Saturday, September 9, 2017

The Pilgrim's Progress by Ralph Vaughan Williams



     The comfort of House Beautiful. The Arming of Pilgrim. The sheer terror of war and battle. Temptations of riches, lust, and power. Denial. Hope. Struggle. Victory. Ralph Vaughan Williams’s masterpiece, The Pilgrims Progress, delivers them all.

     Gloriæ Dei Cantores and Elements Theatre Company will present The Pilgrim’s Progress fully staged for the first time in 12 years since they presented the New England premiere of the work in 2005. The opera will draw audience members from across the country and abroad into a timeless story portraying the universal journey of humanity’s search for spiritual redemption.

     The opera was written as the culmination of 45 years of Vaughan Williams’s musical journey. It’s the ultimate expression of the wide variety of his musical style, exhibiting fabulous transparency of orchestration and a luminous sound.

     Set at the Church of the Transfiguration in Orleans, MA, this rarely performed opera will come to life amid frescoes, mosaics, bronze, glasswork, and stone carvings depicting the story of salvation from Genesis to Revelation.

     The opera requires a 40-person main cast, a 60-person chorus, and a full orchestra — nearly a 1 to 1 ratio with the audience seating. It features almost 300 original costumes and thousands of rehearsal hours. 

     The statistics alone are staggering,” Richard Dyer of the Boston Globe said

    The opera is set against abstract projections -- cutting-edge theatre technology designed by Michael Counts, Inc. The main cast features highly acclaimed artists including Richard K. Pugsley, Andrew Nolen, Paul Scholten, Eleni Calenos, Martha Guth, Kathryn Leemhuis, Aaron Sheehan and John Orduña.

     The Pilgrim’s Progress is the featured event of an international symposium on Arts and Ecumenism commemorating the 500th Anniversary of the Reformation. Sponsored in part by the Vaughan Williams Charitable Trust of London, it will be the first fully staged performance of the opera worldwide since it was performed in London in 2012.

     The Pilgrim’s Progress will be performed at the Church of the Transfiguration, Cape Cod, MA, on Oct. 27 and 28, and Nov. 3 and 4 at 7:30 p.m. Call 508-240-2400 for reservations. Ticket availability is limited. Learn more at pilgrimsprogress2017.org.

Wednesday, September 6, 2017

Broadway Blessing -- 20th Anniversary Celebration



    Two decades ago I had a dream of creating an event that would bring the theatre community together every September to ask God’s blessing on the new season.  With the help of many people that dream became Broadway Blessing, an interfaith service of song, dance, and story that will celebrate its 20th anniversary this year.  I produced it for the first 16 years and now am happy to turn that role over to Kathryn Fisher who has put together an exciting program.  

     Please join us at 7 p.m. Sept. 18 at St. Malachy’s/The Actors’ Chapel (49th Street between Broadway and Eighth Avenue) for an evening that will include David Beach (Something Rotten, Mama Mia, Urinetown) and Catherine Russell, who is in Guinness World Records for most performances in the same show. She's been in The Perfect Crime Off-Broadway for 30 years.

   Project Dance, a beloved part of Broadway Blessing for the last decade, will perform and the Rev. George Drance, S.J., artistic director of Magis Theatre Company, will offer a short piece from his play *mark and serve as emcee. 

     As in the past, the service will feature its popular candle lighting ceremony and the Broadway Blessing Choir, under the direction of Stephen Fraser, will sing show tunes and lead the audience in a sing-a-long of a Broadway song at the end.  The program will be followed by a reception in the church’s West Chapel.  

     Reservations are not need. The event, which is free but contributions are welcome, is sponsored by St. Malachy’s and will feature area clergy and congregations, including from The Actors’ Temple.  

      Broadway Blessing began in 1997 after I interviewed Msgr. Michael C. Crimmins and the Rev. Joseph A. Kelly, S.J., priests at St. Malachy’s, for a profile for a Catholic magazine and they mentioned similar congregations representing Episcopal (St. Clement’s), Lutheran (St. Luke’s) and Jewish (The Actors’ Temple) members.  As a freelance writer, I saw potential for more features and ended up doing profiles of those congregations for several publications.

  In the weeks that followed I began thinking about their similarities -- especially congregants who face much rejection and therefore need to find acceptance and approval. I started envisioning a service that would bring them all together to offer comfort and strengthen faith.  I pictured it on a Monday night, when theatres are dark, that it would be free, there wouldn’t be any reserved seats for special people -- everyone would be together -- and that performers from Broadway would take part. 

     I wrote to the clergy of the four congregations and told them my idea.  Very quickly my phone began ringing and they one after the other excitedly told me how much they loved the idea. “No one’s ever thought of this,” Crimmins said.  But no one else was in the position I was in -- a journalist who goes from person to person and because of that can see connections others can’t.  

   That first Blessing attracted nearly 200 people and thanks to  Kelly, who talked up the event and was given a donation, we had a nice reception.  What touched me the most was a young woman who came up to me in tears at the end and said she was an actress and couldn’t get work and had been so down that evening she was thinking of quitting the business and going home. She told me she now felt so uplifted she would keep going. I have thought of her many times over the years when the producing got tough.  

     Broadway Blessing has been presented at St. Malachy’s, St. Luke’s, St. Clement’s, the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine and the Episcopal Church of the Transfiguration. We’ve featured Lynn Redgrave talking about the importance of theatre in her life, four-time Tony winner Boyd Gaines reading a speech by Althol Fugard, Marian Seldes and Frances Sternhagen reading from Tennessee Williams and others, and Edward Herrmann doing a dramatic reading of the final scene of Our Town, taking on all the parts.

   Among others who have participated are Melissa Errico, Christiane Noll, James Barbour, Three Mo’ Tenors, Billy Porter, KT Sullivan, Anna Manahan, Tituss Burgess, Adam Jacobs, J. Mark McVey, Carol Hall, Ken Prymus, Mary-Mitchell Campbell, Richard Maltby Jr, Natalie Toro, Kathleen Chalfant and Broadway Inspirational Voices.

     We’ve also been blessed with original songs composed for past anniversaries by Bob Ost for our fifth, Elizabeth Swados for our 10th and Phil Hall for our 15th.

       I like to think the participants enjoy taking part as much as we love having them.  Seldes and Prymus appeared three times. This is what the late Ed Herrmann had to say before making his second Broadway Blessing appearance: 

     “It’s reassuring to know there are so many people out there you know that believe in God and want to take that part of their life and dedicate it to the theatre because theatre is a very spiritual endeavor. 

     “They come from every conceivable denomination, which I kind of like. It’s like a study in architecture of all these different buildings. They come from all kinds of disciplines and it’s just great to be among them. It’s an annual event, like with spring comes the first buds, now it’s fall and we’re here to bless our endeavors for the rest of the year and maybe some luck will come out of it, whether that’s internal or external.”

Monday, September 4, 2017

Song of the Builders



Song of the Builders
 
On a summer morning
I sat down
on a hillside
to think about God -
 
a worthy pastime.
Near me, I saw
a single cricket;
it was moving the grains of the hillside
 
this way and that way.
How great was its energy,
how humble its effort.
Let us hope
 
it will always be like this,
each of us going on
in our inexplicable ways
building the universe.
 
~ Mary Oliver ~
 
(Why I Wake Early)

Saturday, September 2, 2017

The Peculiar Patriot



     When Liza Jessie Peterson tried to get her play The Peculiar Patriot produced in 2003, she met with rejection from every Off, Off-Broadway theatre she approached. No one would touch it. Her frustration became so great it eventually landed her in jail, where she found a captive audience. 

     She remained in the criminal justice system until last October.  In those 14 years much changed and now her play is having its world premiere at Harlem’s National Black Theatre

    Peterson wasn’t an inmate all those years.  She was an actress  and poet working, as she had since 1998, as a teacher and counselor at Rikers Island, New York City’s largest jail that is ranked one of the 10 worst in the country according to a 2013 report by Mother Jones. From those experiences she shaped her one-woman, 90-minute play, which is being co-produced by HI-ARTS (formerly known as the Hip-Hop Festival). It runs through Oct. 1.  

     “No one back then was talking about prisons the way they are now,” Peterson says.  “It wasn’t a subject that interested people.  It might have been a little too edgy.  The term mass incarceration was not in the language.”

    So when the New York theatre community wouldn’t receive her, she knew one that would.

    “That was the reason why I took it on the prison tour.  I took the script and took it to audiences that appreciated it.  They received me and I am grateful.  They saw me and I saw them.”

    The play is set in the waiting room of an upstate New York prison where Betsy is visiting her best friend, Joann, filling her in on the neighborhood gossip and launching into scathing indictments, laced with humor, against racism in the criminal justice system. 

    Peterson, who is in her 40s, talked about her work in the quiet black box theatre at HI-ARTS, which is one of many arts groups sharing space in a creatively converted former public school in East Harlem. Wearing a black I AM THE TEMPLE T-shirt, black jeans, large gold hoop earrings with an additional longer feathered one in her right ear, several rings of varying sizes and with her brown hair piled on her head, Peterson is a commanding figure at 6’ 1”.  Even at the end of the third day of “intense” rehearsals with director Talvin Wilks, she is eloquent and passionate about her subject, which she calls slavery revisited.

   “Our country is rooted in the system of slavery.  The 13th Amendment declares slavery is illegal except for the punishment of a crime.  Prisoners are allowed to be slaves.  They’re not protected by the abolition of slavery.”

     The play’s title comes from a “sanitized” term used during the time of slavery, The Peculiar Institution. Peterson, who calls herself an artivist, says mass incarceration is peculiar, and anyone who supports the war against racism and poverty is a patriot.

   Among her acting roles, Peterson appeared in the Oscar-nominated documentary “The 13th.”  And she was a consultant to Billy Moyers for his documentary “RIKERS: An American Jail.”  It was at Rikers, a seven-jail complex in the East River, that Peterson began touring her play, eventually appearing in 33 facilities around the country.

     Over time the zeitgeist changed, she said, citing especially the 2012 publication of Michelle Alexander and Cornel West’s The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, which “opened up the narrative.” Her play has changed structurally over the years with the help of performance residencies and a dramaturg.  She’s added current information and multi-media features to make it more theatrical.

    “I believe everything happens for a reason,” Peterson says.  “When I first wrote it, society wasn’t ready to receive it. I wanted to do it in a theatre but I disappeared into the rabbit hole of prison. It was divine timing. I didn’t plan or orchestrate it. All the frustration and creation lined things up for now.  I couldn’t have planned any better.  It was nothing short of orchestrated by God.”

     The format she chose, one character, worked well through all of that touring and will do so again now that she has signed with a touring agent.  She used a black woman “because our voices are rarely heard.”

     Betsy, whose real name is LaQuanda, makes her voice heard during the play.  She was given her nickname years before in juvie by a counselor because her last name is Ross and she was making a quilt.  Just get her going on the racism of the system, especially the profit motivation.

    “Soon as you hear the handcuffs go ka-klink, you hear the cash register go cha-ching,” she says. “We straight cash money crops.”

     And the beneficiaries, Betsy explains, are the rural white towns where prisons are built, bringing jobs in construction and eventually at the facility, not to mention the spinoff enrichment of the manufacturers of jumpsuits and other prison wares, the commissary, the phone company, diners, rest stops, strip malls and the bus companies that transport loved ones.

     “The whole community gets a facelift,” Betsy says.  “Yes, crime does pay, for certain people and certain communities.” 

     Peterson says the privatization of prisons creates the financial drive and motivation for profit.  

     “There’s a financial reward for increasing the number of people behind bars.  Are they being incarcerated for crimes or to maintain profit margins? It’s slavery created for profit. It’s the same dynamic with the racial disparity, with those predominantly black and brown working literally on plantations for corporations.

     “It’s white supremacy, about an economic and socio-economic system created to maintain the power of a specific group through the exploitation of another group.  It’s about looking at dismantling white supremacy if you really want to get at the root of it.”

   Prisons are built largely in white rural areas that have lost industries because they bring salaries, benefits and pensions, Peterson says. 

   “Why wouldn’t they want a job there, but why is prison the only solution?  We need to reimagine a society that doesn’t need to rely on prisons for economic sustenance. If we’re one of the wealthiest nations in the world, why do rural white communities have only prisons to rely on to feed their families?”

     Peterson says black and brown youths are much more likely to be incarcerated for minor crimes like selling firecrackers or fighting in school than white youths. 

   “The numbers tell it.  I’ve worked there 18 years and I could count on one hand the number of white kids and have fingers left over.”

   From her work with adolescents at Rikers, and from her experience being in a relationship with someone who was incarcerated, she knows the toll it takes on everyone.  For those on the outside, it could mean up to five hours travel one way for a couple hours of visiting with a loved one they often can’t even touch.

     “It’s a financial, emotional and psychological strain,” she says.  “That person is not there.  You can’t pick up the phone and call them.  Everything is regulated and monitored.  It takes a toll on the spirit.  You’re worried when you leave but there’s nothing you can do.  You can’t pop up and visit when you want.”

   Peterson left Rikers in October to promote first book, All Day: A Year of Love and Survival Teaching Incarcerated Kids at Rikers Island.  She said it was difficult to turn off what she heard and experienced there.  

   “As a human being and an artist I’m wired to be compassionate.  It’s hard to witness suffering and hear people’s traumas and not carry that with you, the multiple stories from multiple children created a floodgate.”

    And she carries with her the reactions her play drew during talkbacks from those at Rikers and the other prisons where she performed.

    “They always asked me, they implored me, to take it to the outside world so they will know we’re here.  I thought it was so powerful and touching. They wanted to make sure people get the message outside so they won’t remain forgotten, to make their voice visible and heard, to put a human face on a statistic.”