A TOUCH OF ROMANCE FOR TODAY

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The illustration above for a romance story in a women's magazine from 1959 (I'm not sure which one) was done by Coby Whitmore, who specialized in such stories and in magazine ads for women's products.

Whitmore was part of a new wave in magazine illustration in the late Forties that broke away from the Norman Rockwell school — but not too far.  The artists of this generation still relied on an almost photorealistic draftsmanship but began to get freer, more painterly, with the treatment of the surface of the image and moved towards bolder graphic effects in the overall design.  Backgrounds often became highly abstracted — a contrast to the meticulously rendered environments of Rockwell's most characteristic work.  The image below is an illustration for a romance story in a 1957 issue of Good Housekeeping:

The images of the new-wave artists still had a strong narrative element but it was more intimate, trying to capture fleeting moments and moods, focusing on the characters depicted with a view to glamorizing them.

This approach would come to dominate pulp-fiction paperback covers in the late Fifties and Sixties and informs the style of artists like Robert McGinnis.  It's also related to the photorealistic but graphically striking soap-opera comic strips of the Fifties like Mary Perkins On Stage.

CHRISTMAS WITH KEROUAC: THE NAZARETH PRINCIPLE

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                                                                  [Jack Kerouac, photograph with annotations by Allen Ginsberg]

I pulled into Nazareth, I was feelin' 'bout half past dead.


                                     — Robbie Robertson


Paul Zahl and his wife Mary recently moved from Maryland to Florida. 
On the road with a friend, hauling his belongings south, Paul had a
rendezvous with the Ghost of Christmas Past:


Our son Simeon says that faith is summed up in something he calls the
“Nazareth principle”.  This refers to the question in the New Testament
where someone scoffs at Jesus the carpenter by asking, “Can anything
good come out of Nazareth?”


The idea was that Nazareth was a city, in the region of Galilee, which
was known for its “mixed-blood” and therefore suspect practice of
Judaism.  Because the carpenter/prophet came from Nazareth, didn't that
disqualify him from being the real thing?


Yet as Simeon says, in life — time after time — the best things come
from the unlikeliest places.  And this “Nazareth principle” extends to
the fact that out of trouble and wounds, disappointments and closed
doors, come often the actual breakthroughs of personal life.



 

I just saw this “Nazareth principle” up close and personal on a visit
to the town of Rocky Mount, North Carolina.  A friend of mine and I
were driving a rental truck from Washington, D.C. to Orlando, Florida
and I decided to try to find and see a place I dearly love, in my
heart.  This is the house where Jack Kerouac used to come at Christmas
during the mid-1950s in the midst of his wild ride of a life.  Whether
Kerouac was in Manhattan, San Francisco, or Mexico City, he always
hitchhiked his way back home for Christmas.  And home for Kerouac was
wherever his mother, “Memere”, was.

 

Because Kerouac's sister, Caroline, and her husband Paul, and their
little boy Paul were living in Rocky Mount for a period of years, home
for Christmas meant there.




This was Kerouac's most intense Buddhist phase, which also meant a 24/7
dialogue with Christianity, his inherited religion.  The weeks in Rocky
Mount are described in great detail in his notes on religion, which
were published posthumously as Some of the Dharma.  Kerouac would
meditate almost every night in Twin Pine Grove behind his sister's
house, and write down every single word and vision that occurred to him.


He also composed his book Visions of Gerard at the kitchen table in Rocky Mount.

 

So I wanted to see where these great words came to him, to “heav'n's
recording angel” — Allen Ginsberg's phrase for his friend Jack Kerouac.  [Below, a very young Allen Ginsberg:]

But I had no address.

 

What I did have was a photograph of the house, taken by a local
journalist and published on her blog.  I also knew that the house was
in a section of Rocky Mount about three miles outside of town which
used to be called Big Easonburg Woods but is now called West Mount.  This
is all that my friend Michael McDowell and I had to go on — the name
for the neighborhood and a photograph of a tiny frame house painted
blue-gray with purple shutters.

 

So we pulled our Budget truck off Route 95 and made our way to a long
road called West Mount Drive, then just started driving and looking.  There
were a lot of big trucks and no one had any patience with our little
moving van with its caution lights flashing.  We drove about a mile and
saw several houses that might have been the one.  And then . . .


                                                    [Photo © Marion Blackburn]


I saw it!  The handicapped ramp and the colors exactly as in the photograph.

 

At the corner of Cameron Street and West Mount Drive sits the house in
which God spoke to Jack Kerouac.  Or at least that is how I see it. 
The jungled grove of pine trees is right behind the house, there is a
gas station just yards away (in Kerouac's day this was a “cracker”
country store as he described it), and a few small brick bungalows sit
on a dead-end road behind the home.  They each have a satellite dish
and each one looks as if it were built in the mid-1960s.

 

I didn't dare to knock on the door — the house is obviously lived in,
with children's toys scattered in the small backyard — but asked about
it at the gas station.  The man at the desk had never heard of
Kerouac.  Yet this was definitely the house.  I had read about it on
another Kerouac blog, in which the fan had found himself unwelcome when
he looked inside.  But the pictures all matched.


                    [Photo © Daniel Barth]

 

We parked our truck, I walked around, meditated for five minutes — it
was about 100 degrees — and envisaged our man walking around with his
poncho and his dog between two a.m. and five a.m. on those cold
December and January nights in 1956.  That the genius, like the Son of
Man, had “no place to lay his head” except for this tiny little spot in
the “back of beyond”, is simply an astonishing fact of human existence
and history.



 

I don't know if you've ever had the chance to read Visions of Gerard,
but it is sublime.  It tells the story of the death of Jack's older
brother at age nine, in Lowell, Massachusetts — a kind of saint, this child.  And
the author gives his tale and his interpretation of the tale absolutely
everything he has.  It is a masterpiece that I recommend to everyone,
especially if religion interests you.  On one page Jack is a
Samsara-diagnosing Buddhist; on another, a Crown of Thorns Christian, of
piercing conscience and intention.  And he wrote the inspired little
book at the kitchen table of this house on West Mount Drive at the
corner of Cameron Street.

 

Later that night, Michael and I stopped at the house of friends in the
Low Country of South Carolina.  It was and is one of that region's most
beautiful and soulful plantations, an ante-bellum house of exquisite
taste and proportions.  We had a wonderful time, with lovely,
thoughtful people.



 

But I myself was still in Rocky Mount!  How could it be that “God”/A
Higher Power/Karma/The Father of All could have set up a world in which
one of His finest and most gifted spirits would have no settled home
save this tiny refuge, covered now,
and even then, with the dust of passing trailers and trucks and “Dukes
of Hazard” Corvettes.  Yet that's the way it really is.  And there is
something to this affinity with a Man of Sorrows that struck me on
Monday afternoon, and definitely struck Kerouac even back then as he
wrote his notes in the Carolina dawn, which mirrors the facts of
suffering life.

 

Nowhere could the Nazareth principle be more concrete than in Rocky
Mount, North Carolina, off Wesleyan Boulevard on that long industrial road which
cuts through Big Easonburg Woods.

Jack Kerouac rests far from Rocky Mount, in Lowell, Massachusetts, where his grave (above) is also a place of pilgrimage, but you just know that his restless spirit is still on the road — that we're likely to encounter it anywhere, from Bodh Gaya to Nazareth to West Mount Drive.

[Note:  Fans of Paul Zahl's contributions to this site can now find all his articles (and one about him) at The Zahl File, in the category list to the left.]

A MEXICAN LOBBY CARD FOR TODAY

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Mexican lobby cards have a wonderful sort of honesty.  The colorful illustration promises magic, the photographic insert confesses to the kind of banality one will likely find in the film itself.

It hardly matters, since the rumba in question will undoubtedly be caliente.

A THOMAS EAKINS FOR TODAY

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“Taking the Count”, from 1896 — one of several very cool Eakins works depicting “the ring”.

Eakins had a decidedly non-Romantic attitude towards his subjects, which attracted a lot of criticism from the art establishment of his day.  As a teacher at the Pennsylvania Academy Of the Fine Arts he preferred to have his students draw from nude models rather than from plaster casts and was ultimately fired for removing the loincloth from a male model while female students were present.  This contrarian strain has given him a bona fides with modern critics — he's one of the few Victorian academic painters it is fashionable to admire.

Whatever.

JUST BEFORE JAZZ

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Thomas Riis's fascinating book Just Before Jazz examines the influence of black composers and performers on American musical theater between 1890 and 1915 — that is, just before the era in which the modern book musical began to take shape.

The songs of black composers were very similar in many ways to the popular songs written by white composers, even the white composers of operettas.  A number of black composers in this period (like Will Marion Cook, below) were highly sophisticated, classically trained musicians, capable of writing and performing in any style.  (Many of them were “slumming” in popular theater because of barriers to their involvement in more refined areas of practice.)

What distinguished their work was the incorporation of the sort of syncopations found in ragtime, which became a popular sensation around the turn of the century.  Their work didn't emphasize such syncopations to the degree that ragtime did — they were more like stylistic inflections — but they thrilled audiences of the time.

Among the most popular songs in this period, an astonishing percentage were written by black composers, and they included not only minstrel-type songs but ethnically neutral ones.  It was the purely rhythmic lilt that made the difference.

Almost all of these songs were first done for musical shows originating in New York City, often in Broadway productions, leading Riis to argue that black composers bear the primary credit for introducing black musical strains into the American musical.  Berlin and Kern and Gershwin weren't “reaching down” into an exotic black musical culture for inspiration — they were responding, artistically and commercially, to developments in the world of musical theater all around them.

You have to wonder why these black composers aren't better known today.  Partly it's because the lyrics of many of their songs are offensive to modern ears — the “coon song” was a typical genre, with its caricatures derived from minstrel shows.  As black songwriters became more powerful, however, they toned down the uglier aspects of these caricatures, leaving stereotypes comparable to those attached to other ethnic groups like the Irish and the “Dutch” (as Germans were once called.)  These stereotypes aren't congenial to our present tastes, perhaps, but they aren't exactly vicious, either.

More importantly, these black composers failed to achieve wider celebrity, and failed to enter our cultural memory, because they could not participate fully in the flowering of musical comedy in the later decades of the 20th Century.  Their songs were bought and performed by white performers in vaudeville, were sometimes interpolated into shows with white casts and were disseminated nationally via sheet music, but in the theater, they wrote primarily for all-black shows.  Broadway had a place for such shows, but it was a limited place.

Black composers were very rarely hired to provide complete musical programs for shows with white casts — they never became part of the mainstream of producers, musicians and writers who created the ordinary run of Broadway musicals.  White composers adapted the style of their black peers within an establishment that stayed predominantly white.

So today, when we hear Judy Garland and Margaret O'Brien singing “Under the Bamboo Tree” in the movie musical Meet Me In St. Louis, we likely have no idea that this song, a monster hit in 1903, with a tune that is still familiar and still infectious, melodically and rhythmically, was written by three black men, James Weldon Johnson, his brother Rosamond Johnson and Bob Cole.  Below, a portrait of Cole and Rosamond Johnson:

But the past, of course, as an old Russian saying has it, is always unpredictable.

A ROOM SOMEWHERE

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I'm a child of rock and roll.  The first song I remember hearing on the radio, when I was seven years-old, was Elvis Presley's “All Shook Up”.  I don't have a distinct memory of hearing “Hound Dog”, which came out a year earlier, on the radio but I remember some of the cultural fall-out it caused.  I lived in a tiny town in rural North Carolina at the time, and a kid in my first-grade class who lived on a nearby farm brought his guitar to school one day and played the song for us.  I guess it was the first time it dawned on him that knowing how to play the guitar might be seen as a cool thing by his peers.

I remember seeing Elvis perform the song on the Ed Sullivan show, later that year.  A year after that, Jailhouse Rock was the first movie I was ever allowed to go see at night.

I can't say, though, that any of Elvis's songs got to me at that age.  They were just part of the landscape — part of the soundtrack of everyday life.  I didn't really start to appreciate Elvis until I was in my twenties, and didn't own recordings of any of those early hits until then.

The first popular music that got to me came on an LP record.  It was the first LP record my family ever owned, bought to play on our first record player, which my dad brought home as a surprise one day in 1956 and which looked something like this:

It's possible that the LP came with the set, but more likely that my dad bought the player so he could listen to the LP.  It was the Broadway cast recording of My Fair Lady.

This LP was even more popular than Elvis's LPs back then — the My Fair Lady cast recording still holds the record for the most weeks on Billboard's top forty charts.  If my dad bought our first record player just so he could hear it, I'm sure he was doing what tens of thousands of other Americans were doing at the same time.

The extended-play LP — which could fit 26 minutes of music on a side — was only four years old in 1956.  It was developed primarily to fit all the songs from a typical musical on one record, and it was the cast recordings of popular musicals like Kiss Me Kate and My Fair Lady that really established the format.

My dad loved the recording of My Fair Lady and played it over and over.  The song I remember him liking the most was “A Hymn To Him”, with the refrain “Why can't a woman be more like a man?”  The song that got to me was “Wouldn't It Be Loverly?” with its sweet melody and its air of longing:

All I want is a room somewhere,
Far away from the cold night air,
With one enormous chair —
Oh, wouldn't it be loverly?

I'm not sure what I might have been longing for back in those happy times, but the feeling of it struck a chord.

My family always bought the recordings of the big hit Broadway shows — The King and I, Flower Drum Song, Camelot, The Sound Of Music, Funny Girl.  I always loved them, played them over and over, found myself touched by the ballads in particular.  For all that, I never thought of Broadway show tunes as “my music” — when I got to the age when I could choose my own records to buy, they were records of folk and then rock music.  The show tunes were just hidden away somewhere in my heart . . .

. . . until one day, very late in life, I realized what they'd meant to me, what good companions they'd been, what good companions they are and always will be.

“Wouldn't It Be Loverly?” from that 1956 LP still takes me back with uncanny efficiency to the den in my family's house in Belhaven, North Carolina where I first heard it at the age of six.  No other version of the song does this.

Julie Andrews, by the way, was only twenty years-old when she recorded it:


SERUM TO CODFISH COVE (PAGE TEN)

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The tenth and final page of “Serum To Codfish
Cove” by the legendary Carl Barks, found on Rodney Bowcock's Comics and Stories blog, which
Mr. Bowcock has sadly just abandoned.

All ends well, of course, though Donald is soon back to his old ways . . . because nothing ever changes too much in Duckburg.

This delightful work has been posted as a tribute to Barks and Mr. Bowcock, whose blog will be missed.

SERUM TO CODFISH COVE (PAGE NINE)

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The ninth page of “Serum To Codfish
Cove” by the legendary Carl Barks, found on Rodney Bowcock's Comics and Stories blog, which
Mr. Bowcock has sadly just abandoned.

I said in my comments on the previous page of this story that Donald's
repentance resolved the moral aspect of the fable — the boasting that led Donald into the mess he's in.  He's gotten his comeuppance and he knows it.  This wasn't the moral climax of the tale, though, which comes here, when the nephews decide to give all the credit for their actions to Donald.  This will lead to a final ironic twist in the next and concluding page.

Great cut between the third and fourth panels above.  As usual when the action gets intense, Barks plays with the panel borders to indicate dislocation.  Notice how the head of the spy in the third panel actually violates the border of the first panel, which suggests at first glance that the spy is within the nephews' line of sight, even though he isn't literally sharing the space depicted in the panel.

Stay tuned for the final page of this delightful work, posted as a tribute to Barks and Mr. Bowcock, whose blog will be missed.

WAY OUT

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A second report from a recent cultural pilgrimage to New York by Paul
Zahl:


They were all broadcast at nine-thirty, Friday nights on CBS, starting
in March of 1961, right before The Twilight Zone.


I'm referring to the insanely scary episodes of Roald Dahl's
short-lived television series entitled Way Out.

[That's Dahl above, about six years before he did Way Out.]


Do you remember them?


They were grisly, brief, almost always with surprising and shocking
endings, and made a huge impression on watchers of any age.


When I compare the impact of Way Out to The Outer Limits, which was
great, and The Twilight Zone, which was greater . . .


. . . Way Out wins the race.


There was not one single element of humor, except that of the henpecked
or cuckolded, and therefore vengeful, husband — a frequent theme.


The music, by Robert Cobert — who would later do Dark Shadows, Kolchak the Night Stalker, and all the Dan Curtis productions of the
1970s — was extremely eerie.


And Dick Smith, who went on to become a Hollywood legend, did the
Gothic makeup jobs.

 

But the thing is, you can't see them!  They're impossible to see.
They've never been officially released to DVD or video, although four,
and four only, are unofficially available in very poor video versions. 
The reason they haven't been released involves some complicated rights
issues — but David Susskind, who produced the series, gave copies of
the shows to The Museum of Broadcasting in New York City, now known as
the Paley Media Center, on West 52nd Street.


It is only there that these shocking little segments of early Sixties
television can be viewed.

 

They can be viewed, however.



 

Last Thursday, after seeing Our Town at the Barrow Street Theatre the
night before, I went up to midtown and staked out a scholar's console
in the Library of the Paley Center.


I was able to watch four episodes of Way Out, all of which I had seen
in 1961, with a child's (haunted) eyes; and none of which I had seen
again since those unsettling Friday nights in Georgetown, D.C.


The one I was most interested in seeing was the scariest, at least
then, and is called “Soft Focus”.

 

“Soft Focus” is 29 minutes of Barry Morse playing a photographer who
has invented a retouching agent for his portraits of people, which has
the side effect of retouching their actual faces.  Thus a little boy
loses an ugly birthmark which “Dr. Pell” has erased in the lab.  Then,
too, an actress whose face has been scarred is able to be beautiful
again with the help of Dr. Pell.  Dr. Pell's wife, however, Louise, is
involved with her husband's young assistant.  Louise doesn't know that
her husband knows what is going on.

 

He begins to 'touch up' a photograph of her.  She starts to age.  (He
touches up his own photograph, too, to make himself look younger.) When she
begins to look about 50 or so — and she looks awful — her boyfriend
jilts her.  Enraged and abandoned, she enters her husband's studio and
right in front of his eyes, pours the whole bottle of solution on his
portrait.  He screams, and in the climax, which no one who saw it in
1961 ever forgot, he turns towards his gloating wife, and towards the
camera, with half his face wiped away, a perfect blank.


Dick Smith accomplished the effect perfectly.  Barry Morse just stares
at you, the left side of his face a smooth nothing of putty.



 

“Soft Focus” was written by Phil Riesman, Jr., a prolific TV writer who
specialized in history-based shows but wrote three episodes of Way
Out.  The basic idea of Reisman's script for “Soft Focus”, the
unrelenting evil of the villain's vengeance, and of his philandering
wife's vengeance in return, is completely uncompromised.  The
television mise-en-scène is perfect, mostly closeups, with two long
shots, one to show that Dr. Pell knows about his wife's infidelity; and
the last shot of the show, viewing the screaming, flailing, helpless
victim of his own wrath in shadow, shadow, shadow.

 

There is no moral or religious significance  to “Soft Focus”, nor to
any of the Way Out teleplays — and I am interested in finding such
significance when I can.  “Soft Focus” is a completely shattering use
of the small screen to horrify and make an indelible impression on the
viewer, again of any age.

 

Take the time to visit the Paley Media Center on the north side of
52nd Street between Fifth Avenue and Sixth Avenue.  There's much else to
see.


I was told by the very nice keeper of the consoles that no one ever
asks for these Way Out episodes except one peculiar gentleman who
comes twice a year and asks to see them all.


She doesn't know his name but seems to remember the face.  This is
really true.

 

I wonder if  his name is Pell.  I wonder if his face is even more
memorable than she says.


[Editor's Note:  There was a bit of humor in the series, provided by
Dahl's on-camera introductions, in the first of which he said, “The
story we are about to see is
not for children, nor young lovers, nor people with queasy stomachs. It
is for wicked old women.”

SERUM TO CODFISH COVE (PAGE EIGHT)

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The eighth page of “Serum To Codfish
Cove” by the legendary Carl Barks, found on Rodney Bowcock's Comics and Stories blog, which
Mr. Bowcock has sadly just abandoned.

With the nephews on the case, Barks's story kicks into high gear.  Donald's repentance resolves the moral aspect of the fable — all that's left now is action and consequence.  We've come a long way from the first cozy scene in the house, with the snow piling up outside and Donald wanting to read about it in the newspaper — and yet, in the next to last panel above, Codfish Cove, finally in sight, seems farther away than ever.

I'll be
posting the whole thing (ten pages in all) as a tribute to Barks and to
Mr. Bowcock, whose blog will be missed.

STELLA MARIS

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Mary Pickford's Stella Maris, from 1918, is a genuinely strange film, not by any
means, I think, the conventional melodrama it pretends to be. Pickford plays two roles in it — the pampered, protected,
ethereal Stella Maris and the homely, hard-luck Unity Blake, a
characterization bordering on the grotesque. On paper, the title role
ought to be the star part, and in a way it is — Stella gets the good
lighting, the pretty clothes and the guy. But Unity steals the show,
blowing all the other actors off the screen — including Pickford as
Stella in the double exposures.


Stella is sweet, but she delivers little more than poise on screen,
while Unity has energy, quirkiness, self-perception and soul. The
performance by Pickford in the role is sublime — she never strikes a
false note, never steps beyond the twisted, battered persona of the
orphan Unity . . . and yet in her moments of despair, yearning,
resolution, she achieves the kind of transcendent beauty we often see
shining out from behind the many grotesque masks of Lon Chaney. Stella,
by contrast, seems like something seen in a shop window.




It's hard not to believe that there was something deliberate in this,
however unconscious. Perhaps it could be explained by the fact that
Pickford simply got carried away, inspired beyond reason, by the role
of Unity. But why pull back so far in the other role? Stella has little
to do beyond smile or sigh at the wickedness of the world. Stella is a
doll-woman, Unity is a force of nature, and the contrast is
illuminating.


It's finally very difficult to come up with a reason for the hero to fall in
love with Stella — the love scenes between them are oddly bloodless
and perfunctory. There are a lot of reasons for him to fall in love
with Unity, who loves him hopelessly. The two times he and Unity
embrace in the film are electrifying and very moving. There's something
close to bitterness in the choices Pickford makes in the two
characterizations and it sets the melodrama of the story on its ear.




I think it's fair to see in the dual role some kind of metaphor for
female duality — not the duality of woman as a man might conceive it,
between angel and whore, but as a woman might, as Pickford might,
between ugly-ducking and swan. Pickford was hardly a “normal” woman of
the early 20th Century — but she played one on stage and on screen.
The contrast between the normal life she incarnated dramatically and
the actual life she led must have weighed on her psyche. She was not a
conventional beauty, yet her attractiveness put bread on her family's
table — the judgment of others, of men, often meant the difference
between success and failure. Is it too fanciful to imagine that she
sometimes, in the tough times, looked at herself in the mirror — as
Unity does in this film — and despaired of her assets, feeling doomed?


Certainly Pickford's heart is with Unity in this film — and so is the
viewer's. The performance is one of the greatest achievements of silent
cinema. It defines the film in a way that would not have been possible
in the sound era, when the literary text set such a limit on what a
film could be, could mean. A transcendent performance that violated the
text, as Pickford's performance as Unity violates the text of Stella
Maris, would have resulted at best in an interesting failure in a
sound film. Here it results in an improbable, breathtaking, emotionally
disconcerting masterpiece.

SERUM TO CODFISH COVE (PAGE SEVEN)

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The seventh page of “Serum To Codfish
Cove” by the legendary Carl Barks, found on Rodney Bowcock's Comics and Stories blog, which
Mr. Bowcock has sadly just abandoned.

I'll be
posting the whole thing (ten pages in all) as a tribute to Barks and to
Mr. Bowcock, whose blog will be missed.

OUR TOWN

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David Cromer's Off-Broadway production of Our Town, at the Barrow Street Theatre in Manhattan, has been getting lots of press attention and some extraordinary reviews.  Frank Rich in The New York Times devoted a very insightful column to it, relating the play and this production to the profound crisis of spirit currently afflicting the nation.

mardecortesbaja is happy to offer this equally insightful report on the production by Paul Zahl, who was lucky enough to see it last week.  Cromer's staging ends with a startling coup de theatre which Paul discusses in his report and which you might not want to know about if you're planning to see the show, so I've segregated that passage on a separate linked page.

If you weren't planning to see the show, and if you're within striking distance of New York City, I think Paul's report, and Rich's thoughts, might get you to reconsider:


                                                                                   [Image©Scott Prior]

PILGRIMAGE

by Paul Zahl

Wednesday afternoon I took the Vamoose bus from Bethesda, Maryland to the Port
Authority in Manhattan and arrived basically in time to take the subway down to
Christopher Street for the 7:30 performance of Our Town at the Barrow Street Theatre.  It was a pilgrimage for me, because I am
influenced just now by the wisdom of Thornton Wilder (below) and had heard a
lot about this particular production.



 

Charles Isherwood had written in The New York Times of a “. . . surprise Mr.
Cromer springs — a beautiful feat of stagecraft
that transmits the essence of Wilder's philosophy with an overwhelming
sensory immediacy.”


Terry Teachout had written in The Wall Street Journal, “I don't use
the word 'genius' casually, but Mr. Cromer may fill the bill.”


Moreover, Tappan Wilder, Thornton Wilder's literary executor who is a
friend here in the Washington area, had blessed the production.  'Tappy' has seen almost every
production there is or ever shall be.



 

So . . . a brief stop by a West Village video store that specializes in
movies like From Hell It Came and The Black Sleep (which has the
only discussion of the difference between Presbyterianism and
Anglicanism to occur in a 1950s “B” horror movie — no kidding) and then
straight into the theater.

 

I don't want to talk about the initial staging — in which the actors are
set within the audience, in and through the side and transverse aisles,
and at one point are even asked to read lines of the play.  I had seen
this before.

 

But I would like to reflect on the meaning of the play, as a pilgrimage
to me, which the staging finally makes possible.  Act One of Our Town
is full of the gossip and interplay of the people of Grovers Corners,
New Hampshire.  It presents two families, the Webbs and the Gibbses, as
they are in mid-career, going about their business with what we today
call “decency”, love for one's immediate family, and some elements of
Christian sympathy.   The “theme song” of the play is established in Wilder's use of
the hymn, “Blest be the tie that binds/Our hearts in Christian love”.
There is also a tragic character, Mr. Stimson, the defeated alcoholic
choirmaster of the First Congregational Church.

Director David Cromer ups the emotion of Act One by universalizing
the characters through their everyday 2009 casual clothing and by
getting the actors to show their inward lives through concentrated
facial expressions and some intense action in pantomime.  Thus Mrs.
Webb and Mrs. Gibbs reveal their inner drives through stylized, driven work in their kitchens.

You know you're being gotten to when young George Gibbs breaks down as the result of his
father's oblique and rather mild scolding of his son for neglecting his
chores at home, at the expense of his mother.  George goes completely to
pieces with remorse, and it is so like an adolescent boy!  What I am
trying to say is that Act One goes for the inward life of the
characters and is not content with the outward words and situations. 
There is no sense of our being in the year 1910.  We are rather in
2009, with every family's unhappiness and missed opportunities in the
field of love.


                                                                                                 [Image©James Estrin for the NYT]

 
The text of Act Two goes a big step further as the
inwardness of Emily and George's wedding is brought out in their
tortured recriminations with their parents in the church.  It's Wilder
writ large.  This is to say that Emily's entrance into the church is
her “inner” entrance, and George and his mother , perfectly portrayed
by Lori Myers, act out his resistance with no mediation between thought
and act.  This is absolutely wrenching — the unhappiness and also the
initial nobility of every marriage that has ever taken place.  The
blistering Stage Manager, played by Scott Parkinson, 'preaches' here a
little, and that is correct, as he is now playing the Minister.  Again,
everyone is in street clothes of the year 2009 so there is nothing
local or 'contextual' to draw the audience away from the universal
situation.  If I had any criticism at all of the direction, I would
lodge it only and solely at the conclusion of Act Two, where Mrs.
Soames' comments about happiness are underscored a little too much.

 

Now for Act Three, the famous Act Three, the Tibetan book of the dead. 
I never liked this act, speaking personally, because it seemed too
bleak, as if there were no real or warm heaven.  (Note that William
Cameron Menzies, director of the later Invaders from Mars, designed
the canvass of the dead in the Hollywood version of Our Town, with
William Holden and Martha Scott.   It is the high point of that film,
the dead standing, not sitting, on an autumn hillside.  The hillside
looks like the one Menzies designed for Invaders, and that's an
organic connection in the history of film.)

 

In any event, I was now beginning to anticipate a “surprise”, about
which all the reviewers had written.  I assumed that it would probably
have to do with George's grieving gesture at the end of the Act, which
has been staged in many different ways since the play's first
performance in 1938.  Was George going to assume a crucified position
as Alec Guinness did at the end of the original Broadway production of The Cocktail Party, which my mother saw and has never forgotten?  Or
might Emily come back from the dead, as she did in the filmed version
of the play — a change that Thornton Wilder himself approved?  What
was going to happen?

[Click here to find out what does happen in Cromer's production — those of you who might see it and don't want to be forewarned of the surprise are advised to skip this section and just read Paul's conclusion below.]

 
I have sometimes said in talks and sermons that psychology explains
everything, and psychology explains nothing.  Our Town embodies this
view of life, that the inwardness of the characters explains
everything, that the outwardness of life escapes everyone, and that we
are all actually waiting for a time when, to quote the title of an
early 'compressed play' by Wilder, The Sea Shall Give Up Its Dead. 
“And tell me about your identity then, Mrs. Smith,” the Stage Manager says in Act Three.

 

The Barrow Street Theater production of Our Town, performed in the
late Winter and Spring of 2009, is a religious masterpiece.  I wish I
could preach this message.  I have tried to do it, and failed almost
completely.  I am trying to do so still.  It is a theme that can never
be exhausted.

Paul Zahl is a preacher and theologian, and dedicates the above essay to Mary McLean Cappleman.