Stage
Pictured from left: Stanley Bahorek and Ken Barnett. Photo: T. Charles Erickson.
folk opera Boneyard Prayer. In the case of February House, however, he’s left the songwriting chores to his collaborator. Fortunately, both Bockley and Kahane have acting backgrounds, so they’ve formed similar opinions about the needs of a theater song. “You can get away with being very oblique in a pop song,” Kahane explains. “There’s actually a very different approach for writing theater songs and lyrics. You have to think the way a playwright would approach writing a monologue. Think about what the beats are, the beat shifts and how the music supports that. It’s really a question of finding the right diction for the character.” It was Bockley’s task to give dramatic shape to the musical’s essentially a plotless story, which is based on a work of non-fiction by Sherill Tippin. The show imagines what life was like when novelist Carson McCullers, poet W.H. Auden, composer Benjamin Britten and Gypsy Rose Lee, among others, all lived together in a run-down boarding house at 7 Middagh Street in Brooklyn for about a year and a half prior to America’s entry into World War II. Presiding over the group – like a kind of a precursor to Anna Madrigal in Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City novels – was George Davis, a flamboyant author and editor. In the musical, Davis seems to be dealing with his own stalled literary career by enabling the creative efforts of other writers. Kahane is eager to acknowledge the contributions that a host of people – including Artistic Directors Eustis and Long Wharf’s Gordon Edelstein – made to the development 84
CONTEMPORARY CULTURE//MAGAZINE
of February House. “Ted Sperling’s experience and his knowledge were particularly valuable in leading a bunch of musical theater newbies to the well,” Kahane emphasizes. For example, he says that it was Sperling who pointed out the main challenge in adapting Tippin’s book for the stage. “I said, ‘Well, it’s tricky because it’s not a work of fiction,” Sperling recalls. “It doesn’t have a beginning, middle and end. So, structuring it is going to be a lot of work. But, I think it’s ripe with potential and full of rich characters.” Perhaps the most remarkable thing about February House is how the musical got its start. In an economic environment where even the latest film-to-stage adaptation by a big name composer can have trouble attracting financing, Kahane points to “a series of happy coincidences” that led to the Public Theater’s commission. At around the same time that Ted Sperling was becoming familiar with both Kahane and February House, the composer says that he met Ted and Mary Jo Shen. The Shens head a foundation that underwrites the work of innovative musical theater composers like Ricky Ian Gordon, Adam Guettel and Michael John LaChiusa. And they’ve played a part in helping pioneering musicals like Grey Gardens and The Light in the Piazza to secure Broadway runs. “I was aware of their reputations as a supporters of theater that wasn’t specifically commercially-minded,” Kahane says. “So, I introduced myself.” As luck would have it, the Shens had also recently read Sherill Tippin’s book. With their
backing added to Sperling’s, it wasn’t difficult to pique Oskar Eustis’ interest in the project. “The story’s political themes really appealed to Oskar who, coincidentally, was also my dramaturgy professor at Brown,” Kahane reveals. And the first Musical Theater Initiative commission was created. The final piece of the puzzle fell into place when director Davis McCallum joined the creative team. “We ran into each other, again coincidentally, at a reading of Rebecca Gillman’s adaptation of Carson McCuller’s The Heart is a Lonely Hunter,” Kahane recalls. “When Seth came on board three months later the three of us would get together and have rigorous dramaturgical conversations.” In-house readings at the Public followed as the musical was being written. These attracted the attention of both Long Wharf and New York Stage and Film, a professional summer theater located on the Vassar College campus in Poughkeepsie, NY, who offered to sponsor a workshop of the show. “We spent three weeks at New York Stage and Film,” Kahane says. “Which, in retrospect, we really spent figuring out how the three of us [Bockley, Davis and Kahane] worked together in a room, which was incredibly valuable.” When February House finally bowed at Long Wharf after three years of development, the Hartford Courant’s critic Frank Rizzo wrote “Not since Sunday in the Park with George does a musical so dazzlingly explore the role of art, artists and the “real” world in which they live with such creativity, intelligence and heart.” And Joe Meyers said on his ctnews.com blog that Bockley and Kahane’s “portrait of unconventional young artists trying to make a new family for themselves has a timeless feeling…often as funny as it is touching.” Unfortunately, in 1941 George Davis’s experiment in communal living came to an end, having succeeded about as well as the efforts of some to keep America out of World War II. The musical emphasizes the ephemeral nature of the enterprise with songs that are often more wistful and delicate than they are show-stopping. One suspects that Kahane was inspired by what’s left of the actual address. Though the boarding house was torn down in 1945 to make way for the BrooklynQueens Expressway, Kahane says that he has been to visit the spot where it once stood. “Not only did they raze the house, they dug out the land,” he reports, “So, there’s just open air where it had been. But, there’s still something very moving about walking up to the fence overlooking the BQE and sensing that there was this remarkable energy that flowed there some seventy years ago. And now it’s just thin air.” But, from now until June 10 you can visit 7 Middagh Street at the Public Theater (www. publictheater.org) in New York City. And, hopefully, this time it won’t vanish!