• Home
  • About
    • About Last Night
    • Terry Teachout
    • Contact
  • AJBlogCentral
  • ArtsJournal

About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

You are here: Home / 2017 / June / Archives for 19th

Archives for June 19, 2017

Crossover artist

June 19, 2017 by Terry Teachout

Mrs. T drove me up to Peterborough, New Hampshire, and dropped me off at the MacDowell Colony five years ago this past weekend. I spent the five weeks that followed working on Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington and Satchmo at the Waldorf. During that time I saw no shows and wrote no pieces for The Wall Street Journal or any other publication, though I did attend a memorable concert of music by colonists past and present. Otherwise I did nothing but write, stroll idly through the woods, eat the famously tasty meals provided by the staff, and get to know my fellow colonists, with two of whom I formed friendships that have lasted to this day.

The studio in which I spent my mornings and afternoons, whose previous occupants include James Baldwin, Ruth Draper, and Spalding Gray, had no wi-fi, and I didn’t miss it after the first couple of days. I was overjoyed to be forced to pull the plug on the ceaseless hum and buzz of my everyday life, and concentrate instead on the work that had brought me there.

I arrived at MacDowell a bit more than a month after the death of my mother, an experience about which I had previously written a long posting. The colonists at MacDowell colonists are invited to “present” an example of their work during the stay, and I chose to read an excerpt from that piece, to which my listeners responded with sympathy and warmth. Not surprisingly, my mother was very much on my mind throughout my stay—but rarely during the day. Never before had I worked with such single-minded focus as I did at MacDowell, so much so that I was even able to put aside, if only for a time, my grief.

It was at MacDowell that I started to see myself for the first time not merely as a critic but as an artist as well. I wrote about this new self-understanding the day after I left:

Satchmo was premiered in Florida last fall, and a much-revised version of the play will soon be staged by two New England theater companies. Yet in spite of these undertakings, I continued to have difficulties seeing myself as anything other than a critic, a professional appreciator without creative powers of my own. Whenever I tried to tell people about the inexplicable thing that was happening to me, I felt obliged to resort to a grotesque metaphor. “It feels as if I’ve grown another arm,” I’d say.

Coming to the MacDowell Colony was a turning point in this process. Five weeks ago I withdrew from the world and drove to a secluded woodland retreat in New Hampshire, where I found myself in the company of some thirty-odd professional artists. I presented myself to them as a fellow artist and was accepted as one….My closest friends were a poet, a filmmaker, two installation artists, an avant-garde visual artist of ambiguous genre, and a dancer turned law professor. A couple of weeks ago I even acted (in a manner of speaking) in a reading of the first scene of an unfinished play by another colonist. My character, appropriately enough, was a failed actor d’un âge certain who had just written his first play.

Toward the end of my stay, I confessed my continuing uncertainties to one of my new friends. “I come from a small town, just like you, and for years I felt like it was a privilege to be an artist, like I didn’t really deserve it,” she told me. “That was how I was raised. Then I met a woman from Sweden who told me, ‘My dear, being an artist is your job.’ And I knew she was right.”

Five years later, Satchmo at the Waldorf has been produced off Broadway and throughout America. A year ago I made my professional debut as a stage director, and my second play, Billy and Me, will be premiered in West Palm Beach in December. Yes, I’m still a critic, and proud to be one—but I now know that I am also, beyond any possibility of doubt, an artist. I owe this miraculous transformation in part to my marriage to Mrs. T, who encouraged me to dig more out of myself than I had ever thought possible, and in part to the MacDowell Colony, which flung the door of possibility wider still and invited me to step through it. I bless the names of the men and women who saw fit to let me work there. They changed my life.

* * *

The New England Conservatory Contemporary Ensemble performs the original chamber version of Aaron Copland’s Appalachian Spring, composed in part at the MacDowell Colony:

Just because: Peter Pears, Benjamin Britten, and Winterreise

June 19, 2017 by Terry Teachout

TV CAMERAPeter Pears and Benjamin Britten perform excerpts from and talk about Schubert’s Winterreise in their music room in Aldeburgh on the BBC in 1968:

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

Almanac: Herb Gardner on the absurdity of life

June 19, 2017 by Terry Teachout

INK BOTTLE“Gee, if most things aren’t funny, Arn, then they’re only exactly what they are. Then it’s just one long dental appointment, interrupted occasionally by something exciting like waiting, or falling asleep.”

Herb Gardner, A Thousand Clowns

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, closed off Broadway at the Westside Theatre on June 29, 2014, after 18 previews and 136 performances. That production was directed … [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...]

Follow Us on TwitterFollow Us on RSSFollow Us on E-mail

@Terryteachout1

Tweets by TerryTeachout1

Archives

June 2017
M T W T F S S
 1234
567891011
12131415161718
19202122232425
2627282930  
« May   Jul »

An ArtsJournal Blog

Recent Posts

  • Terry Teachout, 65
  • Gripping musical melodrama
  • Replay: Somerset Maugham in 1965
  • Almanac: Somerset Maugham on sentimentality
  • Snapshot: Richard Strauss conducts Till Eulenspiegel

Copyright © 2023 · Magazine Pro Theme on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in