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About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

TT: All there is

July 20, 2009 by Terry Teachout

the-letter-cover2-230x300.jpgThe Letter opens on Saturday, and I find it harder and harder to think or write about anything else. Among other distractions, I have two pieces due this week, a “Sightings” column for Saturday’s Wall Street Journal and an essay about Alan Ayckbourn for the September issue of Commentary. Needless to say, I’ll get them written–I don’t miss deadlines–but in a perfect world, I wouldn’t have anything to do but eat, sleep, and rehearse.

The Santa Fe Opera makes such single-minded concentration easy, for its headquarters is a campus-like complex of buildings located atop a seven-thousand-foot-high mesa north of town. Between rehearsing, eating in the cantina, and lounging by the company-only swimming pool, it’s perfectly possible to spend virtually all of your time in Santa Fe at the ranch (as we opera types call it). So far I’ve also managed to hang out with one old friend and one new one, buy a copy of the new Elmore Leonard novel at Garcia Street Books, and eat a green chile cheeseburger at Bert’s Burger Bowl, but otherwise I haven’t done much of anything since arriving in Santa Fe that wasn’t more or less directly related to The Letter. I haven’t even taken time off to visit the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, which is quite an oversight on the part of an art-loving boulevardier.

Why am I so wrapped up in The Letter? My work on the opera, after all, is all but done. I’ve rewritten one line of the text and signed off on two cuts since arriving in Santa Fe last Sunday, but that’s been about it. The cast and production team don’t really need me, and I’ve mostly been trying not to get under their feet. Yet I went so far last night as to spend two hours watching a lighting rehearsal of The Letter, when I could have stayed home and read Road Dogs instead. (“I can’t believe you’re here,” said Duane Schuler, the lighting designer. “This is like watching grass grow.”)

0717091337.jpgWhat is it, then, that keeps drawing me back to the ranch, and to the men and women who are bringing The Letter to life? Part of it is that they’re all very nice people–I’m a bit surprised by how straightforwardly companionable my colleagues are–but the biggest reason, I suspect, is that I find it both exciting and reassuring to be in the presence of the work of art to which Paul Moravec and I have devoted so much of the past three years of our lives. Right now I want nothing more than to hear and see The Letter as often as possible, not on my iBook or in my imagination but on the stage of the Santa Fe Opera. Only then does it become real.

If The Letter were a painting, I could hang it on my wall and look at it as often as I liked, but an opera, like a play or a ballet, is nothing more than a set of instructions, an idea that must be brought to life through the act of performance. If music, as I have remarked on more than one occasion, is an art form whose meaning is radically ambiguous, then theater is an art form whose content is radically evanescent. The Santa Fe Opera will perform The Letter six times, and it’s entirely possible that it will never be seen again after that. Even if it should be taken up by other companies, it won’t be done in the same way that it’s being done here and now. Is it any wonder, then, that I want to hurl myself into this unrepeatable, irreplaceable experience–that I want, as actors say, to be as “present” as I can possibly be?

Henry James said it: we shall never be again as we were. That’s true of every moment of our lives. Of course they should all be infinitely precious, and of course they’re not–we toss them aside heedlessly, charging on to the next experience. For me, though, these particular moments are different. Yesterday I found myself thinking of these oft-quoted lines from the last scene of Our Town:

EMILY Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it?–every, every minute?

STAGE MANAGER No.

Pause.

The saints and poets, maybe–they do some.

I’m neither of those things, but I do know what’s happening to me this week, and I think I’m realizing as much of it as it’s possible for an ordinary human to grasp. I only wish it could go on and on and on.

UPDATE: The lighting rehearsal turned out to be anything but dull. To read about it, go here.

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Terry Teachout

Terry Teachout, who writes this blog, is the drama critic of The Wall Street Journal and the critic-at-large of Commentary. In addition to his Wall Street Journal drama column and his monthly essays … [Read More...]

About

About “About Last Night”

This is a blog about the arts in New York City and the rest of America, written by Terry Teachout. Terry is a critic, biographer, playwright, director, librettist, recovering musician, and inveterate blogger. In addition to theater, he writes here and elsewhere about all of the other arts--books, … [Read More...]

About My Plays and Opera Libretti

Billy and Me, my second play, received its world premiere on December 8, 2017, at Palm Beach Dramaworks in West Palm Beach, Fla. Satchmo at the Waldorf, my first play, ran earlier this season at New Orleans’ Le Petit Theatre. It previously closed off Broadway at the Westside Theatre on June 29, … [Read More...]

About My Podcast

Peter Marks, Elisabeth Vincentelli, and I are the panelists on “Three on the Aisle,” a bimonthly podcast from New York about theater in America. … [Read More...]

About My Books

My latest book is Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington, published in 2013 by Gotham Books in the U.S. and the Robson Press in England and now available in paperback. I have also written biographies of Louis Armstrong, George Balanchine, and H.L. Mencken, as well as a volume of my collected essays called A … [Read More...]

The Long Goodbye

To read all three installments of "The Long Goodbye," a multi-part posting about the experience of watching a parent die, go here. … [Read More...]

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