John Surman, “Triadichorum,” from Saltash Bells
From 2011 until 2016, I oversaw a play reading series at the Prospect Theater (“the little theater with an edge”) in Modesto, California. During that time, I put on sixteen plays –selected them, casted them, staged and directed them. I acted in some. For every one, I picked the music for pre-show, intermission and exit, and whatever other music was needed to enhance mood (e.g., The Lady in the Van) or ease transitions (Gruesome Playground Injuries and Letters) during performance. In two instances —the life and times of archie and mehitabel and Letters— I actually scripted the play, adapting text from other mediums to use for a staged reading.
It started because (1) I had been acting at the Prospect among other venues and (2) was a member of the board, which made it easy to propose and argue for a project like this.
(3) I had also just left King Lear 
and wanted a chance to act another time across with a talented actor, Dan E., who was planing to leave soon for southern California to try his luck at acting. I had a play in hand too –A Number, Caryl Churchill’s bizarre (well, all of her plays are bizarre) and cerebral (they all tend to be cerebral too) play about cloning and sibling rivalry. We did it, Dan and I in this very talky play, me playing one character (the father) and Dan playing two –or was it three?– sons in serial succession. I used a musical conceit to frame that play. All of the music before and after the play dealt with identity confusion: Slim and Slam’s 1930s “Is You Is or Is You Ain’t My Baby?,” the Ink Spots’ “We Three (My Echo, My Shadow, and Me”), Ted Lewis’s “Me and My Shadow,” Screaming’ Jay Hawkins’s “I Put a Spell on You.”
Two plays later, I did David Hare’s The Vertical Hour, which is an edgy play about relationships, commitment and politics. (Most of Hare’s plays are talky, and most are about relations and politics too.) For that show, I used songs from a mock-old album called If Grief Could Wait, which featured a soprano (Susanna Wallumtrod) whose voice sounded halfway between a classically trained voice and Joan Baez, backed by an ensemble of harp, viola da gamba, and a 14th-century instrument from northern Europe called the nykelharpa, a kind of tuned violin played flat across one’s lap like a dulcimer. I used some Shirley Horn too and Norma Winstone, not jazz-it-up music like most pre-show and intermission music, but slow-it-down music. We reprised the play the next season on the main stage with a full production and pretty much the same actors. The same music too.
***
A year later, I staged an adaptation I had written of the newspaper columns New York Post reporter Don Marquis wrote in the 1920s about a cockroach, Archie, formerly a free verse poet but reincarnated as a cockroach (for the sin of being a free verse …) who, in order to write, had to cast himself ahead first down from the top of the typewriter onto the keys –thus there were no capitals or punctuation in his text– and archie’s alleycat friend Mehitabel, who had inflated grossly ideas about her past lives. (She thought she’d been Cleopatra.) For that show, I used Roaring Twenties-type music: Bix Beiderbecke, Frankie Trumbauer, Joe Venuti and Eddie Lang, Adrian Rollini (my favorite ever bass saxophonist) and a set of stunning recreations of the period’s music by pianist Dick Hyman and cornetist Tom Pletcher.
This was the program flyer.
READER’S THEATER AT THE PROSPECT
It’s fUN! It’s fREE! It’s fANTASTIC!
Come to the Prospect on
Sunday, January 27, at 2 pm
for a staged reading of
the lives and loves of archie and mehitabel 
adapted from the classic by Don Marquis
archie was a free verse poet but he’s been reincarnated as a cockroach now he hammers out letters to marquis by throwing himself headfirst onto the keys from the top of the reporter’s typewriter his alleycat friend mehitabel swears she was cleopatra in a former life but she doesn’t act like it when shes carousing with the tomcats in shinbone alley join archie and mehitabel and their friends as they discuss their triumphs and woes at the prospect and stay afterwards to talk about the play with the cast and director.
AT THE PROSPECT, SUNDAY, JANUARY 27, 2 pm
A talk back session follows
***
For Alan Bennett’s The Lady in the Van, I used classical music, mostly piano –Mitsuko Uchida, Alfred Brendel, Helene Grimaud, Andras Schiff, Evgeny Kissin– and mostly from the Romantic repertoire. For exit music, I played jazz singer Norma Winstone’s “Distance,” a piece I’ve used two or three times for shows because it sets such a strong mood –again, slowing down music, not speeding up music.
I used 40s and 50s honker saxes for Mamet’s The Duck Variations. I acted in that one -one of two old geezers who sit by the edge of Lake Superior and chat about ducks and this and that of no consequence for scene after scene. I bought my self a t-shirt with a rubber ducky on it for that play and wore it during performance.
Li’l Ed and the Blues Imperials: “Compact Man”
I used fierce rock/protest music for Mamet’s The Anarchist, which is about an interview to determine whether a 70s anarchist has changed and deserves to be let out of prison after all these years. (The answer is “no.”) For the show, I used Ike and Tina, Hendrix, Santa-Miles, Cream, Michael Franti, R. L. Burnside, Dylan, Li’l Ed and the Blues Imperials (“Compact Man,” my favorite song by them).
I employed modernist solo and small group jazz –by Jimmy Giuffre, Paul Bley, Carla Bley, Paul Motian –for Rajiv Joseph’s Gruesome Playground Injuries. We needed transitional music for that reading because the actors skip ages from scene to scene, sometimes young, sometimes older, in no particular order (other than the cumulative emotional effect of the scenes) and they had –quickly– to add or subtract signs of their injuries as they aged or youthened. (I just made up that word. I like it! “Youthened!”)
I used tons of music for Letters, the second play I crafted from another source –this time, letters composed by people writing for a variety of purposes across a span of thirty some centuries. The music jumped from The Hilltoppers (a white doo top group, popular when I was in high school) to a terribly modern piano piece by Gyorgi Ligeti and the Columbia Marching Band, followed by Ruben Gonzalez, Nick Cave, Hasil Adkins, Aldo Ciccolini (Satie’s “Mouvement en form de Poire”), and ending with Paul McCartney singing “I’m Gonna Sit Right /Down (and Writer Myself a Letter)”.
In Sharr White’s The Other Place, a brilliant woman scientist suddenly sees things that aren’t there (a young woman in a yellow bikini attending her medical lecture) and remembers a past that never existed (things about her missing daughter that never happened and are much less devastating than what really did happen).
These are not the images I used in the flyer but they are similar in effect.
I used string pieces by Philip Glass and John Cage for the play, vaguely disorienting music, and during the performance and at its close I played duets by British reedman John Surman, him playing both parts, sax and synthesizer.
The last reading I directed at the Prospect –soon after, we moved east to be near our son — was Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, a dramatization of her experience after her husband died unexpectedly. The text was so harrowing that I didn’t need to amp up the music so I used only ballads for that show, reminiscence music, like she was reminiscing about her dead husband: Jimmy Durante and Tony Bennett, Durante with a full string orchestra and Bennett in duet with jazz pianist Bill Evans.
***
At different times on different playbills, I incorporated quotes into the liner notes. Here are a few of them.
All I need to make a comedy is a park, a policeman and a pretty girl. (Charlie Chaplin)
What intrigues me in my life is: how did I become what I am? (Francois Jacob)
This rocket flies on dreams. (Homer Hickam)
but wotthehell wotthehell / oh I should worry and fret / death and I will coquette / theres a dance in the old dame yet / toujours gai toujours gai. (mehitabel the cat)
ADDITIONAL LISTENING
Aldo Ciccolini: Satie: Mouvements en forme de poire: Maniere de Commencement
MUSIC & ME 