We are living at a time when equality is an increasingly sacred value. While my political leanings are deeply aligned with that idea, it doesn’t apply the world of human passions. I don’t want what I adore to be flattened down into equally sized lots. Because after all, we love what we love. “Even the most uncompromising political egalitarian understands that nepotism is a requirement of the heart…love is nothing more or less than favoritism par excellence,” writes Becca Rothfeld.
What follows are several ruminations on excess and passions. Some of these are highlighted because they have brought so much vibrancy and joy to my life. I hope I have provided enough connection possibilities to reach a wide variety of interests.
Becca Rothfeld’s phrase, “ravenous for living,” is an apt description for many of the people I admire. It is also a good daily mantra, one that I hope I can embody right through to the very end.
HURTS SO GOOD
“There is no way around the sense, lodged hard in the throat, that the greatest human longings exceed any possible fulfilment. To want something with sufficient fervor is to want it beyond the possibility of ever getting enough of it.”
— Becca Rothfeld, from All Things are Too Small
In her new collection of insightful essays, Rothfeld addresses the impact of current trends–the cool detachment of minimalism, the flattening (“democratization”) of culture and art—on our very human proclivity to have favorites. Her essays celebrates those parts of our lives that are emotionally hot, engaged, full bodied. She uses her personal proclivities to make a general plea for the pleasures of excess, a tendency towards obsession, for the sheer joy of living with passion.
“We cannot be the whole world and can never even ascend high enough to see all of it at once–all this is a source of disappointment, even torment, to anyone ravenous for living. Our smallness is a condition of our hungering: only someone who is not already everything reaches for more…choose to pursue, as much as we can, a heaven of surfeit on earth.”
Her exuberance is appealing to me because I’m a card-carrying member of that tribe, the one that wants to be in pursuit of “a heaven of surfeit on earth.” My passions are many, and they come in shapes and sizes that are well outside categorical constraints. I can talk for hours about 15th century Italian artist Piero della Francesca, the music and life of Franz Schubert, the novels of W. G. Sebald, where to find the best chicken mole (gotta be honest, it’s at my house) or the 2024 World Champion Boston Celtics (Go C’s!)
I love all of these so much it hurts.
GROWING IT SLOW
One more subject I can talk about for hours: Hadestown, the sung-through musical that is a modern retelling of the Eurydice and Orpheus myth. It began in 2006 as a simple song cycle written by Vermont indie singer/songwriter Anaïs Mitchell. Starting from this unpretentious place, Hadestown went through 12 years of relentless fine tuning and meticulous adjustments. It was workshopped, restructured, collaborated upon and polished before it ended up on Broadway in 2019 where it won eight Tony awards.
Mitchell documented this unexpected evolution in her book, Working on a Song: The Lyrics of Hadestown. It is fascinating material for Hadestown fans like me (I began by listening to the early Hadestown incarnations and have since seen it performed on Broadway and in London’s West End.) It is also a book that should be required reading for anyone who does creative collaboration.
Director and visionary Rachel Chavkin connected with Mitchell in 2012. Her strong background in musical theater became the foundation for bringing Hadestown into its beautifully balanced final form. (“It was a series of songs and we’ve just kept pushing and pushing toward the drama,” Mitchell writes.) Chavkin’s “tough love” tenacity, expertise and intelligence have become part of the Hadestown legend, and her vital role in its evolution is described in detail in Mitchell’s book.
“I’ve never worked on a show as slippery as Hadestown,” Chavkin said. “It’s just very delicate. I just had never touched anything so delicate. I have thought a lot about why that is, and I think it is because of something Anaïs said to me when we first started our collaboration, which is that this is a poetry piece, not a prose piece. Poetry, by its nature, is so much more delicate. With prose, prose can take a lot and prose gives a lot. Poetry is so essentialized.”
She continues:
“I think Hadestown has really grown slowly and it’s grown very carefully, and I think the story feels pretty different than things I’ve seen on Broadway. I think with that kind of careful growth, you can still get here and feel like you know what ground you’re standing on.”
THE ENIGMA OF AURA
Rachel Chavkin has had a long and rewarding relationship with American Repertory Theater in Cambridge MA, directing a number of productions since 2011: Three Pianos, RoosevElvis, Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812, Moby-Dick. Chavkin has a proclivity to lean into what is well known and then take it somewhere new, like classic books (Moby Dick, War and Peace) or the lives of exceptional humans (Franz Schubert, Elvis Presley, Theodore Roosevelt.)
Her latest project is a musical production–Gatsby: An American Myth, being performed once again at American Repertory. This project carries traces of DNA from her prior work in that it takes on an iconic and challenging work–F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 American novel, The Great Gatsby.
Spurred on by this latest Chavkin adaptation, I reread Fitzgerald’s book. It is utterly exquisite, like a perfectly cut gem. One of the most romantic books ever written, it also possesses a very particular tone–one that suggests both silken opulence as well as the haunted fragrance of a lost era. Fitzgerald’s exceptional tonal quality makes the book hard to capture in an adaptation because that singularity is deeply embedded in the harmonies of the writing.
This aspect of the book brings to mind Walter Benjamin‘s notion of aura:
“Aura is the unique and authentic quality that surrounds an original work of art. It is an elusive and intangible atmosphere that emerges from the artwork’s connection to its specific time, place, and cultural context. The aura is linked to the idea of an artwork’s singular existence and its irreplaceable presence in the physical world.”
This is part of what makes the book slippery and seductive, and it also one of the reasons it has been perennial catnip for creatives. There have been so many retellings, sequels and prequels of this book– from films, novels, fan fiction, play adaptations, even an opera by John Harbison.
Of all these attempts my favorite is Gatz, performed by the Elevator Repair Service theater company at American Repertory in 2010. Seven hours long, it is a verbatim read through of the book by a group of bored coworkers in a shabby office. They get caught up in the tale, and the story comes alive. Every word is Fitzgerald’s own, and the effect is magical. As with Hadestown, Gatz was a many year project.
The Great Gatsby entered into public domain in 2021, and many more are taking on the challenge to adapt the novel. A musical version of The Great Gatsby, directed by Marc Bruni, began its run on Broadway in March of this year.
Public domain doesn’t make it easier however to capture what is so extraordinary about the book.
“NOTHING IS EVER JUST ONE THING”
“I find it most interesting when different layers of meaning are layered on top of each other. Nothing is ever just one thing. That, in and of itself, brings an epic quality. I love the sense of a massive journey being taken, because I want art to have those kinds of epic ambitions. But for me, epic doesn’t necessarily mean scale of production, so much as the scale of the interior journey, which can be refracted in very large themes.”
–Rachel Chavkin
Chavkin’s new production is the collaborative effort from an All-Star creative team. Besides the uber-talented Chavkin (who was recently honored by having 48th Street renamed “Chavkin Way”) the musical score has been written by Florence Welch (of Florence and the Machine) and Oscar and Grammy award nominee Thomas Bartlett, the book by Pulitzer Prize winner Martyna Majok, sets by MacArthur genius grant winner Mimi Lein, and choreography by Tony Award winner Sonya Tayeh.
Chavkin has said that she intends her production to lean into the novel’s critique of society. “To believe in [self-made Jay] Gatsby is to believe in America, to believe in this promise of ascension and the idea that we’re all created equal, but that’s not really the case. The idea of equality is a myth that people fight to make real every day. I think the show is trying to hold both the beauty of the myth and the painfulness that it is a myth in equal measure.”
That intention brings a seriousness to the production, one that is quite different from the easy tropes usually associated with the Roaring Twenties–flappers, jazz, wild partying. The overall tone of this production is heavily informed by the sobering coda in the book where narrator Nick Carraway contemplates the promise of America—the “fresh, green breast of the new world”—as well as the demise of that dream, symbolized for him in the Long Island landscape of “vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby’s house.”
The night I saw Gatsby: An American Myth the singing leads were all theatrically and musically excellent. The dancing was disciplined, featuring a refreshing diversity of body types, sizes and genders. The orchestra, its members scattered around in secret pockets of Lein’s dystopic and muscular set, holds its own. And this poignant telling of the fate of Jay Gatsby–AKA Jimmy Gatz—does feel timelessly American and particularly apropos to the disjointed and dispirited time we are living through now. Perennial struggles–between the privileged and the underclass, power brokers and the disenfranchised, women and men, outer appearances and inner realities (in addition to Gatsby’s veiled double life, Nick is portrayed as secretly gay)–speak to just how little has changed in the 100 years since the book was written.
There’s lots of promise, talent and creativity in this bold, carefully considered, intelligent production. I have every reason to believe it will go on to see great success. I do believe that this ambitious production needs more time—time to ask questions, test variations, adjust the flow, make the thousands of micro adjustments that brought Hadestown to such a pitch perfect state. This Gatsby deserves that kind of detailed and dedicated attention from its gifted creative team.
TWO CLOSING THOUGHTS
1. From Rachel Chavkin
“Hadestown invoked a lot of real things, you know. It invoked New Orleans. It invoked hurricane themes. It’s invoking all this imagery, but if we had made that too concrete, then the piece dies because it’s sort of lost its joy and its breath… we only learned it by screwing it up. We learned the hard way.”
2. From Steve Earle (taken from his foreword to Working on a Song
“I loved the New York theater Workshop production [of Hadestown] so much I saw it three times…
I knew Hadestown would be bigger on Broadway, grander in every sense. But I see a lot of theater (it’s kind of all I do, at least until baseball season starts), and I was aware that the upgrade afforded by the jump from not-for-profit to commercial theater isn’t always a good thing artistically.
I was stunned.
Oh, it was bigger alright. It was also better, more focused, and more joyous and heartbreaking at the same time than ever before. I went away wondering what on earth had transpired during those months that made something I believed to be pretty near perfect so much more than it had been before.”
So let us raise our cups to what can happen when the gifted gather and bring focus, discipline, intelligence and hard work to a worthy task.
(Which is also exactly what happened with the Boston Celtics this year. Just sayin…)