Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Lorenzo da Ponte | Cosí fan tutte / 2011

so are we all

by Douglas Messerli

 

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (music), Lorenzo da Ponte (libretto) Cosí fan tutte / LAOpera, at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion (the performance I saw was on Sunday, October 2, 2011)

 

 Despite the often splendiferous musical beauty of da Ponte's and Mozart's wise comic satire, there is something patently unfair about the major series of events. Yes, we easily conclude with Don Alfonso, "Women are like that," but so too, do we comprehend, are men. And it is the men in this opera who truly step out of bounds in testing their sweetheart's faithfulness.

 

    To be fair, the two young soldiers, Ferrando (Saimir Pirgu in the production I saw) and Guglielmo (the handsome Ildebrando D'Arcangelo) begin the opera singing endless praises of their loves, Fiordilgi (Aleksandra Kurzak) and Dorabella (Ruxandra Donose). We immediately recognize their naiveté; and when I say we, I think I can speak for the whole of USA culture given that the current divorce rate is 50% which rises substantially with second and third marriages. Although divorce may be caused by many things other than unfaithfulness, it appears that, in the US at least, Americans are fickle.

      But the young men are easily challenged and persuaded into obedience to their friend Don Alfonso (Lorenzo Regazzo), who, without much difficulty, convinces them to lie to their sweethearts by pretending to go off to war, and to themselves play cheats. After all, to dress up in the costumes of other men, taking on their very different personalities and to court each other's fiancées certainly suggests that they are willing to be guilty of behavior they do not hope to find in their fiancés. Costumes are extremely important in Cosí fan tutte (and, of course, in the whole of the commedia dell'arte tradition, on which much of this opera is based); a slight costume change, an attached moustache, a bit of acting immediately convinces others that a familiar figure is someone else. Even women like the maid Despina can easily dupe their employers, dressed like a man (she becomes in the opera both a mesmerist doctor and a notary). In short, by donning costumes they temporarily become another person, and so too are these young soldiers allowing themselves in their transformations to become unfaithful seducers of the two sisters they proclaim to love.

     Moreover, Mozart gives his sweet heroines a great deal of reverence and fortitude in which to protect them. The celestial song they sing as their lovers go off to war, "Soave sia il vento" ("May the wind be gentle") is almost enough to convince the most hard-hearted realist that these two mean what they say. And to back it up, Fiordiligi sings the powerful "Come scogli" ("Like a rock") pledging her love to Guglielmo.

     The weaker of the two is obviously Dorabella who must be reminded consistently by her sister of the role she should play, and seems, quite early on, more distressed by being left alone than by the absence of Ferrando. Yet, despite her obvious interest in the two strange Albanians who suddenly appear in the sister's home, she also remains impervious throughout Act 1.

      The Albanians, on the other hand, although declaring their love for the two beauties, seem more interested in their own prowess than in the women they are trying seduce. A great part of the humor of da Ponte's text lies in the constant metaphors that point up their "endowments," Guglielmo, in particular, pointing to his masculine attributes in "Non siate ritrosi" ("Don't be shy").

     In the production I saw this was reiterated by their attempt at suicide by arsenic poisoning, wherein their dying bodies were laid out upon a chaise longue, the two men almost on top of one another, hinting at a greater interest in their own bodies than in the two of what they later relate as "the fair sex." If nothing else, the scene suggested a long homoerotic embrace between Ferrando and Guglielmo, made even more apparent when the women come to revive them, all four crawling over and under one another.

     Clearly they are not "playing fair," forcing the women to brush against and touch them—often in somewhat lewd positions. These are beautiful young people, all four of them, and like most young people, are easily aroused.

      What Mozart and da Ponte also make clear is just how boring these wealthy sister's lives are. Except for the excitement through sexual flirtation, there is little do in their house, as Dorabella, in particular makes clear. Despina serves them meals and sweets such a chocolate, they play puzzles, and, mostly, sit discussing their situations. Might it not be fun to do something else since their soldiers have gone off?      Even when Dorabella despicably gives in, exchanging a necklace, containing Ferrando's picture, for a gift from the Albanian Guglielmo, Fiordiligi runs away from her temptation, desperately trying to regain control of the situation through her consciousness ("Per pietà, ben mio, perdona," "Please, my beloved, forgive"). Her brief decision to dress up like a soldier and run off to war to find her lover is absurdly touching, if ludicrous. There is, obviously, no war, and one wonders to where she might run. And if she were to find Guglielmo, how could she show him her love dressed—like Isaac Bashevis Singer's Yentl—as a man? The opera, fortunately, does not take us down that path. Instead, Ferrando challenges her again with suicide. What is a woman to do, given that she has already tried to save him as chastely as she can? Her only choice apparently is to give in.

     The men, all ego, are furious with the obvious turn of events, but fortunately Don Alfonso is wise enough to insist that they accept the natures of their loved ones, without mentioning their own obvious failures and deceits. "Marry them," he advices, and so, apparently they do, both symbolically, with the fake notary marrying Dorabella and Fiordilgi to the Albanians (each linked to the opposite of their lovers in their previous existences) and then, again—at least in promise—to the miraculously returned soldiers. What does it matter, truly, who marries whom, when a simple moustache and coat can alter any personality. And, in that sense, Cosí fan tutte, is neither a celebration of faithfulness or even a return to order, but a joyful tribute to sexually-inspired love.

 

Los Angeles, October 3, 2011

Reprinted from Green Integer Blog (October 2011).

Cailin Maureen Harrison | Defenders / 2019

attempting to save a people who do not need saving

by Douglas Messerli

 

Cailin Maureen Harrison Defenders / directed by Reena Dutt at The Broadwater Black Box / the performance I attended was on December 8, 2019

 

Cailin Maureen Harrison’s play Defenders, directed by Reena Dutt at The Broadwater Black Box in Hollywood, although based on fact, is nearly an absurdist work, revealing perhaps just how absurd things can become in war.

      Fearful that Iceland would come attack of the Nazis, the American military ordered soldiers into that island country. The three figures of this play— Lieutenant Marcus Jansen (Bryan Porter), Sergeant Frank McKinley (Tavis Doucette), and Private Fred LaFleur (Spencer Martin)—are ordered to the island’s northern coast.

       But almost everything that could go wrong does. A powerful storm shipwrecks their vessel, and they are forced with a broken radio and jammed machine gun to take refuge on the smaller, rocky island of Hrisey in a derelict church. They are so fearful that the area may have already infiltrated by Germans, that they almost reject the much-needed help of two locals, Geir Stirdson (John P. Connolly) and his daughter Vigdis Geirdottir (Una Eggerts), who finally are able to convince them that they are friendly, fetching coal for the ancient stove, feeding them, and bringing homemade liquor to comfort the small military unit.

      While McKinley desperately attempts to bring the radio back to life and LaFleur tries again and again to unjam the dead gun, the dynamic leader of the group, Jansen barks out orders and every now and then attempts to scout out the island in search of the enemy, each time returning with more and more serious injuries as he and his loyal second in-command fall into bogs, are whipped apart by the unusually strong winds, and are nearly struck by lightning. All McKinley wants to do is return home, hoping that the evidently wealthy Jansen might eventually take him along into a better financial life.

      Although Geir speaks English, his beautiful daughter speaks mostly Icelandic spiced with an occasional English word (the actress is an Icelander). On top of that LaFleur, obviously from the backwaters of Louisiana, speaks a mix of heavily accented English and Creole. While his seniors pretend to be rational beings, the Private is almost a kind of young mystic, intertwining biblical verses with the Icelandic Eddas, a collection of which has been left behind in the church. It is almost inevitable that he and Vigdis shyly fall in love.

     In short, if this play of meaningless acts did not end so tragically, it might almost be described as a comedy of errors.

     Yet a kind of madness ultimately takes over the mind of Jansen, while a mix of magic and myth spills over from the Icelanders coloring, LaFleur’s already overwrought imagination.

      Iceland, and particularly this small offshore island, has a history of different sets of invaders and pirates, and the stories of the Edda call forth the harsh weather they daily suffer as a kind of protection. Accordingly, they are almost as fearful of the recently arrived American soldiers as the three intruders are of the Nazis, whom they seem imagine behind every rock.

      Accordingly, despite the best intentions of those trapped in this quite ridiculous situation, weapons are brought out, ending in the death of Jansen and the near death of McKinley before an American vessel arrives to save them. Only the innocent LaFleur walks off the island by himself. But we also recognize that he will never be the same again, that the absurd experience where his leaders attempted to save a people who did not need saving, will haunt him the rest of his life.

      The small company which presented this arresting play, Pandelia’s Canary Yellow Company, has created a truly admirable production, with all the actors performing quite brilliantly, and with an arresting set by David Goldstein, appropriate costumes by Shon LeBlank, and excellent sound design by Jesse Mandapat. One might wish that all such small theater Los Angeles companies were so wonderfully professional.

      If Defenders is not precisely a major work of theater drama, it’s certainly a fascinating one, searching out through these long-ago events to balance the impossible-to-believe with a heart-felt spirituality—a need to believe. Every war throughout history has seen such bizarre encounters that only fiction and theater—the representations of our myths—can tell.

 

Los Angeles, December 9, 2019

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

Adrienne Kennedy Funnyhouse of a Negro / 1964 [reading of play]

hersevles: a chamber piece

by Douglas Messerli

 

Adrienne Kennedy Funnyhouse of a Negro / 1964

Adrienne Kennedy Collected Plays & Other Writings, ed. by Marc Robinson (New York: Library of America, 2023)

 

One is tempted to describe Adrienne Kennedy’s 1964 play, Funnyhouse of a Negro, as a kind of chamber piece in black and white. The play takes place in the bedroom of a young woman, Sarah, lit in harsh white played behind a bright white, torn, cheaply-made curtain. Surrounding this spot of “ghastly” white is an “unnatural” black, in which the various imaginary encounters with other “herselves”—the Duchess of Hapsburg, Queen Victoria Regina, Jesus, and Patrice Lumumba—the interior companions of Negro-Sarah, as she is referred to in the cast listing, take place. Accordingly, the very stage set sets up the central tension of this play, an interchange of black and white. And interestingly, despite Sarah’s self-detestation of her own “blackness,” it is in the “unnatural” darkness where all her creative activity occurs. The “white room” of her world is only vaguely defined by the author: “Her room should have a bed, a writing table and a mirror. Near her bed is the statue of Queen Victoria; other objects might be her photographs and her books.” It is a world, in short, of commodities.     

     Yet Kennedy’s startling play is not simply about the basic dichotomies at the heart of this work—the American culture’s long history of breaking down everything into black-and-white (both racially and intellectually)—but is more about all that lies in between, both in terms of racial makeup and in terms of reality—or perhaps what I should speak of as “surreality.”

      Sarah might be to the society at large a “negro,” but to herself she is of mixed heritage, her mother appearing so white that her hair as not even “frizzy,” evidently the product of a mixed marriage. Sarah’s father, whom she detests and is terrified of, is described of as very black, a man haunting Sarah each night from the jungle he once inhabited. Through bits and pieces of dialogue and various retellings from the imaginary characters of Sarah’s mind, we begin to perceive that, upon marrying Sarah’s mother, the father moved his family to Africa where he might, as his own mother wished, “save the race.”

 

                              You must return to Africa, find revelation in the midst

                              of golden savannas, nim and white frankopenny trees,

                              white stallions roaming under a blue sky, you must walk

                              with a white dove and heal the race, heal the misery, take

                              us off the cross…..

 

Her vision of this paradisiacal Africa, in short, is as absurd as Sarah’s own desire to live at the edges of things, in anonymity:

 

                              I am an English major, as my mother was when she went

                              to school in Atlanta…. I am graduated from a city college

                              and have occasional work in libraries, but mostly spend my

                              days preoccupied with the placement and geometric position

                              of words on paper. I write poetry filling white page after

                              white page with imitations of Edith Sitwell. It is my dream

                              to live in rooms with European antiques and my Queen

                              Victoria, photographs of Roman ruins, walls of books, a

                              piano, oriental carpets and to eat my meals on a white

                              glass table. I will visit my friends’ apartments which will

                              contain books, photographs of Roman ruins, pianos and

                              oriental carpets. My friends will be white.

 

Sarah, in sum, wants everything that a bourgeois consumer might desire. Yet each night she is haunted by the return of her dead father—a man whom we are told by the other two “other” figures of this play hung himself in his Harlem hotel upon the death of Patrice Lumumba, but whom Sarah insists she herself as killed by bludgeoning him with an ebony mask—reminding her of her societal position as a “nigger,” and all that dreadful aspersion signifies in a racist world.

     Sarah’s desired world contains no love, and she herself is unable to forgive. She admits to not particularly liking her friends, and makes it clear, despite her occasional sex with him, that she does not love her neighbor, Raymond. She is a product of both passion and hate, born from a mother who ceased having sex with her husband and a father her raped her. Her own writing is pointless, an imitation of a poet, Edith Sitwell, who, dressed in velvet and turbans, poured out often abstract rhythmical works, which, despite their modernity, often earned her the label of poseur.

      A major problem, one shared by all “herselves,” is a clearly Freudian one; each of them is losing their hair, like Sarah’s mother, now locked away in an asylum: fear, humiliation, failure, and embarrassment is at the center of Sarah’s life.

       Yet it is these very fears and the almost mad manifestation of Sarah’s fractured selves that is at the center of any real love and creativity she exhibits. Unlike the white frozen world of objects and vague relationships at the center of her “dream,” the horrible terrors of her own past and the dark world with which she is associated—her always “knocking” obsessions—are at the core of this play, a work which critic Deborah Thompson has observed is “‘founded’ in groundlessness, alienation, errancy, transience, and multiplicity,  written, Kennedy has explained, during a sea voyage: "Away from all my old books, but now besieged and surrounded by a myriad of real, astounding new imagery (ocean, staterooms, the decks, standing at the rail), my unconscious and conscious seemed to join in a new way."

     Tragically, in the world in which Sarah lives—a world filled with a gossipy and uncaring landlady, a cold cynical lover, and those white friends, “shrewd, intellectual and anxious for death”—there is no way to mend the rents and tears of Sarah’s fractured world. The society, in its racist distinctions, does not allow such bourgeois aspirations from a woman of color. And, accordingly, Kennedy’s play must end in Sarah’s destruction, another victim in a culture that does permit one to accept the multitudinous realities of life.

      In full gothic irony, Raymond suggests at play’s end that, in truth, Sarah’s father did not hang himself in a Harlem hotel, but is a “doctor married to a white whore”: “He lives in the city in rooms with European antiques, photographs of Roman ruins, walls of books and oriental carpets. Her father is a nigger who eats his meals on a white glass table.”

 

Los Angeles, January 9, 2015

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

Edward Albee | At Home at the Zoo / 2017

explaining things

by Douglas Messerli

 

Edward Albee At Home at the Zoo / the performance that Howard N. Fox and I saw, presented by the Deaf West Theatre, was at the Wallis Annenberg Center for Performing Arts, Lovelace Studio Theater, on March 16, 2017

 

Over the last many years, the Deaf West Theatre Company (DWT) has presented several wonderful works in American Sign Language in conjunction with spoken words, including their memorable adaptation of Big River: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn—performed first at DWT’s own intimate theater and later at the Mark Taper Forum before being transferred to Broadway’s American Airlines Theater at the Roundabout—garnering two Tony nominations.  Their 2014-15 production of the musical adaptation of Frank Wedekind’s Spring Awakening, presented at the Wallis Annenberg Center for Performing Arts in Beverly Hills (see My Year 2015)—which also moved on to Broadway at the Brooks Atkinson Theatre, again receiving several Tony nominations—was one of the highlights for me of that year.

      Now Deaf West Theater has turned their attention to a very different kind of writer in Edward Albee, undertaking the daunting task of performing two of Albee’s mostly “talk” plays, the playwright’s first play The Zoo Story, which late in his life Albee paired with a prequel about Peter’s home life, melding them together (and demanding that all larger companies perform them that way) as At Home at the Zoo.

    Director Coy Midddlebrook, has taken this pairing quite literally, performing them in “chronological” order, with the prequel first to be followed by the notorious encounter between Peter and Jerry in the park. Actually, I might have preferred to seen these two works done in the opposite order, backing up the stunningly absurdist early play, The Zoo Story—a play I so revered that I republished it as the first work in Mac Wellman’s and my From the Other Side of the Century II: A New American Drama 1960-1995—with its more literal explanation of events in the “at home” segment. But then, I don’t think the later written section is a very good play, and am disappointed in Albee’s decision to recast his remarkable early work—the reaction of an old man seeking to explain things.

      The entire issue of At Home at the Zoo, is Peter’s inability to lead anything but a safe and careful life, with two daughters, two cats, two birds, and a wife who he safely loves as he tucks himself away at work on editing large academic texts, currently reading the most boring book in the world, but, which he quips, might also be one of the most important. His wife, Ann (Amber Zion), is still in love with her husband Peter (Troy Kotsur), despite the years of detachment. But recently she has been having difficulty in sleeping, and has imaginings of hacking off her breasts and acting in strange ways, such as walking to the apartment lobby and exposing herself.

      Aghast, Peter cannot comprehend her “imaginings,” and wonders what has happened to the good life they have worked to develop. Gradually Albee reveals that the major problem is that Peter has become a domesticated animal, a bit like the family’s birds and cats, with none of the wild animal human desires which help to make life exciting, and Ann is bored by their quiet shell of a life.

       Set designer Karyl Newman has subtly reiterated these issues by placing, at the sides of their comfy apartment, decorative lines of a cage, suggesting that even in this family’s normalcy, there are elements of wild animal urges which Peter refuses to face, only in this afternoon conversation revealing that back in his college days he had actually given in to just such dangers urges at a fraternity party, harming a young coed through violently anal sex.

     Yet, even after, he cannot comprehend the ideas Ann is trying to express, and leaves her in confusion, determining to retreat to his favorite bench in Central Park to read a book.

 

     It is there that he encounters the wild beast, Jerry (a role, here split by two actors, Russell Harvard and Tyrone Giordano; I believe we saw Russell Harvard in the role). Through Jerry’s frontal assault of the quiet Peter, his outright challenges, his attempts to “get to know” the reticent reader, and his increasingly disturbing and violent tales—particularly the one about his nasty landlady and her threatening dog—which gradually converge into an outright attack as he demands ownership of Peter’s bench. Along with Albee’s subtle (and not so-subtle) distinctions of class, and the homoerotic overtones (again, sometimes not as subtle as we might be led to believe), the conversation eventually ends with the unexpected murder of Jerry by Peter; in short, where Ann has failed, Jerry succeeds, quite successfully, in bringing out the animal in the now utterly confused Peter, told by his victim to pick up his book and run; in so doing, Jerry becomes almost a sacrificial lamb to verify Peter’s bestiality. By the end, it is clear that Peter is more moved by the male relationship he has suddenly developed with Jerry than his more standard heterosexual one his has with Ann.

     One might argue that these became Albee’s standard themes throughout his career: how the animal in us was always ready to break out at any moment. In numerous of his plays, including Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, A Delicate Balance, Seascape, and The Goat, we can observe these same dynamics, almost empty banter and bored conversation quickly turning into violent threats which result in a behavior that shows we are much closer to the animal world that we suspect.

     But the art of Albee lies in the early pretense, in each play, that we have weaned ourselves from our bestial natures, representing the ordinariness of our lives just before we bear our fangs. 

    Shamefully, I don’t know anything about the difficulties of expressing complex concepts in American Sign Language, but it appeared to me that the deaf actors of this company were exaggerating what in the voiced roles (by Jake Eberle, Jeff Alan-Lee, and Paige Lindsey White) was expressed much more subtly. Watching this play, it appeared that there was simply a problem in translation, as particularly Kotsur in the first act and even more so, Harvard as Jerry in the second, acted in a way that seemed overstated, literalizing a work that is mostly internal and ruminative.

 

    Of course, as I suggested earlier in this piece, I think the author himself also literalized this work in his additions to the original. Do we really need to know that Peter’s wife had previously goaded him into standing his ground and defending his manhood before we see Jerry slowly ground down Peter’s “high” moral values? Alan-Lee was particularly good as the voice of Jerry, almost purring out his taunts rather than visually ranting and raving as the actor of Jerry did. The bench-centered game between Jerry and Peter is almost entirely one of spoken words and voice. Except for the shocking appearance of a knife at play’s end, hardly any motion, other than a few paces back and forth, a circling of his enemy, and the final sinking into his rightful place upon the public bench, followed by a few jabs, is all Albee’s play requires. 

      I would not want to insist that Albee is simply the wrong author for a signed performance, that the process might be a bit like translating the densest “language” poetry into Russian or Japanese; but that may be the case. I admit, I don’t know the answer. I certainly admire DWT’s challenging attempt, and was pleased to be able to see the results; and I am looking forward to their other performances. This small company has done more to give voice to deaf actors than almost any other company I know of.

       

Los Angeles, March 19, 2017

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