Curious Colorful Night – It’s a Dream – Momentary Bliss
Three lovers’ duets that are not what they seem to the ear
Ah, young lovers’ duets. A hallmark of musicals, especially those of the 1920s and 1930s, and so of course also of the musical “Speakeasy – John and Jane’s Adventures in the Wonderland”, set in Prohibition era New York, and influenced by the magical realism of Lewis Carroll’s Alice books.
The story of Speakeasy opens with young ingenues, newlyweds John and Jane Allison, who are very much in love, but who, after individual moments of erotic indiscretion find themselves thrust down a rabbit hole or through a looking glass into a dream-like, disorienting world of New York City’s queer speakeasy subculture.
John and Jane, exploring this world separately, quickly discover that the rules of time and space don’t quite apply anymore. They also discover that in this world they can sing to express their feelings (why, we must be in a musical!), and after Jane encounters her friend Roberta White preparing to go slumming in Harlem, and John encounters a gaggle of gay florists preparing for the drag ball, the newlyweds sing about this curious night they are experiencing. (The use of the word curious in the title phrase, and its exaggerated amplification in the lyric “I’m drawn to follow you, curious, then even curiouser, to the curioust sight” is obviously a conscious nod to Lewis Carroll’s “cuiouser and curiouser”, just like everything that happens to John and Jane is rooted in the Carroll books as well as Roaring Twenties queer subculture.)
Curious Colorful Night
CURIOUS COLORFUL NIGHT
JANE:
WHAT IS THIS WORLD THAT I FELL INTO
WHERE THERE’S NO TELLING WHO
WHAT WHEN AND HOW
WHAT ARE THESE PLACES THAT AWE ME
WITH FACES THAT DRAW ME
TO FOLLOW THEM NOW
CURIOUS COLORFUL NIGHT
SHININGLY CLEVERLY BRIGHT
I’M DRAWN TO FOLLOW YOU
CURIOUS, THEN EVEN CURIOUSER TO THE CURIOUST SIGHT
JOHN:
WHAT IS THIS PLACE I HAVE LANDED IN
STRANGE WORLD I’M STRANDED IN
WHERE DO I GO
WHO ARE THOSE CREATURES COMPELLING ME
ODD FLOWERS TELLING ME
WHAT I DON’T KNOW
CURIOUS COLORFUL NIGHT
FUNNY FANTASTICAL SIGHT
I GROW DELERIOUS
SWEETLY UNSERIOUS
FOLLOWING CURIOUS GLITTERING LIGHT
JOHN AND JANE:
CURIOUS COLORFUL SIGHT
MAKE ME A SEEKER TONIGHT
I’LL GO ALONG
BE IT RIGHT, BE IT WRONG
YOU HAVE TAUGHT ME THE SONG
OF YOUR WONDEROUS LIGHT
It sounds like a sweet duet for our ingenues, one in which their voices come together in the final chorus for mutual affirmation of purpose. Almost, but not quite. The formatting in the lyrics echoes what would also be clear in the staging if not clear through merely listening to the song. Jane and John are in separate parts of the magical world they have entered. They are not (yet) aware that their spouse, too, has been weirdly thrust into a strange new world they find odd yet also oddly compelling, and one they choose to continue exploring. The audience alone gets to see them both, together but not together, separately and simultaneously compelled and confounded by the adventures that follow.
Jane and John Allison (in last year’s Speakeasy workshop)
This musical irony of Jane and John singing harmonious duets unaware of each other is carried through much of “Speakeasy”. Several numbers also involving many other characters include John and Jane duetting their reactions, musically congruent, yet unsettlingly unaware of another, as their actions take them further down paths exploring non-heteronormative environments and activities (i.e. the queer subculture) always experienced separately, but witnessed simultaneously by the audience.
And as the couple further explores “this world [they] fell into” (and the audience starts to wonder how all this will inevitably effect their relationship) they get physically and emotionally entangled in the affairs of brash lesbian night club singer Duchess Bentley and famed female impersonator Julian Carnation. Act One nearly ends with Jane dancing with Duchess and John dancing with Julian in the Wonderland nightclub, blissfully unaware their spouse is in the same nightclub also dancing with someone of the same sex. John and Jane realize they are crossing dangerous emotional lines here, but they allow themselves to indulge this bliss because they reckon it’s all only a dream they are dreaming, not really real:
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.
It wouldn’t be a visit to the botanic garden without the obligatory “Ed sniffs a flower” picture, as my Facebook Friends have already learned to expect from us with seasonal regularly.
To get to the unicorn one must find the meadow in the sky. A wizard helps the knight get to the meadow in the sky by magically creating a rainbow up to the clouds. The knight climbs up the rainbow. So far so complicated (and unromantic). But we are not there yet.
I was introduced to BJ and her writings that would eventually become “The Oriole’s Song” during a weekend visit to Philadelphia over 23 years ago. While Ed, Dave, BJ and other family members were leaving the house to attend Quaker Meeting, BJ handed me sheets of paper with two short stories she had written for her writing group. She insisted I read them and tell her what I thought, as I was “an artist”. I felt a little trepidation. Ed and I had been dating for only half a year and I was meeting many of his relatives, including BJ, for the first time that weekend, and now I was being asked to read and judge her writing? What if I didn’t care for it? Already imagining devising diplomatic responses, I sat down to read in the empty house. By the time the family returned from Meeting, I was flush with the excitement of having encountered a thing of beauty.
BJ and I spent much of the rest of the day talking about her short stories, and how she planned writing more, vignettes that would eventually form the chapters of her memoir. She told me about her girlhood in China, her experiences of the war, of being one of the only Caucasian children in Yuanling, and feeling even more like a stranger as a teenager in the United States. She told me about returning to China in the 1970’s during the height of the Cultural Revolution with Dave and the two China born daughters they’d adopted in the 1960’s. She told me about returning again in the 1990’s, and floating high over Yuanling in a boat, now that the city of her childhood was drowned by the raised waters of the Yuan River Dam. She told me how her father was one of the last Americans left in China when the Communists took over in 1948, how he was denounced and put on trial and convicted as a spy, marked for execution.
The only formal requirement is that it must be no longer than 100 minutes duration.”
