(Response to ALL THE KING'S MEN, a play by Robert Penn Warren, directed by August Staub at Theatre in the Square, Marietta, GA; and EDALAT SQUARE, an opera in one act by R. Timothy Brady, directed by the composer/librettist at Emory University.)
Friday night, and then again on Sunday afternoon, I've enjoyed two works of theatre that turn on the same question: What's right when what's good diverges from what's legal? Rather than being weighed down by the question, both works use techniques to keep the storytelling light and supple.
When I read ALL THE KING'S MEN as a teenager, I never pictured Stark as actor David Milford portrays him - crinkly faced cherub, ingratiating and boyish, suddenly bullying and sarcastic. Fighting for his own political primacy so that he can continue to "do good," Stark casts about for any way he can use to undermine his opponents, settling on the method of exposing the bad choices they made.
Penn Warren's script works best as central "reporter" and amateur historian "Jack Burden" tries to explain Stark to us. The play moves fluidly back through time, juxtaposing opposites (Stark the master politician, Stark the sap in his first campaign, Lucy Stark the religious crusader, Sadie Burk her husband's cynical mistress). It bogs down between suites of scenes, when Burden debates a "Professor" who pedantically iterates that a hospital is a good thing, no matter why or how it was built. The play made me want to read more Penn Warren, and to re-read the novel. At forty-seven, I'm better able to appreciate the ambiguities and ambivalence in the world that he depicts.
Now, young though he is, composer/librettist R. Timothy Brady has created a short opera that admirably avoids the easy answer. EDALAT SQUARE was the site in Iran where two teenaged boys were executed for sodomy in 2005. The libretto is a sequence of poetic monologues, stylized and abstracted from the literal situation. Only once, near the end, the two young men sing to each other, in lines that seem to refer to seeing God. But the focus is not really on them. The older brother "Hassan" is our lens for the story. His first line, spoken on tape while we see him kneel on his prayer rug, is, "I have dreamed of a revolution, a changing of the world in the world that God had originally intended." For the sake of that dream, and strict law, and the honor of his family, Hassan reports his brother and friend to the authorities. It's clear that for him, for his mother, as for the young men, no good comes from his legal and moral decision.
Brady's dramatic structure is light, and his musical texture is remarkably airy. We hear a tape of the traditional call to prayer, while we see an abstract Persian design and watch Hassan's preparations for prayer. That sung prayer accustoms us to long, unaccompanied vocal lines that do their arabesques before returning to the original tone. A string quartet plays in similar lines. Often, the accompaniment plays between vocal lines, not under them. Once in awhile, the quartet makes percussive sounds with plucking and knocking. Hassan never sings, and rarely makes a live vocal sound, while we hear the pre-recorded voice over of his internal monologues. He does, however, perform a ritual hand-washing, and a microphone at the water bowl amplifies that sound to become part of the texture of the music. The mother sings with an "R+B soul" vocal quality; the two lovers sing with legitimate operatic voices. The final lines, sung by some kind of judge, were the most striking of all in vocal quality -- performed, I think, by a singer trained in Persian classical music -- and in their pronouncement from Sufi poetry, aimed at Hassan, in agony after the hanging: "Is there any Remover of difficulties save God? Say: Praised be God! He is God! All are his servants, and all abide by his bidding!"
I admire the composer's restraint, and the variety of ways that he colors those long lines.
