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April 8, 2005

Elizabeth Spencer (and me!) at Lincoln Center

bout to sign off myself with Eric's imminent return, I'm going to leave you more or less where I started: with the writer Elizabeth Spencer. Her novella The Light in the Piazza has been made into a musical by Adam Guettel (grandson of Richard Rodgers) and Craig Lucas. Using an interesting strategy prior to bringing it to New York, they tested and tinkered with it in regional theaters in Seattle and Chicago. The New York production officially opens on April 18, but previews began last month. I'm going up with a Chapel Hill group (joined by my mom from Texas) to see a matinee on the 16th.

The musical itself is an accomplishment for Guettel and Lucas and all, but more than that, it's a reintroduction of Spencer's writing, her whole long career of it, to a new generation. For the Lincoln Center Theater Review she has written a wonderful essay on what it was like to grow up southern and story-telling in the first flower of great modern southern writing:

In the last century before World War II, the South was a dormant land. Devastated by a brutal invasion, bitter from loss in a war that had wrecked its economy, its people followed the olden ways, some good, some bad, in a sort of changeless devotion. By every statistical report, the states of the old Confederacy were "backward"--poorly schooled, poorly fed, a crippled land.

But then something unexpected happened: it seemed that every other person began writing fiction. Mostly, this was not the historical, Walter Scott-type fiction, which sent a novel like Gone with the Wind to wide success. It was, instead, fiction of the finest modern cast, bringing names like William Faulkner, Robert Penn Warren, Eudora Welty, Katherine Anne Porter and Flannery O'Connor to foremost attention in the literary world everywhere. There are many speculations from critics as to why this explosion of talent took place. Southerners, according to large statistical percentages, were not even supposed to be able to read very well, much less write. But, undiscoverable by statistics, there was a compelling urgency at work that I, too, experienced--a swelling in the heart was saying, Get things down, tell about them!

What a treat it will be to see the show. While we are in town, my mother and I are also going to see Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf on Sunday, and then the St. Lawrence String Quartet in the new Zankel Hall in Carnegie Hall on Tuesday night. (The first violinist, Geoff Nuttall, is our cousin.) Tips for how to spend our free time in the city are most welcome.

Thanks to Eric for the guest-hosting opportunity, and many more thanks to the rest of you for putting up with me for what must have seemed an eternity. Stay tuned. IsThatLegal? will return to regular programming soon.

Posted by Eric at April 8, 2005 11:44 AM

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Posted by: Ruby at April 15, 2005 8:11 AM