[ MAUKA-MAKAI ]
OK, so you were comfortably ensconced in your home in Vero Beach, Fla., or Lemon Grove, Calif., this past summer. COVER STORY
Waging an inner
war on terror
Theater groups explore inner
workings of fearBy Scott Vogel
svogel@starbulletin.comA few months later, you discovered that you were living next door to a mass-murderer in potentio, a man who -- almost single-handedly -- would take your great and mighty country and turn it on its ear.
And what did you say when, a few days after Sept. 11, the FBI showed up at your door demanding to know if you had any advance word on your neighbor's murderous intentions?
Well, you said, they were quiet people. Or they were private people. Or they were surprisingly polite people, given the crimes for which they were later accused.
In fact, no one was surprised when a woman by the name of Diane Adair, a neighbor of the now notorious Nawaq Alhamzi and Khalid Al-Midhar, told the Washington Post that "they seemed like normal people." After all, like legions of miscreants before them, the men gave no evidence of a double life.
"You never imagine that you have a hijacker next door," said Adair, putting it succinctly.Great artists and great criminals, it turns out, share a fascination with what hidden depths might be concealed beneath a pristine surface. And this fascination finds expression in murder, yes, but also in opera, literature and theater, as two of the fall arts season's most intriguing offerings have recently made crystal clear. Each explored the disquiet behind the quiet, and by doing so, each proved (by the way) that there's quite an entrancing arts scene out there if only you're willing to burrow under our fair city's pop culture veneer.
At first glance it seems hard to believe that the local media virtually ignored a recent one-night-only staging of Ravel's "L'Enfant et les Sortilèges" by Hawaii Opera Theatre. The oversight is perhaps explainable by reference to the performance date (Halloween) and a strange journalistic fascination with the ins and outs of trick-or-treating. But an oversight it was, and a glaring one. The 45-minute opera (opera express?) was nothing less than thrilling, a work as challenging to the ear and eye as it was when first composed, in 1925.You've no doubt heard that "L'Enfant" concerns a 6-year-old boy sent to bed without supper following an incident that culminates in his sticking his tongue out at his mother. (Actually, his punishment does include allowances for dry bread and unsweetened tea, but let's not get bogged down in details.) You may also know that the boy responds rather badly to his imprisonment, smashing a cup and teapot, disrupting the pendulum on a grandfather clock, pulling a cat's tail and disemboweling a stuffed squirrel with a fountain pen.
The boy is, in short, "acting out," to use a phrase that thankfully never existed in Ravel's day. But what happens next -- the grandfather clock, the teapot, etc., magically come to life -- shocks the boy out of his unruliness and into a consideration of the hidden animus in the inanimate. It's a situation that grows steadily terrifying by the minute (a terror captured perfectly by Stephanie Conching, who played the boy), not to mention musically adventurous. When the teapot begins singing to the cup ("How's your mug?" he begins, appropriately), the number has a music-hall raucousness that might have been an outtake from "Cabaret."
Soon, a princess appears from the pages of the boy's torn storybook, singing a rather traditional aria on the pleasures of freedom from the page. But then, just as quickly, the child's math book comes to life, the numbers swirling around him during a cacophonous tarantella that gradually grows more and more frantic ("Two slow trains leave at 20-minute intervals!" they chant, SAT-like).Before his ordeal concludes, the boy will witness the anthropomorphosis of cats and trees, moths and bats, a frog and a dragonfly, in yet another harrowing escalation of craziness. And in the midst of it all, he longs for the comforting arms of the woman he had previously defied, his mama, but she is nowhere to be found. It isn't until the boy manages to perform an act of kindness (he dresses the paw of an injured squirrel) that the spell is broken and objects of his room, along with his fears, retreat into the backdrop.
"L'Enfant" is at times a hilariously fractured fairy tale, and one complete with a moral for children (listen to your parents, they know everything) and adults (parents don't really know anything). And if in the end life only seemed more mysterious and unpredictable to the piece's Honolulu audience, the lucky few who witnessed the spectacle surely left with their artistic batteries fully charged, along with a renewed respect for the power of illusion.
This would have pleased Ravel, at least on the evidence of an essay he wrote called "Recollections of My Lazy Childhood," which was published shortly before his death in 1937.
"A true artist cannot be sincere," he wrote. "The imaginary, the false, if you please, used to create an illusion is mankind's one great superiority over the animals."
Had he lived to witness the events of the "artistry" of 21st-century terrorists, one wonders whether Ravel might have amended the above opinion.
James Joyce seems to have been more troubled by the illusions of life, his vast oeuvre a continuous ritual of unmasking. In "The Dead," a musical version of which plays through Dec. 9 at Hawaii Pacific University Theatre, a long and apparently solid marriage is rocked, however gently, by the revelation of a brief affair that occurred 25 years ago, one that may never have even been consummated.Michael Furey is the name of the boy whom Gretta Conroy once consorted with, a fragile slip of a thing who died tragically not long after she ended their affair. Perhaps she feared telling her husband, Gabriel, about her past, or perhaps she blocked it out; nevertheless, the memory of Michael comes blazingly to life during a Christmas party given by Gabriel's aunts. There Gretta hears a song, "The Lass of Aughrim," which Michael used to sing to her.
"Such eyes as he had," she tells her husband, helplessly transfixed by the memory. "Big dark eyes! And such an expression in them -- an expression!"
Gabriel wonders if she was in love with Michael, a question that provokes the cryptic reply, "I was great with him at that time," and then Gretta launches into the story of her final farewell to the boy, on a rainy night when Michael appeared in her garden begging for love and telling her that without her, he didn't want to live. Later, after Gretta has fallen asleep, Gabriel ponders their life together.
"He thought," Joyce writes, "of how she who lay beside him had locked in her heart for so many years that image of her lover's eyes when he had told her that he did not wish to live." It's a pattern of thought that eventually leads Gabriel to a generous consideration of all life's many secrets, particularly those that the dead take to their graves.
"He was conscious of, but could not apprehend, their wayward and fleeting existence. His own identity was fading out into a gray impalpable world: The solid world itself which these dead had one time reared and lived in was dissolving and dwindling."
Everything on which Gabriel once depended now seems to have a question mark attached to it, and all because of the glimpse into Gretta's hidden depths he was briefly granted.
"James Joyce's 'The Dead,'" the musical, is an adaptation of the short story, and as such differs in a number of details from its source material. But what the show -- and the cast and crew of the HPU production -- brilliantly retain is the sense of teeming passions lurking just underneath the tightly corseted world of 1904 Dublin. Most of the action takes place at the Christmas party, an artistic choice that requires a large cast to be onstage for long periods even though most of them have little dialogue.
This may have created a logistical nightmare for "The Dead" director Joyce Maltby, but you'd never know it. Every actor is supremely focused on embodying his or her character, so much so that it's unlikely that any two theatergoers will share exactly the same experience. One will alight upon Jo Pruden knitting her brows even as her character, Mrs. Malins, awaits the arrival of her son Freddy, a belligerent drunk sure to wreak havoc on the genteel assemblage.
Another will be drawn to Mary Frances Kabel-Gwin's eyes as they grow in anticipation whenever someone gets up to sing. A third might delight in one of Sharon Adair's dismissive eyebrow flashes. They're all a part of what makes "The Dead" such a richly textured story, and its stage adaptation such a satisfying experience.
Joyce apparently based his novella on a poem by Thomas Moore ("Oh Ye Dead"), the writer no doubt stirred by lines like the following:
"It is true, it is true, we are shadows cold and wan; and the fair and the brave whom we loved on earth are gone."
Except that they're not really gone, any more than the phantoms who walk amongst us are really real. Similarly, the recent stagings of "L'Enfant et les Sortilèges" and "The Dead" may well have been wayward and flickering shadows, but it's unlikely that either will soon disappear from our memories.
And in a time of infamous crimes and notorious criminals, it's comforting to know that our minds are still storing up a few happy remembrances.
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