By Helen Epstein

There were no star soloists or conductors around on Friday night and since the TMC is over, no music students to paper the hall. But with David Zinman (pictured) conducting a raring-to-go Boston Symphony Orchestra (BSO) and an even more psyched Tanglewood Festival Chorus and soprano Isabel Bayrakdarian, Friday night’s program of Poulenc’s Gloria and Holst’s The Planets Suite for Large Orchestra proved to be one of the highlights of this long, uneven summer at Tanglewood.

The evening sent the ovation-inflation monitor soaring. The orchestra and conductor received prolonged standing ovations from the audience; each section received ovations from the others; the choral director received an ovation from the musicians; everybody applauded the conductor.

The Tanglewood Festival Chorus under John Oliver was particularly crisp and alive with Armenian-Canadian soprano Isabel Bayrakdarian (pictured at left) making a satisfyingly earthy soloist for this less than ethereal piece of liturgical music. Holst’s astrological suite (we often hear the Jupiter section on classical radio stations), with its two harps, six timpani, and glockenspiel showcased the entire orchestra to advantage and gave anyone with a passing interest in astrology a lot to think about (Holst, a schoolteacher as well as amateur astrologer apparently enjoyed casting his friends’ horoscopes) and, as I listened to his program for the planets that control each sign, I found myself thinking of the temperaments of family and friends.

Musicians so like playing these pieces and audiences so much like hearing them it makes you wonder why they are not performed more frequently in Boston. Every single player and singer seemed thrilled to be performing this music, absorbed in it, attentive to their masterful conductor and having a good time. It made me think how often that is not the case at symphony concerts.
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Helen Epstein is the author of Music Talks in paper and on Kindle.

Tanglewood highlight: Pianist Garrick Ohlsson gave a haunting, introspective, and idiosyncratic performance of Chopin.

After some peculiar programming last week, Tanglewood’s current weekend got off to a rousing start on Thursday night as Garrick Ohlsson gave a haunting, introspective, and idiosyncratic performance of Chopin. The program, emotion-packed and filled with delicacies as though the pianist could not bear to leave anything out, included nocturnes and mazurkas, Ballade No. 1, and Piano Sonata No. 3, as well as Variations brillantes in B-flat on a rondo from Hérold’s Ludovic.

Although Ohlsson has built a stellar career as a soloist and chamber player with a huge repertory of other composers, back in 1970 he became the first American pianist to win the International Frederic Chopin Competition. Chopin has remained salient in his mind and hands for over 40 years, so long that he invites comparison with the great virtuosi of our childhoods. Unlike the bravura performances of yesteryear, Ohllson’s are intimate ruminations and, far from showpieces, sound almost as though the pianist is still exploring the nuances of a piece by himself rather than performing them before an audience.

In this bicentenary year for the composer, Ohlsson is playing special concerts devoted to Chopin all over the country and appearing in an internationally-produced Chopin documentary. His concert, like the one preceding it, was packed—both inside Ozawa Hall and outside on the lawn. His playing commands extraordinary attention and rewards it. Every creak of a folding chair became an offense.

Lucky New York, Berkeley, Seattle, and La Jolla, where he will play Chopin in the fall.
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Helen Epstein is the author of Music Talks in paper and on Kindle.

John Douglas Thompson as Richard III: Every Inch an Evil King. Photo: Kevin Sprague

I saw Shakespeare & Company’s excellent production of Richard III in Lenox, MA last weekend (through September 5 at Founders’ Theatre), with an exceptionally strong ensemble that was kicked into high gear by a high-energy performance from John Douglas Thompson in the title role.

It’s an unusual production, highlighting comedic elements whenever possible and often bordering on farce. As Ben Brantley pointed out in today’s Times, “the usual perplexing concerns of motive and Freudian pathology . . . are not at issue in this production.” Richard III is who he is: irresistibly, seductively evil, the Devil incarnate. He’s equally manic. In fact towards the end of the play, Thompson plays him as so unhinged by paranoia that I thought of Forest Whitaker’s portrayal of Idi Amin in the film The Last King of Scotland.

I attended the play’s first read-through, where Artistic Director Tony Simotes—just out of chemo for cancer treatment—presided with quiet authority. But he proved unable to continue directing, so it’s difficult to know in the end exactly whose sensibility has shaped the production. According to the program notes, Tony Simotes “conceived and adapted” it. Jonathan Croy directed with assistance from Malcolm Ingram. Since they all trained together at Shakespeare & Company and have enjoyed a long collegiality, their ideas blend seamlessly, abetted by the expert execution of a first-rate design team.

Simotes, Croy, and Ingram have been actors at Shakespeare & Company since the early 1980s. I’ve relished their work in multiple productions over the years, often together. Simotes, a former fight director, made such an indelible Puck in 1984 that I still remember his entry swinging on a rope onto the stage of the amphitheater of The Mount in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Croy’s tall, sardonic presence and Ingram’s more stately one have also left clear imprints on my memory.

Those decades of working together pay off in Richard III, as does the fact that several more charismatic Shakespeare & Company veterans—Jason Asprey, Elizabeth Ingram, Rocco Sisto, Tod Randolph, Johnny Lee Davenport, and Annette Miller—constitute the cast. These are artists who take turns as actors, writers, teachers, and directors in Shakespeare and in contemporary works. They are daring, flexible, and, each in his or her own way, charismatic.

Of course, because they are all graduates of Shakespeare & Company’s training program (the Ingrams have been teaching it for nearly 30 years) the text is, as always, unusually accessible. And these veterans are joined by the excellent Nigel Gore, who has become a company regular, and Lela Espericueta, one of the talented newcomers whom Simotes brought in from the University of Wisconsin where he taught.

I’ve grown to expect excellence from the company and have raved about John Douglas Thompson, Tod Randolph, and Jason Asprey before, so here I’ll focus on the sensibility of Jonathan Croy (pictured at left wearing a top hat), a tall, sardonic presence whose onstage antics have kept me laughing for years. Croy has done some 50 shows with Shakespeare & Company playing mostly comic roles but also Buckingham in an earlier production of Richard III and Sherlock Holmes in last year’s Hound of the Baskervilles and working with young actors.

In this Richard, Croy plays the irrational and the comic for all it is worth, focusing not on exploring layers of character or meaning but accepting what the characters say of themselves at face value. This production feels historically accurate, pre-psychoanalytical, and the pace is commensurately fast. Even the monologues whiz by. All the curses in the play as well as Richard’s hunchback made me think of Verdi’s Rigoletto at first, but soon thoughts of opera segued to operetta.

The Simotes-Croy production comes very close to undercutting Shakespeare’s mediation on evil, but it’s a fresh new look at a classic and well worth seeing more than once.
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Helen Epstein will be speaking on Memoir at the Lenox Library at 18 Main Street, Lenox, Massachusetts on Tuesday, August 31.

Appealing to the Young: Some say violinist Joshua Bell resembles Tom Cruise.

Given how old this audience has grown, programmers are faced with a dilemma: How many more times do they program the standards? How much new music do they dare introduce to the old folks? What can they dig up from the lesser repertory? And which stars will bring in the crowds?

I thought about all this again as I watched Susanna Mälkki bobbing energetically before a tired BSO and soloists Joshua Bell and Jeremy Denk performing Mendelssohn. All three are in their forties but looked like teenagers among the gray and white heads. Mälkki and Bell are “whole body” performers whose personal choreography draws attention to itself (in the manner of MTV), sometimes leading the listener/watcher into and sometimes away from the music. And although it’s the 21st century and women conductors have been around for a while, it is still a novelty to watch a woman conducting the BSO, especially a trim and stylish one.

The visual has become dominant at Tanglewood. There are large screens placed in the Shed so that concertgoers can replicate the living room experience of watching PBS music specials, including close-ups of fingers and faces: like the Met opera broadcasts, this new practice at Tanglewood adds more items to the list of gifts and talents required for a professional career in classical music.

Conductor Susanna Mälkki: Elicited a phoned-in performance from the Boston Symphony Orchestra at Tanglewood.

Joshua Bell and Jeremy Denk—both attractive, charismatic guys—gave the program their energetic best. They are at the top of their musical game and—a plus when the music is less than absorbing—they are fun to watch. Like Yo Yo Ma, Joshua Bell has become a pop icon. He also bears more than a passing resemblance to Tom Cruise. His playing can be ethereal as well as earthy, savage as well as sweet. He’s also clearly one of the best violinists around. Both he and Jeremy Denk underlined their generational and cultural difference from the formally-clad-in-white orchestra musicians by appearing in casual, black attire.

Mälkki is another story. The program, as she conducted it, was underwhelming. Mendelssohn and Beethoven are staples of classical music radio stations everywhere. Three of the pieces on the program are warhorses and the fourth, Mendelssohn’s Double Concerto for Violin, Piano and Orchestra, forgotten for good reason. Mendelssohn wrote it when he was 14 years old. Unlike Mozart’s work composed at the same age, it is mainly of historical interest.

The overture to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, written only three years later when Mendelssohn was 17, seems to be written by another composer. It is such an elderly chestnut, so overexposed, that it demands someone like Levine to reinvigorate the music as well as the orchestra that’s performing it. Mälkki ’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream sounded ragged and unbalanced, with the French horn entering like a blast out of nowhere. Despite her gyrations, the orchestra seemed unresponsive and produced a phoned-in performance.
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Helen Epstein is the author of Music Talks that includes a chapter on Bernstein and Ozawa teaching conducting at Tanglewood in the 1980s.

Allison McLemore, Susanne Marley, Carole Monferdini, Sandra Blaney and Joel Ripka in the CTC production of Culf View Drive. Photo credit: Rick Teller

Gulf View Drive by Arlene Hutton. The third play in the Nibroc Trilogy. Directed by Daniel Elihu Kramer. Staged by the Chester Theater Company, Chester, MA, through August 22.

Reviewed by Helen Epstein

Gulf View Drive, the third play of the trilogy, is set in 1953. The historical context has shifted from Appalachia in the 1940s to Florida in the Eisenhower years; the set has changed from a wooden farmhouse in the hills to a screened-in, cinder block house on the water. Anthropology came to mind as I registered this change in locale, and I found myself thinking about how rarely American plays convey so vivid a sense of place and local culture as these three that seem to work well as stand-alones or in sequence.

Ms. Hutton has said that she didn’t set out to write a trilogy but got so involved with her characters that she wrote a second play for them and then a third. I got involved with the couple too. Everybody loves a romance, and I was hooked from the moment Raleigh Brummett, the wise-cracking, young soldier just discharged from the military, talked his way into schoolteacher May Gill’s heart on a train from California heading east in Last Train to Nibroc. I reflected on their relationship at odd moments in my day, noting how they did and did not resemble people I know in my very different secular and urban New England culture.

Hutton’s solitary male protagonist, as performed by the engaging Joel Ripka, is one of the quirkiest and most sympathetic male characters I’ve recently seen onstage. An aspiring writer saddled with an illiterate, ill-tempered, widowed mother; an irresponsible and pregnant younger sister; and epilepsy, he manages to be even-tempered, even-handed, supportive, and preternaturally kind.

His schoolteacher bride, as performed by Allison McLemore, radiates intelligence as well as inner tension and impatience. She’s the kind of woman who would have had a far easier life had she been born a generation later and brings to mind—if you’re of a certain age—the smart, demanding female teachers of the 1950s.

A lens of second wave feminism, in fact, accounts for some of the novelty of Hutton’s Gulf View Drive. The play includes three more roles for women, two of whom could easily have been written as caricatures of “white trash” but who, in excellent performances, come alive as multi-dimensional people.

There is the self-pitying, devout Southern Baptist widow Mrs. Brummett who, in Susanne Marley’s performance, sustains our interest as we witness the effects of her bad mothering. There is her daughter Treva, performed by a sprightly Sandra Blaney, a pony-tailed, pregnant, young mother who has abandoned her young children and her abusive husband. There is the endlessly patient, middle-class, denominational-tolerant Mrs. Gill, a widow whose son has been killed in the war. Carole Monferdini brings a groundedness and common sense to this role that is utterly convincing and helps account for her daughter May’s independence and high mindedness.

When, outside of an Almodovar movie, had I recently seen so many plum roles for women?

The relationships between the four women and the one man left in their intimate lives would be enough material for a play, but Hutton takes on much more. One of my companions at Gulf View Drive felt overwhelmed by the many themes and subjects ricocheting through the play, but I felt they were invigorating. They include the great changes set in motion on the home front by the second world war, including the employment and then unemployment of women and the opening up of a remote and parochial Christian society to the world; the post-war passage of the GI Bill and its effect on education; demographic change such as the emigration of Kentuckians to industrial centers in the Midwest as well as south to Florida; technological change as print and radio give way to the new mass medium of television; the first glimmerings of new thinking about race.

Sandra Blaney, Susanne Marley and Carole Monderdini in Gulf View Drive. Photo credit: Rick Teller

Our writer hero Raleigh lands a lucrative publishing gig; our heroine May Gill is fired from her job because she has let the African-American janitor’s son audit her English classes; “no-good,” pregnant daughter Treva applies to and gets accepted to Berea College, a college dedicated to giving young Appalachian adults a higher education, and, more surprising, her mother agrees to accompany her and take care of the new baby. Saintly Mrs. Gill recovers from her double losses and turns down a marriage proposal and a comfy future in Ohio.

Hutton’s script rarely lets its actors or audience down. It’s fun, witty, moving, and poetic. The Nibroc Trilogy builds from a chance encounter on a train between two passengers to a full portrait of a society in the grip of major changes. This production, ably directed by Daniel Elihu Kramer, with dead-on costumes by Charles Concoran and the evocative sound design of Tom Shread, deserves to be seen by a wider audience.

Helen Epstein’s book on Tina Packer is now available on Kindle. She has also written a biography of Joe Papp. Order through the link below and The Arts Fuse receives a percentage of the sale.

After the Revolution by Amy Herzog. Directed by Carolyn Cantor. Staged by the Williamstown Theatre Festival, Williamstown, MA, July 21 through August 1 (closed).

Katherine Powell (Emma) and David Margulies (Morty) raise their glasses in After the Revolution at the WTF. Photo: T. Charles Erickson

Long before the invention of psychotherapy, long before writer William Faulkner wrote “The past is never dead. It is not even past,” the Greeks mined family history for its dramatic possibilities. The consequences of an event or choice made by one generation that steers the course of lives long after is a staple of dramatic literature, all the more potent when the event is politically or personally traumatic.

Amy Herzog’s intelligent, incisive, and multi-layered After the Revolution, which had its world premiere at The Williamstown Theatre Festival last month, left me thinking not only about the extraordinary family of contemporary characters she brings to life but about how many groups and generations have confronted a history of massive trauma.

In many cases a period of self-imposed silence—if not an outright secretiveness—follows victimization, as in many survivor families from the Armenian and Cambodian genocides and the Holocaust. Sometimes, political repression enforces this silence, as for the families of dissidents in the parts of Europe formerly controlled by the Soviets.

In the United States, there is a large sub-culture of families of American Communists black-listed during the McCarthy years. I’ve long wondered when some Red Diaper baby or a member of the third-generation will produce a significant work about this. Now Amy Herzog has.

Her two-act family drama is set in 1999. Bill Clinton is still President as Emma, a grand-daughter of the beloved and black-listed Joe Joseph, graduates from law school and arrives at her parents’ home to celebrate the occasion with her family. Grandpa Joe is dead, but grandmother Vera Joseph is a sometimes befuddled, still feisty, no-nonsense matriarch with thick gray hair, clunky Birkenstocks, and a commanding presence. She refuses to budge from her Marxist principles or give in to the indignity of wearing a hearing aid. She also keeps abreast of her grand-daughter’s (Latino) boyfriends and complains, “I never understood your prejudice against Jewish men.”

Emma’s father, Ben Joseph, is a familiar figure: an idealistic, overworked high school teacher, passionate about educating his “under-privileged” students and driven by left-wing politics. His ideology imbues his being and spills over into his relationships with his two daughters, whom he was left to raise alone after his first wife left him.

Emma has responded by identifying with her father and internalizing his beliefs; her sister Jess has rebelled and spent her adolescent and young adult life in and out of rehab. Ben’s second wife, Mel, provides a cool, competent, Midwestern balance to the family, but at a crucial moment confides in Emma her own struggles as an outsider in a left-wing family. Like Ben’s college-professor brother Leo and his sports-loving kids, she tries to keep her life separate from ideology.

There is also Miguel, Emma’s boyfriend and law school classmate, a refreshingly smart and irreverent son of Latin American immigrants and Morty, an old friend of Emma’s grandparents, who identifies himself as a former “fellow traveler” and holds a torch for Grandma Vera.

Mare Winningham (Mel) comforts Peter Friedman (Ben) in After the Revolution. Photo: Sam Hough

Emma and Miguel work together (much to Vera and Ben’s satisfaction) on the Joseph Fund, a foundation Emma has established in memory of her grandfather that is currently engaged in the long fight to appeal a death sentence for Mumia Abu-Jamal. Mumia is the real-life former Philadelphia radio personality and activist convicted of murder, now on death row. Things would be perfect on Emma’s graduation day, aside from the news that a new book has come out based on newly-opened, Soviet-era archives that irrefutably names Grandpa Joe as a Russian spy.

The brothers Ben and Leo at first keep the news to themselves, but soon are compelled to share it with an angry and confused Emma, who wonders how it will impact both the meaning and the financial underpinnings of her foundation. The ripple effect broadens out to include Morty, Miguel, her parents, uncle, sister, and grandmother.

Emma refuses to speak to her father, whom she views as having kept a crucial secret from her; Miguel wants her to drop the family psychodrama and focus on Mumia; sister Jess is relieved that, for a change, the spotlight is off her; Grandma asks “Which side are you on?” The kindly, world-weary Morty concludes: “You’re disappointed in your family but that’s not an uncommon predicament.”

Playwright Amy Herzog: An insider familiar with the complications generated by a progressive American family.

This is clearly a play written by an insider, familiar with the lingo, dynamics, and endless complications of politics in a progressive, American family. Playwright Herzog, a graduate of Yale as well as the Yale School of Drama, has said, “My extended family is largely Marxist,” and “One of the things that spurred me directly to write the play was Morton Sobell’s confession in 2008 that he, along with Julius Rosenberg, had spied.”

She has bolstered her personal memories with extensive research as a Williamstown Theatre Fellow: the breadth and depth of her reading has paid off in spades.

The production and cast of After the Revolution have been well-reviewed elsewhere, and the play ended its too-brief Wiliamstown run last weekend. Still, while it is too late to see this play in the Berkshires, here’s a valuable heads-up for the fall in New York, where the play will be presented at Playwrights Horizons. Herzog is an emerging dramatist of unusual gifts; this is a play that will last.

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Helen Epstein has written a biography of Joe Papp. Her translation of Heda Kovaly’s memoir of Stalinism, Under A Cruel Star, is also available on amazon.com. Order though the link below and The Arts Fuse receives a small percentage of the sale.

In my other life, as editor of World Books for The World, BBC/PRI’s national radio program dedicated to international news, I write and edit book reviews as well commentaries and interviews. I also host a monthly podcast dedicated to global literature, which is available through ITunes.

The most recent pieces posted on World Books include Helen Epstein’s pointed review of Jessica Stern’s Denial: A Memoir of Terror, a first-hand, detailed account by a Harvard expert on international terrorism of her rape by a stranger when she was 15 years old.

Other reviews include an evaluation of a new translation of the prophetic prose pieces of the late 18th-century, Teutonic bad boy Heinrich von Kleist. Harvey Blume (Mr. Short Fuse) reviews a collection of novellas, The King of Trees, by the Chinese writer Ah Cheng, the best of the trio a brilliant examination of chess. Roberta Silman is underwhelmed by the Dutch novel The Storm, Margriet de Moor’s yarn based on a real life, natural catastrophe, a 1953 winter hurricane that killed nearly 2,000 people.

Nigerian writer Sefi Atta

My latest podcast features a conversation with Sefi Atta, an impressive Nigerian writer whose novel Everything Good Will Come won the Wole Soyinka Prize for Literature. Her recently published collection of short stories, News From Home, garnered the 2009 NOMA Award for Publishing. Both are well worth reading; her next novel, Swallow, will be out in September.

Finally, Tommy Wallach dissects two books that attempt to turn examinations of cruelty into an art. One of the short volumes is the controversial French bestseller Beside the Sea, the story of a mother who kills her young children.

Charles Dutoit conducts the BSO and pianist Kirill Gerstein at Tanglewood, July 30, 2010 (Photo: Hilary Scott)

By Helen Epstein

July 30 featured a Russian warhorse program at Tanglewood: Glinka’s “Overture to Ruslan and Ludmila”; Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1 in B-flat minor, and Prokofiev’s Music from the ballet Romeo and Juliet.

These are familiar (some might say over-familiar) works for orchestra, but, of course, there’s a reason they’re still being programmed. Supremely accessible and dramatic symphonic pieces, they feature tunes the audience walks out humming. Snobs put them down as “easy listening,” but later composers knew their worth and mined their themes and ideas for lucrative pop music, movie, TV, Muzak, and musical comedy scores.

Why program them today? They are perennial crowd-pleasers and popular with the thousands of tourists drawn to Tanglewood as much for the beauty of the place as for the music. Also, there are always new generations of orchestral players, soloists, and audience members for whom these old chestnuts are new. The challenge is for creative artists to find new ways to bring them to life.

Veteran conductor Charles Dutoit opted for subtle rather than overblown readings of all three Russians. The masterful chief conductor of the Philadelphia Orchestra showcased all the excellent sections of the Boston Symphony Orchestra (BSO), especially the razor-sharp precision of the percussionists, the power and bombast of the brass, and the agility of the strings. The winds were especially lyrical, especially in the slow movement of the Tchaikovsky.

In the concerto, Kirill Gerstein made for an interesting piano soloist . Born in Voronezh, Russia in 1979, he underwent the typical, rigorous course of Russian piano pedagogy. But he taught himself jazz by listening to his parents’ records—he came to the U.S. at the age of 14 to study jazz at Berklee—surely one of the few Russian classical musicians to do that.

Charles Dutoit conducts the BSO and pianist Kirill Gerstein. The latter's technique is as impressive as that of Horowitz or Van Cliburn. (Photo: Hilary Scott)

Gerstein’s technique is as impressive as that of Horowitz or Van Cliburn—whom we associate with great performances of this concerto—but instead of the massive, grand interpretation of Tchaikovsky listeners have become accustomed to, Gerstein gave an intimate, musing, introverted interpretation, which I thought must have been influenced by his work in jazz. Particularly in the slow movement, Gerstein’s playing sounded more like chamber music than a concerto. Tanglewood’s cavernous shed took on the ambiance of a club. Gerstein’s flawless yet relaxed style worked well with Dutoit’s.

The wonderful BSO wind players were featured in the Prelude at Osawa Hall a couple of hours earlier in a charming program of twentieth-century music including pieces for wind ensemble by Ligeti, Berio, Janacek, and Schifrin. The ensemble included Cynthia Meyers, flute; Robert Sheena, oboe; Thomas Martin, clarinet; Richard Ranti, bassoon; Jason Snider, horn; and David Martins, bass clarinet.

The musicians were required to speak as well as play in Berio’s “Opus Number Zoo,” and some of them proved to be as engaging actors as they are musicians. Their rendition of “Tom Cats,” where the players enact witnessing a cat fight was great comedy as well as musical performance.

All in all an extremely satisfying evening at Tanglewood.

Helen Epstein’s book on the lives of classical musicians is now available on Kindle and in softcover.

Allison McLemore and Joel Ripka in See Rock City at the Chester Theater Company. Photo: Rick Teller

See Rock City by Arlene Hutton. The second play in the Nibroc Trilogy. Directed by Jay Stratton. Staged by the Chester Theater Company, Chester, MA, through August 8.

Reviewed By Helen Epstein

Arlene Hutton’s absorbing Nibroc Trilogy, produced by the Chester Theater Company (CTC), is now in its second phase with See Rock City. Although the three plays are each meant to stand alone, CTC is producing them all this summer and on the final two Saturdays of the season (August 14 and 21) will present the complete cycle in one day.

If Last Train to Nibroc, a romantic two-hander of a young soldier and a young schoolteacher who begin a romance on a train, sometimes evoked Scenes from a Marriage, See Rock City is in the tradition of American family drama with two mothers-in-law onstage and a brother, a sister, and a father hovering in the wings.

The play takes places on the one-set porch of the Gill home as, far away on the beaches of Normandy, American forces are about to launch their invasion of France. The war front and the home front are juxtaposed as music and radio broadcasts of the time are heard in the background and a merry Raleigh Brummett and May Gill return from their honeymoon.

Like enthusiasts of television series, we’re happy to see this pair of oddly-matched but sympathetic lovers again. After several weeks of playing May Gill and Raleigh Brummett, Allison McLemore and Joel Ripka have settled fully into their roles of high-strung schoolteacher and laid-back aspiring writer. Both actors bring their quirky, strong-willed characters to stirring life. Their chemistry is palpable, and we believe their love can withstand the marital trials ahead. They are joined by the equally persuasive Carole Monferdini as the saintly Mrs. Gill and Susanne Marley as “Mean as a snake” Mrs. Brummett.

Inter-generational family dynamics and class and religious divisions in small town society now enrich and contextualize the struggles of the young couple. As more and more boys from Kentucky, including May’s brother, are drafted to fight in the Second World War, local opinion begins to impinge on their lives. May is promoted to principal of her school and becomes the breadwinner of the family, supporting her husband, father, and mother. Raleigh, who receives a stream of rejection letters from magazine editors after an initial flush of success with his first short stories, is relegated to the role of lay-about.

Although he initially volunteered for the military, he was discharged because of epilepsy. Mrs. Brummett, an uneducated woman who still believes that her son’s fits are a personality issue, laments that mothers of soldiers who have died spit at her in town. She’s ashamed of a son who is home in wartime, doesn’t support his wife, and lives in her family’s home. The saintly Mrs. Gill, on the other hand, defends her son-in-law and worries about her own son Charlie who’s in the military. Although the time frame is mid-twentieth century, the characters are timeless.

The design team is the same for all three plays of the trilogy and set, costume, lighting, and sound work seamlessly together. I found the use of news dispatches from New York and Paris particularly effective, as well as the evocative lyrics of the pop music of the time.

This is the story of how the Second World War played out in the backwater regions of the American home front as well as the story of a marriage. We are fully with Arlene Hutton’s people as “the lights go on again all over the world” and look forward to finding out how she will conclude her impressive trilogy.

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Helen Epstein is the author of the biography Joe Papp and a profile of art historian Meyer Schapiro available on Kindle/Amazon.

If you want a country theater experience, complete with magical valley and stream and a freight train in the distance, go to Chester, MA this month. Chester Theater Company’s The Nibroc Trilogy is a winner and will culminate on the final two Saturdays of the season (August 14 and 21) with the presentation of the complete cycle in one day. Special event tickets for those days will include an afternoon ice cream social and a country-style dinner.

This Girl Bends: Art and Feminism Since 1960
June 26–December 12, 2010

The Williams College Museum of Art (WCMA) in Williamstown, MA, which almost always has well-curated exhibits, includes in its summer offerings This Girl Bends: Art and Feminism Since 1960, which looks at the connections between art and feminism since 1960 with over 20 artworks from the museum’s permanent collection.

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The new edition of Helen Epstein’s Music Talks is available online and through Kindle/Amazon. She is also the author of Joe Papp. Order these books through Kindle or through the links below to Amazon and The Arts Fuse receives a (small) percentage of the sale.

The promising Alexander Prior on the podium

Conducting is one of the “impossible professions,” difficult to define or teach. Many fabled conductors lead the Boston Symphony Orchestra (BSO) and TMC orchestras every summer at Tanglewood, each with his or her own aura, technique, body language, and proclivity for lecturing on existential meaning or staying close to the details of the musical score. Every once in a while, a student conductor appears who not only galvanizes the orchestra but the audience—whether in the hall or out on the lawn.

Last Sunday the indisputable star of a very good concert was improbably young Alexander Prior (born in October 1992), who studied conducting and composition at the St. Petersburg State Conservatory and has been a finalist in several international conducting competitions.

He elicited an extraordinarily authoritative and vivid rendition of Prokofieff’s Romeo and Juliet from the attentive and accomplished TMC musicians that had the audience sitting at the edge of their seats.

His photogenic good looks are no liability to an international career. Administrative skills and a flair for fundraising? Possibly. Like all these savvy young artists, Prior has an extensive website, complete with trailer and discography. Take a look and listen.

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Helen Epstein reported about the conducting seminar at Tanglewood in the 1980s, when the late Leonard Bernstein, Andre Previn, and Seiji Ozawa were teaching. You can read about them in her collection Music Talks. Order the book though the Amazon link below and The Arts Fuse receives a (small) percentage of the order.

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Mahler's Second with the BSO: Michael Tilson Thomas with first chair players in the Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra. (The conductor of the Tanglewood Festival Chorus, John Oliver, is in the background.) Photo by Ron Barnell

It isn’t often that you get to hear the same conductor, same composer, and two different orchestras but that unusual experience was offered at Tanglewood as Michael Tilson Thomas (filling in for James Levine) conducted the Boston Symphony Orchestra (BSO) in Mahler’s Second Symphony last week and the Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra in Mahler’s Third on Saturday night.

The conductor, Music Director of the San Francisco Symphony, first conducted the BSO in 1969 and has a long history of conducting Mahler. Recently, however, he has been researching the composer for a documentary film to be released in the spring and his immersion in the world of the composer was evident in his readings of the Second and Third Symphonies.

The two orchestras—first, the spectacularly accurate, subtly polished BSO, then the far younger and less practiced Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra—could not have been more different.

The Tanglewood Music Center (TMC) is a fellowship program for emerging musicians who study with and in the proximity of BSO musicians and conductors for the summer, performing several concerts of their own. For many, it was their first time performing a Mahler symphony, and their excitement showed. This was passionate, spontaneous playing of music, as if their lives depended on it.

If the legato passages were not as silken as those of the BSO, the section playing not as cohesive, and entrances not as sure, the rawer parts of the symphony were extraordinary, evoking Bohemian beer garden combos and ragtag military bands, The trombones snarled, the percussionists thundered, and the many soloists excelled.

I’m a fan of both the BSO and the TMC. Both rose to the occasion under Michael Tilson Thomas, a very different conductor than James Levine but, it turns out, just as masterful.

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The new edition of Helen Epstein’s Music Talks is available online and through Kindle/Amazon. She is also the author of Joe Papp. Order these books through Kindle or through the links below to Amazon and The Arts Fuse receives a (small) percentage of the sale.

CTC performers Allison McLemore and Joel Ripka ride the Last Train to Nibroc. Photo: Rick Teller

Last Train to Nibroc by Arlene Hutton. Staged by the Chester Theater Company, Chester, MA, through July 25.

I drove back to Chester Theater Company(CTC) last night expecting another engrossing evening and got it. I love making the trip to the village (pop. 1000) and the makeshift theater in its small Town Hall with its inexpensive but ingenious and effective sets, costumes, and light and sound design. I’m always interested in the work selected by Artistic Director Byam Stevens, who makes plain his commitment to a writer’s theater.

“There are companies that celebrate the magic of the actor’s craft,” he writes, “that propound the primacy of the director, that espouse particular artistic or ethnic identities. These are all fine things . . . But if there has been a craft that has left its imprint on my seasons here, it is the craft of the writer . . . deep insight into the human condition, rich characterizations, first rate dialogue, and a deep and abiding faith in the essential poetry of common people.”

Words to warm any writer’s heart.

I had never heard of Last Train to Nibroc or playwright Arlene Hutton, author of more than a dozen plays and self-described “daughter of hillbillies,” whose work draws on her Appalachian family background. In fact, Last Train To Nibroc received a 2000 NY Drama League nomination for Best Play and more than 50 regional productions. CTC is producing it this summer as part of a trilogy as well as a marathon.

All performances are followed by a Talkback, which in the CTC’s case means the director gets to talk as much or even more than the audience. Given the subject, we preceded it with a visit to Chester’s Railway Station, a place staffed by railway buffs and local historians who seem to know everything there is to know about railroads in the U.S.

But, back to the play. Set in the early 1940s, Last Train to Nibroc is a romance between May, a young woman planning on becoming a missionary and Raleigh, a young man planning to become a writer. Relaxed and lanky, Raleigh takes the empty seat beside May on an eastbound train from California bearing the coffins of Nathaniel West and F. Scott Fitzgerald. He has been discharged from the Air Force for medical reasons; she has gone to California to visit her fiance and is returning home to Kentucky disappointed. In a first scene that sparkles with humor and charm, the two get acquainted, sparring in the tradition of the finest plays and movies of the 1940s.

The stop-and-start relationship that evolves over the next two scenes (separated by two brief pauses in which a soundtrack of contemporary radio broadcasts and music of the time sustains the historic mood) is both engaging on its own terms and evocative of theater history. I thought of characters from plays as different as Major Barbara and Same Time Next Year, to name just two. The characters are fun to watch, their relational misunderstandings both familiar and specific to their time and place.

As I’ve come to expect at CTC, the actors are very good, as is the direction. Joel Ripka makes a convincing and sympathetic suitor and Allison McLemore a tart and intelligent May. But thinking about the director’s credo, I found some of Hutton’s dialogue (or perhaps it was his direction of her “poetry of common people”) a tad labored. Our culture has made “the Journey” into a cliche. Heavy declamatory emphasis on images such as “The tree” or “The train” undermines their metaphoric power. We get it.

With that small caveat, I’m recommending that you go to Chester very soon.

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Helen Epstein is the author of the biography Joe Papp and a profile of art historian Meyer Schapiro available on Kindle/Amazon.

Performers Walton Wilson and Kristin Wold are wonderful in Sea Marks at Shakespeare & Company.

By Helen Epstein

Perhaps a director’s most important choice is sifting through the great backlist of dramatic literature and choosing a play whose sensibility she not only wishes to explore and inhabit, but that she can cast and direct well. When the play, the director and design team, the actors, and historical moment all line up, the result can be as magical as Daniela Varon’s production of Sea Marks by the late Gardner McKay at Shakespeare & Company running through September 4.

Gardner McKay was an unusual playwright: he’s best known, among boomers, as a heart-throb Hollywood and television actor. From an early age, he took serious interest in writing and sailing—two passions he pursued for most of his adult life. Sea Marks is a partly epistolary romance between Colm Primrose, an Irish fisherman who lives by the sea, and Timothea Stiles, an assistant in a British publishing company. McKay wrote it in 1971, when it enjoyed a modest success. Director Daniela Varon saw it some 20 years ago, and it remained so alive in her memory that she chose to direct it in 2010.

Varon says that the dizzying pace of contemporary life was one of the factors that drew her to this two-character play in which “the hand-written and hand-carried word has the power to bridge oceans and change lives.” With set and costumes by Kiki Smith and two wonderful performances by Shakespeare & Company veterans Walton Wilson and Kristin Wold, this is theater you’ll be sorry to miss.

Helen Epstein is the author of Joe Papp and two pieces about Shakespeare & Company that you can download from the Kindle by clicking here Helen recently spoke to the Lexington Minuteman about the art of the memoir.

Chad Hoeppner, Rebecca Brooksher, and Kevin Hogan In the CTC production of Molly Sweeney Photo: Rick Teller

Reviewed By Helen Epstein

Molly Sweeney by Brian Friel. Directed by Michael Dowling. Staged by the Chester Theatre Company, Chester, MA, through July 11.

This summer Chester Theatre Company (CTC) Artistic Director Byam Stevens is exhorting theatergoers to “free the inner audience” within them. Theatergoers, he says, have become like critics, losing a sense of honest engagement with drama. The critic, he argues, is a character invented by modern journalism, a charlatan uneducated in theater history and practice, rating cultural productions like a Consumer Reports evaluator, making judgments from a (superior) distance rather than partaking of the theatrical experience.

Audiences, he argued, in an introduction to the company’s first production of the season, Brian Friel’s Molly Sweeney, should become theater colleagues rather than “voyeurs”; they should join actors, designers, and directors in engaging directly with the playwright’s work, “eschewing the soul deadening thumbs up/thumbs down shortcut,” experiencing, actively trying to understand, rather than just looking.

Just looking is the subject of Molly Sweeney, which is the opening production of the season at Stevens’s wonderful theater in the Town Hall of Chester, Massachusetts, a tiny valley town in western Massachusetts so isolated that it’s a wonder he can fill the auditorium’s 128 seats. Chester is located on Route 20, a few miles east of the Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival, a half hour’s drive from the Berkshire hub of Lenox-Stockbridge and an hour from Northampton. Nevertheless, theater cognoscenti regularly make the drive, and some precede the show with dinner at the Pioneer Grill and Pizzeria, an unassuming, little restaurant where the fruits and vegetables come right out of the garden.

A similar freshness imbues the productions of the CTC, this week Molly Sweeney by accomplished Irish playwright Brian Friel. This is a play about engagement at its most basic level: through what senses do each of us perceive the world we live in? What happens when we try to improve on that arrangement?

Rebecca Brooksher in CTC's Molly Sweeney Photo: Rick Teller

Friel based the play on an early New Yorker article by neurologist Oliver Sacks. In October of 1991, Sacks received a telephone call about a 50-year-old man he called Virgil, who had been virtually blind since childhood. Virgil had been offered a miracle cure, a chance to see the world. “There was nothing to lose,” Sacks wrote, “and there might be much to gain.” But, in fact, it was a miracle that misfired and wound up with Virgil losing his job, his house, his health, and independence, “leaving him a gravely sick man, unable to fend for himself.”

Friel transforms 50-year-old American Virgil into 34-year-old Irish Molly Sweeney, creates a ne’er-do-well husband named Frank, and an opthomologist identified as Mr. Rice. The play is performed as a set of intertwined monologues that the three actors deliver directly to the audience from three chairs: a stool for the callow, impulsive, but loving husband; a comfortable easy chair for the physician whose professional and personal life has been arrested by his wife’s desertion to one of his medical colleagues; a plain hospital chair for the spunky and sensual Molly, first blind, then sighted, then blind again.

The directness of their speeches to the audience are reminiscent of a psychotherapeutic encounter; their isolation from and misunderstanding of one another is pronounced. The emotional intensity is sometimes broken by the distraction of Lara Dubin’s lighting design, which is meant to evoke Molly Sweeney’s changing visual field but, like some of the ultra-high-tech lighting I’ve seen lately, ends up being distracting.

Michael Dowling cast and directed the play well. All three actors—Rebecca Brooksher as Molly, Kevin Hogan as Mr. Rice, and Chad Hoeppner as Frank Sweeney—are accomplished and almost always interesting to watch and hear. They convincingly bring to life Friel’s meditation on this extraordinary true story, which combines fairy tale and Faustian bargain. “Beware of strangers bearing gifts” and “Be careful what you wish for” are only two phrases of folk wisdom that resonate through this deeply intriguing play. Like many such adaptations from real life, however, Friel had to choose and simplify in order to create a satisfying drama.

Afterwards, I looked up Sacks’s Anthropologist on Mars (where the New Yorker piece has been collected), to reread and reflect on the many complex issues the production brings to theatrical life.

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Helen Epstein is the author of the biography Joe Papp and a profile of art historian Meyer Schapiro available on Kindle/Amazon. She will be speaking about memoir on July 8 at Cary Library in Lexington, MA.

Harriet Harris and Jeff McCarthy check out the razor's edge in the Barrington Stage Company production of Sweeney Todd. Photo by Kevin Sprague

By Helen Epstein

For Stephen Sondheim fans there’s the Barrington Stage Company production of Sweeney Todd that runs till July 17. I’m waiting for Yasmina Reza’s Art , which is directed by Henry Wishcamper and runs from July 22 through August 7.

For Shakespeare lovers, there’s Shakespeare & Co’s fabulous new production of Richard III directed by Artistic Director Tony Simotes, running from July 2 through September 5. Simotes last directed the extraordinary actor John Douglas Thompson as Othello. The formidable cast of Richard includes Tod Randolph, Jason Asprey, Nigel Gore, Elizabeth Ingram, and Rocco Sisto.

Combing the Hair (La Coiffure), c. 1896, by Edgar Degas. Oil on canvas, 114.3 x 146.7 cm. The National Gallery, London. Bought, 1937 (NG 4865). © National Gallery, London / Art Resource, NY

For theatergoers who like to search for culture in out-of-the way places, take a chance on the tiny, picturesque Chester Theatre Company in Chester, MA. From July 14 to August 22, the company will present Arlene Hutton’s Nibroc Trilogy (Last Train to Nibroc, See Rock City, Gulf View Drive), a three-play exploration of the extraordinary social changes sweeping the U.S. between 1941 and 1953 told through the experiences of two young Kentuckians who meet, fall in love, and develop their own special kind of family.

For visual arts mavens, there’s the new Clark Institute show, Picasso Looks at Degas, which runs through September 12.

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Helen Epstein’s work, including her award-winning profile of art historian Meyer Schapiro, is now on Kindle.

Director Tony Simotes at the Shakespeare & Company read through

The stellar cast, headed by John Douglas Thompson, includes many Shakespeare & Company veterans including Tod Randolph, Jason Asprey, Johnny Lee Davenport, Nigel Gore, Elizabeth Ingram, Annette Miller, and Rocco Sisto.

Speaking in a whisper, Simotes apologized for arriving late and described some of the side effects of his treatment, including difficulties in concentration and nausea. He brought along an unusual prop: a plastic spittoon, which he used frequently during the three hours that followed.

Unlike many cancer patients in the public eye and unlike the late producer Joe Papp, for example, Simotes believes it’s important to keep his actors and the company’s many associates and audience members apprised of his medical condition. The actors gave him a standing ovation when he entered Studio 3 at Shakespeare & Company’s campus in Lenox, MA. Then they sat down for a three-hour first reading of a production (opening on July 2nd) that promises to be the highlight of this summer season.

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Helen Epstein’s work, including her award-winning profile of art historian Meyer Schapiro, is now on Kindle.

Orchard House: Where Louisa May Alcott wrote Little Women

By Helen Epstein

“We are all going to be made perfect,” wrote ten-year-old Louisa May Alcott in June of 1843, “This day we left Concord in the rain to travel by wagon the ten miles to our new home which Father has named Fruitlands.” Louisa’s father Bronson Alcott, the notoriously impractical luftmensch, set out in the spring of 1843 with his wife Abigail, his four young daughters, and his friend Charles Lane to live a utopian dream in a farmhouse off the road between Boston and Worcester, funded by his brother-in-law.

Since the Transcendentalist was against the consumption or use of animals (including cows, ducks, and chickens and their eggs) and determined to live off “the fruits of the earth” (ergo Fruitlands Farm), the family would eat only grains, fruits, and vegetables. They would draw water for drinking, cooking, and their cold baths (another of Alcott’s dicta) from the well 50 yards from the house and cut firewood in the forest. There would be no household help.

Alcott took the best room for his study and allocated the bedrooms to himself and his wife Abigail; Charles Lane; and his good friend Henry David Thoreau, whose regular visits he anticipated. Louisa and her three sisters—then 11, 8, and 3—slept in a low, narrow, third-floor attic that made Cinderella’s lodgings look luxurious.

Alcott and Charles Lane sometimes traveled together for weeks at a time during which Lane would argue for Alcott to abandon his family and form a true “consociate” community similar to the nearby Shakers.

In January of 1844, all but starving and freezing to death in the Massachusetts winter, Abigail Alcott— who had the empathy and patience of the social worker she was—finally called an end to the experiment, packed up her four young daughters, abandoned camp, and found refuge with relatives.

There are dozens of excellent books about the Alcotts, Emersons, Thoreau, and Hawthorne, but reading them can’t beat actually walking through the places where the people actually lived. It’s also nice to be able to travel by car rather than by wagon.

Driving west from Concord to Fruitlands on Route 2 on a fine spring day, you can get a sense of the lay of the land as well as the climate. It was chilly in the May sun, and we had a hot lunch at Alcott’s Restaurant and Tea Room (whose excellent menu the philosopher would surely condemn). There are also three other museums at Fruitlands, including an excellently curated small gem of a Shaker Museum.

But the main reason I went to Fruitlands was to follow the footsteps of Louisa and, in fact, I came to understand the author of Little Women in a new way. It has been pointed out by many critics that Louisa May Alcott all but wrote her admired but hapless father out of her autobiographical novel. Mr. March makes a brief appearance in Chapter 22.

Moreover, Louisa’s alter ego (and model for so many later women writers) Jo March does not marry in Little Women. She finally submits to the marriage plot via Professor Baer as a result of popular demand after readers devoured Little Men. She obliged with Jo’s Boys.

Louisa May herself never married and, like the Belle of Amherst, Louisa has become an iconic figure. Orchard House, where she wrote Little Women has become a kind of shrine visited by readers from all over the world who have read the book, often translated as “The Four Daughters of Dr. March.”

Unlike Emily Dickinson’s home in Amherst, however, Alcott’s is one of a cluster, including the historic home of Ralph Waldo Emerson, the home of his grandparents, and Walden Pond. Concord was a literary hotbed with neighbors and frequent visitors such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Margaret Fuller, journalist, social reformer, and the first woman granted research privileges at Harvard. They were all enthusiastic walkers (their walking sticks are intriguing artifacts) who frequently visited each others’ homes.

Orchard House and Emerson’s House are less than half a mile apart; Emerson walked about one mile to the Old Manse, slightly more to Walden Pond, and 20 miles to Boston when he felt like it. Although I didn’t replicate that walk, I spent the better part of two days touring the historic Concord houses. Walden Pond and the Concord Museum are accessible year-round but, for the most part, the historic homes are open only from April to November.

All have volunteer docents who are well-versed in local history, and shops with well-stocked book sections. There is no wandering about at will except at the Concord Museum. Guided tours are the rule and, if you’re lucky, they become mini-seminars.

The Concord Museum: The place to begin tracking the Transcendentalists.

The Concord Museum is perhaps the best starting point. It’s a small, modern, but comfortingly low-tech museum (an old-fashioned diorama of the Revolutionary War reminded me of childhood days at New York’s Museum of Natural History) that starts with a display about the Algonquins who were displaced by the Colonists and provides a visual narrative to the 19th century.

The Museum boasts a nationally-significant decorative arts collection: Concord-made furniture, silver, and clocks, as well as several important historical relics. One is the lantern immortalized by Longfellow in Paul Revere’s Ride (”One if by land; two if by sea”); another is the desk where Thoreau wrote Walden and “Civil Disobedience.”

The most compelling exhibit for me is Emerson’s study, brought over in its entirety from Emerson House after a fire broke out in its original location. He wrote in a wooden rocking chair, placed next to a round table in the center of the room whose top revolved like a lazy Susan when he wished to look at something besides what he was working on.

There’s a painting by May Alcott (Amy in Little Women) hanging over the sofa as well as art Emerson brought back with him from Europe. Like Louisa, May was encouraged to visit with Emerson and peruse his treasures. The study, like all the Museum’s displays, is beautiful, but if you want to experience the actual space in which the writers lived and wrote, you will wish to hurry on.

The Old Manse, half a mile from Concord Center just outside Minuteman National Park, was the home of Emerson’s grandfather, Unitarian minister William Emerson, who began living there in 1770. The house had a clear view of the Concord River and the Revolutionary War’s North Bridge. He allegedly watched the fighting from the bedroom window and called it “The Battle in my Backyard.”

Emerson spent many summers with his grandparents and, in 1835, moved in for a short time. After Emerson moved to his own home in Concord, Nathaniel Hawthorne moved in and wrote Mosses from an Old Manse in the house. Thoreau planted a vegetable garden outside as a wedding gift.

Touring the house (a property of Massachusetts’s Trustees of Reservations) is an experience of both literary and social history. There is the minister’s parlor on the right with its fireplace and 1864 Steinway piano—an important nineteenth-century item that replaced the earlier Aeolian harp (hung in trees like contemporary wind chimes) as the musical instrument of choice for a proper family.

On the left is the study with a handsome grandfather clock from 1770 and oil paintings by yet another of the gifted women of the group, Sophia Hawthorne. She also etched a couple of the messages into the thick glass window panes, some of them 300 years old. You can try to channel both Emerson and Hawthorne in the study where the first wrote “Nature” and the second struggled with writer’s block, working on Mosses from an Old Manse while facing the wall and away from the windows. One of the most interesting rooms is the fully-furnished kitchen with its set kettle, where water was boiled; it’s an open hearth where pots were hung and a sloped sink.

Ralph Waldo Emerson House in Concord, MA

The Emerson Memorial House feels quite different from both the Concord Museum and the Old Manse. It’s still privately owned by family descendants and feels homey. Almost all the furnishings are the originals except for the study, whose originals are preserved in the fire-proof and climate-controlled building across the road.

Nonetheless, even the replicated study is a place to soak in the literary atmosphere. You can imagine Emerson in his rocking chair working at his lectures (he came to believe that a speaking career was better both financially and for disseminating his ideas than publishing), surrounded by portraits and busts of and books by the men he admired: Dante, Goethe, Thomas Carlyle, Abraham Lincoln, Charles Sumner, John Muir.

Touring the house with its fireplace in every room and places for candelabra and leather buckets for putting out fires, one becomes sensitized to the amount of time and energy expended (not by Emerson) to keep the place well-lit, well-heated, and supplied with water (there was no indoor plumbing until the 1870s).

Which provides an interesting segue to Orchard House. One of Bronson Alcott’s most pragmatic ideas, so far as I can tell, was to extend the original house, build his family’s kitchen directly over their well, and to devise a pump to deliver the water to a soapstone sink. This was ingenious, time-saving, possibly life-saving arrangement in the bitter winters and probably much appreciated by his wife and daughters after their Spartan conditions on Fruitlands Farm.

Orchard House was also close to Concord Center and on the site of a real apple orchard—12 acres of orchard as per Thoreau, who survey the land for them. The Alcotts moved into the house in 1858 and lived there for 20 years.

Father Alcott believed in progressive, child-centered education. Two more ingenious ideas, for which he is justly honored, were to encourage all his daughters to write in daily journals and to allow May to sketch on the walls of her room.

All four of his daughters experimented with music and theater as well as the visual arts: the two older girls even founded a quasi-community theater called The Concord Dramatic Players Union. May’s impressive artistic work hangs on the walls.

But, for me, the most moving artifact in Orchard House is Louisa’s desk, a tiny half-moon of wood that her father built into the wall, where she sat and sometimes wrote for 14 hours at a stretch.

By the time she died at age 55 in 1888, she had written more than 30 books that have been translated into 50 languages, had toured Europe like her hero Emerson, raised her late sister May’s daughter Lulu, and was finally able to maintain a comfortable lifestyle with an apartment in Boston’s Louisburg Square.

You can read about Louisa May Alcott, her father, Thoreau, Emerson, Hawthorne, and their world in several notable books like John Matteson’s Eden’s Outcasts; Megan Marshall’s The Peabody Sisters; and Robert D. Richardson’s Emerson: The Mind on Fire. But now’s the time to visit where they lived and worked.

Helen Epstein’s work is now available on Kindle, including her essay on Memoir.

The new edition of Helen Epstein’s Music Talks is available online and at music outlets like the shop at Symphony Hall in Boston. She is also the author of Joe Papp and “Where She Came From.” Order these books through the link below to Amazon and The Arts Fuse receives a (small) percentage of the sale.

Spirits Calling: Blithe Spirit at the Lyric Stage Company of Boston. L-R: Sarah deLima, Richard Snee, Kathy St. George, Anne Gottlieb, Arthur Waldstein. Credit: Mark S. Howard

Blithe Spirit by Noël Coward. Directed by Spiro Veloudos. Staged by the Lyric Stage Company of Boston, Boston, MA, through June 5.

Reviewed By Helen Epstein

That was one of the few questions I was taking the trouble to ask myself while giving in to the sheer enjoyment of Spiro Veloudos’s exuberantly entertaining, no-holds-barred production of Noël Coward’s Blithe Spirit. Although it has been called “an allegory of homosexualization” by at least one academic, and although it was allegedly written in seven days in an artistic and perhaps irrational act of defiance during the German bombardment of England in 1941, Blithe Spirit is one of the most mainstream and most-revived plays in the Anglo-American theater and one of the most consistently satisfying.

Like Mozart’s music, Coward’s dialogue is melodic and unfailingly attractive to the ear; the theatergoer does not wish to miss a single word. Like Chekhov’s plays, Coward’s characters are familiar figures— the Doctor, the Writer, the Writer’s Wife, the eternal and enigmatic figure of the Mystic/Medium—that offer the actor multiple possibilities of interpretation and interaction. Like much classical comedy, it pokes fun at timeless targets: the upper class, the lower class, marriage and its clueless spouses, the age-old seductions of the occult, as well as the twentieth century targets of psychology and parapsychology.

But perhaps knowing the historical context in which Blithe Spirit was written gives that suddenly rocking seance table, falling vase of flowers, and recurrent blowing-open French doors an underlying layer of gravity. I had the sense at times that this light and ostensibly most diverting of divertissements about ghosts and their return to haunt the living was written at a pitch of anger as Coward tried to fend off the prospect of real and massive death all around him.

The story, so clearly drawn that even my theater-language-challenged, French spouse could follow it, begins with Charles Condomine (what exactly did Coward have in mind with that name?), an author researching a book about the occult. To further his project, he and his wife Ruth invite Madame Arcati, a local medium, to dinner. Afterwards, Madame Arcati will conduct a seance with them and their skeptical guests, physician Dr. Bradman and his wife.

Richard Snee and Paula Plum, as man and ghost, converse in Blithe Spirit. Credit: Mark S. Howard

A whiff of psychoanalysis wafts through the air: the Condomines discuss the author’s deceased first wife Elvira before dinner with Charles tactfully refusing to compare the relative charms of his two wives and Ruth claiming disinterest.

But that conversation triggers an unconscious force that—during the subsequent seance—hints at Madame Arcati’s success in bringing the ghost of Elvira over “from the other side.” Elvira moves into the household, visible only to Charles but increasingly disruptive to Ruth.

The beautiful single set by Brynna Bloomfield—a warmly-lit living room that evokes New England more than England—is complemented by Charles Schoonmaker’s eye-catching costumes and the evocative use by sound designer Arshan Gailus of Irving Berlin and Noël Coward songs as performed by Leigh Barret and Jonathan Goldberg.

In counterpoint to the British accents, director Spiro Veloudos has opted for what struck me as a broad, energetic, very American style with two robust and full-voiced Mrs. Condomines; a Madame Arcati who looks and acts like a chaotic guru-groupie from the 1960s; and two suave and rational professional men of the mid-twentieth century.

Richard Snee is consistently satisfying as the attractive, somewhat smug author (a stand-in for Coward himself) who complains to his wife, “You won’t even allow me to have a hallucination if I want to!” Arthur Waldstein is convincing in the role of Dr. Bradman. Anne Gottlieb makes a fine Lyric Stage debut as the second Mrs. Condomine, bringing strength and humor as well as nuance to her role of famous author’s wife, delivering such lines as “I must beg of you to dematerialize my husband’s first wife as soon as possible,” with plausible gravity.

Veteran Boston actress Paula Plum has a ball as the first Mrs. Condomine (”I may be an illusion but I’m definitely here!” ) allowing her malice and mischievousness full rein. I found Kathy St. George’s Madame Arcati a bit over the top, but the rest of the audience seemed delighted by her antics.

We may not be in a blitzkrieg now, but between the unplugged BP oil spill, the daily slaughter in the Middle East, and the European debt crisis, we can all use a little diversion. The Lyric’s Blithe Spirit fits the bill.

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The new edition of Helen Epstein’s Music Talks is available online and at music outlets like the shop at Symphony Hall in Boston. She is also the author of Joe Papp. Order these books through the link below to Amazon and The Arts Fuse receives a (small) percentage of the sale.

Reviewed By Helen Epstein

Chamber Orchestra of Boston conductor David Feltner

Although it is a popular and engaging staple of the concert hall, the fully staged version of Igor Stravinsky’s L’Histoire du soldat or The Soldier’s Tale is one of the least performed in the classical repertoire. Written while the composer took refuge in Switzerland during the First World War—after Firebird, Petrushka, and The Rite of Spring—and when money and musical resources were in short supply, Stravinsky was thinking small and scored it for one violin, one bass, one clarinet, one bassoon, one trumpet, one trombone, and one percussionist (a scoring that makes it a perennial favorite of conservatory students).

Nonetheless, he specified that it be “read, played, and danced,” thus requiring at the very least one actor and one dancer. Inspired by Russian folktales, written by a Swiss novelist, and translated by a British librettist, the story is a mishmash of a Faustian bargain spliced with fairy tale: the Devil gets the soldier’s fiddle with the offer of a magic book that will bring him all the wealth in the world; the soldier cures a sick Princess; the Devil gets him in the end. Also there’s the soldier’s old mother.

The Chamber Orchestra of Boston (COB) asked Paula Plum to collapse the roles of narrator, actor, and dancer into one—a challenge for the most versatile performer and one that showcased the problematic nature of the work as a theater piece.

The music, rhythmically intricate, referencing and taking off on hallowed musical forms such as a Bach chorale and American ragtime, was performed expertly by the members of the COB. Unfortunately, the ingenuity of the music is not matched by the text. It has no doubt dated badly and needs editing for a contemporary audience and a consistent English-language style.

Ms. Plum chose a heroic, overblown style of narration that made her storytelling as well as portrayal of the soldier, the Devil, and the Princess confusing for the audience. Sometimes she sounded like a librarian reading a Dr. Seuss book to small children; other times she sounded like a hapless actor trapped by a script that required her to enunciate over the music such incongruous bits of dialogue as “Good-bye old chap!” “Howdy!” “Adios,” and “Later.”

Whatever Stravinsky was thinking when he got together with Swiss novelist C. F. Ramuz got lost in translation. This is a piece waiting for some innovative stage director to take a good look, clean-up it up, and bring it into the 21st century.

The second piece in the program (scored for exactly the same ensemble minus the narrator) was Michael Daugherty’s Dead Elvis, a short piece written in 1993. In the place of the narrator stands the bassoonist, dressed as Elvis, complete with shades and toupee, his large phallic instrument making pelvic contortions unnecessary to make his point.

Although the program note by the composer cites the Faustian bargain Elvis made by selling out to Las Vegas and the question of the rock star’s death as embodied by the work, I found the piece fun, the bassoon an eccentric musical choice for Elvis, and the performance leaving me once again amazed at the high quality of musicianship in Boston.

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The new edition of Helen Epstein’s Music Talks is available online and at music outlets like the shop at Symphony Hall in Boston. She is also the author of Joe Papp. Order these books through the link below to Amazon and The Arts Fuse receives a (small) percentage of the sale.