Sunday, May 30, 2010

The Huntington Theater's "Prelude to a Kiss" is a modern fairy tale that needs a re-think

Last night, we saw Craig Lucas's play, "Prelude to a Kiss" at the Huntington Theater. The story depends on the audience suspending belief and accepting a supernatural event -- the exchange of one soul with another, in this case the soul of a young bride with that of an old man in declining health, thanks to a kiss.

I think the playwright has created two likable characters in Rita, the bride (played by Cassie Beck, who has a wonderful nasal voice that makes every syllable reach the balcony, and a hefty real body to match), and Peter, the young man (played with breezy authority by Brian Sgambati). The performances are strong. They meet, fall in love, and seem happy.

I like what seems to be the main idea here -- that once you marry (that is, once your relationship is formally bonded), there comes a point where you say to your spouse, "Hey, you aren't really the man/woman I thought you were! You...you lied to me!" You might be right, and you may have been deceived, and you may have been involved in your own self-deception.

But why is the soul-exchange kiss performed between Rita and an old man? I had a hard time making sense of the mythical situation. If it had been an old woman, and Peter was then forced to come to grips with the old woman that his wife would someday become, and thus with his own mortality, should he stay married with Rita, it might have made more sense. As it was, the exchange with an old man seemed like a writing workshop gaffe that Lucas couldn't figure out how to handle. The slight homo-erotic buzz of the relationship between Peter and the old man seemed more ridiculous than enlightening.

Everything comes out right in the end. We have a happy ending. It's a little sappy, in fact. After reading the glowing reviews of the play (here is Louise Kennedy's review in the Globe), I wanted to like the play. I liked the characters, but I think the play is slight.

Wednesday, May 26, 2010

What the old sensibility of James Russell Lowell says to us

As a bass member of the Brookline Chorus, I sang in our final concert on May 15 at All Saints Parish church in Brookline. Included in our program was a new ten minute choral work by Kirke Mechem, "Once to Every Man and Nation". The text for the piece is from a poem by the 19th century poet and abolitionist James Russell Lowell. The song is tuneful in an old-fashioned way, its melody based on a Welsh folk song. The poem itself expresses a sensibility very different from our time. Lowell wrote poetry to inspire people to fight slavery in America. Though I don't listen much to modern pop music, I think the idea of poetry or music inspiring action now seems odd. The last time that happened was, I think, in the 60s, with Dylan, Peter, Paul and Mary, Pete Seeger, and a bunch of others.

Here's a couple of examples of what I mean. Lowell's poem starts:

Once to every man and nation,
Comes the moment to decide,
In the strife of truth with false-hood,
For the good or evil side;


Do people nowadays believe that any decision will confront us "once" in a lifetime, in a "moment to decide"? The choice is stark, between truth and false-hood, between the good or evil side (between abolition and slavery). One might use the terms good and evil, especially if one is a religious conservative, but we don't see any decision as an irrevocable between good and evil. Partly, we think of this as realism, a recognition of the world's complexity and ambiguity. And we try hard to see things in shades of gray, so that we can compromise and maintain some benefit from each side. We believe that thinking in stark terms is not very sophisticated. (I struggle with almost every decision I face, like a neurotic in a Woody Allen film.)

The poem is a call to action, a call to be brave. Once you choose the "good", then you must be prepared for sacrifice. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers died in the Civil War, from both sides. Perhaps our modern avoidance of that type of thinking is a way to avoid that type of sacrifice.

---

I enjoyed singing the piece, and I know the rest of the chorus did as well. (I'm sorry that Kirke Mechem wasn't able to attend our performance -- he fell ill in the days before the concert and had to return home.)

Here is the rest of the poem:

Some great cause, some great decision,
Offering each the bloom or blight,

And the choice goes by forever,

'Twixt that darkness and that light.

Then to side with truth is noble,
When we share her wretched crust,
Ere her cause bring fame and profit,
And 'tis prosperous to be just;

Then it is the brave man chooses,
While the coward stands aside,
Till the multitude make virtue,
Of the faith they had denied.

Though the cause of evil prosper,
Yet the truth alone is strong:
Though her portion be the scaffold,
And upon the throne be wrong,

Yet that scaffold sways the future,
AND, BEHIND THE DIM UNKNOWN,
STANDETH GOD WITHIN THE SHADOW,
KEEPING WATCH ABOVE HIS OWN.

Wednesday, May 5, 2010

Reading The Emigrants, by W. G. Sebald

The Emigrants, by W. G. Sebald (first published: Vito von Eichborn GmbH & Co Verlag, 1992)

At my mother's house, we have an old black leather suitcase filled with family pictures. They are mostly 2 x 3 and 3 x 5 black-and-white pictures, many of them of our family members in Greece from over the last 60-70 years. We used to take out the suitcase, open it on a table, and pull out the pictures (though we haven't done that in years). We would spend an enjoyably melancholy hour two talking about the people in the pictures.

Reading The Emigrants is a little like shuffling through those family pictures. Sebald was a German Jew who himself had emigrated to England, where he lived much of his adult life. There are four chapters in the book, each chapter devoted to a family member that the narrator either knew slightly, or not at all. Each chapter explores the life of that relative, pieced together by the narrator from interviews with surviving cousins, friends, and other relatives. The four people are each emigrants: an artist living in northern England, a peripatetic waiter who traveled through much of the world, a German schoolteacher, a retired professor. The time span of the lives is from the 30s to the 70s. Their generally sad lives are reconstructed, at times vividly so. The Holocaust is not referenced directly, but it seems to be there in the background.

There are no plots, no dramatic events. There are a few interesting conversations with people who reveal unknown facets of the lives being investigated. It is very much like sitting at home, for hours, talking about family members we've known, or hardly knew. To me, it's completely absorbing.

It's not exactly memoir, but an investigation in memoir. It is fiction, even though it may be based on real people, and real events. The very real photographs interspersed throughout the text give the book a documentary feel. But then, I believe almost all writing, even memoir, is either definitely fiction, or closely akin to it. This is a wonderful re-creation of lives, and it's full of life.

Monday, May 3, 2010

MetroWest Opera's Magic Flute -- a lot of fun, and don't worry about the story line

We saw Mozart's "Magic Flute" Saturday night in Weston, put on by MetroWest Opera. I didn't know that the company was founded by Dana Schnitzer, the soprano soloist who sings for the Brookline Chorus. It's an amazing feat of energy and organization to sing (and sing well) and to organize an opera company. And to not grab a leading role for herself in the opera, despite having the talent to justify such a move, said good things about her.

I had never been to The Magic Flute, though years ago we had seen and since forgotten the movie Ingmar Bergman made of a performance in Stockholm. The music was wonderful, the singers were wonderful. The bass who played Sarastro, John-Paul Huckle, filled the hall with his big voice. His voice startled me, full of the deep conviction and weight you expect from the character. The Queen of the Night, Christine Teeters, sang the amazing aria scene where she gives Pamina a dagger and orders her to kill Sarastro, with a surprising amount of menace (why did Mozart compose those cheerful soprano notes for that aria? And it works). And Matt Wight, as Papageno, sang well and was really moving, particularly in the scenes where Papageno (this silly clownlike man) sings that all he wants in life is a Papagena and family.

But the story line of the opera -- we couldn't make it out. It's very convoluted. We heard from a friend that Mozart was influence at the time by the Masons. There's a lot of mumbo jumbo about quazi-religious rituals, trials, citadels, membership among the elect. It was painful to follow. Better to concentrate on the music and singing, which was a lot of fun.