Barrington Stage Company has world-premiered nine, yes nine, of Mark St. Germain‘s plays, and the most recent is Dancing Lessons, on stage now. I really like his plays–Ruth, Freud’s Last Session, et al–for their old fashioned storytelling and well-developed characters. No surprises, but emotionally-clean, good theater.
Dancing Lessons is no exception, with its exploration of the tentative communications between a man with Asperger’s Syndrome and a woman whose Broadway dancing career is over when she is hit by a cab and unable to heal from the accident.
Again there are no surprises plot-wise. Even the sharp-edges of Asperger’s are worn off if you’ve read The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon, which has been turned into a musical, now on stage in London, or the hilarious Rosie Project, an offbeat romance written from the point of view of the male ‘hero’ who happens to have Asperger’s. Why is it that the men are the ones with Asperger’s?
Regardless, the play has a crackling pace, with both broad and subtle humor, but also moments when the whole audience was holding its breath. Our male hero has come to the dancer, who lives in the same Manhattan building, for dance lessons before a formal attire event he will attend. The kicker is he doesn’t like to be touched. The 10 or so minutes when they first shake hands to the very tender and revealing lovemaking is some of the most remarkable theater I’ve seen in ages.
And when the dancer’s leg brace comes off and the man’s posture straightens up, their Fred-and-Ginger moment is cathartic for the whole audience. It’s an interlude that has to end, however, as the characters return to their reality.
Yes, the play is about damaged people, physically and psychically. But it’s also about those blessed moments of love and grace, moments to cherish on stage, in books, and hopefully, in real life.
Alice and I adventured to Lowell, MA on Saturday. I had recently read The Daring Ladies of Lowell by Kate Alcott. Whereas the author succumbed to romance-novel tropes, I loved her description of the daily life of the mill girls. I wanted to see for myself, and Alice was game to visit the National Park Service site there.
We started at the beginning, with the building of the power canal. This picturesque trolleyman, Thomas Tucker, took us along the railroad tracks to our boat.
There we got our first glimpse at the managed waterway.
Clever businessmen, wanting to harvest timber for ship building in Newburyport, figured out how to maneuver a 32′ drop in the Merrimack River, turning it into a highway for the transport of goods. Through a series of locks.
In 1796, farmers sold part of their land and then provided the labor to dig through the massive rock layers and open up trenches for the canals. Lock chambers were constructed to manage the rise and drop of water levels that ranged from 2′ to 17′. Our own lock experience: a 5′ water level change, after a particularly heavy rain, when it would normally be about 2-3′.
Headed toward the lock chamber. See the lock keepers on top? They will manually open the lock for us.
Butt power opens the lock
You might get a kick out of the import rates on the canal. Manure cost 50 cents per boatload. Uh huh. Manure was imported into Lowell, not the other way around. Some clever experimenter found out that a chemical in manure set dyes to prevent fading. Imagine that smell!
click to enlarge
Perhaps you’d rather import white oak pipe staves. 100 cents per M.
We bumped our way through the lock system, away from the mills toward the open river.
This portrait of Mr. Francis hangs in the nearby Whistler birthplace home and museum
We learned about the Chief of Police of Water, James Francis. This clever engineer invented a flood gate system (you’ve heard “opening the flood gates”) to protect the town during wild weather. He was given a parade and a tea set when he saved the town from flooded catastrophe in 1848, with the first use of the 4 1/2 ton, wood gates.
The other side. A marvel of the wide canal and nature!
In 1816, the original canal system was expanded from the initial 10′ width, opening up the waterway to larger boats and more traffic. The timing was perfect for Mr. Lowell, who, in 1810, traveled to England, well into its own Industrial Revolution, to study its mill system. Returning in 1817, he began to invent Lowell as a mill town, but more importantly as an “industrial laboratory.”
Used to be farm land. Now mill after mill, powered by the canal generated lock system. A small lock here.
Ironically, with the farmers looking for short-term cash, they in essence brought their way of life to an end. In less than 30 years, the farms were gone. The pastoral was replaced with the industrial.
By the 1830s, Lowell was a showplace of industrial prowess. And a new labor force was created–the daughters of those nearby farmers. Now, the girls and young women could become financially useful to their families by working for wages and living by the “clock and bell,” instead of the sun.
Boott Cotton Mill
First bell, 4 a.m. Work at 4:30 a.m. The girls would take a 35 minute break for breakfast, and later, their other meals. They would rush from the mill back to their boardinghouse, shared with 25-40 other girls.
A typical mill owned some 70 boardinghouse blocks, some reserved for men, who performed the awful tasks of carding the wool–a lung-killing job. After the Civil War, mill owners were less “paternalistic” and workers could live wherever they chose in the city. But initially, it was a factory town system.
Boarding house dining room
Part of worker wages were garnished to pay the “Keeper,” who could then skimp or over-indulge as she pleased. One daughter complained about her mother who couldn’t make ends meet as a Keeper, being too generous in her portions. Some made up the difference, breaking the rules by serving non-mill residents. Tension over pay spilled beyond the disgruntled mill girls, who in 1847, made $2 per week, after room and board was deducted.
Still $2 was enough for financial autonomy. After sending money home, they still had some left for themselves and became instrumental in creating a consumer economy of readymade products geared toward women. Inexpensive jewelry, hat decorations, even a book, all became desirable treats after working their 73 hour work week. 13 hours Monday through Friday, 8 hours on Saturday. In their free time, they might ride the trolley to the end of the line for the amusement park (which encouraged the trolley use on non-work days; always thinking how to make a $).
Spinning Jenny, 2nd generation technology to speed up the spinning process
One child who was hired to “doff the bobbins” (taking the empty bobbins to the spinners and full bobbins to the weaving floor) said that, at first, the job seemed like play. But after doing the same thing over and over, all week long, well…
And the noise. Perhaps the most evocative part of the day was hearing just a few weaving machines running at Boott Cotton Mill. Incessant bang, bam, bang, bam, bang, bam. Really Loud. You’ll notice in this video, that the “mill girl” is wearing ear plugs.
Not so back in the day. No surprise, the girls only lasted 3-4 years on average. The job was a path to independence or marriage or … illness. This is one aspect the Alcott novel explores pretty well, as does Elizabeth Gaskell’s amazing North and South.
The size of the room. Imagine if all the machines were running. The cloth made here is sold in the gift shop.
With such efficient production, supply soon exceeded demand, and the manufacturers wanted to cut wages. After all, the mill girls were making more than teachers. The workforce started to shift to immigrants, desperate for the work even at lower wages. Irish, Greeks, French Canadians, Jews, and more took over from the moral “mill girl,” and Lowell began its slow descent.
The mills lost money during the Civil War, and the genteel boarding houses for the mill girls were replaced by tenements.
While the first protests were conducted by the mill girls, in 1912, a wage reduction led to a massive union strike. Continuing financial strain prevented investing in the latest technology, too. After World War I, “Spindle City” couldn’t compete with the mills in the South. Some moved, others were abandoned, many torn down. Some became artist lofts.
After the river was cleaned up. Lowell had grade D water according to the 1972 Clean Air and Water Act. The canal water would turn bright yellow or hot red, depending on the dyes dumped in it. Now, the water is a B. Technically, you can fish and swim. Hmmm.
By 1960, it was basically over. Some who volunteer in the museum mill, worked for the real deal in the 1980s. But that was a last and dying breath. For a town that prided itself on a motto like “Art is the Handmaid of Human Good,” Lowell “sacrificed its workers for dividends” and its fresh, clean environment for expediency. “Sounds familiar,” Alice mused, referring to today’s repetition of history.
James McNeil Whistler may have hailed from Lowell, but he saw fit to lie about it, claiming Baltimore or England as his birthplace. But the house is in Lowell, and the Art Association is working very hard to restore it. We were given a private, detailed tour by the director, before looking around at its small, nice art collection on our own. After all, where else could you see Whistler’s father?
I’ve never been in a parade before. And Sunday, I not only marched, but carried a flag! I joined the Road to Freedom Walk in Dobbs Ferry, up the Hudson in New York. You can’t imagine how thrilled I was to be asked to carry a flag! This only after asking everyone around me, and they had run out of children. I was the only female flag bearer. Woo hoo!
And what a flag it was! The “Join or Die” logo came from a political cartoon created by Benjamin Franklin in 1754. It shows a snake cut into 9 parts, each labeled with a colony, except for the four New England colonies, simply labeled N.E. Maybe there wasn’t room in the cartoon to name each colony. I don’t know.
But it became a famous symbol of the need for the colonies to unite, instead of act in their own interests, despite failing as a rallying mantra for the French and Indian War. It was resuscitated for the Revolutionary War and stuck.
The pine tree would be co-opted in 1913 for the Armory Show, as a symbol of freedom for the artists involved
The other flags included the 1775 Commander in Chief flag, the Bunker Hill flag shown here, with its pine tree coming to symbolize liberty in New England, and a prototypical “Betsy Ross” flag with 13 stars in a circle.
But the purpose of this march was to commemorate the August 19, 1781 route taken by the Continental Army, as it began its 400 mile march to Virginia to encounter Cornwallis.
We marched about 1 mile. Multiply that times 400, and it might not have been as much fun. But like any good march, there was mud. There was a fife and drum setting the mood to move. I found it really easy to walk to the beat, as you might can pick out from this video.
What’s important is the men I’m marching behind. They are the 1st Rhode Island, a majority African American regiment who formed in the summer of 1778, fought at Saratoga, and made the long march to Virginia.
I pushed up with my flag to march right behind them. They marched in all seriousness. I had a silly, delighted grin on my face. Policemen stopped traffic and saluted. It was good.
During our breaks, as the soldiers wiped their brows (it was hot for them in their uniforms, even as they were a bit tattered providing natural ventilation), they argued over rum rations and whether rum was the “devil’s drink” or a “likeable thing” and how sugar was tied to slavery. “You don’t like that, do you?” They teased one of the cohort for being from Dela-where? I interjected that I liked Delaware. “That makes two of you,” another shot back.
As we marched on, the fife picked out tunes the soldiers knew, and they sang along. They changed the lyrics of “Yankee Doodle” to say something about George Washington being one in a million. Maybe that’s how the lyrics went before George Cohan et al.
We paused in a cemetery where Revolutionary and Civil War veterans are buried. The soldiers fired their muskets in salute, as you can see in these videos.
What is clear is how much slower battle would have been and the need for two lines of soldiers. You can make out how tedious it was to load from the second video.
The fife and drum led us right through the historic town center and into the woods, following an aqueduct. We marched over rocks and stumps, but mostly on a nice sandy path. The temperature, already pleasant, dropped with the shade. We soldiered on, up hills, up and up, until we reached the launching point, coinciding with the end of the aqueduct.
Our hard work earned us lemonade and cookies. As I furled up the flag, I tried the cranberry drink, mixed with tea. So good. Then one of the soldiers and I sat under a tree, while a commemoration took place.
He took an offered slice of watermelon, lamenting he had no beer to go with it. “Sounds awful…sweet and bitter!” He just grinned. I asked about the holes in his trousers. “I earned these through the march,” he explained. “Not as bad as some others.”
I knew just what he meant. There I was in a “you were there” moment.
Over the past few weeks, I’ve visited several artist studios, artists from the past. You can be the judge. Does being in their studio make them seem alive, as if they just left the room?
I’d say no for the Norman Rockwell Studio, where throngs of tourists encounter a guide, who has a spiel she repeats on a loop, poor thing. It’s all so neatly packaged. If the studio is intended to reveal the man, we learn next to nothing about Rockwell here. You might get a sense of that from this perfect little video, with its perky musical accompaniment.
I rather preferred Daniel Chester French’s studio. Notice the broken windows in the skylight? Now here’s a guy who was actually working.
Yes, there’s the guide, pointing out facts about how the Lincoln maquette is scaled proportionately to the Lincoln Memorial in DC. But he also explained a French quirk–how he used his private railroad to take pieces out into the sunshine, to see how they would look in natural light. He could walk all around, study the shadows, and such.
So here’s the sculpture on the flatbed railroad “car.” See if you can make out the tracks in my less than glorious picture. The tracks run through these huge doors to the outside…
…where they dead end. They simply serve the purpose.
And he had his tools, like sample hands, at the ready.
I like this place.
Nothing quite compares to the ramshackle studio of William Kent. Kent died in 2012, but he lived and worked here until the end. A real character. No heat in that studio that had been a barn, a barn used either as a slaughterhouse or for chicken processing. Ew.
Still, traveling up hill and down dale to get to this extraordinarily picturesque ruin would have inspired any artist.
Kent didn’t start out at Yale making art. He studied music with Hindemith. Interesting. His art work has pop overtones. The sculptures, his most interesting works, are made from wood from a nearby mill and definitely owe something to Claes Oldenburg, another Yalie. His everyday household objects–the scissors, the hammer, the spade–are made of layers of various types of wood, often then add a surprise. The saw that cuts through a lightbulb or a pepper. A safety pin piercing a wooden football.
Here are the tools of his trade found in his dark, crammed studio.
And a different kind of tool, the inspiration for the cartoon sculpture series.
When the New Haven schools abandoned chalkboards for marker-erase boards, he took on the chalkboards to carve as the “plate” for crudely-executed prints, sometimes transferring to fabric, as well as paper. Strongly political and conceptual in a Warhol mode, these works represent the other body of work he’s known for. He used this print as a kind of calling card, as a gift when visiting a friend’s house.
I’m leaving out the overtly sexual works Kent made, which caused a furor in buttoned-up New Haven in the 1960s. So much so that Kent lost the directorship of the child-friendly Eli Whitney Museum. A character, to be sure.
The William Kent Foundation is selling the works in the house and studio and will exist only until the last work is sold. The Foundation gives whatever money it makes to “indigent artists.” With prices that range from $6000 to $48,000 for the sculptures, the works aren’t selling too quickly. So there’s time to see this unedited studio, so revealing of the artist’s mind.
Back to the more carefully-presented, genteel, 1760s farmhouse and studios of 120 years of working artists at Weir Farm. Now we’re talking National Park Service.
This studio is literally as pretty as a picture. It belonged to Julian Alden Weir, an Academic painter from the “tradition,” who, from 1882 on, would escape from New York each summer, and sometimes winter, to live on this farm run by a hired manager. His art and artist friends–Duncan Phillips, John Singer Sargent, Albert Pinkham Ryder, John Twachtman, Childe Hassam–followed.
It’s idyllic Connecticut. It just doesn’t get any prettier than this place. Rolling hills, stone-walled fences, gardens designed by Weir’s daughter Cora, all framed by the softest blue sky and gentlest green grass. Weir advised “go in nature and paint with a stick,” to capture the immediacy of this beauty.
Yes, there’s an oddity here and there, like this dining room chandelier from the house. But mostly, what is here is Park-Service-prescribed heavenly beauty, dated 1915. Can you imagine working in a studio this pristine, this picturesque?
You can make out the face of Weir’s daughter Cora on his paint box
I walked the grounds with a printed guide to see just where Weir stood to make his paintings. Thomas Cole’s wonderful house Cedar Grove up the Hudson River offers the same tool. Magical!
Here, the artist story continues. Mahonri Young, Brigham Young’s non-religious son (yes, really), comes to Connecticut to paint and marries Weir’s daughter Dorothy, another artist. They live in the house, and
Clay maquette of a farmer, the working man subject Young preferred
Mahonri builds a separate studio for his sculpture and painting. It’s in much rougher condition and so not as charming as its Weir neighbor.
Still, who wouldn’t love this remembrance of an adult visitor? As a child, he recalls getting in and playing in this tub of clay. Delicious!
Today, artists continue to paint en plein air here. As I was leaving, the artists, too, were wrapping up their day. A day that allowed peaceful seclusion, but also connection to like-minded spirits. An artist’s dream.
Dancing Lessons is no exception, with its exploration of the tentative communications between a man with Asperger’s Syndrome and a woman whose Broadway dancing career is over when she is hit by a cab and unable to heal from the accident.
lay has a crackling pace, with both broad and subtle humor, but also moments when the whole audience was holding its breath. Our male hero has come to the dancer, who lives in the same Manhattan building, for dance lessons before a formal attire event he will attend. The kicker is he doesn’t like to be touched. The 10 or so minutes when they first shake hands to the very tender and revealing lovemaking is some of the most remarkable theater I’ve seen in ages.
And the noise. Perhaps the most evocative part of the day was hearing just a few weaving machines running at 
James McNeil Whistler
made the long march to Virginia.
During our breaks, as the soldiers wiped their brows (it was hot for them in their uniforms, even as they were a bit tattered providing natural ventilation), they argued over rum rations and whether rum was the “devil’s drink” or a “likeable thing” and how sugar was tied to slavery. “You don’t like that, do you?” They teased one of the cohort for being from Dela-where? I interjected that I liked Delaware. “That makes two of you,” another shot back.
something to Claes Oldenburg, another Yalie. His everyday household objects–the scissors, the hammer, the spade–are made of layers of various types of wood, often then add a surprise. The saw that cuts through a lightbulb or a pepper. A safety pin piercing a wooden football.
