“Rhobert wears a house, like a monstrous diver’s helmet, on his head. His legs are banty-bowed and shaky because as a child he had rickets. He is way down. Rods of the house like antennae of a dead thing, stuffed, prop up in the air. He is way down. He is sinking. His house is a dead thing that weights him down.”
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Adrienne Kennedy's Sleep Deprivation Chamber
The Round House Theatre’s Adrienne Kennedy festival, with online videos of four plays was a gift. She fuses elegance and fury. Words, images, identities are put into play. Personal history isn’t the focus, but one of the elements. The process of writing is another. She embraces messiness and loose ends and the endlessness of obsessions.
“Sleep deprivation chamber” stands out: no props, no slides, no symbolic images. “Just” words: Suzanne’s letters pleading for help, the insane theater of cross-examinations, depositions, Mom’s voice on the telephone, …. Above all, Suzanne’s insisting on the uprightness and respectability of Teddy and their whole family. They are law-abiding, moral, industrious, successful, educated, public-spirited, …. The crux of the drama is the discovery that none of that matters.
Cuts and blackouts, repetition, starting over and over, commenting on the story, … it’s not anti-realism but a higher, realer realism.It was a shame not to experience it embodied and in person, but even as a stream it hits its mark.
Happy 100th, Patricia Highsmith
Born January 19, 1921, author of Strangers on a train, the Ripley stories, and many other books, including The Price of Salt (1952):
“I don’t know any small towns in Illinois," Carol was saying. "Why Illinois? … All right, Rockford … I’ll remember, I’ll think of Roquefort …”
...
Therese could smell Carol’s perfume faintly, that familiar sweetness that was strangely unfamiliar now, because it did not evoke what it had once evoked.
The Dudamel/L.A. Phil Ives cycle – #6
Charles Ives: Complete Symphonies, Los Angeles Philharmonic & Gustavo Dudamel
Can any of this music matter now? How could it?
If it was …
- Not statements, but listenings, auditions. Echoes rather than statements (quotations).
- Intimate and idiosyncratic.
- Capturing a moment when the European classical tradition and the brass band tradition and the ballad tradition, and widespread domestic music-making and ragtime and all the newer traditions were colliding with modernity, modernism, recording, radio, urbanization, mass media. The last composer with all of these as living memories.
- Memory not nostalgia. The quaintness of Ives’s life story has outlived its usefulness. Anyway, Ives’s subject isn’t 19th century Danbury but his process of remembering. Not the tune, but the memory of the tune.
- Spaced out. A space and time in which different musics are sounding all around the listener.
- Inclusive. Not this or that but all. Challenging us to take in it all.
- Two opposite moods: Pandemonium & Stillness
The Dudamel/L.A. Phil Ives cycle – #5
Charles Ives: Complete Symphonies, Los Angeles Philharmonic & Gustavo Dudamel
“Robert Browning Overture”
Fourteen years ago the Phil did this under Ingo Metzmacher. Memorable not only as a terrific performance, but as the first time I ever had the opportunity to hear one of Ives’s orchestral pieces. An inexcusable wait, but worth it. An interesting extra for this recording - a bit of no-fooling Ives collage. The orchestra is deployed as a collection of distinct forces, operating independent of each other, or else in direct opposition. The brasses against the strings against the reeds. The middle section had the darkly glittering textures: beauty but also terror and exaltation. And evolving further into an animated cartoon of riffs, fashioning an idiosyncratic integrity.
The Dudamel/L.A. Phil Ives cycle - #4
Charles Ives: Complete Symphonies, Los Angeles Philharmonic & Gustavo Dudamel
4.1. The performance felt like a church service yanked out of shape – or into shape. Into another kind of order. Not a spoof at all, but earnest, with expressionist detonations in a dreamscape. The chorus – as if overheard from somewhere else – asking, “Watchman, tell us of the night / what its signs of promise are. … Tell us ….”
4.2. Taking the listener on a wild ride. The real jolts come in the quiet passages between the noisy explosions. The strings keening off key. The tiny taps, parps, and gurgles resounding without clear direction or trajectory. Joanne Pearce Martin nailing the concise piano concerto that's folded inside. At the performance last February, the non-fanatics sitting around us seemed restless and uncomfortable. Still able to unsettle. In the recording, the different elements are clear and sharply defined. No blur, no muddle, heroically defined. Each element retains its integrity.
4.3. Then another kind of disruption: a lush fugue. A hymn – and the people singing the hymn – figuring as parts of a pattern.
4.4. Drums barely audible far off. Gagaku ghosts drone. A string detonation, then screech. Bits of tunes with ragged edges. Not afraid of sounds that are ugly or unmusical. The Phil brings out things I’ve never heard before: the flat horn blast about four minutes in, the goofy razz a bit later, the soloists standing out from the wordless chorus. Individual elements of a mobile, balanced against each other, circling overhead.
The Dudamel/L.A. Phil Ives cycle - #3
Charles Ives: Complete Symphonies, Los Angeles Philharmonic & Gustavo Dudamel
Symphony #3. Score! This could push this piece into the active repertoire, finally.
3.1. The Leonard Bernstein’s 1965 recording made this luminous ultra-Copland. The 1995 version of the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra was sharper-edged. Twenty-five years later, the L.A. Phil clarifies the alternation of moods: expansive/intensive, exalted/satirical, transcendental/parochial. At first dogmatic, earnest, grim – but ending with a glimpse of the sky, fresh air. Ives titled it “Old Folks Gatherin'”, which it could be. But more: a specific hymn sounding in a general dawn.
3.2. “Children’s Day”? A bit too complicated for a romp. Not nostalgia but the earnestness of the game. The skip becomes a bit awkward. The call and response a bit harsh. Flirting, teasing. Finally heavier, steadier, slower, gently dissonant.
3.3. Bernstein made this “Communion” simultaneously swagger and satirize swaggering. Introductory interrogatatories: quiet, soft, but too Edward Hopper to be complacent. Where are we? A crisis? Yes, but evolving. Violin dance for a while. Big declamation winding-down.