Souvenir
A Fantasia on the Life of Florence Foster Jenkins
Donald Corren and Judy Kaye at the Lyceum Theater
Boston Globe
Time Out: New York
NY News
Florence Foster Jenkins, a wealthy society woman active in New York in the 1930s and ‘40s, believed herself to be a great coloratura soprano. In reality she couldn’t sing two consecutive notes in tune.
Undeterred by family criticism she began to give recitals for her large circle of friends in the ballroom of the Ritz Carlton where she lived. Word of the recitals soon spread to the general public and very soon she was packing the ballroom. Despite all the laughter and jeers, the shrieks and howls of derision, she believed the audience was genuinely moved by her singing. A belief that took her all the way to Carnegie Hall for a sold-out concert in 1944, an event that is still talked about.
Over the years, Mrs. Jenkins has become a figure of fun, a camp whose records are played at parties to be laughed at.
Souvenir takes a different approach, seeing Mrs. Jenkins through the eyes of her reluctant accompanist, Cosme McMoon.
When they first meet he regards her as a convenient, if embarrassing, way to pay the rent, worrying what his friends will say. As he comes to know her, however, her unshakable faith in herself and in the music she loves, makes him want to protect her from the laughter he hears when she sings, laughter to which she remains oblivious — till the evening she steps out onto the stage of Carnegie Hall.
When at last she hears the laugher, it is Cosme who rescues her from doubt, helping her to maintain her delusions, staying true to the beautiful music she hears in her head, the music that, in the play’s final moments, the audience hears too.
L.A. Times
L.A. Times
Songbook
In the opinion of some, beginning in the 1920s and ending with the United States’ entry into the war at the end of ’41, New York City enjoyed an explosion of talent rivaling that of Renaissance Florence.
The characters of Songbook live in the afterglow of that explosion, a generation before Stonewall, privileged perhaps by talent and background, ‘discreet in public, candid in private’ as one of the characters puts it, navigating the city as they search for what is permanent in a hostile and ephemeral world.
The play was my last collaboration with the director Vivian Matalon before his death in 2018. During our long time of living together, he directed all of my work. Songbook was presented in two workshops at the York Theater on East 54th Street, where Souvenir began.
Under Vivian’s customarily exact, and exacting, direction I was fortunate to see the play acted by four gifted actors - when Bob Stillman was unavailable for the second workshop, the role of Sam - who must not only sing but play the piano - was played by Malcolm Gets. While watching Vivian rehearse one day I realized that there was little chance of completing the play but that the story could perhaps form the basis of a novel, a different way of telling it.
… It was for me immensely moving for so many reasons and on so many levels. You have captured a great deal of how I feel about life and music from this vantage point of my life… I was struck by your ability to conjure or reincarnate another time, resonantly and sometimes painfully so.
Michael Feinstein
It is my marriage play, though the word is never used.
A play about love, and devotion, and singing, and all the songs we use to say those things to each other we don’t have the words to say for ourselves.
Spanning a period of more than fifty years in New York City - from 1949 to 2010 - it explores the lives of three remarkable men, together and apart, and of their legacy, what from among and between them they are able to pass on to a new generation.
New York City from 1949 to 2010, but mostly centered on the post-war years through the Seventies.
Though it shares the same characters and incidents as the play, the novel is expanded in its scope; reaching from 1949 to 2010. Through it all runs a thread of music, the songs that expressed what was hard to put into words.
A trailer for the full-length video
Faced with a moment of ultimate crisis, William Grant, a contemporary man, seems to split in two becoming himself, and Will Kemp, Shakespeare’s famous fool.
In 1599, though no one is quite sure why—there are various theories—Kemp undertook his famous dance, jigging his way from London to Norwich, a hundred and twenty-five miles distant, his nine days’ wonder.
In present-day Will’s imagination, history is turned upside-down as Kemp refuses to leave the stage quietly, hoping instead that he can compel Shakespeare to change his mind and beg him to return, so he can be again be the star he once was.
Forced to fight his way through Kemp’s egomania, jokes, dances, bad puns, bragging, and foolery, Will must try to find his own voice, coming to terms with his own ambition and the limits of his life, balancing what has been achieved with what he failed to accomplish.
A Christmas Carol
I love the story, played Scrooge myself for four seasons at the McCarter theater in Princeton, and wanted to make an adaptation that paid more attention to the social realities of the time.
A chamber version, this adaptation is devised to be performed with between five and seven actors - and no children. Along with weaving new details throughout, I’ve also added my own ending— because what does happen when a person’s life is turned upside down? As a relatively young man when the Spirits visit—Scrooge is forty-five in the story, the idea of him being an older man comes, I think, from the illustrations and then the various movies—there is time for him to remake his life.
Carl Wallnau as Scrooge
One of Dickens' principal sources for this story as well as for others, was Mayhews ongoing survey of London's underbelly that would later be published as London Labour and the London Poor.
At the mid-point of the nineteenth century, London was the first industrialized capital, notoriously filthy and noisy, flooded by dispossessed country workers hoping to find work and a better life, but instead finding, according to Jacob Adler, the worst slums in Europe and bone-crushing poverty.
In A Christmas Carol, Dickens presents a world full of the possibility of good that is corrupted and befouled by greed till, on that one night of the year when redemption is possible, Scrooge is offered the chance to remake his life.
I wrote a new ending to show how he seizes that chance. What he does with it, and how it affects the lives of others, is the subject of the play.
I love the story, played Scrooge myself for four seasons at the McCarter theater in Princeton, and wanted to make an adaptation that paid more attention to the social realities of the time.
A chamber version, this adaptation is devised to be performed with between five and seven actors - and no children. Along with weaving new details throughout, I’ve also added my own ending— because what does happen when a person’s life is turned upside down? As a relatively young man when the Spirits visit—Scrooge is forty-five in the story, the idea of him being an older man comes, I think, from the illustrations and then the various movies—there is time for him to remake his life.
Carl Wallnau as Scrooge
One of Dickens' principal sources for this story as well as for others, was Mayhews ongoing survey of London's underbelly that would later be published as London Labour and the London Poor.
At the mid-point of the nineteenth century, London was the first industrialized capital, notoriously filthy and noisy, flooded by dispossessed country workers hoping to find work and a better life, but instead finding, according to Jacob Adler, the worst slums in Europe and bone-crushing poverty.
In A Christmas Carol, Dickens presents a world full of the possibility of good that is corrupted and befouled by greed till, on that one night of the year when redemption is possible, Scrooge is offered the chance to remake his life.
I wrote a new ending to show how he seizes that chance. What he does with it, and how it affects the lives of others, is the subject of the play.
A fiction that takes aspects of three of Joseph Conrad’s best-known sea tales, with additions and alterations by me, combining them into a new story of love, loneliness, and that unexpected, unlooked-for moment of decision, the results of which can never be predicted or undone.
The text is complete; I’m now editing the audio which I’ll be posting in installments.
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