The intimate estrangement of poetry, drama and opera

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THE INTIMATE ESTRANGEMENT OF POETRY, DRAMA & OPERA

by

Luisa Villani

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(LITERATURE AND CREATIVE WRITING)

May 2012

Copyright 2012 Luisa Villani

ii
EPIGRAPH

There is a metaphysics in the preference for the eye or ear, and a politics as well.

Herbert Blau
The Audience

A work of art is a form that articulates forces, making them intelligible.

Guy Davenport
Every Force Evolves a Form
iii
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I owe a great deal to the wonderful community of friends, family, and
colleagues who’ve supported this project and me in ways too numerous to name.
Specifically I am grateful to David St. John and Frank Ticheli for stimulating my
inquiry with their interdisciplinary workshop which brought together poets and
composers. I am also grateful to several faculty members who have shared with me
their projects and experiences in the worlds of poetry, drama and opera, specifically
Aimee Bender, John Carlos Rowe, Mark Irwin, David Rollo and Susan McCabe.
A number of friends and colleagues have read portions of this dissertation at
different stages and/or have helped me work out my ideas in conversation. I’m
grateful to Rosaly Roffman, Sandra Heinke, Carol Levin and Carolyn May. Other
artists and scholars shared their work with me, allowed me to sit in on rehearsals or
to see their own drafts‐in‐progress, submitted to interviews, or were otherwise
generous with their time and ideas. For these kindnesses, I wish to thank Lillian
Groag, Julie Kornblum and Daniel Catán. I offer my heartfelt condolences to the
Catán family.
Generous financial support from the University of Southern California in the
form of a University Diversity Fellowship allowed me to begin this inquiry, and the
continued support of the Wallace Annenberg Foundation helped me to finish it. I am
grateful for the intellectual space and freedom to try out ideas, take risks, hit a few
dead‐ends, and not panic. The Annenberg Dissertation Fellowship supported crucial
iv
research in New York City at Lincoln Center and The Frick Collection, and in Chicago
at the Newberry Library. Thank you to the Huntington Library also, for granting me
use of their collection.
I am grateful to The HARC Foundation for selecting the creative portion of
my dissertation, Zéphyrine, as a finalist for their Emerging American Playwrights
Award.
I am most grateful to Janalynn Bliss, without whose careful attention to
details and organizational skills, I would have been lost.
Finally, I would like to offer my most heartfelt appreciation to Timothy John
Gong, who has given me the gift of true intellectual and emotional partnership.
While Tim and I have been at each other’s sides we’ve crossed and re‐crossed the
country numerous times, and his indulgence in not only attending many
performances, but engaging in discussion with me about them until the wee hours
has proved not only his patience, but his love.

v
TABLE OF CONTENTS

Epigraph   ii

Acknowledgements iii

Abstract   vi

Critical Portion

Introduction: To “Get Along”   1
The Twentieth‐Century Conundrum 17
Introduction Endnotes   23
Introduction References   25

Chapter One: W;t and Master Class; The De‐Humanizing
Power of Art   26
To “Bring Us Into”   40
Chapter One References   46

Chapter Two: War Music, Under Milk Wood, and Amelia;
Manifestations of Intent   47
Chapter Two References   71

Chapter Three: Catan’s Il Postino 72
A Final Glance   86
Chapter Three Endnotes 90
Chapter Three Referenes 91

Creative Portion

Chapter Four: Ties to My Creative Work 92

Chapter Five: Zéphyrine 94
Synopsis 94
Dramatis Personae 97
Zéphyrine 98

Bibliography 190

vi

ABSTRACT

“The Intimate Estrangement of Poetry, Drama & Opera” focuses on these forms in
moments where they overlap with/delineate from each other as a type of identity
politics. Beginning with a historical perspective of Sydney’s 1579 “Defense of
Poetry” and Vincenzo Galilei’s 1581 treatise for the Florentine Camerata, reliance on
Greek definitions carried these forms through the Renaissance. In the twentieth‐
and twenty‐first century, questions of the relationship of these forms to each other
persist, as exhibited in artworks where they exist together, as either part of a
collaborative form (mostly in operas, but not always), or as an element inside
another work. This persistence is not a polemic, but an opportunity for praxis in the
evolution of the artist toward mastery. While some may view the plays Wit by
Margaret Edson and Master Class by Terrence McNally as anchored in the form of
drama to the point they “use” poetry or opera, it is the movement between poles of
intimacy and estrangement in regards to their contained elements which displays a
deeper understanding of the possibilities for resonance and power. Under Milk
Wood by Dylan Thomas and War Music by Lillian Groag (based on the poetry of
Christopher Logue), both have a deeper involvement with poetry, although the
boundaries exhibited question the praxis. The operas Amelia (based on the poetry
of Gardner McFall) and Il Postino (based on the novel by Anthony Skármeta) add
another dimension to the inquiry offering not only a chance to examine (look at)
vii
poetry, drama and opera, but to examine the way in which poetry, drama and opera
look at each other.
“Zéphyrine,” a three‐act drama written in verse, explores in its form opportunities
for music and in its content the relationship of women under economic and social
duress. In the early sixteen‐hundreds, Europe was still in the throes of a witch‐
hunting craze that often times saw single women, particularly widows with
property, fall victim to greed in the name of piety. Zéphyrine is one such widow,
who must decide between her own interests and that of saving her neighbor from a
pair of itinerant witch hunters who plan to use The Malleus Maleficarum as evidence
to seize property. The forces of the nameless and forgotten speaking, prompted the
writing of this story as a drama for stage, using the lyric line to articulate the often
times forgotten utterances of the heart’s distress, and experimenting with leaving
the lyric open enough that it could be used as a libretto or basis for a libretto, with
an eye toward aria, duet, trio, and thematic development.

1

INTRODUCTION: TO “GET ALONG”

“If you want to get along in life, you have to understand people.”
This was what my grandfather told me when I asked him a question, and
although I don’t remember what the question was precisely, I remember the answer
and the moment he told it to me very clearly. It was a Sunday afternoon and we
were standing outside the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. That week, the New York City
Opera was performing in Los Angeles.
1
  My grandfather, an Italian immigrant whose
first home in his adopted country had been in New York, had taken me on two buses
from our small, green, stucco, ranch house in the foothills of Tujunga, California, to
the center of Los Angeles culture, the home of the city’s musical heart, to watch and
listen to a Verdi opera. I was chosen for this task because I was the only one of my
siblings known for the ability to sit for an extended period of time and not fidget,
quite a feat for a seven‐year‐old, and because I was a willing audience when my
grandfather explained things in his patois of broken English and colloquial country
aphorisms.
The question I asked was not, “Why were they singing?” I recall that
watching and listening to a bunch of adults in costumes singing about what was
happening did not specifically seem all that foreign to me. After all, I sang through
entire afternoons with my dolls, during recesses, on the way home from school, and
it was quite natural to hear other children singing when they were doing things.
Singing was part of playing, an announcement that play was happening, that make
believe was going on, that there was an activity being engaged in which was set
2
apart from the other activities of the day, an activity that had a world of its own, a
sound of its own, and while that sound sustained, that world endured. To get back
to that world, all one had to do was start singing it again, and it blossomed in all its
imagined effulgence, like an illumined scrim over the phenomenal world.
My question was more akin to, “Why were we watching?” Every child knows
there are rules to play. The sing‐song of a world being created in near vicinity on a
playground may be off limits to those not willing to sing, or it may be open to
alteration by those who come along and participate. It might even be open to
derision by a critical eye. Amongst one’s peers, the politics of open play was a
tenuous network of fluctuating circumstances. Here were these adults, participating
in this world, and there I was, sitting in the dark with my grandfather, watching.
The expectations of what I was supposed to do, how I was supposed to react, were
unclear. Like a good little primate, I took my cues from the adults. I followed the
rest of the audience in applause, perked at their giggles, was rapt at their silence
during intense moments, and when it was all done and we were no longer under the
scrutiny of the lobby’s diamond‐cut mirrored ceiling, I put the question to my
grandfather.
“If you want to get along in life, you have to understand people,” was his
reply.
A few years later, in 1975, Laura Mulvey penned the first incarnation of “gaze
theory” in her essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” I did not read her
essay until decades later. When I did read it, as it raised questions for me regarding
the voyeuristic nature of watching a movie, I thought back to this experience with
3
my grandfather. I was stuck on Mulvey’s statement “What is seen on the screen is so
manifestly shown” (135). This statement brought me back to the moment when my
senses were affronted by a story being displayed for me in a way which was not my
schoolmates engaging in the world of play—a world that had an understandable
hierarchy for a seven‐year‐old. In the manifestly present world of an opera being
performed in front of me, on a stage, with the openly conjuring power of the human
voice, and the distancing hierarchy of a stage, I had been at a loss as to what my
response was supposed to be, and my grandfather’s answer at the time did not
clarify the matter. Mulvey stated in her essay: “… the mass of mainstream film, and
the conventions within which it has consciously evolved, portray a world which
unwinds magically, indifferent to the presence of the audience” (133). Yes, this
magical unwinding was something I expected as a child, something I engaged in as
an adult, but, at a very early age, I did not understand the active indifference, or the
proper amount of indifference, I was supposed to enact to a live performance. I
understood being quiet, and I further understood that music being played by the pit
orchestra was a signal to be supremely quiet, and attentive to what was about to
happen. Music had the power to bring us into, to smooth the transition from one
state of reality to another, a thought I pondered further while reading Mulvey’s
essay. This essay prizes the agency of the gaze over the world of sound. Of course,
the essay was an early feminist examination of patriarchal modes in story‐telling as
they pertained to film, particularly in what Mulvey termed a forming identification
process: “It is these cinematic codes and their relationship to formative external
structures that must be broken down …” (141) Those structures for Mulvey were
4
primarily visual, not aural, and further criticism in the last few years has questioned
this omission in her essay, and argued for an overreach in her use of the
psychoanalytical:
Mulvey uses the gaze to examine male pleasure in narrative cinema.
But, as Lacan argues, the gaze is a much more primary part of human
subjectivity than patriarchy, which although powerful, is a secondary
manifestation of culture. Lacan’s theory of the “real” existing prior to
the symbolic and the imaginary explains the power of the eye, the idea
of “spectatorship,” and visual nature of “agency.” (Manlove 83)

Ah, representation, the real and the symbolic, the standing in of one thing for
another, the replay of an event with all its interpretive power. Where my simplistic
question at the age of seven had more to do with my own discomfort at not
understanding the rules of participation—and every young human knows that
correct participation is key to survival—my grandfather’s answer pointed to a
larger, more existential dilemma in the human experience
2
, how we learn about
each other, what necessary information must be gleaned from observation,
compared to already known behaviors, and used “to get along.” Whereas my
nascent question might have had to do with survival in the specific now of the
moment, his answer pointed more toward not just future survival, but also thriving
in the larger scheme of human interactions, the network of life itself. The question
of “Why go to the opera?” for my grandfather was a matter of gaining agency, of
perhaps passing that agency on, of affirming and conferring knowledge, in addition
to experiencing pleasure.
A few years after my experience at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, I was
excited to learn that our class field trip for the fourth grade was to the Music Center
to participate in a square‐dancing festival for parochial schools in the Los Angeles
5
area. I was not thrilled about holding the hand of a boy and dosey‐doing. What I
was looking forward to was a promised “special theatrical presentation” to be
enjoyed after dozens of different schools filled the plaza with groups of whirling
plaid uniforms and demonstrated their proficiency at following step calls. I
remembered the experience I’d had with my grandfather, and looked forward once
again to sitting in the instructive darkness of the hall, although I remember my
anticipation was part comforting nostalgia and part the satisfaction of having a
familiarity with an activity my classmates did not yet have. I was a bit of a know‐it‐
all. My bid to have one‐upped my classmates was thwarted however, when we were
led away from the Dorothy Chandler, across the terrace and into the Mark Taper
Forum. The special presentation was a play, the name of which I have long
forgotten, but the content of which I have not.
As we sat in the semi‐circle auditorium and looked down at the thrust stage
in the middle of the semi‐circle, the house lights went dim, and a group of about
seven or eight adults, each in obviously stylized costumes, stepped forth to deliver a
monologue about who they were and what they had done. Each costume was meant
to match a type of firearm that the actor/actress represented. I distinctly remember
the young actress dressed in frilly, polka‐dotted bell‐bottoms and exaggerated
bonnet, although I can’t remember what type of gun she was supposed to be
portraying. At a certain point though, she was very distraught, because her owner
came to retrieve her, and fired her at a human being. She was horrified, streaming
tears as the other “guns” comforted her, which was where the play ended and the
house lights came up for our applause.
6
I discovered several things during that performance. In retrospect the
primary thing I discovered was that I was a critic. Even at the young age of ten, I felt
slightly insulted by the obviousness of the message, by the transparency of the
allegory, and by the thought that someone believed I was too stupid to understand
in plain language that guns were deadly. There were other things about the
production eating at me, although at that age I could not identify nor explain what
they were. I was embarrassed by the tears of the actress, not touched. This was not
like the opera, where the music announced to me the make‐believe of the
presentation, even though the house lights dimming and our expected silence
achieved some of that announcement. The window into the world I was witnessing
was somehow not working. The obviousness message of what I was expected to
think and feel made the act of believing this pretend world falter, in fact, made it
almost comical without it intending to be comical.   This was the first time I
disagreed with a representation, with a play, with the ability to construct an
alternate reality presented to me in a “professional” production. I did not feel
certain about my disagreement though; I felt discomfort.   Perhaps I had inferred
from my grandfather’s message that all things experienced in the darkness of a
theater could be instructive, to the point of conveying secret and valuable
knowledge, knowledge which could not be gained through other means, except
perhaps in the pages of well‐written book. If the things conveyed in the instructive
darkness of a theater could be reduced to billboard slogans, had my grandfather
been wrong? I was agitated by the realization that this experience had not turned
out like my previous experience, that it had been sort of easy, and far less
7
rewarding. I had not gained any agency nor ability through my experience, in fact
someone had tried to gain agency through me. I had been used.
In 1579, Sir Philip Sydney stated that, “Where the philosophers, as they
scorn to delight, so must they be content little to move …” (943) Sydney examined
the ability of literature, “poesy” in particularly, but also prose and plays, in terms of
what the function of art should be. He determined that it was to teach, and he
explained why this particular type of teaching, enrobed in the raiment of delight,
was more effective than preaching moral philosophies:
For even those hard‐hearted evil men who think virtue a school‐name,
and know no other good but indulgere genio [to indulge their nature],
and therefore despise the austere admonitions of the philosopher, and
feel not the inward reason they stand upon, yet will content to be
delighted, which is all the good‐fellow poet seemeth to promise; and
so steal to see the form of goodness—which seen, they cannot help
but love—ere themselves be aware, as if they took a medicine of
cherries. (943)

By “delighted” Sydney did not mean “talked down to.” He does not name the
allegorical mystery plays such as Everyman (in which the character “Good Deeds”
accompanies the protagonist to his afterlife to plead his case before god) as
examples of poesy an audience would steal—as in steal away—to see.   These plays
were used by clergy to instruct a vastly illiterate population (mostly before Sydney’s
time, but still performed in his day). Sydney is more concerned with the suitability
of art to do the societal work of moral instruction—teaching us how to “get along”—
through its ability to delight the senses, to entertain. This entertainment is not
limited to the masses, nor to one type of poetry or drama. Sydney includes
tragedies, stating that they, “openeth the greatest wounds… and showeth forth the
8
ulcers that are covered with tissue,” therefore it makes “kings fear to be tyrants”
(934).
So, for Sydney, it was possible to deliver a moral message, within the artifice
of a poem or play, even while depicting death and the tragic circumstances of life, all
the while maintaining the cleverness of an alternate reality, an imitation. Nowhere
does Sydney doubt the complexity of that imitation, in fact he even states the poet is
free from the limits of the natural world, “not enclosed within the narrow warrant of
her gifts, but freely ranging only within the zodiac of his own wit” (936). Sydney
strives toward a definition of poetry in its function, not in its outward garb. That
outward garb can be as fanciful as is necessary, even as fanciful as a talking gun, if
that fancy allows the reader to engage the work and learn truths, through the
submersion of the intellect in an alternate reality.
Sydney’s argument is one grounded in praxis, not in a particular device. He
defines “poesy” which he is defending against some harsh critics of his day, not as
simply poetry or verse, “since there have been many most excellent poets that never
versified, and now swarm many versifiers that need never answer to the name of
poets” (939), but as the interaction of two elements. He goes so far as to give
examples of prose pieces he considers poesy. He therefore defines poesy as “an art
of imitation, for so Aristotle termeth it in the word mimesis—that is to say, a
representing, counterfeiting, or figuring for to speak metaphorically, a speaking
picture—with this end, to teach and delight” (937). It is the ability to convey,
without overtly conveying, and without blatantly exposing that there is a
conveyance—the enchantment of the act as it “magically unwinds”—which grounds
9
the delight portion of Sydney’s praxis, and it is the success of that delight which
allows the second fundamental element of poesy, teaching, to occur.
Taken to the extreme, Darko Suvin’s twentieth‐century argument for what
defines the genre of science fiction finds a similar grounding in praxis to Sydney’s
defense. Where Sydney finds poesy existing through the dual operations of teaching
and delighting, Suvin also finds dual operations defining science fiction, the linked
operations of cognition and estrangement. Paul Alkon uses Suvin’s term “cognitive
estrangement” as the founding element of his book, Science Fiction Before 1900,
because a definition grounded in praxis moves the inception of this genre prior to
where most believe it began, in 1818 with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, to 1726 with
the first publication of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, and possibly earlier.
Alkon explains that “cognitive estrangement” defines a literature:
… that not only defamiliarizes aspects of the ordinary world that we
inhabit, but that does so in ways inviting awareness (cognition) of the
principles governing those features of life that we are invited to
regard as unfamiliar—as though we were, perhaps, alien
anthropologist visiting this planet to study it, taking nothing for
granted beforehand. Cognition is involved whenever the
defamiliarized subject is understood on a more rational basis as a
contingent phenomenon whose conditions, if known, may be subject
to control or even alteration rather than simply unquestioning
acceptance. Suvin’s example … is Galileo’s ability to look at a swinging
chandelier with sufficient detachment to see its movement as strange
enough to require an explanation, which he then provided in stating
the laws governing pendulum motion. Awareness of these laws, in
turn, allows a measure of control over such motion and application of
it to new purposes. Suvin concludes that science fiction is “a literary
genre whose necessary and sufficient conditions are the presence and
interaction of estrangement and cognition, and whose main formal
device is an imaginative framework alternative to the author’s
empirical environment. (Alkon, 11)

10
Suvin notes that Galileo saw a familiar pendulum, but he saw it in an
unfamiliar way, independent of his known, phenomenal world, therefore he was
able to question its motion, or the cause of its motion. Once Galileo acquired this
knowledge, he could apply it to other circumstances, and mitigate his ignorance.
The combating of ignorance is important to both Sydney and Suvin, be they
more than four hundred years apart.
3
  Sydney expects that a poet, properly engaged
in his craft, can so capture the heart, and therefore the mind, of an evil person, that
he can raise that person above his expectations of himself (indulgere genio), and
deliver him from ignorance through his desire to imbibe more of the goodness
innate in poesy. Sydney calls this “the medicine of cherries,” the tonic that disguises
its healing with delight.   This is a deliverance from the resulting circumstance of
ignorance, evil, and not as fully liminal as what Suvin argues, even though it is a
raising of the consciousness. Suvin’s operation of delight, which leads the mind to
awareness, is estrangement, the delight in recognizing the ordinary world in its
defamiliarized form. This estrangement brings about the awareness of conditions
as “contingent phenomenon,” which may then be further examined. For Suvin,
teaching (cognition) occurs with the ability to question, which is a deliverance from
ignorance, or unexamined acceptance. For Sydney, deliverance is the ability to act,
to chose good, even if one doesn’t fully know why one is choosing good. For Suvin, it
is the ability to think. For both, the ability to find the truths of human experience (to
“get along”), through an imitated reality, is key (and that imitated reality for the
writer is limited only by “the zodiac of his own wit”).
11
Be that as it may, why did the play I witnessed when I was ten not ring true
for me, and why do I now, as an adult, view it as a failure to convey a necessary
truth? Because, if the alternate reality is a world where inanimate objects can move
and talk on their own, why, if they didn’t want the humans to use them, did the guns
simply not just run away? A created universe cannot violate its own rules.   If an
object can talk and walk around the stage, it has the ability to move. It has free will.
It can chose not to kill. In the play however, there was an exception to the rules of
the universe I’d just been given, and the resulting learning I was supposed to garner
was hindered. What was the message? Don’t pick up a gun? Don’t shoot someone?
Killing is bad? Guns don’t really want to shoot people? In retrospect, the plot
trajectory of someone picking up the gun with the southern belle accent and using
her, argued the opposite of the intent of the play. It echoed the National Rifle
Association’s bumper sticker campaign: guns don’t kill people; people kill people. If I
had witnessed a play about the remorse of a human spirit in torment over taking
another life, the message would have hit home more, but then again, we were an
audience of grade school parochial kids. Perhaps the gore of a gunshot wound
enacted in front of us was deemed too graphic (although, we did face the image of a
crucified Christ daily every time we entered a classroom).
A larger question exists in this anecdote, beyond the failure of this particular,
long‐passed afternoon. For those like Sydney, Mulvey and Suvin, who are concerned
about the relationship of perception to art, and art to perception, the question may
be specifically grounded in a particular area—the importance of poetry to the
English language and the English language to poetry; the patriarchy of film; or the
12
redeeming of an often marginalized genre of fiction—but, it is an inquiry as
enduring as the history of art itself, reaching back to the time of Ancient Greece, to
the festival of the Dionysia and the writings of Aristotle.
Evidence suggests that the Dionysian plays began between 550 and 220
B.C.E. These plays were not merely acted scenes, but were a combination of poetry,
drama, music, dance, and costuming, into one art form. Written in the middle of this
period, Aristotle’s Poetics of 335 B.C.E. can be thought of as the first text to analyze
an art form from observation and to produce a theory of how that form should
operate. The surviving parts of the Poetics concerns itself with drama—comedy,
tragedy, and the satyr play—as well as lyric and epic poetry. While giving
definitions for these, Aristotle places them under the creative purview of the poet, a
term that, in Greek, literally means “maker.” It is important to mention this
ancestry, because Sydney and his contemporaries are still under the influence of the
ancients (via surviving Roman and Greek texts). Sydney specifically calls upon the
authority of Greece to again elevate the name of poet:
The Greeks called him a “poet,” which name hath, as the most excellent gone
through other languages. It cometh of this word poiein, which is to make: wherein, I
know not whether by luck or wisdom, we Englishmen have met with the Greeks and
called him a maker. (936)
“Maker” was indeed a common word for poet in the sixteenth‐century. Also
common to the era, and not limited to England, nor to the language arts, was the use
of Ancient Greece as an authoritative source to fuel artistic inquiry. In Italy, in 1581
(two years after Sydney wrote The Defense of Poesy—which is not to suggest that
13
either read the other’s work but merely that they were immersed in the artistic
milieu of their age and place), Vincenzo Galilei (father of Galileo) wrote a “Dialogue
Concerning Ancient and Modern Music.” Vincenzo Galilei was part of a ridotto, an
Italian institution of his day. A ridotto was a private academy or club for intellectual
friends and associates, banded together around a particular topic. Vincenzo Galilei’s
ridotto was the Florentine Camerata, and their special interest was the nature of
musical and dramatic expression.

Galilei’s “dialogue” follows a question and answer format, similar to the
dialogues of Plato. He cites specific Greek texts as authorities on plays, particularly
on the aural quality of those plays and their musik. There is no adequately
translated transcription of this Greek musik which can be converted into the
notation system of Galilei’s day, so neither he nor his contemporaries had actually
heard it, but they had read, in many texts, about its power to “change the souls of
people and animals” (Greenberg). Galilei and his contemporaries were concerned
with certain aspects and textual treatments in the popular music of their time,
particularly madrigals, which relied heavily on contrapuntal voices and vocal
mimicry of a word’s denotation, at the expense of its connotation, its emotive
quality, and the ability to simply discern what the singer was singing. From this
focus on the ancients, three corollaries followed: “the text must be clearly
understood. Therefore, the performance must be by a solo voice … the words must
be sung with correct and natural declamation … the melody must not depict mere
graphic details in the text but must interpret the feeling of the whole passage …”
14
(Grout 42) From this inception evolved the category of artistic works which would
come to be known later as opera.
4

Since the end of the Romantic Era, reliance on ancient texts as authorities on
contemporary artistic modes has fallen out of vogue. Writers and composers such
as Wordsworth and Wagner were among the last to herald the poet as an individual
with a super‐sensible awareness and purpose
5
, as Sydney would have also seen
him/her, or that there is an elemental form, linked to an all‐inclusiveness or
incorporation of disparate forms, which has a greater power than any one form by
itself.
6

While in the twentieth‐century and post twentieth‐century there is no longer
a heavy reliance on an idealized, by‐gone, golden era of antiquity, artists and
theorists still attempt to understand artistic milieus, particularly their own, to
explain shifts in styles, and perhaps even defend those shifts.   This might have to do
more with mastery, or with the survival of the artist through an exhibited mastery,
by which one demonstrates the knowledge of a form’s constituent elements, even to
the point of having the confidence to change them.   To understand this further, a
look again at early feminist scholarship from the nineteen‐seventies explains
“mastery” through an examination of the lack of great women masters in painting
and sculpture. In her essay, “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” Linda
Nochlin examines the link to mastery through the process of making art:
… the making of art involves a self‐consistent language of form,
more or less dependent upon or working against, given temporally
defined conventions, schemata, or systems of notation, which have to
be learned or worked out, either through teaching, apprenticeship, or
a long period of individual experimentation. (43)
15
Nochlin argues that in previous periods, since the support structures readily
available for men to undergo this process of “working against” were missing for
women, it was not possible to produce a woman master in those periods. Her
argument, in order to proceed, must first establish a very fundamental premise
(What does the making of art involve?), and it is that fundamental premise which
has been at the heart of artistic inquiry since antiquity, and which artistic inquiries
never seem to stray far from, be they in the Renaissance, the Romantic Era, the
Modernist Era, or the Post‐Modernist Era:

What is art? or What is art’s function?

Through what methods does it achieve that function?

Unlike the visual arts which rely on dimensional perspective to define a form
(i.e. a painting is two‐dimensional and sculpture is three‐dimensional), poetry,
drama and opera share foundational moments in their ancestry and defining
moments in their history, during which they work in concordance or in opposition
to shared “given temporally defined conventions, schemata, or systems of notation”
in order to gain self‐definition, and allow their practitioners to achieve mastery.
Even when freed from their ancestral constraints and examined individually, their
familial relationships persist, much like the way in which one can examine old
family photographs and still see the persistence of visual resonances in the living
descendants. Contemporary poetry, freed from the constraints of meter (which
16
came from music), still bears the family resemblance of its origins, because the basic
units of language, its syllables, combine in accented and unaccented patterns to
produce the correct pronunciation of words, as noted in any dictionary. Drama,
freed from the verse line after the English Renaissance, still operates in varying
degrees upon notions of either imparting something to an audience or holding them
rapt (a job previously assigned to the poet by Sydney). Opera, of the three, is the
only one less at odds with its poetry and its dramatic arc, but this varies in degrees
from production to production, in accordance with the different beliefs held by
those engaging in its practice, in regards to its supremacy to/dependence
on/independence from its text and its story.   In regards to each other, these three
forms operate between poles of intimacy and estrangement in their striving for self‐
definition. Like teenagers struggling with self‐identity, the need to distance or reject
characteristics or elements that exhibit too direct a resemblance to their ancestry
often occurs, sometimes simultaneously with a pride in ancestral power (which can
confer a contemporary power through prestige garnered from lineage). The fruit,
therefore, to be gathered from this inquiry is not found in examining (looking at)
poetry, drama, and opera, but in examining the way in which poetry, drama and
opera look at each other, the intimate estrangement of that gaze (the movement
between poles of intimacy and separation).

There is a resonance here with Suvin’s
cognitive estrangement, but whereas Suvin argued that estrangement lead to
cognition, this inquiry into intimate estrangement posits that intimacy and
estrangement do not follow each other in any order, but that since the twentieth‐
17
century, they can be found to exist in a paradoxical simultaneity, during the practice
of poetry, drama and opera.

The TwentiethCentury Conundrum
Richard Strauss died in September of 1949, almost precisely in the middle of
the twentieth‐century. The span of Strauss’ work began with a deep involvement in
the Romantic Era. Some musicologists have even called him the “second Richard,”
indicating that his work picked up where Richard Wagner’s left off. Richard Strauss’
last opera though, Capriccio (1941) embodies a debate which concerned Strauss for
most of his artistic life. It poses a question by the composer, a question the opera
asks, but does not ostensibly answer. This is not the Wagnerian certainty of
“gesumptkuntswerk,” the all‐inclusive art form which absorbs into itself music,
theater, poetry, staging, etc., to produce declarative works with an ideological
agenda, but a work of art which prizes the power of examination, the subtle yet
compelling engagement of the question mark over the obvious exuberance of the
exclamation point.
Capriccio is set in a chateau in Paris in 1775. For opera, the eighteenth
century was the era of the War of the Buffoons and the Gluck‐Piccinni debates, an
era of operatic reform (one of many), therefore setting the opera in a historical
context is apropos of Strauss’ own artistic inquiry. The dramatic situation of the
opera offers a further parallel.   A young widow, the Countess Madeleine, has two
suitors, a poet (Olivier) and a composer (Flamand), and she must decide between
the two by deciding which of their art forms is the superior. Oliver writes her a love
18
poem that further endears him to her, but when Flamand sets that poem to music,
she finds her passions again quickened. If only the two men could be combined into
one perfected suitor—but, alas, they cannot, and she cannot decide between them.
The development of the opera from its first idea to its first performance is a
rather long and complicated history in itself.
7
  The idea for the opera was first
suggested to Strauss in 1934, and before its 1941 premiere, as many as four people
were, at one time or another, involved in writing the libretto. The first of these was
Stefan Zweig. In 1934, while doing research on another project, Zweig came across
two volumes of libretti by the Abbé Giovanni Battista Casti (1724‐1808), a
contemporary and rival of Lorenzo da Ponte (Mozart’s librettist). Among these
libretti was Prima la Musica e poi le Parole, a short, one‐act comedy that had been set
to music by Salieri and first performed in 1786. Zweig recognized an idea that
would appeal to Strauss: a composer and poet are required by their benefactor to
produce an example of their joint art in the shape of a dramatic scene for two
singers. Zweig was right, Strauss was interested, but unfortunately for Zweig, who
was Jewish, the political climate in Germany was two hazardous for him to leave
London where he was doing his research. Joseph Gregor was given the Casti
libretto, but his result was not satisfactory to Strauss. Clemens Krauss, Strauss’
friend, was coaxed by Strauss into taking on the task and is the librettist of record,
but Strauss himself was also heavily involved in the libretto.
Capriccio is subtitled A Conversation Piece for Music. This title was decided
on closer to 1941, when Strauss and his librettist recognized that they were not
intending to write a traditional opera per se, but a work that would be new,
19
intellectual, and unique. It was as if Strauss, engaged in the dramatic situation
which could bring forth questions he himself was vested in, did not want those
questions colored by any assumptions laden in the term “opera,” so he attempted to
free the work from those assumptions by purposely calling it, “a conversation
piece.” In scene nine, the conversation is in full swing, as Olivier, Flamand, and La
Roche (a theater director) debate the superiority of their individual art forms:

Olivier: Music and dance are the slaves of rhythm, they have
served it since the beginning of time.
Flamand: There is more constraint in the restrictions of verse.
Olivier: Freedom of ideas is given to poets. Who sees any
boundary between content and form?
Flamand: Music is in every respect more full of meaning, it
ascends in spheres which you cannot invade with the mind.
Olivier: Not in musical abstraction but in the clearest language
can I express what I’m thinking. This is what music can never
achieve.
Flamand: My ideas exist as melodies and what they mean to
me is inexpressible. A single chord you can feel the whole
world in.
La Roche: ah, they are fighting each other. Each claims to be
more important in his art. I could spare them the trouble. In
my realm, they are nothing but servants.
Count: We are already in the middle of the discussion of the
basic argument of our time.
“The basic argument of our time,” is ostensibly a debate in 1775 in a chateau
in Paris, however the debate between poetry, drama, and opera, and their
relationship to each other and the subjects they sought to express, was also the
basic debate of the twentieth‐century. High Modernism attempted to free poetry
20
from the lyrical excesses of Romanticism by grounding it in images. T.S. Eliot’s
“objective correlative”
8
sought to find, through the image expressed in a poetic line,
the visual instant that could capture the complexity of a situation or emotion.
9

Modernism in the theater favored prose‐drama over the lyric line and was very
much concerned with breaking down not only lyrical façades but also societal
façades, particularly those which obscured underlying complexities (and
hypocrisies). Overlapping the early part of the century, opera had also gone through
a “verismo” movement, and where the plays of Henrick Ibsen often uncovered the
ruthless nature of societal structures, the operas of Mascagni, Leoncavalla, Giordana
and Puccini not only uncovered those structures but also depicted outright brutality.
(In reference to the torture scene in Puccini’s Tosca, opera historian Joseph Kerman
called the entire work “a shabby little shocker” (Greenberg L.31).
Richard Strauss was no stranger to shocking an audience. His early opera,
Salome (1905), based on the play by Oscar Wilde, depicted the biblical story of John
the Baptist and his eventual beheading. In the finale scene of the one‐act opera, the
dancer, Salome, having already performed the dance of the seven veils and
demanded her reward, declares her love to John the Baptist’s severed head. Strauss
is generally not associated with the verismo movement though, because even though
he depicted psychologically intriguing situations, he often set them in period‐
costume and removed them from his time, as he did with Der Rosenkavalier (1910)
and Capriccio.
The verismo, the truth, sought by Strauss in Capriccio, is not the forging of an
ideological movement, but the awareness of the question, an awareness of the
21
relationship of the parts to the whole, an awareness of which would resonate across
the twentieth‐century in High Modernism, Structuralism and Post‐Structuralism.
The intimate estrangement of poetry, drama and opera is Capriccio’s engendering
moment.
It has been stated by noted musicologist Robert M. Greenberg that “a
composer shapes time with sound” (L.II). I would posit that the element of shaping
time is not unique to music. Doesn’t a poet or a writer shape time with words?
Doesn’t a dramatist shape time with a play? Each of these art forms requires an
element of time to be engaged. Ezra pound may have looked to the image to bring
the universal in an instant, but a poem, an art form dependent on language, happens
over periods of time (perhaps short periods, perhaps not), because it must be read
before the instant is reached. The shaping of time is key to our artistic experiences.
We are bound by time, which means we are bound to experience our reality
in a sequential manner. We can extemporize about the future, the past, even the
present, but we are caught in the never‐ending sequence of one moment following
the next. Each moment, as we live it, makes a little more past, and a little less future.
Our lives are moving markers, our present day a sliding knob between the
parentheses of our birth and our death. When we experience a work of art, we are
within a subset (another set of parentheses within the larger parentheses of our
existence) and that subset gives added meaning or information within the larger set,
in much the same way a parenthetical remark gives added information which is
either relevant to the larger meaning, or a diversion from it.
22
These parenthetical moments offer us learning, or a heuristic into other
meanings that are perhaps glossed over in the perfunctory waking world, the
pedantic dealings of the daily world in which we must live out the patterns of our
existence, the daily rising, working, attending to the body and its needs. As the
character of Pat Nixon notes in John Williams’ opera Nixon in China, “let routine dull
the edge of mortality.”   It is the quotidian nature of our lives, the necessities of
rising, going, doing, returning, our engagement with these things, that perhaps takes
the sting out of mortality by calling us to action, but it is also the break from that
diurnal action that gives us focus not only upon the inevitableness of our mortality,
but upon other similarly larger meanings to the small things we do. In this regard,
the popular motto of the late twentieth century: “it’s the way you look at the
problem that is the problem,” can be expanded: “it is the way we look at the life we
lead, the lens, which is the life we lead.”
For this reason, this examination focuses on the ways in which poetry, drama
and opera look at each other and speculates on that gaze, instead of arguing for a
fixed ideological point.   The intimate estrangement of poetry, drama and opera, is
the lens through which that gaze is obtained.
23
INTRODUCTION ENDNOTES

1. In 1966 the Music Center Opera Association began importing productions
from the New York City Opera as part of its regular season. This lasted
through 1982. The Los Angeles Opera company was formed after a
reorganization in 1984.   Although the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion was a
musical Mecca for the city, philharmonic performance and opera
performance suffered from a lack of resources, particularly from the
circumstance of having to share the same performance space, which meant
the tearing down of sets between performances, or the limiting of
productions in frequency and scale to cut down on costs. This situation
endured until the Los Angeles Philharmonic gained a permanent home and
the Music Center added a fourth hall with the opening of the Walt Disney
Concert Hall in 2003.

2. It can be argued that Mulvey’s inquiry is also a dilemma of finding the ability
to thrive. Feminism of her period was concerned with agency and how it
couldn’t be achieved until the processes by which women were objectified
were identified.

3. Mulvey’s project is also concerned with combating ignorance. However,
where Sydney heralds “delight” for its ability to covertly teach, Mulvey
questions its (delight via visual pleasure) covertness as a type of ignorance
by which identity is surreptitiously and unknowingly formed.

4. Richard Taruskin also makes the case for the Greek influence (without
having heard Greek music) on Vincenzo Galilei and other intellectuals of
Galilei’s time in “Chapter 19: The Pressure of Radical Humanism” of his book,
The Oxford History of Western Music. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2005.

5. See “Preface to Lyrical Ballads,” 1800, William Wordsworth. Also, Percy
Bysshe Shelley’s 1821 “A Defense of Poetry” echoes not only the title of Sir
Phillip Sydney’s earlier work, but also his vindication of poetry on the basis
of its function in society.

6. Gesamtkunstwerk was the term Richard Wagner (1813‐83) applied to his all‐
encompassing art form. Instead of becoming a form in themselves, his
products are today viewed as a part of opera’s evolution.

7. Much of the following is based on Michael Kennedy’s biography of Richard
Strauss, particularly his chapter on Capriccio, and Ernst Krause’s discussion
of the opera’s history. See bibliography.

8. See T.S. Eliot’s essay, “Hamlet and His Problems.”

24
9. Ezra Pound preceded Eliot in establishing the “Imagist” movement, later
known as Modernism. Even though one of Pound’s basic tenets in his essay
“A Retrospect” mentioned composing “in the sequence of the musical
phrase,” this is generally regarded as an admonition against rote syllabics in
favor of tightened language which marries form to meaning through correct
choices in tone and diction.

25
INTRODUCTION REFERENCES

Alkon, Paul. Science Fiction Before 1900: Imagination Discovers Technology. New
York: Routledge, 2002. Print.
Greenberg, Robert. How to Listen to and Understand Opera. The Great Courses,
2007. DVD.
‐ Lecture II: “Words and Music”
‐ Lectures IV, VI: “The Invention of Opera: Monteverdi’s Orfeo”
‐ Lecture 31: “Verismo, Puccini, and Tosca, I”

Grout, Donald J. A Short History of Opera. New York: Columbia UP, 2003. Print.
Manlove, Clifford. “Visual ‘Drive’ and Cinematic Narrative: Reading Gaze Theory in
Lacan, Hitchcock, and Mulvey.” Cinema Journal 46.3 (Spring 2007): 83‐108. Print.

Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” The Audience Studies
Reader. Ed. Will Booker & Deborah Jermyn. London: Routledge, 2003. 133‐142.
Print.

Nochlin, Linda. “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” Women, Art and
Power and Other Essays. Boulder: Westview Press, 1989. 145‐78. Print.
Strauss, Richard. Capriccio: A Conversation Piece for Music. Libretto by Richard
Strauss & Clemens Krauss. EMI Classics, 2000. CD.
Sydney, Sir Phillip. “The Defense of Poesy.” The Norton Anthology of English
Literature. Vol. 1. Ed. M.H. Abrams, et al. New York: Norton, 2006: 933‐54. Print.

Williams, John. Nixon in China. Lib. Alice Goodman. Perf. Orchestra of St. Lukes.
Cond. Edo de Waart. BMI, 1987. CD.
26
CHAPTER ONE:
W;T AND MASTER CLASS: THE DEHUMANIZING POWER OF ART

W;t (pronounced “wit”), the play by Margaret Edson, won the 1999 Pulitzer
Prize for Drama. The play was originally performed under the title “Wit,” but was
published in book form by Faber and Faber in 1999, and the title was changed to
include a semi‐colon. This change to the use of punctuation references a key scene
in the play where the main character (who is undergoing a series of radical
treatments for late‐detected, end‐stage ovarian cancer) relives a scene with her
mentor, Professor E.M. Ashford, an authority on the Holy Sonnets of the seventeenth
century poet, John Donne.
E.M.
Do it again.

VIVIAN. (To audience.)
It was something of a shock. I had to sit down. (She plops
down.)

E.M.
Please sit down. Your essay on Holy Sonnet Six, Miss Bearing,
is a melodrama, with a veneer of scholarship unworthy of
you—to say nothing of Donne. Do it again.

VIVIAN.
I, ah ...

E.M.
You must begin with a text, Miss Bearing, not with a
feeling.
Death be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadfull, for, thou art not soe.
You have entirely missed the point of the poem, because, I
must tell you, you have used an edition of the text that is
inauthentically punctuated. In the Gardner edition—

27
VIVIAN.
That edition was checked out of the library—
E.M.
Miss Bearing!

VIVIAN.
Sorry.

E.M.
You take this too lightly, Miss Bearing. This is
Metaphysical Poetry, not The Modern Novel. The standards of
scholarship and critical reading which one would apply to any
other text are simply insufficient. The effort must be total for
the results to be meaningful. Do you think the punctuation of
the last line of this sonnet is merely an insignificant detail?
The sonnet begins with a valiant struggle with death,
calling on all the forces of intellect and drama to vanquish the
enemy. But it is ultimately about overcoming the seemingly
insuperable barriers separating life, death, and eternal life.
In the edition you chose, this profoundly simple meaning is
sacrificed to hysterical punctuation:
And Death ‐ capital D shall be no more ‐ semicolon!
Death ‐ capital D comma thou shalt die ‐ exclamation
point!
If you go in for this sort of thing, I suggest you take up
Shakespeare. Gardner's edition of the Holy Sonnets returns to
the Westmoreland manuscript source of 1610—not for
sentimental reasons, I assure you, but because Helen Gardner
is a scholar. It reads:
And death shall be no more, comma, Death thou shalt die.
(As she recites this line, she makes a little gesture at the comma.)
Nothing but a breath—a comma—separates life from life
everlasting. It is very simple really. With the original
punctuation restored, death is no longer something to act out
on a stage, with exclamation points. It's a comma, a pause.
This way, the uncompromising way, one learns something
from this poem, wouldn't you say? Life, death. Soul, God.
Past, present. Not insuperable barriers, not semicolons, just a
comma.

VIVIAN.
Life, death ... I see. (Standing.) It's a metaphysical conceit. It's
wit! I'll go back to the library and rewrite the paper—

E.M.   (Standing, emphatically.)
It is not wit, Miss Bearing. It is truth.   (Walking around the desk
28
to her.) The paper's not the point.

VIVIAN.
It isn't?

E.M.   (Tenderly.)
Vivian. You're a bright young woman. Use your intelligence.
Don't go back to the library. Go out. Enjoy yourself with your
friends. Hmm? (Vivian walks away. E.M. slides off)

VIVIAN.   (As she gradually returns to the hospital.)
I, ah, went outside. The sun was very bright. I, ah,
walked around, past the ... There were students on the lawn,
talking about nothing, laughing. The insuperable barrier
between one thing and another is ... just a comma? Simple
human truth, uncompromising scholarly standards? They're
connected? I just couldn't ...
I went back to the library.
Anyway.
All right. Significant contribution to knowledge.
Eight cycles of chemotherapy. Give me the full dose, the
full dose every time. (Scene change. In a burst of activity, the
hospital scene is created.)
The attention was flattering. For the first five minutes.
Now I know how poems feel.
(1.13‐15)
Yes, Vivian knows how poems feel, because she has applied the rigors
Professor Ashford taught her toward the study of the very same subject—the Holy
Sonnets of John Donne, which she is now herself an expert on—but Vivian applied
only the “uncompromising scholarly standards”, and not the “simple human truth.”
We experience other scenes of Vivian in the classroom grilling her students that
make the audience cringe.
As a poet and a scholar, I can say that it is moments like the use of Sonnet Six
in the theater that not only warm our hearts with a deep sense of validation, but also
make us sit up and take notice of how poetry we love so dearly is in fact being used.
29
In this flashback, poetry is not just an artifact presented to round out the main
character, Dr. Vivian Bearing, but is examined in depth to show how Vivian became
the person she is in the “now” of the play, a woman in her forties enduring a series
of rigorous medical procedures, alone. She has so devoted herself to study and to
“uncompromising scholarly standards”, that she does not have a family, nor a close
friend to offer her the simple kindness of companionship through this ordeal. She
missed the point of “truth” her mentor attempted to convey to her, and instead
focused on the manner of how to obtain truth, which Vivian interpreted as using the
mind as tool, an axe, a shield, a flashlight. As Vivian is gradually reduced through the
course of the play from a healthy middle‐aged woman to a frail and frightened being,
she is stripped of her composure, her ability to cope, of the essence of who Vivian
Bearing is. None of these things will assist her in the journey she must undertake.
Vivian has taken uncompromising standards to the point that she does not
compromise with human beings, namely, her students. Indeed, one of her attending
physicians is a former student, which causes Vivian to remiss “I wish I had given him
an A” (1.25). This avoidance of human contact was not what Professor E.M. Ashford
was trying to convey to Vivian. E.M. attempted to convey to Vivian the importance
of life itself, over life in the abstract, telling her to go out and be with people, in
addition to reconsidering the version of the poem. The difference between a
semicolon and a comma in the last line of Donne’s Sonnet Six was the difference
between heavy‐handed overstatement (misinterpretation) and the subtle
understanding of nuance, of subtlety itself. This, like human relationships, cannot
be gotten easily nor by force, but by the slow accumulation of interactions, by the
30
simplicity of “being with.” In the literary sense we can say that Donne’s Sonnet Six
is a trope of the play, an iconic element meant to signify the entirety of poetry, the
entirety of Vivian’s study, but this is a very reductive idea, because it is too
overarching, and overarching ideas are what has gotten Vivian into the lonely state
she is in. This one poem is this one poem, and yes, it is a pivotal text for Dr. Vivian
Bearing, and to the play, but it is precisely by it being this one poem that it means so
much. The play performs a close reading of this poetic text, allowing the sonnet to
exit as this one sonnet, but also as palimpsest for the drama. Vivian tries to recite
the poem while sick from chemo, but it doesn’t come easily. In the second‐to‐last
scene of the play, Professor Ashford visits Vivian in the hospital and catches her in
an almost lucid lull between morphine doses. Vivian is in a great deal of pain, and
very scared, and Ashford offers to comfort her by reciting something, but Vivian
moans “Nooooo.” Ashford is in town for her grandson’s birthday, and she has a
bookstore bag with her. She pulls out a copy of The Runaway Bunny, a children’s
book, and reads it to Vivian as she cradles her.

E.M.
…Now then.

Once there was a little bunny who wanted to run away.
So he said to his mother, “I am running away.”

“If you run away, “ his mother said, “I will run after you,
For you are my little bunny.”

“If you run after me,” said the little bunny, “I will become
a fish in a trout stream and I will swim away from you.”

“If you become a fish in a trout stream,” said the mother,
“I will become a fisherman and I will fish for you.

31
(Thinking out loud.) Look at that. A little allegory of the soul.
No matter where it hides, God will find it. See, Vivian?

Vivian. (Moaning)
Uhhhhh.
(1.62‐63)

By the end of the play, Dr. Vivian Bearing dies: she rises from the hospital
bed, unties her gown, and walks naked into a light whose center her body is
searching toward.
There is no music in the stage production of the play. It would be hard to
imagine what music could add to this drama that is so intent on the audience
listening to the words, even listening to the punctuation of the words. Music for
materials this strong would have to not overpower, and might actually reduce the
drama by overstating the obvious. Curiously though, in 2001, the play was adapted
into a cable television film with Emma Thompson as Vivian Bearing, adaptation and
direction by Mike Nichols, and there is music in that film version. The choice of
music for that production, and where/how it is used is germane to this inquiry.
Do not misinterpret this to mean that the film version of Wit has a score
which accompanies the play from start to finish, as many film scores do. It does not.
The musical elements are sparingly used. They are not played over the opening
credits, nor at any scenes where the intensity of the drama is obvious. The same
piece of music is used, at two key moments in the drama, the first being one we
already discussed, the moment when Vivian, the cancer patient, relives an encounter
from her days as a student with her mentor. On stage, this moment moves between
sets to make a transition in time. On screen, the dialogue is exactly the same as it is
in the play, but the visual is a pastiche of different scenes, first Vivian with no hair in
32
her hospital bed, then a younger Vivian with long, brown hair, entering E.M.’s wood‐
paneled office, then E.M. continuing her explanation of the sonnet to the bald‐
headed Vivian in the hospital, then the young Vivian walking across a college lawn,
deep in thought, then Vivian in her hospital bed again, touching her i.v. Music is
used with this pastiche as a subtle bolster to show that all these changes in scenery
are connected. The music relieves the jarring visual switching as we follow the
continuous dialogue.
What music can accomplish this? The music is an excerpt from a roughly
eight‐minute composition by the Estonian composer, Arvo Pärt, “Spiegel im Spiegel.”
The piece is written for two instruments, violin and piano, in a style which Part
created and calls “tintinnabulation.” The piano slowly arpeggiates the tonic triad
while the violin moves diatonically in stepwise motion. The piece has a very slow
and meditative tempo, as if the piano and violin were emotionally coming to an
understanding, punctuated sparingly with infrequent bass chords by the piano—the
understanding grounded in a gradually dawning knowledge.
Pärt has this to say about tintinnabulation:
[It] is an area I sometimes wander into when I am searching for
answers—in my life, my music, my work. In my dark hours, I
have the certain feeling that everything outside this one thing
has no meaning. The complex and many‐faceted only confuses
me, and I must search for unity. What is it, this one thing, and
how do I find my way to it? Traces of this perfect thing appear
in many guises—and everything that is unimportant falls away.
Tintinnabulation is like this…The three notes of a triad are like
bells. And that is why I call it tintinnabulation. (Rodda)

In the film version of Wit, music by a composer who has been noted by some
as the most prominent living composer of sacred music, is used for all its subtle and
33
meditative ability to underscore the meditation of Donne’s Sonnet Six on the subtle
separation of life, death, and afterlife, and to link the past and the present, with the
same subtle musical meditation. Pärt says, “I could compare my music to white light
which contains all colors. Only a prism can divide the colors and make them appear;
this prism could be the spirit of the listener” (Conen). As E.M. attempts—through
her explanation of the sonnet and the importance of the punctuation—to slow
Vivian down and bring her to a fuller understanding, the music moves through the
triad and the diatonic at a calm and purposeful pace and brings the listener to a calm
yet purposeful feeling of something being uncovered, revealed (particularly in the
punctuating bass chords), of the spirit of the listener discerning, parsing out
meaning, or “color” as Arvo Pärt would put it.
“Spiegel im Spiegel” in German can mean either “mirror in the mirror” or
“mirrors in the mirror”—a reference to infinity, via the many reflections produced
by a mirror held to a mirror. The title of the piece may not have been as important
to the selection of the piece for use in the filmed version, as was its ability to do the
necessary work of bringing us into the collapsing of time and crystallization of
understanding, nonetheless it is apt for the moment it accompanies in the play.
Vivian is reflecting on a critical moment in her personal development, a moment
which reflects in her present surroundings, these two scenes sending meaning into
each other as if they were mirrors holding each other’s telescoping images.
In the Mike Nichols’ video version of the play, the ending is different from the
stage play. As stated, the stage version ends with no music as Vivian sits up from the
hospital bed, loosens the string on her gown, and walks naked into a light. At this
34
point in the play, her body has just flat‐lined, and her attending, a former student of
hers, has called a code team to resuscitate Vivian’s lifeless form. The team arrives
and begins their work, but Vivian’s nurse stops them, pointing out that there is a
“DNR” on her chart, a do‐not‐resuscitate order. Emotions are tense as the team
fights with the nurse, but ultimately they rely on the written order and let the
patient go.
The video version of the play does not have Vivian walking naked into a
bright light. She dies in her bed with the same argument over resuscitating her
taking place and the nurse winning, but then we cut to seeing her still face, eyes
closed, against the white sheet, and we hear a voice‐over of Vivian reciting Sonnet
Six, “Death be not proud.” “Spiegel im Spiegel” again accompanies the poem and we
hear the two together, words and music, as Vivian’s dead face seems to be glowing
with a light from either within or above her head. Actually, “Spiegel im Spiegel”
begins before Vivian’s voice over, as her nurse adjusts the sheets and pays Vivian
the final respect of putting her corpse into a more unmolested position on the bed,
so the music again joins different actions, the hands of the nurse moving Vivian, the
deceased body of Vivian finally relieved of pain. The poem at this moment in the
video play is an interesting choice, because the viewer is left to ask if Vivian finally
understood the meaning Professor E.M. Ashford attempted to convey, that Truth
(capital “T”) is not a metaphysical conceit one can study at an intellectual distance;
that one must bring all the forces of living to bear (including scholarship but not
exclusive to it): “The effort must be total for the results to be meaningful,” but not
total in the sense that it is an immersion which excludes life, but total in the sense
35
that it includes everything, even the human. Because the sonnet recurs this final
time in the video we are reminded of the words of T.S. Eliot:
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time
(l.240‐3)
Because we hear the sonnet and the music again at the end of the video
version of Wit, we are left to believe (or at least to ask ourselves if we do believe),
that (/if) Vivian Bearing finally arrived at Professor Ashford’s meaning.

Sometimes a play attempts to use music as the palimpsest for meaning, just
as Margaret Edson used the Holy Sonnets of John Donne in Wit. Master Class (1995)
by Terrence McNally is one such play. In many dramaturgy sources, this play is
listed as being authored by McNally, “with incidental music by Giuseppe Verdi,
Giacomo Puccini, and Vincenzo Bellini”. This is odd, because the play used pieces by
these composers at key moments, in much the same way that Arvo Pärt’s music is
used in the video version of Wit, to bridge flashbacks and the present, yet we
wouldn’t expect to see Arvo Pärt mentioned in a dramaturgy description of Wit.
However, McNally borrows heavily from opera for not only music, but for words (to
greater extent than Edson used John Donne’s sonnets) and drama to build the
climatic moment of the play, so noting the composers is justified.
Master Class uses as its subject and main character the legendary soprano,
Maria Callas, who is present in the moment of the play to give a voice master class to
several young and aspiring singers. The play is divided into two acts, both of which
are parts of this master class, and both of which end with the slippage of Callas’
36
character from the present into recollections of the past in a monologue which she
gives during/after/in response to, her students’ singing, and both of which have
recordings of Maria Callas singing arias, while the actor playing Callas reminisces.
The audience experiences these recordings as the memories of Callas’ glorious past,
which is no more, but which is ever‐present in her psyche. She is the great and
glorious Maria Callas and she commands the stage as if she were still the performing
diva.
RECORDING.
"Alla grandezza aneli,
Ma sarai tu malvagio?"

MARIA. Yes, I dare to go to the greatest heights! My whole
life has led up to this moment.

RECORDING.
"Pien di misfatti e il calle della potenza,
E mal per lui che il piede dubitoso vi pone,
E retrocede!"

MARIA. A debut at La Scala. With Maesto De Sabata, no less.
Good chest note there. Now the first high C. They're impressed.
Just wait. You haven't heard anything yet. (The orchestra plays the
introduction to the aria proper.)
Ah, Verdi! Ah, Shakespeare! Ah, my own ambition. (The
aria itself has begun now. During the following, Maria will occasionally
listen to it, comment on it but sometimes not even be aware of it.)
The costume is so heavy. I can scarcely move. They've
made me look so fat.
"But the signorina is, how shall we say? "ample." There
are limits to what we can do. We're nor‐magicians."
Hideous giggling behind little fairy hands.
'The signorina is Signora Meneghini, my wife, and you will
show her courtesy and respect and you will make her another
costume and send me the bill."
"Thank you, Battista."
"You are my wife, Maria. I adore you."
I can breathe now. Maybe I'll have a success now!
"He's old enough to be her father."
"With a figure like that, who else would want her? She
37
should count her blessings."
"But that voice"
''You can't fuck a voice."
I know what they're saying. I don't care. I know what I
want and after tonight I'll have it. They haven't heard anything
like this since Malibran! In less than one year I've become the
Queen of La Scala. That has to count for something. La Divina.
Imagine being called La Divina. I am La Divina. Listen to that!
I've won, Battista, I've made something of myself.
"Why can't you say you love me, Maria?"
Don't ask me that. Not now. I have a performance.
Where is my eyebrow pencil? Someone's taken it. They're all
jealous. They want to see me fail. They take my make‐up. They
tear my costumes. Where is my rouge? Everything is in disarray.
Not now, Battista. I can't bear to see you in my dressing
room mirror standing there behind me, always asking me if I
love you. You got what you wanted. A famous wife. I got what
I wanted. This night and every night that I go out there and
sing. When I sing, I'm not fat. I'm not ugly. I'm not an old
man's wife. I'm Callas. I'm La Divina. I'm everything I wanted
to be. So don't bring up love when you look at me in my mirror
like that, Battista. Love can wait.
Tell me, is the theatre full? Has the tenor apologized?
He called me a cow. Have you paid the claque, Battista? We
have work to do, my husband. Lady Macbeth, Norma, Lucia,
Tosca. We have made as unholy a pact as Macbeth and his
Lady.
I've become thin. Look at me. Another Audrey Hepburn
they're all saying. I've become a beautiful woman, Battista. I
like being beautiful. I had thirty‐seven curtain calls at the theatre
tonight. They say a student leapt from the balcony for
love of me but he wasn't killed. "Then he didn't really love
me," I told the reporters and I laughed for the photographers.
I laughed!
I can't bear it when you look at me like that. It's worse
here, when we're alone, than at the theatre. I want you to
sleep in your room. You're an old man. The thought of sleeping
with you repulses me. Wait! And yet I do love you. Not
the way you hoped, I know. Not the way I hoped either. I
thought it would suffice. Why are you looking at me like that?
You know what I'm going to say. It's been in all the papers.
Of course he's going to marry me. I'm sorry, Battista. I never
meant you harm.
I told him, Ari. I think I broke his heart. We must be
very happy together, you and I, to have caused so much pain.
I realize now: all those years of singing, perfecting my voice,
38
so that it would express everything I felt, they were for you.
My song of love was for you, Ari, all those great passionate
melodies, Bellini, Verdi, Donizetti, my siren songs to a man
who doesn't even like opera! It's very funny when you think
about it. A great ballerina dancing for a blind man.
I have news, Ari, such great and wonderful news. I'm going
to have your child. No, our child, our son. I would not
insult you by giving you a daughter. And we will name him
Odysseus for the greatest Greek hero of them aU, like you, and
because he wandered the world the longest, like me, until he
came home to love.
No, I don't need your child to feel like a woman. I am
a woman. I don't need anything. Some people would say I
don't need you. I want a child. Your child. I love you. There,
I've said it.
Don't ask me to do that. Why would you ask me to do
that? What do you mean, you've changed your mind? I'm not
a young woman. This may be my only chance. I'll give up anything,
my career even, everything I've worked for, but not this.
Then don't marry me. I won't do it. You can't make me.
I won't let you make me!
Don't leave me! I've been alone all my life until now!
o child I will never see or know or nurse or say how
much I love you, forgive me.
lt's done, Ari.
Now what?
Sing? You're telling me to sing? Sing what? "Stormy
Weather"? Sing where? In the street? I'm losing my voice!
Don't you read the papers? I'm getting by on sheer nerve. I
always did. That's what's going, not the voice.
They fired me at La Scala. As if I cared, I have you. (She
kneels.)
Marry me, Ari. Your canary is asking you to marry her.
(She opens her arms.)
"Ho dato tutto a teo "
(The Macbeth aria is over. We hear the audience applauding. Second
Soprano sings the last line of the aria. "No ... no ... no .... ")

SECOND SOPRANO. Mme. Callas?

MARIA. Ssshh! Listen, they’re applauding. Never move on
your applause. It shortens it.

SECOND SOPRANO. No one was applauding. You told them
not to.

39
MARIA. I would never tell anyone that, ma chere. The worst
Part about being a teacher is being misunderstood. Applause is
What we live on. Sometimes it’s the only thing we have…
(2.46‐9)

These two soliloquies, the first at the end of act one and this one near the end
of the play (and act two) are stunning in their emotional content. Callas is haunted
by the voices of the past, which she still argues with to claim her sense of self, but
she is a damaged human being, an embodied contradiction, a stunning display of
confidence and neediness. Callas uses the excuse of sacrificing for art to distance
herself from humanity in nearly the same way that Vivian Bearing used sacrificing
for scholarship, except that Callas’ involvement goes beyond an involvement in art,
to an extreme self‐involvement. Yes, it can be argued that Vivian Bearing’s was also
self‐involved, that she manifested her self‐involvement as rigorous scholarship, but
Vivian Bearing came to understand herself differently by the end of the play. Callas
does not, and yet, that is the drama of the character, her blatant unwillingness to be
anything less than the great and all‐knowing, always right, Maria Callas.
The choice of music for these two moments in the play is apropos of Callas’
emotional state. At the end of the first act, it is Amina’s aria from La Sonnambula
(The Sleepwalker) by Vincenzo Bellini, and at the end it is Verdi’s ruthless Lady
Macbeth, discovering treachery in a letter, plotting murder, and a rise to power. In
both these soliloquies Callas winds up in an argument with “Ari,” Aristotle Onassis,
whom she has sought refuge in as her career, and her voice, has faded. In the first
soliloquy she is flattered by his attentions, by having been a captured song bird, a
“canary” to sing only for him, and still she pines for something more from him, some
40
further approval, which he withholds. She wanders in her memories, like Amina,
between shadowy grasps at fulfillment in loving a man, and longing because he is
forever unattainable—he is marrying another and Amina can hear the wedding
chimes.
The end of act one in Terrence McNally’s Master Class prepares us for the end
of act two in several ways. First, by introducing us to the technique of overlaying an
opera recording over a student soprano singing the same aria, but letting the live
soprano and the present fade as the past and the recording take over, and second, by
allowing the slippage of Callas’ emotional state from her tenuous toe‐hold on the
present (which represents an attempt at involvement with others), into the past
where she is consumed with self‐involvement. Callas is deluded in these moments,
as she enumerates her sacrifices, for her art, for her public, for Ari, (“all those years
of singing, of perfecting my voice, so that it would express everything I felt, they
were for you”), just as Lady Macbeth deludes herself by justifying her ruthlessness.
In Callas’ act two soliloquy we discover she aborted a child to appease Onassis, a
desperate act to win approval from a man “who doesn’t even like opera,” a man for
whom she left her husband (who supported her career). Callas’ inner world is filled
with brutality, from the self‐deprivations she endured, to the demands she made on
others in order to feed the consuming void of ambition.

To “Bring Us Into”
Both Wit and Master Class use other art forms as palimpsest, as overwritten
manuscript, and as artifact. We could say metaphorically that in each case, each
41
play, projects itself transparently over the image of the poem, or the aria, which in
turn lie transparently over other images, several piles deep. In this way the artifact
(poem or aria) is “studied,” is fixed in the past, yet is present in the now of the play.
What rises to the surface in each of these instances, amongst the many layers, is the
dramatic arc which makes sense of all this data, of all this input. Neither Wit nor
Master Class lose sight of this dramatic tension, of the very intent of the play.
In terms of intimate estrangement, tracking the boundaries of the forms in
each play, and asking whether the form is “used” or “incorporated” offers a clue at
how the creators of each play viewed the palimpsest materials.   In Wit, Edson is
very clear about the boundaries of the sonnet she uses, and although the content of
the sonnet, even its punctuation, is resonant with the dramatic arc, the boundary of
poetry versus drama is clear in that poetry and the poetic line is confined to this one
sonnet so it may be “studied,” even mused upon, by Dr. Bearing. Poetry, even a
particularly resonant sonnet, is in service of the dramatic arc, almost to the point of
being an artifact, a stage prop in the play. (Perhaps this is unfair, as I will further
elaborate.)
Both Wit (the video version) and Master Class use music. As I have
previously argued, the choice of music is apropos in each. Music is not a sound track
in either, but a resonator for a particular moment, dialogue, or series of actions. If
we were looking at a scale, with “uses music” on the left, and “incorporates music”
on the right, I would place Wit toward the left and Master Class a bit right of center,
because the boundaries for music, even background music are clear in Wit, but the
arias as they are played and used in Master Class often times abut the dialogue, even
42
rising in intensity with it. McNally relies very much on the power of music to “bring
us into,” to smooth transitions, in the same way that a film score beginning as the
opening credits role prepares one for the experience of movie watching. When it
happens in the first act it is perhaps a bit gimmicky or uncomfortable, but that
discomfort is part of the prickliness of the main character, her seeming inability to
hold back, her sense of entitlement. In the second act, the discomfort is taken a step
further as the character stuns the audience with her personal history.
In this way it could be argued that John Donne’s sonnet in Wit is not just a
mere artifact or stage prop, but also assists in this action of “bringing into.” The
difference here is that the poem, a being of language, is not physically allowed to
recede into the background as the opera excerpts are in Master Class, however, in
the video, the poem is aligned with Arvo Pärt ‘s music, and that is played under
words at key moments. The intimate estrangement of each work is easy to locate
because their creators have a clear sense of the boundaries of forms, and each uses
those boundaries (those forms separated from the form they are working in) to
bring the audience into a state of interiority, of intimacy.
Neither Edson nor McNally make a case for a hybrid form by attempting to
let the power of music or the power of poetry carry the work of the dramatic arc.
Epiphanies happen in dramatic monologues for both plays, so while the poetry or
music may be resonant, they are each fixed. John Donne’s sonnet remains John
Donne’s sonnet, and the two chosen arias may run parallel to the emotional content
of the monologues, but neither piece is altered by the play. In a hybrid form, such as
opera, all the incorporated forms (the music, poetry, and drama), would exhibit
43
change over the course of the opera. None of the three would be static. In Wit and
Master Class, the dramatic arc is what changes, rising and falling, while the poetry
and music are the static building blocks bolstering that change. While the poetry
and music assist in achieving an inner understanding for both works, they remain
estranged from the primary form of the drama in order to bolster that intimacy.
A final note on the dramatic tension of Master Class, before further
exploration of how losing sight of the dramatic intent can drastically reduce the
force present in the form.
Callas begins in Master Class as perhaps quirky, definitely opinionated, with
continual self‐justifications for her boldness and her frankness. She ends on nearly
the same self‐justifying note (pun intended):

If I have seemed harsh, it is because I have been harsh with myself. I'm
not good with words, but I have tried to reach you. To communicate
something of what I feel about what we do as artists, as musicians and
as human beings. The sun will not fall down from the sky if there are
no more Traviatas. The world can and will go on without us but I have
to think that we have made this world a better place. That we have left
it richer, wiser than had we not chosen the way of art. The older I get,
the less I know but I am certain that what we do matters. If I didn't
believe that. You must know what you want to do in life, you must
decide, for we cannot do everything. Do not think singing is an easy
career. It is a lifetime's work; it does not stop here. Whether I continue
singing or not doesn't matter. Besides, it's all there in the recordings.
What matters is that you use whatever you have learned wisely. Think
of the expression of the words, of good diction, and of your own deep
feelings. The only thanks I ask is that you sing properly and honestly.
If you do this, I will feel repaid.
Well, that's that. (She gathers her things and goes. Blackout.)
(2.50)
The character is not only giving us directions on how to sing, but on how to
interpret her own, often times paradoxical instructions “What matters is that you
44
use whatever you have learned wisely.   Think of the expression of the words—“ We
must use wisely what we have learned of Callas to think back on her words, on her
character (her nature, her personality, who she was in life and who she was in the
play). This is an instruction not just on how to read Maria Callas, but on how to
read, or take in, the play. It approaches a meta‐critical moment in its admonitions,
and expresses a deeper awareness of the playwright, Terrence McNally, of the
claims staked in contemporary culture by stage dramas:
… Good plays really are a matter of life and death. We’re an
endangered species and we’re fighting back. As long as there are
civilized people on this planet, people are going to want to sit around
the campfire and listen to us tell the stories of our tribe. That’s human
nature. That doesn’t change. But we will have to work harder than
ever before to hold their attention. We’re not the only storyteller in
town anymore…. (vi)

Terrance McNally’s Master Class won a Tony Award in 1996 for best play, and
new productions of the play have been performed in every decade since it
premiered. The power of the play is evident, but also, the power or force of opera is
part of the power of the play, though, as stated earlier, Master Class, for all its
involvement and use of opera, never loses sight of its dramatic intent.
And, it is dramatic intent which attracts criticism from those who have a
problem with the way in which the play uses other source materials, namely the real
master classes Maria Callas gave at the Juilliard School during the 1971‐72 academic
year, which have been preserved on the classical three‐disc EMI recording, and the
life of Maria Callas herself. For the purposes of this inquiry, delving into this area is
off topic, but I will offer this: Many may also disagree with John Adam’s
interpretation of Richard Nixon or Henry Kissinger, but it can be argued that it is the
45
interpretations of cultural icons through the artistic lens which adds to their cultural
caché. It is my humble observation that the controversy of McNally’s play makes it a
topic of discussion, makes the reviews of it diverse in their critical summations,
makes it a favorite of actresses looking to stretch the limits of their craft, and a
favorite to pick‐on for those wishing to defend the reputation of Maria Callas.
Master Class is hard to ignore.

46
CHAPTER ONE REFERENCES

Conen, Hermann. “White Light.” Liner notes. Alina. ECM Records, 2000. CD.
Eliot, T. S. “Little Gidding.” The Four Quartets. New York: Harcourt, 1971. Print.
Edson, Margaret. Wit. New York: Dramatists Play Service, Inc., 1999. Print.
McNally, Terrence. Introduction. 15 Short Plays. Lyme: Smith & Krauss, 1994. Print.
McNally, Terrence. Master Class. New York: Dramatists Play Service, Inc., 1996.
Print.
Rodda, Richard E. Liner notes. Pärt: Fratres.   Telarc, 1995. CD.
Wit. Dir. Mike Nichols. Perf. Emma Thompson, Christopher Lloyd, Audra
MacDonald and Eileen Atkins. HBO Films, 2001. DVD.

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CHAPTER TWO:
WAR MUSIC, UNDER MILK WOOD, AND AMELIA: MANIFESTATIONS OF INTENT

Returning to a metaphor I introduced in the previous chapter, when a
practitioner of one form (poetry, drama, or music), chooses to use another form as
palimpsest, as overwritten manuscript, it is possible for the following effect to
occur: in the case of a play, the image of the drama projects itself transparently over
the image of the poetry, or the music (in Master Class, opera), which in turn lie
transparently over other images, several piles deep. Amongst these many layers,
the dramatic arc rises to the surface to make sense of all this data. It gives
meaningful structure. Is this always the case for every play that uses poetry or
opera as a significant element? Is this structure a defining constituent of a play’s
success? Are there instances where poetry or opera (music) might perform the
same metaphor upon stage plays? What is the effect if this relationship is not clear?
There are three productions from whose observational notes, I attempted to
answer these questions and map out a further relationship of force to form and the
strange yet intimate way in which poetry, drama, and opera relate to each other.
The first, War Music(2009), is a stage play by Lillian Groag based on the poetry book
War Music by Christopher Logue; the second, Under Milk Wood (1945) by the poet
Dylan Thomas, was first performed as a radio drama and was described by Thomas
as “a play for voices” ; the third, Amelia (2010) is an opera with music by Daron Aric
Hagen, libretto by Gardner McFall, and story by Stephen Wadsworth (loosely based
on the book, The Pilot’s Daughter, by McFall). Including Under Milk Wood at this
48
point in the inquiry might seem out of step since it was written over fifty years prior
to the other two, but it is performed regularly by small theater groups and still
exists in recording, both audio and video. It offers interesting developmental
elements in its ongoing life, which make it relevant to this inquiry.
I first encountered Christopher Logue’s work in the June 2004 issue of Poetry
Magazine, in which was printed an excerpt of Cold Calls (War Music continued):

Many believe in the stars.

Take Quinamid
The son of a Dardanian astrologer
Who disregarded what his father said
And came to Troy in a taxi.

Gone. (3)

A “taxi?”   I checked what I knew of the piece again, and yes, it was in fact
confirmed by several different sources that this was a version of Homer’s Iliad, but
that it was unlike any version as yet attempted. It moved beyond interpreting
Homer’s intent through translation, into taking the crystallized emotions of Homer’s
characters and infusing them into a modern syntax and partially modernized
imagery to produce a work that many hyperbolically claimed “jumped off the page”
in a fresh, startling, and yet emotionally true register. I agreed, even as my scholarly
self tried to match sections of the Iliad’s lines directly to Logue’s work. There is no
direct match, although there are resonances that ring very true. As I perused the
available volumes of Logue’s epic, I gave up on trying to find the literal translation of
Homer, and enjoyed instead waiting for what would come next in Logue’s
interpretation. How would he handle certain elements, certain scenes?
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The language is alive. The images are stunning, a conflagration of the
brutality of war in the ancient world and the brutality of war in the modern era,
interspersed with the banality of contemporary pop culture which is as capricious in
its style changes as the will of the gods. Logue has a background which includes
work on the stage and screen (and writing for both), so he is no stranger to vivid
imagery, quick “cut to”, and terse dialogue, but it is really the sizzling expanse of his
diction and the aural quality of the work which make it engaging. It was these
qualities that first attracted Logue’s work to Carey Perloff, Artistic Director of the
American Conservatory Theater (ACT) in San Francisco. As Perloff recounts:

One afternoon several years ago, writer‐director Lillian Groag
rushed into my office with a slim paperback version of British poet
Christopher Logue's breathtaking War Music, and thrust it onto my
lap. "We MUST turn this into a play for A.C.T.'s core acting company,"
enthused Lillian. "Go home and read it immediately." So I did. I
couldn't get over how moving, funny, and visceral Logue's "account"
of the Iliad is and how quickly it leaps off the page, asking to be staged.
Lillian had a complete production already in mind: choreography by
Danny Pelzig, original music by John Glover, a striking visual
landscape, and a muscular company of 13 actors sending Logue's
gorgeous language into the far reaches of A.C.T. 's theater. I was
captivated by her vision, because it so beautifully represents all that
matters to us at A.C.T.: sublime language, big ideas, passionate
emotion, the collaboration of great resident actors and exciting young
talent from our Master of Fine Arts Program, and the resurrection of a
timeless classic in a vivid, contemporary way. (5)

Having been privy to the development of the production due to a different
collaboration I was working on with John Glover, I understood the genesis of the
production to be different from how Perloff recounts it in the program notes.
What began as a “dramatic reading” of War Music, actors in as sparse costuming and
staging as possible, reciting with the intensity of dramatic monologue to the
50
audience, with the addition of music to bolster transitions, quickly became a full‐
blown play, with props, costumes and “scenes.” One review even noted that the
“effort” of the play “upstages the play onstage” (Hurwitt). Theater critic Loni Kao
Stark hit upon the major dissonances of the production:
Unfortunately the play did not connect from the onset and for
the rest of the play, all the elements struggled to play together
but never did. No emotional heart strings were tugged. When
the comic relief of Zeus and his clan of goddesses came on for
the first time, I was grateful for the change of pace and a bit of
humor. However, I also experienced whiplash from trying to
grok such a sudden change of pace. Just when I got somewhat
familiar with the interjections by the gods, the play sprinkles in
scenes of modern warfare with guns blazing. The timing was
off and what I got was another dose of whiplash.
Attempting to stage in jarring modern gimmickry what Logue did with the
conflagration of high/low diction, past/present historical references, pop(low)
culture/high culture, did not translate from Logue’s text to A.C.T.’s production. All
the pop and sizzle of Logue’s writing was lost, sacrificed to “mixing it up” on stage.
In Logue’s War Music, Zues and Poseidon discuss the lack of reverence of the
humans, and Zues reassures his brother that respect will be paid:

“Brother,” God said, “your altars smoke on every coast,
To catch your voice, grave saints in oilskins lean across the waves.
Try not to let the humans bother you—
My full associate in destiny. Between ourselves”
(Leading him out onto the sand) “I may wind up this war,
And then, Pope of the Oceans, with Greece rowing home
You will have sacrifices up to here…
And as they heave, your train of overhanging crests
Obliterates their spade‐and‐bucket Maginot Line.
But later—when I give the nod.”

Hardly are those words out, when:

51
“Rubbish!”

“They hear, and looking round they see
(Steadying her red‐sepal hat with the russet‐silk flutes)
Creamy‐armed Hera with the teenage Athene
Holding their scallop‐edged parasol high)
As they wobble their way down the dunes,
Shouting:

“…truce…”

“…and an oath…”

“For peace…”

“…dirty peace.”

“In your name…”

But as they near their voices fall,
And as they slow their eyes fall, too,
For looking into His when He is cross
Is like running into searchlights turned full on.
(114‐5)
On stage, the hilarity of this scene is campy—Zeus making grinding motions
as if he were in a fraternity‐hazing drama when he says “Pope of the Oceans,” and
the goddesses, indeed “wobbling” across the stage under a pink parasol. In Logue’s
version, the gods are ridiculous, but they are not camp. They are completely serious
in their outrages and in their apparel, which is meant to be persnickety, overly fine,
even prim, but not Hello Kitty. How seriously the gods take themselves, even in
their self‐righteous tirades, makes Logue’s War Music stunning. When you read the
gods and goddesses, you suck in your breath and you know what comes next is not
going to be good for the humans. You don’t expect what comes next to be a pink
parasol. It doesn’t say in Logue’s text that the parasol is pink, just “scallop‐edged,”
perhaps the type of thing a Victorian lady might have carried had she been on a
52
sunny beach in Greece. The goddesses are out walking off their hot‐headedness in
the hot sun. Hera, wife of Zeus, wears a “red‐sepal hat with the russet‐silk flutes.”
Red sepal is a flower with deep, red felt petals, and sometimes called “Ashanti
blood,” or other sanguine nicknames. Hera has blood on her mind as she walks
down the beach, but she cools her anger in front of her husband—she fears his
wrath—not in a Monty Python‐ish way of not wanting to be caught being naughty‐
naughty—but because he can discern with his gaze, and punish with it, as if it were
“searchlights turned full on.” Hera not meeting Zeus’s gaze is deference, and fear,
not camp.
As Carey Perloff puts it, bringing War Music to stage and deciding how to
physically represent what Logue accomplishes with metaphor and the poetic line
was a collaborative effort:

Once we committed to the Idea of developing War Music into a
theater piece, we began deploying A.C.T.'s collective resources. The
first step was to fully encounter the poem itself, by hearing it read
aloud in its entirety around a table by a cast that included actors from
AC.T.'s resident company and M.F.A Program, supported by A.C.T.'s
intrepid artistic staff, including Resident Dramaturg, Michael Paller.
Then began a series of discussions about which sections of this truly
epic poem were most critical, and about how to tell the story visually
and musically as well as aurally. From there we added the
extraordinary creative team, with each member having the unusual
opportunity to interject ideas from the very beginning. As the script
evolved, we held two staged workshops in which the cast began to put
sections of the script on its feet and to solicit feedback from audiences.
(5)

With the description of the process Perloff gives, bringing War Music to stage
does in fact sound like an extensive process. It rings true with an interesting remark
53
made by the award‐winning playwright, Terrence McNally (from the introduction to
the first published volume of his collected plays):
The only thing I don’t like reading is plays. Play manuscripts
are like an architect’s blueprints. We have to try to imagine what all
the two‐dimensional lines and drawings will look like when they are
realized in space and time as actual buildings. With a play script, we
must try to imagine what the play will sound and look and feel like
with the right actors, designers and directors interpreting them. I
don’t know about you, but I’m not very good at that. The theatre is
three‐dimensional. Its very essence is space and time. Reading a play
is like looking at a map. The journey is the rehearsal process. The
destination is the production. I’m too impatient to get to Oz to be a
good play reader. I want to be there. (v)
Plays are “three‐dimensional” products, and developing them requires
something beyond the page to test the outcome. The difference between McNally’s
comments, and Perloff’s is that McNally describes the process of bringing a text to
life, a text that is already thought‐out in regards to it’s dramatic arc, the very thing
that makes a play a play, and Perloff is describing a “frakensteining” of those
elements normally associated with stage plays into a performance, but a
performance of what? Certainly not a performance of Christopher Logue’s War
Music, because Cristopher Logue’s War Music is only a part of this monster being
pieced together. What text is being performed?
According to the program, War Music, the play is “adapted and directed by
Lillian Groag,” so it was Groag that the responsibility for what happened on stage
seemed to rest, although the process Perloff described included a lot of “we” being
responsible for decisions and development. Assigning responsibility to any
individual for the production at this juncture seems pointless, and not really
54
important to the scholarship at hand, yet there is one more quote from Terrence
McNally I’d like to use to pose a question about the production before moving on:

Good actors force me to write as honestly as I can. I say “force”
because if you have fudged the truth in a script (and sometimes I want
to take a short‐cut to the end of a scene or an act, a short‐cut that the
action of the play doesn’t justify). A good actor’s honesty will shine a
very bright light on that moment of chicanery and you will have to fix
it or go down in flames. Good actors are merciless in that way. They
can’t help it. It’s one of the reasons they’re good actors. Mediocre
actors allow playwrights to get away with murder. (v)
This is not to disparage the cast of War Music, but to point out a flaw in the
“collaborativeness” of the process used to bring War Music to stage. The thing
Terrence McNally is getting at, the item that a playwright might be able to “fudge” on
the page, but not when that page comes to life, is the dramatic arc, the emotional
sweep, the change, how it occurs, step‐by‐step, the very thing that makes a play, a
play, and not just a segment of time where a bunch of people got up and talked. In
order to test that thing, the play, the very pages of the script, have to exist first so
the actors can test them. If it was a collaborative effort that did the actual writing of
Logue’s text into the format of a play, who was testing what, and why aren’t there a
bunch of writers listed under the adaptation credits instead of only one?
If A.C.T. was still working through the relationship of epic poem to play script
when rehearsals began, how could the actors articulate the relationship their
characters had to the dramatic arc? How can one find one’s character’s emotional
place in the play when the play is not finished?
Christopher Logue’s War Music uses all the power of language, both its sizzle
and its nuance, to capture the caprice and passion of the Mount Olympus family as
55
they look down on the tribulations of their human charges and attempt to pull on
the fabric of life, warping the action of the story first one way, then another. Lillian
Groag tried to honor Logue’s text by not altering individual sentences, by keeping
their nuance and sizzle, but decisions had to be made about what sections of the
book to use, who was to speak as the narrator for what sections, and with a vast cast
of characters in Logue’s epic, many actors had to do more than one part, so then
costumes had to be employed to distinguish the characters. Eventually, Logue’s
language suffered. The irony of Logue’s text is lost in the visual context of War Music,
the play. One must really listen to Logue to understand his satire of contemporary
culture, and not be visually misdirected by the incongruent vision of ancient Greeks
wearing cargo pants. Moments where Groag tried to be true to Logue’s text went
against McNally’s theory of dramatic honesty which requires that the stream of
dialogue between characters follow the development of their emotions, not their
ability to make extemporaneous (yet beautiful) metaphors about the scene before
them.
According to Perloff, everyone involved in the production was so inspired by
Logue’s work, by the power of his poetic line, his imagery, and that excitement
garnered the support to bring War Music to the stage. I would like to say that War
Music, the play, did not achieve the success all those involved in it hoped for,
because it held Logue’s poetry with such esteem it couldn’t sacrifice that poetry to
the quest of making a great play. However, Logue’s words are there, excised
perhaps, but there, amongst all the distractions of props and odd costumes and
walking and gesticulating and carrying of pink parasols. What is not there, is a play,
56
a vehicle that takes the audience along the journey of the dramatic arc. The action
abruptly ends on the death of Patroclus, and Achilles returns to the battle. No
explanation for why we go this far and no further, other than the audience has had
enough.

At first glance, Under Milk Wood may seem as undeveloped in dramatic intent
as War Music (stage version). There is no clear trajectory of action in the play
beyond the diurnal following of a fishing village from sleepy first light, through the
bustle of the day, and back into the land of dreams. This recounting of the hours is
done through a polyphonic vehicle of many monologues (some interior, some to
deceased characters) and dialogues, the stringing together of these snippets
accomplished via two narrators redirecting the focus of the “listening” when
necessary. Under Milk Wood was first performed as a radio play in Wales, which
explains its highly satisfying aural qualities, its braided interplay of characters and
voices. Each voice “takes the stage,” one at a time, to deliver a short interaction with
another, or an overheard internal utterance. Each spoken scene must be gripping
and the entire piece must be engaging so as to not lose the listener (either through
confusion or through boredom).
The genesis of Under Milk Wood into the script that Thomas left is
documented by Dylan Thomas scholar, Daniel Jones:
The publication of Thomas's Collected Poems in 1953 marked
the end of one period of his literary development; after this, according
to his own words, he intended to turn from the strictly personal kind
of poetry to a more public form of expression, and to large‐scale
dramatic works, in particular, where there would be scope for all his
versatility, for his gifts of humor and characterization as well as his
genius for poetry. It is fortunate that at least one of these projected
57
works has been preserved for us. Under Milk Wood, a Play for Voices
grew by a slow and natural process, and the story of that growth,
known only to a few friends of the poet, is most interesting. Thomas
liked small towns by the sea best, and small We1sh towns by the sea
best of all. Before the war, he lived for many years in Laugharne, and
during the war, for a time in New Quay; there is no doubt that he
absorbed the spirit of these places and, through imagination and
insight, the spirit of all other Places like them. When, more than ten
years ago, a short talk was commissioned by the B.B.C., the description
of a small Welsh seaside town was a natural choice of subject. Quite
Early One Morning, short as it is, and written so many years ago, is
closely related to Under Milk Wood. There is the same sequence of
time, though limited to the morning hours and in winter, not spring;
we hear the dreams of the sleeping town and see the sleepers getting
up and going about their business….
The success of this. broadcast talk suggested to Thomas a more
extended work against the same kind of background. At first he was
unable to decide upon the form of the work, and there was much
discussion with friends about a stage play, a comedy in verse, and a
radio play with a blind man as narrator and central character. The
blind man, a natural bridge between eye and ear for the radio listener,
survives in Under Milk Wood, with the difference that Captain
Cat is "made to share his central position with two anonymous
narrators. But the simple time sequence of Quite Early One Morning,
which resembles the pattern of Under Milk Wood so closely, at first
appeared inadequate; some kind of plot seemed to be necessary.
Thomas thought he had found the theme he wanted in the contrast
between Llareggub and the surrounding world, the conflict between
the eccentrics, strong in their individuality and‐ freedom, and the sane
ones who sacrifice everything to some notion of conformity. The
whole population of Llareggub cannot very well be accommodated
inside the walls of a lunatic asylum; so the sane world decrees that the
town itself shall be declared an "insane area," with all traffic and
goods diverted from it. Captain Cat, spokesman of the indignant
citizens, insists that the sanity of Llareggub should be put on trial in
the townhall with every legal formality; he will be Counsel for the
Defense and the citizens themselves will be witnesses. The trial takes
place, but it comes to a surprising end. The final speech for the
Prosecution consists of a full and minute description of the ideally
sane town; as soon as they hear this, the people of Llareggub
Withdraw their defense and beg to be cordoned off from the sane
world as soon as possible.
Once more settled in his house overlooking Laugharne Estuary,
Thomas began working according to the plan of "The Town Was Mad,"
as he called it, and brought the action up to the delivery of letters by
Willy Nilly, the postman; but by that time he had changed his mind,
58
and there was no letter for Captain Cat about the sanity or the insanity
of the town. When this first part of Under Milk Wood, with the
provisional title Llareggub, a Piece for Radio Perhaps, appeared for the
first time in [a literary magazine]. Thomas had returned to the plan of
Quite Early One Morning; his intention was to limit the picture to the
town itself, with hardly a suggestion of a world beyond the town, and
to extend the time sequence to form a complete cycle.
Before Thomas's third visit to the United States in 1953, the
title Under Milk Wood, a Play for Voices was decided upon, the first
part, Llareggub, was revised, and the work had been extended to the
end of Polly Garter's Song, where it first appears. In this form, the
play was read at the Kaufmann Auditorium of the Young Men's
Hebrew Association on the fifteenth and the twenty‐ninth of May; the
poet himself read the parts of the First Voice and the Reverend Eli
Jenkins.
As soon as Thomas returned to Britain, the B.B.C. urged him to
complete the work without further delay, and, by omitting some
projected ballads and unfinished material for the closing section, he
was able to supply a finished version at the end of October. The first
broadcast of the whole work, produced by Douglas Cleverdon with a
distinguished all‐Welsh cast, was given on January 25, 1954, with a
repetition two days later. (vii‐x)

The first broadcast of the whole work (which Jones references as produced
by Douglas Cleverdon) was a posthumous broadcast in January of 1954. Dylan
Thomas died in November of 1953 in New York. After Thomas’ death, the actor
Richard Burton, himself a Welshman, took up the cause of championing Thomas’ last
finished work (as well as many other Welsh‐connected individuals), and Burton can
be heard on the recording of the 1954 B.B.C. production as “first voice.” Burton also
played that part in the 1972 film, Under Milk Wood, directed by Andrew Sinclair.
It is clear, from the more than ten‐year genesis of the piece, and from Daniel
Jones’ account of the process, that Thomas was working out the relationship of
poetry to drama in the piece, perfecting the lines for each voice as he searched for a
dramatic arc around which to shape the piece. Did he ever find that arc?
59
As the story of Under Milk Wood progresses, one does ask, “what is the story
here?”   Actions progress through the dialogues, the monologues, and the
interactions of the townspeople with each other, but is there a rising moment, or a
resolution to follow that? This concept of drama as a beginning, middle and end was
certainly being questioned in the twentieth‐century, but it is unclear if Thomas was
working out a post‐structuralist quandary through the script of the play. With all
the changes he made, it is more likely that he was searching for a resolution in a
more musical or operatic sense for the piece, a place that felt finished through what
was discovered in modulation of what was initially presented, and that resolution he
did find. Under Milk Wood ends in nearly the same state as it begins, with the
approach again of darkness, but the darkness the listener is delivered unto is a more
informed darkness than he/she came from. The townspeople of Llareggub (“bugger
all” backwards) retire to their dreams, and we hear those dreams, dreams indicative
of inner states we heard them engage during their waking hours. Those dreams are
grand, quirky, as individual as the people themselves, and the dreams organically
complete the actions/thoughts earlier witnessed by the listener. Compare the
actions of Mrs. Ogmore‐Pritchard, a widow of both her husbands, Mr. Ogmore, and
Mr. Pritchard, when Willy Nilly, the postman, delivers a letter to her during the day,
to when she prepares for sleep:
CAPTAIN CAT (Softly, to himself)

That's Willy Nilly knocking at Bay View. Rat‐a‐tat,
very soft. The knocker's got a kid glove on. Who's
sent a letter to Mrs. Ogmore‐Pritchard?
[Ratatat, distant again]

60
CAPTAIN CAT

Careful now, she swabs the front glassy. Every
step's like a bar of soap. Mind your size twelveses.
That old Bessie would beeswax the lawn to make the
birds slip.

WILLY NILLY

Morning, Mrs. Ogmore‐Pritchard.

MRS OGMORE‐PRITCHARD

Good morning, postman.

WILLY NILLY

Here's a letter for you with stamped and addressed
envelope enclosed, all the way from Builth Wells. A
gentleman wants to study birds and can he have
accommodation for two weeks and a bath vegetarian.

MRS OGMORE‐PRITCHARD

No.
WILLY NILLY (Persuasively)

You wouldn't know he was in the house, Mrs. Ogmore‐
Pritchard. He'd be out in the mornings at the bang of
dawn with his bag of breadcrumbs and his little
telescope ...

MRS OGMORE‐PRITCHARD

And come home at all hours covered with feathers. I
don't want persons in my nice clean rooms breathing all
over the chairs . . .

WILLY NILLY

Cross my heart, he won't breathe.

MRS OGMORE‐PRITCHARD

…and putting their feet on my carpets and
sneezing on my china and sleeping in my sheets . . .
61
WILLY NILLY

He only wants a single bed, Mrs. Ogmore‐Pritchard.
[Door slams]

CAPTAIN CAT (Softly)

And back she goes to the kitchen to polish the
potatoes.
(43‐4)

Mrs. Ogmore‐Pritchard, the widow, takes in borders, but she never lets any in
her house because she is afraid they will put things out of place or muss up her
rooms. Even her deceased husbands are not free of her punctilious nature:
FIRST VOICE
…Mrs. Ogmore‐Pritcard, at the first drop of the dusk‐
shower, seals all her sea‐view doors, draws the germ‐
free blinds, sits, erect as a dry dream on a high‐backed
hygienic chair and wills herself to cold, quick sleep. At
once, at twice, Mr. Ogmore and Mr. Pritchard, who all
dead day long have been gossiping like ghosts in the
woodshed, planning the loveless destruction of their
glass widow, reluctantly sign and sidle into her clean
house.

MR PRITCHARD

You first, Mr. Ogmore.

MR OGMORE

After you, Mr. Pritchard.

MR PRITCHARD

No, no, Mr. Ogmore. You widowed her first.

FIRST VOICE

And in through the keyhole, with tears where
their eyes once were, they ooze and grumble.
62
MRS OGMORE‐PRITCHARD

Husbands,

FIRST VOICE

she says in her sleep. There is acid love in her
voice for one of the two shambling phantoms. Mr.
Ogmore hopes that it is not for him. So does Mr.
Pritchard.

MRS OGMORE‐PRITCHARD

I love you both.

MR OGMORE (with terror)

Oh, Mrs. Ogmore.

MR PRITCHARD (with horror)

Oh, Mrs. Pritchard.

MRS OGMORE‐PRITCHARD

Soon it will be time to go to bed. Tell me your
tasks in order.

MR OGMORE & MR PRITCHARD

We must take our pyjamas from the drawer
marked pyjamas.
(84‐6)
This last scene of Mrs. Ogmore‐Pritchard keeping the ghosts of her deceased
husbands in her sense of order, completes her character’s actions from earlier in the
day and earlier in the play. Just as they are in the waking world, so the inhabitants
of Llareggub are in the land of their dreams. Just as they once were in life, so they
are in death, and in their dreams.
63
As a radio play, and as a poetic drama on the page, Under Milk Wood fairs
better than the script version of War Music. On the stage though, Under Milk Wood,
suffers from the same problem as Logue’s highly listenable (by this I mean the
listening of the reader’s own internal voice) War Music when it was attempted on
stage. Decisions must be made about what to “see”—that seeing being very much
divorced from a reader’s internal mechanism of “seeing” which plays quickly with
the words into images and just as quickly moves on to listen to and digest the next
group of words. Examining play reviews of Under Milk Wood over the last fifty
years, reveals a tendency to favor the play in the time period closely following
Thomas’ death, and gradually to critique the productions under their own merits,
which very depending on how intrusive the visual elements are. References are
made to Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, specifically to Act III, of Our Town, in which
deceased characters comment on the town, and on being dead. These references
frequently state the “less is more” quality of Our Town’s minimal staging, and how
productions of Under Milk Wood would benefit from this type of thinking.
The 1972 film production of Under Milk Wood, further brings home the point
of how being too visual with the text can break the text’s impact instead of
heightening it. Where Dylan Thomas assigns a melodious opening monologue to the
FIRST VOICE, the text reads:
…young girls lie bedded soft or glide in their dreams, with rings
and trousseaux, bridesmaided by glowing worms down the aisles of
organplaying wood. The boys are dreaming wicked or of the bucking
ranches of the night and the jollyrodgered sea. And the anthracite
statues of the horses sleep in the fields, and the cows in the byres, and
the dogs in the wet‐nosed yards, and the cats nap in the slant corners
of lope sly, streaking and needling, on the one cloud of the roofs. (1‐2)

64
Visually, the camera cuts from image to image, young girls asleep, young boys
asleep, horses in fields, cows in barns, cats on roofs, instead of employing perhaps a
slow pan of a village skyline coming into focus against the dawn, as the words work
on their own to be heard and enjoyed. Quickly cutting to a horse in a field, with the
words “anthracite statues of the horses sleep in the fields,” is like playing a child’s
flashcard identification game with the viewer, and it diminishes what the words can
do alone—the power of Thomas’ syntax and diction. In this respect, the 1972 film,
Under Milk Wood, and the 2009 production War Music, suffer from the same
diminishment of aural impact through visual device.
This again brings this inquiry to intimate estrangement and the nature of
forms to the forces that call them into being. In his book Collaborative Form; Studies
in the Relations of the Arts, Thomas Jensen Hines parses out a relationship between
what he defines as “collaborations” as opposed to what could more simply be
thought of as “primary form” that merely employs another form as one of its
constituent parts. According to Hines, in collaborations “the singular contributions
of the individual arts are less important than the part each plays in relation to the
others and to the whole. The key to understanding interactions between the arts is
the artists’ capacity to balance each art against the others….no single art becomes
the basis for comparison or contrast” (169). Hines puts collaborations and what he
calls “primary forms” in two different categories, the former having a greater
understanding of its parts, and the latter being immersed in one form and simply
using another as a prop or device. By Hines’ definition, plays like Wit, would be
primary forms that simply “use” poetry. This need to essential‐ize a binary “either
65
or” relationship to works resulting from the combining of different constituent
forms oversimplifies the complexity with which practitioners of different forms
view each other, and what can be learned from examining the process of
engagement in developing and producing works that contain different constituent
elements.
I believe it is more beneficial and intellectually more satisfying to pars the
ways in which artworks like Wit and Master Class view other forms contained
within, rather than dismissing them from an inquiry because they are not strictly
“collaborative,” therefore they can teach nothing about collaboration. On the
contrary, they can teach a great deal. If we understand how the forms included in
Wit and Master Class resonate with the dramatic arc, we can look for similar
moments of intimacy and estrangement in other works. War Music (the play), for all
its narrative claims to extensive workshop, did not work out something very
elemental, the degrees of intimacy and estrangement between the poetry text and
the play. The play copied (often times too much) and excised at will, caught
between reverence for the poetry and a need for dramatic drive. By emphasizing a
sameness with Logue’s work, War Music failed to emphasize how it was different.
At any rate, whether we categorize the resulting products as collaborations,
combinations, adaptations, derivations, primary forms, etc., what results does bear
out the amount of thought put into how the constituent parts of a work relate to the
whole of it, a process of thinking that is undertaken by the creator(s), whether
he/she(they) do so with full awareness or not. I prefer to return to my original
metaphor when attempting to discern what the thought process was that (or how
66
much thought) went into the finished product: images on transparencies, laid on top
of images on transparencies, all resting on top of other images, several layers deep.
If the entire thing viewed from above is a blurred jumble, then not much thought
was put into the relationship of each to the other, or to the whole. If there are
jutting incongruencies, then again, one wonders if the engagement in process fell
short. If something comes into focus from above and seems to project the presence
of awareness, of self‐definition, then a process of working out the relationship of
each to each and each to the whole was undertaken by the creator(s), and it is likely
that the degree of trueness to that discernable vision aligns with the degree of
engagement in the process. For Hines, these would be those oh‐so‐rare and
perfected collaborative forms. For the purpose of this extended inquiry, judging
perfection is not the point. Trying to understand the intimate estrangement of the
process is more useful than outlining a prescription for perfection.
The 2010 opera, Amelia, is interesting in this respect because it assigned
responsibility for its three different elements, the poetry(libretto), the music, and
the dramatic arc (the story), to three different individuals, and the opera itself
displays an ample amount of process behind its finished product. For Speight
Jenkins, general director of the Seattle Opera, that process began in 2002‐3 when he
and Stephen Wadsworth began individually listening to duplicate collections of over
thirty contemporary operas on compact discs and reviewing many more scores.
They each took notes independently of the other, then met nine months later to
discuss their results. They narrowed down the field to four composers, wrote
letters to each, and eventually decided to work with Daron Aric Hagen who wrote
67
back with six ideas for possible stories he’d like to explore in music. Jenkins
recounts:
So began a fascinating colloquy. We talked about everything from an
opera about Richard Nixon to one on global warming, civil rights, or
Native Americans. I honestly can't remember all the subjects, but I do
know that maybe because of being the opera company of Seattle,
where Boeing for so long has been located, the subject of flight kept
coming up. And finally, after a long time and many ideas that seemed
to be going nowhere, Daron said one day that he had an idea that dealt
with Vietnam and flying. I was immediately interested. At that point
the United States had been in Iraq for some two years or more, and
the Vietnam War seemed more pertinent than ever, though now
distant enough in time that it could be explored without controversy.
And though we believed that the Iraq War would be over by the time
of' the premiere, the subject of Vietnam would mean something to
everyone, whatever his or her political persuasion.
I have no recollection of what specific ideas he had, but we
pursued the conversation in several calls. Very soon he mentioned
that he had a good friend with whom he had worked previously at the
Yaddo artists' colony in upstate New York and who was an
exceptional poet. He said that she had a personal connection to
Vietnam because her father, a navy pilot, had been lost while training
for a second tour of duty there, and that she had written many poems
about him. Her name was Gardner McFall. He sent me several books
to read on the general subject‐the latest and most complete biography
of Amelia Earhart and several books on flying—but most important a
book of Gardner's poems, The Pilot's Daughter…
…I liked the idea. I thought that Daron had turned up the ideal
librettist, but how could I advise them? The two of them had to
discover how to tell the story of the little girl who had lost her father
and somehow figured out a way to live without him but still be with
him. Daron felt that the story should have links to ancient history, to
more modem history, and to the time of composition. I realized when
we started talking at length, in particular one day at his club on New
York's West Side, that we were embarking on an unusual course. Most
operas have a book, a play, a movie, or a myth as a source. An original
story, however, has served for some powerful operas –Aida and Die
Meistersinger, are two examples. So we were off but not exactly
running. Gardner had to get the ideas down on paper, and
they had to be what would stimulate Daron to write the music.
I began to receive interesting scenarios that involved not just
the basic story of the little girl who lost her father but also the story of
a mythic aviatrix and of Daedalus and Icarus, the father and son of
Greek mythology. Trying to escape with his son from the Labyrinth
68
on Crete, Daedalus devised wings that would enable them to flyaway.
Ignoring his father's warnings, however, Icarus flew too high and too
close to the sun. The heat melted the wax that held his wings together,
and they fell apart, causing him to crash to his death. Daron and
Gardner had lots of wonderful ideas, a fascinating scenario that
included much of what is in Amelia today, but I thought we needed
someone who had worked extensively in theater and was also a writer
to sort out what would work theatrically.
Since Stephen Wadsworth had previously worked with Daron
Hagen, and I had asked Stephen to direct the opera, it seemed logical
to call on Stephen. He immediately established rapport with Gardner
and reestablished his relationship with Daron. He loved Gardner’s
writing and began to work with the two of them on structuring the
book. It was he who believed that there had to a be a scene in
Vietnam, thus conceivable allowing us to produce the first American
opera with some of its text in Vietnamese. (McFall, xii‐xvi)

The resulting opera, Amelia, is not the retelling of Gardner McFall’s personal
story, as recounted in her book of poems. Wadsworth purposely shaped the
narrative so as to have the missing pilot’s plane go down over Vietnam, and not be
lost at sea, as McFall’s father was. Due to this restructuring, a scene where the
grown Amelia and her mother go to Vietnam after receiving information about the
missing father/husband plays out on stage and in song as two time sequences at
once. The mother and daughter in story time interacting with a Vietnamese couple,
and the father interacting with Viet Kong twenty years earlier as they threaten to
shoot the same couples’ little girl if the pilot will not give them information they
want. The little girl dies, and Dodge (the pilot), gives a photo of his daughter to the
couple, along with a letter for his family. In story time, the now aged couple hand
the photo to Amelia and her mother. The letter they burned long ago, because they
were angry.
The opera is structured in two acts, each with three scenes, and each of the
resulting six scenes has dual time lines, in the past and the present. Melinda
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Bargreen (staff writer for the Seattle Opera) gives a kitschy account in the program
notes, of Daric Aric Hagen’s method for composing with this structure:
Suspended in the solitary act of creation, the man gazes at the
wall where he has scrawled colorful swathes of yellow, blue, and
orange in an act of furious creation. Is he a painter, a graphic artist
perhaps? No, he’s a composer: Daron Aric Hagen, contemplating the
dramatic and musical arc of his forthcoming brand‐new opera, Amelia.
For Hagen, the very internal act of music composition can be partly
externalized by creating a mural‐like representation of the musical
and poetic themes of his opera‐in‐the‐works.
“Looking at the wall and dreaming on the entire act is as close
as I’m likely ever to get to understanding how a painter must feel
working on a mural, “Hagen explains. “A real sense of the palette of
ideas at hand is literally rendered in the colors arrayed the
storyboard.”
He retyped and reformatted the libretto, “storyboarded” it on
the wall, and illuminated it with colors: red for one character, blue for
another, orange for a third. Hagen did the same with the musical and
poetic themes and motives whose development he wanted to track.
The results may not fit our mental picture of the composer at work,
leaning over the piano and tossing drafts of manuscript paper hither
and thither.
Of course, Hagen still does plenty of work at the piano, putting
notes on paper as they stream into his mind. But in a complicated
opera like Amelia—whose mostly contemporary story includes
flashbacks in time to the Vietnam War, to the early days of aviation,
and even to the Greek myth of the flying Icarus—it helps to have a
visual layout showing how all this links together. (13)

Amelia, is not just The Pilot’s Daughter set to music, in fact it is far from it.
The libretto is inspired by McFall’s personal experience, but it leaves the particulars
of her story behind for more dramatic elements. Critics had both praise and some
complaints about the opera, but regardless of whether they were praising or
complaining, the word “original” kept coming up. Anthony Tomasini of The New
York Times described it as “earnest and original, if heavy‐handed and
melodramatic,” while Heidi Waleson of the Wall Street Journal stated:
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The centerpiece of the final scene of Amelia, the splendid opera
that was given its world premiere by the Seattle Opera on May 8, is an
orchestral depiction of labor and delivery, followed by a jubilant
chorale that celebrates the baby’s birth. It is only one of the elements
that make this work, by composer Daron Aric Hagen and librettist
Gardner McFall, both highly original and gripping…Ms. McFall’s multi‐
layered libretto never loses sight of its story, and Mr. Hagen’s restless,
questioning music, never loses its heart.

Whether one agrees with Waleson or with Tomasini, what is evident from
Amelia is that a great deal of thought went into the process of working out the
intimate estrangement, the relationship of the poetry, to the drama, and to the
opera. Dramatically, there is an arc that resolves by the end of the opera: the main
character reaches an epiphany through the delivery of her child, that life, like birth,
is inevitably painful, and superbly unstoppable. The poetry does not hijack the story
by being heavy‐handed with metaphor, yet it is not watered‐down. Hagen’s music is
complex, yet memorable, with themes that develop over the course of the scenes.
Melodies heard in the very first scene of act one where the young Amelia sings an
ode to the stars and the music swells and soars, resonate in the emotional lullaby
Dodge sings to his daughter, “Find comfort in the dream of stars,” and in the last
scene, the birth of Amelia’s daughter.
For those who study collaborative forms (like Thomas Jensen Hines), Amelia
is a true collaboration where there is no primary form, only a perfect melding. I’m
not going to argue for the perfection of melding. I prefer to think of Amelia’s success
as an engagement of each of the artists in the process of intimate estrangement.

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CHAPTER TWO REFERENCES

Bargreen, Melinda. Program notes. Amelia. Seattle Opera, 2010. Print.
Hines, Thomas Jensen. Collaborative Form: Studies in the Relations of the Arts. Ohio:
Kent State UP, 1991. Print.
Hurwitt, Robert. “Theater review: War Music.” SFGate.com. 3 April. 2009. Web. 15
April. 2009
Logue, Christopher. Cold Calls: War Music Continued. London: Faber & Faber, 2005.
Print.
Logue, Christopher. War Music. Chicago: U of Chicago Press, 2003. Print.
McFall, Gardner. Amelia: The Libretto. Seattle: U of Washington Press, 2009. Print.
McNally, Terrence. Introduction. 15 Short Plays. Lyme: Smith & Krauss, 1994. Print.
Perloff, Carey. Program notes. War Music. American Conservatory Theater, 2009.
Print.
Stark, Loni Kao. “’War Music’ at ACT: A Play Full of Dissonance.” Starkinsider.com.
9 April. 2009. Web.
Thomas, Dylan. Under Milk Wood: A Play for Voices. Chicago: New Directions. 1954.
Print.
Tomasini, Anthony. “A Woman’s Flights of Fantasy and Fear.” Rev. of Amelia by
Daron Eric Hagen, Gardner McFall & Stephen Wadsworth. Dir. Speight Jenkins. New
York Times. 9 May. 2010. Web. 10 May. 2010.
Under Milk Wood. Dir. Andrew Sinclair. Perf. Richard Burton, Peter O’Toole and
Elizabeth Taylor. Sundance Films, 2005. DVD.
Waleson, Heidi. “On So Many Levels, a Success.” Rev. of Amelia by Daron Eric Hagen,
Gardner McFall & Stephen Wadsworth. Dir. Speight Jenkins. The Wall Street Journal.
15 May. 2010. Web. 17 May. 2010.
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CHAPTER THREE:
CATAN’S IL POSTINO

I have a special relationship with the movie, Il Postino. On January 3, 1994, I
lost my home, my livelihood, and my husband of twelve years in the Northridge
Earthquake. Unable to restart our joint accounting practice because it reminded me
too acutely of what I’d lost, I went back to school to get a degree in psychology and
perhaps start a new life helping people heal their psyches. The psyche I most
wanted to heal was my own. In my second‐to‐last year, I took a literature class with
the poet, Dorothy Barresi. She assigned weekly journal entries, and I started getting
my assignments back with hash marks in the paragraphs. I asked her what these
were, and she said, “line breaks.”
I didn’t become a poet overnight. I worked hard, timidly sent work out,
applied for graduate school, but when I was accepted for graduate study, I was
hooked.   After Il Postino won an Oscar, I sat in a dollar theater infatuated with the
story that revolved around poetry. I noted the name of the novel and the author.
My passion for my newly‐found calling was inflamed when the character of the shy
postman asked the great poet, Pablo Neruda: “Do you think the whole world is a
metaphor for something?”
This question resonated with my first experience of opera with my
grandfather. I had learned from him that opera was an opportunity to learn about
people, to see characters in a state of intensified emotion, and to examine human
behavior through the guise of the musical world. Opera could be a metaphor.
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In his book, Metaphysical Song, Gary Tomlinson, describes the fundamental
appeal of opera as the ability of sung words to transport listeners to a state of
“fascination,” which he identifies with extravagance, hyper‐reality and irrationality.
The key element, for Tomlinson, is a voice in a state of “heightened utterance”:
“voice connects its bearers and hearers to ordinarily supersensible realities” (88).
That quickening I felt during my first opera, and many operas since, I felt again
when watching the movie, Il Postino. When I discovered in 2009 that the Los
Angeles Opera had commissioned an opera of Il Postino, I was rife with questions.
Which Il Postino, the book, or the movie? How would the libretto be written? Who
would write it? I was still reeling from the Los Angeles Opera production of The Fly,
a serious misstep for the company. After most of the audience disappeared at the
intermission of the opening performance, I had gleaned through the program,
hoping to gain insight into the question on everyone’s mind, “What were they
thinking?” When I found this quote by the director of the film the opera was
adapted from, David Cronenberg: “I wanted The Fly to be like other operas: drama
set to music” (58), I cringed.   Oh dear. Not the heightened sense of reality, the
grand consort of words and music and dramatic action, but merely the “setting” of a
drama to music.
In his notes on Amelia, Speight Jenkins, General Director of The Seattle Opera,
alluded to this idea of music as accompaniment, but not as true partner or
empowered other in contemporary opera:
There is another problem in the creation of an opera, one that didn't
seem to effect many composers in the nineteenth century…. I mean
music that only accompanies words and is actually less important.
This can happen whether the opera comes from a play or a book; gray
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music inevitably causes the work to languish seriously. All the money
in the world spent for its production and the finest possible singing
actors cannot save a piece in which the music does not become
memorable. Indeed, the worst possible feeling for an audience
member is the sense that the music gets in the way of an interesting
story. [ ] The glory of opera is the power of music to enrich words, to
give them more than one meaning, or at least intensified meaning. An
opera that simply sets the text of a play to music wastes money and
time.   (McFall, x)

The Fly, for those who saw it, was like sitting through the 1986 movie being
sung (which meant it was longer, so most of the audience left at the intermission).
David Henry Hwang
1
was hired to add poetic lines to the dialogue, but either his
lines were not fresh (at one point the female lead actually utters this cliché to a
detective: “Be afraid, be very afraid”), or they were so bizarre and out of place with
the rest of the dialogue they were like being jabbed in the ear: “The New Flesh has
come!” Yes it had, and it was cheesy, cheesy, cheesy.
With all this history of anticipation and disappointment, I contacted the
announced composer of Il Postino, Daniel Catán. I was familiar with Catán’s other
operas and his body of work, of his investment in producing works in Spanish, and
with his affinity for Latin American literature. He was very forthcoming and eager
to talk about the production.
2

Il Postino, the opera, was originally aiming for inclusion in the 2009‐2010
season for Los Angeles Opera, but was postponed until 2010‐2011. In fact, it was
the opening opera for the 2010‐2011 season.   There are many reasons and
speculations about why Il Postino was delayed.   Daniel Catán had been writing a
major role into the opera for the character of Pablo Neruda (to be sung by Placido
Domingo), much larger (with much more stage time) than the role Neruda has in the
75
novel, or in the movie adaptation of Il Postino. Placido Domingo was already looking
toward the future and the negotiation of his contract renewal as creative director of
the Los Angeles Opera. With the 2008‐2009 season being marred by the operatic
adaptation of the science‐fiction movie, The Fly, further movie‐to‐opera projects
might have been a hard selling‐point, but Il Postino benefited from originally being a
novel, and not just any novel, but a novel about the power of poetry. Another
possible reason for the delay might have been the planned production of Wagner’s
ring trilogy for the 2009‐2010 season, a sort of appeasement to the opera’s fan‐base
for subjecting them to The Fly (whose audiences tended to empty at intermission for
every performance).
With the production costs from two previous seasons of extravagant and
technically demanding staging dragging on the company, Il Postino opened in
September of 2010 with a much more pared‐down stage which utilized filmed
backdrops to set the tone of political upheavals, a libretto which followed the film
much closer than the novel (it was even set in Italy, the location of the movie,
whereas the novel is set in Chili), and music very reminiscent of Puccini (which is to
say it was very mellifluous and not overly‐demanding on its listeners). Domingo
announced the same month he was staying at Los Angeles Opera through 2013.
3

It was clear to me when I saw the opera that some different intentions played
out in the score, different from when Catán was writing the opera. I based these
observations on conversations we had during 2008‐2009, and I planned a follow‐up
with Catán in early 2011, after Il Postino’s première, and after he’d left Los Angeles
to go work on his next planned project in Austin. That follow‐up conversation never
76
happened. On April 9, 2011, the composer, Daniel Catán, died in his sleep. His last
opera, Meet John Doe, a departure from his previous works which all had Spanish
language titles and libretti in Spanish, remains uncompleted.
Of Placido Domingo’s role in the creation of Il Postino, Catan said the
following:
Before Placido jumped into the cast—curiously enough—he’d been
asking me to think of a suitable libretto or opera for him to sing, and I
just couldn’t. And I ended up deciding on Il Postino and because of the
cast I had in mind, the allocation of voices, I thought that there was no
role for him. Originally I had conceived Neruda as a baritone, so it’s
only when he suggested that he wanted to do Neruda as a tenor, I
thought “that’s not a bad idea,” then I started rethinking the role as a
tenor role. And then I thought the opera benefited from that change,
because of the imagery or similarity, the analogies between the two
poets Mario, the young boy and Neruda, could be better handled if two
voices were together. And then as Placido started looking at the part,
and suggested a few extra scenes or moments, I started rehearsing
with him. I modified the part to fit his voice, to take advantage of the
strengths in his voice. So, it’s been a really wonderful collaboration
for me. I know his voice so well now, that the last aria I did for him, he
asked me to add a new scene. I wrote it absolutely with a lot of
confidence, knowing exactly what his strengths were, and he was
amazed that it fitted him so well. He was delighted. I was delighted
too.

One of the scenes/arias added for Placido Domingo (as Pablo Neruda) was
the first aria of the opera, where Neruda sings a love song to his wife, Matilda. In
terms of the opera stage, it’s quite a racy scene. Matilda (Cristina Gallardo‐Domâs)
sits on a tabletop, her back to the audience. Neruda faces her and the audience, and
as he sings, he disrobes her to the waist. The aria he sings to her is based on a
Neruda love poem:
Naked, you are as
Simple as your hand,
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Smooth, earthy, minimal,
Round, transparent,
You have lines of moonlight, paths of apple,
Naked you are like slender naked wheat.
(1.2.7)
In the movie and the book, this scene never happens. In the book by Antonio
Skármeta, the mother of the girl the postman has romantic aims toward visits Pablo
Neruda at his abode to hand him a poem copied on a piece of paper as an indictment
that Mario’s intentions toward her daughter are indecent:
Naked, you are as simple as one of your hands,
smooth, terrestrial, tiny, round, transparent,
you have moon‐lines, apple paths.
Naked you are blue like a Cuban night,
there are vines and stars in your hair.
Naked you are enormous and yellow
like summer in a gilded church. (49)

Catán’s opera removes what is needed from the Neruda poem to make an
aria for Placido Domingo (as Neruda), but, in the movie, and the novel, even though
this poem is written and published by Neruda, he does not speak it to his wife. In
essence, Mario speaks it on paper as part of his seduction plan to win Beatrice. This
is not to say that there are no scenes of affection between Neruda and his wife
Matilde in the novel or the movie. In the movie, Mario accidentally witnesses a
passionate kiss between Neruda and his wife, but in the opera that voyeurism is
expanded greatly.
On the whole, Il Postino (the opera) follows Il Postino (the movie) more
closely than it follows the Skármeta novel. Oddly enough, when trying to explain
78
how he chooses a subject or idea to work with, Catán made the comparison of
reading movie scripts:
To the layman, a film script is very difficult to tell whether it’s a
good one or not. It really needs a film director to see it and say,
“Yes, I can make a good film out of this or I would need certain
changes.” The person that ideally should give or make that
decision [for a libretto] is the composer, but since there are so
few librettists that know their craft, really the composer is the
person that should direct the librettist or the writer as to give
him some guidelines as to how to tackle it and what kind of
thing he needs and what kind of thing he wants….I’m looking at
a new spectacle that will have its own dramatic arc and will
follow the laws of music. It will follow that. I believe that
opera combines all of those elements and they are strongly
present all the time and they cannot be ignored, because they
can make an opera collapse. Nevertheless, the guiding thread
and the guiding force must be music. If the music is not there,
no matter how strong the other elements are, the opera will
not succeed.
It is a musical spectacle. It involves other elements but
the music is the driving force. If the music is just
accompanying or trailing behind the drama then it fails to do
what its supposed to do.   So I think that whether he intends it
or not, it is the musician that needs to draw the arcs and be
aware of them and work towards them, even if unconsciously.
If it’s the sustenance of vowels or the delivery of a text in sing‐
song form, then it’s a disaster because it is not the right way to
deliver a text. That’s not what an opera is doing.

Daniel Catán, Speight Jenkins, and even the poet Dana Gioia (who is also an
active librettist) state that music has more of a primary role in an opera, Gioia even
going so far as to infer that drama and poetry “pull back” in a sense, to let the music
operate:
A verse libretto must work simultaneously as poetry and
drama. The language itself must be memorable and expressive, but
good words aren't enough. The libretto must create arresting
characters and powerful situations that propel the action. Otherwise
it is a failure. The great challenge is finding the right balance. The
words must be emotionally direct and evocative but also
extraordinarily concise. They must be richly poetic but not too dense
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or complex. The text must give the composer enough room to let the
music take charge. The biggest difference between a poem and a
libretto, however, is its essentially collaborative nature. A libretto
doesn't exist to be judged on its own literary quality. It exists to
inspire a composer to create a compelling musical drama. The libretto
ultimately justifies itself as the departure point for a collaborative
work in which the poet is a minority partner. (Vance‐Watkins)

In regards to Il Postino and being his own librettist, Catán further elaborated
how the words and their meaning were give voice in the music, particularly in the
lead character, the postman himself:
What I attempted to do with Mario is to have him go from somebody
that is very shy and awkward at delivering his thoughts, cannot put
his thoughts together verbally very coherently, to somebody in the
end who can sing like a god. So just as he learns about himself and
about life and about poetry and so on, you can see that translated into
the art of singing: he learns how to sing by the end of the opera. He
goes from somebody that stutters, cannot put thoughts together at all,
does it awkwardly (presented with some charm), to somebody that
can do a melodic line like the best Puccini….Just as a poet is born at
the end, a great singer is born at the end. Of course that great singer is
seen in some ways throughout, but it is very obvious at the end. Now
that aspect doesn’t appear in the film; this can only be done in the
opera.

Even with the added aspect of Mario finding his poetic voice and his tenor
voice by the end of the opera, Il Postino, the opera, follows Il Postino, the movie,
pretty closely (more than it follows the novel). Perhaps this was done for
expediency’s sake since the movie script already attempted to extract a dramatic arc
from the novel’s contents, but it is unfair of me to assume that without Catán’s
confirmation. The opera, as Daniel Catán predicted, climaxes when Mario Ruoppolo,
Italian fisherman who cannot fish because of seasickness (in the novel he is Mario
Jiménez, Chilean), finds his true voice, which finally soars to the heights and beyond
of Pablo Neruda’s voice (Placido Domingo’s). This “maturing” happens near the end
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of the opera, being its climactic moment, so Neruda’s arias outnumber Mario’s, who
must start out as less than Neruda and finally outpace him in a brilliant epiphany
moment. The character of Mario makes it to the end of the opera only as a voice, as
in the movie, because he is killed at a political protest for which he was selected to
read a poem, but a recording he made for Neruda survives. Neruda has left the
Italian island where this took place and finds out about Mario’s demise at the end of
the opera, and so has the final word, but not the final note, on Mario’s maturity.
In the movie, that maturity is linked with the development of a poetic voice
and with the recognition of the power of metaphor and its important to poetry. In
the novel, the movie and the opera, metaphors are dangerous when the come from
the mouth of a man addressing a woman (from the novel):
Her mother stood up and crossed the palms of her hands over
her chest as if they were the blades of a guillotine.
“My dear, tell me no more. We are in the thick of a very
dangerous situation. All men who first touch with words go much
further afterwards with their hands.”
“How could words be bad?” Beatriz said, hugging the pillow.
“There isn’t a drug in the world worse than all that blah‐blah‐
blah‐blah. It makes a village innkeeper feel like a Venetian princess.
Later, when the moment of truth arrives, when life catches up with
you, you’ll realize that those words are no better than a bad check. I
would much rather have a drunkard in the bar grab you ass than have
someone tell you that your smile flies higher than a butterfly….You
have the kind of fever, my child, that can only be cured in two ways: a
good beating or a little trip.” She let go of the girl’s ear pulled a
suitcase out from under the bed, and threw it on the mattress. “Start
packing!” (35)

In the movie, as well as in the opera, sending Beatrice packing is not
discussed, but the discovery of the “metaphors” Mario has been telling Beatrice by
her mother, Donna Rosa, is important because of the danger Donna Rosa believes
Beatrice is in, and because it represents Mario’s attempts at finding his poetic voice
81
in the world, which in the opera is quite literally about Mario, the charming
stutterer, finding his voice. In the novel, the danger of this encounter is
countenanced in the reaction of Beatriz’s mother, which is not as short as it is in the
movie, nor the opera. In the novel, the mother is no stranger to Neruda’s poems, has
even copied one into her own journal when she was her daughter’s age, but her
perspective is informed by a life of the daily torment of regret, a pain she wants to
spare her daughter from. Poetry and its dangers are discussed at more length than
in the movie or the opera. In the movie, this discussion is shortened and the danger
is reduced to the discovery of something potentially naughty, which might bring an
unwanted pregnancy, but the daily heartbreak of being a single mother, of daily
pining for the loss of the beloved, is reduced, and the mother is also reduced to a
person outside of the world of poetry, indeed, a person who is suspicious of what
she does not understand. In the novel, she understands very well.
The opera again, takes its cues in this regard from the movie. Donna Rosa is
a “character,” an archetype, the on‐guard mother protecting her daughter’s virginity.
In the opera, she is a brief moment highlighting Mario’s development. Even Mario’s
father gets an aria in the opera and is expanded from his presence in the movie,
while Beatrice’s mother isn’t even listed as a character because she has no major
pieces to sing. In the novel, she is a character in her own right, having a lifetime of
experience informing her words. She understands danger, even it’s most subtle and
nuanced forms. In this respect, the dramatic arc of the novel is laid upon the
slithering dark shadow of danger always lurking just beyond the light of perception.
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This dramatic element of danger, pushes the climax of the story toward danger’s
revelation.
In the novel, this climax occurs in a hospital room. Neruda has returned to
die in a hospital in Isle Negra (which is a town in Chili, not an island), and Mario has
read the poet’s mail, even memorized it, before it can be confiscated and destroyed
by the new regime. Mario goes to the hospital to recite the mail to Neruda, and
Neruda dies in his arms. Mario is then ushered into a black car outside the hospital,
and we know his end is near. In Mario’s final scene with Neruda, he holds delirious
poet in his arms, and begs him not to die:
…He [Neruda] did not even know he was reciting it, but
Mario heard it as the poet opened the window and the wind
tore through the shadows:

I return to the sea wrapped in the sky,
The silence between one wave and the next
Creates a dangerous suspense,
Life dies, the blood rests
Until a new movement breaks
And the voice of infinity resounds.

Mario hugged the poet from behind, and lifting his hands to
cover his hallucinating eyes, said, “Don’t die, poet.” (106)

In the novel, Mario is not only begging Neruda not to die, but he is begging
poetry itself—a character so present in the novel as the light imbued warrior
against the skulking darkness of evil—not to die. In the novel, Neruda dies before
Mario, but they are both tragic heroes in an eternal fight, and they both are finally
consumed by shadow; Neruda by hallucinations, and Mario is last seen entering the
bowels of a black car. Most of the drama is used in service of illuminating poetry’s
power in contrast to this evil darkness.
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In the movie, and the opera, Mario dies before Neruda, and Neruda gives us
the final summation of the dramatic arc. In the movie, poetry could not save Mario,
in fact it might have contributed to his demise. Mario finds his final triumph and
lives again through a sound recording he made for Neruda, which Beatrice didn’t
have the heart to part with, so she plays it for Neruda upon his return to the Italian
island, many years later. The last voice is Mario, but it is a disembodied voice, a
voice that realized its power, but could not hold onto it. Poetry also does not save
Mario in the novel; in fact, it distinguishes him as a troublemaker, someone to be
gotten rid of by the regime. The ending of the movie and the novel are bittersweet, a
throwback to the romantic era where the sublime is more important than the
triumphant.
The original title of the Skármeta novel was Ardiente Paciencia (burning
patience), but it since has been translated into many languages and changed into the
same title as the movie, Il Postino. As Burning Patience the novel, fevers play an
important literary element. The fever of passion, both the passion of sexual desire
and the passion of desire for political freedom, are a threat to the physical survival
of the body. The poetry of the novel serves to heighten the tension of these dual
threats to the body’s physical existence.
This element is different in the film and the opera. In the film and the opera,
the dramatic arc tracks the development of self‐expression, of poetry itself, linked to
voice. Sexual desire and the desire for political freedom are threats to the emotional
survival of the self. The body must die in order for the psyche to transcend the
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physical world. Transcendence, the old romantic ideal of a sublime truth, is sought
after and achieved through the dramatic arc of the movie and the opera.
Catán noted that it was allure of sublime elements, particularly in regards to
characters, that attracted him to stories for operas:
I like opera’s that have a lot to do with the characters as opposed to a
concept. Wagner’s operas have a concept that drives them; good or
evil, or sin or redemption, or whatever it is. We could talk about
Verdi’s operas as being character driven. Now, if they are character
driven, it doesn’t mean there’s no concept behind them, but you get to
that concept—to love or jealousy or whatever it is—through the
characters as opposed to the concept being more of a presence like it
happens in Wagner. I’m more the Verdi type, so when I choose an
opera or a plot or a story, I choose it because I’m attracted to the
characters and I can see those characters delivering their thoughts in
music. And when I see that, when I first encounter those characters, I
encounter them in another medium that doesn’t make them do that.
So then I feel this would make a great character in an opera, in an
operatic stage, because those thoughts or those emotions are the right
ones to be delivered in music. That’s my first requirement. Then, the
story has to be interestingly designed so that it sustains our show, and
then the dramatic arc and all of the plot has to be well‐designed so
that it holds. I think that the first thing that attracts me though, is the
character.

Catán found his engagement with intimate estrangement first in the
character, in the allure of what that character could do in an opera, the dramatic
possibilities that lead to the musical opportunities. His rejection of Wagner
resonates with Richard Strauss’ attempt in Capriccio to present a dialogue, a
conversation, a debate, rather than to deliver dogma. The conductor Arturo
Toscanini once commented during a rehearsal of Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde, “If
they were Italians they would already have seven children. But see, they’re
Germans. They’re still talking it over” (Greenberg). Catán was not interested in
delivering a message, but in exploring through the combination of words, music, and
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drama.
This is not to say that Daniel Catán was not interested in the operatic canon.
He did express to me an agenda regarding Spanish‐language opera:
I certainly want to inaugurate what I call Opera in Spanish, because the
history of Spanish opera is kind of a bad one. It’s sad, because it never
really took off (for one reason or another, historical coincidences, and
the theatres were not there).
Opera started off in Italy and it soon took off in France and in
Germany. It took much longer to reach Russia. Eventually it ended up
in England too. (Although that was also much later; it started early
then paused and then really didn’t rekindle until the

twentieth‐
century.) But, operas in Spanish never really thrived. There were one
or two composers who managed to produce works, but that was it.
So, my personal ambition is to start a series of works that will be—call
it “the core”— but at least to start the repertory, and then to tempt
other composers to write more in Spanish and turn it into a school of
opera with its own characteristics and its own point of view.
It’s difficult to enumerate all the characteristics of a Spanish
opera as opposed to an Italian opera.   Some people think that opera in
Spanish is basically the same thing [as opera in other languages], just
sung in Spanish, but it’s much beyond that. For example, if you have a
French film, but you translate it into English, it remains a French film
translated into English: it doesn’t become an English film. Or a
Hollywood film translated into French doesn’t become a French
movie: its still a Hollywood movie. So there’s something deeper, and
what it means is that film operates within a culture, regardless of
what language is being spoken. An opera in a certain language, a
French opera or a German opera, recreates that world where German
culture takes place. It’s part of that culture.
I turn to a lot of Latin American novels, sometimes even
reading them in English, because they are very Latin American in the
way they look at the world.   I’m confident that by doing that, I am
recreating that piece of the world. I do want to inaugurate the idea of
opera in Spanish, and within that the whole Spanish culture as a vast
and very rich culture. It partly encompasses Spain and Latin America
in a really wonderful body of works, and it’s a culture that’s been with
us for centuries. It’s not a new thing. So that’s my personal ambition.
It has been forever. I’ve always wanted to create that new genre of
opera in Spanish.

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Whether or not Catán’s five finished operas (Encuentro en el Ocaso (1980);
La hija de Rappaccini (1991); Florencia en el Amazonas (1996); Salsipuedes, a Tale of
Love, War, and Anchovies (2004); and Il Postino (2010), will comprise or be the
beginning of the “the core,” of a Spanish language opera repertoire for the twentieth
century, only time will tell. At the moment, his works stand as the only substantial
contemporary oeuvre for Spanish language opera. Like Puccini, whom Catán’s
works are frequently compared to for their melodic ease (a comparison he was
aware of), he left his final opera unfinished, but unlike Puccini, it does not appear
that this final work is important enough to those in the opera world, when
compared to his other works, to be completed posthumously by another composer.
Currently, Placido Domingo is championing the performance of Il Postino at the
major opera venues around the globe, taking its production and performance to
New York, Paris, and beyond. The Los Angeles premiere was recorded and is slated
to appear on the public television program, Great Performances in late 2011.

A Final Glance
The many versions of Il Postino move (I’m remiss at this point to say
“translate”) the story of a Chilean poet and Chilean postman in Chili and written in
Spanish, into the story of a Chilean poet and an Italian postman in Italy, told in
Italian, into the story of a Chilean poet and an Italian postman, sung in Spanish. In
an odd way, the opera comes full circle. Catán took from all the materials what
would best serve his Spanish language opera. The music gets criticized by some as
being “too Puccini,” because it does not make demands on the listener in the way a
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John Adams opera in English might. The score is very wed to the vowels and the
cadences of Spanish. However, if we understand “a work of art is a form that
articulates forces, making them intelligible” (Davenport), considering the force of
Catáns desire for a Spanish opera movement, the music of his opera, Il Postino,
attempts to capture not only the mellifluous vowels of Spanish, but the open
heartbreak of those vowels when they cry out in Act II, scene 7: “Chile, la sangre de
tus hijos nuevamente derramada!” (“Chile, the blood of your children once again has
been spilt!“)
In the first interview I had with Daniel Catán, he expressed an awareness of
having a Spanish language opera do musically what was innate to the Spanish
language, and having the libretto serve that music, so, he expressed an
understanding of the linked nature of the music and the words, how the creation of
each relied on the abilities of the other. He was not interested in “translating” an
English concept (either conceived in the English language or English culture), into
the Spanish language.   I can say he was interested in exploring the intimate
estrangement of poetry, drama and opera, because he exhibited a willingness to
undergo the processes of inquiry and praxis, of questioning and experimenting with
“given temporally defined conventions” (Nochlin).
Talking with Daniel Catán brought home to me one of my earlier musings
about the affect of time on culture and the human experience. We are finite beings
bound by time, caught in the never‐ending sequence of one moment following the
next.   The parenthetical moments of birth and death mark each life as a subset
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against the unstoppable myriad of humanity, in the same way that experiencing a
work of art is experiencing a subset (another set of parentheses within the larger
parentheses of our existence), a subset that either gives added meaning to the
larger set, or is a diversion from it. We are caught in the movement of intimate
estrangement, of trying to define by separating, but the parts are always included in
the whole. Our personal identity politics resonates with the identity politics of
poetry, drama and opera, because we too operate between poles of intimacy and
estrangement in our striving for self‐definition.
Here, my inquiry ends, with one final excerpt, a small, parenthetical moment
which appears in all three versions of Il Postino, in nearly identical words. Mario
attempts to explain his engagement with a poem Pablo Neruda has just recited to
him. I cite it here from the first source, the novel. Mario speaks and Don Pablo
replies:
“How can I explain it to you? When you recited that poem, the
words went from over there to over here.”
“Like the sea, then!”
“Yes, they moved just like the sea.”
“That’s the rhythm.”
“And I felt weird because with all that movement, I got dizzy.”
“You got dizzy?”
“Of course. I was like a boat tossing upon your words.”
The poet’s eyelids rose slowly.
“Like a boat tossing on my words.”
“Uh‐huh.”
“You know what you just did, Mario?”
“No, what?”
“You invented a metaphor.”
“But it doesn’t count, ‘cause it just came out by accident.”
“All images are accidents, my son.”
Mario placed his hand over his heart in an attempt to calm the
wild palpitations. He was sure his chest would burst open right there.
But he pulled himself together and with one impertinent finger
shaking just inches away from his emeritus client’s nose said, “Do you
89
think that everything in the world, I mean everything, the wind, the
ocean, trees, mountains, fire, animals, houses, deserts, the rain…”
“Now you can say ‘etcetera.’”
“…all the etceteras. Do you think the whole world is a
metaphor for something?” (12‐3)

This is the resonating moment, the heuristic of intimate estrangement
embodied in the words of the novel, the dialogue of the movie, and the duet of opera.
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CHAPTER THREE ENDNOTES

1. Henry David Hwang is a Pulitzer‐Prize nominated playwright. His play, M.
Butterfly, won a Tony Award and was adapted for film.

2. I first met Daniel Catán in mid‐December of 2008. I had been a fan of his
work for some time, and our meeting was fortuitous. He was teaching at
College of the Canyons in Valencia, California. Catán was gracious enough to
let me interview him at Nicole’s Restaurant in Pasadena. He had told his
students that he was developing a new opera based on the Antonia Skármeta
novel, Il Postino, for Los Angeles Opera, and being that I was researching the
relationship of opera, drama, and poetry, I felt fortunate to be able to talk to
him while he was still writing the opera. In fact, having the opportunity to
talk with Catán lead me to a further examination of my own interests, which
lead to this, the continuation and writing of my own project. We talked again
in 2009, before the opera premiered. I had planned to speak with him again,
but fate intervened.

3. It might have been awkward to be saying farewell to the star of one of the
company’s current productions, or Domingo might not have been ready to
use Il Postino as his farewell piece to his Los Angeles fans. Whether he was
banking on Il Postino to help save the company or his own reputation, or
whether the company was banking on it, remains a closed‐door topic.

91

CHAPTER THREE REFERENCES

Catán, Daniel. Il Postino: Opera in Three Acts. Milwaukee: Associated Music
Publishers, 2010. Print.
Davenport, Guy. The Geography of Imagination. San Francisco: North Point Press,
1981. Print.
The Fly. Program Notes.   Los Angeles Opera, September 2008
Greenberg, Robert. How to Listen to and Understand Opera. The Great Courses,
2007. DVD.
‐ Lecture 27: “Tristan and Isolde”
Il Postino. Dir. Michael Radford. Perf. Massimo Troisi, Philippe Noiret and Maria
Grazia Cucinotta. Miramax, 2000. DVD.
McFall, Gardner. Amelia: The Libretto. Seattle: U of Washington Press, 2009. Print.
Tomlinson, Gary. Metaphysical Song. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999.
Print.
Vance‐Watkins, Lequita. “On Writing Nosferatu and the Role of the Poet as
Librettist.” Danagioia.net. Web. 9 March. 2009.
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CHAPTER FOUR:
TIES TO MY CREATIVE WORK

With all the time I’ve spent talking with poets, composers and dramaturges, I
am aware that if there is music at some point to Zéphyrine, it will in all likelihood
depart from the text, since I am not working with a composer, but in the hopes of
someday attracting one to the story. With this in mind, I attempted to leave the text
open in places so that the music could find its way in.
The place where I might have over directed is in the “duet” between
Zéphyrine and Axelle, where they are both running through the apple orchard from
opposite ends to warn each other, and they finally meet in the middle. My hope is
that if there is a composer willing to take this on someday, that he/she too be
inspired by the sense of urgency each character feels for the other, by the sense of
similarity in their desire to save a friend, by the tension of travelling toward that
goal, and that the moment does inspire some memorable music. As a poet first
putting pen to paper without direction from a composer, I hope for that.
I did pay attention to the dramatic arc, and to a transition in the two main
characters from the beginning of the play to the end. The dramatic arc traces the
relationship between two best friends, Axelle, and Zéphyrine. Zéphyrine must
recognize that her indulgence in grief has put her on an island, and by the time she is
ready to come off it, she has to do so by making a large sacrifice for her friend,
Axelle. Through Axelle we recognize the tension of patriarchy on the relationships
of women, and in her final scene with her husband, where she notes the two male
witch hunters got what they wanted, but were ultimately consumed by the same
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drive for possession they used to consume Zéphyrine, there is an uneasy recognition
of the power of men, even the power of her husband.

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CHAPTER FIVE: ZÉPHYRINE
SYNOPSIS
Setting: The story takes place in the French farmlands, in the early 1600s, near the
end of the witch‐hunting craze of the Early Modern period in Europe. Zéphyrine, the
widow, possesses an abundance of land and livestock, while her neighbor, Claude,
struggles to support his family of nine children. Claude is married to Zéphyrine’s
childhood friend, Axelle.
Act I: Opens at Zéphyrine’s apple farm. Axelle has come to check on her widowed
friend, and more importantly, to seek help in ending an unwanted tenth pregnancy.
Zéphyrine does not have an answer for this dilemma and Axelle departs, but not
before Zephyrine’s orchard ladder has been sabotaged by Axelle’s two middle boys,
a scheme Axelle was not aware of. Zéphyrine climbs the ladder to feed a nest of
abandoned baby birds she has been tending since her husband’s death—her main
solace. The ladder slips and she falls, but her dress is caught on a tree branch so her
fall is not serious. Two witch‐hunters, Toussaint and Côme observe both the
sabotage and her fall, but they do not run to her aid. Instead, after she goes inside,
they come calling to find the farm wife at home, and discover she is a widow. They
also depart, after hatching a scheme to seize Zéphyrine’s lands by accusing her of
witchcraft.
Act II: After returning home, Axelle learns that her husband, Claude, has put her two
boys up to a scheme to sabotage Zéphyrine’s orchard ladder, and she leaves quickly
to go and warn her friend. Before she leaves, Claude admonishes his wife for being
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more concerned about the welfare of her friend than that of her family. Toussaint
and Côme arrive at Claude’s farm and conspire with him to accuse Zéphyrine of
witchcraft, then split the profits—her confiscated lands. They inform him that she
survived a fall from a ladder, a ladder sabotaged by his two boys, so he is more than
willing to cooperate. They carry with them a copy of The Malleus Maleficarum, the
infamous witch‐hunting manual, and plan to use an account from the text of a witch
who kept “a nest of male members in a tree” to prove that Zéphyrine has an
unnatural and unholy habit.   They set to ensnare Zéphyrine by using her own grief‐
driven habit of caring for an abandoned nest of baby birds as evidence of her
enchanting powers.
Act III: Zéphyrine runs to warn her friend about the presence of witch‐hunters in
the valley and the need for Axelle not to tell anyone else that she wants to end a
pregnancy, lest she be accused of some dark deed. Axelle is running to tell
Zéphyrine of the doomed ladder. This scene is a duet of sentiments as both
Zéphyrine and Axelle move toward each other, culminating when they meet in the
middle of the orchard and embrace. Safely back inside Zéphyrine’s house,
Zéphyrine decides to help Axelle by giving Claude more land so he can sustain his
family. The decision comes too late though, as she looks through the window and
sees a mob descending on her farm, lead by the witch‐hunters. She asks Axelle to
retrieve a bible from under the bed, and knocks her friend out cold with a blow to
the back of the head, so that Axelle will not also be taken by the mob. Zéphyrine is
seized by the mob, and gives a moving gallows speech. In the last scene, Axelle and
Claude are living on Zéphyrine’s farm, and Axelle comments on the mysterious
96
disappearance of the witch‐hunters after Zéphrine’s death, to which Claude replies
that a man’s mind “is ever on his den.”
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DRAMATIS PERSONAE
Zéphyrine The widow
Claude Owner of the adjacent farm, head of a family of nine children
Axelle Claude’s wife and Zéphyrine’s childhood friend
Toussaint Itinerant witch‐hunter
Côme Toussaint’s companion and an ex‐con
Twin boys Two of Axelle and Claude’s nine children
(they speak in unison)
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ZÉPHYRINE

ACT I

Scene 1

SETTING: Early1600’s France, a farm village. Upstage, flats
dotted with trees denote an orchard and hillsides
surrounding a small valley. Downstage left a tree
with a ladder leaning against a branch which
bears a nest. Downstage right, façade of a stone
house with a straw roof, a peasant’s dwelling,
cutaway to reveal one room, a hearth, a table, a
cot, nearly bare shelves, a rag rug, two women.
The wall with the front door and a window are
near center stage, facing the tree.

AT RISE: Zéphyrine the widow pulls a black kettle from
the hearth and prepares tea for the visiting
Axelle, wife of the neighboring farmer.

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AXELLE
I thought of you yesterday
when the sky beat the ground
with silver ropes of rain.
I was caught when the sky tore its seams
and I thought for sure a fury
lashed my shoulders like a bandit.
The rain beat so hard it ripped
the skinny tunics from my middle two boys.
I had to clothe them in flour sacks.
How then have you fared,
all these month alone
through winter’s blanket and these pounding rains?

ZÉPHYRINE
We are women.
It’s the things that need us
that keep us going,
the mouths to feed and the sewing,
until we are threadbare in spirit
like worn tunics ourselves.

100
(Axelle looks around at the empty room, and the empty cot.)

ZÉPHYRINE(cont’d)
Yes, I know, it’s just me now
so what am I speaking of?
By whose needs do I mark my hours,
raise my bones from slumber
or even find reason
to lay them down again?

AXELLE
No, I didn’t mean‐‐

(As AXELLE and ZÉPHYRINE speak inside the house, two boys
clothed in britches and flour sacks sneak up to the tree and look
around to see if they are being watched.)

ZÉPHYRINE
No harm.
There are no secrets in our little valley.
By the Baker’s flatulence we all know
which bread has gone stale
and been served at his own table.
101

(Axelle smiles and shakes her head as she sips her tea.)

ZÉPHYRINE(cont’d)
Grief, with its acute articulations,
has pared down even my humor.

(ZÉPHYRINE walks to the window and looks out at the nest in the
tree. The two boys hide behind the trunk.)

ZÉPHYRINE(cont’d)
There are no secrets in our little valley.
All oddities are reported
from clothes line to crooked ear
quicker than echo could run the valley’s rim
and there they circle round and round
and never leave.
And yet we are in many ways unfamiliar
with each other’s pains.

(ZÉPHYRINE stares for a moment thoughtfully at the nest, then
turns from the window and retrieves from under the bed a new
white tunic. The boys see she has left, and sneak up to the ladder.
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One pulls a small saw from his britches, and they proceed to
shorten one of the ladder legs, to set a booby trap. ZÉPHYRINE
gives the shirt to AXELLE.)

ZÉPHYRINE(cont’d)
I was making this for Corentin when he fell.
Give it to the one most deserving.

(AXELLE takes the shirt. ZÉPHYRINE sits at the table.)

AXELLE
Thank you Zéphyrine.
Those two middle ones though,
they frighten me with their antics.
I’ll give the shirt to Claude.
I know he’s barrel‐chested from all the ale,
something Corentin was not,
but I’ll make it fit.
I’ve become adept at knowing how to fit
and how to fix
what men know how to ruin.

103
(AXELLE pauses as they both drink, and she puts her cup down
slowly, choosing carefully her next words.)

AXELLE(cont’d)
I have heard it rumored sometimes
that women even know how to end things,
the things that begin in men
and take root in the womb.
I have heard of some women, widows,
who seem to know how to stop this growth
(her voice trails off)

ZÉPHYRINE
Axelle, are you with child again?

(AXELLE looks away.)

ZÉPHYRINE(cont’d)
You already have nine mouths to feed.

AXELLE
What can I do? You must know something.
104

ZÉPHYRINE
You think my solitude has opened me to nature’s secrets?

AXELLE
My children tell me you tend a nest, and that you speak
with care to the tender chirpings there.
I thought perhaps those mouths might have spoken back
or repaid their benefactress with the gift
of some smaller mystery.

(Over a hillside stage right, two men appear. They are walking
down a road that leads into the valley, but one stops the other
when he sees the boys tinkering with the ladder, and the two men
surreptitiously observe the boys, who are so busy with their
mischief, they don’t spot the men. When the boys finish they run
away.)

ZÉPHYRINE
Last autumn, Corentin and I began every day
before light, the cow, the chickens, the gathering,
but before the routine of this life
there was a bird, so strange and so sweet
105
trilling in our dreams,
like the lyric of water
gently poured,
and when we woke‐‐

AXELLE
When you woke—

ZÉPHYRINE
No, you’re right, when I woke.
Women always wake first to stoke the fires
and set the kettle,
but before that tide of routine, I remember…
(pauses, then goes on dreamily)
the blue light of evening giving over to day,
and the blue tinge of his skin,
his black brows, shiny as little fishes
in the stream behind the house,
his skin, so blue‐lit by evening, becoming warm,
but first that birdsong, so ordinary,
and so marvelous in its quotidian regularity,
and so magical in its herald,
and how the blue light of evening,
106
and the statue of my beloved’s cool cheeks
turned from blue stone
to warm flesh
when that bird sang
and the sun took the horizon….
(another pause)

AXELLE
It happens later here…in the valley…the real light of day.
It seems we grope in the dark
while the sun lights the backsides of our hills.

ZÉPHYRINE
(coming back to normal speech)
We do. We fumble around in the half‐shadow
When others already walk the streets of their little cobble towns.

(AXELLE seems relieved that ZÉPHYRINE is out of her reverie and
presses her for more practical details to keep the conversation on
even keel.)

AXELLE
But, why do you feed a bird? Surely nature keeps its own?
107

ZÉPHYRINE
I don’t feed her, and nature seems
to have toppled right end down
the same as Corentin.
The love‐bird lovers came back this spring
with a full nest
and I’ve been lying here
listening to their chorus,
waiting for the blue magic of Corentin’s brow
until the cow begs for my knuckles
to squeeze out her relief.
I’m a bad farm wife
and an even worse farm widow.

AXELLE
So why do you interrupt this little family?

ZÉPHYRINE
I’m not. She flew away. Suddenly. Her mate
disappeared one day and she stayed for a while,
little thing, lost, but purposeful
and then she seemed to lose that too.
108
The rains must have been too much.
Sometimes I cover the nest.
I stuff the little mouths with meal
and watered bread, sometimes worms.
I want their throats slick with nourishment
and later slippery with song,
so I can remember Corentin’s slippery eyebrows
and how his brow journeyed toward morning,
as his flesh grew warm.

(AXELLE and ZÉPHYRINE both fall silent for a moment. A soft
rumble of distant thunder.)

AXELLE
I have stayed too long.

ZÉPHYRINE
Yes, it will rain soon,
and we both have mouths to feed.
Loneliness has dulled my graces.

(They both rise.)

109
ZÉPHYRINE(con’t)
I bored a tinker the other day
with my recipe for worms and mush.

I seem to give my heart to anyone who happens by.
If despair weren’t a sin, I’d even bare myself in confession,
but I don’t want to be damned by loneliness twice.
At least in the next life,
Corentin waits.

AXELLE
I have learned that every farm wife gives herself small comforts
to make our individual pains more bearable.
Your friendship has been mine.

(Thunder claps again.)

AXELLE(con’t)
I will try to take comfort in that more often,
and look beyond my own nine, soon to be ten,
yawping mouths.

110
(They hug and AXELLE exits the hut, stuffs the shirt in her bodice,
covers her head in her shawl, and walks past the tree to stage left
to exit. As she passes the tree, she looks up at the nest.
ZÉPHYRINE closes the door.)

(BLACKOUT)

(END OF SCENE)

111
ACT I

Scene 2

SETTING: Same as previous scene, but the focus shifts to
the two men on the hillside, upstage center.
Downstage remains dark and upstage lights up,
as these two, TOUSSAINT and CÔME discuss the
goings on.

AT RISE: Spot on TOUSSAINT and CÔME. Their heads
turn in unison from stage right to stage left as
they watch AXELLE exit. Downstage remains
dark.

CÔME
Strange comings and goings in this little valley.

TOUSSAINT
We are no strangers to strange.

CÔME
Should we warn the occupant of his faulty ladder?
112

(CÔME is already moving forward, but TOUSSAINT puts out his
arm and stops him.)

TOUSSAINT
As our esteemed cousin philosopher from across the ocean has said,
“knowledge is power.”

CÔME
Englishmen are all blasphemers.

TOUSSAINT
Yes, but their cosmopolitan minds are concise,
and the buffoonery of these peasants
bears closer scrutiny.
Observe the hillsides, how they surround this gentle hamlet,
like the arms of a mother,
an overprotective mother who shields
her child’s ears from even the possibility
of harsh words from others.

(CÔME looks around, then looks at TOUSSAINT, not getting the
gist.)
113

TOUSSAINT(con’t)
They are cut off. They know very little of the outside world.

(CÔME nods, but still doesn’t get it.)

CÔME
So they don’t know broken ladders are dangerous.

(TOUSSAINT smacks the back of CÔME’s head.)

TOUSSAINT
If you weren’t as serviceable as you are stupid
I’d return your dull wit to the tool shed where I found it.

CÔME
(on his knees)
Don’t send me back to prison!

TOUSSAINT
(pulling CÔME up from his knees)
How many times do I have to tell you not to do that!
114
We are authorities, witch hunters, we don’t kneel
before men nor idols, only before God,
or a wealthy friar.

(CÔME rights himself and smoothes his hair. A spot light
downstage on ZÉPHYRINE as she exits her house, shawl over her
shoulders and a basket on her arm. Thunder clap and noise of
light rain: she pulls the shawl over her head. Both TOUSSAINT
and CÔME watch her. CÔME seems bothered by the rain, the
sudden cold, or perhaps the impending danger. TOUSSAINT puts
his arm around CÔME’S shoulder.)

TOUSSAINT
(into CÔME’S ear)
Remember, death is our friend, and guilt, our profit.

(ZÉPHYRINE goes up the ladder to feed the nest, her steps wobbly.
She takes off her shawl and covers the nest with it, propping it up
with a twig. She takes food from the basket and feeds the hungry
mouths. She leans over to adjust the shawl, and this makes the
ladder slip out from under her, but she does not fall. She is swung
around to face the audience, her dress caught on a ragged tree
115
claw.   She looks up at the sky.   Her dress slowly rips and she
descends to the ground.)

(The thunder claps louder and noise of a downpour fills the air.
ZÉPHYRINE looks up at the sky, throws out her arms.

ZÉPHYRINE
Even this you want from me!
(motions at the nest)
Why not strike me down
and finish me!
(She falls to her knees. She waits with her arms out. Nothing
happens.)
Bit by bit you have stripped me,
and left me cruelly alone.
And this one comfort?
Must you diminish that too?
Even Axelle’s friendship has grown thin
these many months
as if I carried a disease that she feared—
being a widow.
You made me this.
116
What am I supposed to do with all this silence?
No one comes near.
I have become an oddity,
the woman with all the land and trees and goats
and a nest outside her door.
The woman who won’t be able
to pick her own bushels this fall.
The woman whose husband fell off his ladder
and rested his head on a stone.
They’re all waiting like jackals
to see what will become of me—
no, not me—to see what will become of the trees.
Where are you in all this silence?
Where is the signet of your grace?
(drops her arms, sighs)
It’s a busy exchange
all the whispered hopes rising like steam
and an inscrutable face above it all
watching us boil
the way I’ve watched my own soup pots.
(looks up)
I don’t want to believe in your indifference.
Where is the balm you promised
117
against the shock of mortality?
Why can’t I find it?
I’m lost, so lost.
If it weren’t for this one helpless thing
needing my ministrations…
If someone would have told me
at the first breath I gasped
that my soul would be non‐existent
without someone to care for,
I think my infant self would have refused to breath.
This loneliness is hell,
and I watch all those who let routine
dull the edge of mortality,
and I think I’d rather succumb to the executioner’s blow,
even invite it,
than have to go through years of anticipating its fall.

(She crawls back to the house. Downstage goes dark.)

CÔME
I couldn’t hear her words
but she certainly was thankful.
She kneeled all the way to her door.
118
I think we witnessed a miracle.

TOUSSAINT
Only the church can sanction a miracle.
For the laity there is only magic,
the stone that grinds our daily bread.
(he motions for CÔME to follow him down the hillside)

(BLACKOUT)

(END OF SCENE)

119
ACT I

Scene 3

SETTING: Interior of ZÉPHYRINE’s house, downstage.
ZÉPHYRINE has a rag shawl pulled around her
shoulders and pinned in front to hide the tear in
the back of her dress. TOUSSAINT and CÔME
warm themselves by the fire. Light only on
interior set.

AT RISE: ZÉPHYRINE pulls plates from the cupboard and
puts them on the table with some apples.

TOUSSAINT
Thank you gracious lady‐‐

(TOUSSAINT and CÔME both move to the table. TOUSSAINT
gingerly places an apple on his plate and begins to slice it, as
CÔME grabs one and hungrily bites into it. TOUSSAINT gives him
a reproachful look and CÔME puts the apple on his plate and
eagerly waits for TOUSSAINT to finish with the knife.)
120

TOUSSAINT(con’t)
‐‐forgive my companion. We have been on the road many days.

ZÉPHYRINE
No harm. Visitors are treated well
in our little valley, and I am used
to the appetites of men.

TOUSSAINT
Are we impinging on your stores for your husband?
I don’t want to dwindle your winter apples.
He must work a hard day with all these trees to tend
and your livestock.

ZÉPHYRINE
I’m a widow. My winter stores
were meant for two.
There’s no need to worry.

TOUSSAINT
(pats her hand)
121
The Lord listens with great care to the grieving.

(ZÉPHYRINE is uncomfortable with this gesture, and withdraws
her hand from the table.)

ZÉPHYRINE
Thank you for your kindness.

TOUSSAINT
WE are men of God. We are accustomed to the quiet
ways of the heart. You have no need
to hide your suffering from us.

ZÉPHYRINE
I apologize Father. You wear an unfamiliar cassock.

(CÔME chortles, nearly chokes on an apple piece, and TOUSSAINT
kicks him under the table as he pats his back.)

TOUSSAINT
Our offices for the church do not include
such stringent vows,
but we do often hear confessions.
122
(changes the subject quickly)
Your charity then must extend beyond
your nest of friends outside
to the tables of your neighbors?

(ZÉPHYRINE stares at him blankly.)

TOUSSAINT(con’t)
We noticed your shawl in the tree.
It was a bright flag of hope
amongst the gloomy downpour.
I commented to my companion
as we scurried through the torrent
that one who cared so much
for the smallest of God’s creatures
surely was a beacon of mercy
to many in need, and would offer
assistance to even our soggied heads.

ZÉPHYRINE
Charity is my duty, to all of God’s creatures.
I give when I can.

123
TOUSSAINT
Yes, I understand that in a valley of such abundance,
charity may not often be required.

ZÉPHYRINE
Not every farm has the ratio of stores to mouths
that I now enjoy.
The next farm over has nine mouths
and smaller acreage.

(Under the table, TOUSSAINT grabs CÔME’s knee excitedly. )

TOUSSAINT
And of course with these less fortunate
you share your bounty.

ZÉPHYRINE
I give what I can. Just this morning,
I gave a new tunic
but there was need for two—the boys
both running around in flour sacks—

(At this, TOUSSAINT squeezes CÔME’s knee.)
124

ZÉPHYRINE(con’t)
but I only had the one.

TOUSSAINT
I can perceive though, good sister,
that your charitable heart knows no bounds
and within this valley you are a popular source
of comfort and wisdom.

ZÉPHYRINE
(sighs)
Your flattery embarrasses me,
and is unwarranted.

TOUSSAINT
Again, proof of your kind inner nature,
(he motions to CÔME to rise)
which leads me to believe our services
and whatever beneficence we can offer
are more in need at your neighbors home,
being the meager.
(looks toward the window)
125
The storm has stifled itself.
(rises and rubs his stomach)
Madame this nourishment was filling for the soul,
but the body must, from time to time, empty.
Where can we relieve ourselves like gentleman?

ZÉPHYRINE
Behind the house. You’ll find a group of tall rush.

(CÔME rises and knocks over the bag he was carrying, a book
toppling out onto the floor.
TOUSSAINT is annoyed at his clumsiness.)

TOUSSAINT
Côme, leave the luggage. We shall return to bid a proper farewell
to this kind lady.

(They move toward the door, and ZÉPHYRINE rises to clear the
plates.)

TOUSSAINT(con’t)
One more question good madam—

126
ZÉPHYRINE
Yes?

TOUSSAINT
Your name, “Zéphyrine?”

ZÉPHYRINE
From the saint, Zephyrinus, the pope.

(TOUSSAINT waves his hand in the air to dismiss his own
ignorance.)

TOUSSAINT
Of course.

(TOUSSAINT and CÔME exit the house.

ZÉPHYRINE shakes her head.

ZÉPHYRINE
‐‐and your name means all saints,
but you obviously don’t know all of them.
127

(ZÉPHYRINE picks up the book and examines it. She sits at the
table.)

ZÉPHYRINE(con’t)
(reads the title)
The Malleus Maleficarum….The Hammer Against Witches.
(opens the book and browses the text)
What fantabulae.
(closes the book and slams her fist on the cover)
Can it be that such things are actually
raised from fantasy to fact
by sheer virtue of print?
So many misunderstandings are aroused
by the power of fear.
Where are the righteous?
(she pauses)
These two are up to no good.
(another pause)
I have to warn Axelle. Her desire might loose her tongue
and these two are too dandified to be wholly pious.
Their mannerisms itch the skin
like the after affect of a mosquito bite
128
and they are looking for a host.
(she looks toward the door)
How to circumvent their wandering…
I’ll have to wait a while.

(BLACKOUT)

(END OF SCENE)

129
ACT I

Scene 4

SETTING: Exterior of ZÉPHYRINE’s house, downstage. Only
exterior is lit. Interior remains dark.

AT RISE: TOUSSAINT and CÔME squat in some bushes,
with their pants down.

TOUSSAINT
A perfect stage! A perfect set!
Each part given to each and perfectly played,
and best of all, each unsuspecting the hand
that lettered the text.

CÔME
I don’t think this is the place she intended for us to use.

(TOUSSAINT motions to swat CÔME, who ducks. TOUSSAINT
momentarily drops his britches, then picks them up again.)

130
TOUSSAINT
If I’ve messed my britches you’ll wash them
and wear mine wet.

(TOUSSAINT pulls up his pants, checks his behind, then walks
from the bush.)

TOUSSAINT(con’t)
Not even your idiocy can ruin my reverie
in this moment.

CÔME
You’re always in a better mood after you’ve relieved yourself.

TOUSSAINT
This is relief of a different kind
my dull‐witted charge.
(sweeps his arms around him)
This is no poor little widow with a few scrawny hens
and a single ramshackle cow.
(motions toward the house)
The house isn’t much,
(motions toward the orchards)
131
but these orchards…
There’s enough here for us to retire like kings.

CÔME
I don’t like ladders. I’m afraid of heights.

TOUSSAINT
Yes my endotrophic friend,
there are nasty things for you in the air to fear,
nooses that snap the neck,
(makes a snapping motion with his two hands, as if he were
snapping a branch in half)
but neither of us will be climbing to strained heights
for our daily bread anymore.

(CÔME looks at TOUSSAINT rapt with attention.)

TOUSSAINT(con’t)
Took you note of the clothing those young hoodlums wore?
Of course you didn’t.
They wore flour sacks for tunics.

(CÔME stares blankly at TOUSSAINT.)
132

TOUSSAINT(con’t)
I’m surprised I don’t have to tell you how to shit.
When your body calls, you’re brain turns off.
When your mouth chews it jitters your thinking
to nonsense.
Did you hear, as you chomped away like a cow,
what she said about the next farm over?
(he turns away from CÔME and doesn’t wait for a reply)
It’s all too perfect! And we, for once, will not have to fabricate
one single occurrence, because it’s all been laid out before us.
And those starving simpletons will make it all come to fruition
(motions across the valley toward the next farm)
with just the simplest of suggestions.
They’ve practically done the deed already.
And when it is all over, ah then,
then my odiferous helpmeet,
guilt will be our guide,
and this farm our grandeur,
and those flour‐sack‐wearing fools
our servants, or they will swing
from the very trees they covet.
It’s a general rule, I have found,
133
that the poor count their children as treasure,
having nothing else of worth,
and will drive themselves into the ground
for maintenance of the young.
How else can one explain their ridiculous
preponderance to have so many mouths to feed
and backs to clothe?

(CÔME straightens up and cinches his pants.)

CÔME
It seems inevitable, one of life’s charges,
Eating, sleeping, relieving
(motions back toward the bushes)
and propagating.

TOUSSAINT
I pity the fright it must have given your mother
when she dropped you on your head and feared
you dead, and the even larger fright
when you grew, forestalled, to these
shortened mental heights.

134
(CÔME stares at him blankly again.)

TOUSSAINT(con’t)
I waste good insults on your myopic perception.
Lets get our things and go.
By nightfall we could be wealthy.

(They both turn toward the house, then TOUSSAINT stops CÔME.)

TOUSSAINT(con’t)
When we get to the next farm, follow my lead
and agree with great enthusiasm.
That is all you need do.

CÔME
I am always agreeable with you.

(TOUSSAINT stops to look at CÔME.)

TOUSSAINT
If your idiocy were not a proven fact
I’d think sometimes there was wit
at play in your words.
135

(BLACKOUT)

(END OF ACT I)

136
ACT II

Scene 1

SETTING: Exterior of AXELLE & CLAUDE’s house,
surrounded by less fecund trees than
ZÉPHYRINE’s. The set is an almost identical flip‐
flop of ACT I, except that the tree, now stage
right, is smaller, scrawnier, and appears to be
dead, even hung with a few tattered rags of
laundry. The house façade, stage left, is wood
and not stone, and leans noticeably. The floor of
the house is cluttered with many sleeping
palettes, and a baby bassinette.

AT RISE: CLAUDE and AXELLE sit at their table. AXELLE
chops apples into a pot.

AXELLE
If you wanted me to check on Zéphyrine
because you were concerned
you could have at least done me the favor
of feeding our brood.
137

CLAUDE
If you hadn’t brought back apples
there would be nothing to feed them with.

(AXELLE looks at him in shock.)

AXELLE
So, it’s come to this. We survive then by mercy
and not by industry.

CLAUDE
Watch what you say. I am at industry at all times
on your behalf. Besides, I thought you and the widow
were friends.

AXELLE
Men understand friendship by drink and song.
Women feel their friendships as innate as a pulse.
We don’t need to slap each other on the back
and piss at chickens for assurances.
138

CLAUDE
That tongue could cut apples.
I know you women clap your tongues over clothes‐lines
the way soldiers clap daggers.
You’ll never convince me women’s fellowship
is as true as a fellows.

AXELLE
And the only reason that is true is because
we think of our husbands first,
when men think of each other.

CLAUDE
A man has to do what life demands of him
and sometimes he needs the reason of his fellows
to help him find the resources to swing his feet
out of bed in the morning
and battle nature herself for sustenance.
When I was a young man I thought my father
unfair for making me milk the cow
every morning before he woke,
139
but now I understand the relentless toil
of a man’s mind. When the children have worn
their clothes down to their skins,
I’m the one reproached for their lack
of covering, not the mother.
Women are given the grace of exclusion
from that rebuke by being like children themselves,
in that they too depend on their master’s mind
and the continuity of his effort
to keep them clothed.
They have no understanding of the savage
necessities of life.
Women live by the rabbit’s cunning,
but a man must plow, and hunt, and kill
to feed his den. Our minds are ever
on our dens.

AXELLE
Which explains another of man’s bestial proclivities—

CLAUDE
If you really do think of your husband first Axelle,
you’ll silence your reprobation.
140
I’m doing more than you know
to turn our situation around.

(AXELLE gets up from the table and goes to the hearth, where she
picks up an empty bucket.)

AXELLE
You could do more than I know
If I didn’t have to know the fire bucket was empty.

(AXELLE motions at him with the bucket to fill it, but he doesn’t
move from the table.)

CLAUDE
You’ve already forgotten what I said about the cow
and my father. Leave me to work out our problems.

(AXELLE, exasperated, walks out of the house to fill the bucket.
The two little boys in flour sacks run up to the house. As they pass
AXELLE stops them.)

AXELLE
141
Where have you two been? I asked you this morning
to find good wood before the rains
and now I find the bucket and box both empty.

TWIN BOYS
(in unison)
Papa sent us on an urgent errand.

(They dart for the house and do not stop to help their mother pick
up wood.)

AXELLE
Even male children cleave to their father’s schemes
before their mother’s requests.

(AXELLE sighs and sits on a tree stump used for log splitting
underneath the window. From here, she can hear the
conversation of CLAUDE and the TWIN BOYS inside the house.)

CLAUDE
Come here my lads and tell me of your success.
Did you half the ladder leg, then replace it, as I instructed.

142
TWIN BOYS
(in unison)
Yes Papa.

(AXELLE seems perplexed by these comments.)

CLAUDE
And did you wait to see if the widow fell
my staunch little men?

(AXELLE sits bolt upright in shock.)

TWIN BOYS
(in unison)
No Papa. We were afraid Mama would see us.

(AXELLE drops the fire wood bucket and runs stage right, toward
ZÉPHYRINE’s.
As she exits, TOUSSAINT and CÔME come on stage right, passing
her. Claude and the boys appear to be continuing to converse
inside as he rewards them with apple slices.)

143
CÔME
That woman is always in a hurry.

TOUSSAINT
If you had nine mouths to feed
your life would be a flight of urgencies too.

(The TWIN BOYS exit the house and also run past TOUSSAINT and
CÔME, but they appear to be headed into the orchard.)

TOUSSAINT(con’t)
Like the stealthy arrow
it appears we have found our mark.
(turns to CÔME and messes up his clothes)
Now remember, you’re in shock.
You’ve had a terrible fright from what you saw.

CÔME
Yes, terrible.

TOUSSAINT
You’re so befuddled by what you’ve seen
144
that I have to do most of the talking.

(CÔME nods and they walk to the door of the house, then knock on
it. CLAUDE opens the door, and CÔME swoons, as TOUSSAINT
catches him.)

TOUSSAINT
Good morrow kind sir!
A palette for my friend,
he’s had a terrible fright!

(They both help CÔME inside and lay him on the floor. He lies
there, apparently in shock, staring at the ceiling. TOUSSAINT
waves his hand in front of his eyes.)

TOUSSAINT
Zounds man!
(looks toward the ceiling
O Blessed Father,
revive his senses.

145
CLAUDE
What caused him to be thus?.

TOUSSAINT
(looks around, as if he is about to reveal a secret)
I will tell you, but first I must know the caliber
of your household. Have you a Bible?

(CLAUDE goes to the hearth and takes the bible off the mantle,
then hands it to TOUSSAINT.)

TOUSSAINT(con’t)
Ah, I suspected you were of good faith
when I surveyed the meagerness of your homestead.
The Good Lord only visits such trials upon those
pure of spirit, so when rewarded they know
from whom their bounty has fallen.

CÔME
(raises his head)
Not like your neighbor the widow.

146
(TOUSSAINT pushes his forehead back down, and wraps CÔME’s
arm around the bible.)

TOUSSAINT
Cleave to the good book brother.
It will restore your senses.

CÔME
(hugging the bible)
O merciful God!.

(TOUSSAINT puts his hand over CÔME’s mouth and shakes his head
to signal silence. He then motions CLAUDE away to the table so
they can talk.)
TOUSSAINT
We have seen worse in our day,
but this peaceful valley has surprised us.

CLAUDE
Dear sir, if there are bandits about I must warn others.
(he makes for the door, but TOUSSAINT stops him)

147
TOUSSAINT
I assure you, noble‐hearted sir,
whatever danger has presented itself,
it has for the moment been abated,
or at least arrested in its domicile
by whatever graces my companion here
could muster, for which
he has paid with the temporary loss
of his senses, but we are men of God
and our faith is our balm
and renews us when faced with these trials.

(CLAUDE is bewildered by the wildness of this talk. TOUSSAINT
drops to his knees and pulls CLAUDE down to join him.)

TOUSSAINT(con’t)
Pray with me sir, and our ultimate benefactor
will extend his beneficence to all who find
the peace of slumber under this pious roof.

CLAUDE
But why are we in need of such a talisman?.

148
TOUSSAINT
(raises his hand in a stop signal)
Oh no goodly! Speak to me not of magic,
for that is the undoing of my friend.
Say you have not been tainted!

CLAUDE
No, no, I’ve not been tainted.
Sir, your actions are unprecedented.

(TOUSSAINT rises and motions CLAUDE to the table. CLAUDE
follows him, entranced, and sits in a chair, while TOUSSAINT
stands and begins his story.)

TOUSSAINT
First allow me to explain our offices
as best I can, for we have been charged
with a duty not easily comprehended
except by those ranked amongst the most high,
Papal powers.

149
(At this statement CÔME raises his head to look at TOUSSAINT, as if
to say, “Really?’ and TOUSSAINT motions for him to lie back down.
CLAUDE has his back to CÔME and doesn’t see this.)

TOUSSAINT(con’t)
Our attentions were brought to your little valley
due to the suspicious nature of these turbulent rains—
(waits for CLAUDE to agree)

CLAUDE
They have been bad.

TOUSSAINT
Yes, but not as wicked as the cause
of the maelstrom.
Know you the widow of the next farm,
whose trees and domicile
appear to be placidly unaffected?

CLAUDE
Zéphyrine? Aye, her husband, Corentin
and I were friends, God rest his soul.

150
TOUSSAINT
Yes, exactly, God rest his soul.
Know you how he came to be resting?

CLAUDE
He feel from a ladder during the harvest
and struck his head on a stone.

TOUSSAINT
Seems it not unlikely to you that such an experienced fellow,
should meet with such an end,
to be struck down in something so ordinary,
so completely diurnal to his ways?
Questioned no one the wholeness of his ladder?

(CLAUDE sits upright at this comment.)

TOUSSAINT(con’t)
Of course not. You are of such pious bent
that nothing foul would certainly ever enter your heart,
but let me explain further my meaning,
and with that, my office.
151

We travel, my friend and I, and when we come
to a happy hamlet, and all is in balance, all mouths
equally sharing the abundance brought by righteous effort,
we offer good lessons on conduct to the young
and commend them back to their parent’s charge,
but when we find an imbalance,
a place where the needs of the righteous go unheeded
while bounty is heaped on a single household,
a household without even enough hands to properly
tend and nurture the blessings of abundance,
then we question, and often we find
some dire circumstance at work, some, dare I say,
magic.

Have you not noticed that your neighbor
seems to care more for a nest outside her door
than she does for the welfare of your children?
Seems it not odd to you,
and unfitting with a female temperament
to let the young, even young that are not her own,
suffer?

152
CLAUDE
(nodding slowly in agreement)
Yes, it does seem odd.

TOUSSAINT
Precisely sir. I can see you are a man of both
intellect and righteousness, and God will
restore the bounty to your household
as soon as I show you the clarity of His will.

CLAUDE
Yes, I’m listening. Your words speak reason.

TOUSSAINT
Then sir, if you have found reason in my meaning so far,
do not let the unnaturalness of what I am about to relate
to you, strike at the soundness of what has gone before,
for I have seen many things which the righteous,
as yourself, could not even fathom,
and yet they exist, as the lackadaisical state of my learned friend
attests to, for I assure you his reason
was as sound as mine, until the misfortune of magic
153
struck him down.
But, let me not rely upon my own words solely.
Let me read to you from an authoritative text.

(CLAUDE seems lost in a reverie of his own thinking as TOUSSAINT
walks over and motions to CÔME to hand his something. CÔME
pulls The Malleus Maleficarum from under his shirt and gives it to
TOUSSAINT. CÔME then clasps his hands and gives TOUSSAINT the
sign for victory. TOUSSAINT kicks him, and he drops his arms.
TOUSSAINT walks back to CLAUDE’S field of vision, opens the book,
and reads.)

TOUSSAINT(con’t)
“and amongst their kind there have been accounts
of those who keep a nest of male members in a tree”

Note you the nest we spoke of?

CLAUDE
Yes.

154
TOUSSAINT
Well, I can tell you then good sir,
since you know of her attentions to the object,
but perhaps have not seen its exact contents—
and fortunate for you that you have not, or else
you too would have your senses disarranged, as my companion—
that there is unnatural magic at work here
causing an imbalance in this valley’s resources,
an imbalance to the smiting blows of rain,
an imbalance in a man who should have
always been balanced,
yet came to rest his head on a stone pillow.
(puts his hand on CLAUDE’s shoulder)
You see my meaning then
and the dire circumstances at play?

CLAUDE
You say we are bewitched.

TOUSSAINT
In a word my good fellow, yes.

155
(CLAUDE ponders these things for a moment, then slowly puts
forth a question.)

CLAUDE
What will become of her orchards.

TOUSSAINT
Ah, you are a practical man. Your wherewithal will serve
us well in what must be done. Those things untainted
by her spells will naturally fall to you as the savior
of so many grateful neighbors,
and those which are tainted, my friend and I will work
for blessings to make them once again
seemly in the eyes of the Lord,
and serviceable upon his earth,
though it may take us years to undo the harm.
That is the duty of our office,
to restore to right
what is a wrong against nature and the heavens.

(CLAUDE continues to sit in thought.)

156
TOUSSAINT(con’t)
If one is to act, one must act quickly upon such creatures,
for their words sometimes hold sway with the tender‐hearted,
and their cunning can always be counted upon
as their ends draw near.
They can smell things coming to a boil
From the stench they have created.
No you some sturdy fellows whom you can take into your confidence?
Can you rouse the people to act in unison?

CLAUDE
I have good fellows I can depend upon,
and the town already knows of Zéphyrine’s
oddities. Her long months of keeping to herself
are unprecedented. She has not even been to church.

TOUSSAINT
Precisely! Could mere grief account for such
a lack of piety? Is not the church our ultimate comfort
against such hardship? Why remove one’s self from
the bosom of the Lord, unless one was not comforted
157
by that burning heart to begin with?
You’re a man of wisdom.
Act quickly.
I will revive my friend and meet you
at the widow’s.

(CLAUDE hurriedly exits.)

TOUSSAINT(con’t)
(turns to CÔME)
What would it take
to take all one could
if one could take it all?
Very little when small mind’s are influenced by desire.
This has been all too easy.

(CÔME rises from the floor.)

CÔME
That was much easier than pretending
to be possessed and writhing
in the dirt. I dislike it
158
when you make me do that.
And he doesn’t even suspect you know of his own deeds.

TOUSSAINT
No, that fruit is not yet ripe enough to be plucked
from the air of occurrence. One obstacle down,
then the other.
(motions toward the table and the cut apples)
We might as well eat
and give the masses time to assemble.
The performance has just begun.
As the darkness draws near,
so does our fortune.

(BLACKOUT)

(END OF ACT II)

159
ACT III

Scene 1

SETTING: A road through the middle of an orchard. The
sun appears to be setting over the hillsides, and a
canopy of tree branches casts long, finger‐like
shadows across the path.   The path bends in a
sharp angle which reaches an apex downstage
center, and it is possible that through the thicket
of trees, one would not see someone on the other
side of the bend.

AT RISE: AXELLE, stage left, faces stage right, and runs (in
place) toward Zéphyrine’s house. ZÉPHYRINE,
stage right, faces stage left, and runs (in place)
toward Axelle’s house. They do not see each
other around the bend.

AXELLE
Zéphyrine don’t climb the ladder.
ZÉPHYRINE
Axelle, don’t loose your tongue.
160

AXELLE
There is a danger you don’t even suspect.

ZÉPHYRINE
There is a danger headed for your door.

AXELLE
Don’t let loneliness drive you to your end.

ZÉPHYRINE
Don’t let weariness drive you to desperation.

AXELLE
I am coming.

ZÉPHYRINE
I am coming.

AXELLE ZÉPHYRINE
I have been too long absent I have been too long absent
from the offices of my friendship. from the offices of my friendship.

161
AXELLE
There is a voice inside me
and many little nightmares blooming
on the ladder of my soul.

ZÉPHYRINE
There are many little nightmares
upon the ladder of our dreams,
and all night long we climb and descend,
caught on the tide of emotions we refuse
to succumb to by daylight.
Don’t let those little dooms
undo you.

AXELLE
Don’t climb the ladder.
Leave nature to nature’s keeping.

ZÉPHYRINE
Don’t fall prey
to the thin opportunities of cowards.

162
AXELLE ZÉPHYRINE
I could have been a better friend I could have been a better friend
this long winter— this long winter—

AXELLE
and brought you to my shabby hearth.

ZÉPHYRINE
and offered you my hands when yours were full with chores.

AXELLE ZÉPHYRINE
I have no real excuse, except I have no real excuse, except
absorption in my own concerns, absorption in my own concerns,
of which you should have been one. of which you should have been
one.

AXELLE
I’m on my way now though,
as the danger is all too present.

ZÉPHYRINE
I’m on my way to you now, with a wisdom
born of fear.
163
Don’t loose your tongue.

AXELLE
Don’t climb the ladder.

ZÉPHYRINE
Don’t let the daily dungeon drag you down.

AXELLE
Don’t aspire to be less than a widow.

ZÉPHYRINE
I have no right to be burdened by nothing
while you are burdened by many.

AXELLE
Don’t climb the ladder.

ZÉPHYRINE
Don’t loose your tongue.

AXELLE ZÉPHYRINE
Those who have no need Those who have no need
164
have no need of friendship, have no need of friendship,
but I need you, but you need me,
and you need me and I need you

AXELLE
the way that a garden needs a gardener

ZÉPHYRINE
the way that a gardener needs a garden

AXELLE
to give order to its growing.

ZÉPHYRINE
to give expression to his talents.

AXELLE ZÉPHYRINE
Don’t let this long silence Don’t let this long silence
so recently broken so recently broken
be the coda be the coda
to all we shared as girls to all we shared as girls

165
AXELLE
when nothing impeded our delight in each other’s silliness,
and nothing ceased our giggles when butterflies laced the meadows.

ZÉPHYRINE
but be silent just a bit longer
until I am at your side.
Don’t loose your tongue.

AXELLE
Don’t undo our long ago happy hours
with the fruit of your loneliness.
I am coming.

(AXELLE and ZÉPHYRINE meet center stage and embrace.)

(BLACKOUT)

(END OF SCENE)
166
ACT III

Scene 2

SETTING: ZÉPHYRINE’s house. Early dark. Outside, the
nest is still in the tree branch and covered by
ZÉPHYRINE’s shawl. The ladder lies on the
ground.

AT RISE: ZÉPHYRINE sits at the end of the cot. AXELLE
sits behind her, sewing the tear in her dress.

ZÉPHYRINE
So you’ve seen these two men?

AXELLE
They arrived at our house as I was leaving.

ZÉPHYRINE
But you didn’t speak to them,
and you’ve told no one else
what you told me earlier?
167

AXELLE
(over ZÉPHYRINE’s shoulder)
I came to you first.

(They fall silent for a moment.)

AXELLE(con’t)
Remember when we were girls, and we would
sit like this to braid each other’s hair?

ZÉPHYRINE
With larkspur and daisies, sometimes
foxglove.

AXELLE
Ah, the remember the wreaths of foxglove?

ZÉPHYRINE
We put them on our heads and pranced around like queens
giving orders to our loyal subjects, the goats.

(They both smile and fall silent.)
168
AXELLE
You pretended you were marrying Corentin.

ZÉPHYRINE
I remember.

(Silence again.)

ZÉPHYRINE(con’t)
I think I’m going to sell my orchard to CLAUDE.

AXELLE
If he had the money to pay for it
he wouldn’t be putting the children
up to such desperate and despicable measures.

ZÉPHYRINE
He can pay me back from the harvests each year.
I’ll assign a long lease.

AXELLE
Why would you do such a thing for someone
who tried to harm you?
169

ZÉPHYRINE
I’m not doing it for him, I’m doing it for you.
(she turns around and faces AXELLE)
Men are an undependable lot.
You can’t even count on them to live
when they should live,
or to grow old
when they should grow old,
or to give you children
when they should give you children,
or to leave you alone
and stop giving you children.
(she turns back around and AXELLE continues sewing)
And those men who have no choice but to wander
for their bread are an infestation.
These other two rummaging about, these “men of God,”
our little valley is like a leaky dike
vulnerable to their groping dirty fingers.
We need to shore up where we can
so they’ll grow tired and move on.

170
(AXELLE finishes sewing and bites the thread to break it. She
examines her work.)

AXELLE
Well, not like new, but at least presentable.

(They face each other again.)

AXELLE(con’t)
But Zéphyrine, where will you go?

ZÉPHYRINE
I’ll move into town. I’ll keep some trees, and some goats.
I’ll bake pies.

(They embrace, and ZÉPHYRINE rises, walks about the room.)

ZÉPHYRINE(con’t)
I’ve learned that not everything of importance in my life
has been taken, and instead of clinging
to what remains with the curdled hope
I can reverse the laws of nature
and make a memory become flesh
171
for a few minutes at dawn,
I’m going to let go
and put my hope in small things,
like the smell of apple blossom,
the sight of well‐fed children,
and the satisfied smile of a friend,
which is, after all, no small thing.

(They lock gazes, and AXELLE nods.)

ZÉPHYRINE(con’t)
I’ll get a new ladder though,
and continue to feed my nest of raw mouths.
(she walks toward the window)
Their cheeping scrawny fires must be stoked.

(Outside, the men of the village approach carrying torches,
TOUSSAINT, CLAUDE, and CÔME (supported by other men as he
pretends to swoon) in the lead.)

ZÉPHYRINE(con’t)
But maybe all these plans.
have been conjured
172
too late to matter.

(AXELLE rises and joins her at the window.)

AXELLE
What are they doing?

ZÉPHYRINE
I think I see the meaning in all this.
(turns to AXELLE)
Axelle, you have to leave.

AXELLE
I’m not leaving you to face a mob alone.
Besides, I can go to CLAUDE and explain to him it’s all right.

(ZÉPHYRINE closes the shutter and bolts it.)

ZÉPHYRINE
Axelle, we don’t know what has happened,
but we know it has momentum,
and it’s headed this way.
Step aside.
173

AXELLE
I won’t leave you.

ZÉPHYRINE
If our households have diverged
and we don’t stand on opposite sides,
we will both fall.

AXELLE
(takes ZÉPHYRINE’s hand)
I won’t let you fall.

ZÉPHYRINE
You came to save me, I won’t forget that.
Now you need to save yourself.

AXELLE
We can reason with them. Surely they will listen to reason.

ZÉPHYRINE
Men do not reason when their stomachs are empty
174
and their hearts are desperate.
They go to war.

AXELLE
You have to try, for me.

ZÉPHYRINE
(sighs)
Yes, for you.
(she looks around the room)
Reach under my cot and fetch my Bible.
We are going to need assistance.

(AXELLE gets down on her hands and knees and searches under
the cot. ZÉPHYRINE takes the bible off the mantel and as AXELLE
rises:)

AXELLE
I don’t feel it under there—

(ZÉPHYRINE hits her in back of the head with the heavy book and
knocks her out. AXELLE falls on the bed. ZÉPHYRINE checks
175
AXELLE to make sure she is only passed out, then smoothes
AXELLE’s hair, and kisses her forehead.)

ZÉPHYRINE
Sleep well my sister. You will have to wake without me.

(Outside, the men set the nest on fire. ZÉPHYRINE opens the front
door, and when she sees this, she runs toward the tree.)

ZÉPHYRINE
No!

TOUSSAINT
Seize her!

(The men hold ZÉPHYRINE back as the nest burns.)

TOUSSAINT(con’t)
We have destroyed the source of your enchanting.
(points at ZÉPHYRINE)
No longer can you romance the rain
into doing your bidding
or the earth into fecund supplication
176
while your neighbors crops wither,
sucked dry of life force before your spells.

(A man carries the unconscious AXELLE out of the house.)

ZÉPHYRINE
Leave her alone. She’s pregnant.

CÔME
Look, a coven in the making!

(CLAUDE turns to CÔME and towers over him.)

CLAUDE
Hold your tongue.

(TOUSSAINT steps into diffuse the situation. He examines
AXELLE.)

TOUSSAINT
This woman has merely fainted,
(turns to the crowd)
177
but we’ve intervened most propitiously
before that one
(he points to ZÉPHYRINE)
could do harm to the unborn child.
Take her to the village!

(As the crowd moves off with ZÉPHYRINE, TOUSSAINT motions to
CLAUDE to take his wife.)

TOUSSAINT
Take her home. It is best if she doesn’t see what transpires.
We are expert in these matters
and more than once have witnessed
the ruination of the innocent
along with the damned.

(BLACKOUT)

(END OF SCENE)
178
ACT III

Scene 3

SETTING: A gallows raised above the stage. People
surround it with torches. TOUSSAINT stands on
the platform.

AT RISE: ZÉPHYRINE is lead onto the platform with her
hands bound. The crowd murmurs.

(TOUSSAINT raises his hands to hush the crowd.)

TOUSSAINT
The widow Zéphyrine stands accused of witchcraft
and foul sorcery.
(he turns toward Zéphyrine)
Do you wish to offer testimony on your own behalf?

(ZÉPHYRINE looks on him with contempt.)

179
ZÉPHYRINE
Yes.

(TOUSSAINT steps toward her to undo her hands and speaks to
her.)

TOUSSAINT
Remember, with a word
I can bring the same fate upon your friend.
Don’t test me.
(he backs away and gives her room to speak)

(ZÉPHYRINE looks around at the waiting faces and composes
herself.)

ZÉPHYRINE
You have brought me here to testify
and I don’t know what to tell you.

Perhaps you have reasons,
but they all seem to unravel
like a basket ruined in the rain.

180
(TOUSSAINT takes a step towards ZÉPHYRINE and she puts up her
hand.)

ZÉPHYRINE(con’t)
Perhaps water is my undoing.

I like the feel of the downpour
washing the river from my eyes.
I have named that river loneliness.

You call it being a widow.

You call it unnatural to be dancing
in the plashy streams and mud‐lush hills.
You say I enchanted the water,
and that’s why my hut remained
while others washed away.

I tell you it’s a curse of a different kind,
one you’d have to be alone with for many years
before you could begin to understand.

181
And if it is evil, it’s not mine.
(she pauses and the crowd murmurs)

If you felt a nothingness so large
it threatened to undo you,
you’d find your feet testing the earth too
no matter what the weather.
You’d dance this hectic kingdom of stones
just to feel the good, good bruise,
just to point,

“There. Still whole enough to be wounded.”

It’s a delicate point I make.
Too much of a nuance to be regarded
when your children need a roof.

Faced with the corrosive motion of fear
truth loses its potency
and floats in a limpid rill
like a dead fish.

182
Or maybe truth is a stone
worn smooth by too much water,
a stone just the right weight for throwing
at the widow whose trees you covet,

because they thrive when yours wither,
and her hens never fail to egg.

Fecundity must surely be profane,
because one must toil at being holy.

I have felt God’s indifference to my prayers,
the way you’ve felt the soil become bored
with your constant planting.

(TOUSSAINT crosses his arms impatiently.)

ZÉPHYRINE(con’t)
I know that’s a heresy,
and I have little time.
The rest I must answer.

They said I had a nest of male members in a tree.
183
What I had was a bird who sang sweet aurora
and a thatched hut at the edge of a pond‐studded bog.

I had the small blessing of music at first light
and a mountain of emptiness at my back.

And if I paid that nest undo homage with worm‐gift,
flower head, or tender root, then who are the ones
who spied, and never cared to offer
the simple grace of “Good morrow neighbor?”

I tell you it’s as if I’ve been gone for years,
and this body was mere sack‐cloth
left behind by an unwanted guest.

This body is a roped curtain
barring what you want.

And when you push it aside
I will vanish.

But know this before I go:

184
You have accused me with a theme,
not a crime. You have built what little you have
the way night builds on day,
first as the shadows of fluttering leaves,
then the elongated trunk of a tree,
then the darkness,
which is after all,
nothing.

You have tried me on ether,
but I am well accustomed
to the power of naught.
I have long survived on even less,

so with ether as my sole defense
I will disappear.
(ZÉPHYRINE bows her head.)

(BLACKOUT)

(END OF SCENE)
185
ACT III

Scene 4

SETTING: Late summer. ZÉPHYRINE’s house. The tree
branch that once held a nest has been sawed off.

AT RISE: Later afternoon, but only the exterior, downstage
left is lit. The interior of the house remains dark.
AXELLE’S TWIN BOYS run around the tree
wearing crisp, white shirts. Insects buzz.

Light rises on the interior downstage right to
reveal a larger table than before, set with cups
and dishes for all the children. CLAUDE sits at
the head. AXELLE tends the hearth stove, her
belly swollen with child. She straightens up and
rubs her back.

AXELLE
Thank you for bringing the firewood.
186
CLAUDE
A man always tends to his den.
(AXELLE shudders at this statement.)
CLAUDE(con’t)
Is the child coming?
AXELLE
No.
CLAUDE
I thought I saw a small agony in your face.
AXELLE
It was an agony of a different kind.
(she turns back to her cook pot)
CLAUDE
Have you considered names for the child?

AXELLE
If it’s a girl I’m naming her “Zéphyrine.”
(Claude slams the table.)
AXELLE
You can bluster all you want. It’s my right,
and there’s no one here to say
it’s not a good name.
187
Your witch hunters evaporated
quicker than clouds
after the storm they caused.
(AXELLE faces him and they stare at each other steadily.)
CLAUDE
Women live by the rabbit’s cunning,
but a man must plow, and hunt,
(pauses)
and kill to feed his den. Our minds are ever
on our dens.
AXELLE
Do you think you could ring the bell and call your
den to supper?
(CLAUDE rises from the table and goes outside. The exterior goes
dark.
AXELLE sits in a chair.)
AXELLE(con’t)
Oh Zéphyrine. I feel I am trapped in the momentum
of a life I did not plan, with nothing to anchor me
except routine.
(she looks around the room)
188
The daily tether pulls me
from one chore to the next—
from milking, to picking, to cubing carrots
before I slide them into the pot,
but my hands….
Sometimes they are strange to me,
(she holds out her hands and looks at them)
pounding down dough as if whishing it bruises,
they seem the hands of someone else,
because my heart now regularly leaves my body,
(she goes to the window, pulls the curtain at the window shut)
and when it’s fully present it is angry, murderous
around the neck of a chicken,
torturous in deboning Claude’s dead rabbits.
(she goes back to the table and chops food angrily, then stops)
What begins in indecision
ends in the hands of others.
(she puts the knife down)
And, here I am, in the long forgotten house of friendship
without my friend.
(she smoothes back a loose hair)
But I do rise daily,
189
inside a scheme that
is mostly how you wanted it,
except for your absence,
(rubs her round stomach)
and that I will try to correct
in the smallest of ways
and in name only.
There will once again be a Zéphyrine
running through this orchard
with foxglove in her hair.

(BLACKOUT)
190
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