Time Machine to the 19th Century

We boarded our Ford rental and dialed the year mechanism back in time.  We fortuitously landed in the early 19^th century when Jane Austen was publishing her iconic books to find ourselves in picturesque Garrison, New York overlooking the Hudson Heights where Kate Hamill’s adaptation of Austen’s Pride and Prejudice was being performed as part of the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival.  The journey back in time took us through the verdant hills of Connecticut and then New York, arriving at our hotel for an overnight stay only to realize we forgot something important: we were supposed to pack our folding chairs for the atmospheric picnic on the sprawling lawn which everyone enjoys before the evening performance as well as for a talk by the author herself, Kate Hamill, who also stars as the irresistible Lizzy in the play.  What to do?  Wal-Mart to the rescue!  So we dialed back to 2017 and a nearby Wal-Mart super store where we found two inexpensive folding chairs.  What a way to start a time journey. 

Back to the early 19^th century we strolled from the parking lot of the Boscobel House and Gardens, through a rose garden no less, where a Shakespearean tent and stage has been erected for the summer.  We found a perfect little table for our dinner, Ann with her requisite Cabernet, with dainty chairs already provided.  Who knew?   So, we ate and enjoyed watching others set up blankets and chairs on the lawn for their own feasts.

Meanwhile a table (and more chairs!) was set up for a rare and sparkling interview with Kate Hamill who we learned is now in the process of creating adaptations of all of Jane Austen’s works, Ann having already loved her first inventive endeavor, Sense and Sensibility at the Folger Shakespeare Theatre in Washington last year.  Hamill comes to authorship via way of the stage and she is a damn good actress, saving the centerpiece role of Lizzy for herself of course (why not, she’s the boss, and she fits and acts the part perfectly!). Hamill is to the left in the photo below.

After her talk and some time for the picnickers to finish while the sun was setting to the west of West Point which can be seen in the distance, we went to the tent to find our seats and enjoy the show.  I’m not writing a full blown review.  Hamill has chosen farce as the ideal vehicle to present the work, has appropriately “killed off” Kitty who is really superfluous to a dramatized version, and has several male members playing two or more roles, including some of the female roles.  The characters are now almost caricatures.  We’re talking belly laughs at times, a riotous, imaginative adaptation, but one which left us feeling it was somewhat irreverent.  But that is merely a personal opinion, preferring a more straight forward dramatization.  Of course we have enjoyed it many times on film and only once on stage in London, so Hamill’s production was certainly different.  The acting and directing was what you would expect from experienced Shakespearean actors.  So, all in all, it was a wonderful evening.

Afterwards, we set our time clock back to the 21^st century and drove to our hotel on the winding dark roads.  In the morning, we were really looking forward to visiting the real star of the weekend, a tour of Boscobel itself.   

After checking out, back to the early 19^th century and the magnificent, unique, beautiful Boscobel House.  This home was built in Montrose, NY in 1808 and after being scheduled for complete demolition in the mid 1950s was rescued, piece by piece, by a historical-minded group of locals, including an endowment from The Readers Digest cofounder and was painstakingly moved to its present site in Garrison, some 15 miles away, with a similar view of the Hudson.  No expense was spared over the years to reproduce with precision the way the house looked when its original owner, Morris Dyckman, built it and furnished it between 1804 and 1808, only a few years before Pride and Prejudice was first published.  From the floorings, the furniture to the wallpaper, all recreated either by hand or reproduced down to the most exacting detail.  All perfection.

The home itself, with its views, is breathtakingly elegant, and beautifully maintained with historical exactitude.  One gets a very real sense during the small group tour of what it must have been like to live in those times, albeit as a very wealthy person, Boscobel not being your run-of-the-mill abode.  There was much ingenuity as to how natural light and ventilation are used and simple contrivances to make their lives a little easier.  Alas, no Internet or plumbing or central heating, but much reading, music, card playing, camaraderie, pleasures we of the 21st century survivors club have somewhat left behind. 

There was a astute appreciation of history, architecture and the Federal style furniture which made this home stand out in its unusual neoclassical design.  It is as memorable as our tours of Emily Dickinson’s home, Thomas Jefferson’s, The Biltmore in Asheville and many others we’ve visited over the years, maybe more so because of the meticulousness of how it’s been preserved.  Where original artifacts were not longer extant, they’ve been carefully reproduced.  Absolutely nothing has been ignored in this process.  A mere look at the 200+ year old wind up Grandfather clock, with its original mechanism and still operating, speaks volumes about the care to preserve history.

After the tour we again took in the breathtaking views of the Hudson Heights and West Point, explored the gardens and then went into nearby Cold Spring to have a late lunch at the Hudson House which has been in operation since 1832, only one year before the Collected Works of Jane Austen was first published, some 15 years after her death.  Her works have never gone out of print since.  Naturally, Hudson House is on the Hudson River so we were still well ensconced in the 19^th century before dialing 2017 on our Ford time machine, climbing and gliding down the winding, hilly back roads, returning to our interim home at our boat club in Connecticut.

 

Rabbit at Rest -- Art as Life Itself

For years I’ve had a copy of Updike’s Rabbit at Rest sitting on the small bookshelf of our boat, where we have spent a part of the summer for each of the last eighteen years.  Each stay grows a little shorter as we age.  Perhaps that is because the boat seems to get smaller but the truth is it’s just more difficult. Boating demands strength and agility and a touch of fearlessness, all of which we had in abundance when we first started to boat on the Long Island Sound almost forty years ago, visiting most ports from Norwalk, CT to Nantucket, with yearly stopovers at Block Island.  Our stays now are mostly at the home port dock, but fortunately we are far out into the Norwalk River so it’s almost like being at a quiet mooring, with just more creature comforts when needed, like air conditioning. But occasionally we go out to the Norwalk Islands where we still have a mooring, especially on a fine day like this, leaving our home port…

I’m not sure why I kept this duplicate copy of what I consider to be Updike’s finest novel, Rabbit at Rest, on the boat, but now I know, having picked it up again.  I’m steeped in nostalgia. When I first read it I felt I was looking into my future.  Now I'm looking into my past. No one is a better social historian than Updike, the novelist. I miss him so much.

Simply put, Updike peers into the abyss of death in this novel.  It hangs heavily in some way on every page and having gone through some of the same experiences with angioplasties and more, I closely identify.  He’s now a snowbird in this novel, 6 months in Florida and 6 months in his familiar Pennsylvania environs. Rabbit (Harry Angstrom) has let himself go, however.  His little exercise is golfing but even that goes by the wayside.  On the other hand he is addicted to fast food, salt, you name the poison.   “Harry remorsefully feels the bulk, 230 pounds the kindest scales say, that has enwrapped him at the age of 55 like a set of blankets the decades have brought one by one. His doctor down here keeps telling him to cut out the beer and munchies and each night…he vows to but in the sunshine of the next day he’s hungry again, for anything salty and easy to chew.  What did his old basketball couch…tell him toward the end of his life, about how when you get old you eat and eat and it’s never the right food?  Sometimes Rabbit’s spirit feels as if it might faint from lugging all this body around.”

This last sentence really gets to the heart of the novel.  It makes me wonder whether Updike was unconsciously elaborating on the great Delmore Schwartz poem, The Heavy Bear Who Goes With Me, especially the lines:

Breathing at my side, that heavy animal,  

That heavy bear who sleeps with me,  

Howls in his sleep for a world of sugar,  

A sweetness intimate as the water’s clasp,  

Howls in his sleep because the tight-rope  

Trembles and shows the darkness beneath.  

—The strutting show-off is terrified,  

Dressed in his dress-suit, bulging his pants,  

Trembles to think that his quivering meat  

Must finally wince to nothing at all.

With that as the essential theme, nothing escapes the granular examination of Updike the social historian, the sterility of Florida life, the inherent difficulty of the father – son relationship (poor Nelson becomes hooked on drugs, always having to live in the larger than life shadow of his father, and leads the family into financial crisis), the political back drop of the time – Ronald Reagan and George Bush, the cupidity of corporate America, driving real industry overseas and becoming a nation of financial engineering.  In fact, so much of the novel stands up to today’s world and one can see the foreshadowing of the Age of Trump.  There is even a swipe at Trump on the front page of Rabbit’s local Florida paper of the late 80s, a picture of Trump with the headline (Male call: the year’s hottest). One would have to wonder what Updiike would have written with the last few years as political fodder.

Rabbit maintains a little garden at his house in Pennsylvania, but he’s also planted the seeds of what his family has become, his wife Janice yearning for a life of her own as a real estate broker, his son Nelson running their car dealership into the ground with debts to finance his cocaine habit, his daughter in law, Pru, hanging onto a loveless marriage, his two grandchildren looking to their grandpa for love and guidance, and Rabbit like a deer caught in the headlights.  “Family life with children, is something out of his past, that he has not been sorry to leave behind; it was for him like a bush in some neglected corner of the back yard that gets overgrown, a lilac bush or privet some bindweed has invade from underneath with leaves so similar and tendrils so tightly entwining it gives the gardener a headache in the sun to try to separate bad growth from good.  Anyway he basically had but the one child, Nelson, one lousy child.”

But that is not the only thing that is entwined, being strangled; it’s his heart and the American soul. “As the candy settles in his stomach a sense of doom regrows its claws around his heart”  “With [his golf partners], he’s a big Swede, they call him Angstrom, a comical pet gentile, a big pale uncircumcised hunk of the American dream.”   And when he finally has a heart attack on a Gulf of Mexico beach, “he lay helpless and jellyfishlike under a sky of red, of being in the hands of others, of being the blind, pained, focal point of a world of concern and expertise, at some depth was a coming back home, after a life of ill-advised journeying.  Sinking, he perceived the world around him as gaseous and rising, the grave and affectionate faces of paramedics and doctors and nurses released by his emergency like a cloud of holiday balloons.”

He has an angioplasty when he should have had a bypass, but he doesn’t want anything done in Florida instead returning to his home soil of Pennsylvania.  “Harry always forgets, what is so hard to picture in flat Florida, the speckled busyness, the antic jammed architecture, the distant blue hilliness forcing in the foreground the gabled houses to climb and cling on the high sides of streets, the spiky retaining walls and sharp slopes….”  But home there are problems, family problems, money problems, leading to marital discord, and Rabbit on the run again, but to where, to Florida, bringing his compromised heart, and his focus more and more on death. “It has always…interested him, that sinister mulch of facts our little lives grow out of before joining the mulch themselves…”

And yet, on the lonely drive down I95, one that I’ve done scores of times myself, Updike’s penchant for social commentary and his ear for dialogue dominates.  Nearing the Florida border Rabbit turns to a man one empty stool away from the counter of a rest stop restaurant, asking:

“’About how many more hours is it to the Florida line?’  He lets his Pennsylvania accent drag a little extra, hoping to pass.

‘Four’ the man answers with a smile. ‘I just came from there. Where you headin’ for in Florida?’

‘Way the other end.  Deleon.  My wife and I have a condo there, I’m driving down alone, she’ll be following later.’

The man keeps smiling, smiling and chewing. ‘I know Deleon.  Nice old town.’

Rabbit has never noticed much that is old about it.  ‘From our balcony we used to have a look at the sea but they built it up.’

‘Lot of building on the Gulf side now, the Atlantic side pretty well full. Began my day in Sarasota.’

‘Really? That’s a long way to come.’

‘That’s why I’m makin’ such a pig of myself.  Hadn’t eaten more than a candy bar since five o’clock this morning.  After a while you got to stop, you begin to see things.’

‘What sort of things?’

‘The stretch I just came over, lot of patchy ground fog, it gets to you.  Just coffee gets to your stomach.’  This man has a truly nice way of smiling and chewing and talking all at once.  His mouth is wide but lipless, like a Muppet’s  He has set his truck driver’s cap, with a bill and a mesh panel in the back, beside his plate; his good head of gray hair, slightly wavy like a rich man’s is permanently dented by the edge of the cap.

‘You driving one of those big trucks? I don’t know how you guys do it. How far you goin’?’

All the salad on the plate has vanished and the smile has broadened, ‘Boston.’

‘Boston! All the way?’ Rabbit has never been to Boston,  to him it is the end of the world, tucked up in under Maine.  People living that far north are as fantastic to him as Eskimos.’

 

There is more to the dialogue than that but it exhibits Updike’s keen ear for ordinary talk.  I could have had the same conversation as that (although Boston is not fantastic to me in the same way).

Arriving in Florida, without his wife, who is really not following him, he is alone, with his failing heart and his dimming dreams, the heavy bear that goes with him, dragging him down, down.  Rabbit at Rest.  Brilliant, one of the best novels of the late 20^th century along with Roth’s American Pastoral.

Not having Updike’s decade by decade commentary of the Rabbit series feels like the same galactic void from his sentence:  “The stark plummy stars press down and the depth of the galactic void for an instant makes you feel suspended upside down.” My world is upside down without him.

“We are each of us like our little blue planet, hung in black space, upheld by nothing but our mutual reassurances, our loving ties.” –

 

Life is COMPANY, Sondheim’s Classic

Bobby.../ Bobby.../ Bobby baby.../ Bobby bubi.../ Robby.../ Robert darling.../ Bobby, we've been trying to call you…

This is my favorite Sondheim musical.  Yes, it’s dated, but it’s been updated.  Yes, it doesn’t measure up in some ways to some of his later works, but it stands on its own. 

So, why do I feel this way?  I think it is THE breakout musical for Sondheim, for which he wrote both the lyrics and music (not his first time, but his most successful first time).  It set the stage for everything that followed in American musical theatre.  His intricate scoring, the deep emotional, dramatic and comic connections, his ability to merge words and music, anoint him as our very own Shakespeare of the American musical stage. 

So we set off to see the MNM Production at the Rinker Playhouse which is part of the Kravis Center for the Performing Arts, albeit late in the production run.   Therefore I was able to see what some of my “fellow” critics had to say about the show, which I would characterize as being lukewarm, one even unfairly comparing it to the Dramaworks’ Sweeney Todd production which is concurrently playing nearby.  Such a comparison is apples to oranges (although Dramaworks’ production is the best Sweeney Todd that we’ve ever seen).  One is more like opera and the other is like a cabaret revue.  

This is a high, high energy production and MNM Production’s mission is to bring Florida’s own reservoir of considerable talent to the stage.  These are all local professionals and we who live in South Florida have to applaud and support such an effort.  Many of the cast we’ve seen before, predominately at Dramaworks.  They are highly experienced and most of the cast have great voices and terrific comic timing.

Company is also squarely set in New York City in 1970, the year Ann and I married and we were still living there.  So it speaks very directly to me.  It is not his very first NYC focused work.  His musical, Saturday night about City life (which is rarely performed) was written by him in the mid 1950s when he was just developing his craft.  It never opened at the time as the producer died.  It finally was performed in the late 1990s after Sondheim was THE name on Broadway.

Company rose out of a number of one act plays written by George Firth and was brought together by Sondheim, morphing the main character – outsiders in each -- into one person, “Bobby.”  It utilizes a series of connected songs that underscore the main theme: the foibles of marriage.  For its time it was revolutionary as so many of Sondheim musicals have continued to be.

It's the story of Bobby the bachelor who is conflicted about being married versus the stories of his friends who have problematic marriages as well as his girlfriends who have issues of their own.  Bobby is plainly confused.  It hangs out there like unresolved anxiety, right to the end.

As it was based on a series of plays that spoke for themselves, the music Sondheim wrote is not in the classic move-the-plot-along variety.  As he himself said "the only effective approach I could come up with was quasi-Brechtian songs which either commented on the action, like "Barcelona" – but never be PART of the action. They had to be the opposite of what Oscar [Hammerstein] had trained me to write, even though he himself had experimented with songs of that kind in Allegro.  I decided to hold the score together through subject matter: all the songs deal either with marriage or in one sense or another, New York City."

In reflecting on the musical in his book Finishing the Hat, he said "Chekhov wrote ‘if you are afraid of loneliness don't marry.’ Luckily I didn't come across that till long after 'Company' had been produced.  Chekhov said in seven words what it took George and me two years and two and a half hours to say less profoundly.  If I’d read that sentence, I am not sure we would have dared to write the show, and we might have been denied the exhilarating experience of exploring what he said for ourselves."

That’s the back-story to this groundbreaking musical, one that explores the loneliness of love relationships, and the importance of friends, in the most vibrant metropolis of its time.  We move through the “approach-avoidance” complex of marriage through a series of songs, so many of them now classics, and several incorporated in the widely performed Sondheim revue, Side by Side by Sondheim.

As some of the critical reviews pointed out, the actor who plays Bobby does not have an exceptional singing voice, and he has to sing some of the more moving songs, “Someone Is Waiting," “Marry Me a Little,” and "Being Alive," but he carries these on the shoulders of his acting abilities and we enjoyed his performance.  He is also supported by some of the finest singers in South Florida and so much of the show is ensemble singing and then solos or duets by Bobby’s friends and girlfriends.

The four couples in the play (Joanne and Larry. Peter and Susan, Jenny and David, and Harry and Sarah) knock it out of the park with "The Little Things You Do Together," an acerbic rebuke about marital relationships.  The husbands meanwhile leeringly hover over Bobby, singling "Have I Got A Girl for You" in the first and second acts.

There are several real show-stopping moments in this production:  Amy’s riotous, “Getting Married Today," Marta’s “Another Hundred People," capturing the city’s sense of alienation with gusto, and Joanne’s stinging, cynical piece about the empty lives of affluent women in the city, "The Ladies Who Lunch."  His girlfriends, Marta, April, and Kathy, critique his non-committal ways in a hilarious pastiche of a sister act song in “You Could Drive a Person Crazy.”

One of my favorite songs from the show is “Sorry – Grateful,” expressing the ambivalence of marriage, sung by Bobby’s friends, Harry,  David, and Larry when Bobby asks Harry whether he was ever sorry he got married.  It’s a perfectly measured argument, lyrically, and expressed in a waltz like rhythm.  I’m not going to include all the lyrics, but here is an excerpt, classic Sondheim: You're sorry-grateful / Regretful-happy / Why look for answers / Where none occur?  My own piano interpretation, in the less than ideal recording environment of my living room, can be seen / heard here.

Every song in the show is timeless and every performer brings his / her best to the stage in their delivery. Here is the extraordinary cast:

Robert        Robert William Johnston*

Sarah          Laura Hodos*

Harry         Wayne LeGette*

Susan         Amy Miller Brennan*

Peter          Clay Cartland

Jenny         Lindsey Corey*

David        Joshua McKinney

Amy          Leah Sessa

Paul           Josh Kolb

Joanne       Erika Scotti*

Larry         Larry Alexander*

Marta        Mallory Newbrough

Kathy        Jinon Deeb

April.        Nicole Kinzel 

*Denotes a member of Actors' Equity Association, the union of professional actors and stage managers in the United States.

Bruce Linser demonstrates his considerable directing skills in this production, accentuating the comedic elements (e.g Sarah’s karate exhibition and her secret food addiction) and, with Kimberly Dawn Smith’s choreography, brings out the best of the energetic, ensemble pieces such as “Side By Side By Side” in the second act.  

Set design by Tim Bennett gives the director and cast a main stage to work on and five different platforms, sometimes all of them being utilized at the same time.  The set suggests the isolated nature of city life and the 70’s, although it is creatively brought into the present by Linser having his cast use the ubiquitous cell phone, replacing the answering machine.

The musical accompaniment is first rate, Paul Reekie directing four other musicians while playing the piano.  This is the kind of theatre that merits our appreciation and support in the future.