The sounds I hear as I sit at my desk can be as seductive as a love song from Andrew Lloyd-Webber's megahit, The Phantom of the Opera, or as frenetic as Mayor Cora Hoover Hooper's "I've Got You To Lean On" from Stephen Sondheim's 1964 flop, Anyone Can Whistle.
Two recent premieres presented by Bay Area theatre companies focused on one of the strangest and most personal facets of a person's relationship with music. In one drama (about a famous musical talent), the audience was able to get inside the artist's head to listen to the sounds no other composer of his era was hearing and learn how his music affected the artistic sensitivities of future generations. In the other, the audience watched helplessly as an old woman struggling with dementia tried to communicate with a stranger whose presence frightened her.
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As part of its support for Nigerian-American playwright Mfoniso Udofia's creation of her epic nine-play cycle about the Ufot family, Magic Theatre recently presented the world premiere of the cycle's fifth play, In Old Age. Bay area audiences were first introduced to the character of Abasiama in 2016 in Udofia's Sojourner (the cycle's first play), when Abasiama was a pregnant graduate student who made the wrenching decision to send her newborn daughter (Iniabasi) home to Nigeria with the child's good-for-nothing father (Ukpong Ekpeyoung) so that, at the very least, the child could be raised by a caring community of elders.When Abasiama returned to a San Francisco stage earlier this year in the cycle's fourth play, Her Portmanteau, she had matured into a fussy grandmother whose two daughters -- an out lesbian (Adiaha) and the aforementioned Iniabasi (newly arrived from Nigeria) -- had trouble maintaining their personal boundaries in her presence. Abasiama's excitement at once again being with her daughters (especially after a long and frustrating drive from western Massachusetts) brought out the fierceness of her lifetime tendency to behave like a control freak.
As In Old Age begins, Abasiama (Nancy Moricette) is asleep on a couch in the living room of her home in Worcester, Massachusetts when she is awakened by someone at the door. It's a handyman named Azell (Steven Anthony Jones), who has been sent by the people at Abasiama's church to perform some long-overdue repairs on the house. Azell has been prepaid for his labor by one of Abasiama's daughters and needs to gain access to the house so he can figure out what needs fixing and get to work.
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| Steven Anthony Jones and Nancy Moricette in a scene from In Old Age (Photo by: Jennifer Reiley) |
There's just one problem. Abasiama is terrified of the stranger (as protective of her living space as a lioness might be of her cubs) and obviously confused. Not only is she having trouble understanding Azell, she struggles to find the words she needs to communicate with him in English. Failing to do so, she lapses into her native Ibibio, which is completely incomprehensible to the confused handyman. She is also determined to prevent Azell from going down into the basement.
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| Steven Anthony Jones (Azell) and Nancy Moricette (Abasiama) in a scene from In Old Age (Photo by: Jennifer Reiley) |
During performances of Her Portmanteau, audiences learned that Abasiama's second husband (Disciple Ufot) suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder (Disciple's mental illness often caused him to become physically violent). Years later, it's impossible to tell whether the loud banging noises which are heard throughout Udofia's play are still being made by the crazed Disciple (as he struggles with the demons who keep haunting him) or are merely the sounds of his struggles that remain in Abasiama's memory. Considering the season, it's doubtful that they can be attributed to old steam pipes.
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| Nancy Moricette as Abasiama in a scene from In Old Age (Photo by: Jennifer Reiley) |
Watching In Old Age was one of those rare occasions in which a half century of listening to bel canto opera came in extremely handy. Why? Whether one is listening to text written in Italian or Ibibio, it becomes a lot easier to accept the experience with the understanding that one is watching a mad scene. The sooner a viewer stops trying to make sense of what sounds like total gibberish and lets a character's body language take over the conversation, the easier it is to understand that Abasiama is now trapped in an easily frightened stage of dementia.
Not only do her terror and vulnerability eventually help to bring out Azell's sympathy, they give the former alcoholic a surprisingly safe space in which to confess his sins against his own family. As Udofia explains:
“Each play in the cycle has a different structure. So it’s not as if I can learn something in one play and then just take that framework into another. A play like In Old Age is deceptive. It looks like a very small play, and potentially easy to produce, but that’s not true. There are three set changes, from the bottom up. And those poor actors are going to be exhausted every night. Real production questions need to be taken into consideration.”
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| Nancy Moricette as Abasiama in a scene from In Old Age (Photo by: Jennifer Reiley) |
“In the other love stories I’ve written, one character might sacrifice in an act of love, while the other will take that sacrifice, run with it, and leave the gift-giver in the dust. In Old Age is different in how love is being expressed. It’s the first ‘work of love’ story I’ve ever written. In In Old Age, both partners do the individual work they need to do in order to experience a higher form of love. The love story blooms and passes very quickly. After In Old Age, Abasiama will cease to exist in the cycle in dramatic flesh and bone. It’s sad that I will never write her again, but I will write the memory of her through other people’s mouths.”
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| Nancy Moricette as Abasiama in a scene from In Old Age (Photo by: Jennifer Reiley) |
Udofia's solution employs an effective combination of empathy and magical realism in which Azell becomes a translator who narrates the thoughts Abasiama has communicated telepathically to him as he cradles the frightened woman in his arms. Magnificently directed by Victor Malana Maog (who also directed Her Portmanteau for American Conservatory Theater), the two characters' truce and transition demonstrate the power of a playwright's words to accomplish more with a minimum of histrionics.
Beautifully framed by Andrew Boyce's skeletal set design, coddled by York Kennedy's lighting, and spooked by Sara Huddleston's unnerving sound design, Udofia's two-hander delivers a powerful lesson in the vulnerability of the human heart and the desperation of a tortured soul trying to pierce through the cloud of dementia. As the final scene fades into darkness, the audience slowly realizes how carefully the director has guided Nancy Moricette and Steven Anthony Jones through the dramatic experience that brings Abasiama's long, poignant, and often painful journey to a close.
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| Nancy Moricette (Abasiama) and Steven Anthony Jones (Azell) in a scene from from In Old Age (Photo by: Jennifer Reiley) |
Performances of In Old Age continue through April 21 at Magic Theatre (click here for tickets).
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One fine day, more than half a century ago, one of my elementary school teachers asked the students in my class to name their personal hero. While some boys might have chosen a famous baseball player like Gil Hodges, Duke Snider, or Pee Wee Reese, I'm pretty sure I was the only person in the room who named Johann Sebastian Bach.What becomes of the adolescent who names a classical composer as his idol? Back in those days there may have been some snickering or confusion about who I was referring to. But for Hershey Felder (who was born in 1968), a pathway opened up to a self-made edutainment career which allowed the talented musician to impersonate his favorite composers while telling audiences all about these famous men's lives and performing their music. Thanks to the artistic directors of Berkeley Repertory Theatre and TheatreWorks Silicon Valley, over the past decade I've had the great pleasure of watching Felder hold center stage in George Gershwin Alone, Monsieur Chopin, Beethoven, As I Knew Him, Maestro Bernstein, Our Great Tchaikovsky, and Hershey Felder as Irving Berlin.
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| Hershey Felder as Claude Debussy (Photo by: Christopher Ash) |
TheatreWorks Silicon Valley is currently presenting the Bay area premiere of this gifted polymath's latest effort, a one-man show entitled Hershey Felder: A Paris Love Story which focuses on the French composer, Claude Debussy. Directed by Trevor Hay (with scenery designed by Felder and lighting and a series of magnificently evocative projections by Christopher Ash), this is the finest tribute I've seen in Felder's ever-growing portrait gallery. As Robert Kelley (the founder and artistic director of TheatreWorks Silicon Valley) writes in his program note:
“The brilliant Hershey Felder has a very precise ritual before each performance: several hours of rehearsal, alone at the piano, the theatre empty with only a few exceptions. I was honored to be such an exception and loved slipping into the auditorium to listen to astonishing music played with immense passion and consummate skill. One night in June 2017, during the early performances of Hershey Felder Beethoven, Hershey interrupted his practice, turned from the piano and said, ’Kelley, I want to play you something special, something I’ve been thinking about.’ He began an exquisite version of Clair de lune -- beautiful, soft, haunting -- then segued into another piece, then another, each as thrilling as the one before.”
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| Hershey Felder as Claude Debussy (Photo by: Christopher Ash) |
“Like many of us, I grew up playing the piano and Claude Debussy is one of my favorite classical composers. To me, his works are like films, something I see as well as hear. Debussy’s ravishing music conjures visual images that are haunting, romantic, captivating, aching, and much more. In the hands of Hershey Felder that music tells not only Debussy’s story but his own deeply personal one -- a story from the heart played out across the enchanted impressionist landscape of a shimmering Paris. The intersection of music and drama has been a primary focus of this company for almost half a century and I am fiercely proud that A Paris Love Story is launching this 50th year. It is a treasured birthday gift to all of us.”
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| Hershey Felder as Claude Debussy (Photo by: Christopher Ash) |
Felder's set design places his grand piano between the ends of two bridges spanning the Seine. As Ash's dream-like projections vary from sketches of Parisian landmarks like the Cathedral of Notre Dame to flocks of birds and schools of fish darting through one's imagination, the audience is caught up in the sweep of Debussy's music, a style less recognizable for its meter than the freedom of its movement, like the pulsing of waves on the ocean. Later in the evening, as Ash creates images of snow gently falling from the sky above Paris, Debussy's music provides the perfect accompaniment for the beauty to be found in nature.
Unlike some of his previous portraits (in which he limited himself to portraying historic composers), A Paris Love Story allows Felder to "have his cake and eat it, too." For 90 minutes, Felder alternates between portraying the deceased Debussy's spirit as well as a 19-year-old musician (obviously modeled on Felder's own experience) who has traveled to Paris to commemorate the 100th anniversary of Debussy's death on March 25, 1918. Having grown up in a home where Debussy's music was often heard, the young man has immersed himself in the history of the composer's life to the point where he desperately desires to touch the iron handrail outside the house in which Debussy composed his music.
As Debussy's spirit watches and listens to the young man's thoughts (smiling as he recalls his distaste for the pomposity of Richard Wagner's music), the audience is lulled into a quiet appreciation of the genius of Debussy's writing (which delivered such masterpieces as La Mer, Clair de Lune, and Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune). Unlike Felder's shows about such famous songwriters as George Gershwin and Irving Berlin, there is no sing-along at the end of the performance.
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| Hershey Felder as Claude Debussy (Photo by: Christopher Ash) |
With costumes by Stacey Nezda and impressive sound design by Erik Carstensen, Felder's latest show portrays a musician whose life story is not as well known to the general public, but whose ability to create sounds that have the fluidity of water and the shifting dimensions of dreams has enchanted classical music lovers for more than a century. Performances of Hershey Felder: A Paris Love Story continue through May 5 at the Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts (click here for tickets).
While I have yet to attend a performance of Felder's 1997 opera (Noah's Ark) or witness him perform Franz Liszt in Musik, I hope to someday see him perform An American Story for Actor & Orchestra (which premiered in Los Angeles in 2009). The following clip offers some insight into what sounds like a fascinating project.
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