Benjamin Britten and Myfanwy Piper | The Turn of the Screw / 2011

the piper's son

by Douglas Messerli

 

Benjamin Britten (composer), Myfanwy Piper (text, based on novella by Henry James), The Turn of the Screw / Los Angeles, Los Angeles Opera, the production I saw was a matinee performance on March 20, 2011

 

Britten's powerful opera, The Turn of the Screw, is quite different from both the film version and, even at times from James' original. In James' novella and Jack Clayton's The Innocents, for example, the ghosts may or may not be manifestations of the governess' imagination; or, at least, we can never be certain. But, while in the Britten version the phantoms may still be in the mind of Miss Giddens (Patricia Racette, who is given no name in the opera), they are, on stage, very corporeal, singing and moaning, with the children appearing to see them or hear them and responding to their commands. The specters clearly, in the Britten work, have an influence of their charges even beyond death. And Britten strongly suggests that the greatest part of that influence has to do with sexuality, not only between the former valet Peter Quint (William Burden) and former governess, Miss Jessel, but with Quint and the young boy Miles (credibly sung and performed by 12-year-old Michael Kepler Meo) and Miss Jessel and Flora (Ashley Emerson).

     Consequently, Britten's carefully structured two acts of eight scenes each explores not just the psychology of its characters, but their metaphysical encounters with good and evil. The question of innocence, so central of the film version, is embraced, accordingly, within the larger question of the battle between these forces.

     It is clear from the very first scene, when the Governess, charged with all responsibilities concerning the two children, expresses her anxieties, that she will never be up to the task. She is too young and untried to take on the battle with the unsavory forces of history represented by Miles and Flora's short past. In this society of the fin de siecle (which is, one must recall, the period in which this "ghost story" was written), forces are moving in two opposing directions; with Victorian conventions still in full force, the unspoken dominating over the open and honest presentation of sexuality, the era also saw a rise of unconventional behavior represented by and in literary figures created by Wilde, Huysmans, Schnitzler, Zola, Shaw, etc.

     The children's seemingly perfect behavior creates a sense for the two women, Governess and Housekeeper, that everything is as it should be, while we witness, through Britten's cunning music and Myfanwy Piper's text, that something is terribly wrong. From the first moment of their obedient bows and curtseys, we suspect there is something amiss, our first real clue being the news of Miles' dismissal from school. In Britten's work the reasons for that dismissal are even vaguer than in James and the film, but the fact that he will never be allowed to return hints at the gravity of the situation, and Britten allows our imaginations to take us where we want.

     Mrs. Grosse, who cannot quite say what she has seen except to suggest that it was terrible and not to her liking, also hints as something eviler, perhaps, that what the reality was. And, in that sense, like the busybody housekeeper in Wuthering Heights, she helps to create the hysterical atmosphere which defeats any logical solutions the Governess might have come to.

     But then, there are those visitations, and Quint's banshee-like cries for Miles in Britten's Act I, Scene 8—cries to which Miles does respond—that seem to make it quite apparent that the relationship he had with Miles was more than a simple case of bad influence. His ululations come from a deeper place than a simple relationship between a young master and servant. And so too does Miss Jessel's sad soliloquy in Act II, Scene 3, in which she bemoans both her loss of love with Quint and Flora, indicating something far more serious than a Governess-pupil encounter.

    Even greater revelations, however, come in the form of how the children play. While it may at first seem totally innocent, the children's haunting song of "Tom, Tom the Piper's son," with, in the Los Angeles production, Miles astride his sister with a whip, is more disturbing, I feel, than even the presence of the ghosts. We recognize almost immediately that there is something almost sadomasochistic about the game, and that it obviously is connected to something sexual of which children should have no knowledge. Moreover, the subject of that song, Tom, the son of the piper, has been naughty, is beaten, and "howls through the streets." There is also the suggestion in the word piper, moreover, that Miles must eventually "pay the piper," that he must eventually face the consequences of his acts, and, along with that, the underlying story of the Pied Piper of Hamelin, who, when the city refused to pay for his services of removing rats, turned the children into rats.

     Similarly, Britten's hidden joke of Miles' Latin lessons, wherein Miles sings Latin words that all pun on sexual body parts,

     

                                            “amnis, axis, caulis, collis,

                                            clunis, crinis, fascis, follis,

                                            fustis, ignis, orbis, ensis,

                                            panis, piscis, postis, mensis,

                                            torris, unguis and canalis,

                                            vectis, vermis, and natalis

                                            sanguis, pelvis, cucumis,

                                            lapis, cassis, manis, glis.”

 

while the Governess, apparently not terribly knowledgeable in Latin, smilingly listens, points to a world far more evil than the one the Governess has ever imagined.

     Miles' strange "Malo" song, with its references to "malo," a variation of bad or evil, "naughty boy," and an "apple tree" reveal that Miles, himself, recognizes the condition of his world, and expresses his fears for his own condition, that he is bad because he has eaten of the tree.

     If James only hints at these possibilities, Britten projects them, plays with them, and through them makes a case for why the situation must come to the close as it does in all versions. In the battle between good and evil—even if we can describe the Governess as representing good—she is no match. Her absurd belief that by speaking something you can exorcise it (not entirely different, of course, from Freud's methods) does not deal with the possibility that evil can swallow up the truth and spit it out. Those so many unsaid things about life at Bly house may have silenced any truth forever. 

     Although Miles may recognize Peter Quint as the Devil with his last words, the Devil has stolen the boy from the living as surely as if he was an obscene lover. The Governess, in her battle to "win over" Miles, to transform him, did not know enough to love him as the boy he was.

     Finally, it is evident that the composer may have been drawn to these concerns because of his own inclinations, particularly his love of young boys, sensitively revealed in John Bridcut's Britten's Children. Although Britten lived for years with his singer-partner Peter Pears, he also became close friends and a father-like figure for dozens of 12–14-year-old boys, showering them with gifts and letters. Many of these boys came from children's choruses, and for some of them he wrote roles in his operas. Only one boy, 13-year-old Harry Morris accused him of possible sexual molestation, claiming that Britten entered his bedroom in Cornwall where the composer had taken the boy on a sailing trip; charges were never filed.

     Britten chose the young singer, David Hemmings (later a noted actor) for the role of Miles and, according to friends, was obviously obsessed with the boy, an adoration which Hemmings, strikingly handsome at 12, readily accepted. But Hemmings later insisted that Britten made no sexual advances. It is apparent, nonetheless, that Britten very well knew what Quint might have felt for Miles, and understood the ramifications of such involvements. And, to my way of thinking, it is why Britten was so focused on those aspects of James' tale.

 

Los Angeles, April 20, 2011

Reprinted from Green Integer Blog (April 2011).

 

 

Bill T. Jones | Analogy Trilogy / 2018

dancing deep memories of the past

By Douglas Messerli

 

Bill T. Jones Analogy Trilogy (with Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company) / Royce Hall, UCLA / the performance I saw was on November 3, 2018

 

The extravaganza, 7-hour (with intermissions and dinner buffet) production of Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company’s vast Analogy Trilogy, which I witnessed last night at UCLA’s Royce Hall in Los Angeles, was very different from what I might have imagined it to be. Yes, this fairly young company—consisting of dancers Vinson Fraley, Jr., Barrington Hinds, Shane Larson, I-Ling Liu, Penda N’Diaye, Jenna Riegel, Christina Robson, Carlo Antonio Villanueva, and Huwang Zhang; as well as singers Matthew Gamble, composer Nick Hallett, and pianist Emily Manzo, along with numerous creative designers, lighting people, and numerous others, are all quite wonderful, with the dancers performing in often athletic groupings that work against the gender differences of the characters they are playing, but always brilliantly performing as they move in and out of each other’s theatrical space with great élan and theatrical presence.

 

     Yet never having seen this popular company previously I couldn’t quite have imagined just how much Jones and his former collaborator Zane—with whom Jones had a romantic relationship, and who died of AIDS in 1968—were more importantly “storytellers” and dancers fascinated by a wide range of music than the dance techniques which are, supposedly, at the center of their works.

      The three performances of this long work basically use microphones to relate the lives of three rather remarkable figures, Dora in Analogy/Dora: Tramantane, the story of a young Jewish woman, a rather fearless figure, coming out of Flemish Belgium in the early years of Nazi rule, and working with such groups as ORT, WIZO, and SIFO which helped in Vichy France and other regions to sneak out children—often replacing them with their elders (as Dora laments became something she could no longer stomach, the process of choosing some Jews to go to the camps while saving others of the organization’s choice)—so that they might escape to Switzerland and elsewhere. See my essay on just this process in My Year 2015.

      Using large seemingly light-weight metal sculptural pieces, silver on one side and red on the other, the dancers moved in and out of spaces representing, apparently, the terrifying artifices, cold and friendlier, in order to survive. At one point, a Gestapo member, asking for Dora’s passport (a bilingual being, she has two varying passports, but determines to give up her German one, listing her as a Juden) she reveals that not all the Germans were monsters, the man reading the passport, after which simply closing it and returning it to her, freeing her, quite obviously, from transport to the execution camps.            Her less politicized sister, however, trying to survive the good live in Marseilles, does not survive, growing ill and unable to live through a world she did not quite comprehend. Yet Dora’s fierce actions come through, despite the many doubts she personally suffers, and she does survive, despite the death of her mother, her father, and sister’s deaths. Not all Jews, it is clear, allowed themselves to suffer the German occupation; some, for whatever reason, chose to fight, however painful, and survive, allowing many others to live.

     Dora’s story, moreover, is made even richer by the introduction of the vibrant reembraces of several others, some active in the underground movement and a few, such as her “distant cousin” Marcel Marceau, the famed mime, who was born to a Jewish family as Marcel Mangel, who is described as contributing to the escape of dozens of Jewish children. Part of the power of Jones’ storytelling is how it incorporates, as does his mentor in these works, novelist W. G. Sebald, upon the intense secret interrelationships between known and unknown historical figures.

     For me, the second of these works, Analogy/Lance: Pretty aka the Escape Artist, the tale of a young boy, who even as a child was so talented that the San Francisco Ballet offered to take him into their training. Yet as a very young boy, studying ballet, he became addicted to drugs, and nightly visited the gay areas of the Castro and more seedy city regions, picking up older men and threatening them with the revelation of their pederasty if they didn’t give him money and continue to pay him. He reports that he never did report them to their wives, their employers, and others, but survived by the threat, enjoying his own sense of a being more powerful that these abusive beings.

     Yet his drug addictions, his continual jail sentences for drug possession, began to unravel his career. Even then Lance/Pretty, and the dozens of other names he had given himself through whom he survived, led him on to incredible careers, including a Broadway play, composing and singing gigs, a phenomenal drag queen identity in Paris (where he, as a black man evidently channeled Josephine Baker) made for a life larger than he might even imagined, wherein often he made phenomenal amounts of money.

      He later fell in love with a straighter prisoner, Michael, back in jail, and was able to resurrect himself yet again in New York. Yet despite the apparent love and continued support from his “uncle,” a elderly man who describes as his “husband,” who himself appears to be trying to kick his drug habit, Pretty/Lance/LTB and the many other identities he has assumed, is gradually consumed by his habits, soon unable to walk and refusing to admit what his doctors are truly trying to tell him: that he is dying of AIDS.

     Pretty, in his constant escapes from reality, will not admit to his own condition, yet gradually, with the help of his interlocker—the central focus of all of Jones’ dance dramas—he finally admits his “faith,” his belief that when you “cross to the other side,” it is alone and is based on the life you lived, not upon carriers taking you over. The dancers throughout create metal-rod-like constructions of what a room or home might temporarily look like, the same image being projected upon the screen behind them, referencing an imaginary world that “Pretty” never quite can reach. 

     It’s a kind of marvelous existentialist perception that finally redeems him and helps us to recognize that his thousands of mistakes have nonetheless make for a fascinating life. If he is beautiful, if everyone seemed to love and enjoy him; the problem was that he was still a flawed being, unable to live up to the dozens of amazing potentials he had imagined for himself.

      Both the figures whom had been presented before our buffet were, in some senses, immigrants, individuals traveling through many spaces and societies in which they might never feel completely comfortable, and had, accordingly, been forced to assimilate new identities. As Leonard Bernstein wrote about one of his major figures in his comic-opera Candide, “I am easily ‘assimilated.’” And that is precisely the case of Sebald’s character of Andros in his The Emigrant, a man who evidently fell in love with the great American aviator, Cosmo Solomon, who, himself falls ill and is institutionalized in a mental facility. Ambros assimilates by becoming a servant to Cosmo’s family, and when Cosmo’s wife dies, himself follows his friend into the same fate as Ambros, permitting and even allowing himself the terribly brutal electro-therapy gladly enforced by the brutal institutional director. That all of this, in turn, can be attributed itself to the effects of the Holocaust should surely come as no surprise.

     I have to admit that I have always had problems with Sebald’s own sense of displacement (he too was a kind of emigrant, a German living in England for much of his life); but I find some his tropes about that sense of outsiderness too carefully constructed and even, at times, far too facile—despite the claims of many of his readers of his enormous perspicaciouscacity. Nonetheless this work surely does resonate with the other two dances that proceeded it.

 

    Finally, I must also admit that, although as anyone who knows me might perceive, I love story, I’m not sure it’s my favorite way of looking at dance. If these wonderful performers are truly good actors, set-movers, and, at times, exhilarating personalities, I want to see them simply move more often, to see their lovely bodies in motion rather than in carrying about sets and shifting in their undulating gender-free story-telling. When they gathered in the center of the stage or in intimate moments which reiterated the cubist-like tales they were relating, I was enchanted. Yet, I felt there needed to be more of those literal bodily encounters, moved away from the storytelling, as intense as it often felt, that Jones and his dramaturge had created.

      There is no question about the profundity of Jones’ themes in this vast trilogy, and one can only admire his imaginative perspective. But I might have wanted to see it more through the movements of dance than through those more abstracted and literally-constructed microphoned voices. For my taste, the fragments Jones was seeking which were narratively based—were often rather literal—and might have been better served through the movements of bodies in pure space.

 

Los Angeles, November 4, 2018

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (November 2018)

Joe Orton | Loot / 2019

after all, people might talk

by Douglas Messerli

 

Joe Orton Loot / Los Angeles, Odyssey Theatre Ensemble / the performance I saw was with Howard Fox on June 16, 2019.

 

In playwright Joe Orton’s comedies things usually begin bad and quickly get worse—or at least more frenetic. The “villains” almost win out in the end, while the pious forces of society such as the police and priests get punished, or more often, are simply exposed for being the true scoundrels working against the social order. Wild sexuality, homosexuality, incest, robbery, and even murder are treated by Orton as far more fun than a life of order and religiosity.

      It is no wonder, accordingly, that his second play Loot, which first opened in 1964, drew outrage from much of British society. That it has been so often staged since (I’ve seen two productions just in Los Angeles) perhaps demonstrates how morality has shifted or simply how much fun his dark comic plays are. Certainly, Orton’s version of black comedy completely altered the theater world—far, far more than the angry young men plays of John Osbourne and others or kitchen sink dramas of Arnold Wesker or Shelagh Delaney.

      The new production of the noted Los Angeles theater Odyssey Theatre Ensemble, although a bit rough at moments in its directorial (by Bart DeLorenzo) timing, did not disappoint, even if the often audience did.

     Any play that features two young gay men, Hal (Robbie Jarvis) and Dennis (Alex James-Phelps) who have just drilled through the wall of the funeral parlor where  Dennis works to steal a large amount of “loot” from the next-door bank; a nurse, Fay (Elizabeth Arends), who has just done away with her patient, Mrs. McLeavy in order to marry that woman’s church-going husband, McLeavy (Nicholas Hormann); and an investigating policeman, Truscott (Ron Bottita) who pretends to be from the water board, and who apparently wouldn’t even wince at actually applying such a torture device, has my vote right from the beginning.

      Truscott, evidently based on a real thuggish and abusive policeman, Harold Challenor, in Orton’s topsy-turvy world is the true force of evil in this farce, while even the sexual high-jinx of Hal and Dennis (one must recall that homosexuality was still banned in England and the Stonewall uprising in the USA was about five years in the future), their seemingly successful robbery, Dennis’ determination to marry Fay (he is clearly bi-sexual or perhaps, given his good looks, even pan-sexual) and even Fay’s murder (evidently not her first) can’t even begin to match the open brutality, lies, and abusiveness of Truscott.

      This is a play in which you truly hope the thieves and murderer get away with their crimes. After all, the boys need the money to settle down together, and Fay has once more run out of funds, while Mrs. McLeavy (Selina Woolery Smith) was quite clearly a blind, old woman already on her deathbed, and her cliché-spouting husband certainly might deserve a change of venue. Surely Mrs. McLeavy’s black dress, trimmed with an emerald lining (costumes by Michael Mullen), looks better on the young Fay than it might have ever on the old wife.

       The central problem of this work is where to hide all that delicious cash. The gay lovers suddenly perceive there is no better place, particularly with Truscott mussing around while turning off the toilet and beating up Hal’s highly confused old Da, that the coffin would be perfect, but where to put the body already inhabiting that spot?

       Despite Truscott’s endless attacks, they are mostly bluffs since he seems to be the most stupid and blind chief of police in existence, a bit like the one in Robert Altman’s film, years later, Gosford Park, a work obviously influenced by the likes of Loot.

       A lot of humor of this work exists in its endless site-gags, some of which, despite the generally excellent acting of the play’s characters, just didn’t quite come off. Yet the wit of Orton’s dialogue is so infectious that even the appearing and disappearing coffin and body, a bit clumsy at moments, doesn’t truly slow down the play much.

       The problem is with any Orton work is to speak his outrageous witty lines without any attempt to give credence to their absurdity. This playwright’s fictions simply won’t survive with campy winks. Orton’s writing “pretends” to be as serious as Osbourne’s tortured couples, while all the time revealing the absurdity of their situations. The cast at the Odyssey primarily succeeded, but, once again, there were moments when the dialogue was perhaps slowed down a bit, or, even worse, sped up, going right past the audience’s ability to catch up with the satire. Orton’s plays combine post-modern wit and old-fashioned comic athleticism in a way that is extremely difficult to portray for young actors. And despite the director’s program declaration that Orton’s play has not aged, I’d argue that in the horrible cynicism in which we today live, the writer’s irony has been somewhat lost.

      When the country has selected a president that behaves somewhat similarly to the policeman Truscott, making the rules up as he goes along, and might be very willingly accept a bribe of 30% of the loot, or even vindictively kill off the pious old coot who knows too much about the events, it has become a bit more difficult to laugh out loud.

     And as in Harold Prince’s 1970 film Something for Everyone—another offspring of Orton’s comic outlook—it is Fay who finally whisks away the handsome young prince, Dennis, explaining that when she and he marry it wouldn’t look right for him to remain with Hal: “after all, people might talk.”

 

Los Angeles, June 17, 2019

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (June 2019).