Henrik Ibsen | Ghosts / 1987 [BBC TV production]

some questions to ibsen about his ghosts

by Douglas Messerli

 

Henrik Ibsen (writer), Elijah Moshinsky (director) Ghosts / 1987 [BBC TV production]

 

I must presume that nearly everyone who has and is currently reading my USTheater, Opera, and Performance website and the many volumes of my annually produced My Year will know something, and may even have possibly read Ibsen’s 1881 drama, which had its premiere in, of all places, Chicago, Illinois in 1882, performed by a traveling Danish theater company, made up of mostly amateur performers.

     This play, if you recall, is not a work about tragic figures who are punished for their refusal to live up to the society’s moral values, but are brought down, quite ironically, by their refusal to break the strict values of the late 19th century provincial world in which they live.

      In particular, the seemingly saintly Mrs. Alving (quite brilliantly acted in this BBC production by Judi Dench), after long enduring her husband’s “degeneration”—which consists, evidently, of wine and women, including bedding the house maid Johanna—she rushes into the arms of her local pastor, Manders (Michael Gambon), for advice and, so it seems from her later confidences, perhaps even for love.

      Insisting that she return home to help her husband defeat his devils—a common dictum even today among hypocritical spiritual advisors who order women to remain in the bondage of abusive relationships—she has been forced as a young inexperience woman to fend for herself. Given the intelligence and fortitude Mrs. Alving naturally possesses, she returns, sending her young son, at a far too early age, to Paris to study art, she taking over her disinterested husband’s financial affairs which, upon his death, has made her a wealthy woman.

     Now, years later, she is able to build an orphanage in his name, partly a tribute to her guilty conscience and, at the same time, an attempt to close all debts, emotionally and morally, she may feel she still owed her entrapped husband—particularly after she has come to realize that as entangled as she was in a relationship of deceit, so was Captain Alving ensnared by close-minded values of those around him, including herself.

     Into this hothouse of sorrow and guilt, her son Oswald (Kenneth Branagh), after having some success in his artistic career, returns to the isolated, always darkened but immaculately kept house, presumably to help celebrate the new orphanage, but actually because he is having difficulty in seeing which has sent him to a doctor who, as close as Ibsen himself is able to speak the truth, is diagnosed as having a “softening of the brain”—or, in modern parlance, the young man is suffering from inherited syphilis and will soon become blind.

      All of this is complicated by Manders’ visit to the Alving manse to deliver a speech for the opening of the orphanage, a time when Mrs. Alving also chooses to reveal to him that her husband was the father of the beautiful young woman now working as her housemaid Regina (Natasha Richardson), not the often drunken and truly hypocritical Engstrand, who by cozying up to the pastor has hoped to get his “daughter” to return to town with him, where he plans to open a “home for wandering sailors” with perhaps a little grant for his new enterprise as well.

      As if things were not bad enough, Oswald appears to have taken a romantic liking to Regina, who unknown to either of them, are half sister and brother.

      Now that I’ve refreshed your memories a bit, I have two major questions to ask, both of which, have troubled me since I first read this play in Norway as a 16-year-old.

    Let me begin, Mr. Ibsen, with the problem of Engstrand (Freddie Jones), who is also the first character of your dark drama to express his chicanery. The savvy Regina immediately sees through his proposals to create a home for sailors, particularly when he insists that she come “home” to help him run it. The “home” clearly is to be a whorehouse, and the feisty woman whom Mrs. Alving has helped to educate wants nothing at all to do with it. Besides, it is clear that she has her eyes on the young son of the Alving family, who has previously promised to take her back with him to Paris. In secret she has even learned French. Indeed, Regina is quite openly embarrassed by her “father,” and several times insists he leave her and the house immediately.

     Engstrand, while later pretending a newfound religiosity, invites Manders to lead the nightly prayers, a ceremony he claims he has instigated for the betterment of his fellow carpenters.

     Even a 16-year-old boy could see through his plot. As the candles are lit for the prayers, flames are ignited by the fresh sawdust of the construction, and the would-be orphanage quickly burns to the ground. Engstrand, certainly the firebug behind the orphanage’s destruction, can now freely, if somewhat subtly, bribe Manders into making sure that he receives some of Mrs. Alving’s remaining funds for his sailor’s home project.

     Given Regina’s immediate recognition of her father’s intentions and Mrs. Alving’s knowledge that he is only the titular father of her husband’s child, how can Manders or anyone else—including Regina, when she finally learns of her true parentage, determines to become a prostitute in the tradition of her mother by returning to town with Engstrand—want anything to do with this scoundrel? Why, Mr. Ibsen, has Mrs. Alving, knowing what she does, even hired him, evidently paying him well, to work on the construction of the orphanage?

     And, of course, you carefully reveal Engstrand’s multiple deceptions—at one point even convincing Manders that in taking in Johanna, while ignoring the money she had been bequeathed by Mrs. Alving, he married her simply out of love and caring for a girl in her predicament.

     Hardly does Manders enter the Alving house, when he appears scandalized that Mrs. Alving is reading contemporary fiction, seriously warning her against their effects, although he has admittedly read none of them.

     A short while later he convinces the benefactress that if she were to buy insurance to cover the new orphanage she (and more particularly he) might be subject to local talk about the necessity to insure something that stood for a godly belief in the betterment of the society around them, both town and country.

     Later, he is outraged by the fact that Oswald has not only regularly dined with his artist friends, many of whom are unmarried and fathers of children, but that Oswald speaks out so strongly for the natural morality of his friends as opposed to church teachings.

     When we finally learn of his long-ago advice to Mrs. Alving and his refusals to accept her desperate love for him, we can only ask, Mr. Ibsen, what on earth was behind Fru Alving’s attraction to this hypocritically babbling idiot in the first place? Even she, when Manders becomes convinced of Engstrand’s defense of his marrying the Alving’s housemaid, calls him a “baby.”

     Dear Mr. Ibsen, why has she even allowed him—given her own self-revelations and her growing investigation of the narrow culture in which she lives—into her house? Letting him run her financial affairs with the orphanage is almost inexplicable. Throughout much of Elijah Moshinsky’s brilliant production, Dench is forced to sit in silent observation of this fool who seems more out of a comic opera or a play by Molière than one the great Norwegian characters of the past drawn from your prolific pen.

     In the end, I feel the Manders figure is almost a statement of your failure, Mr. Ibsen, in this play. If the events of Ghosts with its series of recurring patterns that apparently cannot be contained by its characters suggests a truly contemporary tragedy, its stock figures such as Engstrand and Manders to not feel appropriate to a work that so dutifully explores the intelligent and inquisitive performances of actors such as Dench, Branagh, and Richardson.

     Beyond the revelations of Mrs. Alving and the hard-hearted realism of Regina—we eventually learn that Oswald wanted her to remain close to him so that, when the time came when he would lose his sight, predicting that she would have grown tired of having to deal with such an invalid, Regina might willingly and mercifully have injected him with the morphine he brought back to Norway with him—my only possible justification Engstrand and Manders inclusion in Mrs. Alving’s and Regina’s hearts that the two would-be seers, each in their own way, are also quite blind.

     It is only Oswald, unable now to see even the sun along the horizon of daybreak, who can truly perceive that for all their failures he now must die. His cry of “the sun, the sun” might almost be read as emanating from a kind of new Christ, crying out “Father, forgive them; for they know not what they did.”

     The only choice for the indecisive Mrs. Alving, syringe in hand, is to become a kind of errant Mary, helping to kill her immaculately-birthed* child.

 

*I use this phrase because in Ibsen’s play, Mrs. Alving, who would have certainly passed on her son’s syphilis, seems to be free of all its symptoms.

 

Los Angeles, July 13, 2020

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (July 2020).

Miklos Laszlo | Illotszertór (Parfumerie) / 2013

working against love

by Douglas Messerli

 

Miklos Laszlo Illotszertór (Parfumerie), translated and adapted by E. P. Mowdall (from the English translation by Florence Laszlo) / Beverly Hills, California, Bram Goldsmith Theater in the Wallis Annenberg Center for Performing Arts, the performance I saw was the matinee on November 30, 2013

 

The new Bram Goldsmith Theater in Beverly Hills’ Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts is stunningly beautiful, as well as the set for its first theatrical production which I attended this past Saturday. The play, opening just before Christmas, seemed a perfect selection for the new Annenberg complex, in part because a big element of this play concerns Christmas shopping at a Budapest shop, and the film version of Hungarian Mikos Laszlo’s 1937-based play, The Shop Around the Corner, remains one of most popular of Lubitsch’s cinematic comedies; the musical version of this work, Jerry Bock’s and Sheldon Harnick’s She Loves Me, happens to be one my favorite Broadway musicals of all time, whose New York revival I saw in 1994. Other versions of this play, the movies in the Judy Garland vehicle In the Good Old Summertime and You’ve Got Mail—if not as wonderfully crafted—also attracted large audiences. What a wonderful opportunity, it seemed to me and others to see the ur-version of this popular work.

     Too bad that the original play, at least as adapted by E. P. Dowdall, a nephew of the original playwright, falls so flat. While Lubitsch honed in on the details of character, differentiating the eight employees of Miklos Hammerschmidt’s perfume parlor, Laszlo’s version flattens their personalities. Nearly all the employees of this shop keep secrets from one another that show them up to be self-centered and somewhat unlikeable. The cadish Steven Kadar (Matt Walton) is having a not-so-secret affair with Mrs. Hammerschmidt; Ilona Ritter (Cheryl Lynn Bowers), previously Kadar’s love interest, has a more-or-less permanent fiancée whom she, suddenly and inexplicably, marries before the second act as she disappears from the play. The young delivery boy Arpad Novack (Jacob Kempt) is not only incompetent but an inveterate gossip and a dangerous bicyclist, whose aim is to become a clerk. The play’s two central figures, Amalia Balash (Deborah Ann Woll) and George Horvath (Eddie Kaye Thomas), are selfish, unaware lovers who cannot even recognize one another as their secret correspondents, and spend their working days demeaning one another. Even the somewhat nebbish elder clerk, Sopos (Arye Gross) later admits that it was he, to protect his job, who wrote a note to his boss revealing that Mrs. Hammerschmidt was involved with one of the staff.  Hammerschmidt suspects George is her secret lover and in irritated vengeance fires his most trusted employee on the first day of this drama. Only Miss Molnar and Arpad’s replacement Fritz seem to have no secrets to reveal, but then they are so one-dimensional that they hardly exist. In short, there is something so dislikeable about these figures (as opposed to the movie and musical wherein even rakish Kadar is fairly loveable) that after a few moments of conversation we lose interest in their machinations. The workers of Hammerschmidt’s Parfumerie, alas, if very human, are terribly sympathetic figures.

      All of this might have been ameliorated if the cast could bring life to their roles through their acting skills. It may have been that in the balcony where I sat the acoustics were just not that good, but it seemed more likely that this semi-professional cast was just not up to the demands, declaiming their lines without great commitment to their characters.

     Despite the stunning set (by Allen Moyer), moreover, director Mark Brokaw brought little creativity to their movements across the stage, using his actors primarily to bring various articles in and out of drawers only to take those same objects, soon after, away. The large, highly polished, horseshoe counter at the center of the stage was used less as a spot where they might occasionally converge than as a kind of container in and out of which the various salespeople moved for no apparent reason. The richly brocaded settees were employed more for a placement of perfumed candles than as spaces in which characters might sit upon and share their little communal gossipy. Perhaps this was all intentional, suggesting their own illogical efforts at communication and purposefulness, but, in the end, their aimless actions proved simply distracting. The play, after all, eventually depends on their pausing to reflect—and join in camaraderie.

     Finally, the play itself becomes utterly lethargic as we learn, early on, the work’s major secret: that Amelia and George are unknowingly in love, while the film and musical waited until the second act to allow Georg/Geroge to discover that fact with a visit to a café in the film and to a gypsy nightspot in She Loves Me. In this original version, alas, the suspense upon which the work depends is missing, as George passively refuses to reveal the situation to his postbox correspondent, the play, accordingly, stuttering into puttering repetition. Little in this version seems to mean anything of consequence. Even Mr. Hammerschmidt ultimately gets his wife back, despite her atrocious behavior. Everybody, by play’s end, gets their desired bonus. Although the young Arpad is denied a desired motorcycle in the play, he is pleasurably dragged off to dinner with the Hammerschmidt family. In the film, while the Arpad character has already moved on to a date with a woman, the homeless and overwhelmed Fritz (Rudy in the movie) is rightfully awarded dinner with Mr. Maraschek (the name given the boss in the cinema-version). It is these little, sometimes sentimental, tweaks in the story that make all the difference.

      Certainly there are moments in this work when the character interrelationships momentarily elevate the play into something—as my friend Perla Karney, whom I encountered after in the lobby, described it—“sweet.” Sipos’ fatherly advice to the young George is often engaging, as is his eventual feeling of guilt for having initiated the series of events which culminates in Mr. Hammerschmidt’s attempted suicide. Although he could not match the comic bluster of the film’s Frank Morgan, Schiff’s Hammerschmidt, at times, does nicely convey the saddened confusion of a man who, in his devotion to his job, nearly loses his wife. And the final scenes between George and Amalia (Thomas and Wolf) are touchingly exhilarating as they both suddenly perceive that behind their perpetual spats was love rather than belligerence. And we know, at heart, that Laszlo’s play is a gentle love story of a world gone by. It’s just too bad that this “original” Illotszertór couldn’t live up to the expectations created by its various reincarnations.

 

Los Angeles, December 2, 2013

Reprinted from US Theater, Opera and Performance (December 2013).

Gian-Carlo Menotti | The Medium / 1950, 1977 || The Consul / 1960 || Amahl and the Night Visitors / 1998

strong but fragile survivors

by Douglas Messerli

 

Gian-Carlo Menotti The Medium / Thomas Schippers conducting the Symphony Orchestra of

     Rome Radio Italiana, 1950

Gian-Carlo Menotti The Medium  Peter Morin (director) / Raffi Armenian conducting The Straford 

     Ensemble / 1977 [TV production based on the Comus Music Theatre of Canada Production]

Gian-Carlo Menotti The Consul / Werner Torkanowsky conducting / Produced for television by

     Jean Darlymple, 1960

Gian-Carlo Menotti Amahl and the Night Visitors / NBC Theatre [Hallmark Hall of Fame production]

     1951-1962

 

With Gian-Carlo Menotti’s death on February 1, 2007, the US lost one of its major composers of opera. Even though he had remained throughout his life an Italian citizen, living for the past several years in Monaco and Scotland, Menotti composed and performed his major operas in the US, where he lived for most of his life, companion for years with the composer Samuel Barber and, later, with conductor Thomas Schippers.

     I remember Menotti—as many of my generation might—for his Amahl and the Night Visitors, his so-called Christmas opera, performed annually from 1951 for a number of years on NBC television. The simple story of a poor young shepherd boy’s and his mother’s encounter with the Three Kings, the biblical wise men on their way to witness the birth of the Holy Child, was perhaps my first encounter with opera, a kind of treasured annual event in my house—although my other family members, I am sure, would not have suffered it if I’d not pleaded each year for that special 45 minutes of viewing.

     I’d also seen—although I can’t remember where (perhaps on stage at Waukesha, Wisconsin High School)—a performance of his short L’amour á trois, The Telephone, wherein a young woman, Lucy, is so infatuated with her phone that her lover, Ben cannot hold her attention long enough to propose marriage. His final solution is to telephone with his proposal.

     If the two works I’ve described sound somewhat simplistic and—here comes that terrible word—“popular,” Menotti’s works were just that! Despite my family’s disinterest in Amahl, millions of households did watch it, presumably with great pleasure, annually—at a time when television executives were still testing out various cultural activities (drama, historical reenactments, orchestral music, and opera) on the relatively new medium.

     Menotti’s other operas, moreover, The Medium (1946), The Consul (1950), and The Saint of Bleecker Street (1954), were all performed on Broadway—the first with a run at the Ethel Barrymore Theater in 1947-1948 of 211 performances; the second running eight months and winning the Pulitzer Prize and Drama Critics’ Circle Award; and the third, performed at the Broadway Theater (although with less success), also awarded the Drama Critics’ Circle Award, a second Pulitzer Prize and the New York Music Critics’ Circle Award. Menotti, in short, was popular. Through his highly dramatic plots and appealing, melodic music (the composer is often compared to Puccini), Menotti was able to bring together music, theater, and popular entertainment in a way that is nearly inconceivable today! As music critic Martin Bernheimer described Menotti, he is “a modern composer who writes old-fashioned opera for the masses.”

     One might, contrarily, describe Menotti—along with Leonard Bernstein and a few others—as an innovative composer in his attempts to blend popular theater with a so-called “high” art, a composer who would influence later figures such as Arnold Weinstein (whom I’ve written about in my 2003 volume of these cultural memoirs), Irene Maria Fornes, Stephen Sondheim, Mac Wellman (in works such as The Lesser Magoo) and even me—in my own operatic endeavor with composer Michael Kowalski, Still in Love!

     By the end of his career, however—a career perhaps also shortened by his entrepreneurial activities of the Festival of Two Worlds occurring in both Spoleto, Italy and Charleston, South Carolina—Menotti’s melodically based theater pieces were critically attacked. While his libretto for Samuel Barber’s Vanessa was praised, his own later works—as well as those of Barber—were often scathingly dismissed. Times had changed.

     The critics, in some respects, may be justified for their reactions. There is no question that Menotti’s art is often retardataire; that the high drama of his pieces can appear almost comical to today’s more cynical audiences. Although Menotti’s lyrical works are often as discordant as Bernstein’s, for example, he does not share that composer’s jazz idioms, so brilliantly played out in On the Town and West Side Story. Yet, there are many moments in Menotti’s work that are far more musically challenging than Sondheim’s compositions and match Bernstein’s inventiveness: the overture to Bernstein’s 1955 “comic opera” Candide echoes many elements of Menotti’s earlier “Dance” of Amahl and the Night Visitors, and Bernstein’s Trouble in Tahiti shares many chordal moments with Menotti’s early works.  

     Menotti’s first major opera, The Medium (composed after a short one-act opera buffa, Amelia Goes to the Ball; another television work, The Old Maid and the Thief, and a failed opera seria, The Island God), seems to have been created in a hot-house environment. The very plot of the opera is, at times, absurd. Madame Flora is a medium who, with help of her daughter Monica and a mute, gypsy, servant boy, Toby, defrauds her customers—a couple, the Gobineaus, who are desperate to contact their baby boy, drowned in a decorative lawn fountain, and Mrs. Nolan, come to hear news of her more recently deceased daughter—in order to eke out a meager living. Meanwhile, Monica and Toby, innocently toying with one another during Madame Flora’s absences and drinking binges, have fallen in love.

     Madame Flora arrives home (she has threatened a neighbor lady to force her to repay a loan by sitting on her doorstep for hours) to find that nothing is prepared for the evening’s séance. She threatens both children, particularly Toby, whom she found on the streets of Budapest. The séance is successfully performed with Monica’s lovely interpretation of the two children (“Mother, Mother, are you there?) and Toby’s technical support with the lights and table risings. Near the end of the event, however, Madame feels a touch against her throat, and becomes horrified, demanding the participants depart. She is certain that Toby has somehow been involved in the event, and insistently questions him, later even whipping him as he cowers in fear; yet he cannot (or, Madame Flora is convinced, will not) answer her questions.

     Frightened by his silence and her own doubts, she determines to end the séances and return the money to the Gobineaus and Mrs. Nolan. A week later, however, they show up at the usual time, pleading that she continue the séances. Still affected by the previous week’s events, Madame rejects their pleas, explaining to her former customers just how she has tricked them. Incredibly, they refuse to believe her, insisting that the voices they heard were real, that she must have powers even she does not comprehend. Perceiving them as gullible idiots, she demands they leave her house, soon after requiring the same of Toby. Monica pleads that he is incapable of caring for himself, that he will die on the streets, but Madame Flora is determined to put her fears to rest. She locks Monica in her room and sends the boy off, settling down to drink and ruminate why she, a woman who has seen the worst of war-time events, should now be so frightened by death.

     Toby sneaks back into the house to free Monica and take her away with him. Startled from her drunkenness, the medium reaches for her gun, shooting into the dark: Toby is dead.

    Such grand, histrionic events need to be performed and directed in a similar manner if the opera is to succeed. I purchased two DVD’s of The Medium, the first a televised production from 1977 by The Stratford Ensemble with Maureen Forrester as Madame Flora and Shawna Farrell as Monica. This was a toned-down production, Forrester speaking many of her lines, some scenes pared away, the set starkly barren. I found the production enjoyable—but somewhat unconvincing. The second production—the earlier 1951 Menotti-directed film with Thomas Schippers conducting the Symphony Orchestra of Rome Radio Italiana and Marie Powers and Anna Maria Alberghetti in the major roles—was wonderfully over-the-top and cinematically conceived. As the reviewer for the Time Out Film Guide expressed it: “With monstrous characters and images only conceivable in a fevered or operatic mind (where else would one find Toby the deaf mute gypsy boy, his defiant eyelids sealed with hot candle wax), yet fully realizable nowhere else but the cinema.”

     The 1960 Jean Dalrymple-produced television production of Menotti’s The Consul was presented in the drab, gritty black-and-white of early TV. But Patricia Neway’s performance of Magda Sorel captured the slightly mad actions of a woman psychologically on the edge. Her husband, after all, is an underground hero, forced in the very first scene of the opera to leave his home—to cross the frontier—so that he will not betray his compatriots. Their baby son, watched over by the husband’s aged mother, is slowly starving to death.

    This couple’s sorrowful duet of departure, transformed by the mother’s participation into a trio, is centered upon what are perhaps some of the looniest lyrics ever created:

 

                    Now, O lips, say goodbye

                    The word must be said but the heart must not heed.

                    ….

                    The rose holds summer in her winter sleep.

                    The sea gathers moonlight where ships cannot plough.

                    And so will the heart retain endless hope…

                    …where time does not count, where words cannot reach.

                    Let no tears, no love laden tears dim the light that charts

                         our way.

                    Leave the tears to the starless one who wanders without

                         compass in the night.

 

Despite being nearly drowned in metaphors, the audience recognizes that this is the language of believers, of the heroes Sorel and his wife represent. John’s only practical advice to Magda is to visit the Consul.

     We never discover what Consul she is to visit, in what country the police are terrorizing her, or to where she and her husband are trying to escape. And, in that sense, there is a sort of Ionescoian abstraction to Menotti’s opera. It is a no-man’s land and an everyman’s land simultaneously—it might represent any European city before World War II and any dictatorially run country after the war. Whereas John and Magda sing in a metaphorically based, dream-like language, the secretary of the Consul intones a bureaucratic gobbledygook. “May I speak to the Consul” Magda pleads again and again, only to be answered, “No one’s allowed to speak to the Consul, the Consul is busy.”

     Asked what she wants, Magda tries to explain her husband’s role as hero and leader of the underground, to explain her own suffering, relate her child’s and mother-in-law’s deaths, and warn that her every move is watched. For the secretary, however, there is nothing to be done; forms must be filled out. The hilarious, repetitively rhythmic interchange between the Consul Secretary and Magda is reminiscent of both Ionesco and Beckett:

 

                  Secretary:  Your name is a number.

                  Magda: My name is Sorel.

                  Secretary: Sorel is a name and a name is a number.

                  Magda: The hidden hunger waits for the heart-sick panther to return.

                  Secretary: I give you these papers. This is how to begin.

                                     Your name is a number

                                     Your story’s a case

                                     You need a request

                                    Your hopes will be filed

                                    Come back next week.

                  Magda: Will you explain [to the Consul]?

                  Secretary: What is there to explain?

                  Magda: Explain that John is a hero. That flowers bloom in the blood

                               that was shed.

 

     The secretary can only repeat the requirements: "Fill out the papers, Your name is a number,” etc. Like others visiting the Consul day after day, Magda makes no progress in communicating her plight. After so insistently demanding to see the Consul that the Secretary caves in, Magda is met at the door by his previous visitor: the chief of police who threatens her life. She collapses, returning to the Consul the next day without any hope of response, then returning home to kill herself at the very moment that her husband has himself returned to help his family escape.

      In this opera the melodic references to Puccini (“Now, O lips, say goodbye) are darkly comedic in their relation to the Consul office interchanges, and, accordingly, the music seems much more dissonant and fragmented than the former opera. It is almost as if in The Consul Menotti has found the perfect foil for his melodramatic and sometimes overly sweet melodic moments. Without diminishing any of the true tragedy of his tale, Menotti also elicits a sense of the absurdity and meaningless of all acts.

     Having seen Amahl and the Night Visitors two or three times in recent years, I was satisfied to listen to a recording of that opera. The Royal Opera House at Convent Garden production with Lorna Haywood as the Mother and James Rainbird as the young crippled boy was a beautiful reminder of the joys of this true family event. Here too, particularly in his presentation of the slightly ridiculous King Kasper, Menotti was able to combine the absurd and the sublime. How could anyone with a shred of humor not be enchanted by King Kasper's fascinating catalogue of the contents of his marvelous box in “This Is My Box,” or the repeatedly chanted elisions of the wise men in “Thank You Good Friends” in response to the gifts brought them by the poor shepherds. The beautiful antiphony of “Have You Seen a Child?"—the wise men asking about the Christ child, Amahl’s mother responding with the news of her own son—marvelously personalizes the mythical and helps to explain her later attempt to steal the Kings’ gold. Only Menotti, moreover, could have conjured up the wonderfully absurd idea of presenting to the Christ child a gift of a crutch—reminding us all perhaps of how impossible it is to stand on two feet as a human being.

     If Menotti was an unabashed romantic, so too was he a kind of early absurdist, a theatrical trickster who could combine the tragic occurrences of the 20th century with a comic recognition of the spiritual emptiness with which those events had left its survivors. Madame Flora, Magda Sorel, even the abandoned Mother of the small crippled child, all inordinately strong figures, are brought down by nearly insignificant events and individuals—by a touch of the flesh, by an office worker demanding that human beings become a number, by three wandering kings mysteriously passing in the night who sweep up a mother's child from bleak reality into a myth of eternal proportions.     

      American culture has indeed lost something with the death of a man who could speak so eloquently—in both music and language—of the fragility of life.

 

Los Angeles, March 10, 2007

Reprinted from The Green Integer Review, No. 8 (April 2007)

          

 

Before writing on the early Menotti production of his The Medium, I had not heard the Anna Maria Alberghetti performance. As a young teenager, I knew her only for her role in the Broadway musical Carnival, listening to the recording of that musical—in particular, her rendition of the song “Mira”— so many times that today it can hardly be heard, the music appearing as a faint background accompaniment to a series of cracks, hisses, and scratch sounds—the record itself becoming a sort of “strong but fragile survivor.” Several years ago, I was introduced to Anna Maria Alberghetti at an art opening at the Los Angeles County Museum, and was able to tell her in person how much her performances had meant to me.            

 

Los Angeles, March 11, 2007

Eugène Ionesco | Rhinocéros / 2012

growing horns

by Douglas Messerli

 

Eugène Ionesco Rhinocéros / performed by the Théâtre de la Ville-Paris, Royce Hall, University of California, Los Angeles / the performance I saw was on September 22, 2012

 

Although I read Ionesco’s acclaimed play when it was first published in English in the early 1960s, I had never seen a theatrical production of the work (and only clips from the 1974 American film), so I jumped at the chance of attending the performance at UCLA’s Royce Hall by the Théâtre de la Ville-Paris in French (with English language subtitles).

     Yet, I left the theater, despite having finally seen one of the best plays by one of my favorite playwrights, slightly disappointed. That sometimes happens, even at brilliant productions: one is tired or slightly distracted for reasons other than the play one is observing. Here, part of the problem simply lay in the fact the distance between the translation board and the stage was vast enough that it was hard to follow the stage action and still read the English, and the constant vertical motion of the eyes often distracted me.

     More importantly, however, is that Ionesco’s play, often touted as his best, is a parable that, once it has asserted its major premise has little place else to go. Los Angeles Times critic Charles McNulty quoted Kenneth Tynan: Ionesco is "a brilliant, anarchic sprinter unfitted by temperament for the steady, provident mountaineering of the three-act form." Also, having seen this production, I now wonder whether other plays such as his early short works (including the unforgettable The Chairs) and later works such as The Killer and Exit the King are not simply more profound works. At the heart of Rhinoceros is an important but quite simple warning of cultural conformity, and in the wake of World War II (the play was written, we must remember, just over a decade after the end of the war) Ionesco’s Rhinoceri—whether two horned or one—perfectly encapsulated the cultural betrayal of everyday citizens who suddenly embraced Fascism and Nazism. 

      But there are deeper problems with director Emmanuel Demarcy-Mota’s production of the Ionesco play. His version is absolutely brilliant when it comes to the ensemble scenes. The second act scene in the local, small-town newspaper office, where characters react en masse to the increasing gossip about the beasts roaming the city and, soon after, despite Botard’s (Jauris Casanova) argument that there can be no such animal in France, discover that another employee, Boeuf (so his wife reports) has become a rhinoceros and is threatening to stampede their very offices. The marvelous mass movements of the characters as their desks, chairs, and bodies go spinning with the charges of the beast, are evidence of this company’s brilliant group acting.

     And there are numerous other moments of excellent performance, particularly in Bérenger’s speeches and the logician’s perfectly absurd discussion of the difference between African and Asian rhincoeri. Yet, in perhaps the most important scene of the play, as the sensitive Jean (Hugues Quester in this production)—completely opposed to the rhinoceri transformations—gradually is transformed into just a beast, the work loses focus as he is transformed behind a plastic door where we see only the outlines of his facial shifts. As I mentioned previously, I did not see Zero Mostel’s 1961 rendition of Jean, but in the movie and in descriptions of his New York performance I recognize significant differences which made this early interpretation, a true theatrical wonder. In a fascinating article in the Jewish Daily Forward by Mostel’s nephew, Raphael Mostel describes the events behind the Broadway production:

 

                      The scene Z is most remembered for in this play is the

                      one in which he transformed into a rhinoceros. Ionesco had

                      envisioned the transformation happening behind a curtain,

                      and the actor bursting through with a rhino mask. But Z

                      could perform the most astonishing physical feats — whether

                      reducing Johnny Carson to hysterics by placing a proffered

                      cigarette on his brow and somehow getting it to roll all around

                      his face until it fell into his mouth like a pinball machine, or

                      doing a Dada-like imitation of a coffee percolator. And he

                      wanted to make the frightening transformation with his face

                      and body in full view of the audience.

 

As reviewer Jack Kroll wrote of that performance in Newsweek: “Something unbelievable happened. A fat comedian named Zero Mostel gave a performance that was even more astonishing than [Laurence] Olivier’s” (Olivier had performed the role in London).

       Just such an “astonishing” individual performance is what is missing in this otherwise capable French rendition. One might even suggest that few companies could have better portrayed the kind of mass hysteria which is at the heart of Ionesco’s play.  But, as Bérenger, himself ponders, it is not just the masses wherein these transformations are taking place, but in the individual hearts. Jean stood against the rhinoceros invasion at the very moment he begins to grow, in his very reasonableness, more and more lenient. Even while attacking the beasts, he grows more and more sympathetic to their plight, to their odd differences. And in that very allowance of human empathy he is himself destroyed. That is perhaps a more frightening statement than the fact that some individuals have turned into beasts, the idea that one cannot ever permit the thought that there may be some good in these transformations actually allows the transformations to take place. And seeing that struggle up close and in person is crucial to the structure of the play.

      In the end Bérenger is left alone, like Miles Bennell in Invasion of the Body Snatchers, with no one to tell his tale to except, perhaps, the audience. And it is we who must determine, accordingly, whether he is mad or sane.

     Demarcy-Mota’s production focused more on the chorus, all of whom allowed the transformation to occur, than upon that man set apart. But then, that is part of the problem with Ionesco’s engaging parable; it is more fun to watch a pack of charging rhinocerori than a non-capitulating loner shouting abuses at them.

 

Los Angeles, October 5, 2012

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera and Performance (October 2012).