Stephen Sondheim and George Furth | Merrily We Roll Along / 2010 and 2016

the believers and those who have lost faith

by Douglas Messerli

 

Stephen Sondheim (music and lyrics), George Furth (book, based on the play by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart) Merrily We Roll Along / the versions I saw were at Crossley Terrace Theatre at the First Presbyterian Church in Hollywood in 2010 and the production on Saturday, November 27, 2016 at the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts / Bram Goldsmith Theater

 

Howard and I first saw Stephen Sondheim’s 1981 musical, revised from a version of Off-Broadway in 1994, at the Crossley Terrace Theatre at the First Presbyterian Church in Hollywood in 2010. I remember it as a very pleasant amateur production with a small, somewhat difficult-to-hear combo playing from off stage. One of the local Los Angeles reviewers, Philip Brandes, described it as “Making the most of modest resources, a heartfelt, committed revival from Actors Co-op,” which “shows why this under-appreciated Stephen Sondheim-George Furth musical has steadily risen in stature since its initial commercial failure….” Other local reviewers equally praised it.

        Inexplicably, Howard does not recall our attending it, but I remember several of its excellent songs, including “Not a Day Goes By” and the musical’s final number which—since the play moves backward from 1976-1957—is actually the first sentiments of the work’s three major characters, a lovely song of the belief in their futures, “Our Time,” which expresses the hopes of every generation, this witnessing the New York flyby of the Russian satellite, Sputnik.  “Old Friends,” the funny-angry song “Franklin Shepard, Inc,” “It’s a Hit,” and “Good Thing Going” were also among the musical’s high points.

      But I also recall that both Howard and I were startled by a work, based on a 1934 play by the famed writing team of George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart, which expressed such clear cynicism. Probably because I had already spoken, in several pieces of Sondheim’s dark cynicism in other works, I chose not to review the piece that year. And, “as the days go by,” I’m happy now that I didn’t review it for the 2010 volume.

      For now—having just come away from the wonderfully produced and marvelously acted and sung version, directed by Michael Arden for the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts in Beverly Hills—I realize just how wonderfully theatrical Sondheim’s and Furth’s musical is, despite the cynicism it expressed for its lead character Franklin Shepard (Aaron Lazar), who falls into the spider’s web of singer-lover Gussie Carnegie (Saycon Sengbloh), that the other central figures had, in fact, retained their faith in the future, even if, in the very first scene, Franklin’s friend Mary Flynn (Donna Vivino)—who gets incredibly drunk at the Hollywood party to celebrate the clearly mediocre movie he has just produced—so berates his hangers-on that she will never again be allowed to be in Franklin’s presence, just as his other “old friend,” Charley Kringas (the truly marvelous Wayne Brady) has previously been banned. By the end of this first scene, the last in the musical’s chronology, Franklin, having now been abandoned by his second wife, Gussie, is left alone with no one but himself to help him understand how seriously he has fucked up his life.

      Over the course of 20 years of particular scenes—in the musical’s backward scenario, from 1976, 1973, 1968, 1966, 1964, 1960, 1959, and 1957—we watch the gradual devolution of Frank from a dreamer about creating serious music (the only thing he’s really good at) to a  man who cheats on his first wife, Beth, and later his second wife, Gussie, and is willing to give up almost all of his formerly challenging concepts for mediocre projects that produce money but offer little intellectual or spiritual challenges. Those who most loved him, one by one, are forced to admit his hollow core, and do so in quite painful terms, particularly in Charley’s on-TV interview—in another highly embarrassing moment for Franklin—“Franklin Shepard, Inc,”—and, after the first scene breakdown, in Mary’s own rendition of “Not a Day Goes By” (sung oddly enough—while making it utterly apparent that Mary has perhaps a deeper love for him that his fiancée—as a trio between Franklin and his new wife, Beth). In almost every step along the way, Franklin, because of his selfishness, inner greed, and lack of true feeling, makes the wrong decisions—winding up with all the praise of his fawning “blob” mob peers and lots of money, but with no self-respect; while the formerly diminished Charley, whose last name their first producer, Joe Josephson  (Amir Talai) cannot even remember, receives a Pulitzer Prize for his plays—the writer’s not very believable symbol for true recognition of talent; and, even if she can no longer write, Mary had, at least, a best-selling novel—equally non-convincing, but again a symbol for the audience to perceive that she has talent. In short, for all Franklin’s financial success, by play’s end (represented in the work’s beginning) he has very little to show for all of his wonderful dreams, for which everyone previously loved him.

       To stitch all of these various “scenes” together, Sondheim—always a genius with ensemble pieces—creates a series of “transitions” with songs such as the title work, “Merrily We Roll Along” and the “Blob” songs, as well as numerous repetitions and reprises. Today, particularly, in a grandly produced production such as this one, with full sets (a maybe overly-busy representation of numerous bulb-lit actor’s mirrors and larger mirrors which reiterate both the theater world and the self-consciousness involved with those portrayed) and a wide range of believable costumes (both by Dane Laffrey) I finally realized just how innovative Sondheim’s musical was in 1981, when it bombed after 16 performances (more about that below). As director Arden wrote in the program: “

 

        I think they [Sondheim and Furth] wrote this musical a little before

        its time because I can’t imagine anyone having a hard time following

        it now. If anything, Merrily provides us an opportunity for reflection.

 

        I have a history of tearing up whenever I see what I might describe as a near-perfect musical. The great acting and singing of these actors, particularly given the various trajectories in which the plot took them from their earliest dreams and imaginations, left me with very few moments of dry eyes, and sometimes, embarrassingly—but I still proudly admit—I even had to control an occasional sob. As I’ve often written, when it comes to the American musical, I am a true sentimentalist—particularly when comes to any musical from 1940-1960, and any Sondheim musical after.

        And this time round, Merrily We Roll Along seemed not simply cynical, but a story of moral precaution. One can chose, with careful thinking and emotional response, which way to go; and, particularly with the collaboration of friends, one can devote one’s life to the more complex and difficult, instead of giving into the demands of those who find that music and art have to be “hummable” and simply popular in order to, as Gussie puts it, “get what you want.” The continued “question” of ensemble members, “how did I get here?” is absolutely made clear in Sondheim’s and Furth’s lucid work. Whether or not Franklin will be ever able to perceive that answer is open to question, but by the time the musical finishes, revealing his former glorious belief in his own generation, we no longer care, for he has desperately failed to live up to his own dreaming.

 

Los Angeles, November 27, 2016

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

The Wooster Group | Early Shaker Spirituals: A Record Album Interpretation / 2015

all shook up

by Douglas Messerli

 

The Wooster Group Early Shaker Spirituals: A Record Album Interpretation / the performance I saw was at Redcat (Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater) at Disney Hall, Los Angeles, January 22, 2015

 

In the Wooster Group’s new production of Early Shaker Spirituals: A Record Album Interpretation, it appears that the company has, if not reached a kind of crossroads, perhaps paused to reconsider its direction. Unlike many such experimentally-based theatrical companies, whose major activities included deconstructing major and minor theatrical works, the Wooster Group have generally layered their productions of “classical” works with technological elements (videos, multiple cameras, radio and phonographic soundtracks, and various other aural additions)—most apparent in productions such as Tennessee Williams’ Vieux Carré, Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida (retitled Cry, Trojans!), and North Atlantic—or with seemingly conflicting genres, such as the mash-up of opera and grade-B films in La Didone. Yet they have also done several productions of American classics by Eugene O’Neill, in particular, in which they have peeled away the layers of literary varnish that have accrued, revealing in the early O’Neill sea plays, The Hairy Ape and The Emperor Jones, a vitality that had long been lost. And it is in this tradition, with a truly stark and unornamented “recreation” of art, that Early Shaker Spirituals falls.

     But here, in a new way that is not apparent in their other works, this important American institution seems to have moved further in a direction that questions and challenges the ironic sensibility that seems present in some of their previous productions. At moments, the narration almost plays with the potential of the ironic, beginning with the male introducer (Jamie Poskin) who contextualizes the performances we are about to encounter. Noting that the group has already “recreated” extant records, including Hula and L.S.D, the current recreation of recordings made by the Shakers in 1965, 1970, and 1976 potentially might be another “jumping off spot” for a series of reevaluations of US culture. Yet, once the quaintly dressed women singers—Cynthia Hedstrom, Elizabeth LeCompte, Frances McDormand, Bebe Miller, and Suzzy Roche—begin their series of 20 early Shaker spirituals, we recognize that whatever humor exists in the work existed already in the minds of the original creators. For the most part, these are pure creations of love and commitment to God, based on a life of “bending, reeling, winding, linking, and intertwining their human ways” with those of the Holy Spirit.

    Yes, a DJ-like figure does play, on the side and in back of the action, the record itself, snatches of which we can hear after the singers have performed and which, we quickly perceive, they themselves are listening to as they sing “along” to the original works. But these technological additions (if, in their simplicity, they can even be described that way) serve simply as markers and musical cues (how do you sing a capella on pitch without a pitch pipe?) rather than representing another layer between the performers and audience. Indeed, the actors appear to be attempting to render their simple songs in the same amateur (arising from the pleasure and love of singing rather than a professional ability) manner as the original Shaker singers. This is particularly notable when Frances McDormand explains the origins of one of the songs, pausing, interrupting herself, and retelling the story in a way that is meant to perfectly imitate the original on the recording.

     Like the starkly simple set and their homespun costumes, the performers are clearly attempting to duplicate the original, to create a mimetic image, rather than to comment on or give greater significance to the original. If these figures occasionally exchange private glances, share brief phrases of conversation and rather formally exchange positions with each other, it is not meant as commentary as much as it is to suggest that the Shaker singers recognized themselves as apart from the community before whom they were performing. From our contemporary viewpoint, these women are quaint outsiders, slightly strange. But by bridging that gap, they are attempting, if nothing else, to communicate Shaker values to us. Accordingly, the Wooster Group performers are in the strange position of existing on our side of reality, while attempting to project something other.

     This is made even more apparent when, in the second part of the program, the women gather to dance to some of the very same songs which they have just sung. One of the major elements of Shaker religious ceremonies, and part of the reason why they were described as “shakers” was that their dances were highly formalized combinations of hand gestures and movements of their feet. Given the beautiful lyrics and the rhythms of the songs, which completely transform and help to reveal that what we have aurally experienced in.Elder Joseph’s beautiful anthem to simplicity, as the expressions of “coming down,” the “bow and the bend,” and the “turning, turning” is literalized and made concrete in movement:

 

                            'Tis the gift to be simple, 'tis the gift to be free

                               'Tis the gift to come down where we ought to be,

                             And when we find ourselves in the place just right,

                                'Twill be in the valley of love and delight.

 

                            When true simplicity is gain'd,

                               To bow and to bend we shan't be asham'd,

                            To turn, turn will be our delight,

                                Till by turning, turning we come 'round right.

 

In this second portion, moreover, the Shaker past is reintegrated with our present, as the male dancers, dressed in modern costume, move in an outer ring which, although continues to segregate them from the women of the past, still brings them together through and space, the “you” being joined with the “I,” or the “them” with the “us”—as it necessarily must be since, presumably, the dances are a respectful “re-creation,” a stylized imaginative “reconstruction” of actual Shaker dances, rather than, like the songs, a faithful imitation.

     In short, in presenting Early Shaker Spirituals the group is no longer attempting to reconceive a theatrical event of the past, nor even to revitalize it, but to respectfully reiterate it, exploring the songs and dances for what they originally offered rather than reimagining what they might now mean for us.

    The quietude of the audience throughout these songs and dances suggests not only a certain awe of the beautiful simplicity of the works but represents a recognition of the distance between ourselves and the art we are encountering. But it is just that distance, that awe of something slightly removed from ourselves that, when we ultimately perceive it as still having so much meaning, results in the final release of joyful applause. If the Shakers saw it as a religious experience, today we describe that, more often, as art.

     Given the various directions the Wooster Group has moved over its glorious existence since 1975, it would be absurd to attempt to describe what might be expected in their future works; but it is clear that at least some of their members have found new meaning in the original art without needing to overlay it with contemporary innovations and irony.

 

Los Angeles, January 21, 2015

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (January 2105).

 

Gioachino Rossini and Cesare Sterbini | Il barbiere di siviglia, ossia L'inutile precauzione (The Barber of Seville, or The Useless Precaution) / 2007 [the Metropolitan Opera HD-live broadcast]

the crazy house

by Douglas Messerli

 

Gioachino Rossini (composer), Cesare Sterbini (Libretto, based on the play by Pierre Beaumarchais), Bartlett Sher (stage director), Gary Halvorson (film director) Il barbiere di siviglia, ossia L'inutile precauzione (The Barber of Seville, or The Useless Precaution) / 2007 [the Metropolitan Opera HD-live broadcast]

The great Peruvian tenor Juan Diego Flórez, sometimes described as Pavarotti's heir, who performed Count Almaviva in the Met production of The Barber of Seville Howard and I recently saw is also known also for his performances in La Fille du Régiment, one of Pavarotti's greatest achievements.

     Accordingly, it seems appropriate that I briefly discuss the Metropolitan Opera's wonderful production of The Barber, whose overall production values, overseen by Bartlett Sher, and brilliant operatic performances by Joyce DiDonato as Rosina, Peter Mattei as Figaro, John Del Carlo as Dr. Bartolo, John Relyea as Don Basilio, Claudia Waite as Berta, and, particularly, Flórez as the Count (whose "Ah! qual colpo inaspettato!" nearly stopped the opera with audience applause) were memorable.

  

     The story of The Barber of Seville, as most opera-goers know, is a simple one, the kind of contrived plot behind hundreds of 17th and 18th century farces. Count Almaviva, having espied Rosina in the streets, has fallen in love and followed her to Seville, where he disguises himself as a poor student, Lindoro. Rosina is equally in love with the young man, but is locked away in the house of her guardian, Dr. Bartolo, advised by the musician Basilio, who warns him of the Count's love for Bartolo's ward. Hearing of the Count's interest and the arrival in Seville of a young man, Bartolo tightens the young girl's security, since he himself intends to marry her.

      Figaro, the local barber who has entry to all homes and—so it appears—hearts, is an old friend of the Count, and plots with him how the Count might enter Bartolo's house. He will disguise himself yet again, this time as a drunken soldier, ordered to be billeted in Bartolo's home. When that ends in chaos and failure, the Count visits the house as a disciple of Don Basilio to teach Rosina a music lesson, plotting with her their escape that night.

     The rest of the story predictably involves around a number of temporary setbacks and detours, but ends in the joyful marriage of Rosina to the Count with a nod to Figaro's necessary help, although by opera's end it does almost seem that if the Count had simply appeared as himself in the beginning he might more easily have won Rosina's hand, as if, as the subtitle suggests, all his precautions were useless. But then, of course, there would have been no occasion around which to weave Rossini's joyous arias!

      Aspects of this plot have been employed in so many instances that it may sound to the reader than I am describing another opera or play. The flaxen-haired ward of Judge Turpin in Sweeney Todd, Lucy, a young girl also held against her will, whom the lecherous Judge intends to marry, quickly springs to mind.

      What makes Rossini's version refreshing, however, is the heady willfulness of his heroine, who from the first scene is determined to get the man she wants and is so artful in her quick-witted lies that the audience gasps as she nearly outfoxes her suspicious guardian. In Act II, when Bartolo suggests the letter of love he possesses was sent by the count to another woman, so strong is Rosina's sense of vengeance that she is willing to destroy her own life by marrying the old coot. In short, we can only feel a comic delight when the Count sings of the pains and sorrows the poor, innocent girl has had to suffer; for the woman with whom he will awake in the morning is, in fact, another being than the one of which he sings. There is, indeed, a kind of madness in his love.

      Not only is Rossini's opera, at times, a madcap farce, but is a work that speaks again and again of madness. It is, first of all, a world dominated by the busy activities of Figaro, involved as he is in the secrets and scandals of city life.  Despite the seemingly sequestered world of Dr. Bartolo's house wherein Rosina is confined, moreover, people rush in and out on a regular basis, particularly the Count, first as a soldier, then as a musician; but so too does Figaro feel, evidently, at home in the place, so much so that he is even able to obtain Bartolo's keys. At one point, when Basilio is locked out of the house, he simply pulls apart the iron gate that protects the place. These comings and goings provoke such an uproar at the end of Act I that a crowd gathers in the streets outside the home and the civil guard arrives to correct the chaos. The maid, Berta, sings of the crazy household ("Il vecchitto cerca moglie."). Madness reigns throughout this opera, a storm accompanying even the would-be saviors of Rosina. Is it any wonder that when order is restored, Bartolo defeated, and the Count married to his love, we who have witnessed all these events can only suspect that Rosina and Almaviva may soon continue that chaos in their own new abode.

 

Los Angeles, September 26, 2007

Reprinted from Green Integer Blog (August 2009).

Rogelio Orizondo, with Carlos Díaz | Antignón, un contigente épico / 2017

 

a tragic cabaret

by Douglas Messerli

 

Rogelio Orizondo (text, with dramaturgy by Orizondo and Carlos Díaz), Antignón, un contigente épico / Redcat (Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater), the performance I saw was on March 15, 2017

  

Based on a very unreliable telling of Sophocles’ Antigone, the Cuban theater company Teatro El Público explores several issues of that play in the context of Cuban history, beginning, in part, with the poetry of José Martí. Yes, here two there appear to be two brothers, at once in love with each other and warring against one another (they appear naked in the earliest scenes), along with two sisters, also naked, presumably surrogates of Antigone and Ismene.

 

     We might imagine the brothers are similar to Che and Fidel Castro, fighting over how the Cuban revolution should be defined; but there the similarities stop, as the company explores, in cabaret-like skits the various elements of contemporary Cuba, the often open sexuality, the macho-like battles played out on the streets (performed deliciously, in this case, by two women actors, with water bottles serving as their cocks), the importance of the scout movement in government indoctrination, and, through old, grainy films, the relationship of the island’s culture to its Soviet relationships.

       Violence and camp alternate, as the characters present their world in a kind of shadow-relationship with the tragic epic of Sophocles play, while reminding us that they are diverted by contemporary exigencies.

       The great wonder of this production is the cast, Giselda Caler, Daysi Forcade, Luis Manuel Álvarez, Roberto Espinosa, and Linnet Hernádez, in and out of dress, more often as the play proceeds, dressed in outrageous costumes that reflect their changing attitudes. Even though their Spanish was highlighted on an English-language theater light-board, those shifting values often went by so fast, that for the English-language reader, they were sometimes hard to follow.

        But the many absurd edicts and proclamations that come down from on high translate well: “Most theater directors, we learn are homosexual. Many actors are homosexual. All of the actors of Teatro El Público are homosexual,” so one of these edicts proclaims. Even the character of the beautiful Martí poem quoted in the program seems to have a gay friend, a poet who “cleans houses in order to survive” and whom the author finds “in front of the Capitol building…./ looking at, longing for (I believe) those other dumb dirty boys / who make the Zona Rosa a fun place in the city.”

      We have only to remind ourselves of all the great Cuban gay and lesbian writers: Reinaldo Arenas, José Lezama Lima, Eduardo Machado, Virgilio Piñera, Juana María Rodríguez, Severo Sarduy, and Ana María Simo, to name only a few, to realize that despite Castro’s seeming homophobia, life in this world is far more than diverse, particularly given the island’s Spanish, Asian, African, and other roots.

     Playwright Rogelio Orizondo and director Carlos Díaz do not so much “discuss” these issues as to throw them out in the cabaret-performances as various possibilities, and probable alternatives to the tragedy behind Cuban history. If Polyneices is not permitted to be buried and Antigone is ordered to be buried alive, these sassy figures, nonetheless, transform Creon’s world in which they live. While film, we are told, is quickly censored in Cuban life, Cuban theater continues to present fresh and energized viewpoints as expressed by these excellent performers.

     As critic Manuel García Martinez wrote of this production, “Throughout the discourse they claimed freedom and sensuality for their own personal life.” In general, the company members’ pizazz and sass made up for any of the seeming incoherencies of their tale. Like dreamy carnival performers, these theatrical hoofers made you want to believe in Cuba’s future.

 

Los Angeles, March 16, 2017

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

The Wooster Group | La Didone / 2009

forces of gravity

by Douglas Messerli

 

Giovanni Francesco Busenello (libretto), Francesco Cavalli (music), additional text: Terrore nello spazio (Planet of the Vampires), a film by Mario Bava, 1965 and Queen of Outer Space, a film by Edward Bernds, 1958 La Didone / Redcat (Roy and Edna Disney-CalArts Theater), Los Angeles / the performance I saw was on June 14, 2009

 

Known for its innovative retellings of major dramas and events (Hamlet, The Hairy Ape, The Emperor Jones, etc.) The Wooster Group has moved into even more challenging territory with their newest extravaganza, La Didone, a retelling, in operatic form, of Francesco Cavalli's 1641 opera of the Carthagian Queen Dido and her new lover, Aeneas.

     Not only has director Elizabeth LeCompte taken on the challenges of opera in this work, but has overlaid the Cavalli work (unknown to most opera-goers) with a grade-B science fiction story, directed by the Italian film maker Mario Bava, Terrore nello spazio, known in this country as Planet of the Vampires. The film has it fans, Ridley Scott among them, whose film Alien was obviously influenced by this campy movie.

     On some levels it seems quite justifiable—and may have appeared to be absolutely "brilliant" in the early inception of the work—to bring the two, what used to be called "high culture" and "low culture" together, allowing them to comment on each other and to elucidate related themes. Both worlds, Dido's Carthage and the planet Aura, are visited by outsiders: Aeneas, prince of Troy, washes up upon the shores of Africa after a deadly sea storm; the spaceships Argos and Galliot, investigating mysterious signals coming from Aura, are caught in a force of gravity and plummet quickly to the new planet's surface, the Galliot destroyed in the process.

     That same kind of gravitational pull seems to happen to Aeneas, as Cupid (disguised as Aeneas' son Ascanius) plunges an arrow into Dido's breast, who, having remained true to her the memory of her dead husband, suddenly finds herself madly in love with the visiting stranger.

     The worlds for both sets of explorers suddenly shifts, as the remaining members of the Argos crew senses strange beings around them who they cannot see, and Aeneas is drawn into a boar hunt—presented almost as a frenzied sexual prelude—during which he and Dido retire to a cave to make love.

     The inhabitants of the planet Aura, in turns out, are invisible beings whose sun is dying, and who can survive only by taking over the bodies of their visitors. As in Invasion of the Body Snatchers, these beings become the people whose bodies they invade; and, as the now-repaired Argos takes off into space, there appears to be only one "real" survivor left, the others having been transformed to Aurans.

      Similarly, Dido hopes by conquering the heart of Aeneas to lure him into Carthage society. But the gods call him back to Italy, and Dido is left alone with a broken heart. In the Aeneid she commits suicide, but in Cavalli's version, she regains her sanity, marrying the nearby King Jarbas, who has long been in love with her.

      The Argonauts, in a Rod Serling-like plot development, realizing they do not have the energy to return home, choose a planet on which to settle: the third planet from the sun. We realize that either we are already the ancestors of these alien zombies or are about to be invaded.

     As always, The Wooster Group performs all of this lunacy with great seriousness, and that, in turn, saves most of this work from simply becoming camp. The singing, particularly Hai-Ting Chinn's Dido, John Young's Aeneas, and Andrew Nolen's Jarbas, was excellent and entices one to see the complete Cavalli opera (the original lasts 4-5 hours, while this production ran for about an hour and a half). Yet for all of the bravado and talent of the company, there remained something about the production that left one feeling that the connections were frail and facile.

     Certainly, it challenged its audience. Just the attempt to keep two simultaneous stories—the one in Italian, the other in a quietly-spoken film jargon—both of whose words often scrolled quickly forward at the same moment that computer screens deliver up various images, was, as Los Angeles Times theater critic Charles McNulty described it, "an exhausting cerebral spin." Experienced often enough, such intellectual activity could possibly save one from early dementia.

      Yet, at heart, I felt this work was intellectually empty, and spiritually had no real soul. The laughter it evoked was from the bland sci-fi jargon ("How do we repair the meteor rejector, Mark?), while the delight it offered was only of the musical sort. Between the two lay a hollow art.   

 

Los Angeles, June 18, 2009

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

 

John Kelly | Time No Line / 2019

against linear time

by Douglas Messerli

 

John Kelly Time No Line / the performance I saw with Pablo Capra was at REDCAT (Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater) on April 25, 2019

 

It is difficult to know how to describe John Kelly’s one-man performance, Time No Line, which I saw last night at REDCAT in downtown Los Angeles. That difficulty has partly to do with the fact that Kelly’s work is so many different things: a kind of muted autobiographical commentary (this particular work is based on his journals begun in 1976 and continuing into the present), a history of his involvement with dance (he performed briefly with The American Ballet Theater), art (for a while he studied with Larry Rivers), and music (he sings a couple of songs in drag and talks of his passion for opera), a kind of silent film presentation, and, perhaps most importantly, a testimony to the many friends he has lost of AIDS over the years.

     The lean and handsome Kelly has had a fascinating and often horrifying life. Playing, in the past, figures such as Joni Mitchell, Egon Schiele, and Caravaggio, Kelly was himself diagnosed as HIV-positive and broke his neck at another point while learning how to sing on a trapeze while playing the female impersonator of the 1920s, Barbette.

      If there’s a sort of self-obsession about this work simply because the performer puts himself front and center as such a multi-talented actor, there is also a kind of humility in his sharing of so many loves, endurances, and embarrassments.

     As reviewer Dan Callahan wrote in The Village Voice, “Kelly’s Time No Line is less about himself and more about the people he has lost.” The people of whom he speaks, some of them with whom I shared distant friendships, became ghosts that haunt his memory, and even when he is sharing his own artistic experiences, Kelly himself becomes a kind of ghost, explaining—or perhaps, at moments, self-justifying—his highly checkered past from dancing with ballet companies, performing in famed art venues such as La MaMa (where this performance appeared in 2018), The Whitney Museum of Art, the Walker Art Center, The Andy Warhol Museum, The Tate Modern and, as well in far less grand East Village venues such as Limbo Lounge, Pyramid Club, Club 57, and the gay bar The Anvil (where long before his 1980 performances there, I met my first lover, the year before returning to the university to encounter my husband of now almost 50 years.)

      It’s a kind of heady mix to perform a song in one of his drag singer’s persona and in the next minute talk about Bush-appointee to the chair of the National Endowment for the Arts, John Frohnmayer who notoriously nixed NEA grants awarded by that year’s panel to Tim Miller, John Fleck, Holly Hughes, and Karen Finley. At one point Kelly chalks a kind of version of Leonardo Da Vinci’s The Vitruvian Man on the stage floor.

     At moments Kelly reads from his journal before performing unscripted events involving props and interacting with his own images from his past projected on a back screen. It’s quite clear, as Kelly has described himself elsewhere, he is a “range queen,” a bit like performer Joey Arias (whom Kelly mentions in passing), a person who can, instant by instant, transform himself, a kind of artist-warrior who battles notions of gender and a notion of a coherent being.

     To comprehend his performances you have almost to imagine a genius-child dressing up and acting out nearly everyone figure he loves before his bedroom mirror. Only, the fun thing in this case is that we get to be there, to share his wonderment of human life, even if so many of them people and events are now phantoms. Time, in Kelly’s world is not linear, but endlessly circular and even overlaid with both present and past.

     The rather young—I think I may have been the eldest member of the audience—and sophisticated REDCAT attendees clearly assimilated and enjoyed Kelly’s chameleon-like work, even if they might not always know the figures of whom he speaks and enacts. This man/woman/ child gets to have it all along with the much deserved applause.

 

Los Angeles, April 26, 2019

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