Notes from a Composer

Two songs from “Speakeasy” explore two sides of a closeted 1920’s lesbian

For many years I hoped to write a musical about the queer subculture of Roaring Twenties New York, but didn’t find my “in” until I came upon the idea of adapting Lewis Carroll’s two “Alice” books as a magical realist template for exploring that world.  Alice became a young newlywed couple, John and Jane Allison, with “Wonderland” inspiring Jane’s trip down the queer rabbit hole, and “Through the Looking Glass” pointing the way for John.

And so I began work on the musical I would eventually call Speakeasy (with various reworkings of the subtitle, currently settled on “John and Jane’s Adventures in the Wonderland”).  Yet before I made any decisions on story, characters, songs, I needed to immerse myself in the little known history of LGBTQ life in the 1920’s and 1930’s.  I spent a year just doing research, and learned an awful lot about the social and sexual mores of the era as well as its (in)famous queer cultural provocateurs.  Much of this research made its way through a magical realist Carrollesque lens into the musical (and much of which has already been discussed in this blog).

Sometimes this research took me into even earlier times, for need of greater context.  Which is how I learned about the “female friendships” of the 19th century.  These would be intense relationships between two women, in school or college, that could be as deeply bonded as any traditionally romantic or familial bond.  Publicly these “female friendships” could exhibit all the hallmarks of romance: physical affection, love letters, lavishing gifts on another, intense jealousies, sharing beds, displays of devastating heartbreak when relationships dissolved.  Society approved and encouraged these “female friendships” as a way for young women to exercise romantic proclivities within the safety of sorority, away from male temptation. That these friendships could become sexual was not imagined.  That doesn’t mean however that some of these female friendships didn’t become sexual.

Times were different in the 1800’s.  Men sharing beds with men and women sharing beds with women was common.  The terms heterosexual and homosexual weren’t even coined until the end of the 19th century.  But once coined, their usage and the greater awareness of homosexual identity and activity seeped into society by the early 20th century. Intense “female friendships”, as practiced and encouraged in middle class society in the 19th century, now became tainted and suspect.  Suspicion and fear of lesbianism made something once deemed a normal rite of passage for young women now appear unhealthy and dangerous.

So by the 1920’s the practice of these intensely bonded “female friendships” was long in the past.  But I imagined a society lady old enough to have experienced it in her youth; a conservative, closeted middle age woman, so frightened of her own lesbianism that she remains consciously wholly unaware of it.  She would look back on her girlhood friendship as an ideal she could cling to while the cultural and sexual revolutions of the Roaring Twenties rage around her, confusing her with possibilities she has denied herself, while idealizing a past relationship she refuses to examine close enough to see it for all it truly is.

Alice and the Caterpillar

For the historical aspects of “Speakeasy” she would stand in for both the influential high society ladies that helped usher in Prohibition and also later helped dismantle it when it became clear that the social ills of Prohibition were overwhelming any social good originally intended by its enacting (Prohibition and its end had profound effects on the rise and fall of 1920s/1930s queer culture, a reality I felt I needed to thread into “Speakeasy’s” narrative).  As regards to “Alice in Wonderland”, the character of the society lady would easily intersect with the Queen of Hearts in the dramatic end of the story (personifying the reactionary forces that clamped down on the free-wheeling Speakeasy culture or the Roaring Twenties).  But when Jane Allison first meets her, the society lady will intersect with the Caterpillar (who book Alice encounters in the chapter “Advice from a Caterpillar”).  And so I named the her Caroline Chrysalides.

Chrysalides is an obvious reference to the butterfly that Caroline would become if only she burst through that massive cocoon she built around her soul, and came out as the fabulous lesbian butterfly she could be.  I liked that the Caterpillar in “Alice in Wonderland” imperiously insists that Alice explain who she is, just at a time when Alice has gone through so many disorienting changes she is unsure that she can “explain herself”.  There is delicious irony to transposing that conversation to Caroline Chrysalides chastising Jane on her equally currently unsteady sense of identity, when Caroline’s own true self is so woefully closeted.

Jane and Caroline in last year’s “Speakeasy” workshop

Jane reminds Caroline of the “steady, simple girls” of her youth, so unlike the contemporary “jazzers” and “flappers” that scandalize her with their loose morals. Which leads Caroline to sing “Once I Had a Friend”, decrying the girls of today and extolling the female friendships of her youth. In song she is supported by her three attendants: a hairdresser, a tailor and a secretary (played by the same performers who we previously saw as the gay florists), who likely have a greater appreciation of the Jazz Age and the hidden, true extent of Caroline Chrysalides feelings about her girlhood friend than the protesting lady would ever consciously admit).

Once I Had a Friend 

ONCE I HAD A FRIEND

CAROLINE:

YOUNG WOMEN TODAY

THEY RUN AND THEY STRAY

ATTENDANTS:

FROM NIGHTCLUBS TO BARS AND SALOONS

CAROLINE:

IN MY DAY YOUNG GIRLS

WERE ELEGANT PEARLS

ATTENDANTS:

BUT NOW THEY’RE UNLADYLIKE LOONS

CAROLINE:

TO TELL YOU THE TRUTH

MY SWEET BIRD OF YOUTH

WAS AN AGE THAT PASSED FAR TOO SOON

AH, THOSE DEAR DAYS OF OLD

ATTENDANTS:

ERE THE WORLD GREW SO COLD

CAROLINE:

I SPENT WITH MY DEAR, DARLING FRIEND

WE WERE STEADY AND SWEET

ATTENDANTS:

INNOCENT AND DISCREET

CAROLINE:

BUT SCHOOLGIRL DAYS CAME TO AN END

THEN WE TOOK A NEW LIFE

AS A MOTHER AND WIFE

GAVE A SIGH AND WAVED THOSE DAYS GOOD-BYE

ONCE I HAD A FRIEND

A BEAUTIFUL FRIEND

A TRUE LOVING BLUE BONNET FRIEND

AND WHEN IT WAS SPRING

WE’D LAUGH AND WE’D SING

SUCH SWEET AFTERNOONS WE WOULD SPEND

AND OUR EYES WOULD SHINE

WHILE HER HAND HELD MINE

AND OUR HEARTS LIKE GARDENS WE’D TEND

LEARNING SONG AND RHYME

IN SWEET BLOSSOM TIME

MAY THE SPRING IN OUR HEARTS NEVER END

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