"Medical professionals turn to music making as a tonic"

by Jeffrey Brown and Anne Azzi Davenport 

[I seem to have launched a sort of ad hoc series about the performing arts and performing artists in the time of COVID-19.  I started in March and April with a two-part collection of articles reporting what theatergoers and reviewers in different parts of the country were doing to fill the theater gap right after performances all ceased.

[I went through a report on an online play reading to an online performance of The Diary of Anne Frank from St. Paul in May, followed in June by a PBS NewsHour transcript about the artist’s place in this crisis.  In July, I ran a report from Kirk Woodward on a play contest he entered that was conducted on the Internet accompanied in August by Kirk’s report on an online acting class he took.

[At the end of that month, I reposted a collection of pieces from NewsHour again concerning cellist Yo-Yo Ma’s call for artists to help keep people’s spirits up while they’re stuck in their homes.  Now, here it is September and I’m posting another NewsHour transcript pertaining to artists and the pandemic: a report on medical professionals who’ve found that playing music has a therapeutic effect—on the doctors and nurses making the music even more than anyone else who may be listening to it.

[The following report, produced by Anne Azzi Davenport and delivered by Jeffrey Brown, NewsHour’s chief arts correspondent, was broadcast on PBS NewsHour on Friday evening, 18 September  2020.]

Where do healers find comfort? For some U.S. doctors and caregivers, the answer is in music. Jeffrey Brown went to Newton, Massachusetts, recently to see how medical professionals are regenerating their spirits—and becoming better providers in the process. It’s part of our ongoing arts and culture coverage, Canvas.

Judy Woodruff: If you are a healer, question: Where do you find comfort? In the case of doctors across the United States, the answer is music.

As part of a new series focusing on the connection between arts and health, Jeffrey Brown went to Newton, Massachusetts, recently to see how medical professionals are regenerating their spirits and becoming better providers.

The story is part of our ongoing arts and culture coverage, Canvas.

Jeffrey Brown: It’s called the National Virtual Medical Orchestra, 60 medical professionals and students from around the country, musicians all, who come together usually to perform in the way that is suddenly the new normal: in the digital world.

But on a recent day, eight of them, led by conductor John Masko, were live and in-person for us, playing parts of works by several composers at a socially distanced backyard gathering.

This is a rare chance to hear live music, of course, and for these medical musicians an opportunity to actually get together and play. For some of them, the music is also a kind of healing in a time of trauma.

One was violist Dr. Michael Cho, who’s been on the front lines of the pandemic.

Michael Cho: I saw a lot of really, really sick people. My specialty is seeing sick people. That part of it, I was used to. Just the number of people in that condition was just — it was just mind-boggling.

Jeffrey Brown: A pulmonary and critical care physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, Cho has been caring for patients most in need of ventilators to help them breathe.

Michael Cho: There is a lot of tragedy.

For example, one of the worst things, I think, about the pandemic is seeing family members. So, a husband and wife both come in. A woman and her nephew, they’re sick at the same time. And maybe they both succumb to the illness. I mean, those kinds of things are just horrible to think about.

And to have my colleagues and my co-workers and my friends and my family and music is what keeps me resilient through all this.

Jeffrey Brown: For many medical professionals like Michael Cho, music came before medicine, and continues to play an enormous role in their lives.

The past decade has seen a steady rise in the number of so-called medical orchestras all over the country, now numbering more than 20, non-professional, but very high-quality.

One of the oldest, founded in 1984 by members of the Harvard Medical School, is the Longwood Symphony Orchestra in Boston. Pediatrician Lisa Wong has served as its president and violinist.

Lisa Wong: I think the attention to detail and our training for looking for beauty and working hard to make that happen is the same between being a musician and being a doctor.

Jeffrey Brown: She’s now cared for several generations of children in the Boston area, and remains fascinated by the deep connections between music and medicine, the fact that so many doctors played instruments as children and still do, all explored in her book “Scales to Scalpels: Doctors Who Practice the Healing Arts of Music and Medicine.”

There’s the act of close listening to the strings of a fellow musician or the murmur of a patient’s heart. There’s the need for concentration and striving for excellence in both. There’s even neurological connectivity, she says. Playing music in childhood helps wire an information highway in the brain.

Lisa Wong: Once those highways are established, you can put science through that, you can put medicine through that. You develop the brain differently.

So, what the neuroscientists are finding is, the brain of a musician looks different than a brain of someone who hasn’t played music.

Jeffrey Brown: There’s also a growing effort to use their music to help patients directly.

During the pandemic, Longwood members have performed outside a number of local hospitals. And Wong helped form the Boston Hope Hospital Music project, medical and other musicians performing for COVID patients.

Now she says the group wants to find even more ways to help fellow front-line medical workers, including offering music lessons and performances.

Lisa Wong: Just offering them sort of an array of things that they can do to heal that way, and to get them a little bit away from just the day-to-day challenges of the medicine itself.

Jeffrey Brown: And why is that so needed now? What have you seen?

Lisa Wong: Exhaustion. Sadness. Hopelessness. And they want to be healing.

This is what post-traumatic stress is. So, we’re looking ahead that the next number of years, I think it’s going to take a long time for our profession to heal.

Jeffrey Brown: For now, the National Virtual Medical Orchestra is providing a select group from around the country a place to heal and connect with some larger purpose.

John Masko: When you work with a medical orchestra, you really get that perspective that we are here for spiritual fulfillment and we’re here to enjoy ourselves.

Jeffrey Brown: You feel that?

John Masko: I feel that because feel that, yes.

Jeffrey Brown: It was started this spring by 28-year-old John Masko, a son of two physicians, but not one himself, who’s worked with medical musicians as music director of the Providence Medical Orchestra.

It, like arts groups everywhere, shut down in the pandemic.

John Masko: I started to hear very quickly from people about how it was simultaneously happening that their stress levels were rising astronomically in their professional lives, and that the vital outlet they had for relieving that and for using a different part of their brain was now gone.

Jeffrey Brown: Masko has found a new way into producing in virtual space. He sends musicians a video of himself conducting a piece.

The individuals record themselves, send in their video, and then rework their parts based on Masko’s e-mail notes. Then the 60 individual voices are put together by professional audio and video producers.

John Masko: Groups like ours are really positioned to lead the way in innovating this new style of music-making, which, even when we get back to performing regular live music, can feed back into that and expand the sphere of music-making.

Jeffrey Brown: Raise your hand if you’re just happy to be playing music with a fellow human beings, playing music.

Woman: Two hands.

Jeffrey Brown: Two hands.

For now, these musicians are left with this kind of distanced gathering, along with a deep understanding of the connections between art and medicine, including when it’s the healers themselves in need.

Lisa Wong: It’s hard and it’s necessary to know that you also need to heal, to be able to become revitalized, so that you have enough energy to go back out.

That’s the whole thing about the arts that will revitalize you, restore faith in humanity, opportunity to really appreciate beauty. And once that’s filled, then you can give it back.

Jeffrey Brown: You’re alive again, in a sense.

Lisa Wong: Absolutely.

Jeffrey Brown: And there is nothing like live music for that.

For the “PBS NewsHour,” I’m Jeffrey Brown in Newton, Massachusetts.

Judy Woodruff: Thank you, Jeff.

And we love that these medical professionals can find healing in this way.

'Help!'

by Kirk Woodward

[The article below, Kirk Woodward’s examination of the Beatles’ 1965 movie Help!, will be my friend’s 100th solo contribution to Rick On Theater (plus one collaboration with me).  Of those previous 99 posts, some of which were multipart contributions, six have been about the Beatles or one of its former members. 

[I’ve been a fan of the Beatles since I first heard them on the radio when I was a high school student in Europe in the early ’60s.  (“She Loves Me” was released in the U.K. at the end of August 1963, just as I was about to start school outside Geneva.  We listened to rock ’n’ roll on BBC radio, Radio Luxembourg, and pirate radio.)  But my enthusiasm pales before Kirk’s loyalty.  In addition to that, Kirk knows music, which I don’t, so he applies that to his fandom as well. 

[Furthermore, as a longtime theater student, with experience as an actor, director, and playwright—as well as a composer and lyricist—Kirk has a perspective on the Beatles’ film output that’s, if not unique, then at least rare.  The proof is below.  If you don’t know Help!, the group’s second film, Kirk’s discussion will make you want to see it.  If you do know it, it’ll change your appreciation of it. 

[You know what the Beatles said: “Now I find I've changed my mind and opened up the doors.”  (Yeah, I know that’s not what they really meant.  But it’s what I mean!)]

In the late 1960’s, some of us studying at Washington and Lee University were fortunate to spend some days in London on summer theater trips organized by the school’s drama professor, Lee (really Leonel) Kahn.

Lee had connections with the British theater world and arranged to bring in as lecturers a number of young and exciting professionals from England, some of whom would go on to careers of success and importance, like the playwrights and screenwriters Christopher Hampton (now Sir Christopher, b. 1946) and David Mercer (1928-1980).

Our lecturers introduced us to the most exciting elements of British theater of the time. From London I wrote my mother:

Something else which came out in a lecture this morning is that the Beatles have had an important influence on one kind of British theater. The line goes:

”Goon Show” (Spike Mulligan, Peter Sellers, etc.)
                                     V

Beatles (sense of humor, the looseness of their stage shows and their strong relation to the audience)

                                    V

Street theater, small-group theater, improvisations (akin to off-off-Broadway)

I would modify some of what I wrote my mother: the Beatles’ stage shows were “loose” only in the sense that they never seemed “canned” – there was always a personally spontaneous element in their appearances. And I should have mentioned that their influence spilled into many areas besides theater, in particular, music (of course), fashion, and, our topic here, film.

I have written about the Beatles several times for this blog. In this article I am writing about their second film, Help!, a film that has influenced theater and other arts as well.

Help! was filmed and released in 1965. It followed the Beatles’ brilliant and wildly successful first film, A Hard Day’s Night (1964). Both films were directed by the American expatriate Richard Lester (b. 1932), who began his career by directing advertisements and who developed a style of filmmaking involving a quick pace, rapid and unexpected shifts between shots, and humor that often verged on the surreal.

Both A Hard Day’s Night and Help! exhibit these traits, but they are very different films. A Hard Day’s Night is a black and white film. Focusing on an imagined day or so in the lives of the four Beatles, it is concise, with a script written by Alun Owen (1925-1994) filmed on an extremely tight budget, wasting no space.

Help!, a year later, had, as Richard Lester has said, a somewhat larger budget, and was shot in color, with an expansive script written by Mark Behm (1925-2007), otherwise best known for his delightful screenplay of the mystery film Charade (1963). Behm’s script for Help! was given touches of dialogue and plot by Charles Wood (1932-2020), about whom I will say more below.

In contrast to the very England-bound A Hard Day’s Night, Help! takes place in England, the Alps, back in England again, and finally in the Bahamas. Critical opinion tends to consider A Hard Day’s Night a masterpiece, and Help! nowhere near as successful.

I consider this ranking, if I may use the word, baloney. The films are different in significant ways, and I admire A Hard Day’s Night, but I love Help! I seldom feel the need to watch A Hard Day’s Night, but Help! is one of my favorite movies.

Why? For starters, it has the Beatles in it, and although that fact by itself may not justify enthusiasm (as it does not quite, sadly, for Magical Mystery Tour, their self-made film of 1968), it certainly contributes.

In A Hard Day’s Night, as Richard Lester explains in a video introduction to the film, the focus is the public lives of the Beatles; the logical next step would have been a film about their private lives, but, Lester says, at that time their private lives were rated “X.”

The agreed-on answer was to let the Beatles be the center of an experience that revolved around them, hence the film’s plot: members of an Eastern cult worship with a daily sacrifice, but the mandatory sacrificial ring has disappeared – it has ended up on Ringo’s finger, and it won’t come off, despite the best efforts of the cult, as well as two renegade British scientists who want it for their own purposes. Ringo’s life is in danger as long as he wears the ring.

That’s the plot. Right up front it must be said that the film could not possibly be made today, certainly not in the way it exists now, with English actors playing Indian members of a religion seen as murderous and barbaric (supposedly based on Thugs, an alleged murderous gang that terrorized India for decades). A viewer today has a lot of ignoring to do. Whether or not to, of course, is an individual decision.

In any case, the plot is outlandish and absurd, and rendered completely non-realistic by Richard Lester’s directorial style. In an essay in the 2007 video release of Help!, the director Martin Scorsese (b. 1942) writes that Lester

had an extraordinary sense of pace and motion, in the editing and in the movement of the people onscreen. . . . Most of all, it was the freedom, the feeling that the structure of the picture could bend and twist to accommodate the spirit of youth. . .  that you could play with form and structure and break as many rules as you wanted as long as you had a strong emotional core – this was what Lester gave us. . . .  You were let in on the joke, and that made it even funnier.

 The supporting actors are all wonderful. Lester tended to work with a core group of actors, particularly Victor Spinetti (1929-2012) and Roy Kinnear (1934-1988), who were thoroughly familiar with his comic style. Leo McKern (1920-2002) and Eleanor Bron (b. 1938) as the high priest of the cult and his ambiguous henchwoman respectively, are superb.

What about the Beatles? As themselves they are wonderful, of course – they’re the Beatles. One cannot help watching them; they are energetic and entertaining and yet they have an odd reserve about them – they’re keeping something private. All the songs they wrote for the film remain classics; they were practically exploding as songwriters at this period, with “Yesterday” one of the songs on the British album of Help! (but not used in the movie). Not bad.

As for their acting, it presents an interesting study in movie performing. Ringo, who shone as an actor in A Hard Day’s Night, continues to charm and amuse. John and George, who are not showcased as much as Ringo, succeed by underplaying everything. They are both delightfully deadpan.

Paul’s performance is a different matter. In general, underacting is the best approach to acting in film, and overacting the worst. I don’t know in what order the scenes of Help! were shot, but in the earlier part of the movie Paul makes “facial expressions” and basically tries too hard. The good news is that he calms down as the film goes on, and is fine by halfway or so through the movie.

In general, the Beatles are the more or less relaxed center of the turmoil of Help!, and there is plenty of turmoil. Topics presented and satirized in the movie include: war, the justice system, the military, science, British technology, government, the police, and religion, all of it accompanied by heavy doses of violence involving knives, poison gas, tanks, lasers, and savage man-eating animals.

This is a film about a rock band? This is comedy? Well, yes, or perhaps more accurately it is farce, which, as Eric Bentley writes in The Life of the Drama (1964), is “generally the fantasy of innocence surrounded by malevolence.” Richard Lester’s style, as I have described it here, is a farce style – which is not to say that it is frivolous.

In fact, in choosing Charles Wood to work on the script of the film, Lester chose a writer particularly fascinated by war and its effects. Wood wrote frequently about military life and action, and notably went on to write the screenplay for How I Won the War (1967), a surreal antiwar film that featured John Lennon as a soldier who, along with many others, is killed.

The scene in Help! where the Beatles record on Salisbury Plain, near Stonehenge, in particular shows Wood’s influence, with the modern British Army providing a protective ring of tanks around the Beatles, while the enemy, in World War I garb with a mixture of weapons, waits for sappers to dig under the recording area and set off deadly explosives. There is a battle, which leads to a retreat and apparently ends tragically. . . .

Among the other subjects treated extensively in the film, organized religion takes a particularly strong beating, including a scene in which Clang, the High Priest, treats an Anglican minister to a long string of ecclesiastical platitudes, and a scene in which Ringo mutters, “It’s a different religion from ours. I think.”

Richard Lester told the press when the film was released, “You’ll find nothing new about Help!. There’s not one bit of insight into a social phenomenon of our times.” Except, of course, for the phenomena of war, the justice system, the military, science, British technology, government, the police, and religion!

All this points to one of the ways the film was influential. Help! demonstrated on a large and widely viewed platform that the illusion of realism in movies was not a requirement for addressing serious issues in film.

They could be presented fancifully, comically, bizarrely – there were few limits, as long as they were handled with the appropriate style, and Lester knew what that style could be. Help! opened a large door to new kinds of expression of opinion.

And others went through that door, as two examples will illustrate. One is that the film, and Magical Mystery Tour which followed it (although not terribly successfully), showed the way for what was shortly to become the Monty Python troupe (John Cleese, Eric Idle, Graham Chapman, Terry Jones, Terry Gilliam, Michael Palin), in terms of the use of quick cuts, topic changes, and bizarre juxtapositions.

An example comes toward the center of Help!, when a title card announces an intermission, followed by a short scene of the Beatles in the forest, with one of them appearing to bounce another like a ball. . . followed by a card announcing the second part, a short scene between two Indian women, one the recently saved human sacrifice and the other her clearly English mother . . . followed by another title card, and the resumption of the movie.

Some of Lester’s stylistic effects were the result of necessity; although he had a bigger budget for Help!, it wasn’t extravagant. He had to make the most of what he had. Some of the shots in the film probably would have been reshot under other circumstances. But in the environment he created, they didn’t matter.  He led the audience to accept whatever he did.

If one is going to take the kind of risks that Lester takes, it helps to have talent. One example that stands out for me is that while filming on the mountain slopes of Switzerland, it was difficult to find spaces where crowds weren’t surrounding the Beatles, and one of those spaces had telephone poles with wires across it.

Lester solved the problem by superimposing musical notes from “Ticket to Ride,” the song being played that moment, on the wires, as though the wires were staves in a music score. That’s creativity; that’s talent.

When putting together film of the Beatles playing together, Lester decided not to care whether or not they made logical sense. For example, in the song “You’re Going to Lose That Girl,” Ringo is seen playing the drums, and, in one shot, the bongos, although logically that couldn’t happen in one runthrough of the song. Countless videos since Help! have taken off from what Lester developed in part out of necessity. (The Monkees, whose TV show first aired in 1966, took the hint immediately.)

Countless videos since Help! have taken off from what Lester developed in part out of necessity. When putting together film of the Beatles playing together, he decided not to care whether or not they made logical sense. For example, in the song “You’re Going to Lose That Girl,” Ringo is seen playing the drums, and, in one shot, the bongos, although logically that couldn’t happen in one runthrough of the song.

I wonder if what I’ve been saying gives the impression that the Beatles didn’t have much to do with the influence of Help!. Clearly that is not so. The Beatles made it happen, they cooperated with it, they were in the middle of it, and their sense of humor is the inspiration for it. They were personalities, and those personalities lent themselves to experimentation.

In fact, the biggest problem the Beatles had in filming Help! is that they had already made one movie, and they hated to repeat anything they had already done. As a result they spent a lot of filming time stoned, they were casual about learning lines, and they never got around to making a third major movie; they just couldn’t be bothered.

But not wanting to repeat themselves– wanting continually to take a fresh approach – is the essence of what Richard Lester did, and what A Hard Day’s Night and Help! do. The Beatles brought a conscious search for newness into the world of popular art, including film – and theater. I would claim, among other early results of this approach, “rock musicals” such as Hair (1967), and groups like the Firesign Theatre (1966 on), who, using a radio drama format, performed on stage extensively, and frequently invoked the Beatles – an influence acknowledged by both Firesign and Python members.

Here is one personal example of the latter. George Harrison, in particular, seems to have thought of the Monty Python troupe as the logical successor to the Beatles. In a recent comment in this blog, Rick, commenting on a play I wrote about theater superstitions, said:

The play, which Kirk wrote late in 2019, long before I even thought of this post, reminds me of a Monty Python sketch! I can actually hear the Pythons doing it. (Kirk and I are both fans of the Pythons, and he agreed that ‘That Scottish Play’ “is definitely like a Python sketch!” – though he’s “not sure I consciously had that in mind” when he composed it.)  [See “Ghosts, Curses, & Charms: Theater Superstitions – Part 1” (14 August 2020), Comment dated 6 September 2020.]

There – a direct line from my recent play, through the Pythons, to the Beatles. That’s influence. When I wrote my mother, I was correct – I had no idea at the time how correct –that “improvisations” were one way the Beatles had influenced theater, and those improvisations helped spawn the Pythons.

That’s just one example of their influence. I am certainly not saying that they invented the performance world we experience today – for example, improvisation existed long before the Beatles; so did theater for that matter. But they made possible multiple new approaches in the performance arts, and to this day we enjoy the benefits.

[I was on the same trip to London in the summer of 1969 that Kirk took.  (Kirk and I were classmates at W&L and we both worked with Lee Kahn.)  The program was housed in a dormitory of the University of London and along with the shows we saw, we had, as Kirk reports, meetings with and lectures from a number of theater figures, both pros and academics, at the dorm.  At one of those sessions, a talk by playwright Christopher Hampton, an incident centering on John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger drew me up short.

[Hampton, a resident dramatist at the Royal Court Theatre whose play The Philanthropist was about to open at the theater as I remember, came to speak to us about the rise of the contemporary theater (or something like that—I forget the actual topic after 51 years). In his discussion, Hampton mentioned that an important influence in his artistic development was the original production of Look Back in Anger in 1956, which he'd seen when he was 10.  I quickly did the math and figured out that Hampton—born in January 1946—is the same age as I am.  (I’m almost exactly 11 months younger than Hampton.)

[I was immediately depressed because here he was, a produced playwright of some renown already and here I was, sitting, as it were, at his feet, having accomplished nothing so far in my life.  He's gone on to write several important plays, including Total Eclipse (1967) and Les Liaisons Dangereuses (1985), and a batch of screenplays and opera librettos, while I have gone on . . . to continue to do nothing of significance—with the possible exception, says Kirk graciously, of starting Rick On Theater; but that’s only a late development.  Ah, well . . . such are the inequities of life!

[Kirk has a special attachment—critical, to be sure—to Help!  I have one to A Hard Day’s Night, but it’s visceral.  It’s also more to the title song than to the whole film and is connected to a very specific memory. 

[The movie was released in Europe, where I was living at the time, in July 1964, less than a year before I took a trip to Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union over spring vacation with a group from my school in Geneva.  (The French title is Quatre garçons dans le vent, literally “Four boys in the wind,” but its idiomatic sense is “Four boys in fashion” or, more colloquially, “Four hip guys.”  The German title, incidentally, is simply Yeah Yeah Yeah.) 

[The songs from the film were in all our heads, and one of our group, a boy from a really wealthy family, had brought along an electric guitar and a complete portable amp system (which we had set up in the train compartment for our cross-continental journey from Geneva to Warsaw).  I’m sure he played the soundtrack and we sang that song over and over on that long train voyage. 

[Skipping ahead a couple of days, we were in the Soviet Union and on a flight from Moscow to Leningrad when I remembered something vital: our adult chaperone was supposed to have arranged to pick up my visa for Hungary from the Hungarian embassy in Moscow! 

[The Hungarians had refused to issue me a visa through the embassy in Bern the way all my schoolmates had gotten theirs—I carried a diplomatic passport and visas for Western diplomats had to be issued by the foreign ministry in Budapest—so I was supposed to pick it up in Moscow.  But the faculty leader had forgotten and so had I (I was all of 18 at the time), and we were en route to Leningrad. 

[When we couldn’t get the visa at the Hungarian consulate in Leningrad or, next, in Kiev, we had to arrange for me to fly over Hungary and meet the group in Vienna.  So they all took off by train to Budapest and I waited in Kiev for a plane to Vienna the next day. 

[Alone and without rubles except what I needed to get through the day, I had to kill time somehow.  So I wandered around the city—I spoke a little Russian but no Ukrainian—and sang “A Hard Day’s Night” to myself over and over. 

[I was a little relieved to get to Vienna—Austria was a relatively free country and I spoke German by then, so I could get around and talk to people—but I still had almost no cash until the group arrived in town some hours after I did.  So I walked and sang “A Hard Day’s Night” some more! 

[To this day, I can’t hear that song—which, like most Beatles tunes, I still love—without flashing back to that spring trip 55 years ago to Warsaw, Moscow, Leningrad, Kiev, and Vienna . . . but not Budapest; I never got there.]

Some Prominent Playwrights from the Archives

BUFFALO GAL
by A. R. Gurney
Primary Stages, 59E59 Theaters
2 September 2008

Well, the 2008-09 season has opened!  Seemed early to me—Labor Day hadn’t even come and gone yet—but Primary Stages, one of our longer-running Off-Broadway companies (founded in 1984), started its program on 22 July 2008 with A. R. Gurney’s Buffalo Gal. 

The production had its press opening on 5 August, but its scheduled closing on 30 August was still earlier than most other companies’ initial productions.  (I’m also subscribing to MCC, whose first show doesn’t even open until 10 September; Primary Stages’ next production starts on 30 September.)  What’s next—Christmas starting before Thanksgiving?

Oh, wait.  It already does.  Never mind. 

Okay, enough silliness.  My friend Diana and I went to 59E59 Theaters, the Eastside space in which Primary Stages is working, to see Buffalo Gal on Thursday, 21 August, and it was an excellent theater evening.  Primary Stages is presenting its season in Theater A on the ground floor at 59E59, a 185-seat proscenium house and the complex’s largest space.

It’s not a great play—probably won’t go down in the canon of theater literature as a significant play—but it works on stage and was very enjoyable.  It was also a relief.  As I said to Diana as we were leaving, it’s been a long time since I haven’t left a theater either disappointed or worse. 

(I also let slip the hope that this bodes well for the season, but as soon as I said that, I remembered back to September 2004 when we saw what I thought was a wonderful production of two Ionesco one-acts—The Bald Soprano and The Lesson at the Atlantic Theater Company; see my 4 October 2004 report on Rick On Theater—after which the season went precipitously downhill.  Now I’m afraid I’ve jinxed this season!)

I’ve never been the fan of Gurney (with the exception of 1995’s Sylvia) that I have been of John Guare or Lanford Wilson, say, but he’s a solid playwright—and he’s been at it for so long that he can do it with his eyes closed, I’m sure, and still come out with a creditable script.  This may be a case of that to an extent—plus the fact that he’s dealing here with his own, and I assume beloved, field of endeavor: The Theater. 

Of course, he’s also writing about his main subject, the one he’s devoted his career to: the American WASP—and for good measure, he’s thrown in Chekhov, possibly every theater person’s most favorite playwright next to Shakespeare, and the city of Buffalo, where Gurney, like his leading lady, was born.  [A. R. “Pete” Gurney died at 86 on 13 June 2017.]  In an interview, Gurney said, “I’ve always loved the city of Buffalo and I wanted to write about it.”  Now he has.

So, Theater, WASPs, Chekhov, and Buffalo.  How could he miss?  Well, it’s not as if there aren’t problems with the script—not, that is to specify, the production—and so, I’ll dispense with those cavils tout de suite so as to get past them.  It’s not that they aren’t significant—in another play, they’d have scuttled the whole megillah (and I ain’t talkin’ about the gorilla, neither)—but Gurney, the cast, and director Mark Lamos pull it off smoothly.

I guess, since this is a pretty new play—it premièred at Williamstown in 2000 and had a regular run in . . . guess where!  Buffalo, in 2002—I should give you all a run-down of the plot and all. 

Buffalo Gal (and, yes, the song of that title does play during the show) is a sort of backstage dramedy.  Actually, to be precise, it’s an on-stage-before-rehearsals-start dramedy, but as far as sub-genres go, that’s the same thing.  It’s about actors, directors, producers, stage managers, costumes, sets, props, acting . . . and the stage vs. Hollywood (in this case, TV). 

In the interview, Gurney doesn’t suggest that he chose Chekhov for his model for this reason, but the Russian may be one of Western theater’s most “theatrical” playwrights.  Among all the modern dramatists, he’s one of the few who’ve had no success in films.  (1994’s Vanya on 42nd Street by Louis Malle and David Mamet comes closest.  I always wondered if Robert Altman’s 1978 film A Wedding was inspired by the Chekhov short story, but I’ve never found any confirmation of that suspicion.) 

Ibsen hasn’t done so well (both writers, of course, have had videos of stage productions or, in the case of A Doll’s House, a wonderful live TV production back in the ’50s), but all of Shaw’s major plays were turned into movies—and Pygmalion, of course, got double treatment: stage play-movie-stage musical-movie musical. 

But Chekhov, outside of Russia, has never transferred, yet his plays are considered challenges for actors and directors, loved by theater companies and, presumably, audiences.  I would guess that among actors—and maybe playwrights, too—the most beloved stage piece is The Seagull.  It’s all about us, after all.  But Cherry Orchard, the play at the heart of Buffalo Gal, is about coming home, and that’s what Gurney wrote about in his play. 

Amanda, the main character, even tries to quote F. Scott Fitzgerald on the subject, saying, “Americans always want to be back somewhere.  Something like that, only he said it better.”  (I wondered why no one came back with Thomas Wolfe’s admonishment about home—that you can’t go there again.)  The parallels Gurney constructs, though, are almost too obvious—and that’s one of the complaints I have.

Amanda (Susan Sullivan, whose professional life somewhat parallels Amanda’s), is a successful and famous TV star who’s returning home to Buffalo, where she grew up and started out on the local stage, to play Madam Ranevskaya in the production of Cherry Orchard staged by a rising local rep company.  Her career, mostly because her age is approaching late-middle, has hit a slow point and she’s hoping a stage success will give her a boost. 

The director, Jackie (Jennifer Regan), in turn, hopes that Amanda’s stardom will attract audiences, critics, and contributors to her still-new theater, and that, on the heels of this success (she’s even anticipating a transfer to New York), she can really bring quality theater to Buffalo again.  (It’s not in the script, but the Studio Arena Theatre, Buffalo’s long-time, high-rep regional company went dark earlier this year.  One of its better-known successes was sending Tennessee Williams’s Eccentricities of a Nightingale to Broadway in 1976.) 

The casting of Amanda as Ranevskaya is too perfect: on her way in from the airport, the actress—who’s arrived a day before the rest of the cast to get a feel for the theater—makes the driver from the theater take the long way to by-pass the freeway and to make a detour to her grandmother’s old house.  Amanda grew up there, playing on the veranda (“Amanda on the veranda,” grandma used to say), and now . . . can you all guess?—it’s for sale.  (There’s no cherry orchard at the old house, but there was an apple tree!) 

Of course, Hollywood keeps getting in the way.  Even before Amanda shows up, the director and her staff have been on the phone with Amanda’s agent to get the signed contract.  The agent is apparently delaying—he doesn’t even approve of the whole venture; he’s pushing a trashy sit-com on Fox in which Amanda would play a sort of trash-talking Estelle Getty grandmother (heavens!) role.  He’s raising all kinds of objections, including to the clause that guarantees Jackie a role in the potential transfer to New York if the show is successful. 

Amanda herself is afraid she won’t be able to learn the lines for a stage performance again; in Hollywood, she reminds everyone, you only get pieces of the dialogue at a time, and even then you don’t have to say the words exactly as long as you get the sense right.  She’s had some failed marriages and a daughter with problems, and she needs money to care for her.  The Fox show is lucrative, but insulting and demeaning; however, the producers keep upping the ante and enhancing her role with each offer, relayed by the agent from the coast. 

But before the company can begin to worry about Amanda bolting for TV again, they learn that the leading man, who was to play Leonid, Ranevskaya’s brother, had dropped out.  He and Amanda had worked together before—it’s one of the reasons she wants to do the play—but he’s immediately replaced with a local star, James Johnson (Dathan B. Williams), whom Amanda demands to meet. 

“James” turns out to be “Jimmy” Johnson, Amanda realizes suddenly—formerly one of the boys in her acting classes in Buffalo; he’s also African-American—the theater practices “nontraditional casting”—and Amanda quips, “The 19th-century land-owning Russian lady just discovers she has a black brother.”  

Finally, Amanda gets a phone message from a Dr. Dan Robbins, but she doesn’t recognize the name until a staffer calls the local dentist back and discovers he used to be Danny Ruben (Mark Blum)—her first love and the boy who got her into theater back in high school.  (They wrote and put on a musical—he sends along a CD of them singing the signature song, “Say When,” which is played over the theater’s sound system for all of the assembled characters to hear.  This is something else I’ll address in a moment.)

Among the other clichés are an ASM, Debbie (Carmen M. Herlihy), who’s a theater student conversant with every theater-history factoid you could imagine; and an assistant director, Roy (James Waterston), who admits he’s in theater because he just loves the words.  (His parents are both deaf; at home, communication is all signs.)

I won’t be a spoiler this time and tell you how things turn out—the play is too good as a theater piece, even if it’s not top-level dramatic lit—but I will say that the drama turns on whether Amanda will do the play or not, or whether she goes back to L.A. to do the sit-com (which, in another twist of coincidence, starts taping in the middle of the play’s run—that is, she can’t do both, wouldn’t ya know). 

There’s also the question of whether she’ll throw it all over to stay in Buffalo with her lost love, Dan, whose wife may be leaving him because he’s never really stopped loving Amanda (or, as we might suppose, the image of Amanda, the now-famous Hollywood actress).

All of the characters say too much.  I don’t mean they talk too much, but they say too much.  Debbie, of course, is a chatterer, so I don’t mean her—that’s her character and cliché though it may be, it’s believable.  But everyone else is constantly revealing the most private, intimate things to people who are virtually total strangers.  This is especially true of Amanda—who tells everyone about her daughter’s emotional problems, her money troubles, her failed marriages.  

She acknowledges she has a granddaughter by her unmarried daughter (though she specifies that that little fact—the grandmother part, not the unwed-mother part!—must not appear in her program bio) and finally, while her old boyfriend is trying to convince her to run away with him, she acknowledges that he had gotten her pregnant when they were teens and she had run away to have a secret abortion in Puerto Rico.  (The two are ostensibly alone on stage, but there’s no privacy with techies in the booth and others in the wings and off-stage offices.) 

Why she doesn’t just go on Oprah and reveal all, I don’t know—or write a lucrative tell-all book.  That would solve her money problems, I’d imagine!  Much of the drama and some of the plot rests on these revelations, but, my God!, aren’t some things just private?  Except for Dan (James/Jimmy has left the theater by this time), the actress has never met any of these people.  Remember, Amanda isn’t out of the YouTube and Facebook generation—she hasn’t grown up with her life on the ’Net; she’s a “lady” of a “certain age.”  Yeah, I know, that’s an anachronism . . . but puh-leeeze . . . . 

I don’t think I’ve caught all the contrivances and coincidences Gurney weaves into his plot, but I think you get the idea—it’s a little too convenient to be believed.  The parallels with Cherry Orchard, the Hollywood-vs.-stage conflict, the going-home sentimentality—it’s all a little too hard to credit.  If it weren’t a master craftsman like Gurney, with a terrific cast and sure-handed director, it would have fallen apart in the first scene.

So, that gets me to the acting (and, less obviously, the directing—since Lamos’s work was too subtle in this case to be clearly discernable). 

Make no mistake, this is a star vehicle—or the Off-Broadway equivalent of one.  Amanda is the main character and is on stage most of the play.  Nonetheless, the company worked as an ensemble, even though Susan Sullivan was also the best-known member of the cast by far.  [With a long, successful career in television, Sullivan would probably become most recognized for her portrayal of Martha Rodgers on Castle (2009–2016), the ABC crime-comedy-drama series.]  (James Waterston is the son of Sam Waterston, but in his own right, he’s not very well known yet.) 

The ensembleness of the cast was the clearest benefit of Lamos’s directing—that and the casting itself, certainly.  (Gurney apparently had a hand in casting Sullivan as Amanda—he promoted her for the role.)  Even despite the excesses of Gurney’s script, all the actors created believable characters and convincing circumstances.  It might be hard to believe me now, but while I was watching the play unfold, even as I asked myself from time to time if Amanda should really be telling everyone her private details so readily, I never actually doubted that that was what was going on in this set of lives.  (The jokes, by the way—it is a “dramedy,” as I said before—were not so predictable, though many were “theater jokes.”  I had no problem chuckling away, even guffawing occasionally.) 

It had to be Sullivan, however, who took the prize for making this all work as well as it did.  (The Times gave the production a near-rave—and also ran a feature on Sullivan about a week later—though other New York papers were less enthusiastic.  I admit, because of so many previous differences with Ben Brantley’s criticism, I had trepidations about the show before I went; the review came out two weeks before I saw the play.) 

I’m not sure how they all managed to pull this trick off, but if I had to make an educated guess, I’d say that all the actors simply behaved as if they believed every moment of Gurney’s script.  They never hesitated or flinched, and they didn’t try to run over the less credible bits.  Like con artists, I guess, if actors make as if they believe what they’re doing, the audience—ahem, “marks”—will, too.  I don’t know if there’s psychological justification for that assertion, but it seems true. 

I also assume that Lamos had a hand in this, since every cast member was doing the same level of work—Sullivan’s efforts were obviously greater, but they were all doing the same quality, even if she was doing more quantity. 

[This report was written before I included the review round-up that’s now standard for ROT.  The Times review was Ben Brantley, “Stranger in Newly Strange Lands: Home and Theater,” 6 Aug. 2008; the feature on Sullivan was Patricia Cohen, “Stage Role Close to Home for a Former TV Star,” 11 Aug. 2008.  Other New York City reviews were: Joe Dziemianowicz, “Susan Sullivan shines in ‘Buffalo Gal,’” Daily News 6 Aug. 2008; Frank Scheck, “Star’s Return Sheds Little Theatrical Light,” New York Post 11 Aug. 2008; Michael Feingold, “Hair’s Central Park Revival Still Shines With Youthful Energy; Buffalo Gal Skillfully Reworks Chekhov, “ Village Voice 12 Aug. 2008; and Marilyn Stasio, “Off Broadway: Buffalo Gal,” Variety 6 Aug. 2008.]

*  *  *  *
A BODY OF WATER
by Lee Blessing
Primary Stages, 59E59 Theaters
10 December 2008

My friend Diana and I saw the second show at Primary Stages, Lee Blessing’s A Body of Water, on Friday, 17 October 2008.  Charles Isherwood, whose New York Times review of Body of Water appeared two days before we went to 59E59 to see the performance, playing in Theater A, the large proscenium space on the first floor, was decidedly negative, which didn’t bode well.  (I have always had disagreements with the Times’s principal theater critic, Ben Brantley, but most of the time I have found that Isherwood’s judgment aligns with mine.) 

Primary Stages’ publicity summarized the plot of Body thus: “Avis and Moss awake one morning in a house set in the forested hills above a picturesque body of water.  The weather’s great, the view’s magnificent.  However, neither of them seems to know whose house this is or who they are.  Will a stranger at their doorstep be able to help?”  It suggested that Blessing was going to “explore” who we are without our memories. 

Neither Diana nor I, however, could say what the hell Blessing was up to; it was an overextended—and ultimately enervating—gimmick.  Isherwood called the play a “sputtering drama” and “ultimately forgettable” and recommended that Blessing put the pieces of his puzzle “back in the box.”  He may have been a little harsh in his specifics, but his overall evaluation of the play was, unhappily, on the nose.  In fact, my impression was that Blessing had dreamed up a concept and then wrote a play to fit the circumstances.  In fact, here’s what he said in an interview about the play’s “inspiration”:

I woke up one morning, and this idea had suddenly struck me.  You know, what if a couple of people like me woke up and didn’t know who they were?  It developed from there.  Some plays begin with characters, some plays begin with locations, and a play like this simply begins with a premise.

Well, I don’t think the play ever “developed from there.”  Blessing never came up with anything to say with, through, or about the situation or the characters he invented.  When asked what the theme of the play is, he talked all around the question but never really answered it, sounding to me like someone who didn’t have the answer. 

That stranger at the doorstep, named Wren (yes, like the bird; it’s a kind of running joke through the play—”Avis,” as she notes, means bird in Latin—but not a good enough one to recapitulate), may or may not be Avis and Moss’s daughter, and she basically manipulates them by revealing each morning when they awake with no memories of the previous day what she wants them to know, which may or may not be true. 

The problem here is not that Wren may be manipulating Avis and Moss, but Blessing is manipulating us.  And I hate it when a playwright manipulates me.  I don’t like it when Pinter does it, and he’s a lot better at it than Blessing.  Besides, Pinter generally has something to say by way of his manipulation; I’m not at all convinced Blessing does.

I don’t see the value in going in to a detailed description of this production of what I deem a phony drama—it pretends to have something on its mind, but doesn’t (or I’m too dumb to get it).  I will say that the acting was fine (Christine Lahti was Avis and Michael Cristofer, who is the playwright of 1977’s Pulitzer- and Tony-winning Shadow Box, was Moss) as far as the script allowed, and the direction, by Maria Mileaf, was competent given that same proviso. 

The problem wasn’t the production; it’s the script.  Blessing isn’t a writer I’ve followed much, though I enjoyed Chesapeake back in 1999, but here, for my dough, he failed.  (Come to think of it, Chesapeake’s a play with a gimmick at the center, too.  Mark-Linn Baker played a man who is, in truth, the reincarnated pet Chesapeake Bay retriever he had disastrously tried to kidnap.  They died together in the attempt, and Baker came back as the dog in human form!  But that, at least, was a little different, and Blessing had a point to make about free expression, artistic freedom, and right-wing demagoguery.)

*  *  *  *
THE THIRD STORY
by Charles Busch
MCC Theater, Lucille Lortel Theatre
28 February 2009 

Charles Busch’s The Third Story is a play about storytelling—mostly the Hollywood variety.  Busch has interwoven four stories about twins and mothers-and-sons in his play which had its New York première as part of the MCC Theater’s 2008-09 season at the Lucille Lortel Theatre.  (It had its world première last fall at La Jolla, which commissioned the play.) 

Diana, my frequent theater partner, and I went into Greenwich Village on Friday, 27 February 2009, to see the production, starring Kathleen Turner (Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?) and Busch himself (in several female roles), which was a replacement for a new Neil LaBute play MCC had originally intended to present, The Break of Noon. 

The theater, which has last season’s reasons to be pretty by LaBute about to open on Broadway, didn’t want another LaBute play to compete with this commercial debut, the playwright’s first on Broadway.  I’m no great fan of LaBute, but I’m not sure we got the better of this deal. 

I’m not really a big fan of Busch, either, so that may color my feelings some.  Not that I have any objection to Busch’s work; it just never seems more than mildly amusing to me.  In The Third Story, for instance, he’s composed a sort of showcase for virtuosic character acting, but it’s a pretty shallow exercise for the cast.  They get to display some Thespian pyrotechnics, especially Busch and Scott Parkinson, but there’s no depth to any of it. 

Busch’s playwriting is of the same vein, I’d say.  He includes a “Playwright’s Note” in the program which is a mini-essay on storytelling, especially in his family (some of the autobiography he reveals there shows up now and then in Story’s plot . . . er, plots). 

He also reveals that he started this script off as the story of a queen of crime, a sort of Ma Barker with fashion sense (she likes designer clothes!) and then rediscovered a sci-fi play he’d written in the ’90s about a “frosty lady scientist who creates a clone” and decided to combine the two. 

But that wasn’t enough for Busch, so he invented a Russian fairy tale and folded that in, too.  To lace these together, he created the screenwriter and her son who are writing the film script that encompasses these plots—four stories in all.  (The play’s title refers to an axiom the screenwriter posits that the first two drafts of a script only sketch out the characters and plot outlines, but in the third draft, the story comes together.) 

As I reckon, these were all supposed to interlace with one another, covering similar themes and plot elements, even using some of the same lines.  The difficulty I had, however, was that there were too many balls bouncing in the air for me to keep track of them all and keep them all connected to one another. 

At the same time, since all four stories were dealing with the same basic ideas, everything important got repeated four times (and more—several of the characters also tell stories themselves).  Since none of these ideas was especially profound (at least not in my opinion), that was overkill.  At two hours, Story felt very long; several members of the audience left at intermission and at least one pair walked up the aisle during the second act. 

It seems that this season a lot of the plays I’ve seen had the same fundamental fault: they were insubstantial.  Some also had dramaturgical problems as well, but even the ones that were well structured didn’t have much to say.

I’ll briefly mention some of the performances, since that’s really all there was on offer.  (The tech production was perfectly adequate—and unremarkable.) 

Busch, aside from his storytelling focus, is obsessed with old movies—especially cheesy old movies.  (That’s been a focus of his scripts since the start, whether they were travesties of ’50s teen romps like Psycho Beach Party or horror flicks like Vampire Lesbians of Sodom, or genre flicks of the ’30s and ’40s.)  Here he’s used the gangster films of the ’30s and a ’50s/’60s B sci-fi movie. 

Busch got to display his acting talents as Queenie Bartlett, mob queen, and Baba Yaga, an old crone (think Maria Ouspenskaya on ugly pills) in the Russian fairy story.  (He also played Queenie’s clone, which, I admit, was a pretty funny performance.  Imagine a Bizarro Joan Crawford.  But it was no heftier than a Carol Burnett sketch.) 

Busch has done this kind of thing so often, it’s close to being effortless—and I’m no longer sure what the point of his doing it is.  I mean, is it outrageous anymore for a guy to play a woman.  It’s been on Broadway, for Pete’s sake (M Butterfly, 1988; Victor/Victoria, 1995; Hairspray, 2002); how much more mainstream can you get? 

I can’t say it made the play any funnier knowing that Queenie and Baba Yaga were men in drag than if they had been played by a woman, or by an actor whose gender we didn’t know.  (That’s probably not fair—I didn’t find the play all that funny to start with.)

Kathleen Turner played Peg, the screenwriter, with much the same force and intestinal strength she used for Martha in Virginia Woolf (2005).  (Turner injured her knee a week or so before I saw the performance and almost had to drop out of the show, but she was performing by then with a cane and what looked like a brace hidden in her costume.  It just looked like part of the character’s bio that she was a little lame—after all, Peg goes back to the Hollywood of the silents!) 

The part really doesn’t deserve Turner’s strength: the play’s too slight for the force she emits on stage.  I don’t mean she overplayed the part; in fact, she did a perfect job of portraying this somewhat selfish, remote woman who has all but alienated her son (and sometime writing partner).  Turner’s whiskey voice, which worked so well for Martha, served her here, too. 

We got to see her do some real acting, simple and uncomplex as it was, while the others were all doing surface caricatures (all that’s demanded by the script).  It’s just that Peg doesn’t reach anywhere near the level of Martha, just as Story can’t come close to Virginia Woolf so that Turner’s talents are pretty much wasted.  She could have phoned this in—though it’s good for us she didn’t. 

Of the rest of the cast, Scott Parkinson was both the most fun to watch and, it would seem, had the most fun working.  He played Zygote in the sci-fi plot, the artificial human the “frosty scientist” created in her lab.  (For those who have forgotten their basic biology, a zygote is a fertilized egg.  Zygote, the character, turns out to have been created from Dr. Constance Hudson’s own egg in an experiment that went a little awry.)  Parkinson’s character is a cross among Peter Lorre, Gollum (Lord of the Rings), and Marty Feldman’s Igor in Young Frankenstein and he was both creepy and a little sweet.  But the character is so outlandish that Parkinson got to create the one truly unpredictable aspect of Busch’s script, which is so deliberately derivative that almost every surprise isn’t one.  In fact, if you think of Busch as a sort of Mel Brooks manqué, Zygote is the closest he comes to Brooks’s most inspired looniness, and Parkinson, like Turner with her character, hit it right on the nose.

The rest of the cast, because of their parts as I’ve suggested, never got beyond caricature and cartoon.  They were all surface roles because that’s all the script required.  Jonathan Walker’s Drew, Peg’s son, came closest to a real stage character, but his Steve Bartlett, Queenie’s gunsel son, was no more than a celluloid reflection of a Bogie or Cagney role. 

Sarah Rafferty’s Verna, Steve’s platinum-haired bride, was equally one-dimensional, as if the actress were doing Leslie Ann Warren’s Norma from Victor/Victoria (the film) without the camp. (Ironically, Rafferty’s fairy tale role, Princess Vasalisa, however briefly she showed up, was fuller and more warm-blooded.) 

Jennifer Van Dyck, as Dr. Hudson, like her castmates, did what was needed, creating a clichéd cold-blooded scientist.  I can’t fault director Carl Andress for any of this, either, because it looked to me as if this was what Busch had written.  (Since the playwright was always there, I have to assume that if Andress, who had also directed the world première at La Jolla, had gone off the mark somewhere, Busch would have had a word with him, no?)  All Andress had to do here was keep the actors from bumping into one another or knocking the set over!

In the end, I guess it’s obvious, none of this added up to much.  Busch, from what I know of him (I’ve seen a few of his plays, but I’m not a follower, as I said), isn’t a playwright of ideas.  He’s all about cleverness—Look what I did!  Isn’t this funny?—and, in the past, anyway, outrageousness.  He’s not terribly outrageous anymore, and cleverness, even if he were better at it than he was here, isn’t enough to sustain a play.  Carol Burnett did that kind of thing, but in three-minute sketches.  (And she did it on free TV, so we could change the channel if we wished, and back in the ’60s, when it might have been, if not new, then uncommon.)

The Metropolitan Opera/Lincoln Center Theater New Works Program

[On Rick On Theater, I’ve written about movicals (20 September 2013, with a supplemental post, “More on Movicals,” on 21 February 2014), the adaptations of films to stage musicals  such as Carnival! (1961), 42nd Street (1980), Moulin Rouge! (2019), and Mrs. Doubtfire (2020).

[I’ve never covered opera at all on this blog, however—because it’s not a topic on which I’m competent—much less operas derived from straight plays.  So now I find an article on that very topic in the Winter 2020 issue (number 75) of the Lincoln Center Theater Review (published on 25 February) and I’m presenting it here—with some supplemental material from the same magazine.

[LCTR, a publication of the Lincoln Center Theater, devotes each issue to one production at LTC.  This one was on Lynn Nottage’s 2003 play Intimate Apparel (produced Off-Broadway at the Roundabout Theatre in 2004) which LTC was presenting with the Metropolitan Opera in its operatic adaptation at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater.  (The opera of Intimate Apparel, composed by Ricky Ian Gordon. was in previews when the theaters all closed on 12 March 2020 due to the coronavirus pandemic.  It’s scheduled to reopen in Spring 2021.)

[In 2006, the project that became the Metropolitan Opera/Lincoln Center Theater New Works Program was launched to develop new operas through a collaboration between a playwright and a composer, a pairing set up by the New Works Program.  The plan’s first real success was Two Boys, composed by Nico Muhly with a libretto by playwright Craig Lucas.  The opera was staged at the Met in October and November 2013 by Bartlett Sher (who’s also directing Intimate Apparel).] 

“A LETTER FROM THE EDITOR”

by Alexis Gargagliano 

Collaboration makes theater possible. There is a special electricity that emerges when a multitude of artists, and ideas, come together to tell a story. They create a whole world that the audience can see, hear, and believe. The opera of Intimate Apparel embodies that collaborative magic. Even its conception was the result of bridge-building—the opera bloomed out of the Metropolitan Opera/Lincoln Center Theater New Works Program, a groundbreaking enterprise between two constituents here at Lincoln Center Plaza. It champions the creation of new operas by pairing playwrights and composers. The first flower of this collaboration, Nico Muhly’s Two Boys, with a libretto by the playwright Craig Lucas, premiered at the Met in 2011. [This appears to be an error; the opera premièred at London’s English National Opera in 2011, but débuted at the Met on Monday, 21 October 2013.] The next collaboration will be seen at Lincoln Center Theater. Intimate Apparel [began previews on 27 February 2020 and was scheduled to open on 23 March], like the earlier Two Boys, is directed by Bartlett Sher, Lincoln Center Theater’s resident director, and features music by the celebrated composer Ricky Ian Gordon and a libretto by Lynn Nottage, the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright [twice: in 2009 for Ruined and 2017 for Sweat] whose acclaimed play has been transformed into a mesmerizing opera.

All the characters of Intimate Apparel experience desire and longing, and each of them has dreams much bigger than the world around them can sustain. In this edition [of LCTR], we sought to explore their longings, their limitations, and the world they must navigate. Lynn Nottage sat down with the writer and historian Paula Giddings to discuss the creation of the opera and the necessity of telling the stories of people who would otherwise remain anonymous [“Remember Me”; articles in Issue 75 on LCTR can be read at https://issuu.com/lctheater/docs/lctr_intimateapparel_singlepages_022420]. Ricky Ian Gordon shared stories about his unusual childhood and his creative process [“Lush Sounds”]. A poem by the poet laureate Natasha Trethewey takes us inside the dreams of an elevator operator, a working-class African-American woman like the heroine of Intimate Apparel [“2. Speculation, 1939”]. The historian Annelise Orleck paints a picture of the Lower East Side and the many communities that called it home in the early 1900s [“The Young Immigrants”]. The fashion writer Constance White illuminates the work of black female designers [“Stepping Into the Spotlight”]. André Bishop, the producing artistic director of Lincoln Center Theater; Peter Gelb, the Metropolitan Opera’s general manager; and Paul Cremo, its dramaturg, spoke to us about starting the program, their passion for fostering new work, the germination of Intimate Apparel as opera, and the extraordinary collaboration and vision that bring opera and theater to life [“Something New”; see below]. Finally, this issue also features the art of Ellen Gallagher, Sanford Biggers, and Titus Kaphar, which invites us to see the world and our history anew.

 *  *  *  *

“SOMETHING NEW”

An Interview with André Bishop, Paul Cremo, and Peter Gelb

Our editor, Alexis Gargagliano, spoke with André Bishop, the producing artistic director of Lincoln Center Theater [since 2013; artistic director since 1992]; Peter Gelb, the Metropolitan Opera’s general manager [since 2006]; and Paul Cremo, its dramaturg and the director of the opera-commissioning program [since 2007]. In Gelb’s handsomely appointed office, they discussed the creation of the opera Intimate Apparel, the Metropolitan Opera/Lincoln Center Theater New Works Program, and the burgeoning of contemporary operas in the United States.

ALEXIS GARGAGLIANO How was the New Works Program started?

ANDRÉ BISHOP It was Peter’s idea. He was interested in developing new work—the Met could bring many musical forces to the table, and Lincoln Center Theater could bring accomplished playwrights. That was the beginning. 

PETER GELB Shortly after I was appointed as head of the Metropolitan Opera, we met for the first time to discuss this idea. I wanted to develop a whole program of ways to reenergize the Met. One avenue was to create new work. We were intrigued by the idea of developing work with librettists from the world of theater and bringing stage directors into the development process from the onset. André and I both felt that we could help improve the odds for success with new works by nurturing these collaborations at a very early stage.

AG Had you seen something at Lincoln Center Theater that sparked this idea?

PG Seeing things like Contact [a “dance play” developed by Susan Stroman and John Weidman which ran at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater at Lincoln Center in 1999 and then moved to the Vivian Beaumont Theater in 2000; in 2000, it won the Tony Award for Best Musical, the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Musical, the Outer Critics Circle Award for Outstanding New Broadway Musical, the Drama League Award for Outstanding New Broadway Musical, and the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award for Best Musical] made me realize that André was encouraging the creation of work outside traditional bounds.

AB We had done a couple of sung-through musicals [e.g.: Hello Again (1994), A New Brain (1998), Falsettos (2016)]. So doing something sung through with no dialogue, or hardly any dialogue, was not new to us or to our audience

AG Had there been much crosspollination among the institutions at Lincoln Center?

[Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, houses 12 resident arts organizations.  In addition to the Lincoln Center Theater (Vivian Beaumont Theater, the Broadway house; Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater, the Off-Broadway theater; Claire Tow Theater, for experimental productions) and the Metropolitan Opera, these include the New York Philharmonic (David Geffen Hall) and the New York City Ballet (David H. Koch Theater), among other, smaller performing arts organizations and facilities. The Juilliard School and the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts are also part of Lincoln Center.]

AB There has been very little collaboration, and certainly not like this. We wanted to show that companies on this campus could actually work together and learn from one another.

PG The key ingredient in the collaboration was the arrival of Paul Cremo, our dramaturg. He’s been the field general of this whole project.

PAUL CREMO I think your initial conversations happened in 2005, and I came on board in 2007. You decided not to give commissions with a guaranteed premiere date; instead, it was a more theatrical model, where the end result of the program is the workshop. This allows the pieces to develop freely, without the pressures of a production looming.

AG How did you begin?

AB Once we had raised the money, we matched ten composers with librettists. Some fell away and we added a few more. The other rule we created was not to decide whether a work was appropriate for Lincoln Center Theater or for the Metropolitan Opera until after the workshop.

 

PG At the workshop, each piece is performed with a piano and singers. If we’re going to do a full production, we collectively decide whether it’s a chamber-sized work or a grand opera-sized work. One of the challenges that we face all the time, when I talk to directors who are working here, is how do you connect the audience to the stage? That problem doesn’t exist with the Mitzi. The audience and the stage are one. [The Newhouse is a small amphitheater.  It seats 299 theatergoers in seven semicircular rows.]

AB It’s because it’s small—there are only 290 seats—and it has a thrust stage, which means the last row is only seven rows back. If a director and a designer know how to use that configuration, it’s a wonderful thing. On a larger scale, this is true in the Beaumont as well. That’s why I think these musicals we’ve done in the Beaumont seem so refreshed. Part of it is that the productions, if I can say this, are good productions, but part of it is that the audience is suddenly seeing South Pacific [2008-10] or My Fair Lady [2018-19] on a stage, in a pattern of movement and scenery they’ve never seen before—and the last seat is only thirteen rows back. [The Beaumont, a larger amphitheater, seats 1200 patrons in 13 rows, including a loge.]

PG André is too modest to say it himself, but if not for him the Beaumont would never have been successfully harnessed theatrically. It wasn’t until you took over that the possibility of its really being successfully utilized was achieved.

AB When Jerry Zaks was resident director [1986-90], he did some very good shows there before my time. But when I arrived we put in the orchestra pit, because I very badly wanted to do musicals.

PG The directors who staged these wonderfully successful musicals, particularly someone like Bartlett Sher, have become masters of moving action around in a way that the audience can appreciate from all sides.

When Bart made his debut at the Met with The Barber of Seville [2006] we didn’t have a thrust stage to offer him, so he did the next best thing—he created a passerelle [a semicircular ramp or catwalk that extends from the stage of a theater around the orchestra pit], which brought the action of the stage around and beyond the orchestra pit and literally into the audience.

AG Were there writers creating new works, too, or was it all adaptation, like Intimate Apparel?  

PG It varied. The young composer Matthew Aucoin wanted to write an opera based on the Orpheus myth. André suggested that we pair him with Sarah Ruhl, who had written one of the great plays based on the Orpheus legend, Eurydice [2003]. Matt and Sarah hit it off amazingly well. The opera [also entitled Eurydice] will have its premiere this season at the L.A. Opera [premièred 1 February]. They joined us as a commissioning partner once we went beyond the workshop stage, and it will play at the Met two seasons from now. On the other hand, the opera Two Boys, which Nico Muhly composed, had an original libretto by Craig Lucas, and Bart Sher directed.

AB Craig had written the book to The Light in the Piazza [2003 in Seattle], which was the first show Bart did at the Beaumont [2005].

AG How did the Intimate Apparel conversation start?

PC I had been speaking with Ricky Ian Gordon about possible writers to work with. I suggested Lynn, and Ricky said, “I’ll read her stuff.” We initially planned to have Lynn write something original, but after Ricky read Intimate Apparel he fell in love with it, and Lynn agreed to adapt it.

AG André, what did Lynn tell you about her original conception of Intimate Apparel?

AB My memory is of her telling me that she had originally thought of Intimate Apparel as a musical or an opera, but that she was unknown then and it would have been a bigger, more expensive production and she was afraid that nobody would produce it. So she wrote it as a play.

PC Her father had loved opera. In Lynn’s play Ruined [2008; 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Drama], there are monologues that are like arias. We talked about ways to sort of expand the play a bit, adding a chorus, ensembles. Lynn’s an avid student, and read a bunch of librettos. Ricky talked her through what he needed. He started writing the first notes in April 2012.

PG The development of an opera or a musical is much longer than that of a play. There are more moving parts and it requires more development, more workshops—Intimate Apparel had four. The first workshop was in 2015.

AG How did it change?

PG It got better. (Laughter)

PC The basic bones and the structure were always there because the play existed. But Bart, for instance, after the first workshop said that the boundaries between scenes could blur a little and be more fluid. The opening of the piece also changed. We were trying to get the main character, the seamstress Esther, and her situation clearly established up front. And, in terms of the music, there has been some tightening, shortening, making things more efficient. In the third workshop, Ricky discovered the possibilities of the chorus and started using them in different ways, almost like underscoring.

PG When a composer hears his or her work performed, it’s different from just looking at the notes. It inspires him or her to do more.

AG Does that also change the conversation between the librettist and the composer?

PC They work hand in hand. Their collaboration is the key to it all.

AB Some of the better pieces that have come out of our program so far have been good not only because the composer is good—and it is a world of the composer, really, the opera world—but because the libretto was so strong. In the case of Eurydice and Intimate Apparel, they’re both extremely powerful pieces of writing, adapted by the playwrights from their own plays.

AG What challenges do the playwrights face?

PC Playwrights have a learning curve adapting an existing piece. They first have to throw out nearly half of their text, and that’s challenging (it takes longer to sing something than to say it). This play was very close to Lynn’s heart. She wrote it after her mother died, and she felt that it was a way of communing with her ancestors. She found it really difficult to cut out so much of the great detail that was in the play, but we worked together to isolate the most important text. Then Ricky could show Lynn how the music could tell that story to fill in some of the colors and details that were cut from the text. It’s hard, I think, for any writer. In the theater world, the playwright rules; in the opera world, the composer rules. So the playwright has to step back a bit and hand it over and let the composer run with it.

PG There’s also a technical aspect of a playwright’s learning to write a libretto, of writing words that can be sung. Not only does there have to be fewer of them; they also have to be fit, in the right way, into a singer’s voice.

AG I marveled at the libretto—how Lynn could write such a complex play and then distill it into essentially a poem that can be sung.

PC That’s something else that changed. Hearing the workshops, Ricky got to see where singers were struggling with certain things—like particular words on high notes—and he could lower them or change the emphasis in a line to make it sound more natural.

PG Sometimes even experienced composers forget the capabilities of a human voice, and the workshop will remind them of what’s possible and what isn’t.

AG Was there a moment in one of the first workshops where you felt a particular electricity?

PG I thought it had great potential and was excited by it from the very first workshop—I think we all felt it. We knew it was something special.

AG How did you decide that it was going to be at the Mitzi?

AB I had assumed this would be for the Beaumont, with a full orchestra. It wasn’t until the third workshop that Bart said, “I think we should do it in the Mitzi Newhouse with two pianos.” He was right. In the Mitzi, the words and the music are just right there. You don’t have to strain. We have these incredible singers in this relatively small theater. It’s going to blow the roof off it.

AG How often are new operas produced?

PC Well, during the thirteen years that this program has been in existence there’s been an explosion of contemporary opera in the U.S. Back then, maybe between two and five new operas premiered in a year.  At the Met, prior to this program, there would be years between the premieres of original operas. But in 2018 over forty new operas premiered in the U.S.

Opera was seen as this sort of far-off, grand thing, and too conservative. But younger composers have seen what’s possible. They don’t have to compromise their musical style or values, and they see that new dramatic subjects can be embraced. And opera companies have been inspired by the idea that new operas can bring in new audiences.

AG What are your hopes for the program in the future?

PG There are a couple of projects still in the pipeline that are coming along really nicely. And André and I have been in discussion on adding composers, and Paul’s been vetting them.

*  *  *  *

 “SAID & SUNG” 

There is a long history of plays being adapted into operas. Plays by Pierre Beaumarchais were adapted by Mozart (Le Nozze di Figaro) and by Gioachino Rossini (Il Barbiere di Siviglia). Friedrich Schiller [plays were adapted] by [Gioachino] Rossini (Guillaume Tell), Gaetano Donizetti (Maria Stuarda), and Giuseppe Verdi (Don Carlos)—who also adapted plays by Victor Hugo (Ernani, Rigoletto) and others. Notable operas were based on plays by Victorien Sardou ([Giacomo] Puccini’s Tosca), Eugéne Scribe and Ernest Legouvé ([Francesco] Cilea’s Adriana Lecouvreur); and Pierre Corneille’s Pertharite, roi des Lombards formed the basis for George Frideric Handel’s Rodelinda. Other notable adaptations include plays by David Belasco (Puccini’s Madama Butterfly and La Fanciulla del West), Alexandre Soumet ([Vincenzo] Bellini’s Norma), and Oscar Wilde ([Richard] Strauss’s Salome). Shakespeare has been the most frequent theatrical source, with his plays A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Othello, Macbeth, Falstaff [The Merry Wives of Windsor and Henry IV], Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet among those adapted as operas by [Henry] Purcell, Verdi, [Charles] Gounod, Bellini, [Ambroise] Thomas, and others. In the past century alone, there has been a wide variety of operatic adaptations of well-known plays.

*  *  *  *

“A SELECTION OF OPERAS FROM THE PAST HUNDRED YEARS BASED ON PLAYS”

[LCTR provided the list below, but I can’t duplicate the format on Rick On Theater, so I’ve had to devise a different presentation for the same information.  I’m afraid it’s not as easy to read, for which I apologize to ROTters.  I’ve added the dates of the source plays in brackets and an occasional additional detail.]

PLAY: Woyzeck by Georg Büchner [1836] – OPERA: Wozzeck by Alban Berg – DATE OF PREMIERE: 1925

Porgy by Dorothy & DuBose Heyward [1927] – Porgy and Bess by George Gershwin – 1935

Lulu by Frank Wedekind [Earth Spirit (1895) & Pandora’s Box (1904)] – Lulu by Alban Berg – 1937 (incomplete); 1979 (complete)

Le Viol de Lucrèce by André Obey [1931] – The Rape of Lucretia by Benjamin Britten – 1946

The Little Foxes by Lillian Hellman [1939] – Regina by Marc Blitzstein ­– 1949

A Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare [1595/96] – A Midsummer Night’s Dream by Benjamin Britten – 1960

The Crucible by Arthur Miller [1953] – The Crucible by Robert Ward – 1961

A View from the Bridge by Arthur Miller [1955] – Uno sguardo dal ponte by Renzo Rossellini – 1961

Antony and Cleopatra by William Shakespeare [c. 1607] – Antony and Cleopatra by Samuel Barber – 1966

Summer and Smoke by Tennessee Williams [1948] – Summer and Smoke by Lee Hoiby – 1971

La Balade du Grand Macabre by Michel De Ghelderode [1934] – Le Grand Macabre by György Ligeti – 1978

The Ghost Sonata by August Strindberg [1907] – Die Gespenstersonate by Aribert Reimann – 1984

Greek by Steven Berkoff (based on Oedipus Rex by Sophocles) [1980] – Greek by Mark-Anthony Turnage – 1988

La Mère Coupable (The Guilty Mother) by Pierre Beaumarchais [1792] – The Ghosts of Versailles by John Corigliano – 1991

A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams [1947] – A Streetcar Named Desire by André Previn – 1995

A View from the Bridge by Arthur Miller [1955] – A View from the Bridge by William Bolcom – 1999

The Tempest by William Shakespeare [1610-11] – The Tempest by Thomas Adès – 2004

Doctor Faustus by Christopher Marlowe [1589-92] – Faustus, the Last Night by Pascal Dusapin – 2006

Caligula by Albert Camus [1938] – Caligula by Detlev Glanert – 2006

Our Town by Thornton Wilder [1938] – Our Town by Ned Rorem – 2006

The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde [1895] – The Importance of Being Earnest by Gerald Barry – 2011

Doubt by John Patrick Shanley [2004] – Doubt by Douglas J. Cuomo – 2013

4.48 Psychosis by Sarah Kane [2000] – 4.48 Psychosis by Philip Venables – 2016

Compleat Female Stage Beauty by Jeffrey Hatcher [1999] – Prince of Players by Carlisle Floyd – 2016

Angels in America by Tony Kushner [1991 (Part 1); 1992 (Part 2)] – Angels in America by Peter Eötvös & Mari Mezei – 2017

Hamlet by William Shakespeare [1599-1601] – Hamlet by Brett Deane – 2017

Endgame by Samuel Beckett [1957] – Fin de Partie by György Kurtág – 2018

[In the name of completeness, I think it’d be nice to identify the plays from which the opera adaptations in “Said & Sung” were derived.  So, following my format for the list above, here they are:

La folle journée, ou le Mariage de Figaro (1784) by Pierre Beaumarchais – Le Nozze di Figaro by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart – 1786

Le Barbier de Séville (1775) by Pierre Beaumarchais – Il Barbiere di Siviglia by Gioachino Rossini – 1816

Wilhelm Tell  by Friedrich Schiller (1804) – Guillaume Tell by Gioachino Rossini – 1829

Maria Stuart by Friedrich Schiller (1800) – Maria Stuarda by Gaetano Donizetti – 1835

Don Karlos, Infant von Spanien by Friedrich Schiller (1783-87) – Don Carlos Giuseppe Verdi – 1867

Hernani by Victor Hugo (1830) – Ernani by Giuseppe Verdi – 1844  

Le roi s'amuse (The King Amuses Himself) by Victor Hugo (1832) – Rigoletto by Giuseppe Verdi – 1851

La Tosca by Victorien Sardou (1887) – Tosca by Giacomo Puccini – 1900

Adrienne Lecouvreur by Eugéne Scribe & Ernest Legouvé (1849) – Adriana Lecouvreur by Francesco Cilea – 1902

Pertharite, roi des Lombards (Pertharites, King of the Lombards) by Pierre Corneille (1651) – Rodelinda , regina de' Longobardi by George Frideric Handel –.1725

Madame Butterfly: A Tragedy of Japan (from the 1898 short story "Madame Butterfly" by John Luther Long) by David Belasco (1900) – Madama Butterfly by Giacomo Puccini – 1904

The Girl of the Golden West by David Belasco (1900) – La Fanciulla del West by Giacomo Puccini – 1910

Norma, ou L'infanticide (Norma, or The Infanticide) by Alexandre Soumet (1831) – Norma by Vincenzo Bellini – 1831

Salome by Oscar Wilde (1891) – Salome by Richard Strauss – 1905.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare (1595/96) –  The Fairy-Queen by Henry Purcell – 1692

Othello by William Shakespeare (1603) – Otello by Giuseppe Verdi – 1887

Macbeth by William Shakespeare (1606) – Macbeth by Giuseppe Verdi – 1847

The Merry Wives of Windsor (1597) and Henry IV (1596-99) by William Shakespeare – Falstaff by Giuseppe Verdi – 1893

Hamlet by William Shakespeare (1599-1601) –  Hamlet by Ambroise Thomas – 1868

Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare (1591-95) – Roméo et Juliette by Charles Gounod – ­­­1867

Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare (1591-95) –I Capuleti e i Montecchi (The Capulets and the Montagues) by Vincenzo Bellini – 1830

[Some opera libretti are entirely original, the complete invention of the librettist.  Most operatic plots, however, are based on some source material such as a myth, a work of literature, a historical event, or some other inspiration.  The same was true for decades for the musical play. 

[Like the stage musical, the favorite source for most opera librettists was and is the straight (that is, non-musical) play.  As we can see from the lists above, Shakespeare has been by far the most popular foundation for an opera plot; some of the Bard’s plays formed the basis for multiple operas, from the classic period right up to contemporary operas.

[Even some strikingly modern (and post-modern) scripts have been adapted into operas—not just Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller, but Alfred Jarry and Samuel Beckett.  If the Met/LTC New Works Program succeeds, there may be even more operas based on experimental dramas. 

[It remains to be seen, of course, how readily the operatic audiences will take to new operas.  Sixty-five years ago, when Tennessee Williams tried to experiment with the dramatic form, he was rejected (Camino Real, 1953) and Beckett’s absurdist masterpiece Waiting for Godot (1953, Paris; 1955, London; January 1956, Miami; April 1956, New York) largely confused audiences and critics alike.  I wonder if opera will fare better in the 21st century.]