Gee, those are two names you don’t often see in the same headline. Couple of blogs to pass the time on Monday: A preview/op-ed piece on the Guardian’s stage blog about Lincoln Center Festival and, for Time Out New York, a humor piece on Sarah Palin—possible Broadway star! Guardian piece here. Palin on Upstaged here. Enjoy.
What are you doing Friday night, July 17? Heading out to chic performance space-cum-bar Galapagos to hear my one-act opera, silly! Fade, the 30-minute opera I created last year with composer Stefan Weisman is getting its New York premiere in a couple of weeks. It's part of a one-night benefit for American Opera Projects and Opera On Tap called An Opera Grows in Brooklyn. We're on a triple with David T. Little and OOT. I'll be staging the piece—minimally, since this is essentially a concert presentation. We have an amazing cast, including Amy van Roekel, Jonathan Hays and Pamela Stein. Jody Schum will tickle the ivories and Stephen Black brings it all home with his superior conducting skills. Advance story here. Read all about Fade and listen to the music here. Tickets here. Come for the delicious cocktails, stay for ear-tickling arias.
I have a new blog post up at the Guardian this morning about Neil LaBute and his supposed split with MCC Theater. Read it here. Playgoer speculates about the matter, which came to light on Tuesday after David Ng's blog post for the L.A. Times broke the news. I take the opportunity (and the lack of ready news or gossip) to muse on a little-discussed problem in the nonprofit world: indiscriminate green-lighting of established writers by their informal home theaters. Teaser:
But the nearly exclusive arrangement LaBute enjoyed with MCC speaks more to safety and expediency than any sort of meaningful artistic union. MCC produces American and British plays with no clear aesthetic common denominator. But why LaBute? Could it be he needs a home for the dark, "gotcha" plays he relentlessly cranks out; and MCC needs the star wattage the film director brings?
RTWT here.
You may not know it, but between 1992 and 2000, I did a fair share of acting below 14th Street in some wacky experimental theater pieces. What I did as the Dramaturg in a heavily deconstructed and ubercamp version of Othello I don't want to say. Anyway, last summer, the brilliant kids at Piper MacKenzie Productions wheedled me into appearing in a short mock-silent film. I played a sleazy professor who tries to force himself on a pretty young maid. Fun stuff. Warning: My shameless schmacting and mugging may cause seizures. Never let it be said that I don't have the firsthand knowledge to criticize bad performance.
The Poison Kiss from Piper McKenzie on Vimeo.
I just posted a blog at the Guardian. Topic: Why are we so lame when it comes to history plays and revivals of classics? Go, read, comment, and repeat. Tease:
RTWT here.
Well, as far as San Fran goes, not exactly. My one-act opera, Fade, is coming to that fair city later this month. San Francisco Cabaret Opera will present a concert reading of the work, which I created with composer Stefan Weisman last year. (It got its world premiere in London in October.) Meanwhile, I continue to work with Robert Paterson and Philippe Bodin on new operas.
This weekend, I finally get back to work on my first play, Vicarious, commissioned by the Gingold Theatrical Group. Draft: third. Progress: slow. Mood: tensely excited. Notes for revision: legion. I continue to think this could be a powerful and engrossing work, and extremely contemporary without being too trendily headline-ripped. My hope is to have a solid third draft by mid-June. Then another reading (with some kickass professional thesps, I must say) and a six-month development period with actors on their feet throwing furniture around. After that? Who knows…
Seems like a good time to share exciting news with loyal Histriomasticators: In August I'll be heading to the MacDowell Colony for two weeks of intensive work on a new play. Ah yes: A quiet cabin in my native New Hampshire sounds perfect right about now. I am overjoyed and stunned that they took me on my first application, and I hope it signals the start of yearly pilgrimage to writers' colonies around the country.
I bet you noticed it stopped raining. And the weather is lovely. I feel quite happy today.
The Guardian just published my thought piece on the race for this year's Pulitzer Prize in Drama. I hope it'll be the first of many pieces on that fine paper's website. Check it out and complain in comments below. I also wrote about the Pulitzer on TONY's Upstaged last week. Ruined (left) is the front-runner, but you already knew that. Any thoughts on what might also be considered—or what is being ignored?
More freelance news: In the latest issue of Yale’s Theater magazine, I have a report from Iceland’s first-ever international theater festival, Lókal. I visited in March 2008 and filed the report later that month but—since the wheels of academic publishing grind exceeding slow—it hasn’t seen the light of day till now. (My earlier blog post is here.) Editor Tom Sellar did a bang-up job condensing and focusing my sprawling first draft (thanks, Tom!). The people in Reykjavik were absolutely lovely and their theater scene is varied and promising. However, given the ongoing Econolyptic horrors, I somehow doubt there’ll be a second Lókal anytime soon. The organizers of the festival generously covered airfare and accommodations for five days—for me, the Village Voice’s Alexis Soloski and my colleague Helen Shaw. A friend recently noted: “See? They pay for critics to fly over and the economy collapses.”
Been oh-so-busy seeing shows, blogging at Upstaged (you have bookmarked it and check in thrice daily, right?) and sussing out singers for my new opera, I have had no time to keep ole Histriomasticators happy & well-fed with regular posts. Ah well. But here's something new: A preview/thought piece on Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita, which has inspired a multimedia "imagined opera" at Montclair State University this weekend. The link to the essay at Peak Performance's snazzy website In Site is here. Below is the full unedited text.
Humbert Humbert on Trial
The seductive narrator of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita gets his close-up.
By David Cote
Minor recollection from personal history: Something weird happened to me when I first read Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita years ago. I found myself identifying wholeheartedly with the novel’s flamboyant, honey-tongued narrator, Humbert Humbert. So persuasive and vivid was the world view he elaborated, in such witty, high-flown language, I began to see the world through his eyes. And it was exhilarating. No, I didn’t set off in search of some pliable, underage “nymphet” to enthrall and transport across state lines. But so ardently did Humbert state his case, I became a temporary convert. His mesh of lyrical prose ensnared my reason; everywhere society seemed a fleshly wasteland of morality-annihilating temptations, where the man who fancied himself a worldly aesthete could justify lurid pursuits, as long as he used “a fancy prose style.” It wasn’t perversion, you see; it was poetry.
Soon after, of course, I felt pretty foolish. It’s just a novel, after all.
Still, anyone who has read this audacious, intoxicatingly eloquent record of erotic obsession understands that Nabokov created in Humbert Humbert a unique voice: A refined European gentleman swooning over the delectable philistinism of American youth, which drives him to disgustingly low behavior and impossibly high lyrical flights. Humbert’s language is almost indigestibly rich: twisting, baroque sentences flashing with wordplay and literary allusions, self-consciously stylized dispatches from a mind drunk with its linguistic powers and, above all, fixated on 12-year-old Dolores Haze. Dolores (a.k.a. Dolly, Lola, Lo, L) is the saucy New England teen who reminds Humbert of his lost childhood love, Annabel Leigh. Pleading his case before an imaginary jury (in the conceit of the book, Humbert has been arrested for the murder of love-rival Clare Quilty and has written the book in prison as he awaits trial), Humbert articulates, in exquisite detail, the course of his affair with Lolita and his lurid philosophy about the dangerous allure of “nymphets.”
If the experience of reading the 1955 novel is a like being immersed in the twisted mind of a brilliant pedophile, then the new “imaginary opera” based on the book is a clever three-dimensional extension of that same phenomenon. In this multimedia music-theater deconstruction, an actor playing Humbert (Francois Beukelaers) stands in a quarantined space in the midst of the audience. It’s like he’s in the docket of a metaphorical court. Often he keeps his back to us, staring into a camera as he recites fragmented (but chronological) passages from the novel, occasionally turning to the audience (his jury) to argue his case more intimately. There are no other actors in the piece; instead, we see Humbert’s screen-filling face on a central projection screen, flanked by two others on which we see various corollaries and allusions to the book. These include a young woman floating in the ocean (Humbert characterizes nymphets as a kind of siren or mermaid), the American highways on which Humbert and Lolita travel, an arctic landscape that Humbert visited once; and the desolate hotel rooms where he brings Lolita to satisfy his lust. In this way, director Jim Clayburgh and videographer Kurt D’Haeseleer provide visual cues that locate us in the story.
A quick, general note about the use of video projections in Lolita: One hallmark of Nabokov’s fiction was the reflective surface, the shadows and the (distorted) mirror image. His 1947 novel Bend Sinister opens with a tight focus on a water-filled pothole, the mirror-like surface of which he describes in intricate detail. And here are the opening lines of his 1962 mock-epic poem and mock-analysis, Pale Fire: “I was the shadow of the waxwing slain/By the false azure in the window pane.” In other words, a bird has fatally flown into a window, mistaking the sky reflected in it for the sky itself. And, to add to the play of reflectivity, the “I” of those lines is the shadow of the bird, not the bird. Dolores Haze is, likewise, a shadow, a ghost of the teen inamorata Annabel Leigh who still haunts Humbert’s romantic imagination. Nabokov’s imagination was fired not only by reality, but by the potentially false refraction of reality. Thus it makes perfect sense, in the opera, that Humbert’s consciousness is not represented in any traditional form of stagecraft (live actors playing out scenes in realistic sets) but through video projections, snatches of reality filtered through digital technology. Our antihero is surrounded in his cell by shadows of his past, his memories, and the projections of his erotic desires.
For diehard fans of the novel, I have bad news: it’s a severely truncated version. After all, the piece is 70 minutes and the text (prepared by composer Joshua Fineberg) is fragmentary. So it may not be a bad idea to read or re-read the book before seeing this production. Fineberg’s atonal music—strings scrape and woodwinds whine—counterpoints and reinforces the psychic agony of Humbert’s position. It’s dark, rattling music, not pretty or soothing, and indicates (quite unambiguously) that Humbert’s mind is a dark, chaotic space. (If Fineberg had wanted to dig a little deeper into Humbert’s European lineage, he might have used classical music as a thematic base, rendering in musical metaphor the twisted, decayed late Romanticism that Humbert partly represents.)
The casting of Francois Beukelaers as Humbert is a problematic choice. Humbert’s voice is flamboyantly literary. His complex rhetorical riffs are difficult enough to digest while sitting with the book; how much trickier is it to hear the words, cut from context, and spoken in a fairly thick Belgian accent? Beukelaers cuts a dashing, middle-aged figure as Humbert and his old-world accent adds a touch of Euro-gravitas, but those of us who revere the original text might pine for a reader whose delivery of Nabokov’s lyrical banquet is more pleasing to the ear, who won’t throw us with a strange-sounding vowel. But again, this isn’t a literal rendering of the book. We aren’t here to bask in the glories of Nabokov’s language but to see a mental state portrayed in stark form.
And let’s be honest: this version of Lolita does not purport to be a complete or even faithful adaptation. (But note: Vladimir Nabokov’s estate approved this edit.) It is instead a relatively brief, rapturous, disturbing journey into the mind of a madman, an unrepentant pedophile, a murderer, a man so deranged by the intermingling of sexual desire and cultural sophistication, he corrupts a pubescent girl and blames it all on her. Here’s hoping you make the journey with senses titillated but morals intact.
Hey kids: Are you a singer with a background in opera? Or do you know someone who is? Composer Robert Paterson and I are looking for singers to read through two scenes of our opera-in-progress, A Child Possessed. Details below.
Composer Robert Paterson and librettist David Cote are looking for up to nine vocalists (2 women and 5-7 men) with a background in opera to take part in a demo recording of the piano reduction of two scenes for the new, two-act opera, A Child Possessed. We are offering a small honorarium, some great food at the rehearsals, and a studio-quality demo recording, which we plan on using to spread the word far and wide. The pianist for the recording will be Blair McMillen.
The character breakdowns of vocal parts needed and voice types are detailed below.
At our discretion, a few singers may be asked to double up between the
two scenes. The rehearsals and recording are scheduled for April 29-May
1.
Please forward three sample vocal recordings (at least one 20th or 21st century work preferred), a resume and a headshot, via either a website link or emailed to
Robert Paterson . If emailed, the audio files must be MP3 format only.
Although we prefer to receive materials via the above methods, they may also be mailed to the following address:
American Modern Ensemble
Attn: Robert Paterson
484 West 43rd St, Suite 37C
New York, NY 10036
Receipt Deadline: April 6, 2009.
CHARACTERS
(For These Two Scenes)
HÉLÈNE LOPUCHINE (née Milescu) – Soprano
French,
mid 30s. Beautiful, glamorous, world-renowned soprano based in Paris.
Estranged wife of Stepan. For the last five years, her fame has grown
tremendously. She performs in the world’s best opera houses, with a
repertoire of bel canto, the Romantics, and the occasional Baroque.
(She’s more Mozart and Rossini than Wagner.) Stylish, lovely, but
imperious and chilly, she wants to control her own past, which is full
of secrets. Hélène has emotional difficulty with the idea of family and
motherhood—which leads to guilt. She didn’t come from wealth; she had
to work her way up from poor origins. She has a dry, sharp sense of
humor. Stoic loneliness has become a way of life, what with all the
traveling and limited engagements.
STEPAN LOPUCHINE – Baritone: Robert Gardner
Russian, late 30s. Stepan is a truck driver based in Marseilles. When
not on the road driving long hours throughout the French countryside,
he dwells in a small, shabby room in Madame Pascoli’s boarding house by
the docks—which also serves as a bar for sailors and locals. Stepan’s
life is part proletarian, part bohemian. He’s jolly but moody, apt to
talk about axles and carburetors as well as moral philosophy. Born into
the Russian aristocracy, he was forced to leave the Soviet Union when
he was a young man. Married Hélène, had Génie, became estranged from
Hélène when Génie was about three years old. He’s got a dark sense of
humor and can act the fool, but can be dangerous when angered.
EUGÉNIE LOPUCHINE (Génie) – Child Soprano (not sung in reading)
Age 8. Daughter of Hélène and Stepan. Génie is developmentally
disabled, to the point where she cannot communicate or take care of
herself. At first, she cannot speak—beyond random vocalizations—and her
responses to outside stimuli are impulsive, strange, and occasionally
violent. She is a basically sweet girl but living in a Swiss mental
hospital since the age of three has left her dissociated and alienated.
No one tried to teach her anything or reach her emotionally. So it is
unclear whether she is severely mentally disabled or if it is a
combination of moderate disability plus autism, or emotional damage
brought about by years of institutional life.
DR. CHITRY – Tenor
Age: late 30/early 40s. Doctor in Swiss mental institution. Suave,
poised, the public face of the hospital. He deals with distraught
parents of patients all the time.
DR. KRETSCHMANN – Bass-Baritone
Age: 40s/50s. Starchy, pompous but passionate doctor. Innovator of a
controversial new neurological operation for the developmentally
disabled. Authoritative but not subtle.
RENE – Tenor
Age: late teens. Mentally disabled youth who has undergone a radical
operation. Docile but distracted. Charming and ingratiating with his
supervisors. Flirts with women.
GEORGE – Tenor (or Baritone)
Age: 20s. Mentally disabled youth who has undergone a radical operation. A bit fidgety but he tries to control it.
HANS – Tenor
Age: 20s. Mentally disabled youth who has undergone a radical
operation. Most distant of all, with impaired motor functions.
Withdrawn.
IGRANES – Tenor
Age: 30s. Helene’s manager. An elegant, urbane, fussy fellow. He loves
the opera and adores his client. Conservative in his tastes and
dismissive of anything too modern.
HOTEL MANAGER – Baritone
Age: 20s. Worker at a fancy seaside hotel in Cannes. Not as snooty as
Igranes, but he tries to be smooth. When we see him, he’s rather
flustered.
