The Harry Partch Ensemble | Partch: Windsong / 2017

going/gone crazy

by Douglas Messerli

 

The Harry Partch Ensemble Partch: Windsong / performed at Redcat (Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater) at the Walt Disney Concert Hall / June 23-24, 2017 / the concert I attended with Pablo Capra was on June 23, 2017

 

I last reviewed the music of Harry Partch, also at a concert at Redcat, on May 29, 2009, when the Partch Group performed “Dark Brother,” “God Lonely Man,” Yankee Doodle Fantasy,” “Isobel” and “Annah the Allmaziful” (the last two based on James Joyce and Lewis Carroll),  and his important Sprechstimme-like work Eight Hitchhiker Inscriptions. I promised at the end of that review, which appeared in My Year 2009, that I would be soon attending other concerts of this eccentric American composer’s work.

      In the 8 years since, that group has performed in Los Angeles several times—including at Redcat—and has garnered several Grammy nominations and awards, adding to the number of their performers as well as recreating several new Partch-invented instruments, while adding works by other contemporary composers to their repertoire. I can’t exactly explain why it has taken me so long to return to Partch’s music, but I was pleased to attend a performance the other evening of the newest event, “Partch: Windsong” with my editorial assistant Pablo Capra, and, by accident, my dear friend Deborah Meadows.

      Actually, after hearing last night’s sell-out concert I did perceive why I had not immediately decided to return to the works of Partch. Despite the sort of Americana energy Partch’s work conveys, there is, as I described to Pablo, also a sort of corny, kitsch aspect to his work, particularly in the first act of this new concert which featured his 12 Intrusions from 1950. Some of these fascinating “songs” are based on classical dramas and others on Chinese poems, but many of them, such as “The Letter” come from an American heartland sensibility that might remind one of a sort of cynical version of Frank Capra, wherein the American everyday man is heartily, if somewhat negatively, celebrated.

     In “The Letter” the narrator relates an epistle that recounts his unhappy marriage “by the shotgun,” and his following incarceration, after which, upon his release from jail, he wishes for his wife’s death.

     Other pieces call up visions of “a rose,” “a waterfall,” and “a crane,” all with Partch’s standard employment of fretted strings and heavy percussion, including his remarkable BooBams played by Rick Terry, and Bass Marimba, performed by TJ Troy. If it’s all extremely entertaining, particularly, as performers, including the great experimental pianist Vicki Ray (playing, in this case, chromelodeon and canons), rush from instrument to instrument, there is, nonetheless, something slightly embarrassing here about Partch’s “downhome” aesthetic, the same kind of “aw-shucks” kind of sensibility of his memorable Hitchhiker Inscriptions. Charles Ives’ love of the circus and American parades immediately spring to mind; but here the California on-the-road sensibilities replace the more effete New England traditions of the older

     The wonderful exception in this first “act” was Partch’s memorable Ulysses at the Edge of the World of 1962, performed with baritone saxophone by Ulrich Krieger and trumpet by Dan American Rosenbloom. That work alone would be worth the ticket to the concert.

     But then, the “second act” was even more amazing, particularly given the encyclopedic orchestration of Windsong, the score of Madeline Tourtelot’s 1958 art-house film of the same name—performed in its Los Angeles premiere—that encompasses all the startlingly beautiful instruments displayed on the Redcat stage (in a brief speech, John Schneider called for financial support for the group’s recreation of the final few instruments that Partch had created so that they might perform other such restorative works).

    Windsong, as the program notes suggest, is “a collage of sounds,” but it is also a bravura performance of the players, as they rush from instrument to instrument, from chamber bowls to chromelodeon, from canons to kithara and spoils of war, while the diamond marimba and bass marimba pound out the impressive rhythms of the piece. The Redcat audience couldn’t resist the work.

      What followed, a stunningly beautiful piece by Partch’s close friend, gay composer Lou Harrison, Suite for Cello & Harp (1948), was like a dessert that salved the ears after the rambunctious Windsong. I almost cried with the weeping laments of Caleb Young’s cello and the strangely percussive accompaniment of the harp. This short piece, as far as I was concerned, might have gone on forever, and audience members could not resist the standard silences between movements.

 

    The final work in the concert, Partch’s Sonata Dementia represented the pure mania of the composer’s sensibility once more, as he studied the very notions of psychological problems, including schizophrenia, paranoia, and numerous other diagnosed mental problems with Mass Marimba and the Hypobass, while, in the last passages, performer Barnes chants "Mumbo jumbo, hocus pocus, hoity toity, etc.” and every other possible set of words one might apply to madness, using its professional terms along with the common mockings of the conditions it brings to light.

      Here, we see the kind of Partch “madness” that led many contemporary pop-artists such as Iggy Pop and the Stooges to his music, and helped them to take Partch’s art (whom Iggy Pop openly acknowledges influenced his compositions) into their later punk rock works. My friend, Pablo sent me just three links to Iggy Pop’s works, but they are absolutely revealing. You need just listen to Iggy Pop’s “The Passenger” and his “I’m Bored” to immediately comprehend the remarkable transition of Partch’s down-and-out American colloquialisms into the entire punk movement. The writer of Partch’s “The Letter” is only a step away from crying out “I Wanna Be Your Dog” who might almost be screaming out the dissociative lines from the composer’s Dementia Sonata. Ultimately, the entire culture, without always knowing it, took up Partch’s strange isolate compositions to express the new generation’s anguish.

 

Los Angeles, June 24, 2017

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (June 2017).

María Irene Fornes | Promenade / 1969 [reading of play]

a very long walk

by Douglas Messerli

 

María Irene Fornes Promenade, in Robert J. Schroeder, ed. The New Underground Theatre (New York: Bantam Books, 1968).

María Irene Fornes Promenade / New York, Judson Poets’ Theatre, Judson Memorial Church, April 9, 1965; revived New York, Promenade Theatre, June 9, 1969.

 

Sometime when I was a junior at the University of Wisconsin, I purchased a small collection of off-Broadway plays titled The New Underground Theatre, edited by Robert J. Schroeder. I bought a great many books in those days that, for one reason or another, I never read, and this was one of them. It wasn’t that I was disinterested in the plays in this book, but simply that I was preoccupied, not only with reading classroom texts—which this most definitely was not—but also with nightly trips to the Madison gay bar and other extracurricular activities.

    I’d read numerous contemporary plays in high school by Pinter, Genet, Albee, Ionesco and others (indeed for years, in my memory I thought I had had this little book on my basement room shelf even in those days), but these plays remained unread until last night, when something called out to me pick it up again, whereupon I read the first play in this volume, Promenade, by María Irene Fornes, with music by Al Carmines, the pastor at the Judson Memorial Church where it was first performed.

      I also published a play by Fornes, a much more traditional work, Abingdon Square, 32 years later in 2000 (in fact I’ve published plays by three of the eight writers represented in this tiny Bantam paperback anthology—beside Fornes, Murray Mednick and Ronald Tavel). But reading her play, a more specific memory came to me as I suddenly recalled that in early 1969, the year Promenade was revived off-off Broadway (with actress Madeline Kahn in the role of the servant; it first opened at Carmines’ Judson Poets’ Theatre in 1965*) I moved for several months to New York City. For a short period, I lived in Greenwich Village, and I recall seeing posters for the play as I walked the streets, “promenading,” one is tempted to say.

 

    Something called out to me even then to see this play, but I couldn’t quite comprehend how to buy tickets, having never seen the Judson Theatre and not knowing where it even was. Living day to day as a temporary worker, I didn’t have enough money, moreover, to buy a ticket. I didn’t subscribe to a newspaper, had no telephone directory to look up the address. When a few weeks later I began working at a permanent job at Columbia University, the off-off Broadway theaters, which I later got to know quite well, seemed to be on another planet. When I did go to theater—three times during my New York stay—it was to Broadway productions (Dear World [which I describe in My Year 2005], Celebration by The Fantasticks creators Tom Jones and Harvey Schmidt, and, strangely, Peter Luke’s adaptation of Baron Corvo’s Hadrian the VII. The only off-Broadway play I saw was Mart Crowley’s The Boys in the Band, at Theatre Four where I worked as an usher for a few nights.

      Perhaps, had I attended that 1969 performance of the Steinian–like Promenade, I would not have understood or even enjoyed it. I was so serious in those days. Fornes, on the other hand, whips up a quite fantastically absurd fable about two prisoners (105 and 106) who dig their way out of a penitentiary to take a spectacular promenade through the streets, a park, and fabulous parties, only to be returned to prison (with all the other party-goers) by the jailer. The prison warden, himself, throws a lavish party, threatening them with a return to the cell if they do not enjoy the event.

     Thrown back into the cell from which they’ve escaped, the two original prisoners merely leave once more through the hole, returning to a mother who throughout the play has claimed her children have gone missing. Asking them if they have “found evil,” she sings them to sleep, with lines such as:

 

                                                  I know everything.

                                                  Half of it I really know.

                                                  The rest I make up.

                                                  The rest I make up.

 

    In fact, the entire play reads as freshly as if it were being created, made-up like the plays of childhood imagination, spontaneously. But in the spirit of mid-1960 liberation, the play also has plenty of opportunities for nudity and scenes of sexual expression, including. at one banquet, several women who each want to be naked:

 

                                                    Only three.

                                                    Only three

                                                    Naked ladies.

                                                    All right, four

                                                    Four naked ladies.

 

In another undressing incident the prisoners strip to put their clothes upon a man who has been wounded in a hit-and-run driving event, and in so doing escape the jailer. At yet another moment a servant and chorus sing a hilarious linguistic romp about how clothes effect behavior:

 

                                                    Who can marry a gigolo?

                                                    Can you?

                                                    Can you?

                                                    I can’t.

 

With repeated choruses about “a businessman,” “a cop,” “a clown,” and “a priest,” concluding in:

 

                                                     You see, a costume

                                                     Can change your life.

                                                     Be one and all.

                                                     Be each and all.

                                                     Transvest

                                                     Impersonate

                                                    ‘Cause costumes

                                                     Change the course

                                                     Of life.

 

At the same moment, the jailer re-enters wearing the prisoner’s jackets, presumably having taken on both their identities.

     One might even describe Fornes’ work as a kind of Ovid-like parade of transformations, reflecting the world around her in 1965 and, particularly in 1969, when, a few days after I left New York, the transvestites of Stonewall (a bar I often passed on my way to other favored gay bars) took to the streets against the police, transforming the whole of gay society.

      Certainly, had I found my way to the Promenade advertised on the rows of small posters in 1969, I would never have known that this wonderful playwright, while writing this work, was living in a long-term relationship with Susan Sontag.

       It has taken me 46 years to circle back to the play which had long ago called out to me as young man. It has been a very long walk.

 

*I should add that it took me a great deal of research to confirm my feeling that I had seen posters for the musical in 1969, since Fornes’ biographies all focus on the original 1965 production. Stubbornly, I checked Carmines’ biographies, where it was hinted to have been produced in 1969. I presumed that it was a revival until even further research in the Burns Mantle Best Play books (I have little faith in Wikipedia) reconfirmed it.   

 

Los Angeles, January 29, 2014

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (January 2014).

                                                                                          

Edward Albee | Seascape / 2005

living darwinism

by Douglas Messerli

 

Edward Albee Seascape / Booth Theatre, the production I attended was a matinee performance on November 6, 2005

 

A retired married couple, Nancy and Charlie, are enjoying a seaside beach. She is painting; he, resting on a nearby blanket. The only interruption of their obvious pleasures is the roaring of a jet plane.

     We soon discover, however, that other less pleasurable issues lie just below the surface. Nancy enjoys the day so thoroughly that she would like to “stay [on the beach] forever!” She loves the water, the air, the sand, the dunes, the beach grass, and the sunshine, and imagines the possibility of moving from beach to beach, going “around the world and never leav[ing] the beach…” The more practical Charlie scoffs at the notion. But she persists: it’s necessary to find out what he really likes and “make all the plans.” But Charlie, clearly, prefers doing nothing, just vegetating: no planning for enjoyment is in his view of the short future they may have left.

      So Albee’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play Seascape begins. It’s a small spat, a typical domestic debate, and on one level the play never seems to rise above this—the small, domestic issues of a healthy but slightly aging couple attempting to determine what to do with their future. Even the sudden appearance of a couple of marvelously colored lizards curious about these beachside interlopers doesn’t move the play far off topic: for the lizards not only speak fluent English, but they, too, are a monogamous couple attempting to determine what the future holds in store.

     Despite some moments of terror, some suggestions of dark horror, and a great deal of humor as the two “animals” and two “humans” attempt to comprehend each other’s worlds, the play seems, as The New York Times reviewer Ben Brantley wrote of the production I recently saw, to “lack emotional gravity,” to be perfectly likeable but also, in some way, “forgettable”—particularly in the context of Albee’s more highly emotionally pitched oeuvre. In some respects, I agree. There is a problem at the heart of this play that relates to the text’s seeming insistence on a kind of realist fantasy. The lizards who seem ready to climb out of their watery domain into a Darwinian transformation seem too glibly linked by their author to their human counterparts; the humans, in turn, seem too ready to embrace them, to understand their dilemmas and even help them adapt to the brave new world they are about to enter. The human couple insist that there is no way for the lizards to return to the sea: “You’ll have to come back…sooner or later. You don’t have any choice.” And we clearly recognize that the final lines of the play, the male lizard Leslie’s challenge to their offer of help: “All right. Begin.” is a hollow one, since the humans cannot even agree on to handle the issues facing their own lives. Should they act out a kind of desperate series of adventures to temporarily stave off what is soon to be their fate or should they, as Charlie’s actions suggest, curl into an eternal nap?

       Part of the problem that arises in the current production is that the wonderfully able actress Frances Sternhagen may not have the best choice for the role of Nancy. In the original play the role was performed by Deborah Kerr, and, although I never saw that production I can imagine the kind of plucky common sense (witnessed in Kerr’s role as a nun in Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison) and the slightly romantic and dreamy figure (as she played in The King and I) that might allow the mix of reality and fantasy so necessary in this work. Sternhagen plays the role, rather, as a kind Connecticut do-gooder against George Grizzard’s curmudgeonly city-dweller, and the mix doesn’t allow the play to slip into the metaphoric dimension into which it seems naturally to want to expand.

     Albee is not at all interested in the redemption of two bestial creatures, but in the possible redemption of a human couple’s life. As Charlie points out, it would be impossible to recount to anyone their conversation with two lizards. The lizards are, after all, not “real” but phantasmagorical mirror images of the couple themselves. Charlie’s own childhood activity of standing and sitting for long periods at the dark bottom of bodies of water is paralleled by the former activities of their lizard counterparts. In short, he has always had the predilection to return to a beast-like state. On the other hand, Nancy, not unlike the giant birds the lizards recognize in the passing airplanes, is almost ready to fly away in own extended visions of possibility. In order to live life to its fullest does one have to chase the future until, utterly exhausted, one falls into one’s grave? To be an actively living species does it necessarily mean one has to embrace every possible Darwinian change?

      The vision this human couple share, that they indeed are not very different from the beasts from which their kind sprang, is, perhaps, an obvious one, even a fairly likeable conclusion (if you’re not a religious fundamentalist)—but it is not forgettable, or at least to should not be forgettable. For it is that vision that leads us to these very questions and the solutions necessary for the successful continuation of our lives. If war between the sexes and between generations is the subject of many of Albee’s dramas, it is the possibility of peace that he here proposes. We have to help one another, he implies, to begin living the human potentiality of our lives.

 

Los Angeles, November 25, 2005

 

Noël Coward | Blithe Spirit / 2015

breaking away

by Douglas Messerli

 

Noël Coward Blithe Spirit / Los Angeles, Ahmanson Theatre, the performance I attended was the matinee of January 11, 2015

 

When I wrote on the film version of Blithe Spirit in late June last year, little did I know I would be seeing a stage production early in the new year—for I might have combined the two and compared them.

     Having now written on a play that I still do not perceive as deeply profound, I have little more to say. Let me just begin by admitting that, as great as it is to see Angela Lansbury exuberantly performing at the age of nearly 90—one of five memorable occasions when I have seen her perform brilliantly on stage (I’d seen her previously in Dear World, Gypsy, Sweeney Todd and The Best Man)—she cannot compare to the impervious fortress of eccentricities created by Margaret Rutherford. Despite her wonderful comic timing, and her balletic machinations as she prepares to collapse from trance to trance, she is reasonably sane when compared with Rutherford’s rendition of Madame Arcati. And, understandably, she appears a bit frail. Still, since nearly everyone, including myself, is in love with Lansbury, it hardly matters. That she is still “here,” after all these years, and her clowning through the mad séances and hocus pocus mutters of Coward’s dark comedy is enough! The remaining cast members, particularly, Charlotte Parry as Ruth, Charles Edwards aa Charles, and Jemina Rooper as Elvira are all capable and convincing. 

 

    What did strike me seeing the play version of the work, embraced in the theatrical conventions of its original subtitle, “An Improbable Comedy,” was just how serious this work really is at heart. Yes, Blithe Spirit is still funny, to which the guttural howls of the man seated behind me attested; the entire audience, indeed, laughed on cue, particularly when Charles was attempting to converse with his spectral ex-wife Elvira while explaining his extra-sensory perceptions to his understandably skeptical current wife, Ruth. And Madame Arcati is simply, as they used to say, a hoot: a wise owl who knows she’s odd and loves being so; offended only when she is described as an amateur, she knows well that, daft or not, she is the “real” thing. And there were moments, of course, in which even I could not hold back my giggles.

    Yet, as Barry Day, writing in the play’s program, pointed out, Coward’s play shares a great deal with the works of Harold Pinter such as The Homecoming or even the farces of Joe Orton (on my mind, since my companion and I recently saw a production of his What the Butler Saw). If the characters express a series of witty bon mots, they are aimed with all seriousness at one another. As Day points out, in this play Charles Condomine is not only “between women,” but is a kind of bigamist—and utterly enchanted, at least for a while, by the situation. Ruth provides him a highly organized, efficient and intelligent existence, wherein she even helps, so he declares to Elvira, with his writing. Elvira, on the other hand, imbues with life with a blithe spirit, an ethereal and comic lightness and beauty that Ruth cannot provide. In short, Ruth is the real and ordinary, while Elvira, even when she was alive, was simply spirit. The balance is perfect, particularly for a man who appears to have little to offer himself. His major occupation, we must remember, is writing rather predictable murder mysteries, such as the one on which is about to embark, concerning a fraudulent and murderous medium. The fact that Madame Arcati is neither a fake nor has any evil intentions but actually does—with the help of their hyper-energized servant, Edith—conjure up a ghost, nixes his boring story. It seems doubtful, at play’s end, that he will write again—unless it is to recount his horrifying experiences with marriage and the dead. 

     Predictably, in their frustration and anger with him and the situation in which they find themselves—particularly after Ruth as well as Elvira joins the dead, arguing that Charles, metaphorically speaking, has helped to “kill them off”—the two women begin to perceive all they have lost, the jokes grow less and less humorous as they turn into bitter jibes and lashing out against transgressions present and past. And explicably, Charles increasingly wishes to be rid of both of them. When he finally succeeds, all hell breaks loose, as his comfy Kent castle is vengefully shattered and destroyed. The real and the spiritual collide to create chaos, sending this selfish Adam out of paradise into the cold Folkestone streets and, presumably, to a long overseas voyage from which he can never safely return. A bit like the self-centered Teddy of Pinter’s The Homecoming, Charles leaves love behind in the ruins, as he moves toward what is probably a meaningless and empty life. If he has temporarily been a bigamist, by play’s end he is a bachelor, akin to his creator, free to seek out the company of his own kind. 

    What has begun as a kind of domestic comedy, accordingly, ends, quite misogynistically, as a tale of man who, having finally weaned himself away from the women he has used and abused all of his life, is condemned to wander the earth just as his wives are doomed to inhabit his now ruined habitat. One might also argue, on the other hand, that Charles has finally entrapped his women in the domestic world at which he saw himself as the center, but which he is now free, however pointlessly, to escape. Whatever is “out there” may be without love, but it possibly may provide new adventures nonetheless, a life he formerly could not imagine.

 

Los Angeles, January 12, 2015

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (January 2015).

Nico Muhly, Nicholas Wright,and Winston Graham | Marnie / 2018

tumbling through their own sentences

by Douglas Messerli

 

Nico Muhly (composer), Nicholas Wright and Winston Graham (libretto), Michael Mayer (stage director), Habib Azar (film director) Marnie / 2018 [Metropolitan Opera live-HD film]

 

I should begin this essay by admitting that I never much liked Alfred Hitchcock’s 1964 film Marnie, mostly because of its hack psychological story, as retooled from Winston Graham’s 1961 novel by screenwriter Jay Presson Allen. I have never much liked her film-writing and doctoring, including works such as The Prime of Miss Brodie, Travels with My Aunt, Forty Carats, Cabaret, Funny Lady and other box-office successes.

     What she basically does is take important novels and plays and “re-fix” them in ways that exaggerate their characters, Liza Minelli’s portrayal of Sally Bowles in Cabaret being a perfect example (she complained that director-choreographer Bob Fosse didn’t much like the Bowles figure, and if you properly read the Isherwood book, why should you?) Although she was known as someone who might re-write and improve works, I think she often turned them into glossier versions of what were actually darker pieces of writing, and Marnie, in particular, seemed like a film, under Hitchcock’s handling, about a tortured psychotic whose problems were simply explained away with a childhood incident in which, seeing her prostitute mother being attacked by a sailor, she took up a fireplace poker and clubbed the intruder to death, the sudden remembrance of which frees her to remain with her husband, Mark Rutland, as her protector instead of facing jail time for her numerous acts of robbery in her past.

      I attended the new Metropolitan opera live-HD production yesterday, accordingly, with some consternation and a great many doubts. Although Muhly and his librettist Nicholas Wright immediately embraced the idea of turning Graham’s novel into an opera, I still feel it’s a highly confused and second-rate work. Even if we discover the heart of Marnie’s problems are quite different from the movie, it doesn’t still quite explain her hatred of all men and her insistence upon robbing them and turning much of her evil gain over to her detestable mother (a bad woman through and through as even her performer Denyce Graves admitted in an intermission interview). But, at least, in refocusing on the novel, Muhly and Wright, along with director Michael Mayer, have given us a much stronger and denser work, which takes the celebrity luster off both the Tipi Hedren and Sean Connery characters, exposing their far darker natures.

      Fortunately, Isabel Leonard (as Marnie) and Christopher Maltman (as Mark) are remarkable singers who take their cues from oboe and trombone intrusions all colored with Muhly’s lyrical explorations that occasionally remind us of Bernard Herrmann’s scores for Vertigo, and other Hitchcock scores, including Marnie.

      That is not to say that Muhly’s score is not original. In fact, along with Wright’s libretto, Mulhy pulls the work away from the great film director’s version, taking its figures deeper into the shadows of human behavior by not only repeating the heroine’s seemingly pointless behavior, but revealing the ugly manipulation of Rutland, who, after discovering Marnie’s role as a serial thief, forces her into a marriage and who, finally in frustration, he tries to rape. The end of Act I ends violently with her attempt to slit her wrists in rejection of his advancements.

     The introduction of Mark’s rather sleazy brother, Terry (played by countertenor Iestyn Davies), moreover, takes us into yet another dimension. This Cain-marked man—a red patch crosses his face from birth—also allies him to the outsider if nearly-perfect looking Marnie. As Davies recognized about his character, although he is another detestable figure in this tale of anti-heroes, he is the truthteller, determined to make Marnie realize who she truly is.

 

     But, obviously—given the fact that Muhly and Wright have literally split Marnie’s character into four other madrigal singers, dressed and with hair coifed in a similar manner, simply wearing differently colored coats, representing a few of her various identities—it is nearly impossible for her to discover who she is. If Terry sees her as simply a liar, she perceives herself primarily as a survivor, someone who is attempting to stay alive by challenging all the dominant men (and women) in her world who tell her, time and again, that she is not only worthless but an evil being.

      The worst of these is her own mother who has convinced her daughter that she has jealously suffocated her baby brother soon after his birth—an absolutely horrific possibility completely exorcised from Allen’s screenplay. But Mark’s own mother (Janis Kelly) is not much of a less monster for him, deciding that despite her distaste for his appearance and morals, that Terry is perhaps more ruthless and, accordingly, better able to run her son’s printing operation. If Kelly, in an intermission interview saw her character as only being “strong” instead of evil, the book, in which Mark’s mother is secretly buying up stocks in the company in order to oust mark, makes it apparent that she too is a kind of monster. In short, no one in this opera version is a truly good person. Each wants something from the others.

 

    Strutt, the first we see among the many Marnie has robbed, wants only payment, presumably endless, for her having broken the illusion that she was an extension of his ego. Others in her past creep out of the woodwork, represented by the group of black-suited men who dance always around Marnie and her four symbolic selves (with wonderful choreography by Lynne Page).  Is it any wonder that Marnie hates men?

      Relocated from Virginia and Maryland back into its original location of the English countryside, it makes total sense for Marnie to be a horse woman who prefers the beast to men. Her horse, Florio, she luminously sings, is the only being she truly loves. But even here she is betrayed as, when she is disgusted by the hounds who are attempting to rout out a vixen from her den—surely a cornered beast with whom she can identify—she turns Florio away, sending him on a wild race away from the hunt, which ends in his disastrous stumble over a wall, Mark’s own fall into a hospital bed, and Marnie being forced to take out a gun and kill the only thing she ever loved.

     She is now finally ready to continue her criminal career, stealing Mark’s keys and breaking into his safe. Yet something has changed; she can no longer put the easy money she discovers into her purse. Perhaps the very fact that he has stayed by her side, even knowing the truth, has altered her perception of men. He may have brutally used her to capture her as a bride, yet he has remained a kind of gentleman of sorts.

     The discovery of the truth, after her mother’s death, that it was Marnie’s mother who herself strangled her newborn, the central character of what we now realize is a kind of study in morality in a world with little morality to offer, beauteously thrills of her freedom at the very moment that handcuffs are placed around her wrists. Again, unlike the film, Marnie is not “saved” or even protected by Mark’s chauvinistic actions but must now make her own decisions of how to salvage her life, becoming perhaps the only character who is truly free from the ugly controls imposed upon others. If in her robberies she might have imagined she controlled the men for whom she worked, she now perceives that they simply ruled her behavior, and in that recognition becomes a kind of feminist figure able now to go her own way, wherever that may lead her.

     Marnie may still not be a great opera, but it is certainly a fascinating one, where the composer and librettist rarely permit their characters to sing out full sentences in a world that won’t entirely allow them to speak out any true emotion or truth. Tumbling through the mostly exuberant score, the singers come at last to a kind of peace with their own inabilities to express the fullness of their lives. And Muhly’s opera transcends its own somewhat pedestrian story.

 

Los Angeles, November 11, 2018

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