Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City
“When the major talents are directors, actors, and scene designers—that’s dead-end theater. Fine to see, but it ain’t going nowhere. You have to turn out good new writers.”
Lillian Hellman, “The Art of Theater No. 1” (Paris Review, Winter-Spring 1965)
This morning I fly back to New York from Winter Park, Florida, where I attended the premiere of Music, Awake! on Saturday night. Mrs. T is under the weather—I inadvertently passed my nasty spring cold on to her—and so couldn’t accompany me, which was the only blot on an otherwise miraculous weekend. All else was bliss, and then some.
No sooner did I get to Florida than I went to the music building of Rollins College in search of John Sinclair, the artistic director of the Bach Festival Society, for whom Paul Moravec and I wrote the piece. Not finding John in his office, I pulled open a door across the hall and found him warming up the choir that would be singing the first performance that evening. I got a round of applause from the members of the choir, who proceeded to perform Music, Awake! for me. It was the first time that I’d heard it done by actual human beings (as opposed to the synthesized version on my MacBook). I was overwhelmed by the unexpected sound of my words being sung by a large, enthusiastic choir, so much so that I actually started crying—though I did have the presence of mind to remind the singers to be sure and hit the consonants hard at the concert!
An hour later, Paul and I took our aisle seats in Rollins College’s Knowles Memorial Chapel and listened to the Bach Festival Society Chorus and Orchestra sing and play Music, Awake! to perfection. That was, needless to say, an even more overwhelming experience. Even so, I think I may have been moved more deeply by the surprise-party performance that John and the choir gave for me alone.
My text is an ode to music. It’s the first poem I’ve ever written, and I confess to being proud of this stanza in particular:
Out of mystery, faith;
Out of chaos, form;
Out of anger, love;
Out of terror, hope;
Out of silence, tone.
Console us, blesséd music,
And grant us peace.
When the performance was finished, I leaned over to Paul and said, “I think this might be a good time to tell you that our collaboration has been one of the great things in my life.”
“Me, too, buddy,” he replied.
No sooner do I get back to New York this afternoon than I’ll be flinging myself head first into the final week of press previews for the current Broadway season. I’m seeing American Psycho tonight, Waitress and Fully Committed on Wednesday, and Tuck Everlasting on Thursday. Then, on Friday morning, I fly down to West Palm Beach, where I’ll be spending the next three and a half weeks rehearsing Palm Beach Dramaworks’ production of Satchmo at the Waldorf, which opens on May 13.
This will be, as regular readers of this blog know, my professional debut as a stage director. I rejoice to say that I’m making it in the company of Barry Shabaka Henley, who appeared in the Chicago premiere of Satchmo earlier this year and has agreed to do the honors in Florida as well. Yes, I’m feeling a little antsy, but Shabaka was stupendous in Chicago, and I have no doubt whatsoever that he’ll tear it up in Florida. I doubt I’ll be blogging quite as often from West Palm Beach as I did from Chicago and San Francisco in January, but I hope to report from the rehearsal hall whenever I can find a few spare minutes.
In the meantime, I’ve got a lot to do between now and Friday, and even more to do after that. Am I ready? I sure hope so—and I couldn’t be more excited. Wish me luck.
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To read Matthew J. Palm’s Orlando Sentinel review of the premiere of Music, Awake!, go here.
A 1961 IBM sales film, directed by Saul Bass:
(This is the latest in a series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)
“When I first went out to Hollywood one heard talk from writers about whoring. But you are not tempted to whore unless you want to be a whore.”
Lillian Hellman, “The Art of Theater No. 1” (Paris Review, Winter-Spring 1965)
In today’s Wall Street Journal I report from Chicago on the premiere of Tracy Letts’ new play, Mary Page Marlowe. Here’s an excerpt.
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Tracy Letts is a poet of the ordinary, a playwright who writes about commonplace lives in uncommon ways. Take “Mary Page Marlowe,” his latest play, in which he tells the story of an accountant from Ohio whose life, while occasionally bumpy, seems at bottom to be as conventional as a loaf of store-bought white bread. Yet she claims on her deathbed to have led “a good life,” and whether or not you agree with her, you’ll be enthralled to watch that life unfold, for it is described in a manner so clear and true that you cannot doubt its significance.
Handsomely mounted by Steppenwolf Theatre Company and staged by Anna D. Shapiro with great delicacy, “Mary Page Marlowe,” which runs for a bit less than 90 intermission-free minutes, consists of a series of loosely linked vignettes that follow the title character from childhood to old age—we see her as a baby and at the ages of 12, 19, 27, 36, 40, 44, 50, 59, 63 and 69—and are performed out of chronological order. In addition, Mr. Letts has left yawning gaps between the 11 scenes, meaning that while it isn’t hard to follow what’s going on at any given moment, you must pay close attention to make the various events in Mary Page’s life add up to a meaningful whole….
On paper, it may not sound as though “Mary Page Marlowe” is worth the trouble. Born in 1945, Mary Page marries three times and has two children (Jack Edwards and Madeline Weinstein), one of whom she outlives. We see her gossiping with her college roommates (Tess Frazer and Ariana Venturi), sleeping with her boss (Gary Wilmes), talking to her therapist (Kirsten Fitzgerald), telling her children that she is getting a divorce, watching TV with her third husband (Alan Wilder) and learning from a nurse (Sandra Marquez) that she will soon die. The only surprise comes in the scene in which she informs her second husband (Ian Barford) that she’s going to have to spend at least two years in prison for drunken driving. Otherwise, Mary Page never goes anywhere interesting or does anything unusual.
So why bother with her? Because Mr. Letts does much the same thing in “Mary Page Marlowe” that Thornton Wilder had in mind when he described “Our Town,” his celebrated chronicle of life in a small New England village, as “an attempt to find a value above all price for the smallest events in our daily life.” Inspired by the death of his mother a year and a half ago, he has sought to plumb the complexities of an “average” life, one in which a person’s identity changes from decade to decade, very often in ways that seem arbitrary beyond belief. “Someone else could have written my diary,” Mary Page tells her therapist. “I’m not the person I am. I’m just acting like a person who is a wife and a mother.” Who, then, is she—and how ought she to live? That so ordinary a woman should be grappling with such profound questions may not be the stuff of high drama, but in Mr. Letts’ hands it proves to be the stuff of a deeply affecting night at the theater….
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Read the whole thing here.
Tracy Letts and Carrie Coon talk about Mary Page Marlowe on PBS NewsHour:
The Everly Brothers sing “Wake Up, Little Susie” and “Bye Bye Love” on The Perry Como Show, accompanied by Mitchell Ayers and His Orchestra. This episode was originally telecast on NBC on December 7, 1957:
(This is the latest in a series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)
“Profundity must smile.”
Thomas Mann, Lotte in Weimar: The Beloved Returns
Paul Moravec and I are headed down to Florida this weekend for our latest premiere: John Sinclair and the Bach Festival Society of Winter Park are giving the first performance of our latest collaboration, an anthem for chorus and orchestra called Music, Awake! It was commissioned by the Bach Festival Society in honor of John’s twenty-fifth anniversary its artistic director. In addition to writing the text, I also wrote program notes for the premiere, which takes place on Saturday at 7:30 in Rollins College’s Knowles Memorial Chapel. The program, which will be repeated on Sunday at three p.m., also includes a complete performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.
For more information or to order tickets, go here.
Here are my program notes, which will give you some idea of what the new piece sounds like. I hope you can come!
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When the Bach Festival Society asked Paul Moravec and me to write a piece in honor of John Sinclair’s silver anniversary as its artistic director, it struck me at once that it should be an ode to music. Many great composers of the past, among them Handel, Purcell, Schubert, Chabrier, Vaughan Williams, and Britten, have written such works, and I thought it would be appropriate for us to seek to follow in their footsteps.
Not surprisingly, Paul agreed. “Everything a composer writes is, in part, an ode to music,” he says. “A musician devotes himself to an art that continually illumines his life with joy. Making music is a privilege, and sharing its power an honor. A composer shows his dedication to the muse through daily effort to achieve the ideal sound, the right harmony, the memorable melody. He expresses his thanks because, deep down, he knows that the art somehow justifies his being. As W.H. Auden says in his own ode to music: ‘You alone, alone, O imaginary song/Are unable to say an existence is wrong/And pour out your forgiveness like a wine.’”
In search of inspiration for the text, I looked at the last scene from The Winter’s Tale, a play that Paul and I both love, and found these words: “Music, awake her; strike!/’Tis time; descend; be stone no more; approach;/Strike all that look upon with marvel.” All at once the idea for a poem about music came to me. It would be what rhetoricians call an “apostrophe,” an exclamatory passage in which an inanimate object or idea—in this case, music itself—is addressed directly, as if it were alive. The poem, I thought, could be about what music does to us when we hear it and are, like Shakespeare’s Hermione, transformed by its magical power.
I began by changing Shakespeare’s first line to the more direct “Music, awake!” Next I decided to build the first stanza of the poem around “a,” “e,” “i,” “o,” and “u,” the five vowels that are the basis for all english-language singing. Seven hours later, at the end of a sleepless night of nonstop writing, I finished the first draft. As we did in our three operas, Paul and I then worked closely together to shape and simplify my words in ways that would inspire him musically.
“Music, Awake!” begins, as befits a festival, with a resplendent explosion of sound set in what Robert Browning called “the C Major of this life.” Dark clouds pass across the sonic sky as the soprano soloist implores “blesséd music” to “console us… and grant us peace,” but doubt is dispelled by the return of the opening choral fanfare, followed by what I hope Paul, who is modest to a fault, will forgive me for describing as a truly grand peroration.
To all this I need only add that we are proud and happy to have been invited to help commemorate this occasion. John is a distinguished musician—and a close friend. We hope that you find our joint contribution to this celebratory concert to be a fitting tribute to his great work.
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UPDATE: To read the Orlando Sentinel’s story abut Music, Awake!, go here.