pain that cuts both ways, which brings us back to Katie's Glinda, and the unique and acute tragedy of her portrayal. she viscerally feels the fallout of her own actions every single time, yet in the moment she never learns. in the moment, Glinda never backs down. Glinda will always get the last word. here, she stands firm when she can't see Fiyero's face, but the moment he turns around--before he even admits she's right--she is already shaking her head, trying to take it back.
but she can't take it back. a significant but overlooked reason why Katie's TG always hits so hard is in the runway she meticulously builds for it beforehand, so by the time she returns to that podium we implicitly understand this is just what Glinda does. every time she just has to win, no matter the cost, and every time reckoning with the wreckage of her victory fills her with shame and regret. earlier on during her tenure this was played more like a compulsion--like Glinda literally couldn't help herself--but now as a seasoned performer the approach is more stark: it's no longer that Glinda doesn't mean the horrible things she says and does. it's that Glinda doesn't WANT to mean them, but she does anyway.
this is also what makes Katie's Glinda still feel like Glinda, as opposed to just like, a nice popular girl misunderstood in her own right. because yes, Glinda is very sensitive to the feelings of everyone around her, but she is always more sensitive to her own feelings and self-concept. if she sees a way to make herself and everyone happy she will do her utmost to make that happen; if she doesn't see a way--or if there's no time for her to find one--she defaults to what she wants in the moment every time, other people's feelings be damned, her own future feelings be damned. the possibility that Elphaba is irretrievable terrifies and devastates her just as much as it does Fiyero, but in the moment it doesn't matter. in the moment it only matters that Fiyero was leaving, just as Elphaba had, and the only way to keep him with her was to crush the hope for reunion both of them hold so dearly.
and it works. Glinda always gets what she wants, forever, and there is never any giving it back. there is never anything she can take back, any bridge she can uncross, any harm she can undo--nothing which can be perfectly restored to what it had been. in the end there is only Glinda, the things she thought she wanted, the things she ruined to get them. and she loves all of it still; enough to continue living with them, to help them move forward. but first, she does the only thing anyone can do with the past, which is recount it: painfully, truthfully, in the hope this time she will finally learn.
















