![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
I am such a girl of habit. I had got into the way of being alive
In which I attempt to make up for the flu with theater. It's like chicken soup, only with more lighting cues and fewer kneydlekh. Although if I go and see The Dybbuk next month in New York, that might change.
Tonight I went to Cardillac at Opera Boston—music by Paul Hindemith, serial killings by E.T.A Hoffmann, I'll post a review tomorrow. I am awake far too late as it is.
Last night I saw The Lady's Not for Burning at Theatre@First. This is a play about which it is impossible for me to be sensible; my grandparents took me to a production when I was thirteen, without telling me anything about it, and I fell in love. It was the first modern play I took any notice of. It was the first play I ever bought. (The same hardcover second edition with tattered, saffron-colored jacket I have here on the shelf beside me, with its woodcut cover and someone else's checks and underscores and caesurae pencilled into most of the parts; I think it must have been a rehearsal copy. I preserved it like a relic everywhere I moved: it's in better condition than many a book I've bought since.) I never tried to memorize it, but there are lines I've been able to quote for the last sixteen years:
I have left
Rings of beer on every alehouse table
From the salt sea-coast across half a dozen counties
But each time I thought I was on the way
To a faintly festive hiccup
The sight of the damned world sobered me up again.
I can see
The sky's pale belly glowing and growing big,
Soon to deliver the moon.
What is deep, as love is deep, I'll have
Deeply. What is good, as love is good,
I'll have well. Then if time and space
Have any purpose, I shall belong to it.
I love you, but the world's not changed.
I am therefore very pleased to report that I quite liked this production, because otherwise it'd have depressed me for weeks.
There are problems with their Jennet; I'll get that out of the way first. I don't know if she'd have done better without the southern accent, but I had serious issues with Maria Natapov's diction—not helped by her consistently breathy, rising inflections, which neither conversationalized the verse nor kept its rhythms—and in a play as concerned with poetry as The Lady's Not for Burning, that's almost fatal. If she'd been wooden all round, I'd have simply been able to tune her out. As she had the right intelligent affect for a woman accused of crimes she can't believe anyone still believes in, I kept being distracted. Jennet has some of my favorite lines in the play; I was sorry to lose the full range of what could be done with them. Fortunately, their Thomas Mendip was the excellent Brian Keller: tall, slender, a little saturnine, with a voice that could turn whetstone and scythe for his self-sickness and boom out with caustic profundity, "Don't they know I sing solo bass in Hell's Madrigal Club?" He looks resigned to nothing; there's a real rage in him, not just cynical discontent, and it flashes to the surface at each new manifestation of the world's stupidity, sometimes tempered with humor he can just keep bitter, sometimes spilling over into corrosion. I think I had seen him played gentler, less soul-burnt, and I liked the difference. And yet he could be whimsical and self-upstaging and genuinely shaken by the realization that he's still capable of love: I didn't fall for him, but I'll remember how he leaned up in the window, nodding in, how his voice lightens as he reports the twilight and how you mark the first time Jennet touches him. Their last scene together is, in fact, unbreakable.
For the rest of the cast: a very good Richard and Alizon, not silly, but a kind of clear sweetness; they are less complicated than Jennet and Thomas, but that does not mean they are less real. A very good Tappercoom, in the unenviable position of being at all times the designated (at least to his friends) voice of reason; the scenes with him and the Mayor and the wistfully foolish, music-besotted Chaplain were some of the best in the second and early third act. By the time they sloped off with the alleluia'ing Matthew Skipps, I'd even become fond of Nicholas and Humphrey, in a safely-five-rows-back sort of way, though I am afraid I have actually met mothers like Margaret Devize. Who I wasn't expecting was Rob Noyes' absolutely fucking brilliant Mayor Hebble Tyson. He enters full of blusterous, beleaguered bureaucracy, welded to routine ("This will all be gone into at the proper time!") and blowing his nose like a particularly glutinous form of Victor Borge punctuation; he finishes a broken man, weeping into his handkerchief. All his certainties destroyed. And it's not solely for the audience to grin at. It's as if a commedia Pantalone suddenly fell into three dimensions and didn't know what to do with himself once he got there, tragicomic as Malvolio. That's memorable. I can't remember a thing about the actor who played the role when I was thirteen, but I'll probably have bits of Noyes in my head—at the very least, his post-nasal drip—whenever I read the play now.
And the Appalachian setting worked beautifully. The year is 1919, requiring no alteration to the references to Flanders and artillery; an alchemist in West Virginia is probably something of a stretch, but there are so many little churches and congregations in hollow country,1 Alizon's convent is perfectly believable. The folk music is very well integrated, especially when it accompanies the characters: Thomas has been walking the long, demobbed miles to the tune of "Wayfaring Stranger," the Chaplain is introduced absently singing "Simple Gifts." And I had not thought about how the accents would influence the language, but at least in Thomas' dialogue it produced one wonderful and unexpected effect: those glittering, metaphysical monologues that are both a defense mechanism and a passionate argument roll off his tongue with the cadences of hellfire and revival, except that what he's preaching is human disillusion and the mortal sin of despair. I don't know if you could get that effect with the original stage directions of "the fifteenth century, more or less exactly." I love this sort of thing.
1. Not that I have ever lived in Appalachia, but I did hear Carlisle Floyd talk about the genesis of Susannah (1955) when![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
fleurdelis28 and I went to see the opera at BU in April: that where he grew up in South Carolina in the '20's and '30's, every little town had essentially its own religion and nobody ever noticed; it was just your church, the church. It was only when he came back from college and later university in the 1940's that he realized how out of the mainstream his upbringing really had been; that's what he wrote Susannah from. I was actually reminded of it by this production, which is not a bad thing—it's my favorite opera in English after Peter Grimes and The Medium. What, you thought this post wouldn't include at least one footnote?
So once again, I find myself in the position of recommending a play the night before it closes, but that shouldn't keep you from listening to me. Yes, I'd have preferred an equal match of leads, but it didn't keep me from applauding all of the cast; there are cuts made to the text, but only a few lines ("What a wonderful thing is metaphor") that I really missed. There's the music and the voices. There's one performance left; if you're in the Boston area, you should go see it. And I will hope I don't need to wait another half my lifetime before I hear about another production of this play, because it deserves a wider audience than Pamela Dean's Tam Lin (1991), but if I have to take a version to carry with me for years, I don't mind it being this one.
Tonight I went to Cardillac at Opera Boston—music by Paul Hindemith, serial killings by E.T.A Hoffmann, I'll post a review tomorrow. I am awake far too late as it is.
Last night I saw The Lady's Not for Burning at Theatre@First. This is a play about which it is impossible for me to be sensible; my grandparents took me to a production when I was thirteen, without telling me anything about it, and I fell in love. It was the first modern play I took any notice of. It was the first play I ever bought. (The same hardcover second edition with tattered, saffron-colored jacket I have here on the shelf beside me, with its woodcut cover and someone else's checks and underscores and caesurae pencilled into most of the parts; I think it must have been a rehearsal copy. I preserved it like a relic everywhere I moved: it's in better condition than many a book I've bought since.) I never tried to memorize it, but there are lines I've been able to quote for the last sixteen years:
I have left
Rings of beer on every alehouse table
From the salt sea-coast across half a dozen counties
But each time I thought I was on the way
To a faintly festive hiccup
The sight of the damned world sobered me up again.
I can see
The sky's pale belly glowing and growing big,
Soon to deliver the moon.
What is deep, as love is deep, I'll have
Deeply. What is good, as love is good,
I'll have well. Then if time and space
Have any purpose, I shall belong to it.
I love you, but the world's not changed.
I am therefore very pleased to report that I quite liked this production, because otherwise it'd have depressed me for weeks.
There are problems with their Jennet; I'll get that out of the way first. I don't know if she'd have done better without the southern accent, but I had serious issues with Maria Natapov's diction—not helped by her consistently breathy, rising inflections, which neither conversationalized the verse nor kept its rhythms—and in a play as concerned with poetry as The Lady's Not for Burning, that's almost fatal. If she'd been wooden all round, I'd have simply been able to tune her out. As she had the right intelligent affect for a woman accused of crimes she can't believe anyone still believes in, I kept being distracted. Jennet has some of my favorite lines in the play; I was sorry to lose the full range of what could be done with them. Fortunately, their Thomas Mendip was the excellent Brian Keller: tall, slender, a little saturnine, with a voice that could turn whetstone and scythe for his self-sickness and boom out with caustic profundity, "Don't they know I sing solo bass in Hell's Madrigal Club?" He looks resigned to nothing; there's a real rage in him, not just cynical discontent, and it flashes to the surface at each new manifestation of the world's stupidity, sometimes tempered with humor he can just keep bitter, sometimes spilling over into corrosion. I think I had seen him played gentler, less soul-burnt, and I liked the difference. And yet he could be whimsical and self-upstaging and genuinely shaken by the realization that he's still capable of love: I didn't fall for him, but I'll remember how he leaned up in the window, nodding in, how his voice lightens as he reports the twilight and how you mark the first time Jennet touches him. Their last scene together is, in fact, unbreakable.
For the rest of the cast: a very good Richard and Alizon, not silly, but a kind of clear sweetness; they are less complicated than Jennet and Thomas, but that does not mean they are less real. A very good Tappercoom, in the unenviable position of being at all times the designated (at least to his friends) voice of reason; the scenes with him and the Mayor and the wistfully foolish, music-besotted Chaplain were some of the best in the second and early third act. By the time they sloped off with the alleluia'ing Matthew Skipps, I'd even become fond of Nicholas and Humphrey, in a safely-five-rows-back sort of way, though I am afraid I have actually met mothers like Margaret Devize. Who I wasn't expecting was Rob Noyes' absolutely fucking brilliant Mayor Hebble Tyson. He enters full of blusterous, beleaguered bureaucracy, welded to routine ("This will all be gone into at the proper time!") and blowing his nose like a particularly glutinous form of Victor Borge punctuation; he finishes a broken man, weeping into his handkerchief. All his certainties destroyed. And it's not solely for the audience to grin at. It's as if a commedia Pantalone suddenly fell into three dimensions and didn't know what to do with himself once he got there, tragicomic as Malvolio. That's memorable. I can't remember a thing about the actor who played the role when I was thirteen, but I'll probably have bits of Noyes in my head—at the very least, his post-nasal drip—whenever I read the play now.
And the Appalachian setting worked beautifully. The year is 1919, requiring no alteration to the references to Flanders and artillery; an alchemist in West Virginia is probably something of a stretch, but there are so many little churches and congregations in hollow country,1 Alizon's convent is perfectly believable. The folk music is very well integrated, especially when it accompanies the characters: Thomas has been walking the long, demobbed miles to the tune of "Wayfaring Stranger," the Chaplain is introduced absently singing "Simple Gifts." And I had not thought about how the accents would influence the language, but at least in Thomas' dialogue it produced one wonderful and unexpected effect: those glittering, metaphysical monologues that are both a defense mechanism and a passionate argument roll off his tongue with the cadences of hellfire and revival, except that what he's preaching is human disillusion and the mortal sin of despair. I don't know if you could get that effect with the original stage directions of "the fifteenth century, more or less exactly." I love this sort of thing.
1. Not that I have ever lived in Appalachia, but I did hear Carlisle Floyd talk about the genesis of Susannah (1955) when
fleurdelis28 and I went to see the opera at BU in April: that where he grew up in South Carolina in the '20's and '30's, every little town had essentially its own religion and nobody ever noticed; it was just your church, the church. It was only when he came back from college and later university in the 1940's that he realized how out of the mainstream his upbringing really had been; that's what he wrote Susannah from. I was actually reminded of it by this production, which is not a bad thing—it's my favorite opera in English after Peter Grimes and The Medium. What, you thought this post wouldn't include at least one footnote?So once again, I find myself in the position of recommending a play the night before it closes, but that shouldn't keep you from listening to me. Yes, I'd have preferred an equal match of leads, but it didn't keep me from applauding all of the cast; there are cuts made to the text, but only a few lines ("What a wonderful thing is metaphor") that I really missed. There's the music and the voices. There's one performance left; if you're in the Boston area, you should go see it. And I will hope I don't need to wait another half my lifetime before I hear about another production of this play, because it deserves a wider audience than Pamela Dean's Tam Lin (1991), but if I have to take a version to carry with me for years, I don't mind it being this one.
no subject
The sky's pale belly glowing and growing big,
Soon to deliver the moon.
Those truly are lovely lines!
I've heard of this play, but knew nothing about it. Thanks for the super intro, which make the play, and this production, very intriguing sounding (I like what you say about the Appalachian setting, and particularly what you say in your footnote about each little town having its own religion)--whereas the synopsis in Wikipedia just made it sound confused.
It's funny how blow-by-blow narration can miss out on essentials and reduce something meaningful to a mess, whereas something like your review, which takes the plot as given and concentrates on the pains and particulars of the characters, can really convey the essentials. Or at least, that's how it seems to me now, though I haven't read or seen the play yet.
blowing his nose like a particularly glutinous form of Victor Borge punctuation --laughed out loud at that.
Can you explain about the comparison to Pamela Dean's Tam Lin? Were you just reaching for something popular in order to set a benchmark that this should exceed, or is there something about that Tam Lin that relates to this play and that this play does better?
(And wow, that question comes off as somehow an attack, or at the very least overly interrogatory, but I don't mean it that way. I haven't read Pamela Dean's Tam Lin, either, though I've heard a lot about it. I'm just curious about the connection you're making between them.)
no subject
There's a reason I imprinted on them!
Thanks for the super intro, which make the play, and this production, very intriguing sounding (I like what you say about the Appalachian setting, and particularly what you say in your footnote about each little town having its own religion)--whereas the synopsis in Wikipedia just made it sound confused.
You're very welcome! I don't mind evangelizing for Christopher Fry. I don't love any of his other plays as I do The Lady's Not for Burning, but I've also never seen any of them staged; I'd like to. He's not very often revived.
Or at least, that's how it seems to me now, though I haven't read or seen the play yet.
Well, read it and let me know if I've been an accurate guide. Or come to Boston . . .
--laughed out loud at that.
(It's really impressive.)
Can you explain about the comparison to Pamela Dean's Tam Lin? Were you just reaching for something popular in order to set a benchmark that this should exceed, or is there something about that Tam Lin that relates to this play and that this play does better?
Neither; it was five-thirty in the morning and I failed ellipsis. Tam Lin is a novel with multiple myth-arcs, The Lady's Not for Burning being one of them; because it's rarely performed nowadays, most people I know therefore discovered the play through reading the novel. Which makes it very well-known within a certain cross-section of the science fiction and fantasy community, but I'd still like to see more opportunities for people to discover it as a play. It deserves a wider audience. I may need to rewrite that sentence.
Tam Lin, etc.
no subject
Alchemists in Appalachia... it's no stranger than the folk art St. Francis sculpture I remember once seeing in a museum as a child--not expected from such a Protestant place.* Or the unique variety of crossbow, about which I've thought of writing a paper as there doesn't seem to be anything out there, but I'm not an Appalachian scholar and I have no idea where to begin with it.
*My alternate historical Appalachia is, of course, Catholic, which rather eliminates the profusion of sects, but they've any number of local/heterodox saints to make up the difference, not to mention that most folk believe in hogboys, the Gentry, and so on, not without reason.
no subject
It reads very well, and it plays even better. I have no idea if it's still in print, but you should have good luck with libraries if not.
Or the unique variety of crossbow, about which I've thought of writing a paper as there doesn't seem to be anything out there, but I'm not an Appalachian scholar and I have no idea where to begin with it.
I didn't know there was a uniquely Appalachian crossbow. I approve.
no subject
no subject
It really was worth waiting for. I feel much more kindly toward February now.
It's been a lot of fun to do, and I've enjoyed playing the music-besotted Chaplain. Quite a comtrast from Emerson!
So who are you next time?
no subject
no subject
I've been meaning to read your review of this for weeks now, and I am pleased and somewhat unsurprised that we took almost the exact same view of it (I think I saw it exactly a week earlier than you did),
Did you write it up? I'd love to read.
save that I also would have singled out the men playing the brothers for their startling brilliant obtuseness and ability to play off each other.
They were a very good double act. I'll watch for both of those actors now.