Mac Wellman | Second-Hand Smoke / 1996 [reading of play]

you can’t go home again

by Douglas Messerli

 

Mac Wellman Second-Hand Smoke in Crowtet 2 (Los Angeles: Green Integer, 2003)

 

It must have been around 1996, the year in which Mac Wellman’s third work of his Crowtet quartet premiered at Fordham University, that I co-produced a reading of the play with the theatre company, Bottom’s Dream, in Los Angeles. When I now look back on that reading, I remember it fondly, as I did when I reread the play before my Green Integer publication of the work, along with The Lesser Magoo in 2003. But reading it again, yesterday, I was struck with how little of this rich text I had assimilated, experiencing it as if it were first time I had encountered it.

 

    I missed what was perhaps a wonderful production of it in New York in 1997 at Primary Stages, with my friend, the legendary actor and playwright David Greenspan playing Mr. Glitter, along with Vera Farmiga as Linda, Johann P. Adler as Susannah, and David Patrick Kelly as William Hard.

    What really struck me this time about Wellman’s whole Crowtet series is not only its nostalgic approach to an American landscape which the characters, young and old, can barely abide and is not-so-slowly destroying them through its vast corporate greed and incompetency, but the fact that their radioactive quagmire has been greatly altered. If the inhabitants of the dying community Gradual, Ohio are all rather strange, chalk it up to the effects of the toxic “smaze” which blankets the region, the gradual deaths imposed upon its youths in the drudgery boredom of days working at Days Inn. Is it any wonder that the citizens of the region have all been transformed into mad bats, pesky rats, and roaming cats?

     The local executive Mister Glitter begins the play buried in pseudo-scientific language which he clearly is unable to comprehend:

 

                                    Lever escapement. An escapement in which

                                    a pivoted lever, made to oscillate

                                    by the escape wheel, engages a balance

                                    staff and causes it to oscillate.

                           

                                    A, impulse roller; B, notch; C, lever;

                                    D, ruby pin.

 

     So engaged in such seemingly meaningless instructions and equations (X=a log (a + a2 + y + a@ - y) is Mister Glitter that he has no time and certainly no patience with traveling-salesman-like visitors such as Harry Custom and even his own employee determined to introduce Glitter to the visitor, Mister Phelan.

     Like most busy executives, Glitter is emphatically self-centered and determinedly rude, brushing off not only Custom, but the vising Slyvia Palista, a representative of a federal agency of which even she cannot recall the name. If at first Glitter seems a bit more polite and inquisitive about the agency guest, it is only because she is an attractive woman who might bring back a negative report to her agency. But when he finally challenges her to produce some credentials, she is found not even to be listed in the agency book, and is even more rudely ousted than Custom, who has quietly remained at the center of power.

     Suddenly, near the end of the day, all three remaining men drop their pants, don “fustenellas and the tarboosh,” close the drapes, and dance a “disturbing and gloomy rock song with the lyric”:

 

                                            Close the drapes

                                            Aunt Wednesday

                                            is changing.

 

    If in the first play of the Crowtet Susannah and her crow-fixated father, Raymond, claimed that they donned fezzes and outlandish costumes because of having been gypsies in their early lives, the current denizens of Gradual and nearby hamlets we now learn, according to William Hard in the 3rd act of this play, that “They ape these things to appropriate what’s foreign. Foreign-ness.” Like small-town Shriners, the citizens of this festering “Land of Evening” simply make up the reasons for their strange behavior in their “Quasi-religious, quasi-mystical, quasi-scientific” Americaness, in an attempt to regain the “foreign and forbidden” that was once part of their immigrant pasts.

       The more I see and read Wellman’s theater, the more I realize that he has created a kind of grand world akin to Oz where nearly anyone and everyone proclaims himself as a kind of wizard, growling out, as does Mister Phelan in the First Entr’acte, murky conjurations that keep reality of their not-knowing at a distance.

 

      In the terrifying second “rats” section of Wellman’s touching inversion of Americana, two young girls challenge themselves to stay atop Mister Phelan’s house as long as they possibly can, entertaining themselves and passing the time in absurdly childish and sometimes terrifyingly witty games that include every maxim, piece of jargon, advertising jingle, state slogan, cliché, and nonsensical patter that they have overheard from the surrounding adults.

    The be-fezzed Mister Phelan peeks through the blinds, conjuring up a magical weirdness that even these young girls, Linda and Susan, realize is utterly bizarre. But how else are they to entertain themselves in a world enveloped in such an “evil cloud.” Their seemingly meaningless banter may sound as “sound” simply to be, as the Variety reviewer Howard Waxman summarizes, a dialogue that “melts into a jumble of syllables with mysteries we don’t care to solve,” but how better might they escape the shopping center realities of the world they inhabit. Indeed, I might suggest that the rhythmic chattering of these rats sometimes evolves into a kind a pure poetry that, as William Carlos Williams declared, represents the “pure products of America” gone crazy.

      The play, in fact, ends in a kind of tragic dirge for howling “cats” as, from the opposite direction the two young girls’ binocularly-contained gaze, Susannah and William Hard of the previous two plays, return to the place where their voyage has begun. Having failed in her attempt to find what Bishop Berkeley describes as “bedazzlement,” to discover “a totally different place: where / angels sing, and the dialectical urge / may be laid to rest forever.”  The worn out Susannah is ready to return to “The Junior college at Ping Pong, / …to study typing, theater arts, and waste management,” to work as all the others do,  changing light bulbs at Days Inn.

      Forced by her mentor, Mister William Hard, Susannah spends the last several stanzas of this sad soliloquy reciting the renunciations of her would-be teacher. Like the suddenly exposed Wizard of Oz, Susannah, in Hard’s voice, surrenders her dreams, her magic, her perceived difference to what she has attempted to leave behind:

 

                              I, MISTER WILLIAM HARD, Doctor of Divinity,

                              Gradualness and Equidistance, renounce

                              both river and craft. I surrender my

                              magical powers to Baron Samedi, Lord of

                              the Dead. I renounce both Bug River

                              and the needle of its dream. I renounce

                              slambang what is rigid and straight, and

                              what wiggles. And all the craft of Wicca,

                              whether of the Tribe of Gradual or the

                              Tale of the Bug.

 

                               I renounce all these because…my heart is broke.

 

     What Susannah discovers, however, is what Judy Garland’s Dorothy never quite came to realize: despite one’s fervent desire, as Wellman reiterates, you can never go home again, no matter how many times you tap the heels of your ruby covered feet. For Susannah, “nothing happens.” As the always on-the-prowl pedant Mister William Hard exclaims:

 

                              This is what happens,

                              Susannah, when

                              the scene is too big for the frame;

                              this is what happens when the frame

                              can NEVER be filled.

 

No matter how much her heart is broken, no matter how few of her dreams have come to be realized, Susannah somewhat tragically discovers that her experience is now too large to allow her to slip back into the confines from which she has escaped.

 

Los Angeles, August 22, 2014

Reprinted from American Theater, Opera, and Performance (August 2014).

 

Antonín Dvořák and Jaroslav Kvapil | Rusalka / 2017

raping nature

by Douglas Messerli

 

Antonín Dvořák (composer), Jaroslav Kvapil (libretto) Rusalka / Howard and I saw the HD Live broadcast of the Metropolitan Opera Company production on Saturday, February 25, 2017

 

I feel somewhat uncomfortable beginning an essay by talking about water sprites and a dangerous Water Gnome (Eric Owen), let alone focusing on the Gnome’s daughter, Rusalka (Kristine Opolais), who like H. C. Andersen’s famed little mermaid, having fallen in the love with the local Prince (Brandon Jovanovich), wants to be transformed into a human being. The witch Ježibaba (wonderfully performed by Jamie Barton), along with her rat, crow, and half-cat posse, are only too happy to provide her a potion, while assuring her that if the Prince does not take her on as his lover, he will die and she will be permanently outcast from the spirit world—oh, and she has to get him to love without the power of human speech. You might suspect that we are back in the “topsy-turvy” land of W. S. Gilbert instead of Antonín Dvořák’s early 20th century opera.

 

      But act two makes it clear, despite the fact that Rusalka hardly gets a chance to sing, that the heart of this opera is a bit closer to Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde and even, in parts, has more elements of the great Ring than of Hansel and Gretel.

        The Prince does indeed fall in love with the beautiful Rusalka, but given her muteness and her resistance to his kisses, has little choice but to keep another potential love on hand, in this case the Foreign Princess (Katarina Dalayman). The Princess, robed in colors of red, is all ego and fire, while the pale, white-robed Rusalka is as silent and cold as the moon with which she is associated.

        Most of act Two is played out in the form of an elaborate and erotically-charged Baroque-like series of dances (marvelously choreographed by Austin McCormick) which not only appall poor Rusalka but represent the antithesis of her spiritual existence. Indeed, during the first intermissions, singer Opolais described that performing Rusalka was a presentation of a soul rather than of a heart. In their elaborately brocaded costumes these dancers are almost entirely about frivolous flirtation and meaningless passion.

      Worried for his daughter, the Water Gnome appears at the party to reassure her and argue for the necessity of winning over the Prince; yet his daughter can only see how things are. As director Mary Zimmerman suggested, no love can be consummated when one of the lovers is hiding her true identity, and is not allowed to express the truth.

       When the Prince finally determines to transfer his attentions to the Foreign Princess, he is rejected by both women, as Rusalka escapes her palace isolation and the Princess mocks the Prince’s sudden transformation.

        Act Three is simply—or maybe not so simply—a fulfilling of Ježibaba’s warnings. Poor Rusalka, wandering what is now a fallen world, is indeed frozen out of the world’s one-time beauty, yet refuses to possibly save herself by personally killing her former lover.

      Unfortunately, in this last act the composer felt the need to wrap up everything by reintroducing nearly all of the opera’s characters, including the minor servants of Act Two, the dancing water sprites, Ježibaba and her consorts, and the Water Gnome before returning the bereaved and sorrowful Prince, who, even when he is told that kissing his former lover will mean his death, would prefer living with her in eternity than losing forever her embrace.

      Yet even their Tristan and Isolde moment does not release them, as her father explains; in his world there is no such thing as human sacrifice, only death. And, at opera’s end Rusalka, as promised, is now an eternal wanderer who cannot share in the spiritual nor the world of human passion.

      It’s easy to imagine in this opera that the intruder is Rusalka, a thing of nature who insists upon entering the human world, destroying and being destroyed in the process. But the true barbarian, if we think more clearly, is the Prince, who takes up with the natural world only because of its beauty, without realizing that there are consequences for his conquering and then abandoning nature. In short, Rusalka might be read as a work in which mankind’s need to conquer the world around results in his own destruction—a highly prescient subject given our concerns today. 

      Despite conductor Sir Mark Elder’s long devotion to what he describes as a major opera, however, the very subject matter of Ruslka, particularly given its clotted last act, and its rough-hewn roots in folklore, make for a less profound experience than many greater operas. Having said that, this work, and particularly the new MET production, with its numerous beautifully musical and dance moments, lovely sets, and costumes as well, helped to reveal the operas many charms.

 

Los Angeles, February 26, 2017

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

Janet Schlapkohl | My Sister / 2016

the same but different

by Douglas Messerli

 

Janet Schlapkohl My Sister / Los Angeles, Odyssey Theatre / the performance I attended was the matinee on March 6, 2016

 

First presented in a shorter version at the LA Fringe Festival, Janet Schlapkohl’s play My Sister played January through March of this year, with its production recently extended at Los Angeles’ Odyssey Theatre.

 

       Schlapkohl’s play is set in the Berlin of the 1930s, so one can be assured that it is a story involving Nazi Germany. However, in this case the central (and only on-stage) characters are not Jewish nor have they been intentionally undermining Hitler’s Nationalist Socialist government. These two provincial twins, Magda and Matilde—wonderfully performed by two real-life twins, Elizabeth and Emily Hinkler—have come to the capitol to free themselves from country restrictions, hoping to perform (in Magda’s case) and to write (in Matilde’s instance). Indeed Magda, the less intellectually endowed of the two, seems quite comfortable at moments with the rising anti-Jewish sentiments and the introduction of Hitlerian Eugenics at the hospital where she works during the days as a cleaning woman. 

      Despite their lack of food and finances, however, they might have survived the impending war—in fact, Magda does. The only problem is that the more perceptive of the two, Matilde, is disabled, crippled, with her left arm frozen into upright position. Any attempt to move it takes all her concentration and muscular power. It is Matilde who writes the comic skits that Magda has just begun to perform at a local lesbian cabaret.

      As the days pass, however, Hitler’s government increasingly creates new rules that begin to close down the cabarets and make performing any kind of humor more and more difficult. Matilde, who, unlike her sister, can speak English and who listens all day long as she sits in their apartment to her beloved radio, begins to realize the increasing dangers, and tries to instill what she perceives into her sister’s thinking. Magda, however, does perceive the dangers if she were actually to repeat all the jibes and jokes that Matilde has written for her to perform, and waters-down some of her material.

        And even Magda gradually begins to perceive the difficulties of surviving, particularly after she discovers that the vans presumably taking some of the disabled patients to better facilities are actually transporting them to their deaths. The sudden disappearance of one of her favorite child patients devastates her as she is forced to “pay attention”—a problem she has evidently had all through her childhood education—recognizing that her beloved sister is now in danger, particularly since the apartment manager, who knows of her condition, has himself become a Nationalist Socialist supporter.

 

      She is ready, in fact, to give up any career aspirations, despite the possibility that she may be auditioned through her act for a film role in one of Goebel’s movies; but Matilde insists that she continue in perusing her dreams. Since the government has now banned post-war radios, Magda insists that she also take away Matilde’s one source with the world outside, as she heads off to the performance.

      Presumably, it is the loss of that connection with the world that forces the disabled girl to attempt to follow her sister to the theater.

      While Magda begins to present the skit, to an audience now filled with Nazi soldiers, she shifts entirely away from her original satire, singing, instead, a German folk song in which the soldiers join in singing.

      At that very moment, so we are told by Magda in a postlude, Matilde has taken a fall down the stairs without actually hurting herself; nonetheless she is taken to the hospital and ferried way either for experimentation or extermination before Magda can even reach the hospital.

      If the ending, given Matilde’s seemingly rash decision to leave the apartment, seems somewhat contrived, we nonetheless know that eventually someone would have come to take away the “imperfect” girl. Moreover, how might she able to survive for so many years in such complete isolation? In such a fascist world, it is apparent, everyone’s dreams were dashed and people were destroyed for simply being different from others, a particularly ironic statement given that the two women are, in reality, identical twins.

 

Los Angeles, March 7, 2016

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (March 2016).

Leonard Bernstein, Joseph Fields, Jerome Chodorov, Betty Comden and Adolph Green | Wonderful Town / 2016

it’s love

by Douglas Messerli

 

Joseph Fields and Jerome Chodorov (book, based upon their play My Sister Eilleen, based on the stories by Ruth McKenney), Betty Comden and Adolph Green (lyrics), Leonard Bernstein (music) Wonderful Town / produced by LAOpera, conducted by Grant Gershon / the performance Howard and I saw was December 4, 2016, a matinee performance

 

In preparation for the centennial of Leonard Bernstein’s birth, California and Los Angeles is, as Los Angeles Times music critic, Mark Swed noted, way ahead of the curve. Last summer Michael Tilson Thomas conducted the San Francisco Symphony in a semi-staged version of On the Town, and more recently, Gustavo Dudamel performed a version of Bernstein’s West Side Story at the Hollywood Bowl. I saw neither of these highly praised productions. But yesterday my husband Howard and I did attend a glorious semi-staged production, conducted by the Los Angeles Chorale director, Grant Gershon, of Wonderful Town.

 

      I saw a full Broadway revival of this sweet-toothed musical in 2004, and wrote about it, along with other Bernstein works, in My Year 2004, so I won’t retell the full story of the two Ohio sisters’—based on Ruth and Eileen McKenney (the latter of whom, strangely enough, eventually married American satirist Nathanael West)—attempts to conquer New York. Let’s just say that their antics end in Eileen winning the heart of nearly every heterosexual male she meets in Greenwich Village, and the less attractive Ruth, winning the hearts of an entire fleet of the Brazilian navy and the love of one man, magazine editor, Robert Baker (Marc Kudisch). If the rest of the musical is pretty simplistic, so be it. With Bernstein music and witty lyrics by Adolph Green and Betty Comden, who cares that the work remains rather a lightweight piece?

       There’s always a problem, or at least a fear, when I hear that an opera company is going to produce a work of light-opera and dialogue such as this musical. Although opera performers are becoming, over the years, increasingly versatile, I still recall wonderful singers such as Leontyne Price stiffly singing “Tis a gift to be simple” and other such painful incursions of great opera singers such as Luciano Pavorotti trying to make his way through a song from Cats. Fortunately, under Gershon’s talented hand, the LAOpera turned, this time, to mostly Broadway veterans, such as the comically brilliant singer/actor Faith Prince as Ruth Sherwood, the young Nikki M. James for her sister Eileen (who, apparently, is an even better dancer than she is a charming singer), Roger Bart, playing numerous roles, a wonderful character actor, and the strong-voiced baritone, Kudisch, who did nicely by his role.

       These singers stood at music stands on the stage of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, backed by a large contingent of what I presume are the LAOpera orchestra members. If in a few moments, the tempo seemed a little sluggish, overall it was brightly played, with even director Gershon getting in on the jolly Irish jig of “My Darlin’ Eileen,” which demonstrates the attraction of Eileen to the entire police force of the local Greenwich Village station after the two sisters get into trouble by dancing the resplendent “Conga” through the local streets.

        How could you not love a musical whose very second song—after a tourist like trip through the village, helped along in this production with 1950s-like cinematic projections by Hana S. Kim—is the wailing “Ohio.” If Prince doesn’t quite have the heft of a Rosalind Russell, who makes the song sound a bit like the mooing cows and mewling cats of the character’s home state, Prince does a perfectly credible job. And she finds her comic stride in the hilarious “One Hundred Easy Ways (to Lose a Man),” a song almost as perfect for her many theatrical talents revealed in Guys and Dolls’ “Adelaide’s Lament,” a Broadway moment that I will never forget.

      

      Eileen gets her chance to sing out in “A Little Bit of Love,” in which she reveals her admiration for the gentle soda jerk Frank Lippencott, while soon after switching her mind to the next man she meets. She gets her chance to reveal her dancing talents in “Conga,”  along with nearly everyone in this cast, leading off a trail of conga lovers, but ending it in a series of lifted cartwheels without hardly losing her breath, let alone getting as dizzy as those movements made me as I sat in the audience.

       And, yes, I have heard more spirited versions of the musical’s final “Wrong Note Rag,” in which Bernstein almost painfully blasts our ears with continued off-key combinations of music—both Russell’s recorded versions and the Broadway revival of 2004 did this better—but Prince, James, and the marvelous LAOpera chorus members still got through it quite nicely. Even the “Wreck” (Ben Crawford) gave us a nice rendition of “Pass the Football.”

       The final Conga performed by the entire cast as they exited out the audience doorways, absolutely delighted this large audience, which gave everyone a standing performance. If not the greatest gift to Broadway theater (after all, both On the Town and West Side Story are far greater musicals), it pleases, and in a production such as this one, with only 3 performances, who can find a better way to spend a Sunday afternoon?

 

Los Angeles, December 5, 2016

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (December 2016).  

      

Henrik Ibsen | Hedda Gabler / 2009

burned up

by Douglas Messerli

 

Henrik Ibsen Hedda Gabler, adapted by Christopher Shinn / Roundabout Theatre Company, American Airlines Theatre / the production I saw was a preview on January 17, 2009

 

As New York Times critic Charles Isherwood suggested in his piece (January 18, 2009) on the upcoming production of Henrik Ibsen's Hedda Gabler, Hedda is an "antiheroine" who inevitably draws actresses to her. She is, to put it mildly, one of the nastiest people of 1890s Norway, and one of the "meanest" (as Isherwood describes her) women in theater history.

      To start, she has just married the innocent scholar Jørgen Tesman without any love for the man (she cannot even abide his scholarly interests in domestic crafts of the Middle Ages) but for the reason, as she puts it, "I had danced myself out... My time was up"—in short, within the confining society of the time, as a woman in her late 20s she is in danger of being described as an old maid.

     Equally without purpose, she has demanded they move into a large city house, replete with expensive furniture, this despite the fact that George has not yet been offered the teaching position he hopes will help with the expenses. Rather than accommodating George and his beloved aunt, Hedda demeans both by pretending to believe the aunt's new hat—purchased especially to please Hedda—belongs to the servant, who has tossed it upon the chair. The flowers sent to honor her return from her honeymoon are trashed.

      Later it becomes clear that Hedda has had close relationships both with George's intellectual foe, the romantic and dissipated Eilert Løvborg, and with the family's friend, Judge Brack, who has helped attain and fund their new house and belongings.

      These relationships, however, are not exactly sexual, for Hedda is what we might describe today as a sexual tease, drawing the men toward her only so that she might have control over them. The minute they cross the line, she pulls out her father's (the General's) pistols and shoots.

      Hedda might be said to represent the military way of life. Disinterested in cultural history, she uses the past only as a method of strategy, of determining how to control the men under her "command," demanding of Løvberg, as she hands him one of her pistols, death. When Judge Brack, a far cleverer opponent, wily finds a way to put her under his control, she reacts with the only response she knows, committing suicide with the remaining gun.

 

     Hedda is, quite clearly, an intense woman burning up with desire, but so afraid of losing her self- control, so determined to rule each situation, that she must destroy everything around her, including the brilliant manuscript Løvberg has just written and lost on his way home. Like the uncontrollable behavior fueling her actions, she burns his book in the stove, destroying his metaphorical "child," the only force of life and possibility in the play, and in that act, seals her own doom.

     Yet, as Isherwood and others have pointed out, this "queen of mean" must reveal some other qualities just to make her believable. We need to comprehend her beauty, her wit, her positive qualities—whatever they are—just enough to understand why the intelligent Løvberg, the slimy Brack, and the doddering academic husband all find her so necessary in their lives. For, in the end, all she has touched, all she has thought she controlled, turns to naught. Løvberg does, indeed, die, but as the result of an accidental shooting in the groin, not a bullet through the head. Brack has no real need of Hedda; for him she is simply another tool for manipulation. And "poor" Jørgen ends up happily with Mrs. Elvsted, an attractive woman who has just left her husband to help Løvberg with his writing, who now will surely find a soul mate in Tesman. Accordingly, if Hedda is only presented as a mean, hateful being, the play ends in black hole as the energies of the piece (represented by Hedda and Løvberg) collapse, leaving us with only good, empty-headed bourgeois folk. Despite her aberrations, the audience needs to have been in love with Hedda!

     Unfortunately, the preview of the production I saw in New York on January 17, 2009, offered no solution to the problem. Although Mary-Louise Parker may have been perfect as a sort of sexual gamin in previous plays such as Reckless, Prelude to a Kiss, and How I Learned to Drive, here she has little sexual warmth, mouthing Hedda's evil wit with a not-so-subtle wink and nod, slowing down the action so that, by the end of the play we feel superior to all the characters in the work. Her intense queries directed at Mrs. Elvsted, for example, seem more like an interrogation than the somewhat desperate questions of a jealous woman. Similarly, Michael Serveris' Jørgen Tesman is played as such a fool that even if Hedda feels his offer of marriage was her last chance, we, like Løvberg, cannot comprehend her decision. Rather than creating an innocent alternative to Hedda, Ana Reeder's Thea Elvsted seems an even greater simpleton than Jørgen, unable to understand the comic manipulations of Hedda concerning their shared years in school.

    Christopher Shinn's adaptation of this play, as far as I could tell upon rereading the Fjelde translation of the play a day later, eliminates any possibility that Hedda may have any good qualities, such as her determination to remain faithful to her husband. Anything that might have softened Hedda, to help us to see her as the great lady we are told she is, seems to have been obliterated. In the end, when Judge Brack reacts to Hedda's suicide, "People don't do such things!" we might almost respond: "But then Hedda isn't really a person, is she?"

 

Los Angeles, January 24, 2009

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (January 2009).