Harry Partch | Partch Dark, Partch Light / 2009

why the hell did you come?

by Douglas Messerli

 

Harry Partch Partch Dark, Partch Light, performed by the group Partch at Redcat (Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater) in the Walt Disney Concert Hall on May 29, 2009

 

A true American musical maverick similar in some respects to Charles Ives, composer Harry Partch was born, the son of Presbyterian missionaries, in Oakland, California in June 1901. Much of his youth was spent in isolated Arizona and New Mexico towns, where, reportedly, he heard and sang songs in Spanish, several American Indian languages, and Mandarin, sung to him by his mother, who had spent time in China.

     He attended the University of Southern California in Los Angeles with the intention of a musical career; but in 1925 he discovered the book On the Sensations of Tone by the German physician and physicist Hermann Helmholtz, a study of the psychological effects of musical tones, and soon after dropped out of school to study by himself, exploring the musicality of speech and constructing his own instruments that "underscored the intoning voice." As Partch wrote:

 

             I came to the realization that the spoken word was the distinctive expression my

             constitutional makeup was best fitted for, and that I needed other scales and 

             other instruments. This was the positive result of self-examination—call it 

             intuitive, for it was not the result of any intellectual desire to pick up lost or 

             obscure historical threads. For better or for worse, it was an emotional decision.

 

 His first instrument was the "Monotone," an "adapted viola," which later joined with numerous others including The Diamond Marimba, The Quadrangularis Reversum, the 11-key Bass Marimba, Bamboo Marimbas (nicknamed "Boo" and "Boo II"), Cloud Chamber Bowls, an instrument he called "The Spoils of War" (which included Cloud Chamber Bowls, artillery shell casings, metal whang-guns, and wooden piecings), The Gourd Tree and Cone Gongs, an xylophone augmented with tuned liquor bottles and hubcaps (The Zymo-Xyl), Kitharas, and Harmonic Canons (played with fingers, picks or mallets).

     Receiving a Carnegie grant in the early 1930s, Partch traveled to London, meeting the great Irish poet William Butler Yeats, who gave him permission to set his translation of Sophocles' Oedipus as an opera. Transcribing the inflections of the Abbey Theatre actors, Partch performed his piece on monophone, intoning "By the Rivers of Babylon." Yeats was delighted by the effects.

     Yet the grant soon ran out, and the following year, 1935, Partch returned to the US at the height of the Great Depression, and lived for nine years wandering as a hobo, doing odd jobs and designing his instruments.

     Important works of this period were "Dark Brother," performed at the concert I saw by the Partch group, a piece from Thomas Wolfe's "God's Lonely Man," which reiterates Partch's own sense of isolation and separateness. Most of Partch's relationships were with males, and his feelings of disengagement with the whole of society were obviously intense.

     Yet many of the works of this period are brilliantly comical, including the "Yankee Doodle Fantasy," sung in accompaniment with tin oboes and other instruments, that satirizes patriotism, serious club women, and even his 43-tone note system. Similarly lighter Partch pieces, two based on James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake, "Isobel" of 1944 and "Annah the Allmaziful" of the same year, were, along with his utterly charming tribute to Lewis Carroll's "Jabberwocky," ("O Frabjous Day!"), highlights of the evening.

     One of Partch's most strange but yet arresting works is his "Barstow: Eight Hitchhiker Inscriptions," based on messages left by hitchhikers just outside the Mojave Desert junction of Barstow:

        

         The scribbling is in pencil. It is on one of the white highway railings just outside

         the Mojave Desert junction of Barstow, California. I am walking along the 

         highway and sit down on the railing to rest.

              Idly I notice the scratches where I happen to drop. I have seen many 

         hitchhiker's writings. they are usually just names and addresses—there are 

         literally millions of them, or meaningless obscenities, on the highway signs, 

         railings, walls.

              But this—why, it's music. It's both weak and strong, like unedited human

         expressions always are. It's eloquent in what it fails to express in words. And 

         it's epic. Definitely, it is music....

 

Indeed, upon first hearing each of these numbered pieces, presented in a kind of sprechstimme-like performance by guitarist John Schneider, the words are almost laughable. But Patrch allows us after the original statement to hear the echoes of those words, by repeating them with emotionally-charged after tones and dramatic additions ("ha-ha-ha," "dum-de-dum," etc) that transforms them into haunting expressions of fear and joy. The first one, for example, begins with a young man returning to Boston, Massachusetts, wishing he were dead, yet oddly adding "Today I am a Man." Is his manhood defined by his desire for death or for some sexual encounter that he has recently had? There is no one answer; but the echo of the two, filled in by Partch's joyful exclamations, alter the whole, and suddenly what might have been simple banality is awash with glorious possibilities.

      Similarly, the young girl of "Considered Pretty," whose name and Las Vegas address appears merely to be a sexual invitation, is transformed by the final statement: "objective matrimony," while the sly admission that she is "considered pretty," pulls at our hearts when connected with her obvious desires.

      "Jesus Was God in the Flesh" begins as a simple announcement of belief, repeated over and over like a prayerful charm song instead a statement of faith. "You Lucky Woman" recounts the self-described charms of a passing man, whose braggadocio might be completely disgusting were it not for his final challenge to the opposite sex that "all you have to do is find me." And the final piece "Why in Hell Did You Come?" is shouted out almost in irritation for those hitchhiking complaints of the writer and others suffering the itinerant life. Yet in that ironic cry we hear the numerous echoes of drifters catalogued by John Steinbeck, Woody Guthrie, and others. 

       The evening began with Eleven Intrusions of 1950, written while Partch was staying in Gualala, on California's northern coast, at a ranch owned by pianist Gunnar Johansen. There, among the redwoods, Partch created many of his instruments and worked in relative splendor in comparison to his earlier days. But the isolation apparently became oppressive, and the darkness of these Japanese-inspired works, almost haiku-like studies—each piece generally performed by two instruments that present a sequence of microtonal dissonances—of a rose, a crane, a waterfall, the wind, the street, the lover, soldiers, and other concerns reveal the darkness of a life that formerly seemed to be able to survive great depredations.

      This was, I am sorry to say, my first encounter with the music of Harry Partch, a man who, as I describe above, was rescued later in his life by my friend Betty Freeman. It will not, however, be my last Partch concert. And the day after this event I listened with wonderment to Partch's "Two Studies on Ancient Greek Scales" and, again, to "Barstow" on the record Just West Coast with great pleasure.

 

Los Angeles, May 31, 2009

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

 

Lily Blau | The Missing Pages of Lewis Carroll / 2015

differential equations

by Douglas Messerli

 

Lily Blau (developed in collaboration with Sydney Gallas) The Missing Pages of Lewis Carroll / Pasadena, California, The Theatre at Boston Court / the performance I saw was on Sunday, February 8, 2015

 

 It has long been known that certain pages of the private journals of Charles Ludwidge Dodgson were excised from the year 1863. One page was apparently removed by Dodgson himself, perhaps feeling that he had expressed something too awkwardly or emphatically; another missing page was been accounted for by his habit of mis-numbering the pages of his journals. Yet the pages of June 27-29 of 1863 were clearly razored out, and soon after that date it appears that his formerly close relations with the Liddell family, whose daughters, particularly Alice, he photographed, came to an end. It is also presumed that the Alice of his great book, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and its sequel Through the Looking-Glass, were based on Alice Liddell—although there is much evidence to the contrary—and, since his death, rumors have consistently arisen that, whether consummated or not, Dodgson had had a pedophilic relationship with the young girl. In fact, it may have been his nieces who later removed the pages from his journal, as they and other family members attempted to wipe away nearly all evidence of Dodgson’s relationships with women, including older women, feeling it might color the popularity of his pseudonymous publications under the name of Lewis Carroll, in which they also had a financial stake.

      Several works of fiction, film, and drama have dealt with various aspects of the life of this professor of mathematics at Oxford, including the oddly metaphoric work by John Logan, based on the fact that, at the age of 80, Alice Liddell Hargreaves met Peter Llewellyn Davies, the latter the inspiration for James Barrie’s young Peter Pan; the play obviously deals with two children whom, for the adults surrounding them, unintentionally became symbols for youth, beauty, and, love, but also may have both been the focus of pedophiles.

     Yet none of the theories surrounding Liddell and Dodgson’s relationship has ever been established, and there appears to be other evidence that he might have been attracted to Alice’s older sister or that he was courting the girls’ governess at the time of the rupture between him and the Liddells. The break in social intercourse may even have had more to do with university politics and his lack of support for Dean Henry Liddell than with his relationship with the Liddell children. The fact that he gave up photography in the same year of Alice’s marriage to the cricket-player, Ronald Hargreaves, also may have nothing at all to do with his relationship to the girl.

      Yet clearly, his photographs, if nothing else, reveal a fondness for the young Liddell daughter, and there are clearly many links, direct and indirect, that connect the Alice of his stories with the child whom he photographed. Is it necessarily shocking or perverse to believe that he simply did find Alice quite attractive and even contemplated, in a day in which youthful marriages were not uncommon, proposing marriage to her?

 

     The new play by Lily Blau at Pasadena’s The Theatre at Boston Court, in various ways, explores all the possible alternatives without dismissing any of them. And that, in turn, is what elevates this work from a simple piece of gossipy sleuthing to a drama that, inevitably, given what we know to be the themes of Dodgson’s Lewis Carroll works, transforms it into a mediation on the uncertainty of all knowledge, particularly within an age in which surety was seen as a necessity for adult action. The British Victorians were necessarily confident—even smug—in their acquisitions of colonies, explorations of new territories, and belief in their societal invincibility.

      Dodgson, as least as performed by the memorable actor, Leo Marks, was anything but confident. A man who stuttered in front of most adults; a mathematician who was perceived by many to be a superior intellect to those such as this play’s M. Lapin, who held higher positions in his department; the son of a minister, who himself preached, despite his obvious difficulties, about personal sin; and, self-evidently, a natural skeptic who was graced, nonetheless, with humility, the Dodgson of Blau’s play seems happier at the children’s table where he mightn’t be expected to show a Victorian stiff upper lip.

     The Dodgson of this play clearly is delighted by Alice (Corryn Cummins), and is desperately in love with her; apparently, he has done nothing to shame himself—except, of course, in his own imagination. But there, to use Shakespeare’s old saw, “lies the rub.” Even if he has done nothing wrong, how can he expect to get away with his sinful thoughts, plagued by his religiosity, his fear of being “found out” as a social fraud, and his terror—at least in this telling—of breaking with the conformities of his social position? Certainly, an Oxford professor might feel perfectly free to express a certain amount of eccentricities: Dodgson could “play” with photography, tinker with toys, write up imagined tales, create linguistically tongue-tying poems (which, oddly enough, The Missing Pages does not really explore, despite Dodgson’s inability to speak straightforwardly), even, on occasion, buy his young pupils presents, including a bright blue dress which he awards Alice so that she might match the girl in his story books; but there were limits that even differential calculus might demonstrate to him. As differential equations made clear, for example, “the derivative of the momentum of a body equals the force applied to the body.” Accordingly, whenever Alice moved toward him, he moved further into the distance. But what he had not accounted for is that, as she grew older, Alice might apply a force to his body that could not equal his resistance.

     Indeed, some sources, as I have suggested, hint that his relationship with the Liddells was ended by the indignant parents when it became clear that Alice had fallen in love with Dodgson, or, perhaps, after Dodgson determined he could no longer resist, he asked for her hand in marriage.

     In Blau’s play these dilemmas are melodramatized through warnings of his fellow professor, Lapin (Jeff Marlow), co-conspiring with the white rabbit of his tale. Mrs. Liddell (Erica Hanrahan-Ball), catching up her visitor with a mother’s insight every time he might even imagine stealing a kiss or, more terrifyingly, conjure up an image of actual rape, becomes the Red Queen demanding his head be chopped off.

    Blau’s play, which supposedly occurs on the day when Alice has planned a visit to Dodgson for one last photograph before she marries Hargreaves, is a sad one, not only because it calls up all the quandaries of reality and imagination that, no matter how he actually lived his life, Dodgson surely faced, but because it finally reveals that his great failure in life was not doing some dreadful deed, but doing nothing. Alice gently faults him not for becoming a gray-haired old man, but for refusing to become the rather young and dashing man who unintentionally (or perhaps intentionally) courted her as a child, and with whom she fell in love. Like Gustav von Aschenbach in Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice—whose crime is not that he lusts after the love of another of his own sex, but that he concentrates that unrealizable love upon the visage of a boy—Dodgson’s failure was not that he fell in love with a bright young girl, but that he did not reasonably act upon it. If he truly loved her, mightn’t he have simply waited for a few years to her to have become a woman and proposed the marriage she also sought? Or did he, her parents horrified by the implications? Or did he refuse her, after all, because he was a pedophile who could love only girls of a certain age?

     The playwright proffers no answer, but hints at it through the apparent emptiness of Dodgson’s life. In the end, after giving up even his hobby, he has little life left as Dodgson, having become a literary figure, instead, for all times, dying as a nonexistent being (Lewis Carroll) who expressed sorrow for having written his books, a man who looked perhaps too deeply into a world which existed, as brilliant as it was, only in his imagination.

 

Los Angeles, February 9, 2015

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance

Tyshawn Sorey | Death / 2021

sudden a vista peeps

by Douglas Messerli

 

Tyshawn Sorey (composer, based on a poem by Paul Laurence Dunbar), Nadia Hallgren (director)

Death / 2021

 

Already this year, with the quarantine having still closed the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion and other performance centers, LAOpera presented an on-line digital performance of a new composition by composer Tyshawn Sorey featuring poet Paul Laurence Dunbar’s poem “Death.” The composition was performed by mezzo-soprano Amanda Lynn Bottoms. The work as a whole consisted of three parts in the short film directed by Nadia Hallgren, premiering on February 19th, 2021, the date I watched it.

     The first part, titled Act I consists of a reading of the poem by Ariyon Barbare in the Paul Laurence Dunbar House in Dayton, Ohio. Act II is a short discussion of the work and a brief history of Sorey’s early youth playing the piano in a Newark Catholic Church he attended with his aunt. And Art III consists of the song, with musical accompaniment by pianist Howard Watkins, sung by Bottoms.

     Sorley has for many years been known for his wide swath of influences from classical contemporary composers and musicians as various as Karlheinz Stockhausen, Pierre Boulez, John Cage, Morton Feldman, Anthony Braxton (with whom he studied), Cecil Taylor, and younger jazz musicians and ensembles. Alex Ross in The New Yorker has described him as a defiant shape-shifter who straddles both the classical music and jazz worlds.

 

“There is something awesomely confounding about the music of Tyshawn Sorey, the thirty-eight-year-old Newark-born composer, percussionist, pianist, and trombonist. As a critic, I feel obliged to describe what I hear, and description usually begins with categorization. Sorey’s work eludes the pinging radar of genre and style. Is it jazz? New classical music? Composition? Improvisation? Tonal? Atonal? Minimal? Maximal? Each term captures a part of what Sorey does, but far from all of it. At the same time, he is not one of those crossover artists who indiscriminately mash genres together. Even as his music shifts shape, it retains an obdurate purity of voice. T. S. Eliot’s advice seems apt: ‘Oh, do not ask, “What is it?” / Let us go and make our visit.’”

     Known for his highly complex compositions, Death, because of its focus on a poem of a 12 lines, is far simpler in structure and resonance, each stanza beginning in a rather assertive chordal statement before quickly broiling down in minor chords that—as director Hallgren exemplifies in her images of flying and often quarrelling hawks—spin down into darker and jarring dissonants, finding only temporary repose in major chord key respites.

      The poem itself is not only dark, as you might expect from its title, but is odd in its implications.

 

Storm and strife and stress,

Lost in a wilderness,

Groping to find a way,

Forth to the haunts of day

 

Sudden a vista peeps,

Out of the tangled deeps,

Only a point--the ray

But at the end is day.

 

Dark is the dawn and chill,

Daylight is on the hill,

Night is the flitting breath,

Day rides the hills of death.

 

     The poem begins in an almost Dantean manner, the narrator “lost in the wilderness” having suffered the horrors of life, groping to find his way, apparently, to light.

      Yet the rest of the poem does not function in that manner as a “vista peeps,” the narrator spotting “a point, a ray” of possibility. It is not daylight, however, that provides that vision for in the next line we see in the conjunction “But” the alternative, “day,” not evidently what the poet is seeking. The vision of the vista has come in the dark of “dawn and chill,” just before the sun rises. Night provides a “flitting breath,” while death rides the hills of daylight.

      In short, it appears, the narrator prefers the vision he has found in the night as opposed to the daylight when death becomes a far more obvious opponent.

      If, as Sorey seems to argue, this poem has important meaning for our own times, it is not our having been able to move out of the shadows that we have been facing that will help us to go forward and live fully lives, but rather the visions, the beliefs we burnished out of the dark. Visionary revolutions, one might argue, are always spawned in the worst of times rather than in the best. The new vaccines for COVID were created in the very darkest days of world-wide deaths.

      The date for this poem appears to be 1903, four years after Dunbar—who after marrying Alice Ruth Moore in 1898, lived with his wife in the happy whirl of the Washington, D.C. social scene accorded him for his position at the Library of Congress—was diagnosed with tuberculosis. His doctor suggested a move to the better air of Colorado and regular ingestion of whiskey to alleviate the disease’s symptom, which we now know only leads to a further decline in health. For a few years, so Alice noted in her diary, she served joyfully as his nurse, remaining in love. But her husband soon began showing signs of alcoholism and in 1902 he arrived home in a disturbed state of mind, later beating her so severely that she was ill for months after with peritonitis, an infection in connection with the rupture of the abdomen where he had brutally kicked her. She nearly lost in her life in the incident and never returned to their home, without divorcing.

      By 1903 Dunbar, with the loss of wife and his impending death from TB, accordingly, had plenty of reason to fear the reminders the daylight might show him, an empty house and the daily strife and stress of his illness. In 1904 he moved back to Dayton where his mother lived remaining in her house until his death in 1906. 

     We are now so fortunate to be able to have this work, the third musical setting of this poem, on film. Although, obviously, it would be far better to hear this lied sung by Bottoms in person, I do hope that after the present health crisis the LAOpera company and others who have made similar attempts to reach new audiences will continue to tape and film symphonic and operatic works. I was grateful to be able to share this LAOpera Now production with friends throughout the US.

 

Los Angeles, February 20, 2021

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance and World Cinema Review (February 2021).

Tennessee Williams | A Streetcar Named Desire

a streetcar a little too much on track

by Douglas Messerli

 

Tennessee Williams A Streetcar Named Desire / Dance on Productions at the Odyssey Theatre / the performance I saw was with Thérèse Bachand On May 25, 2019

 

     Any company who might bravely present a new production of the great Williams’ masterpiece has my approval. And the Dance On group—with Susan Priver playing Blanche DuBois, the handsome Max E. Williams as Stanley Kowalski, Melissa Sullivan as Stella, and Christopher Parker as Mitch—has nothing but my admiration.

 

    Surely they know that with legendary figures such as Marlon Brando, Jessica Tandy, Vivien Leigh, Kim Hunter, and others having literally defined their roles, that any revival can only compared in the minds of a mature audience. And the actors and director here actually gave homage, in part, to these figures, as well as the great original director of both the stage play and film Elia Kazan.

     If the actor Williams can never quite hope to match the sort of humorous lowlife of Brando’s Stanley, he certainly looks better with his buff body than the more feminine-looking Brando. In this case, you can truly comprehend why Stella has stayed with him; he’s like a stupid-minded body that you can’t keep your eyes off. Stella, in this production is obviously addicted, just as her sister, to sex—without any of the good-girl Mississippi pretensions.

     If Blanche, at heart, is all about desire, Stella with Stanley make such desires obviously apparent. And while I’ve always thought Kim Hunter’s Stella’s was a little slow-minded, Sullivan’s portrayal represents a lusty, level-headedness that demonstrates how she might be a good lover and mother for the rest of her life.

      Director Jack Heller perceived from his other Williams’ plays such as Kingdom of Earth, just how much actress Priver was a figure perfect for the playwright, and here she gives a rather credible rendition of the Vivien Leigh figure, a woman on the way out who would like to pretend—and is deluded enough to try to pretend—that she is still a woman whom men might want.

      In the movie, the sparks flew simply because of the completely different acting styles of Brando and Leigh, the New School and traditional British character-acting traditions. And Heller attempts to repeat that, despite the fact that the former ice-hockey Canadian Williams has probably never been in the halls of such an acting school.

      Indeed, this production has all the hallmarks of Kazan’s style. But in the process of paying homage, it misses much of the point of the playwright himself. Rumor has it that in the original Broadway production, the playwright sat in the back rows sniggering through the whole production. I believe it, but even if it weren’t true, it should be. For A Streetcar Named Desire is really a very funny play, with the “dumb Pollack” Stanley, with his ridiculous pretensions of the paternalistic Napoleonic Law squaring off with a totally delusional “whore” (she has, after all, lured even a 17 year old male student into her bedroom and perhaps has slept with every passing soldier and salesman that every passed through Laurel, Mississippi, all of this after, in her youth, having mistakenly married a handsome homosexual boy whose death she triggered) who now demands that the hard-working momma’s boy, Mitch, attend to her with chivalrous demeanor of a knight-in-waiting. She wants magic, while Stanley wants realism. It’s a truly hilarious dance, with poor Stella, the star come down to earth, caught in between.

      And that is the problem with this production. This Streetcar plays out as a kind of dirge for a woman terrified—after an entire life of desire—of death in almost a Wagnerian fashion. But that isn’t Williams really. Anyone who could write lines such “The blind leading the blind,” or, even better, “I have always depended upon the kindness of strangers,” is also suggesting a kind of pre-Sontag notion of camp. Blanche is one of the campiest figures who has ever been put upon the stage, I’d argue. And this company makes it all so very, very serious, the way Kazan perceived it.

      At least Heller doesn’t make poor Stella run with her baby up the stairs to her neighbor’s apartment. Instead, as Blanche meets the people from the insane asylum, this director sort of shuffles Stella and her neighbor off to the side, apparently on the street. But why cut the truly beautiful last encounter between her rapist husband and his wife which appears in Williams’ original version, which almost redeems both of them as human beings?: “Now, honey. Now, love. Now, now, love. Now, now love. Now, love....” This is perhaps the most tender moment that Stanley has in the entire play.

      The standing-room audience loved the production, applauding the company’s opening night with a standing ovation—perhaps as they should have. I may just be, in the end, a grumpy critic who has seen too many productions of this work and can’t get the comparisons out of my head.

      Yet, I won’t stop attending to this work and many other such iconic plays, hoping to find a production that makes me completely forget what came before it. Memory can be a dangerous thing, as well as a blessing; how I would love to see these works afresh; but that, of course, is impossible.

 

Los Angeles, May 26, 2019

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

 

Samuel Beckett | Happy Days / 2019

winnie on speed

by Douglas Messerli

 

Samuel Beckett Happy Days / Los Angeles, Mark Taper Forum / the performance I saw with Deborah Meadows on May 22, 2019

 

This past week I saw two famed plays each at opposite ends of Los Angeles, downtown and on the west side, that reminded me just how difficult it is to do iconic plays—works so memorable through previous productions or movie versions of them that it forces a knowledgeable theater-goer to compare them with what has come before them. Both Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days (performed at the distinguished Mark Taper Forum, the play directed by James Bundy) and Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire (at one of the most prestigious LA independent multiplex theaters, Odyssey Theatre Company) recalled similar problems I had recently had with a local production of Long Day’s Journey into the Night, wherein, unfortunately, I kept comparing the actors to the impressive movie production, starring Kathleen Hepburn, Ralph Richardson, Jason Robards, Jr., and Dean Stockwell, directed by Sidney Lumet.

      Fortunately, the case of Happy Days, the central actor was the remarkable Dianne Wiest, one of my favorite actresses on both stage and screen. Moreover, I was too young to have seen the famed Ruth White performance of 1961. But I did, in 2014, see a quite marvelous production of this play in Pasadena’s Boston Court with Brooke Adams as Winnie, and her husband Tony Shalhoub playing a the one-line roll of Willie.

      Whereas Wiest sped through her role, making the partially buried Winne a bit like a train wreck that has left her in the chasm from which she cannot escape, bringing into focus all of Beckett’s hilariously absurd lines—the Taper audience was clearly alert to even the subtlest of the author’s humorous jabs—Adams had performed the play in a kind of slow-mode, revealing the endless repetitions, a bit like Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, of a daily life performed while waiting to die, or to be buried alive.

      It’s not that Wiest isn’t almost perfect for this role, surely one of the best of her now long career; it’s just that I couldn’t help but compare the two performers and the bits and pieces I have seen on archival sites of Ruth White’s version. If Wiest brings out Winnie’s comic embracement of “the best of all possible worlds”—she is, indeed, a kind of student of Voltaire’s Pangloss if there ever was one—Adams was able to demonstrate the poignancy of living while yet representing the absurdity of the Beckettian trope of “I can’t go on; I will go on.”

     Similarly, Michael Rudko as the Taper’s Willie, is a wonderfully comic figure, popping up from his hole just often enough to make Winne believe she is not truly speaking only to herself.     

    And in the second scene with Winnie buried up to her neck, Weist and he came into their own, as the couple finally gently confronted one another and their fears. Weist’s attempt to encourage Willie to come near her so that she can better see him is a touching moment of love and utter frustration, which adds a dimension to her character that almost redeems what I had felt previously as her lack of voiced modulation. And that, in the end, have been the major problem for me: Weist is a genius when it comes to certain roles that demand a kind of one-level type of character: the Woody Allen wide-eyed and somewhat innocent woman or in the role of Honey in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? or even the wide-eyed Emily of Our Town; but although Winnie may be a Candide-like figure, she is also a salty pragmatist who has perhaps driven her husband and herself into their tapped lives. I never felt I heard in her voice the full dimensions of these two extremes.

 

Los Angeles, May 26, 2019

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