Cultural May

One classic play and two operas filled the month of May for us

The Glass Menagerie (Tennessee Williams) was superbly produced and performed.  

Pamela Rabe was, as always, convincing as Amanda, and Rose Riley as Laura was brilliant. Luke Mullins as Tom was completely insightful and authentic.
This was a play where the program was essential reading.Since we don't usually buy a program we were lucky to pick up a discarded copy.


The presentation of the story as a memory of Tom Wingfield's relationship with  a family he had forsaken took hold of the watchers and immersed them in a domestic tragedy.

 There was plenty of broken glass before the end of the evening, in particular one like this animal

 

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The Pearl Fishers (Georges Bizet) 

 The Pearl Fishers by a young Bizet is another opera with really only one big song (in the depths of the temple), but the melody weaves in throughout the production. Staging seemed to call for a ballet, but none was forthcoming, though the program notes called for us to "listen out for tambourine rhythm in the opening chorus which gives the energy of dance to the music." 

Competent singing, easy listening, and a pleasant set- a good night.

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Luisa Miller (Guiseppi Verdi)

This opera was unknown to us, but we decided on a late booking by the increasing reputation of  Nicole Car as Luisa. This too seems to be a memory piece- opening with Luisa's body being called to awake by the mourners:

Nicole's  voice and dramatic verve lived up to all the publicity and made for a thrilling evening-one of the most enjoyable operas we have experienced in recent years. The music was lyrical - no memorable big tunes but every chord  kept us delighted.

The centre-piece of the set was a white marble-like frieze on a dark floor perhaps portraying  the unhappy family and its villainous  retainer. The set tipped and rose through 180 degrees, its floor surface flashing blinding reflections of the stage lights as it shifted angles,  and overhung upside down for most of the performance. Mystifying- like something out of Alice in Wonderland.

A Rabbit run with John Updike

 Wikipedia says Updike’s fiction is distinguished by its attention to the concerns, passions, and suffering of average Americans; its emphasis on Christian theology; and its preoccupation with sexuality and sensual detail.

I nominated one of the Rabbit oeuvre for my book group.  I intended to choose one of the two Rabbit books that won a Pulitzer prize, but my friends wanted to start at the beginning. So Rabbit, run it was.

The book begins with an enigmatic epigraph from a Blaise Pascal pensée:

The motions of Grace, the hardness of the heart; external circumstances

Deciphering what to make of that is not straightforward, but in an Author’s afterword published by Penguin (but no other print versions) he said the book was meant as

“…a realistic demonstration of what happens when a young American family man goes on the road—the people left behind get hurt.  There was no painless dropping out of the Fifties’ fraying but still tight social weave.  Arriving at so prim a moral was surely not my only intention:  the book ends on an ecstatic, open note that was meant to stay open, as testimony to our heart’s stubborn amoral quest for something once called grace...
The religious faith that a useful truth will be imprinted by a perfect artistic submission underlies these Rabbit novels…to convey the quality of existence itself that hovers beneath the quotidian details, what the scholastic philosophers called the ens.  Rather than arrive at a verdict and a directive, I sought to present sides of an unresolvable tension intrinsic to being human. Readers who expect novelists to reward and punish and satirize their characters from a superior standpoint will be disappointed.”

Another autobiographical essay notes that "Updike identified sex, art, and religion as 'the three great secret things' in human experience.  The grandson of a Presbyterian minister (his first father-in-law was also a minister), his writing in all genres has displayed a preoccupation with philosophical questions.  A lifelong churchgoer and student of Christian theology, the Jesuit magazine America awarded him its Campion Award in 1997 as a 'distinguished Christian person of letters' ". 

The Rabbit , run story provoked a spirited discussion in our book group, ranging among those who rejected the apparently gross and banal narrative, those who were somewhat impatient with the detailed and lyrical descriptions of surroundings as getting in the way of what happens, those (me included) who loved the writing just for its own sake, and those (also me) who wanted to explore what Updike was saying and implying about religion, specifically Christian religion, or whether he had a message at that level at all.

We referred not only to the author’s testimony above, but to an appreciation by Julian Barnes written in 2009, a  theologian’s 2009 appreciation of the work, and a 1982 academic philological journal article seeking to draw out implications of points in the text.

The moral is that nominator of the book for discussion at a book club is likely always to get more from the book than anyone else.