{"id":16106,"date":"2023-04-01T10:13:18","date_gmt":"2023-04-01T07:13:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/akademy.org.tr\/en\/?p=16106"},"modified":"2023-04-11T10:16:09","modified_gmt":"2023-04-11T07:16:09","slug":"review-philip-glass-and-the-meaning-of-life","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/akademy.org.tr\/en\/2023\/04\/01\/review-philip-glass-and-the-meaning-of-life\/","title":{"rendered":"Review: Philip Glass and the Meaning of Life"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Once, when the theater-maker Phelim McDermott was a child, he missed out on the show of his dreams.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It was an \u201cAladdin\u201d-like play called \u201cBilly\u2019s Wonderful Kettle\u201d in Manchester, England, and the 7-year-old McDermott was so excited the night before, he got a stomachache that kept him from going. He often thought about that show in the years that followed. In his mind, it was a thing of magic \u2014 the best piece of theater he never saw.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI\u2019ve spent my whole life trying to make a show as good as \u2018Billy\u2019s Wonderful Kettle,\u2019\u201d McDermott says in \u201cTao of Glass,\u201d<\/a> his fragmentary, fantastical and often moving tribute to the composer Philip Glass and the power of art to flow through our lives, as he describes it, like a river.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If McDermott hasn\u2019t matched the idealistic image he has of \u201cKettle,\u201d he certainly has made an earnest effort with Improbable, the inventive theater company he co-founded in 1996. Some of his most inspired creations have been stagings of Glass\u2019s operas \u2014 especially the ritualistic set pieces of \u201cSatyagraha\u201d and the juggling spectacle of \u201cAkhnaten.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

McDermott truly gets<\/em> Glass\u2019s music, and so can act as a kind of visual translator. That, we learn in \u201cTao of Glass,\u201d which opened at NYU Skirball in New York on Thursday, comes from an affection that runs deep, and far into the past.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Here, for the first time, McDermott and Glass have built something together from scratch \u2014 written, co-directed (with Kirsty Housley) and performed by McDermott, with an original score by Glass. On its most basic level, the production is \u201cthe story of a show that never happened,\u201d McDermott says, an adaptation of Maurice Sendak\u2019s \u201cIn the Night Kitchen.\u201d But eventually, \u201cTao\u201d becomes the story of its own creation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The show is metatheatrical from the start. As the lights go down, McDermott is in the aisle, carrying a Skirball tote bag on his shoulder, pretending to look for his seat in the dark. Then a spotlight shines on him, and he looks out at the audience in shocked horror, playing out a bad dream many have. The comedic moment past, he begins, \u201cThis is my favorite bit.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

McDermott is an effortlessly endearing, self-deprecating host, so passionate when speaking about Glass\u2019s music that he\u2019s reminiscent of the Man in Chair from \u201cThe Drowsy Chaperone,\u201d<\/a> a narrator with an infectious delight for his favorite Broadway cast album.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Over a series of nonlinear, discursive vignettes, McDermott illustrates a vision of reality, laid out by the psychologist Arnold Mindell, on three levels: Consensus Reality, Dreamland and Essence. The goal is to experience what Mindell calls \u201cDeep Democracy,\u201d the state of all three levels activated at once. And that provides something of an outline for how \u201cTao\u201d is presented, down to the concentric rings that hang above or sit on the stage in Fly Davis\u2019s design.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Phelim
McDermott, left, with Wright and Janet Etuk operating a bunraku puppet in the show, which blends memory with Eastern philosophy and a new score by Glass.Credit…Tristram Kenton<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\"Phelim<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

On the first level, Consensus Reality, \u201cTao\u201d has the appearance of a workaday one-man show, with McDermott sharing memories and fondly miming Glass conducting with his hair at the keyboard during early performances. In the second half, McDermott is joined by three puppeteers as the scenes becomes dreamier, drifting for what feels like too long before returning to the initial focus on music \u2014 the Essence, \u201cthe Tao which cannot be said.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Your tolerance for this might depend on your relationship with Glass\u2019s music. If you think of it as an extension of his Eastern-inspired meditative practice, everything here is of a piece: McDermott\u2019s obsessions with Lao Tzu, the I Ching and the Rig Veda weave naturally with the slowly transforming, churning arpeggios that are Glass\u2019s trademark. If not, the digressions into states of being could come off as a bit silly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Among the stories McDermott shares are memories of the nights he drove his family mad while he played \u201cGlassworks\u201d on repeat; of using that album in his first professional theater gig; of the time he met Sendak, \u201ca grumpy, gay Oscar the Grouch\u201d; of losing his cool over the destruction of a beloved, ahem, glass table. Interspersed are interludes about Eastern philosophy, flotation tanks and the practice of pretending to be in a coma.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

With an aesthetic that is whimsical but not twee, McDermott and his fellow performers \u2014 David Emmings, Avye Leventis and Sarah Wright \u2014 conjure a shadow play of \u201cIn the Night Kitchen,\u201d a fantasia that transforms briefly into a silhouette of Glass at the keyboard, and bring to life additional characters with, for example, surprisingly human sheets of tissue paper and bunraku puppetry.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There is a version of \u201cTao\u201d \u2014 call it the best piece of theater we never saw \u2014 that would have featured Glass playing piano alongside the action onstage. But early in development, the idea was shot down by his manager; Glass just didn\u2019t have the time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But his score is a substantial, crucial contribution. This is late Glass \u2014 far from the echt Minimalist sound of \u201cGlassworks,\u201d McDermott\u2019s obsession \u2014 performed by a quartet of the percussionist Chris Vatalaro (the show\u2019s music director), the clarinetist Jack McNeill, the violinist Laura Lutzke and the pianist Katherine Tinker.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There is experimentation with found-object percussion, and recent Glass touches including colorful texture, expressive shifts in harmony and soundtrack-like tone painting. McDermott\u2019s childhood memories are matched by na\u00efvely excited music; the flotation tank, by a soporific \u00e9tude; the simulated coma, by a melody so shapeless yet alluring that it could have been written by Satie.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Glass does appear briefly, in the form of a Steinway Spirio piano \u2014 an instrument that can record sound and touch then reproduce it, like an advanced player piano. He tells McDermott that this way, he can be with him onstage \u201clike a ghost.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It was a reminder that while Glass, 86, is still with us \u2014 he was in the theater on Thursday, and bowed with the performers \u2014 he won\u2019t always be. But his art will remain, and it\u2019s through his music that McDermott reaches the Essence level. Culture, McDermott suggests, is the route to our deepest selves.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

With a running time of two and a half hours, \u201cTao\u201d doesn\u2019t make that point quickly. By the end, though, McDermott\u2019s scattered thoughts satisfyingly cohere like kintsugi, the Japanese art of rejoining broken pottery pieces with golden lacquer, which he describes near the beginning. Some of his memories reveal a clear, clean image; others are imperfect shards that don\u2019t seem to fit. But together, they create something new, and beautiful.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n


By Joshua Barone<\/a><\/strong> – nytimes.com<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The director Phelim McDermott, who has acted like a visual translator of Glass\u2019s music, pays tribute to the composer in their show \u201cTao of Glass.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":16107,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,57,44],"tags":[122,121,123],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/akademy.org.tr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16106"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/akademy.org.tr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/akademy.org.tr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/akademy.org.tr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/akademy.org.tr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16106"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/akademy.org.tr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16106\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16159,"href":"http:\/\/akademy.org.tr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16106\/revisions\/16159"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/akademy.org.tr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/16107"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/akademy.org.tr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16106"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/akademy.org.tr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16106"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/akademy.org.tr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16106"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}