winter in a summer town
by Douglas Messerli
Doug Wright (book), Scott Frankel
(music), Michael Korie (lyrics) Grey
Gardens / Walter Kerr Theatre, New York / the performance I attended was on
December 9, 2006
The family’s beautiful 28-room mansion, Grey Gardens, is lit up and
decked out for the evening’s celebration, during which their engagement will be
announced. As she and her two smaller cousins, Jackie and Lee Bouvier, scurry
about the lawns and house, Edie’s imperious mother Edith prepares, with her
composer-accompanist George “Gould” Strong, for an “impromptu” performance of a
recital of songs beloved by her local audiences.
Strolling the mansion lawns, Edie and Joe discover that they have some
very different ideas about marriage: she plans a life in theater, while he
envisions her as a complacent wife in his political career, including, perhaps,
the presidency of the United States. They are hopeful, however, that their love
will overcome their differences. Although Edie is somewhat miffed by her
mother’s planned performance—it is she who should, after all, be the center of
attention—she lovingly compromises with mama, who will sing only eight numbers
instead of nine. But in the charmed world they inhabit, neither Edie nor Joe
can possibly imagine the truly horrifying future they face.
The handsome Harvard graduate would be killed only three years later as
his plane—loaded with more than 21,000 pounds of Torpex (torpedo explosive)
destined for the German V-3 cannon located near Mimoyecques, France—detonated
before he and his crewmate could parachute out. By the end of that special
afternoon in 1941, the girl’s mother Edith, after having discovered that her
husband had flown to Mexico for a quickie divorce and that her dear friend and
pianist Gould was planning to return to New York and his gay life, succeeded—as
she had with all of Edie’s suitors (John Paul Getty and the Rockefellers in
particular)—in scuttling the relationship between her daughter and beau by
communicating to Joe how Edie had earned the nickname “Beautiful Body Beale.”
By the end of the afternoon, Kennedy has reconsidered his proposal and scurried
off to catch his parents at the train station, leaving Edie in the lurch.
So begins the musical version of Grey
Gardens, the first act of which is based on facts that preceded the
terrifying portrait of the two women, living together as recluses years later
in that now derelict mansion, caught on tape by the Maysles brothers in 1973.
Film commentator Robert Osborne has described the experience of the
documentary like “watching two trains colliding head on,” but I would argue
that it’s even more terrifying and compelling. The painful daily encounters
between the Edies big and little, filmed over six weeks, is a study in human
decay—the despair of old age, frail health, lost beauty, and the failure of
dreams and ideals, embarrassingly expressed and played out in self-degrading
“performances” by the two women for voyeurs, camera and audience, a world gone
literally “to the dogs”—or perhaps one should say, “to the cats”—that haunts
the mind long after the close of the shutter. Yet despite the distaste it
leaves, one cannot help but recognize in both women a kind crazed tenacity for
living that transcends all else. The condemned house, infested with raccoons
and fleas, smelling of defecating animals and rotting wood, is somehow a
perfect dramatic backdrop for the elder’s dreadful renditions of her favorite
songs and the younger’s absurdly outlandish costumes. In Edith’s duets with
ancient records, we can almost hear the lovely songs of her youth (performed so
stunningly in the musical version in act one by Christina Ebersole), and in the
mix and match
The musical version, which I witnessed in December 2006, soon after its
premiere, white-washes the grotesquery of the original by turning the crumbling
mansion into an Adams family-like habitat, while abandoning most of the brittle
dialogue that makes the two so fascinating in the documentary version. Yet
there are moments when, through music and lyrics, the Broadway rendition nearly
matches the dark and crazed faith in life and love to which both women aspire.
Particularly in the songs—splendidly performed—“The Revolutionary Costume of
Today,” and “Around the World,” Ebersole’s little Edie comes alive, most
dramatically in the former song’s repeated nonsense phrase—the evocative
“Da-da-da-da-dum”—sung like a naughty school-girl’s hum. Mary Louise Wilson, as
the elder Mrs. Beale, gets the opportunity to transform her bed-bound character
into a woman still alive with sexual energy and maternal instincts in the
Sondheim-inspired ballad “Jerry Likes My Corn,” a ridiculously simple yet
loving pean to the young boy who stops by on his way home from school each
afternoon to help them out.
Jerry
likes the way I do my corn.
Isn’t
he a treasure?
….
Look
how he chows right through my corn.
It’s
my only pleasure.
I boil
it on the hot plate
Till
all the juice is gone.
….
He
knows which side
My
corn is buttered on.
The pink paper lanterns
Still twinkle in place.
My young navy hero,
His tender embrace.
That sapphire blue ocean…
Oh, how can I face
Another winter in a summer town?
Oh God…
Oh God…
My God…
—the piece is less a lament than an
orison to put the world of her past to rest, an unanswered prayer to bury the
American dream.
*Along with the new edition of the
documentary, Todd Oldham is interviewed, wherein he says that many designers
have imitated Little Edie’s style, and that she had a wonderful sense of color
and proportion.
Los Angeles, January 14, 2007
Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (January 2007).
