Archives for August 2011

A month before I met Mrs. T, I spent a night in Frank Lloyd Wright’s Seth Peterson Cottage, which is located on a bluff overlooking a lake two miles from the Wisconsin Dells and is available for short-term rentals. Not long afterward I wrote a piece about the experience for The Wall Street Journal. No sooner did I discover that my spouse-to-be was equally passionate about Wright’s architecture than I resolved to bring her to the cottage at the earliest opportunity. It wasn’t easy—you have to book your stay a year in advance—but yesterday we finally made it.

I have no words to describe the feeling of tranquility that washed over us as we walked through the door of the Peterson Cottage, knowing that it was to be all ours for the next two days. Entering the cottage is like putting on a piece of exquisitely well-tailored clothing: you feel at one with the house and its surroundings, so much so that you can scarcely tell the difference between indoors and outdoors. To be sure, you wouldn’t want to stay there for more than an hour or two with anyone other than the closest of companions. The two-room cottage is small—880 square feet—and the only interior door is the one that leads to the bathroom. Yet you never feel cramped, precisely because Wright took such great pains to meld the house with its site.

Not being a student or critic of architecture, I can’t say anything more informative about the design of the cottage than what Paul Goldberger wrote about it in 1994:

The house is Frank Lloyd Wright boiled down to his essence: Powerful geometric form; low, contained spaces played off against exuberantly high ones; a sense of natural materials put together into a composition that at once seems to hug the earth and blast off from it. From the outside, it is at once serene and energetic. A solid section of stone, barely bigger than a chimney, anchors the center. The low horizontal of the bedroom ceiling comes off from one side, and the high, raked roof of the living-dining room bursts out from the other. The solids and the voids, the lows and the highs, the horizontals and the verticals, are in harmony.

The last word of that passage put me in mind of the exquisite lines from The Merchant of Venice that Ralph Vaughan Williams set in his Serenade to Music: Here will we sit and let the sounds of music/Creep in our ears: soft stillness and the night/Become the touches of sweet harmony. As my beloved spouse and I sat in the soft stillness of the Wisconsin night, we felt the sweet harmony of the Peterson Cottage, in which the built and natural worlds resonate in perfect concord.

Careworn and road-weary though we both are, I doubt that Mrs. T and I have ever been much happier than we are today.

*  *  *

A 1938 British Pathé newsreel of Sir Henry Wood recording Ralph Vaughan Williams’Serenade to Music with the musicians who gave its premiere a few days earlier. Vaughan Williams was present at the session:

David Cromer, who was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2010, talks about his work as a stage director in a MacArthur Foundation interview:

(This is the latest in a weekly series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Wednesday.)

“Beauty is an ecstasy; it is as simple as hunger. There is really nothing to be said about it.”
W. Somerset Maugham, Cakes and Ale

I got an e-mail the other day from Dennis Neal, the Florida actor who is creating the double role of Louis Armstrong and Joe Glaser in Satchmo at the Waldorf, my first play, which opens next month in Orlando. “I have been preparing twenty-five years and a lifetime to tell this story,” he said. “You really can’t imagine how profoundly this has affected me.” Dennis is absolutely right. No matter how hard I try, I know I won’t be able to come close to imagining what it will feel like for him to play Armstrong on stage.
Yes, I wrote both the script of the play and the biography on which Satchmo at the Waldorf is loosely based, and I think that I have a pretty good understanding of what made Louis Armstrong tick. Like everyone who knew him, I find his character to be wholly sympathetic, and I believe that my experience as a working jazz musician has given me a solid grasp of the wellsprings of his artistry. That said, I wouldn’t claim to identify with Armstrong in anything more than a superficial way, if only because our lives were so very diffferent. I come from a middle-class family and was born and raised in a small Missouri town. Armstrong was born in black Storyville, the roughest part of turn-of-the-century New Orleans, and was raised by a part-time prostitute. What’s more, Mayann Armstrong was a single mother, for her son’s natural father deserted him when he was a baby.
So while I do think that I understand Armstrong reasonably well, I can’t even begin to know what it would have felt like to be him. Not so Dennis. To be sure, he wasn’t born in black Storyville or raised by a whore, but he’s seen things that I’ve only read about in books, and my guess is that this will give him a kind of access to Armstrong’s interior life that I can only attempt to simulate from the outside in.
What makes all this so important is that Dennis’ job is to get up in front of an audience and embody Armstrong. I did a certain amount of acting in my youth, and though I wasn’t particularly good at it, I do know what it feels like to play a part. It’s nothing like putting on a mask: you have to meld with the character you’re playing, using elements of your own experience to bring his personality to life.
Because I’m so closely acquainted with Armstrong’s habits of speech, I was able to write dialogue for for him that sounds natural, and I think I was also able to create a “voice” for Joe Glaser that is equally convincing. (It helped that I was able to listen to an informal radio interview with Glaser that was taped off the air in the Fifties, the only surviving recording of his speaking voice.) I can assure you, however, that none of the dialogue in Satchmo at the Waldorf sounds at all natural when I read it out loud, and I expect you’d be reduced to helpless laughter were I to stand up in front of you and try to act out a scene from the play. But having watched Dennis perform the first forty-five minutes of Satchmo at the Waldorf in a workshop performance earlier this year, I haven’t the slightest doubt that the only time he’ll make the audience laugh is when he’s supposed to do so.
I hasten to point out that Dennis isn’t going to be impersonating Armstrong or Glaser. That’s not what I want. As I explain in the stage directions:

The roles of Louis Armstrong and Joe Glaser are played by the same actor. He need not resemble either man physically and should suggest Armstrong’s voice rather than imitating it.

“I don’t want you to be Rich Little doing Satchmo,” I said to Dennis when we met for the first time back in February. “I want you to be an actor. I want you to create your Armstrong and your Glaser.”
“That’s just what I wanted to hear,” he replied with a smile. And it’s just what I expect to see when I fly down to Orlando next Saturday and sit in on my first rehearsal of Satchmo at the Waldorf.

“Beauty is unbearable, drives us to despair, offering us for a minute the glimpse of an eternity that we should like to stretch out over the whole of time.”
Albert Camus, Notebooks 1935-42

Mrs. T and I continue to live out of our suitcases. On Friday we made it to Spring Green, Wisconsin, after spending three unscheduled days in Smalltown, U.S.A., with my mother, who is recovering from her third operation in as many months. Her prospects, unlikely as it may sound, are extremely good.
Once it was evident that she was on the mend, we headed north to see three shows at American Players Theatre, a summer festival that specializes in the classics and isn’t nearly as well known as it ought to be. It’s become one of our regular stops, and we were exceedingly glad to get there, partly because we were desperately tired of running around and partly because one of our favorite people, Keiran Murphy, lives in Spring Green and works at Taliesin, Frank Lloyd Wright’s rural Wisconsin estate. We took Keiran to the last of our three shows, The Critic, yesterday afternoon, then staggered back to our hotel and fell into (A) the hot tub and (B) bed.
Today is what theater people call a “dark day,” meaning that we don’t have any shows to see. Mrs. T has the day off, but I have to write, so I got up early, ate breakfast, and knocked out Friday’s Wall Street Journal drama column, after which I started working on a Commentary essay about Tony Bennett, who is the subject of a newly published biography. It happens that Bennett is not only one of the greatest pop singers who ever lived but an amateur painter of no small accomplishment. (The canvas reproduced here, “Sunday in Central Park,” is one of his best efforts.) I plan to say a little something about his work in that area if space permits.
Now I need to get back to work, for Mrs. T and I are pulling up stakes again tomorrow morning, and I want if at all possible to finish the Bennett essay before we leave. I’ll say more about where we’re going when we get there!

Emil Gilels plays Prokofiev’s Third Piano Sonata in concert at the Moscow Conservatory in 1979:

“There is a road from the eye to the heart that does not go through the intellect. Men do not quarrel about the meaning of sunsets; they never dispute that the hawthorn says the best and wittiest thing about the spring.”
G.K. Chesterton, “A Defence of Heraldry”