Meeting Emma Straub

Between the time I bought my ticket to the Magnetic Fields concert a few months ago and the time I attended the show on Saturday night, I had developed a secondary motivation for being there -- beyond my desire to see one of my favorite bands perform.

See, when I read The Millions' "Most Anticipated Books of 2012" article at the beginning of this year, the title that intrigued me the most was Laura Lamont's Life in Pictures by Emma Straub, "about a Midwestern girl who moves to Los Angeles and, at great cost, becomes a movie star in 1940s Hollywood." I'm writing a play about a '40s movie star, so of course I thought "I have to read this novel when it comes out!"

And it just so happens that Emma Straub is on tour with the Magnetic Fields as their "merch girl" and maintainer of their tour blog! When I realized this, I decided I'd try to introduce myself to her at the concert and let her know that I am truly excited about her book.

So, during the opening act, I went out to the lobby and recognized Emma Straub from her author photo -- she was standing near the merch booth. Though I'm always a little nervous in situations like these, the friend I was with cheered me on, and I went up and introduced myself.

Because the Fox Theater insisted on using their own employees as merchandise vendors, Emma didn't have anything pressing to do and I was able to chat with her for a few minutes. We talked about '40s cinema (we're both Hitchcock fans) and how fun it is to watch old movies and call it "research." She also asked me a little about my play and the Olympians Festival.

According to Emma, Laura Lamont's Life in Pictures actually spans several decades in the life of its heroine, from the '20s to the '70s -- so the blurb on The Millions was a little misleading. Nonetheless, I'm still super excited to read it, and Emma couldn't have been nicer or more approachable.

Laura Lamont's Life in Pictures will be Emma Straub's debut novel, but she is currently represented in bookstores with a short story collection called Other People We Married -- which I want to read now, too!  Here is a video where she reads some of her fiction and Stephin Merritt plays some of his songs, in a joint appearance at the NYC Barnes & Noble earlier this month. She is also chronicling the Magnetic Fields tour for the band's official blog and for the Paris Review blog.

"The Letter": notes on an opera's world premiere

Exactly three weeks ago, I was at the world premiere of the opera The Letter, in Santa Fe. As I mentioned before, the main reason I was excited to see this is because I'm friends with Terry Teachout, the librettist. Because of this personal connection, and also because so much time has elapsed, I'm not "reviewing" it in my usual fashion. Instead, here are some notes, impressions, things that stuck with me...

• The morning of the day the opera premiered, I attended a symposium hosted by Terry and Paul Moravec, the composer. Their collaborative process is really inspirational for anyone who hopes to work in the arts. Following Sondheim's dictum "before you start to write a show, make sure you're all writing the same show!" they spent a long time just figuring out what kind of opera they wanted to write, what its antecedents and stylistic hallmarks would be. And thus, during the writing process, they never had a single fight! They sum up The Letter with the phrase "opera noir": it is based on Somerset Maugham's tale of adultery and murder in entre-les-guerres Malaysia, and the goal was to make it as emotional as an opera and as swift and deadly as a film noir. "This is not an egghead opera!" Terry said repeatedly.
  


• Even so, I know I'm not really qualified to discuss Paul's music because of my lack of experience with modern opera and modern classical music in general. (But yes, I am qualified to call Paul by his first name, since Terry introduced us after the symposium.) I would say that it's the kind of music where you can remember the general contours of the vocal lines, but not any distinct melodies. For instance, I remember that Leslie's first aria ends with her shrieking the word "Blood!" on a very high note, and the Chinese Woman's aria ends on low mezzo notes, rueful and meditative. The text-setting was generally intutitive; it wasn't hard to make out the words. At the symposium, Paul said that he used a twelve-tone scale for Leslie, the liar and murderess (thus making her a "serial killer," ha-ha) and a diatonic scale for Robert, her cuckolded husband. And it's true that when Robert began his first extended passage of music (singing to Leslie to comfort her after the murder), you could feel everyone sort of relax into it, because it was the first diatonic section of the opera. The twelve-tone or chromatic music puts you more on edge, but why shouldn't it? Murky music for an opera about murky people.


• A vicarious thrill: I am 99% sure that Peter Gelb, General Manager of the Metropolitan Opera, walked past me twice as I stood outside the opera house, waiting to take my seat! I recognized him from photographs--in a dark suit, bald, with glasses, he looked rather like an "egghead" himself! I wondered, too, if he carried an invisible aura of celebrity and power about him--something that caused me to notice him in the crowd in the first place, even though he is not a very distinctive-looking man. He ought to have that aura--he's probably the most important man in American opera!

• My mom and I also got a vicarious thrill from seeing Tom Ford, the opera's costume designer, take his bow wearing one of his natty suits with an open-necked shirt. His work on the opera was very stylish--requiring lots of tailored white linen or tropical-weight wool suits for all of the male characters. There are only two females in the opera, but I loved the frilly pink net pegnoir that Leslie wore at the start of the opera, as well as the Chinese Woman's platform shoes and extra-long fingernails!


• The sets and lighting also looked great--and worked in conjunction because of the ceiling fans that rotated and cast noirish shadows across the stage. Stories about despicable people are always better when they're placed in an attractive setting--I guess because we get seduced by the setting for a while, only to get a jolt when we realize the true awfulness that lies below the stylish surface...


• In The Letter, this awfulness isn't just Leslie's adultery, lies, and murder; it's the white characters' casual and unthinking racism toward Asians. This is brought to the fore in a scene that takes place in a men's club, where the men sing a jaunty ditty saluting Leslie and insulting Geoff, who had taken an Asian mistress--"It was a daaamn good thing she shot him!" I believe this is the only section of the opera that uses rhyme and a conventional foursquare meter, so again, it lulls you into laughing and tapping your foot, until you realize what you're laughing at...
  


• Yet at the same time, the opera is not about "the evils of racism" or anything like that. That would make it an intellectualized, moralizing, "egghead opera"--just what Terry and Paul didn't want to write. The Colonial Malaysia setting lends the opera a stylish atmosphere and helps provide motivations for some of the characters--for instance, they're poisoned by racism, or they're frustrated to be so far from England. But deep down, the story is a very basic one--change a few details and you could easily transfer it to a different place and time. This seems to me to be a feature of many of the most enduring operas--e.g. we don't go to see Tosca because of all that Napoleonic-era political stuff, but because of the human interactions between Tosca, Scarpia and Cavaradossi.


• One of my favorite bits of characterization came in the last scene of the opera. Throughout the other scenes, Robert has been an endlessly trusting and supportive husband, with his emotions under control. But at the end, he starts to get suspicious of Leslie (even though she's been acquitted), and his personality changes: he becomes kind of dangerously cheerful, angry, possibly drunk. In other words, you've gotten to know Robert well enough over the course of the opera (through both the music and the acting) that you immediately recognize this shift in his personality--and this leads to a sense of foreboding. Sure enough, something really bad happens to finish out the opera...


• As for the singers, Patricia Racette did a great job with Leslie's challenging music, as well as showing the different sides of her character: someone who knows how to behave like a poised, stiff-upper-lip planter's wife, but is actually sexually frustrated, passionate, and very self-centered. Anthony Michaels-Moore played Robert and, as I said in my paragraph above, his acting contributed a great deal to the success of the final scene. Also there was good support from James Maddalena, as Leslie's lawyer, and Roger Honeywell, as Leslie's deceased lover, a haunting voice calling from offstage in several of the scenes.
  

Terry and Paul have certainly succeeded in creating the exact opera that they wanted to create, and in knowing how to accurately describe what they have made--all of which is harder than it looks! And after reading so much about it on Terry's blog (see all his posts here) it was wonderful to see the artistic fulfillment of it. Bravo, gentlemen!

P.S. I don't feel like taking the time to add multiple images to this post, but if you want to see the costumes and sets, go here; and here for video excerpts of the opera. The photo at the top is of Patricia Racette.

Fade-out: Humberto Solás

I just found out that the Cuban film director, Humberto Solás, died on September 17 at the age of 66. Here is the best obituary I could find--however, he doesn't seem to have been eulogized at length in any major newspapers.

Why do I know, or care, about Sr. Solás, you ask? Well, when I visited Cuba with a school group in 2003, it was somehow arranged for Solás to come and give us an informal talk about being a filmmaker in Cuba.

I wish I could remember more about what Solás said (or wish, at least, that I had my Cuba diary here beside me) but mostly I just remember the room it took place in: small and dim and windowless, which gave the whole proceedings a clandestine air, as if we were hiding from Castro. And most of the questions, I recall, involved people asking about how it was to make films under the Castro regime, to deal with the embargo, etc. Or about the themes and messages of his 2001 movie Miel para Oshun, which we had all watched together a few nights previously.

But as I've said before, my primary orientation is aesthetic rather than political, and I grew annoyed that my classmates had a respected artist in front of them yet were only asking him questions about politics. I wanted to hear his opinions on the art of film itself. So I stood up and shyly asked if there were any films or directors that had particularly influenced him, or that he'd particularly recommend.

"John Huston," he said. "Fat City."

I dutifully wrote that down in my notebook, even though at the time I had barely heard of Huston.

As for his own movie, Miel para Oshun, it pains me to say that I found it very boring at the time. However, I wasn't watching it under ideal conditions--there were about 30 of us trying to watch it on a small TV screen, and it didn't have subtitles, and Cuban dialects can be hard to understand. I'd be willing to give it another shot, but I don't know if it's available in the United States. Maybe it would be easier to pay respect to Solás' memory by watching some John Huston movies instead.

Picture of Solás from fineproductions.info

Clearly Cleary

Recently my family has been re-decorating a set of built-in shelves in our family room. We'd thought that the topmost shelf, which is reachable only if you stand on a stool, was empty except for a few old book jackets--my father has a weird thing about removing book jackets and leaving them where they won't get torn or crumpled. We hadn't dusted this shelf, or even looked at it, in at least twelve years. So when we took down the book jackets and dusted the shelf, we were amazed to discover something else up there:


It's the program and ticket from a 1994 theatrical adaptation of Beverly Cleary's Henry Huggins...signed by Ms. Cleary herself!

I was not quite seven years old at the time. I vaguely remembered getting my program signed at intermission, calculating how many of Cleary's books I had read and proudly telling her the number--at least fifteen, I am sure. My mom was even more excited than I was, because she remembered reading Cleary's books when she herself was a little girl. But we thought we'd lost this autographed program forever. Who knew that it was up on some inaccessible shelf, all these years? (Another funny thing I discovered from this program: I ended up going to high school with the girl who played Ramona.)

Northwest Children's Theater was a new company in 1994, so it must've been a big deal for Cleary to attend Henry Huggins--then again, Cleary grew up in Portland and her beloved characters like Henry, Beezus, and Ramona are all Portland kids. She is now 92 years old and lives in Carmel, California.

As you can see, I read Cleary's books voraciously as a young girl--fifteen of them before the age of seven?! And a few years later, I just as voraciously read Cleary's two volumes of memoirs: A Girl from Yamhill and My Own Two Feet. I would recommend them to anyone who is curious about what life was like for a bright working-class girl/young woman in the 1920s, Great Depression, and World War II. Cleary's life is not full of extraordinary incidents, but her memoirs are a vivid and enjoyable way to take a trip back in time. I can even sense that these books had a hidden influence on my play The Rose of Youth, which takes place in 1934--Cleary belongs to the same generation as the girls I wrote about.

One thing I will always wonder: why is Cleary's boy-hero Henry Huggins just one letter off from Shaw's ill-tempered linguist, Henry Higgins? Click on the photo to get a high-res image and you'll see that even the person who designed the tickets for this Northwest Children's Theater production mixed up the two Henrys...