Murray Ross

The Maestro Returns

Charles Ansbacher paid us a visit last weekend. 
Charles cut quite figure in Colorado Springs a while back. When I first came to town he was our neighbor up the street, conducting the Colorado Springs Symphony in the Palmer High School auditorium. He was the symphony's conductor for nearly two decades.  It's thanks to Charles (and his terrific cohorts, Bee Vrandenburg, Kathleen Collins, Phil Kendall and others) that the symphony grew and prospered, and that the Pikes Center was created and built.  Charles was the real face of the arts in our town, beaming brightly in our newspapers nearly every week.  It was almost too much: everywhere I looked there was Charles  #$%** Ansbacher.  I sometimes wished there might be room for someone else--a young theatre guy for instance.

Charles did not limit himself to conducting our orchestra and building our principal auditorium.  He was a White House fellow; he hob nobbed with the vice president and the transportation secretary sat on his lap. He served on the blue ribbon committee responsible for the state of the art Denver International Airport.  After leaving Colorado Springs, he spent some time with his distinguished wife Swanee Hunt in Vienna (she was Clinton's ambassador to Austria). He flew in under armed escort to conduct the orchestra in war torn Sarajevo. And not incidentally he founded the Boston Landmarks Orchestra, composed primarily of the best free lance musicians in Boston, playing outdoors in public places. It's fair to say that Charles has been busy.

He might be a little less busy in the near future. He recently learned that he has a brain tumor, and that it is malignant.  The prognosis is not so good. When he came to town last weekend most of us realized we might be seeing him for the last time. Kathleen Collins arranged a reception for him over at Scott O'Malley's place, and 50 of Charles' best friends came over to see him in on a snowy afternoon. It was a great crowd. After a little food and drink, we were invited into the small theater to listen to Charles to talk.

I might add that Charles has made a habit of coming into town two or three times a decade.  And when he has come, Kathleen has always seen to it that the maestro has had the opportunity to speak to a gathering of those who know him, and tell us what he's been up to (a lot, always). But this time, of course, was a little different.

There was Charles sitting on Scott O'Malley's stage in the Western Jubilee Warehouse--an unlikely site for a conductor of classical music. The room is small. The walls are covered with Scott's affectionate memorabilia: posters, pennants, quilts, tons of guitars, old radios.  The room is a kind of shrine to old time country and western music. Charles is neither. But for this occasion the room was just right: warm and very personal, glowing. 

Charles began by telling us in a concise and dispassionate way about his condition and treatment.  Following his diagnosis they had operated by cutting a manhole cover in the side of his skull, lifting it up and removing the tumor.  The operation, he said, had not disturbed the cognitive functions of his brain. But it may have removed some of the brain that is connected to the emotions.  That was all right, Charles said, because he has always thought of himself as a mostly rational kind of person anyway.

He then told us his prognosis, as far as it can be known (never perfectly), and quoted Samuel Johnson saying "Depend upon it, sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully."  Everything that followed gave proof of Johnson's wisdom.

Charles gracefully and economically summarized his working life here and afterwards. He began by saying he had been born in privileged circumstances--and that his good fortune had helped him make the best use of the gifts he had. He told us Beethoven was his favorite composer,because Beethoven was brave, strong, well organized and never sentimental-- unlike the French, he said, with a twinkle in the direction of Larry Smith who had just finished conducting a program of French music in the house that Charles built.  He took some questions following his brief talk, and accepted some compliments as well.

I listened to everything Charles said, and everything he said was spoken with grace,and good humor, and great charm--- all Charles trademarks.  But there was something quite special about this performance, a complete honesty and transparency of presence. Charles had no agenda, nothing to sell this time. He was, all there, wonderfully all there. He's lost a little weight, and is just a little more fragile, but that only makes him look more quintessentially himself--his fine features are finer, his face was becoming a master drawing. There was no evidence of emotional disconnection.  On the contrary every single thing he said and did was suffused with feeling, without ever once becoming maudlin. I had never seen Charles like this; I have almost never seen anyone like this. 

Charles has given hundreds of concerts in his life, and spoken well to thousands. But I venture to say that his little talk to friends last weekend was the performance of a lifetime.  It was a privilege to witness.  There's nothing like a fine man come home, all of him right there.

Women's Work

Last night doing the dishes I realized I had messed up a few moments in Our Town, the ones with the women in their kitchens.  As you know, Mrs. Gibbs and Mrs. Webb spend a lot of time working there, without actual kitchens.  There's not a stove, sink, shelf, pot, knife or coffee mug on the premises.  All the women's work is done in mime (with the exception, in our production, of stringing the beans):

We thought we got the mime part down pretty well.  In rehearsals we started with mock-ups of actual kitchens, and started subtracting the set and props when the women had got their routines figured out.  We simplified some things too when we realized that people in the audience were not meant to focus their attention on things like Mrs. Gibbs' exact recipe for French toast. 

All this business has a payoff at the top of the second act, when the stage manager pays the two mothers a famous tribute:

"I don't have to point out to the women in the audience that both these ladies they see before them,both these ladies cooked three meals a day, one of them for twenty years, and the other for forty--and no summer vacation.  They raised two children apiece, washed, cleaned the house, and never had a nervous breakdown."

My friend and colleague Leah Chandler Mills says these lines are potentially patronizing, but thinking of my own mother I never found them so.  In performance, the speech always got appreciative chuckles, just as it's meant to.

Washing up the dishes late last night after dinner with friends, I was thinking that if anyone looked in my kitchen window they would see a scene from Our Town --- someone working in the kitchen--yes, the genders had changed and there were actual dishes, but the actions were the same.  And I realized I had got them slightly wrong in the show.  That's because, like Mrs Webb and Mrs Gibbs, I have done several thousand dishes in my time.  I stack the dishes to the right of the sink, rinse them in the running faucet, stash them in the dishwasher. Like most dish doers in their own homes, I have my routine down. Nothing is wasted when I am doing my dishes, if I am just doing the dishes, as I was doing them last night, the difference being I was also watching myself doing them, just as we watch Mrs. Webb and Mrs. Gibbs doing their's.

I had made the mistake of telling these ladies that the pressure was on in their kitchens--they had to get their breakfasts made and their kids fed before the school bell rang.  So there was a lot of anxiety and tension in both households, and in creating that I had missed the point. The point is that making breakfast and washing dishes is something many of us do but something we rarely look at someone doing.  And if we were to look at that work, we would see something ordinary and remarkable-- small dance routines, little marvels of efficiency, economy and fluidity ( I admit I was thinking this after a half bottle of wine).  It's the sort of thing that can only come with a thousand repititions.  I should have encouraged those women just to do their work and nothing more.  That would have been more than enough.

10 top reasons to see OUR TOWN this weekend

10) Gordon Hinds. He's 89 and has been around a very long time (he played "Old Adam" in As You Like It fifteen years ago). This may be his last performance.In the third act he talks about how his son knew all the stars. "He'd set on the porch even's 'n tell 'em all by name.  Yes, sir, wonderful."  When Gordon says this, you feel the line comes out of his whole life.  I am not kidding.

9) Mallory Hybl. She's 9 years old making her THEATREWORKS debut. She's a genuinely radiant girl. Those of her who know her family will take special pleasure in the moment where Rebecca Gibbs tells us what she loves most in the world, but she's even better when she's just looking at the moon.

8) Mark Arnest.  Not a professional actor, never will be.  But the music he's created up there in the church loft is all his own, and no one could have done it better even if and because it never calls attention to itself. And when he shows up drunk but hermetically sealed late night in Grover's Corners, you don't feel good about this.

7) Jean, Jinn and Dick.  Older folks who all showed up just to sit in the town cemetery.  They are very beautiful too. Real faces on every one of them.

6) Addison, Hela, Sean, Jeremy, Richard, Ashley, Silas, Mark, and Michael.  And anybody else I somehow forgot to mention in Grover's Corners.  Worthy citizens, worthy citizens!

5) Steve Wallace and Tom Paradise. Steve was 19 years old when he appeared as a fireman in the very first ever THEATREWORKS production in 1975.  He's still a fireman.  He's also a terrific Doc Gibbs--watch him give his son a late night talking to.  Tom has been doing amazing work on our stage for three decades with no sign of stopping. Watch him talk--or try to talk-- to his future son in law in Grover's Corners. These guys are real treasures.

4) Stephen Weitz. You can call him Steve, but he'd rather you didn't. Smart guy and decent too. He played Hamlet last summer and came down here to stage manage in Grover's Corners. I think you'll like listening to him talking about everything from Babylon to all of New Hampshire. I do.

3) Emily Paton Davis and Leslie O'Carroll.  Two of Colorado's, finest actresses.  Watch Mrs. Webb at the wedding; Watch Mrs. Gibbs in the cemetary.  Watch them both string beans together. Beautiful stuff.

2) The soda shop scene. Ben Bonenfant and Chrissy Bakkin do more than justiice to one of the best loved--and best--scenes in American drama. This is the way love goes when love goes right.

1) Our Town.  It's a great play -- the only great play in our town at the moment.  And you only have this weekend to see it before we turn the lights out.

Sunday in the park

In Chicago last weekend we visited the south side on a bright Sunday afternoon, and stopped at the Allison Davis garden.  It's a modest stone circle ringing a lawn dedicated to the memory of the man who was the first African American faculty member to receive tenure at the University of Chicago in the 1940's (though his appointment also specified he would not seek admission to the faculty club). The small park is sited at at a racial dividing line where the professor walked every day on his way from his African American neighborhood to his office at the university.  Around the circle are four tablets which contain a brief biography as well as some quotations from Professor Davis. 

http://www.hydepark.org/parks/washington/DavisGard.htm

The park is designed partly so visitors might have a better of view of the adjacent  "Fountain of Time", Lorado Taft's enormous scupture dedicated to the heroic forward struggle of humanity.

All very inspirational, no?  Yes, yet also something else. One of the tablets quotes Professor Davis writing that  "If people of different cultures cannot associate freely, they cannot learn one another's special form of the American language,manners, morals and psychological goals."  Very moving, and yet the park which commemorates these words and its author bore no evidence of such association. The bare little park had an aura of desolation about it.  The gap between the white and black neighborhoods on Chicago's south side is as great as ever--one of Professor Davis' sons noted at the dedication ceremony in 2005 that the mean annual income of the black neighborhood to the south was $13,000, while it was $126,000 in Hyde Park just to the north.  The most direct moment of cultural free association we experienced that morning in the black neighborhood next door was a well thrown egg that landed square on the passenger window of our cruising rental van.  In the park itself, the most visible sign of human interaction  was a small defacement in one of the tablets, which noted that "in 1994 the U.S. Postal service had issued a stamp" honoring Professor Davis for his accomplishments. The word "stamp" had been neatly chisled away--- "stamp" had been stamped out, so to speak. A darkly humorous gesture from an anonymous poetic vandal.

Meanwhile, next door the monumental "Fountain of Time," is showing signs of distress.  It was created in 1922 out of reinfoced concrete aggregate, a new and cheaper alternative to marble. The aggregate has eroded, and Taft's heroic figures have already begun to lose their distinctive character. Grass leaps up at the base.  The large fountain basin was empty.

I'm standing in the middle of the circle of the Professor Davis' park in Chicago's south side, but I'm thinking of what Our Town's Professor Willard says about the early history of man in Grover's Corners: "Early Amerindian stock, Cotachatchee tribes--no evidence before the 10th century of this era--now entirely disappeared."  Not so long from now the marching heroic figures in the Fountain of Time will be amorphous rounded lumps, and all the ringing words of Professor Davis will have faded away. You can watch all of this happening right before your eyes in the Allison Davis park. And yet, for awhile at least, the park and its honoree remind us, there's still life on this earth,  life "straining away, straining all the time to make something of itself."

Out of here

You can understand why people often leave Our Town speaking of what a sweet play it is.  And it is.  There's a first act celebrating American small town values: friendliness, family, good neighbors, etc.  All values worth celebrating too, and Wilder manages to do with ease and gentle irony.  About the worst thing that happens is a son forgets to do his chores---all families should be so lucky.  It's a nice play,presided over by a benign rather laid back stage manager (Stephen Weitz) who makes a point of not preachingtoo much.

 

But Our Town IS something else too.  First thing we learn about the characters we meet is they are no longer with us. Doc Gibbs coming down Main Street now, he died in 1930--hospital is named after him.  His wife, Julia Gibbs, she died before her husband. Newspaperboy, Joe Crowell there, the very bight kid, he got killed in the first world war.  Almost as soon as you meet someone in this show you are reminded of their mortality.  P.S.: they're dead. You hardly notice these postscripts, but they are everywhere. The play is all the time telling us to get life while we can, even as we just smile and let it go by.  And then, in the last act, when we stop smiling, we learn you can't go back, even if you could.

There's your sweet show for you. It's just like like the morning star, "wonderful bright before it has to go."  Sweet show--but it' has to go.  It's outta here--and so are we.

Our Town Weddings

It's a tricky business inviting our audiences to see that Grover's Corners, 1899, is also our town--because of course in many ways it's.  Few of us get our milk delivered on our back porches any more, and I don't think anyone has a horse driven milk truck.  We don't cook as much on wood stoves.  Dogs don't sleep in the street. Michelle's is closed and it's not so easy to get strawberry phosphates after school.  And so on. Our town does not sit on old pliocene granite and our population is no longer 2,642.  Even so, there are some distanct parallels: we may not be quite 86% pecent republican, but El Paso County is not that far away.  We still have a whole lot of churches. Culture?  Well, ma'am, you're right--there ain't much.

But these are not the details that matter.  What matters is that the fundamental things still apply: just like they did in Babylon and in Grover's Corners. Most people eat breakfast, do homeoiwrk, eventually grow up and they get married.  Why this last month alone I went to two weddings---my son's in Philadelphia, and our very own stage manager's right here in Colorado City.  Perfectly lovely weddings, as Mrs. Soames says.  They were good weddings, and as many of them are. and nearly always they make you cry. The wedding now playing nightly in Grover's Corners is a good wedding too.  My favorite moments in the production are when the stage manager is telling us that "every time a child is born into the world it' sNature's attempt to make a perfect human being" and we see Rebecca Gibbs (Mallory Hybl) coming down the aisle to take her seat. She's 9 years old and a very plausible attempt at making a perfect human being so far as I can tell. And then, just afterwards, the Stage Manager  is telling us not to forget the ancestors,millions of them, and we see Framer McCartney (Gordon Hinds) oming down the aisle taking his seat too. Gordon is 89 years old and this may well be his last show.  He's not an ancestor yet, but he's getting there, and with his great age has come the deepest appreciation of the play of any cast member. Listen to how he appreciates looking at the stars at night later on in the cemetary:  "yes sir, wonderful," he says.  To my ears this is the most resonant line in the show.

But back to the wedding in our town.  Here it is, snapped from my Iphone on Friday night:

 

There was some popluar sentiment for staging the wedding further upstage--so we'd all be looking at the bride and groom, and the wedding party would have their backs to us, more or less the way it happens at real weddings.  But I wanted to put the bride and groom in the center of the stage, surrounded by everyone, audience and cast alike.  George and Emily r us. Their wedding is just about the same in our town as it was in Grover's Corners at the turn of the last century.  The same words are being said. The same feelings of fear, grief and joy are spread around the room. The music is familiar. And the whole affair, almost completely predictab;e and very simple, is always moving.  It's a sacrament--and even if, as the stage manager says, we don't know what that means exactly, we know a sacrament when we feel it.  In our town.

full moon

Last night at Alvarado Campground, 9,000 feet, moon rising over the Wet Mountains.  The moonlight was just "terrible" as Emily Webb says.  Choir practice going on down in the Westcliffe Lutheran church. And you could hear the train all the way to Pueblo.

Bright Star, partly occluded

I had an English uncle who came to Colorado years ago--the most musical member of our family.  I took him on a road trip through the Arkansas Valley and slipped in a tape of  Harold in Italy, which I thought would suit the occasion (he was a Berlioz man). Five minutes later he told me very firmly to turn the music off.  Why?  "You can't see the landscape and listen to the music at the same time,"  he said.  At the time I put this down to English prudery, and I still might. But  watching Bright Star,the new movie about John Keats last night, I began to think my uncle had a point.

 

Ben Whishaw is a fine young British actor, and the perfect choice for the tubercular romantic poet. He is dark and delicate, he can read poetry (he was Trevor Nunn's Hamlet five years ago).  He's beautiful and so is the movie, always.  And so is Abbie Cronish, playing Fanny Brawne.  There's some terrific acting, wonderful light, flowers, butterflies and fabrics to die for--the movie is worth going for them alone, on couches, chairs or ruffled around Fanny's neck.  The only thing missing is the poetry.  Some of it's there, but it's always given a dramatic context, as if spontaneously created by the intensity of the occasion, and always subordinate to that occasion (Keats and Fanny trade stanzas of La Belle Dame Sans Merci in one of their few moments alone together, and while the lines matter, the intimacy matters more, as it should in a movie--the actual poem makes very little sense in this context). The poetry is almost always fragmented, understandably, since Keats wrote with the saturation of a great sauterne and usually at length.  And always, as everything is these days at the cinema, the tender poetry is underscored by Mozart or some other aching stings.

I bore through all this about as well as a man can, putting my money on the very end of the film where reviews had advised me to stay, since it was there we would hear Ben Wishaw's complete reading of the "ode to the Nightingale," one of the greatest of poems and one of my favorites.  And sure enough, with the news of Keats' death in Rome, the movie went to black and the poem began.  Ahh, at last, I thought, a poem by John Keats. But what is this?  The houselights were coming up.  And people were getting up, chatting, and shuffling out of the theatre before the first stanza was done.  I wanted to yell, HEY SIT DOWN! SHUT UP! THIS IS THE ODE TO THE NIGHTINGALE! AN ACTUAL POEM BY JOHN KEATS. SOME OF THE GREATEST LINES EVER WRITTEN, YOU BOVINE MORONS!!!  I restrained myself--though now I rather wish I hadn't.  But it would have been to no avail even in a dark and reverent house. The music was still playing.  The credits were rolling and I would have been reading who supplied the shoes while listening to John Keats. From the screen I heard Ben Wishaw say that he had been half in love with easeful death.  "Thanks for the handkerchief," said a woman behind me.  Keats nightingale went unheard, even while pouring forth its soul in ecstasy.  Was it a vision, or a waking dream? 

I won't know for sure till I hear the poem read on the soundtrack.  Which I'll probably play on I-25 roaring past an eighteen wheeler. Sorry, uncle-- it's just the way we live now.

Visible Voices

We opened our new show last night--- Ping Chong's INVISIBLE VOICES, a show of and about people with disabilities, but for all of us.  The house was full.  The performances were richly emotional-- not from professional actors, but from real people speaking the truth about themselves and their lives. In one sense the entire show was deeply anti-theatrical  (when you consider most theatre is about people dressing up and lying in exciting ways).  INVISIBLE VOICES is a show even those theatre hating puritans who fled England to create a more truthful and transparent society would have endorsed. 

But it is also subtly and brilliantly theatrical, given pulse and pace by inspired directorial and scenic design. And the six performers are costumed and characterized by their disabilities more exotically than any ordinary costume shop could provide: Rick and Sandy are in wheelchairs (one from an injury, the other from an illness); Rebecca is blind, accompanied by her guide dog Rizzo (he did not steal the show,though he had his moments). Beautiful Kelly''s prosthetic  legs and her "weird' fingers are fully on display. Billy is deaf, expressively signing his way through the show, with his lines voiced by an actor.  Only Kevin is disabled in disguise (you would never know at first glance that he has suffered a traumatic brain injury). 

The show is also something more than the compelling life histories of six people. Ping Chong has skillfully braided these stories so that distinctive people with particular disabilities tell a larger story of how these socially "undesirable elements" confront, challenge and engage with a society that often marginalizes and diminishes them.  Last night some of the performers were shaken.  Rebecca lost her place for a moment when she turned two of her script pages by mistake.  Rick, sitting next to her, said, "I wish I could help."  But of course he couldn't, and neither could the rest of us, though we all wanted to. It was a vivid window into the isolation that disability can bring.  But no matter-- Rebecca soon found her way.  Indeed the show was very much about people with disabilities finding their way, and very often with great good humor.

The resonance of INVISIBLE VOICES extends well beyond the physical conditions of the performers.  The show reminds us that disability can happen to any of us at any time: in the strict chronological sequence of the narrative adheres, it was more than half way through the evening before we learned how three of the performers acquired their disabilities.  And surprisingly, the emotional watershed of the evening came when one of the performers told us about his estrangement from his biological father, who disappeared when he was seven (and before he was disabled).  That moment, when the performer was overwhelmed with his grief and pain, was stunning not only in itself but because it reminded us how life experiences of a kind not usually catagorized under disability can be the most disabling of all. The moment also was testimony to the cleansing and purging power of the theater--something Aristotle noted several years ago.

Like OUR TOWN, which is wonderfully running in repertory, INVISIBLE VOICES invites us to witness particularities but to consider life in a larger and longer way than we usually do.  Kevin explained that in his way of thinking, disability simply puts people on a steeper path on the road we all travel.  He thinks, he explained, that most people are only temporarily able. So very true.  Disability r us, sooner or later.  Many thanks to Ping and his company, and to the six fabulous performers onstage, for giving us such a great life show.