“But I think he thought that the object of opening the mind is simply opening the mind. Whereas I am incurably convinced that the object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid.”

G.K. Chesterton, Autobiography

In today’s Wall Street Journal drama column I review the New York premiere of Pearl Cleage’s Blues for an Alabama Sky. Here’s an excerpt.

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It’s February—or, as it’s known in the theater business, August Wilson Month. That’s a sly reference to the fact that February also happens to be Black History Month, the time of year when theater companies with white artistic directors are notorious for going out of their way to revive shows by black playwrights, after which they usually consider their duty done until next season. 

More often than not, this means either one of Mr. Wilson’s plays or Lorraine Hansberry’s “A Raisin in the Sun,” but a growing number of ambitious companies are starting to dig deeper and come up with lesser-known works deserving of much wider attention. The latest of these is Keen Company, one of my favorite off-Broadway troupes, whose new offering, Pearl Cleage’s “Blues for an Alabama Sky,” received its premiere in Atlanta in 1995 and has since been staged throughout the U.S. but is only just receiving its first major New York production. About time, too: Ms. Cleage’s tale of a pair of misfits from Georgia who come to Depression-era Harlem in the hope of leading more abundant lives is quietly poignant and beautifully wrought, and Keen Company’s staging, cast to absolute perfection and directed with supreme delicacy by LA Williams, is pleasing in every imaginable way.

At the center of the action are Angel (Alfie Fuller), a would-be nightclub singer, and her roommate Guy (John-Andrew Morrison), an openly gay costume designer. They share a tiny New York apartment but want to move to Paris to pursue their careers in a country where they can live more freely. Angel, however, is more hard-boiled than Guy, and would be content—or so she supposes—to marry for money. “I’m tired of Negro dreams,” she says bitterly. “All they ever do is break your heart.” Enter Leland (Khiry Walker), an unsophisticated, fresh-off-the-bus widower from Tuskegee who falls in love with Angel at first sight….

“Blues for an Alabama Sky” isn’t without flaw—Ms. Cleage gets a bit preachy once or twice—but for the most part she steers well clear of the obvious. I was struck by the impressive assurance with which she sketches the lives of Angel, Guy and their friends, who also include Delia (Jasminn Johnson), a idealistic young neighbor who is setting up Harlem’s first family-planning clinic, and Sam (Sheldon Woodley), a middle-aged doctor who unexpectedly falls for Delia. I was struck, too, by the unselfconscious sweetness and warmth with which Ms. Cleage portrays her five characters…

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Read the whole thing here.

An excerpt from the Court Theatre’s 2017 Chicago revival of Blues for an Alabama Sky, directed by Ron OJ Parson:

In this week’s Wall Street Journal “Sightings” column, I write about one of music’s most mysterious powers. Here’s an excerpt.

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Music is the most mysterious of all the arts. Incorporeal and seemingly without intelligible meaning, it nonetheless has a powerful effect on most of those who hear it—though not all….

Not the least of music’s mysteries is that so many of us turn to it in times of trial. That’s what Philip Kennicott did a few years ago. A once-promising pianist who is now the senior art and architecture critic of the Washington Post, Mr. Kennicott decided to try to learn Bach’s Goldberg Variations after the death of his mother…

Anyone who has resorted to music under like circumstances, whether as a player or merely a listener, will find much to ponder in Mr. Kennicott’s reflections. One of them, though, struck me particularly hard, not because it recalled my own experience but because it didn’t: “I bristle at the idea that music is consoling or has healing power. It is a cliché of lazy music talk, the sort of thing said by people who give money to the symphony and have their names chiseled on the wall of the opera house….”

I scarcely know where to start disagreeing. To be sure, most of the over-familiar words spoken by those who sympathize by rote with the plight of a mourner or caregiver are ineffectual at best, irksome at worst, leaving you with no choice but to paste a fixed half-smile on your face and say something equally meaningless in response. But music is different, in part because it speaks another, deeper language. When Beethoven, who understood suffering well, gave a copy of his Missa Solemnis to Austria’s Archduke Rudolf, he inscribed it as follows: “From the heart—may it return to the heart!” Moreover, countless listeners have similarly testified to the power of music to miraculously bypass the greeting-card banalities of reassurance and help heal a shattered heart….

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Read the whole thing here.

The Busch String Quartet plays the “Cavatina” from Beethoven’s Quartet in B Flat, Op. 130:

Wilhelm Furtwängler and the Berlin Philharmonic perform a transcription for string orchestra of the same movement:

I’m picking up a Zipcar and hitting the road later today for a three-night caregiver’s holiday on Long Island Sound. During my absence, Mrs. T will be looked after around the clock by the doctors and nurses at New York-Presbyterian, whom I have no doubt are equal to the task.

I managed to get three Wall Street Journal columns in the can this past week, meaning that I won’t be bringing work of any kind with me. Instead, I plan to spend the long weekend looking at the water, sitting in a hot tub, watching movies, reading for pleasure, and ordering room service. I might tweet, or I might not. If I don’t, not to worry: I have plenty of nothing to do. Either way, I’ll see you again on Sunday.

Till soon.

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Gerry Mulligan plays Roger Miller’s “King of the Road” in 1965, accompanied by Pete Jolly on piano, Johnny Gray on guitar, Jimmy Bond on bass, and Hal Blaine on drums:

“All other swindlers upon earth are nothing to the self-swindlers, and with such pretences did I cheat myself.”

Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

In an excerpt from “Take 30,” originally telecast by the CBC in 1967, Leonard Cohen talks about why he writes poetry:

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

“Is it not miraculous that tears are given only to humans? Surely there is something divine in them, expressing as they do compassion, sorrow, love, anxiety and all feelings that associate us with the angels.”

James Lees-Milne, diary, September 9, 1979

This is the third February in a row that Mrs. T and I have spent not in Florida, where we used to go every winter to see shows and travel around the state, but up north. Mrs. T’s doctors ordered her to stop flying a few months after we returned to Connecticut in 2017, and our idyllic visits to Sanibel Island, Siesta Key, and Winter Park have since been put on hold while she awaits the double lung transplant that she needs in order to save her life. Of course we both understood that a time was coming when we’d have to hang up our traveling shoes, but we’d managed to skirt the dread day for so long that we came close to forgetting its inevitability.

All unknowing, we made the most out of that last trip down south. Even though Mrs. T’s illness was already putting fast-growing limits on her mobility, we still managed to eat our fill (if such a thing is possible!) of Doc Ford’s Yucatan shrimp, take a sunset cruise around Captiva Island, and see wonderful revivals of Born Yesterday, The House of Blue Leaves, and The Piano Lesson. We even caught two memorable movies, Fences and Manchester by the Sea. In addition, I spent three days workshopping my second play, which opened in West Palm Beach a few months later, and had the time of my life doing it. In between, we spent plenty of time sitting on the porch and watching the sun set over the Gulf of Mexico, which in some ways is the nicest thing about our trips to Florida. It was as if we knew—as we did, deep down inside—that we’d better make the most of the moment.

Along the way I reflected in this space on the importance of taking time off from your everyday life, no matter how much you like it:

Between my father’s unfortunate example and the fact that I have the good fortune to do something for a living that I love, I’ve become something of a workaholic—but not a degenerate one. It took long enough, but experience has finally taught me the value of doing nothing in particular. Not only does leisure recharge my creative batteries, but it is, as Josef Pieper reminds us, good in and of itself: “Unless we regain the art of silence and insight, the ability for non-activity, unless we substitute true leisure for our hectic amusements, we will destroy our culture—and ourselves.”

I wish I’d learned that lesson sooner, but I’m so glad I know it now that I feel no need to repine. To sit in a rocking chair on the back porch of a beach bungalow, alternately reading and looking out at the Gulf of Mexico: that is heaven. It reminds me of something Dr. Johnson said to Boswell: “If I had no duties, and no reference to futurity, I would spend my life in driving briskly in a post-chaise with a pretty woman.” I’d most likely spend mine on Sanibel Island with Mrs. T, who is both pretty and excellent company.

Ah, for the (occasionally) leisurely snowbird’s life we led! The weather in New York, to be sure, has been unseasonably mild so far this year, but that makes no difference to Mrs. T, for she’s been in New York-Presbyterian Hospital since mid-December, and she doesn’t even have a window through which to view from a distance the snow-free streets of upper Manhattan. Her plight reminds me, unlikely as it may sound, of what Hannibal Lecter says to Clarice Starling in The Silence of the Lambs when she remarks on the precise detail of the drawing of Florence that is taped on the wall of his cell: “Did you do it from memory, all the detail?” “Memory, Officer Starling, is what I have instead of a view.”

On the other hand, the memories we have are wonderful, and they are also comforting (up to a point, Lord Copper!). Most comforting of all, though, is our shared hope that once the Big Call comes and Mrs. T is fitted out with a new pair of lungs, we’ll be able to return in due course to Sanibel, Siesta Key, and Winter Park, there to retrace our steps and revel once again in the uncomplicated pleasures of winter in south Florida.

We need that hope, in some ways more than ever. It struck me the other day that ever since Mrs. T went into the hospital, our life has come to resemble Groundhog Day, an endless succession of repeat performances. In my case, I get up in the morning and spend the day writing or running errands. Unless I have a show to see, I then pick up something enticing for Mrs. T to eat and head for the hospital, where we hold hands, watch a movie or two, and talk about nothing in particular. Then I go home and go to bed, and the next day I do it all over again. I am, like Bill Murray, stuck on hold, the only difference being that I know what has happened to me—and that, sooner or later, it will end.

In the meantime, we’re clinging to our memories, but we’re also doing our best to get what’s to be gotten out of the slow-moving present. That’s easier some days than others, but it’s always possible. Lest we forget, Phil Connors, Murray’s character, breaks the fathomless spell and sets time moving again when, at film’s end, he accepts that which is and says to Andie MacDowell, “No matter what happens tomorrow, and for the rest of my life, I’m happy now, because I love you.”

To know that, of course, won’t necessarily get us back to Sanibel Island—only fate and the doctors can do that—but it will make more tolerable whatever lies ahead for us, now and until our shared clock starts ticking once more.

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It occurs to me that I should update you on Mrs. T’s condition, and this seems like a good time to do it.

She was moved back to the ICU last week when her oxygen saturation level began to drop for no obvious reason. It wasn’t a crisis, merely a matter for concern, but the doctors all agreed that it would be prudent to move her to a unit where she could be monitored more closely. She remains fairly stable as of today—indeed, we haven’t had to weather any major crises for more than a month.

Beyond her inexplicably low oxygen numbers, Mrs. T’s biggest problem at present is severe anorexia, which is, we’re told the combined result of her drug regimen and the continuing need for the around-the-clock high-flow supplemental oxygen that will likely keep her in the hospital until she is transplanted (you can’t get it at home). Fortunately, a “cocktail” of appetite-stimulating medications has got her eating again, and she’s even gained back a little weight in recent days, though she still has a long way to go.

If you follow me in the social media, you know that we got a Big Call last Thursday morning, our first one since August. Alas, it was a dry run—the donor lungs didn’t pan out—but it did serve as a welcome reminder that Mrs. T is still at the top of the transplant list. May another donor offer come soon, this one with a happier ending.

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“Perpetual Anticipation,” a number from Stephen Sondheim’s A Little Night Music,sung by members of the original 1973 cast:

A scene from Harold Ramis’ Groundhog Day: