Louisa Proske | The Mother of Us All / 2020 [TV live-production]

men are poor things

by Douglas Messerli

 

Gertrude Stein (libretto), Virgil Thomson (composer), Louisa Proske (director) The Mother of Us All / 2020 [TV live-production]

 

Gertrude Stein’s and Virgil Thomson’s significant 1947 opera, The Mother of Us All—performed in collaboration of The Julliard School, The New York Philharmonic, and MetLiveArts 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.

      Fortunately, Stein’s pastiche of language grows even stronger in this production. This is not only a work about the great ur-feminist Anthony, who helped women get the opportunity to vote, but is a story about all those, past and present, who were disenfranchised, women, blacks, the poor, and just those hadn’t the opportunity of expressing themselves in the democratic process, as well as people who helped that governance to come into being, such as Daniel Webster, John Quincy Adams, and even Lillian Russell.

     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.”

      As reviewer Kurt Gottschalk expressed it, quoting from Stein’s lyrics: “They [men] fear women. They fear each other. They fear their neighbor. They fear other countries. And then they hearten themselves in their fear by crowding together and following each other.” I can’t imagine a better expression of the Trump reign.

 

      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 digged 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.

      I need to add that in 2000, Felix Bernstein played a child in the New York Opera production with Lauren Flanigan, and he would return from his rehearsals and sing out long passages from the opera so beautifully that I nearly cried. I think that during this time Felix and I truly bonded. I was terribly moved by his singing, and particularly of Stein. His young voice more completely characterized Stein’s Anthony B. than any soprano might.

 

Los Angeles, April 14, 2020

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (April 2020).

Richard Linklater | Blue Moon / 2025

the party’s over

by Douglas Messerli

 

Robert Kaplow (screenplay), Richard Linklater (director) Blue Moon / 2025

 

Not since Jean Cocteau’s The Human Voice of 1930 have we seen quite such a monodrama as Richard Linklater’s 2025 film Blue Moon. Yes, there have been numerous staged monologues on and off Broadway, long staged performances in which all the characters were played by the same actor such as the brilliant David Greenspan and others, along with the spun-out stories of recent monologists such as Spalding Gray; but very few films have allowed a single character to go on, almost single-handedly, for the 100 minutes of Blue Moon in which Lorenz Hart (performed almost miraculously by Ethan Hawke) has the floor. It is more than ironic that this great performance, whatever part of it may actually may be true, was also Hart's last. He would die, after drunkenly collapsing to the sidewalk near a bar on 8th Avenue in the pouring rain, of pneumonia a few months later.

     But tonight is March 31, 1943, the night the Broadway musical by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II opened at the St. James Theater and changed the American theater musical forever, and Rodgers’s former and still possibly current lyricist collaborator, Lorenz Hart is in attendance. But the minute the chorus belts out the final titular song, he bolts, rushing off to the famed Sardi’s bar and restaurant before creators Rodgers and Hammerstein, cast members, and other invitees can finish up their backstage congratulations, change their costumes, and make their way to the upstairs dining room at Sardi’s to await the reviews.

    In the empty bar, a closed sign posted on the door, Hart lets loose, at first mostly to bartender Eddie (Bobby Cannavale) and the pianist Morty Rifkin (Jonah Lees), whom Hart quickly renames Knuckles. Beginning with a quick discussion of Casablanca, evidently a regular topic of conversation of Hart and Eddie, Hart is quick to repeat his favorite line from the film, “Nobody ever loved me that much”—a key element of Robert Kaplow’s themes in Blue Moon. He goes on to praise the acting abilities of another figure short of stature (Hart is terribly self-conscious about his own 4 foot, 10 inches height), but of great acting range, Claude Rains, who also, despite his constant dabbling with the ladies, admits his love for Rick and at the end of the film joins up with him to travel to Brazzaville, while Rick expresses the coded homosexuality of the line: "Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship."

     The latter is the perfect line for the closeted Hart, who gets the whole sexual thing out the way almost immediately, admitting that when it comes to sex he is not only "ambisextrous"—able to jerk off with either hand—but omnisexual, arguing that such a condition is necessary to be able to write for both genders. Transsexuality was not a major topic in his day, nor for that matter was homosexuality something to be openly talked about, when even the gayest of men still dreamt of possibly conquering the opposite sex, whatever “conquering” for someone like Hart meant.

    The woman, in this case, is the quite tall Elizabeth Weiland (Elizabeth Qualley), a Yale student whom Hart has mentored and with whom he has spent a romantic (but totally sexless) weekend in Vermont. Among his many fantasies—and this is a man who, although pretending to be a cynical realist is filled with fantastical dreams—is that since she is also joining the party at Sardi’s (her mother is officially involved in the organization that has produced Oklahoma!, the Theatre Guild), perhaps tonight is the night she might….well even Hart is not sure of what he really wants from the girl. His admiration of her, nonetheless, is astounding, and throughout his long monologue, he can hardly find the right words to describe her, getting help from another, quite silent man in the corner, who just happens to be author E. B. White, who having just abandoned his journalistic career is stymied in his attempts to begin a children’s tale.

      Quite explicably, Hart takes out to time to tell White a story about a constantly returning mouse who lives in his apartment, which of course, leads to the noted children’s author’s renowned Stuart Little—all fiction screenwriter Kaplow admits, but it feels possible given the vast array of topics Hart encompasses on his grand voyage of the large and comfy Sardi’s bar, as if he were already on his way to explore the vast territory of Marco Polo, a far more perfect subject he later argues to Rodgers for a serious musical than a bunch of farmers and cowboys. Rodgers had early on asked him, despite their problems due to Hart’s alcoholism, to collaborate with him on the adaptation of Lynn Riggs’ play Green Grow the Lilacs (the source of Oklahoma!’s libretto), but his long-time collaborator turned him down flat.

     And what does he think of the musical, asks Eddie? It’s brilliant, a real breakthrough, destined for a long hit run, and will be performed in US high schools forever after, Hart declaims to Eddie, later repeating these praises to the composer, lyricist, and the crowd gathered to celebrate Oklahoma’s premiere; but it’s also...how to best express it...an unbelievable pastiche as corny as the elephant that Hammerstein has planted in the middle of Aunt Eller’s cornfield, or—had Hart been as truly prescient as he appears to be on this special night—“as corny as Kansas in August,” a line from Rodgers and Hammerstein’s later South Pacific. For Hart the work is easy and safe, unlike the daringly witty, sardonic, and sexual revelations he whipped up for Rodgers in their collaborations such as Pal Joey.

     Sure, he admits to Eddie, he’s envious; who wouldn’t be? But if nothing else, Hart is honest. On the staircase, as Rodgers (Andrew Scott) attempts to escape to the dinner he’s hosting, his former collaboration admits most of his reservations:

 

richard rodgers: Oklahoma! is too easy? The guy actually getting the girl in the end is too easy?

     You've just eliminated every successful musical comedy ever written, Larry.

lorenz hart: It's too easy for me.

rodgers: Did you hear the audience tonight?

hart: Yes.

rodgers: Sixteen hundred people didn't think it was too easy. You're telling me 1,600 people were   

     wrong?

hart: I'm just saying you and I can do something so much more emotionally complicated. We   

     don't have to pander to what...

rodgers: Oscar and I are pandering?

hart: No, I didn't say that.

rodgers: Irving Berlin is pandering?

hart: I love Berlin.

rodgers: "White Christmas" is pandering?

hart: Well, I don't believe "White Christmas."

rodgers: OK.

[Laughter]

rodgers: Well, maybe audiences have changed.

hart: Well, they still love to laugh.

rodgers: They want to laugh, but not in that way.

hart: In what way?

rodgers: In your way. They want to laugh, but they also want to cry a little. They want to feel.

    Despite the difficulties he has had working with Hart on the last couple of musicals due to his drunken disappearing acts, in this instance the great composer is graceful enough to offer up a collaboration on a new version of their A Connecticut Yankee, which Hart did accomplish for the revival of 1943. In this scene, however, both Rodgers and Hart know that their real collaboration is over. Things have changed, particularly with the arrival of World War II. The light-hearted wit of the 1920s and 30s, sprinkled heartily with the Wildean aesthetics of the gay fin de siècle, have little meaning for the audiences facing Hitler. Despite the immense talents of Vivienne Segal* and dancer Vera-Ellen A Connecticut Yankee lasted only 135 performances.

    Later, in the cloak room, Hart finally gets his dream lover away for what in any other film would certainly have led to a steamy moment or two of quick sex; but here, finally, he runs out of words as (based on the letters between the real Hart and Weiland), the 20 some year-old Elizabeth gets her own short monologue as she tells the story of her own dreamboat, a young man who she finally gets alone for a sexual rendezvous which he can’t consummate. Nonetheless, she is still so much in love with him she offers him a second chance in which he performs superbly, but never calls her back. She admits, as disappointed, angry, and righteously bitter about his entire behavior as she is, she would still take up with him again in a moment if he only called. As Hart commiserates, we can’t help loving who we love even if they’re the wrong people for us. When he dares to ask Elizabeth about her feelings for him, her answer is precisely that of the other two women for whom Hart had fallen, as he has earlier joked, “I love you Larry, but not in that way.”

     When he finally introduces her, late in the film, to Rodgers, the composer is immediately taken with her beauty and invites her along to a after-party he is about to attend. In Hammerstein’s company, moreover, is a bright young 12-year-old boy named Stevie (Cilllian Sullivan). When Hammerstein introduces him to Hart, he immediately recites the theater and number of performances of Hart's last Broadway show, arguing that his lyrics have grown a little sloppy. That kid reminded me of myself at just that age, I having almost memorized the Burns Mantle playbooks I studied in the Marion, Iowa Carnegie Public Library. For those in the know, the self-enchanted Stevie is Hammerstein’s protégé Stephen Sondheim, a classmate and friend of Hammerstein’s son James in real life, and who did seek out Hammerstein as his mentor. Since Sondheim himself has reported, however, that his first Broadway opening was Carousel in 1945, we must suppose that this encounter is also one of Kaplow’s fictions.

     All the celebrities of the evening, even E. B. White have now left, and it is finally time for Hart to grab his hat and run off to his own much-touted party, which, although he was well known to have regularly hosted, is probably, in this case, also a fiction. And despite his promises and Eddie’s attempts to keep him sober, Hart still needs, to quote another wonderful songwriting duo, Johnny Mercer and Harold Arlen, “One more for the road.”

     Like so very many alcoholics, Hart is the first to the party and the last to leave. As critic Brian Tellarico observes in his review on the Roger Ebert site:

 

“It’s a film that invites one to reflect on the lyrics Lorenz Hart wrote for the song that gives it its title. ‘I heard somebody whisper, “Please, adore me.”’ Despite all his cynical claims otherwise, Lorenz Hart needed to be adored, too. If only someone could love him that much.”

     Yet Knuckles cannot resist sending him away with his own version of “Blue Moon,” a song whose lyrics, particularly when sung by someone like Billy Holliday or Ella Fitzgerald are still transcendent.

    I think every gay man in the world might like to have seen Hart, who most probably was what everyone suspected, a homosexual, more clearly delineated in this film as a queer. At least in Blue Moon, unlike the dreadful 1948 film Words and Music (wherein Hart, played by Mickey Rooney, falls into depression only after a woman played by Betty Garrett turns down his proposal for marriage) most of those in the know, particularly Eddie and Weiland herself presumes he is a gay man, even if one couldn’t easily admit such things in public in those days. I’d look for proof in the lyrics themselves. Who else but a gay man could write a stanza like the one from “Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered” sung by Vivienne Segal in Pal Joey?

 

                                 I'll sing to him, each spring to him

                                 And worship the trousers that cling to him

                                 Bewitched, bothered and bewildered—am I

 

                                 When he talks, he is seeking

                                 Words to get off his chest

                                 Horizontally speaking

                                 He's at his very best

 

                                 Vexed again, perplexed again

                                 Thank God, I can be oversexed again

                                 Bewitched, bothered and bewildered—am I

 

    Hammerstein’s lovers, you must remember, fall for each other across a crowded room, at a square dance, on a carousel, or just trying out a waltz without any need, for god’s sake, to lay down and cling to the other’s pants, let alone worship them!

 

*Segal sang one of Hart’s new songs in that rewritten revival of A Connecticut Yankee, the witty “To Keep My Love Alive,” which begins:

 

I married many men, a ton of them,

And yet I was untrue to none of them,

Because I bumped off every one of them

To keep my love alive.

 

 In Blue Moon Hart quips about just this number, as if he were already at work on the lyrics.

     Hart is reported to have once proposed marriage to Segal who turned him down, perhaps responding, just as Hart in the film quips “I love you Larry, but not in that way.”

 

Los Angeles, October 6, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (October 2025).

 

Cheryl Dunye | Vanilla Sex / 1992

being called “other” by “others” is pretty strange

by Douglas Messerli

 

Cheryl Dunye (director) Vanilla Sex / 1992

 

This 3-minute short is a very minor work by the major lesbian filmmaker Cheryl Dunye. In Vanilla Sex, Dunye speaks about having attended a conference with mostly white lesbians in Los Angeles, primarily speaking about S&M.

    Through their discussions she discovered that “vanilla sex” in SM parlance meant sex without toys. And she was a bit startled for them to use that phrase in that respect, because, she suddenly remembers that at one point a fellow black woman was applying the same term to her, describing her as having “vanilla sex” because she was then dating a lot of white women.

    She remembers feeling offended on a personal level, feeling hurt that someone would apply such a term to her entirely negative. She finds it interesting, accordingly, that in the same community, the lesbian community, that such a term means two such radically different things. “It meant one thing to black women, and something totally different to this group of white women.”

    What Dunye is hinting at, in her rather casual discussion of a simple two-word phrase is that even with the female gay community there are racial distinctions in language wherein the same pair of words can be addressed as a taunt or attack for going outside of racial boundaries or suggest simply an absence of something that gives pleasure, a shift from “who you do to what you do.”

     The irony here is what characterizes so much of Dunye’s filmmaking. As she puts it, “being called ‘other’ by ‘others’ is pretty strange.”

 

Los Angeles, October 26, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (October 2025).

Eli Rarey | The Famous Joe Project / 2007

acting life instead of living it

by Douglas Messerli

 

Eli Rarey (screenwriter and director) The Famous Joe Project / 2007 [16 minutes]

Joe (Duncan Ferguson), aka “Famous Joe,” is a lonely young man who has decided to record his life on a webcam and broadcast his raw encounters daily.

    At the earliest point in the film we watch a grainy tape of Joe getting fucked by an older man as he ponders his feelings with regard to his various encounters, unsure whether he’s become an actor or is representing his honest feelings.

    Soon after, he meets up with another older man (Randall Rapstine), who seems happy to be filmed, but when it comes to suggesting what he wants to do on film, can only suggest they try out some things he’s seen in a magazine, which seems mostly to involve him getting spanked.

    Despite the fact that Joe has just met him the unimaginative and truly unattractive individual, Joe suddenly declares he loves him despite the fact that they have just met.

    We next witness at interchange between Joe and his visiting sister (Kelly Parver) who is obviously take aback his nearly empty apartment, suggesting that Joe should call his mother since she has become more open…leaving the line open-ended, which hints to us as viewers, particular when Joe tells her he’s not yet ready to call, that his mother has perhaps kicked him out of their home upon hearing he was gay.

    In the next scene, Joe and a stoned-out girl (Siobhan Towey) are in the bathroom, she trying to arouse him in some vague manner without much success. They tongue-kiss for a few seconds before she stands, pulls up her tights and decides that there’s not hope for a sexual encounter, giggling and she offers one more gesture of love.

    Later we see Joe in bed with a heavily tattooed man, evidently after sex. Suddenly the man rises and begins to put on his clothes with the intention of leaving. Joe comments once again that he has so much love to give to others, suggesting that the problem is that others cannot fully accept it, when we now perceive that perhaps in giving it away to everyone, particularly the wrong people as those we have seen on his webcam sessions, he has not left any love for himself.

     When the man opens the motel door and exits, Joe begins to cry uncontrollably.

     In the final scene Joe stands on the sidewalk outside a house calling his sister Dana, the sounds of a party in the background. He reports to his sister that he has called his mother, which evidently she has not heard about, but is apparent unwilling to hear his side of the story. He soon after hangs up, immediately after approached by a young man (John Brently Reynolds), who recognizes him as “famous Joe.” “I really love your website, and I think it’s the best website I’ve every seen, and think it’s totally fucking raw…,” he gushes, “I love watching it.”

     Joe thanks him, and suddenly reveals that today is his birthday, perhaps just responding that at least someone has given him something, a few perhaps drunken comments at least.

     “Happy birthday,” responds the young man.

     Joe responds with thanks, offering up the news that he thinks that today will be his last entry.

     “Why, why is this going to be your last entry?”

     “Because I’m going to kill myself,” Joe deadpans.

     The kid is seriously taken aback. Shaking his head back and forth, he quietly says, “I hope that’s a joke. I had a friend who killed himself, and I think that’s the most fucked up thing a person can do.”

     Joe apologizes, assuring him that he isn’t really going to it, and he was just joking. But the boy is not totally at ease with him having even spoken those words.

     “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, but I don’t really like it when people joke about that at all.”

     “Don’t worry,” Joe assures him. “I’m not going to do it. I just like the idea of it.”

    “That would just fuck me up,” he answers, repeating the sentence before again expressing his love of Joe.

     Joe again apologizes for freaking him out, reiterating the fact that it’s time for him to go home now.

     Don’t go home, the kid pleads, it’s your birthday, and “I love you…”

     Joe begins to snigger, perceiving the boy as simply repeating his own empty self-help sounding phrases from his broadcasts.

     Yet it’s clear the boy really means it as he pushes forward and kisses Joe deeply on the lips.

    Joe pulls away, saying he really does have to go home now, the kid sort of breaking down as he believes that he “fucked up” in demonstrating his love. He feels now that he’s scared Joe away, Joe again promising that he’s not going to kill himself.

      “It’s okay. We love each other, and, and you can always catch me through my website,” Joe wanly assures him.

      The boy’s hero walks away, the kid bowing his head slightly down obviously trying to hold the tears back before he looks up smiling, shouting after the figure that has finally disappeared from the screen: “I love you famous Joe!”

      But when the film goes black, we can only fear that Joe has left behind someone just as sad as he is, but who might have truly offered Joe the leave he is seeking; and we are not at all sure that Joe wasn’t being serious about “his last entry.”

      This short film could be far more profound if it simply had a better script and filled in more history about it’s central figure. Why has Joe reached this situation in his life? What is he attempting to do by creating such a website? And why has his chosen such losers upon which to pour out his love? As it is, we can only conclude that Joe has transferred his mother’s rejection into a great deal of self-hate that he plays out in a public promiscuousness that challenges those like his mom. Yet, it would help to know our character better to help us more fully empathize with his self-destructive decisions. Why does Joe feel he is different from hundreds of other boys, like himself, who lose their familiar love by simply admitting who they are.

      I gather that the author/director Eli Rarey perceived some of the same problems since he turned this work into a feature film in 2012. Stay tuned.

 

Los Angeles, October 25, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (October 2025).