Deborah Lawlor | Freddy / 2017

leaping out

by Douglas Messerli

 

Deborah Lawlor Freddy / Los Angeles, The Fountain Theatre, performed at the Los Angeles City College Theatre Academy’s Caminito Theatre, Frances Loy (director) / (the production I saw, with Pablo Capra and Paul Sands, was a matinee on Thursday, September 28, 2017).

 

Born in 1936, Fred Herko—known by his later friends in New York City as Freddy or Freddie—grew up in a middle-class family in Ossining, New York, known for the maximum-security prison Sing-Sing.

      Despite their relative poverty, when, as a young boy, Herko began showing remarkable musical talents, particularly as a pianist and flautist, his parents made sure he had lessons and even purchased a grand concert piano for the young prodigy.

     He later attended Juilliard Arts Conservatory to study piano, but, at the age of 20 determined instead to become a dancer. Herko was awarded a four-year scholarship to attend American Ballet Theater School, and later studied with major dance companies, including Merce Cunningham and James Waring, while later helping to develop and found, with dancer/performers such as David Gordon, Lucinda Childs and Yvonne Rainer, the Judson Dance Theater, which, along the music of John Cage, opened audiences up to entirely new notions of what dance might entail: it could be rubbing one’s thighs together, running in space, etc. etc.

      Yet, at the same time Herko danced more traditional modern dance works with James Waring, even choreographing new pieces. He also appeared as a back-up dancer on TV shows such as Ed Sullivan’s weekly broadcasts, with singers such Rosemary Clooney and Pearl Bailey.

      Herko, a hirsute beauty, also was a favorite for poets and playwrights, and performed in several off-off-Broadway downtown productions, including Frank O’Hara’s Love’s Labor and Rosalyn Drexler’s Home Movies, while making close friends with young dancers such as the author this play, Deborah Lawlor, and poets such as Diane di Prima, who wrote extensively of her friendship with Herko.

      Extremely active in gay sex, moreover, Herko became a favorite of Andy Warhol, performing in his movies such as Haircut (No. 1), Kiss, The Thirteen Most Beautiful Boys, and Rollerskate, in which the dancer, on one roller-skate, rolled on bloody feet through the New York streets.

      The young talent was also a favorite in the Factory, showing up for late-night revelries with a group of friends—described as the “mole people” for their subterranean lifestyle and their heavy Speed usage—such as Ondine, Rotten Rita, and Billy Name.

      Herko’s long-time boyfriend was Johnny Dodd, who also appeared in Warhol movies and later worked with the Living Theater, in 1964 doing the lighting for Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Rumors had it that Herko also had a longtime relationship with the son of a wealthy Hollywood family and was kept for a while by a wealthy member of the De Rothschild family in an Upper West Side apartment. He also had a relationship with Di Prima’s husband, the poet Alan Marlowe.

      But his heavy drug use, the injections of Speed and, later, LSD, began to take its toll. By 1964 Herko had begun to miss rehearsals, and his body, so beautiful, began to fail him: he lost teeth and had a “haggard” look about him, friends declared.

      Although, that same year, Waring had cast him in a dance production of Wallace Stevens’ Carlos Among the Candles, by October of 1964, Herko was homeless. Dodd, so he reports, found him in a diner, covered with filth, dancing on the countertop, and offered to take him to his home on Cornelia Street for a bath. Other reports, so Gerard Forde, now working on a biography on Herko, assert that Freddy simply showed up a Dodd’s door.

      And the story after that is equally conflicted, most agreeing that Freddy took a bath filled with Dodd’s perfume before walking naked into the living room of the flat with the window wide open to a sunny fall day.

      Some report that Herko demanded everyone but a few leave the room. But yet many report claim they were there to observe Freddy dance to Mozart’s Coronation Mass. Dodd remembers that Freddy danced wildly, at several times charging toward the window. He, himself, wondered whether or not this was to be the “suicide performance” that Herko had long promised his friends. One can only wonder why something wasn’t done to stop the events.

      After several thrusts toward the window, Herko leaped, like Nijinsky in Le Spectre de la Rose, out the window, landing, dead, on the other side of Cornelia Street, exactly one day and 53 years ago from the production I saw—surely not a coincidence.

      Di Prima thought she perceived what was close to a suicide note when, in clearing out his personal effects, she found a novel of Mary Renault, opened to the page when the King throws himself into the ocean. But others argue that Herko was not suicidal, but simply, drugged, wanting to desperately show that he could fly. The planned Steven’s piece had him flying through a window at the end. And, often, in his performances, Herko had leaped off the 20-foot ledge of the Judson School stage without any negative effect.

      The later memorial service at Judson Church was so crowded that only a few could get it, and Warhol, soon after, offered another such service at the Factory, showing Herko’s 3 films.

       I recount this rather extended mini-history of Herko simply to demonstrate why the Fountain Theater’s co-founder, Deborah Lawlor’s, new production is such a natural and has attracted so much Los Angeles attention.

      The multi-media-based play, Freddy, looks at him through the lens of a young dancer friend named Shelley (Katie McConaughy, possibly a stand-in for Lawlor herself) and a Present-Day Shelley (Susan Wilder) who together, create most of the tension in the play between the generational facts of Freddy’s life and later perspectives about it.

       One must immediately commend this production not only for using multi-media perspectives but for joining up, as many LA productions recently have, with other organizations to achieve their goals.

       A few years back I saw a production of Tennessee Williams’ nearly impossible-to-perform Camino Real at the Boston Court Theatre in Pasadena with several cast members being students of the California Institute of the Arts that was so superb that one immediately recognized the rewards of bringing younger and older groups into the same space. Since then there have been numerous other productions of larger companies, such as the LAOpera, using newer organizations such as Redcat and the Wallis Theater for their more experimental productions to great effect. And one can only commend the wonderful Fountain Theatre choosing to produce their new Freddy at the nearby Los Angeles City College Theatre Academy (Caminito Theatre) with members of the award-winning LACC Theatre performers.

 

     The use of actor/dancers such as Alexandra Fiallos, Jamal Hopes, Tristen Kim, Jacqueline Mohr, Lamong Oakley, Connor Clark Pascale, Justice Quinn, Savannah Rutledge, Brianna Saranchock, Trenton Tabak, and Jesse Trout gives a remarkable sense of youth to this clear celebration of the young of his time who Freddy himself obviously worshipped, as well as giving a spirit to the period portrayed in the play.

      Heading, with Stephen Sachs the great theatre company of the Fountain, Deborah Lawlor, who was for years a dancer herself and knew Freddy Herko, the fact of which gives the whole production a further gravitas. This is, in part, her personal vision of the completely charismatic dancer/performer, and, in that sense, it is a kind of special vision which we must admire.

     Unfortunately (and I wince, given admiration of both Lawlor and her company and commitment to Los Angeles theater in saying this), it is a kind of one-dimensional vision. In her production, instead of portraying what are the obvious complexities of Herko’s sensibility, we see what can only be described as authorial announcements of events: this happened and then and then. Herko’s obviously conflicted life is attributed primarily to his endless sexual activities and, primarily, his enchantment with drugs. At one dramatic point he even introduces the totally innocent Past Shelley to heroin.

      I’m not questioning whether or not that really happened: I’m sure it might have. But the play, focusing as it does on his sexuality and drug habits makes it almost appear that Herko was a two-dimensional figure who had little else going for him; we see little of his dance, his theatrical talents, his obvious “charismatic” encounters, not even his personal sexual relationships with others. We’re simply told what happened, not who he really is or even was, despite the dual perspective. I have to admit that, without any evidence, that Lawlor’s script even hints that if Freddy hadn’t died of drugs and self-destructive behavior, he might have died, soon after, of AIDS. Lawlor does not say this. It’s just there is this simplistic statement of his problems leads, unfortunately, to that conclusion. In this version, it appears, he was suffering from too much drugs and way too much sex.

      Marty Dew, playing Herko, is an attractive man who can obviously dance well, given the help of Movement and Dance Director Cate Caplin and choreographer Gary Franco. He’s an attractive figure who keeps one spellbound; but, I’m sorry to say, he doesn’t yet have the theater “chops” to really portray what were the obvious dilemmas of Herko’s life.

     The play, using Javanese-like puppet figures, does attempt to reveal the young Herko’s childhood where he was encouraged by his family to play the piano. But it doesn’t truly deal with the awful truths such as when Freddy revealed to his father that he wanted to change to ballet he was beaten.

      That “little” fact alone suggests that this man was eternally torn by the projectives of his life. The Julliard School reported that he was unable to “focus,” which means, of course, that he had an inability to commit to the years and years of intense practicing that it might take to become a concert pianist. Herko was clearly a poly-talent, a man with so many gifts that he didn’t quite know how to share them. And, looking back on his history, how could he, given the time in which he lived, possibly find an easy solution? Yes, there were many in his community who were intensely seeking to find multi-cultural ways in which to experience art; but the society at large was in closure, a world in which it was not so easy to cross “over” the many, many boundaries that art and life put up before the individual. One only needs to read Michael S. Sherry’s Gay Artists in Modern American Culture: An Imagined Conspiracy to confirm it.

      Diane Di Prima raged against Freddy’s endless gay encounters, for example, in her poem “Fucking Again.” He was late for another date with her. Herko’s current biographer, Forde writes that “He liked hanging out in sleazy bars.”

     What, I might ask, were not sleazy bars in that gay-phobic world? Even in 1969, five years after Freddy’s death, I visited New York bars which anybody in my hometown (and even in New York) would have described as sleazy, the Stonewall being one of the worst of them!

     Freddy was truly seeking love in everything he did. The night before his death he performed on the roof of the Judson Church without a single person having bothered to attend. I’ve had such poetry readings, but I can’t imagine what that might have meant to this fragile man, physically falling apart before his own eyes.

     Lawlor’s production is one in which the audience must really “make believe,” must imagine rather than truly experience the characters. For these young actors don’t quite yet know how, despite their obvious talents, to put the darker and lighter elements of their characters into greater relief. Whether they are running through the openly sexual environs of Warhol’s The Factory, or trying to discover their own personal sensibilities, they seem to be simply sleep-walking through their own acting out of their characters. Surely the figures they represent might have something deeper to say, to query their own choices, even as they recognize they can no longer make such choices. Only Wilder (as the Present-Day Shelley) seems to be able to understand some of the errors of your younger perception.

      And then, there is Herko himself, obviously a sort of Peter Pan-like character, living out his life in as far more delusional “flower-child”-like perspective than the West coast’s San Francisco figures of the early 1960s. These New York folk, nonetheless, were also innocents gone over the edge into a kind of Never-Never Land from which they simply could not return. It can only be such young people as in this performance who can truly convey why, in a world in which a person like Freddy—in the endless diminutive of his own manhood expressed by his very name— might determine to truly become a Peter Pan, leaping through that Cornelia Street window despite and because of the fact that he knew he was now too old for the voyage. He had already performed as a dancer who falls through the skies in Waring’s Icarus, with sets and costumes by Robert Indiana.  

 

    The great dancer Paul Taylor, also a late-to-life dancer, once told me (when I was 21 or 22) that “You’re never too old to become a dancer.” But I knew he was lying, that no matter how hard I studied (as I did that year at the Joffrey Ballet Company) that I had come into to it far too late—despite some very nice comments from my severely authoritarian ballet teachers.

     Freddy suggested to Di Prima that he needed Speed to allow him to do what he desired to do since he come so late to dance. But he clearly misunderstood what Speed really was. As graduate students in the early 1970s, my companion Howard and I—both of whom hated and continue to hate the use of any drugs—did explore Speed a couple of times to finish writing deadlines. In fact, I wrote a couple of my essays from my Masters’ Thesis on Eudora Welty with the enhancement of Speed.

     Yet, we both realized that instead of slowing down time so that we might work against the imaginary clock, if we encountered one another during these times we would suddenly engage in conversations that took hours away from our true work, making us lose what we were actually trying to gain.

     Herko wasn’t losing time, but actually gaining it, his body suddenly decaying, his mind lost in a kind of space that took years away from his talented imagination and physical abilities.

    His final leap through that window may not have been an intentional suicidal but it was a leap outside of reality, outside of time, outside of his own remarkable contributions—a leap into a reality beyond us. And, in retrospect, it is damnably painful for all those who might have wished he could have lived on to exorcise/exercise his so-many talents.

    But, in the end, I beg you, don’t read my piece alone. Go see the performance, Freddy, which brought me to all these words. It’s worth seeing and wondering after.

 

Los Angeles, September 29, 2017

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (September 29, 2017).

Vicki Ray | Rivers of Time / 2019

simple songs and wild variations

by Douglas Messerli

 

Vicki Ray (piano), Rivers of Time, with Carole Kim (visuals) / Los Angeles, REDCAT (Roy and Edna Disney / CalArts Theater), the performance I attended was on January 16, 2019

 

Last night’s piano concert by Vicki Ray, quite simply, was one of the best concerts of contemporary piano music I have ever attended.

     Ray, whose performances I have always admired, was at her very best, particularly in the first piece of the evening, “Sometimes I Feel Like My Time Ain’t Long” by Los Angeles composer Ben Phelps. The composer begins his work with a song sung with piano accompaniment from a wax cylinder recording that is part of the Library of Congress’ Alan Lomax Collection, a song recorded by Lomax in a Clemson, South Carolina house sung by Brady Walker, William Grant, Mary Lee, Thomas Trimmer, and Phil Butler. The simple gospel piece crackles and wavers in its tones on the recording, and Phelps uses those elements in his eight variations on that original tune to create an outstanding exploration of tonal variation.

 

      Gradually, as the work moves forward, the very complexities of this seemingly simple tune grow into more and more complex arpeggios, as we begin to realize through the piano’s variations of pitch that time is both limited and complex: what seems like the momentary becomes suspended in space, and the long musical intervals appear to be far-too-brief passages. It is a work that forces one to consider even the nature of music itself, as you settle in to the various variations of the tune. I could almost have listened to this dialogue between the original 1939 recording and the experimental “takes” on it for an entire evening. And I think the audience was stunned into silence when the work finally came to a close, since it might have almost spun out into an entire symphony for piano only. For me it was truly awe-inspiring, and I could not imagine how the concert might even continue after the intermission.

       During the break I turned to my seated neighbors, who with my questions, reported that they’d traveled through the rainy night the long way from Ventura, having even become lost on their trip. Fred and Carolyn (I never got their last name) were friends, evidently, of the second composer, Daniel Lentz, who now lives in Santa Barbara, and to whom the couple introduced me after the performance.

      Lentz’s work, “River of 1,000 Streams,” which presumably involved electronic intervention, was a bit like a contemporary version of the cascading refrains of Smetana’s The Moldau, but without that earlier work’s sentimentality. Here the repeating refrains were overlaid by the layers of electronic tremolos in a way that did not so much imitate the water’s flow as it moved through the countryside, but, through Ray’s virtuosic playing resonated throughout the Redcat theater, almost matching the rare Los Angeles downpour outside.

     If the earlier piece was a kind of echo and variation, this work, although I might argue it is somewhat similar in structure, builds its chords from the bass to the high soprano keys of the piano, roiling up another kind of “stream” from the bowels of the instrument into its final piercingly high screams. Once again, Ray was a significant on-stage force, someone from whom hardly anyone might wish to remove their eyes.

     Of less interest, accordingly, were Carole Kim’s visual contributions—a screen behind the piano and a kind of multi-colored wall to the left of the piano, at the right side of the stage to the audience. Kim’s black-and-white and sometimes colored prism-like images combining crystalline-like structures with undulating amoebic-like figures were quite often fascinating, but seemed, at least to me, to have little relationship to the compositions.

      Spotting Ray’s companion, Tom Frick, in the lobby, I greeted him and was delighted to be introduced to the pianist’s justifiably proud mother.

 

Los Angeles, January 17, 2019

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

Georges Bizet | Carmen / 2019

three hateful figures

by Douglas Messerli

 

Georges Bizet (composer), Ludovic Halévy and Henri Meilhac (libretto, based on the novella by Prosper Mérimée), Richard Eyre (director), Gary Halvorson (film director) Carmen / 2019 [Metropolitan Opera live-HD film]

 

Over numerous years I have come to know almost every aria in and the plot of Carmen, but oddly enough I had never seen a performance of the popular opera. So, the announcement by the Metropolitan Opera that this year they were including their tragic tale of the gypsy Carmen and the soldier Don José in their live HD broadcast, led Howard and me to buy tickets. And this production was such an excellent one, that feel that perhaps I need not see another.

     I say that, knowing that I might truly enjoy hearing Georges Bizet’s most memorable score, and would truly enjoy singers performing it of the quality of this production, but must also proclaim that the central characters are all rather repulsive. 

      Yes, Carmen (Clémentine Margaine in this production) is a truly independent spirit, who will have love only on her terms, as she expresses it in her Act 1 "Habanera.” If in a society where men generally made the decision about whom they loved, the cigarette girl, given her beauty, is able to make her own choices of lovers and to declare that her shifting interests may result in heart-break or even death for her former lovers. In short, she recognizes herself as a dangerous siren who spends a great deal of energy in playing a kind of dominating whore, spinning webs around men only to leave them entrapped when she moves on to her next lover. And all those around her, apparently, know her pattern and steer clear of her sexual enticements. Only outsiders such as Don José (Roberto Alagna) and the toreador, Escamillo (Alexander Vinogradov) might allow themselves to fall for her charms.

      It is precisely her independence and willfulness that attracts men to her. In a society of feminine passivity, Carmen stands out in her alluring masculine-like stance. One might even observe that she symbolically stands for soldiers and toreadors alike—both groups of which, because of their historical association with their own sex and their colorful costumes, have long been the focus of gay intrigue—as a kind of acceptable drag incarnation of their male colleagues. *

     But Carmen also is a betrayer, a violent fighter, a smuggler, and thief, who entices the flustered Don José not only to leave the saintly—and again quite passive female, who visits her would-be lover only upon instructions and the pleas of Don José’s mother, Micaéla (Aleksandra Kurzak, in real life the wife of Alagna) free her from arrestment, for which he is imprisoned for months, to leave his employment as a soldier, and to join the gypsy smugglers. True, he is intoxicated by his love for Carmen, but we also see through these acts just how weak he is as a man. In a sense, Don José is as passive as Carmen is independent. And he too has now betrayed all those to whom he was formerly committed. Is it any wonder that Carmen can no longer admire or love him? By giving in to all of her demands he has simply shown himself as a male weakling (and we must remember that Mérimée’s tale is very much about gender stereotypes, even if they are often overturned).

      Carmen has now fallen in love with an equally odious being, the self-enchanted, braggadocios bull-fighter from Seville, Escamillo. The children (which are absolutely wonderful in this production, which provided them even with a backstage interview in the intermission) and the locals may all celebrate his achievements, but there is something amiss with this “hero.” Escamillo may appear brave to attempt to visit the smuggler’s mountain hangout to seek out Carmen, but he is quickly bested in a fight with Carmen’s cohorts and backs off. 

     Even if Carmen is currently smitten by him, we recognize that she will eventually perceive his true cowardice and will leave him as well. Fortunately, we never discover what might have occurred in their relationship, but it might be interesting as a separate work to imagine what their relationship would have been and how it might have ended—surely, once more, in violence.

    The true hero of this opera is Micaéla, who truly enters the lion’s den of the smuggler’s hideout, trembling with fear, not only for her encounter with the suspicious males, but for having to encounter her nemesis Carmen. Yet only she is able, temporarily at least, of weaning Don José away from this world so that he might attend to his mother’s impending death.

      Her victory, however, is a short one. He returns to Carmen, this time taking on the most horrific role he might ever embody of a murderer, waiting to be arrested and hung.

     No matter how you might view conventional behavior, you have to be shocked by the trio of horrific beings at the center of this story. Opera is filled with hateful figures, criminals, rapists, and many, many murderers. But these three rather shady figures starring in a single work may be a kind of record.

    They all may be proclaiming love, but the results of that love make you shudder. Even Don Giovanni, the lecherous count also roaming the Seville streets, seems almost saintly in comparison.

As the gentle and mostly unjudgmental Howard said, upon leaving the theater, “these are not such nice people.”

     I was enchanted by the performances and music, even if it didn’t make me want to abandon my life and run into the mountains.

 

*It’s fascinating, simply as a coincidental piece of gay gossip, that Marcel Proust, after Bizet’s death, befriended the composer’s wife and son, upon whom he based two of the central figures in his masterpiece, Remembrance of Things Past. The author of the original Carmen, Prosper Mérimée, although having occasional affairs and long correspondence with women, never married and lived most of his life with his mother. He did have a one-night stand, apparently, with George Sand (not impressed with his sexual prowess), who might almost be portrayed as a kind of Carmen, a strong-willed, talented seductress of many powerful men.

 

Los Angeles, February 6, 2019

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

 

John Beasley | MONK’estra / 2018

 the sweet sound of dissonance

by Douglas Messerli

 

John Beasley MONK’estra / Santa Monica, California, The Broad Stage, the performance I attended with Pablo Capra on October 12, 2018

 

Beginning as a jazz pianist, composer, and arranger, John Beasley for the last few years has reimagined the great songs of pianist Thelonius Monk with, at first, a small combo, finally expanding that into a larger jazz orchestra, MONK’estra, which successfully demonstrates just how great of composer Monk truly was. Indeed, the two albums the group has recorded garnered several Grammy nominations.         

      For lovers of Monk’s often eccentric piano poundings and endless chordal embellishments, it may be hard to even imagine a big band sound—with a row of saxophonists (who double as clarinetists and flautists: Bob Sheppard, Tom Luer, Tommy Peterson, Adam Schroeder, and Danny Janklow), trombonists (Wendell Kelly, Ryan Dragon, Lemar Guillary), and trumpeters (Bijon Watson, Rashawn Ross, James Ford, Brian Swartz), along with percussionist Peter Erskine, bass and acoustic player Ben Shepherd, and Beasley, himself, sporting a Monk-like tam, at the piano and occasionally stalking the stage as the director—yet Beasley’s arrangements incorporate much of the punch and yet complex texture of Monk’s works.

      The night’s list of songs at the The Broad Stage in Santa Monica, a performance which I attended with Pablo Capra, was announced from the stage, and since I standardly do not take notes at events and I don’t know Monk’s entire oeuvre, it’s difficult to recount all the titles. Yet I do recall Monk’s notable Round Midnight, Little Rootie Tootie, Going on the Hudson (one of my favorites), and possibly Dear Ruby. There were many others; in all, Monk wrote about 70 songs.

     What is totally unforgettable is the sound of this group, as if the Duke Ellington orchestra had suddenly shifted into Monk’s extreme dissonance, which, as one group member argues, “he [Monk] makes sound normal.”    

     The utter talent of this group allows for a showcasing of the individuals, with a couple of baritone sax solos (particularly of interest to me, since I played that instrument in high school), a couple of trumpets and a trombone features, alto and tenor sex solos, and special focuses on the drummer and bassist, along with, of course, Beasley’s own very Monk-like piano renditions.

      If at times there may seem to be a bit of sweetening-up of Monk’s more improvisatory approach, MONK’estra does capture the spirit of the jazz legend and reveals, moreover, as Beasley notes, how much of his work included elements of the history of 21^st-century sound, including “hip-hop, bossa nova, Afro-Cuban jazz, funk, fusion and free jazz.”

   The near sold-out performance was filled with people who couldn’t get enough of the highly energized sounds, awarding the performers two well-deserved standing ovations, and demanding an encore.

    What I think we all recognized, despite the negative press Monk received throughout his life (jazz critic Philip Larkin once describing his as “the elephant on the keyboard”), as the arranger / pianist argues:

 

                 I discovered how pliable his music is, like any great composer—

                 for example Bach, who sounds great in any tempo. Monk’s music

                 is so open to interpretation because his compositions have such a

                 solid story. I figured out how to elongate his sophisticated melo-

                 dies and voice things in a non-traditional way. And through it

                 all, those unforgettable melodies just stick with you.

 

     Even if the titles Beasley announced didn’t all stick with me, yet those melodies are still replaying in my head this morning, and the next time MONK’estra performs in town—they now travel the globe in their performances—I hope to be there.

 

Los Angeles, October 13, 2018

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (October 2018).

 

 

Meredith Monk | Atlas / 2019

a great opera brought into the repertoire

by Douglas Messerli

 

Meredith Monk Atlas / at the Disney Concert Hall, June 11, 2019, directed by Yuval Sharon

 

One might imagine that an opera with a plot that is more like a travelogue than a coherent narrative or story, whose set consists of a giant space-like orb, and songs without words primarily made up of what critic Bonnie Marranca has describe as encompassing “glottal effects, ululation, yodeling, speech song, and animal sounds” would be something one would not desire to sit through for several hours. Moreover, even the Joseph Campbell-like mythological adventure at the heart of Meredith Monk’s Atlas is not only vague (based somewhat on the life of adventurer Alexandra David-Néel) but, at moments, is downright hokey, with the small band of travelers and their spirit-guides encountering troupes of agrarian, artic, and desert dwellers before finally spiraling off into space that often combines a kind of silly symbolism with outright fantasy. Unlike Marranca, I am not a great admirer of the Modernist Symbolism.

     Yet, sitting at Disney Concert Hall last night, both my theater-going companion, Deborah Meadows, and I agreed that we might have wished it would go on for even a bit longer, perhaps like one of John Cage’s Europeras.

     The first major production of Monk’s Atlas since its 1991 premiere at the Houston Grand Opera, this Yuval Sharon-directed work might not even have been imagined as possible given Monk’s reluctance in this and in other works to produce performance scores, her own deep involvement in the work (in the original she played the central heroine), and her reliance on a group of performers with whom she had worked for years sharing her special brand of vocalization, choreography, and theatricality.

      Indeed, as critics have long wondered, could a work by Meredith Monk continue to exist without her? Monk may well have wondered that herself, and fortunately when Sharon, working for the past 3-years as a special conductor for the LA Philharmonic, approached her with the idea of reviving it, she agreed—with only one important stipulation: that she be in no way involved in it. From the smile on her face during a well-deserved standing ovation Tuesday evening, it was apparent that she was pleased by the results. As Los Angeles Times critic Mark Swed observed, Atlas had now been transformed from a Monk performance piece to an opera by Meredith Monk. And surely, given the success of this performance it will now be revived internationally. In this sense Sharon has given the world a new work to join the opera canon.

       Nearly everything about this work succeeded. First there was the set design by Es Devlin, which stunned everyone in its imposing and eerie presence even upon entering the hall. His huge, 36-foot spacecraft orb not only served as a canvas to Luke Halls’ projections of earth, moon, and extraterrestrial space, but through moving panels and retractable steps, served as a living quarters at times for the group of travelers on their way to and from their several journeys.

        Beautiful choreography by Danielle Agami articulated Monk’s own vision of the relationship between music and body as did the sound by Mark Grey.

        The space itself had been utterly transformed, as four front rows of seats of the theater had been removed in order to create a small pit wherein the LA Phil New Music Group, conducted by Paolo Bortolameolli, sat.

 

     And then, most obviously, there was the glorious music both from orchestra and on-stage. Consisting of 25 short vignettes, the singers trace the early years of Alexandra (Milena Manocchia) living at home in Illinois with her parents (Kathryn Shuman and Jimmy Traum) to her (now sung by Joanna Lynn-Jacobs) numerous travels with fellow companions Cheng (Yi Li), Erik (John Brancy), and eventually the more self-centered Franco (Dylan Gentile) along with two spirit guides (Miguel Zazueta and Kelci Hahn).

      In their voyages they encounter not only the different communities I describe above, but fascinating and horrifying figures that challenge each of them: a Hungry Ghost (Sharon Kim), an Ice Demon (Jessica Beebe), and a Lonely Spirit (Juecheng Chen). 

      By voyage’s end—after an absolutely glorious Out of Body Chorus, sung near the orchestra pit, an older but surely wiser Alexandra (Ann Carlson) returns home to quietly unpack her accumulated possessions.

 

     What is truly amazing is not only the truly unbelievable (and I do mean hard to be believed) singing by all cast members, but the fact that even without words we can truly comprehend their mix of vowels, rhythmic glossolalia, and complex vocalizations. Even the early opera mutterings of her mother and father are clear expressions of their fears and sadness for their daughter’s desire to leave them. And for all the yodels, screeches, shouts, and bangs, Monk’s music remains, almost like some Broadway ditties, in the ear. All night—a night in which our building lost all its electrical power—I kept hearing the opera’s musical refrains.

       And as for its lack of a coherent “story,” well we all know the story though the experiences of our lives, the necessities of packing and leaving home. Even at my rather advanced age, I still have numerous dreams of planes, trains, and other forms of transportation which I’m using to take me away from and back home.

      And most of us who have read the Odyssey will already know this story. Indeed, the mother in this opera, a bit like Penelope, is constantly knitting throughout the first scene. And the female hero must undergo some of the very same challenges that the Greek hero encounters. Only, as this version makes clear, it is only as an entire world community working together that we all are to survive our wanderings through life.

       A lesson, apparently, that this new version of Monk’s great opera reveals to us through Sharon’s reinvention of her work. I hope that, before I die, I can see it again many a time.

 

Los Angeles, June 12, 2019

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