About Last Night

In today’s Wall Street Journal I review a pay-per-view webcast performance by Houston’s Alley Theatre of a stage version of 1984. (This review was written before the death of my wife Hilary.) Here’s an excerpt.

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“Nineteen Eighty-Four,” George Orwell’s parable of the coming of Stalinist totalitarianism to England,is the most significant political novel of the 20^thcentury—but one with which many readers are by now so familiar that they can no longer come to it fresh. Adapting it for the stage is one way to restore the immediacy of Orwell’s nightmare vision, but the 2014 West End production of the Robert Icke-Duncan Macmillan stage version, which played on Broadway three years ago, was a bells-and-whistles multimedia extravaganza that strayed too far from the original novel for its own good. Not so Michael Gene Sullivan’s no-frills, six-actor 2006 version, intended for performance on a near-bare stage. The script tracks the book closely, spelling out the once-unprintable obscenities at which Orwell could only hint in 1948, though most everything else, even the telescreens, is left to the imagination.

This strikes me as the right way to go, and the Alley Theatre’s Houston premiere of “1984,” as the stage version is known, should by all rights have been a box-office smash. Alas, the coronavirus closed the theater before the show could open, but the company was able to tape a performance with a three-camera crew, and it is now available as a pay-per-view webcast. Crisp, unflashily photographed and as hard-hitting as a right to the kidney, it comes across with bright clarity on the small screen, and even if you know the novel by heart, I expect that you’ll find it—as one of Orwell’s characters might have put it—tripleplusgood.

The six actors, all of whom are members of the Alley’s resident acting company, play multiple roles save for Shawn Hamilton, who is appropriately fearful and desperate as Winston Smith (you can all but smell the sweat on his brow). Everyone else provides exciting support…

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Read the whole thing here.

To watch 1984, go here.

Rob Melrose, artistic director of the Alley Theatre and the director of 1984, answers questions about the production:

This is, first of all, an expression of profound gratitude. I knew that many people were following the unfolding story of my beloved Hilary, but I had no idea how many until I posted this tribute shortly after her death on Tuesday night. It has since drawn more than one hundred and twenty thousand hits—far more than anything else I have ever posted in this space—and I have also received innumerable messages of sympathy here, on Twitter and Facebook, and via e-mail. I’ve tried to answer as many as I could, but the flood of incoming messages has overwhelmed me at last. To those whose warm words go unanswered, I say: thank you from the bottom of my heart for your supreme kindness. What you have written has been of great help at a hard time, and I shall cherish it all the days of my life.

Allow me to let one of your messages stand for the rest:

You and Hilary, and your love for one another, are an inspiration. People really want to believe in that sort of love, especially right now.

I hope so.

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I thought you might like to read about Hilary’s last good day.

Weakened by a decade and a half of ceaseless battle against pulmonary hypertension and the double-lung transplant surgery that we had long hoped would cure it, she was now suffering from an acute bacterial infection for which she was being treated by an antibiotic that so far had failed to reverse her rapid decline, aggravated by kidney failure and various other urgent problems. I arrived at New York-Presbyterian Hospital at midday on Monday assuming that I would be telling Hilary’s doctors to let her die as peacefully as possible, and I’d already warned her family to expect as much. I spoke to her about the gravity of her condition to prepare her for what was to come. She was intubated and unable to speak, but I could tell that she understood what I was saying.

As we prepared to start the complicated paperwork necessary to withdraw life-sustaining measures, Selim Arcasoy, the lung-transplant specialist in charge of Hilary’s case, called to tell me that he had just conferred with the rest of her transplant team and a group of infectious-diseases doctors, and that they were unanimous in believing there to be a small but “non-zero” possibility (as one of them put it) that they could still get the infection under control. I felt that the decision to continue treatment should be left to Hilary, so I laid the situation out to her, then said, “Darling, this is very important—you must make your wishes clear to me. If you want to continue the antibiotics, blink.” She blinked, unambiguously and right on cue.

I told the doctors to hold off on the paperwork and went back into her room. Then an inspiration came to me. “Sweetheart, let’s listen to some happy music,” I said. I opened up my MacBook Air and booted up iTunes, and we spent the next hour and a half listening to joyous records that I knew she liked: Louis Armstrong’s “Back o’ Town Blues,” Leonard Bernstein’s Candide Overture, Johnny Cash’s “Get Rhythm,” Ry Cooder’s “FDR in Trinidad,” Paul Simon’s “Graceland,” Stephen Sondheim’s “Getting Married Today.” Her eyes opened fully for the first time in a month, then grew wide with what I knew was pleasure. I thought: This may be our last real day together—and it’s been a good day, a day we wouldn’t have had without Dr. Arcasoy.

The very last thing I played was the chamber-orchestra version of Aaron Copland’s Appalachian Spring, a piece that had always been close to both our hearts. By then, Hilary was clearly growing tired, and I kissed her and went home to rest up for whatever was to follow, completely drained but profoundly happy.

She died the following night, peacefully and without struggle.

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To learn more about Hilary’s rare illness, go here.

To find out how to become an organ donor, go here.

To donate to the Pulmonary Hypertension Association, go here.

The New England Conservatory Contemporary Ensemble plays the original chamber-orchestra version of Aaron Copland’s Appalachian Spring in concert in 2014:

(This is the latest in a series of arts- and history-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)

“‘I used to think I couldn’t let you go, but I’m learning to feel that I don’t lose you, that you’ll be more to me than ever, and death can’t part us, though it seems to.’

“‘I know it cannot, and I don’t fear it any longer, for I’m sure I shall be your Beth still, to love and help you more than ever. You must take my place, Jo, and be everything to Father and Mother when I’m gone. They will turn to you, don’t fail them, and if it’s hard to work alone, remember that I don’t forget you, and that you’ll be happier in doing that than writing splendid books or seeing all the world, for love is the only thing that we can carry with us when we go, and it makes the end so easy.’”

Louisa May Alcott, Little Women

“Michael has a clean burial in the far north, by the grace of the Almighty God. Bartley will have a fine coffin out of the white boards, and a deep grave surely. What more can we want than that? No man at all can be living for ever, and we must be satisfied.”

John Millington Synge, Riders to the Sea

Aretha Franklin sings “Skylark,” by Hoagy Carmichael and Johnny Mercer, on The New Steve Allen Show. This episode was originally taped on May 19, 1964, for syndicated telecast:

(This is the latest in a series of arts- and history-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)

“Of course I knew I could rely on your sympathy. I am reconciled by the certainty that a continuance of life would have meant only a continuance of pain and suffering of which my wife had had too much before the final accident. (She fell and broke her hip bone.) We have had our share. For sixty years she made life poetry for me and at 88 one must be ready for the end. I shall keep at work and interested while it lasts—though not caring very much for how long.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., letter to Frederick Pollock, May 24, 1929

Hilary Dyson Teachout, the “Mrs. T” of this blog, suffered throughout the decade and a half of our life together from pulmonary hypertension, a rare and devastating illness that gnawed inexorably at her body without touching her soul. She was smart, funny, generous, and gallant, a perfect companion and the love of my life. Indeed, we fell in love at first sight, a thing I had never thought possible until, at the improbable age of forty-nine, it happened to me, followed in the shortest order that I could manage by a middle age full of shared joy. Alas, Hilary lacked the strength to survive the double-lung transplant that we had hoped would give her more life, and now she is gone.

Loss is the price of love: I knew from the start that I was likely to lose her too soon, though I was lucky beyond belief to have her for far longer than her doctors foresaw. But merely to know such a thing cannot begin to ready us for its coming. Raymond Aron said it: “There is no apprenticeship to misfortune. When it strikes us, we still have everything to learn.” I shall now try to learn the lesson of misfortune in a manner as worthy as possible of my beloved Hilary, who faced death as she faced life, with indomitable courage.

Here’s a special memory of my life with Hilary. She was struck by the last sentence:

For those of us still on earth, straining to make something of ourselves, it seems there is no weaning away from the people we love and lose: they are always there, dissolved into the completeness of eternity, waiting patiently—and, I suspect, indifferently—for the little resurrection that is memory.

I am blessed with many, many memories.

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Nancy LaMott sings a medley of “Good Thing Going” and “Not a Day Goes By,” written by Stephen Sondheim for the score of Merrily We Go Along: