Jerry Bock Sheldon Harnick, and Joe Masteroff | "Will He Like Me?" from She Loves Me / 1963

my favorite musical theater songs: “will he like me?’

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pFCzkqCh3-I

Sheldon Harnick (lyrics) and Jerry Bock (music) / 1963

Performer: Barbara Cook from the original Broadway production

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AarSccJPVlU

Sheldon Harnick (lyrics) and Jerry Bock (music) / 1963

Performer: Laura Benanti, in the 2016 Broadway revival

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZrENWITA6_U

Sheldon Harnick (lyrics) and Jerry Bock (music) / 1963

Performer: Audra McDonald, singing at the London Palladium / PBS Television

 

It’s more than haunting that at the very moment I was listening to the tapes above of Barbara Cook’s brilliant performance from the 1963 musical, one of my very favorites, of She Loves Me—for me almost a childhood icon, when at 16 I listened to the original Broadway cast recording that I had bought nearly every day (I wore the record out and, a few years later, bought a second copy)—Cook was already dead. I heard of her death only later in the day. And, yes, I admit, I cried a great deal.

     Cook, after all, had been a significant figure, as I write elsewhere, for so many years in my life, from 1957 on, through her performances of my home-state’s The Music Man and Bernstein’s brilliant Candide through She Loves Me and into a new life (and a new body) in which Howard and I enjoyed her in, first gay bar cabarets, and later in beloved video productions of Follies and more immediate theatrical productions in Los Angeles in Westwood and Beverly Hills. Who couldn’t love that now overweight singer who performed nearly operatic feats while telling such wonderful tales of her own life? Cook was a legend, both on Broadway and later in cabaret and stage. She had it all—and she knew it. She had done everything, and done it so brilliantly that no one could do anything but love and admire her if you enjoyed the genres in which she had appeared.

      She sang so many songs so brilliantly that it seems almost a sin to describe the pleading Sheldon Harnick and Jerry Bock ditty “She Loves Me” as the first of many works I will later describe coming from those incredible lungs. But her performance is so amazing that it is impossible to ignore it.

     I recently listened to the same song, performed in a revival by the quite talented Laura Benanti, who I had first seen and was very impressed by in a revival of Gypsy and later enjoyed enormously in the very underrated Broadway musical, based on Pedro Almodóvar’s Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown. But the differences between their performances are notable. Benanti sings the Harnick-Bock song very nicely and credibly, but far too filled with surety.

     From the very first chord, Cook, who had a voice that might have brought down the angels to the dust of the earth, sings with such a tremulous sense of fear and insecurity that you couldn’t even imagine that this then, thin, almost emaciated singer, could have easily belted out her song to the very back levels of the balcony.

     

Will he like the girl he sees?

If he doesn't, will he know enough to know

That there's more to me than I may always show?

Will he like me?

 

She pleads, terrified by the meeting with her letter-correspondent, who just a few songs before has excitedly sung of their meeting at eight.

     She pleads, furthermore, with the audience that she is a woman who might not be able to express her depths:

 

Will he know that there's a world of love

Waiting to warm him?

How I'm hoping that his eyes and ears

Won't misinform him

 

     She is terrified of his judgment, so much so that she is ready to cancel her appointment. It is almost painful for the audience to hear and see that this beautiful woman, with whom Georg Nowack, the shy assistant manager of Maraczek's Parfumerie, has been corresponding, is also frightened about their evening appointment.

     Yet Cook, in her singing, takes this song to new limits, the plea becoming a kind a pleading  song not with her not-yet-perceived lover, but for an complete engagement with the audience, wherein her soaring lyrical arpeggios totally convince us that she is more than worthy of the unknowing Georg’s love. Benanti sings the final pleading notes of this desperate song of acceptance with a full-throated demand:

 

Will he like me?

He's just got to

 

    Cook, instead, pauses, aspirates the final words, “He’s just…..got to” to create a suspense upon which depends the entire rest of the tale. Yes, he does “got to,” since she’s so impossibly loveable given her singing, but her own fears are voiced so beautifully that we, too, wonder, will Georg really see her inner beauty, really hear her lovely voice? It’s a dilemma, given her own hostility to the real workaday situation, that is expressed totally in the voice. And Cook is able, time and again, throughout this musical to convince of her inner beauty through her voice. Music, in this lovely tale of a Hungary of another time and place, is crucial. If you can’t hear Cook’s vocal message, you may not possibly comprehend the lovers’ attraction to each other. There is no question, given Cook’s singing that “He’s just got to.”

 

Los Angeles, August 8, 2017

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

 

 

Sarah Ruhl | Eurydice / 2019

talking to stones

by Douglas Messerli

 

Sarah Ruhl Eurydice / directed by Frédérique Michel at City Garage in Santa Monica, California / the performance I attended was on Sunday, August 25, 2019

 

Sarah Ruhl’s 2003 play, Eurydice is a retelling of the famous Orpheus and Eurydice myth. But in the re-telling, it is the confused and quickly forgetting Eurydice who is at the center as opposed to her lover, the transcendent musician Orpheus.

     Whereas, in the original Orpheus (her played by Johnny Paulino) is presented as the hero, rushing to retrieve his beloved wife who has suddenly died soon after their marriage, in this version the more important relation for Eurydice (Linsay Plake) is her dead father (Bo Roberts) whose letter from the dead is the lure that causes her death and her strange encounter with “A Nasty Interesting Man,” who turns out to be the Lord of the Underworld (Gifford Irvine).

     Somewhat inexplicably neither she nor her father have yet to be washed in the waters of Lethe, which causes its bathers to completely forget the past. Her father, still fairly conscious, in fact, attempts to gently help his beloved daughter to recall her past life, the meaning of self-identity, and the role she formerly played in both his and Orpheus’ life. But this is clearly a woman, far less passive and more impassioned than the character of Green myth, who is torn between the two great loves of her earthly existence.

     In her new transformation, despite conversations with her father, who attempts her re-education into being—and despite his own diminishing awareness, a condition one might almost describe as the elder’s slow fall into dementia or Alzheimer’s—Eurydice is left alone talking to the stones. Big (Marissa DuBois), Little (Emily Asher Kellis), and Loud (Brandon Reed), who generally listen but also advise her time and again, like the traditional Greek chorus, what is and is not allowed. The limits they suggest are awe-inspiring, and it is clear the despite her father’s gentle encouragement to explore the being she was, she will soon lose any power she might have remaining of her memory of her husband Orpheus’ musical talents. Besides, suggests Ruhl, she was not a very great musician, despite her lover’s extraordinary talents.

     Yet it is her talking to stones that helps her realize potentialities, and her limits. If she has no being in this world of death, unlike in the Green myth, she gradually begins to perceive her past powers, and her capabilities of love both for Orpheus and her father, both of whom struggle without her existence. And, ultimately, as we know from the ancient story, Orpheus does come to retrieve her, amazingly able to convince the Lord of the Underworld to release her because of his musical talents. Even death, it is clear, retains the nostalgia for great music—which should tell us something of our own times. Music (as well as art, theater, dance, poetry, fiction, performance, and so many other arts) are the only way out of a society devoted to death, or, perhaps, even the decaying brain as it moves into death itself. Alzheimer’s patients seem to respond more positively to music than any other stimulus, except perhaps for the human voice. Ruhl is obviously playing with both of these possibilities.

     Much like the her of the ancient myth, however, Orpheus is nearly all bravado. Told that he may not turn back to see if Eurydice is following him in their escape from death, he, like many a doubting male, turns back to see if she is still following him out of Hades. It means that she will disappear, this time dipped in Lethe’s murky waters, resulting also in his own death, both of her belove figures, along with Eurydice herself soon after losing their ability to comprehend the past or even the recognition of those who were important to their lives on earth, as they fall into eternal sleep.

    The City Garage production, directed by the unconquerable and talented Michel and produced by Charles A. Duncombe, uses metal steel bars and gay carpeting to design their set; perhaps not a bad choice given the gymnastics that these tortured characters must endure. They are, after all, in the hands of greater gods that living forces them into calisthenics which no normal human might survive.

     The acting was just fine for Ruhl’s quieter and more disturbingly troubling perceptions of the ancient story. But I was distressed by the fact that this small Bergamot Station-located theater was so sparsely attended at the Sunday matinee at which I saw it.

     If Ruhl if not my favorite playwright, the production should arguably still be seen. And this company has produced some the most innovative theater to appear in Los Angeles, including significant works by Eugène Ionesco, Heiner Müller, Boris Vian, Charles I. Mee, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, María Irene Fornes, and Mac Wellman among many others. Along with Redcat, Rogue Theater, and several other smaller companies, their productions are what make Los Angeles such an exciting place for new theater.

 

Los Angeles, August 29, 2019

Reprinted from US Theater, Opera, and Performance (August 2019).

Harvey Schmidt and Tom Jones | "My Cup Runneth Over," from I Do! I Do! / 1966

my favorite musical theater songs: “my cup runneth over”

by Douglas Messerli

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zgx1wyTdjJg

Composers: Harvey Schmidt and Tom Jones

Singers: Mary Martin and Robert Preston, 1966 (original cast recording)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TPlJd3m2K5Q

Composers: Harvey Schmidt and Tom Jones

Singer: Ed Ames, 1967

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s1H8_CF822c

Composers: Harvey Schmidt and Tom Jones

Singer: Perry Cuomo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bJ3HX4DdnEA

Composers: Harvey Schmidt and Tom Jones

Singers: Robert Goulet and Julie Andrews

I have to say that Harvey Schmidt and Tom Jones I Do! I Do! from 1966 seemed even old-fashioned and fustian the year it appeared; but with the cast of Mary Martin and Robert Preston, under the direction of Gower Champion and the production of the masterful David Merrick what could go wrong? The musical went on to become a long-running hit, with many of its best songs such as “I Love My Wife,” wonderfully sung by Preston and, my favorite, “My Cup Runneth Over,” sung also by dozens of other interpreters such as Ed Ames, Perry Cuomo, and even Anita Bryant, making it a quite popular standard.

    Jan de Hartog’s play, The Fourposter, upon which it was based, was even a nostalgic and sentimental thing back in 1951. And Schmidt and Jones, noted for their minimalist productions with highly romantic music and lyrics were probably perfect for its transformation into musical history, but hardly lightened up the marital tearjerker.

     You’ll have to chalk it up to old age and the fact that Howard and I have been “married” for now 56 years that “My Cup Runneth Over” still chokes me up every time I hear it. I can hardly bear with its corny use of Elizabethan-like language such as the word “runneth”; every time I hear it I also think of the time when a cup, sliding across our glass dining table due to a bit of water underneath, brought the quip from Howard: “my glass runneth over….there and there!” So there is laughter always just underneath my flowing tears. I believe it’s the final stanza that finally does it for me:

 

In only a moment we both will be old

We won't even notice the world turning cold

And so, in these moments with sunlight above

My cup runneth over with love

My cup runneth over with love

With love

 

     Howard and I now are old, and despite our countless difficulties, I guess we are still in love. So you’ll have to forgive this choice as simply a very personal one.

 

Los Angeles, September 27, 2017

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

 

Jule Style, Stephen Sondheim, and Arthur Laurents | "Everything's Coming Up Roses" from Gypsy / 1959

 

my favorite musical theater songs: “everything’s coming up roses”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aGyiuFZ7cs8

Composers: Jule Styne and Stephen Sondheim

Singer: Ethel Merman

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4KaIlbvufU

Composers: Jule Styne and Stephen Sondheim

Singer: Rosalind Russell, 1962

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SCtqfRRGosk

Composers: Jule Styne and Stephen Sondheim

Singer: Shirley Bassey, 1965

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xjoi3W75O0w

Composer: Jule Styne and Stephen Sondheim

Singer: Angela Lansbury, 1989

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rboUaIs4xf0

Composers: Jule Styne and Stephen Sondheim

Singer: Bette Midler, 1993

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZIakJq_b_vE

Composers: Jule Styne and Stephen Sondheim

Singer: Bernadette Peters, 2003

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=szSGvY5MsbQ

Composers: Jule Styne and Stephen Sondheim

Singer: Ruthie Hensall

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LXl10a9gJwA

Composers: Jule Styne and Stephen Sondheim

Singer: Patti Lapone, 2008

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZaYuC9Q01A

Composrs: Jules Styne and Stephen Sondheim

Performer: Tyne Daly, 1989

 

Composer Jule Styne’s and Stephen Sondheim’s Gypsy, I must admit, is not at all my favorite musical, the fact of which I have loudly expressed over the years despite my having seen the film version, Angela Lansbury and Patti Lapone on stage, and the TV production with Better Midler.

     Yet I love Styne and his compositions, and both Howard and I know, personally, his lovely granddaughter, Caroline Styne, who opened, with Suzanne Goin, the popular West Hollywood venue, Luques. And I can never quite put down Gypsy, listening to its songs again and again.

     Part of the problem with the musical is that the most brilliant song, “Rose’s Turn,” is an almost impossible piece to perform, and is difficult for the audience to take home as a “best song,” although it is clearly one of the most consummate musical performances of the theater; Ethel Merman, Rosalind Russell, Bette Midler, Bernadette Peters, and Patti Lapone have all remarkably attempted it, but it still is not a hummable, take-home song. Memorable, yes, but not something except the most remarkable of singers might even tackle; it’s truly not hummable, not what I’ve ever demanded of any song included here, but still not one of my most memorable experiences: it’s a painful expression of life lost and talent ignored, and even the singer diminishes it with her “could have / would have” comment. She might have been great, but she wasn’t, and she knows it. And the song truly exposes those problems.

     Once again, this musical is filled with lovely and memorable tunes: “You’ll Never Get Away from Me,” “Little Lamb,” and many, many more. And all of them make you want to cry.

     But there is only one song that expresses the fierce determination of the central character, Rose, who controls her children so severely that both must eventually escape her handling of them. That song, so very forcefully sung in the original production by Ethel Merman, establishes not only her previous hold of her daughter, Baby June (June Havoc) but her attempt to hold close her other daughter, Louise (the later Gypsy Rose Lee). Merman sings it so utterly strong that you know she will most certainly prevail, and her poor daughter will simply have to endure it. Well, that’s the plot.

    Yet others such as Angela Lansbury, and, particularly, Bette Midler, and Bernadette Peters sang it much more subtly and ironically. Although the song never lost its powerful demands of the future, Midler and Peters, particularly, were able to express the utterly insane demands in which everything is turning up “daffodils,” “Santa Claus,” etc, without actually mocking those same simplistic tropes. We know that they are utterly impossible requirements for the very untalented Louise, but we also recognize the powerful demands or her desperate mother, desperate not only for her daughter to achieve her talent, but to represent herself (best expressed in “Rose’s Turn”) her own mother’s would-be achievements. It is perhaps one of the most painful songs ever sung, a ballad to a future that is totally impossible to achieve, despite the frenetic insistence of a truly mad mother. If the child does ever accomplish anything—and, obviously Gypsy Rose Lee did—we already know it will be nothing of the kind that the mother demands. And the sad truth, when this child becomes a strip-tease artist, tells us about how Rose never could quite comprehend her transformation into the lowest levels of American culture, even though Gypsy Rose Lee struggled throughout her life to return to redemption through her pretense of sexual sins. It was a pretense that is so sad that, today, we can hardly assimilate it.

    Gypsy is a harsh and hard musical which I could never quite embrace. But its aspirations, its desires are at the heart of the American experience, which, of course, is the problem of the American experience. Yet, her emblem to possibility, “Everything’s Coming Up Roses,” is something no one can truly ignore.

 

Los Angeles, March 2, 2018

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

Michel Leiris | Operratics / 2001 [reading]

anybody’s opera

by Douglas Messerli

 

Michel Leiris Operratics (Los Angeles: Green Integer, 2001)

 

French author Michel Leiris [1901-1990] was a central figure in French culture for much of his life. Early on, he became interested in poetry and jazz, and—through his introduction to numerous writers and artists—Max Jacob, Jean Dubuffet, Robert Desnos, Georges Bataille, and, Leiris’ so-called “mentor,” André Masson among them—became involved early on in the Surrealist movement, writing for its magazines and publishing several Surrealist-based works including the fiction Aurora (1927-1928). In 1926 he married Louise Gordon, Picasso’s art dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnwiler’s, stepdaughter.

     Three years later Leiris had a falling-out with surrealist leader André Breton, contributing to several anti-surrealist publications before involving himself with essays on art and creating ethnographical and sociological works, including the seminal study L’Afrique fantôme, a work that argued, along with Claude Lévi-Strauss, for an anthropological perspective for such studies. Leiris later became known for his insightful autobiographical works such as L’Age d’homme (Manhood) of 1939.

    As the publisher of Sun & Moon Press and, later, Green Integer, I had read and known of several of Leiris’ writings, but was quite surprised when my then-typographer and brilliant translator Guy Bennett brought me in 1998 his English-language version of one of Leiris’ major unpublished works, Operatiques, a quirky collection of short pieces Leiris had penned on his secret love, opera. As Leiris declared in his outline to this small, but densely-written work, he perceived his “impertinent” and even “naïve” collection of “fragments” on opera as an attempt to bring his views of the genre to the reader as neither a musician nor a man of the theater, but “as a writer who deals” openly with “aesthetic issues,” combining the concept of “opera” with the “erratic,” as in something deviating from the conventional or customary course, a kind of “wandering” through his beloved subject.

     Myself a lover of opera, with only a rudimentary knowledge of music (I sang throughout college in chorale groups and in musical theater), Leiris’ Operratics, as we came to title it in English, was a perfect book for a press, Green Integer, that had declared itself open to publishing works of “pataphysics and pedantry,” belles-lettres, in particular, that combined erudition with exploratory writing. Leiris suggests his own approach to the subject quite coherently in his short comparison of “Nietzsche and Wagner,” wherein he describes Nietzsche as an “aphorist,” and therefore a more modern thinker, as opposed to the “grandiose, fluid lyricism” of Wagner, which helped to make him a Romantic interested in the effacement of structure.

    Leiris himself is a kind of aphorist in these opera pieces, which consist of a combination of precise ideas, categorizations, observations, and what he has described elsewhere as “brisées,” metaphorically speaking, “broken branches,” the remnants or perhaps buds of new thought—as opposed to essays or structured critical commentary.

     In such works there is a strong implication, helped by his own demurral and the very brevity of the pieces, these works might have been penned by anyone, at least by any intelligent, occasional operagoer. In truth, of course, Leiris’ comments are extremely well-informed. Who else amongst us might suggest, as he does in his short piece, “Die Zauberflöte,” the relationship of Mozart’s characters to Eastern antiquity and speak of the libretto’s “racial hierarchies?” or describe Monteverdi (as in “Discovery of Monteverdi”) as having “expressionistic” qualities that reached its zenith in Puccini?

     Yet it is the appearance of his sleight-of-hand observations that make his works seem so unpretentious, linking them more to a popular guide of literary and historically-linked ideas about opera than to the erudite operatic commentaries of opera critics and musicologists. While grounding his aphoristic commentaries in philosophically-based perceptions, Leiris, nonetheless, makes it all seem easy, encouraging any intelligent operagoer to feel that he or she might gather his or her comments about the subject.

     That seems important, somehow, within the context of today’s HD-live Met broadcasts and the seeming increasing popularity of opera in general: in just the past few months I have attended not only several of the Met broadcasts and LA Opera productions, but recently saw a small new Los Angeles-based company, the Pacific Opera Project, perform a delightful rendition of Leonard Bernstein’s Trouble in Tahiti in a theater space in a Santa Monica public park; heard a network news report of the recent “hyperopera” production of a new work, “Crescent City” in a rented art space in Atwater Crossing (near Los Angeles) where attendees had their choice of sitting on regular chairs, hunkering down on beanbags, or standing and wandering about; watched a YouTube recording of Mayo Thompson’s opera Victorine performed (with Felix Bernstein and Gabe Rubin) in the Whitney Museum of Art Biennial in New York; and happened upon a free New York Symphony Hall production of Ned Rorem’s Three Sisters Who Are Not Sisters with text by Gertrude Stein.

     Had Leiris lived to have partaken of these new opera-going opportunities, I am certain he would have embraced the transformative changes they represent. What once was the domain primarily of devotees, claques, and wealthy patrons has opened up opera to everyday theater and filmgoers who rush to and gush over these new experiences. I know hundreds of purists might wish me into the lower depths of the Rhine, but wouldn’t it be wonderful if there we were to discover a new ring—of blogs by Leiris-inspired, amateur operagoers, twittering away about their newest encounters? 

 

Los Angeles, May 13, 2012

Reprinted from US Theater, Opera, and Performance (May 2012).     

Kier Peters / The Confirmation / 1994 [production]

confirming reality

by Douglas Messerli

 

Kier Peters The Confirmation Vineyard Theatre (as part of the T.W.E.E.D. New Works Festival) / April 6 and 7, 1994

Almost from the moment in September 1991 when we returned to Jerry Fox’s condominium after the memorial ceremony for Howard’s mother Rose, I took out pen and paper and began to write the play The Confirmation.

      Obviously, Rose’s death—I was close to both of Howard’s parents—triggered something in me about mothers, grandmothers, daughters, and sons—although the Midwestern women of the play could not be more different, in their language and mannerisms, than the Baltimore-raised Rose Fox. The character’s language, in its aphoristic repetitions, bore traces, however, of another Baltimorean, Gertrude Stein.

     From the moment Mother commanded Grandma to “sit down there nicely and be out of the way!” (something, given the current situation, I might have commanded of myself), the women of my play took control of my head and hand, leading me through a series of incidents over which I seemed to have little control. Whenever I even attempted to think out some element of plot, the voices forced me in other directions, so that page after page of the original manuscript was torn up, lines crossed out.

      “What are you doing?” asked Jerry, observing me writing in a seemingly uncomfortable position at the dining room windowsill.

     “Writing,” was all I could mutter, as words tumbled through my fingers to the little notebook before me. It seemed I could not write fast enough, and by the time we had returned to Los Angeles a couple of days later, I had completed a rough draft. Never had I produced a work so painlessly. The only things that needed alteration, so it appeared, were instances where I had gotten ahead of my characters’ words and acts.

     As I do with all my plays—or, at least, as Kier does—I sent a typed copy to playwright friend Mac Wellman, who read it with great enthusiasm, ultimately suggesting its inclusion in the 1994 T.W.E.E.D New York Festival.

     Mac also arranged, at an earlier date, a reading at Richard Caliban’s Cucaracha Theater in New York, a production overseen by Richard’s wife, Mollie O’Mara, who later directed the Festival production. The wonderful actress/teacher Nora Dunfee performed in that original reading (there may have been others of the later cast in the first reading, but I have no memory of who else performed). I do know that playwrights Wellman, Len Jenkin, and Matthew Maguire, along with my editor, actress Diana Daves (upon whom I had based, in part, the character of Mother) were in attendance. The reading went splendidly, creating a much more absurdly comic effect than the later Festival production.

     I had titled the play The Confirmation because the work concerned a group of figures who were all attempting to confirm their various visions of reality—visions each at odds with one another. The outsider to this dysfunctional family, Carmelita, was also attempting to confirm her position as a member of the family (yes, Carson McCullers had come to mind in the writing) and to confirm a reality different from what family members were willing to admit. During the final revision, moreover, I was watching on television the horrific circus of the confirmation hearings in October 1991 of Judge Clarence Thomas, accused by his former co-worker Anita Hill of inappropriate sexual conversations covering everything from gang rape, the size of porn star Long Dong Silver’s penis, to sexual intercourse with animals! Who could have made up such a bizarre scenario? To me, Hill’s painful testimony could be nothing but the truth, and to this day I am convinced of the incompetence of the conservative Justice of the Supreme Court.

     Accordingly, I began my play with a quote, representing the two opposing visions of truth represented by those hearings: Anita Hill’s statement “I felt that I had to tell the truth,” as against Thomas’s summary of events, “I have never, in all my life, felt such hurt, such pain, such agony.” To me it seemed to sum up the idea of truth and consequence. My Sun & Moon Press published the play in 1993.

    When I came to New York in early April 1994 to observe rehearsals for the Festival production, I discovered that O’Mara had read the work somewhat differently from what I had, particularly in connection with anti-war statements. It wasn’t that she was incorrect in her interpretations—indeed much was said in this family about military service, whose men, in war after war, had died—but the fact that she and costume designer Carol Brys had decided to literalize those issues, dressing Carmelita, the lesbian nun living in a relationship with Sister, in a military-like costume, came as a surprise. The other major change in the play was Mollie’s decision to cast the estranged sister, Blanche, whom the family believes speaks only Norwegian, but, in fact, speaks only Yiddish, with the wonderful actor Kirk Jackson, dressing in drag and speaking English in a heavy Yiddish accent. When she was at her best, Nora Dunfee, a beloved acting teacher (and the elderly Southern woman on the park bench in the film, Forrest Gump), was a perfect Grandma, but throughout rehearsals she was having difficulty memorizing her lines, and the day before the premiere we were forced to embed the script in a magazine, laying open upon the table in front of the backyard “couch.”

     None of these “changes” really upset me, since I have always felt that one of the wonders of theater is the possibility of various interpretations of a work which directors and actors can provide. With that in mind, I write only minimal stage directions, and prefer to leave the set—in this case highly stylized, with large cardboard tubes suggesting the trees of the backyard—an abstraction. What I wasn’t prepared for was the utter stubbornness of some actors. The woman playing Carmelita, in particular, was constantly asking me about her motivations. Since I have never written from of a psychologically-based perspective, I simply could not answer her. “Clearly she just wants to be part of the family, wants to be part of something!” I declared. But again and again, Cate Woodruff was pulling the work into a kind of bog of conditions, reasons, explanations, and the more O’Mara and I tried to float the play as the slightly nostalgic comedic work I had imagined it, she flatly pulled it down into a thwarted drama of small-town lives.

     Fortunately, lighting director Richard Schaefer and the composer Tom Burnett had captured the spirit of the work, and, along with Jackson’s slightly campy portrayal of Blanche, which completely pulled the play away from any sense of realism, often succeeded in restoring the work’s sense of bemused acceptance of the darker horrors of family life.

     Howard attended the two performances on April 6 and 7 at the famed Vineyard Theatre, along with, once again, many of my playwright friends, Charles Bernstein and Susan Bee, Hannah Weiner, and other poets and artists. Howard, however, did not feel the play succeeded, suggesting that I was straddling absurdity and realism, maintaining that what I had really attempted to do was to write a fully developed realist play—something that couldn’t be further from my mind. Besides, I had no control over the situation, I tried to explain; the characters wrote the play, not I.

     A few weeks after this production, Nora Dunfee fell to a New York street, dead from brain cancer. Clearly her lack of memory throughout the production had been a product of her illness!

    Some years later, a Los Angeles theater company decided to produce The Confirmation for one night. I suggested I might attend the rehearsals, but they seemed to question the need for that. Nonetheless, I did drop by, where I was obviously seen as an intruder even more dangerous than Carmelita. After the rehearsal, the director introduced me to the cast as the publisher of the play, and suddenly I realized why I had gotten such a cold shoulder. “And I might add, I am also the playwright himself; I write under the pseudonym of Kier Peters.” Suddenly several cast members came forward filled with questions.

     That production was what I can only describe as a disaster. The company had been famous for, at one time, producing plays by Ionesco—which explained, perhaps, the continual manipulation throughout the play of various pieces of furniture, particularly the movement of chairs! Of close friends, I think only Martin Nakell attended—thank heaven! And today, so he tells me, he has forgotten the event.                      

 

Los Angeles, May 3, 2008

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (May 2008).