{"id":2309,"date":"2011-05-11T22:30:15","date_gmt":"2011-05-12T02:30:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/?p=2309"},"modified":"2015-09-26T13:46:10","modified_gmt":"2015-09-26T17:46:10","slug":"theater-days","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/?p=2309","title":{"rendered":"Theater Days"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Theater Days<\/h1>\n

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In and Out, by Brian Auger & The Trinity (1968), encountered 1968<\/h3>\n

Buy it here<\/a> | See video with original piece here<\/a><\/p>\n

Gates of Eden, by Bob Dylan (1965), encountered 1968<\/h3>\n

Buy it here<\/a> | Video with original piece here<\/a> | Lyrics here<\/a><\/p>\n

I was theater-smitten before I ever got to college.\u00a0 By my high school years, I\u2019d accumulated over a hundred programs from shows I\u2019d seen, and I could quote you a lot of Shakespeare.\u00a0 In high school, I\u2019d appeared in three plays.\u00a0 Coming to Penn, then, I simply assumed that I\u2019d get involved with the student theater company, and I did.\u00a0 That turned out to be the Pennsylvania Players.\u00a0 My resulting involvement with them ended up being tougher, shorter, and more interesting than I would have predicted.\u00a0 In the end, I took part in only three shows.<\/p>\n

Armless in Philly<\/h3>\n

The first show was\u00a0a big original musical about GIs and nurses during the Korean War.\u00a0 The hero: a concert pianist who gets his arm blown off in combat, but then discovers meaning in life taking care of a little girl with leukemia \u2013\u00a0a little too\u00a0upbeat and square\u00a0for a show being produced during Vietnam.\u00a0 I served as assistant stage manager.[1] Doing that, I bumped up against some truths that were somehow new to me, I\u2019m not sure why, but which I found offputting.\u00a0 I learned that the theater is full of temperamental and cliquish people, for instance.\u00a0 I learned that kids with aristocratic pedigrees from Philadelphia\u2019s Main Line and similar spots further up the Eastern Seaboard had a sense of entitlement, not to mention quaint names.[2]\u00a0 I learned that some of the people in theater were highly flirtatious, and that in an organization drawn from four college classes, a lot of the romantic histories and\/or rivalries among the older members were important, extensive and not readily learned by newcomers.\u00a0 Knock me over with a feather!\u00a0 The effect was sort of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern<\/em>-y, with me stuck occupying a corner of a scene that other people were barging into and out of with little heed to me.<\/p>\n

Despite these shocks, I managed to do all right with that show, and suddenly started \u201cfeeling the love,\u201d in the modern phrase.\u00a0 (I burbled on to my parents \u201cThe first thing I discovered is that they are sort of a closed organization\u2026. The next discovery I made is that they love me and look upon me as some sort of a whiz kid.\u201d)<\/p>\n

The Bottom Rung of the Farm System<\/h3>\n

In recognition of my success, I was now placed in line to direct a show somewhere further up the line.\u00a0 My next step, in the spring,\u00a0was being given a stage manager position on one of an evening of short plays (see the program here<\/a>) that had won an undergraduate playwriting competition.\u00a0 Unlike the very limited assistant stage manager role on the big musical, this was effectively an assistant directorship, and looked on as readying me to direct.<\/p>\n

I surely don\u2019t want to exaggerate how much of a step up this was for me.\u00a0 Looking back, I can see this was\u00a0 the bottom rung of the Penn Players\u2019 farm system.\u00a0 The play we were given, called Blues Man<\/em>, by a senior we\u2019ll call Chaim, was described by him in a handwritten note on the script as: \u201c\u2026 the story of the necessary self-destruction of an emasculated white liberalism and the subsequent emancipation of the Negro Psyche.\u201d\u00a0 This two-character piece concerned the fracturing of a friendship and working relationship of a pair of jazz players, as the black one rejects the well-meaning but ultimately blind and patronizing support of the white one. As the (white) author pointed out to me recently, this was sort of an attempt to follow in the footsteps of black playwright Leroi Jones (these days\u00a0known as Amiri Baraka).\u00a0 Actually, for juvenilia, the play\u2019s not all that bad.\u00a0 But with the strained resources of talent Penn Players devoted to it, we made a hash of it.<\/p>\n

Beyond the fact that we wrote the play a new ending and destroyed the playwright\u2019s vision, we had no cast.\u00a0 For the angry black man we had a whimsical and utterly unmenacing guy I\u2019ll call Charles.\u00a0 (He later married a white girlfriend.)\u00a0 For the white guy we had a foreign grad student with a significant accent I\u2019ll call Dieter.\u00a0 Now, the white liberalism being dissed in the play was specifically American white liberalism.\u00a0 Foreign jazz enthusiasts, of that era especially, were just different from American ones; they liked and were reacting against different things.\u00a0 Dieter could effortlessly have come across as some kind of clueless foreigner, rendered insensible to the values of truth, justice and the American Way by too much food with garlic, powerful tobacco and reflexive Marxism. \u00a0But he couldn\u2019t be a convincing U.S. honky trying to sidestep white guilt.\u00a0 Also, he looked far more conventionally masculine than Charles.\u00a0 Acted that way, too.\u00a0 I remember him at parties,\u00a0absolutely relentless in the pursuit of American women, which Charles never was, despite his quoting me the saw about \u201conce you go black, you never come back.\u201d\u00a0 In Chaim\u2019s and Leroi Jones\u2019 imaginations, this would have been wrong; the black guy should be the studly one, not the \u2013 to use Chaim\u2019s word \u2013 \u201cemasculated\u201d white liberal.<\/p>\n

We Couldn’t Do The Music<\/h3>\n

So, okay, we couldn\u2019t do typecasting.\u00a0 Worse yet, we couldn\u2019t do music, and that was on me.\u00a0 For our play, the choice of cue music for some reason was mine.\u00a0 Now you\u2019d think that I\u2019d have been sophisticated enough to realize that in a play about two blues-oriented American jazzmen, one of whom is black and plays the sax \u2013 the white guy tickles the ivories \u2013 we would lead in and out with small-group jazz that might remind one a bit of (but probably without actually being by) people like Coltrane, Parker or Rollins.\u00a0 But the sad truth was that I knew nothing about those guys in 1968.\u00a0 As I\u2019ve said in another one of these pieces, rock was shouting pretty loudly in my ear right then.<\/p>\n

I did<\/em> have a jazz album, though: Open<\/em>, by the Brian Auger Trinity, a bunch of Brits who had obviously heard rock once or twice.\u00a0 The rock intonations were probably what I liked about it \u2013 well, that and the cover photo of spacy but sexy Julie Driscoll, who, however, only sang on one side of the record.[3] \u00a0So, making use of my limited repertoire of jazz records,\u00a0what we hit upon to play for the cue-in music was In and Out<\/em> from Open<\/em>.\u00a0 So, yes, technically I got the small group aspect right: as the name implies, the Trinity were Brian Auger and two other musicians, a bassist and drummer.\u00a0 But the keyboard Auger was playing on this number was an organ, a Hammond B-3.\u00a0 There\u2019s no better way I know to describe the performance than to call it jaunty, a Hammond tour-de-force.\u00a0 (You can listen to it by following the link above.)\u00a0 It was swinging more than soulful, funky without the spirituality of the Coltrane types.\u00a0 Kind of a strut with a sporadically walking bass line.\u00a0 Call it Carnaby Street Jazz.<\/p>\n

Whatever I was thinking, and I swear I don\u2019t know, the result was that my little musical contribution to the theatrical end product was to strip out any musical context for a racial argument largely couched in musical terms.\u00a0 And whatever I was thinking then, whenever I play that number or that album these days I think of my experience helping put on a little play in a strange and somewhat hostile environment \u2013 a sort of microcosm of how I felt about freshman year at a strange school in a strange city.<\/p>\n

Glorious Rambling Nonsense<\/h3>\n

It\u2019s not the only song that makes me think of the experience.\u00a0 You also have to take Gates of Eden<\/em> into account.\u00a0 It was, as I have said, a three-play evening.\u00a0 The first play, called Necropolis<\/em>, has vanished from my memory (and the author hasn\u2019t answered my e-mails to remind me).\u00a0 But the music that accompanied it has not: Bob Dylan\u2019s haunting, mystical, not-to-be-understood slice of what?\u00a0 Gnosticism?\u00a0 Apocalyptics? It was at about this point in the second semester of my freshman year that I was came to the realization that an English major would be a far safer course of study for me than a lot of other things.\u00a0 I was starting to think and listen like one.\u00a0 And my ear, increasingly sensitized by what I was getting in my courses, recognized both music and poetry amid the ramblings.<\/p>\n

No mistake; the song did ramble.\u00a0 I defy anyone to make cold sense out of lines like:<\/p>\n

The lamppost stands with folded arms.<\/address>\n
Its iron claws attach to curbs \u2018neath holes<\/address>\n
Where babies wail though it shadows metal badge<\/address>\n

So one mistake would be to take every word as if it were seriously meant to denote something.\u00a0\u00a0Another would be to take the whole as if there weren\u2019t something meaningful going on.\u00a0 There are two clear poles of meaning in the song.\u00a0 It starts and ends with wonderment at the elusive meaning of war, and it contrasts the bafflement and confusion the speaker experiences with the certainty of Eden.\u00a0 We know a few things about Eden; among them:<\/p>\n

No sound ever comes from the Gates of Eden.<\/address>\n
\u00a0<\/address>\n
You will not hear a laugh<\/address>\n
\u00a0<\/address>\n
All except inside the Gates of Eden\u00a0 [which seems to contradict the previous point<\/em>]<\/address>\n
\u00a0<\/address>\n
There are no kings inside the Gates of Eden.<\/address>\n

And there are no sins inside the Gates of Eden.<\/em><\/p>\n

\u2026 what’s real and what is not.<\/em><\/address>\n
It doesn’t matter inside the Gates of Eden.<\/em><\/address>\n

And there are no trials inside the Gates of Eden.<\/em><\/p>\n

And there are no truths outside the Gates of Eden.<\/em><\/p>\n

Was the land beyond the Gates of Eden real in the universe of the song?\u00a0 Unclear.\u00a0 And was the peacefulness of Eden anything more than that of the grave?\u00a0 Ditto.\u00a0 There was something uncompromising and bleak about this music, though, which made Eden seem forbidding, even with all these basically positive attributes Dylan posited.\u00a0 But I craved that bleakness for some reason.<\/p>\n

Of course, like everyone in my generation, I\u2019d been somewhat familiar with Dylan for at least three years.\u00a0 But I knew him as a protest singer (Blowin\u2019 in the Wind<\/em>), who also wrote grouchy love songs (Don\u2019t Think Twice, It\u2019s All Right<\/em>), and grouchy songs in general (Like a Rolling Stone<\/em>).\u00a0 The phase he was entering now, half Lewis Carroll nonsense versifier, half mad prophet, appealed to me much more.[4]\u00a0 It was around this time, as I recall, I spent a good part of a skiing trip at my dad\u2019s Catskill cottage, with the two of us playing Blonde On Blonde<\/em>[5]\u00a0speechless with laughter.\u00a0 How can you not laugh at lyrics like:<\/p>\n

The fiddler, he now steps to the road.<\/address>\n
He writes \u201cEverything\u2019s been returned that was owed\u201d<\/address>\n
On the back of the fish truck that loads<\/address>\n
While my conscience explodes.<\/address>\n

This is so preposterous, so inconsequential, so syntactically wrong, the mind just goes into overload.\u00a0 And Dylan was churning this stuff out by the acre at this phase.\u00a0\u00a0 But amidst the cheerful syntactical chaos, you could sense someone whose least utterance was powerful, whether for laughter, bleakness, or anger.\u00a0 Dylan was important.<\/p>\n

So Necropolis<\/em> was, in the final analysis, my real introduction to one of the great artists.<\/p>\n

The Origins Story of an Ink-Stained Wretch<\/h3>\n

To jump ahead just a little in the story, there was, as I\u2019ve stated, one more one-act play, the following academic year.\u00a0 This time I directed.\u00a0 I rubbed shoulders with some interesting people on this one.\u00a0 A future housemate of mine, a guy who went on to write for the New Yorker<\/em>, and also ghosted the memoirs of a well-known madam was in my little cast.\u00a0\u00a0And in another play,\u00a0the well-known musical theater critic Ethan Mordden (not the name he started at Penn with and not the spelling he used at that point of his apparently self-chosen name).\u00a0 The music was in the hands of a man who became a well-known Baltimore DJ during the album rock years.\u00a0 So there were interesting folk about.<\/p>\n

But over that year, which was the first I had a real girlfriend, I made two discoveries.\u00a0 I found out that\u00a0romance was a more interesting endeavor than the exercise in herding cats that theater was turning out to be \u2013 and that I liked reviewing theater for the Daily Pennsylvanian more than I liked producing it for Penn Players.\u00a0 Reviewing plays and musicals is a pursuit that has, off and on, lasted to this day.\u00a0 I remain a theater-struck ink-stained wretch, but with a face that has stayed innocent of greasepaint.<\/p>\n

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[1]\u00a0\u00a0 See excerpts from the program here<\/a>.\u00a0 (The rest had to be jettisoned for reasons of bandwidth.)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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[2]\u00a0\u00a0 The star was my dorm counselor, Bancroft Littlefield, Jr.\u00a0 (Or, from an etymologist\u2019s perspective, Beanfield Littlefield.)\u00a0 Consider this comment bemusement at his name, not a suggestion one way or another\u00a0as to whether\u00a0he had what we moderns call a sense of entitlement, or any other kind of disrespect. \u00a0He has apparently. and doubtless deservedly,\u00a0become a name to reckon with in New England legal and\u00a0political circles.<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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[3]\u00a0\u00a0 The story here is a bit complicated.\u00a0 The album was a double album.\u00a0 The A-side was called Jools<\/em>, and had the above-pictured cover of Julie Driscoll (known then by the nickname Jools, nowadays, 2011, performing under her married name Julie Tippetts<\/a>).\u00a0 Reviewer Greg Boraman aptly summarizes<\/a> her performance this way: \u201cthe seminal 60s hippy chick, sings with a stoned, disjointed charm to great effect.\u201d (There are good videos of Jools performing cuts from the album with the Trinity here<\/a> and here<\/a>.) The B-side was just the Trinity.\u00a0 It had a matching cover photo of an overexposed (a word that happens to be apt as a matter both of photography and of decency) Brian Auger, frontally nude, but with his privates covered by a medallion that depicted the other two members of his band.\u00a0 This side was called Auge<\/em>.\u00a0 That\u2019s where In and Out<\/em> came from.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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[4]\u00a0\u00a0 For a good quick chronological Dylan guide, look here<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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[5]\u00a0\u00a0 I didn\u2019t own it; it came into our world courtesy of one of my stepsister Hilary\u2019s friends or boyfriends, who had the admirable habit of leaving a lot of interesting vinyl up at the cottage.<\/p>\n

Copyright (c) Jack L. B. Gohn<\/p>\n

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Whatever I was thinking, and I swear I don\u2019t know, the result was that my little musical contribution to the theatrical end product was to strip out any musical context for a racial argument largely couched in musical terms. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,968],"tags":[2070,2689,2702,2695,2712,2722,2718,2715,2700,2688,2686,2685,2719,2694,2713,2707,2721,2716,2720,2698,2687,2723,2684,1006,2706,2710,2709,2711,2701,2703,2717,2620,2704,2714,1242,2699,2692,2691,2654,2465,2696,2587,2708,2690,2697,2464,2705,2693],"class_list":["post-2309","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-closeup","category-theme-songs","tag-2070","tag-2689","tag-amiri-baraka","tag-aristocats","tag-auge","tag-bancroft-littlefield","tag-blonde-on-blonde","tag-blowin-in-the-wind","tag-blues-man","tag-bob-dylan","tag-brian-auger","tag-brian-auger-the-trinity","tag-bringing-it-all-back-home","tag-bruce-montgomery","tag-carnaby-street","tag-charlie-parker","tag-daily-pennsylvanian","tag-dont-think-twice-its-all-right","tag-ethan-mordden","tag-farm-system","tag-gates-of-eden","tag-greg-boraman","tag-in-and-out","tag-jazz","tag-john-coltrane","tag-jools","tag-julie-driscoll","tag-julie-tippetts","tag-leroi-jones","tag-liberalism","tag-like-a-rolling-stone","tag-main-line","tag-marxism","tag-necropolis","tag-new-yorker","tag-one-act-play","tag-penn","tag-pennsylvania","tag-pennsylvania-players","tag-philadelphia","tag-rosencrantz-and-guildenstern-are-dead","tag-saxophone","tag-sonny-rollins","tag-theater","tag-tom-stoppard","tag-university-of-pennsylvania","tag-white-guilt","tag-why-me"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2309","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2309"}],"version-history":[{"count":53,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2309\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5504,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2309\/revisions\/5504"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2309"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2309"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2309"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}