men are poor things
by
Douglas Messerli
Gertrude Stein and
Virgil Thomson, The Mother of Us All as performed by the Juillard Opera,
with the New York Philharmonic at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, performed on
television on April 3, 2020
Gertrude
Stein’s and Virgil Thomson’s significant 1947 opera, The Mother of Us All—performed
on live-television the other night from the Charles Engelhard Court of the
Metropolitan Museum of Art—was one of the great events of 2020, and a
particularly needed tonic in these difficult times of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Yet, Thomson’s score, buried as it was,
as The New York Times critic Zachery Wolfe put it, “far-off under the
Branch Bank facade, sounded less snappy than they should.” Stein’s lyrics,
however, sung vitally by soprano Felica Moore, did come alive, and were the
center of this work.
Anthony, in this work, becomes a symbol of
agreeable but endless insistence on the rights of all those who cannot speak up
for themselves. With violins, violas, trumpets, piano, and drums, she sings out
as a lesbian (whose partner expresses much of her lover’s history, demanding
that Anthony speak out more loudly than agreeably) for the causes in which she
believes.
Susan B., however, realizes that despite
her constant rejections to be represented by the ballot, that
“they listen to me, they always listen to me.” Or as Susan herself realizes,
that despite that men “are so selfish,” that they are also “such poor things,” and
that “men are gullible, they listen to me.”
In a strange way, the power with which Susan
courted her male and female audiences through her agreeable and polite behavior
she knew, all the while, “she was right because she was right.”
It’s hard to perceive the powerful
Felicia Moore as a quiet person, so forceful and magnificent is her singing.
But like the male figures of which she sings, she convinces us of her righteous
power. And we come to believe in her abilities to convince us, particularly
through Stein’s use of minor figures who pass through her life such as Jo the Loiterer
(Chance Jonas-O’Toole), Chris the Citizen, and Angel More, who weave into the
stewpot of Stein’s arching history a realization of how Anthony was both part
of the world in which she lived and highly aware of the future in which women
would endlessly have to continue to battle.
Language is at the heart of this
marvelous opera. As the noted orator Daniel Webster (William Socolof), in
Stein’s and Thomson’s opera expresses the pit of identity, an issue of which
Stein, who proclaimed that we simply repeat ourselves, was always interested:
My father’s
name
The pit he
dragged a pit.
My name
cannot be any other.
He digged a
pit he digged it for his brother.
Digging a pit was what all the men in
Susan’s life did, and even after, when women had gained the vote, they choose
to cancel the ballots by destroying the ballot boxes. The battle rages still
today not only on sexual lines, but regarding partisan politics. The mother of
us all has still not yet helped to heal us alas.
Los Angeles, April 14, 2020
Reprinted
from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (April 2020).
