Swish (15 page)

At which point nothing was easier than emptying myself of pride and cunning and rodomontade, but what filled me was not music but despair. Also chocolate, so that in the end I wasn’t just miserable; I was miserable and fat.

And I sleepwalked through my life, not really paying attention, because why bother, and I graduated from college and applied for teaching jobs and didn’t get any. And I figured maybe I could go to grad school somewhere or become a lawyer even though my dad the civil rights lawyer who’d won every case he’d ever argued before the Supreme Court said he didn’t want me to be a lawyer because he thought I could do better, but I
couldn’t
do better, I’d tried and I
couldn’t.
And when they’d assigned
Steppenwolf
in high school I’d memorized the part about living with such strength and indescribable beauty that the spray of your moment’s happiness could be flung so high and dazzlingly over the wide sea of suffering that the light of it, spreading its radiance, might touch others too with its enchantment, but that wasn’t an option anymore so instead I’d just have to tread water in the sea of suffering until I drowned and it was just too fucking bad.

And then one day in the midst of this agony I was having dinner with a slightly kooky older friend with long fingernails who had once dated my father and all at once she said, “I just had a psychic vision! I saw you at age twenty-seven and you were surrounded by light and you were incredibly happy.”

And I said, “Was I a singer?”

And she said, “No. I don’t know what you were doing, but whatever it was, you felt totally fulfilled.”

And I understood all at once, as I headed back to the salad bar despite the fact that they had run out of Baco Bits, that
I could do something else with my life and still be happy.
And I felt the tar pit that had been sucking me relentlessly into its depths begin to liquefy and I realized I had been given back my liberty and my life and I didn’t know yet what I was going to do with them, maybe I’d establish world peace or find a cure for AIDS or hatred or maybe I’d grow wings and fly, because I could do any of those things, and then I asked my friend an even more important question, which was, “Do I have a boyfriend, and is he blond?”

To my dismay, she said she hadn’t seen whether I had a boyfriend or not, because I had been so complete in her vision as I was. I found this a deeply unsatisfactory answer but it was clearly the best I was going to get.

I spent the next few days trying to figure out what I wanted to do now that I didn’t have to do what my stomach wouldn’t let me do. I blathered to my father about my options; I blathered to friends; I blathered to strangers at the pizza parlor. I was paralyzed with indecision. How could I possibly choose a path? Any door I approached would open at my knock; after all, I was smart and funny and could type eighty-five words a minute.

And then I remembered how much fun I’d had writing
G!
and working on it with Director Gina. Perhaps, I thought, I should become a writer of musical theater. I called a friend in NYU’s Graduate Musical Theater Writing Program, and he couldn’t endorse it highly enough. So I decided to apply and, at the same time, to try writing a full-length musical. A thirty-minute jeu d’esprit is one thing; sustaining both the jeu and the esprit over the course of an evening, however, might be entirely beyond my reach. For one thing, what would I write about? How could I possibly top teenage matricidal Harvard applicants?

The answer was: with
Princess Di: A Fairy Tale
(written before Diana’s tragic death), in which the Furies came back for a repeat engagement, joined this time by Carmen Miranda, Ed McMahon, Maleficent the witch from
Sleeping Beauty,
Lady Macbeth, McDonald’s Grimace, and a chorus of reporters named Nigel. Director Gina directed brilliantly, one of my friends dressed in drag to play Camilla Parker-Bowles, and for the show’s finale I turned a Bach chorale into a rousing gospel number. The Graduate Musical Theater Writing Program accepted me and I moved to New York.

Musical theater, more than any other art form, forces its practitioners to collaborate. Lerner and Loewe, Rodgers and Hammerstein, Bock and Harnick—the people who write successfully almost never write alone. Even when one person writes music and lyrics, somebody else usually writes the script (Sondheim and Weidman, Finn and Lapine, Herman and Stewart). The Musical Theater Writing Program trained its students for this reality by insisting that, for the two years we were under its tutelage, each of us choose to focus on either music or words, as we would do most of our work in collaboration with other students.

I found this profoundly annoying; I didn’t need to collaborate with anybody, because I already knew everything. All the same, I did not wish to gain a reputation as a troublemaker, so I enrolled as a composer.

And no matter which lyricist I was working with, I brought in the same goddamn song every week. I used the same six chords (four, really, since two were variations) over and over again whether the song was about a Southern beauty pageant contestant or a town overrun by zombies or a war between a gang of chickens and a gang of frogs, and before long everyone had begun to dread my workshop presentations, me most of all. The music I wrote shone extravagantly and unambiguously, just like the Baroque music I had sung with such passion, yet more and more it illuminated nothing but the paucity of my imagination. I was writing the musical equivalent of lead and I was helpless to transmute it into anything that contained even a hint of gold.

Finally, one evening in my second semester, after sitting in a practice room writing for an hour and a half and coming up with the same song yet again, this time for a character whose husband was about to be shipped off to war, I found one of my professors. “I can’t stand this song anymore,” I said, dragging him to the piano. “Can you help me write something different?”

“Thank
God,
” he said. “Okay. Play a few chords.”

I did, and three of my six standards came out. “See? It’s just gross.”

“Hold your horses. Now take your hands off the keyboard and wiggle your fingers around.” I did. “Now,
without looking at the keyboard,
and
without shaping a chord ahead of time with your fingers,
put your hands down again.” I did, and the piano emitted a bizarre, hideous sound. I made a face. “Do you like that?”

“No.”

“Okay. Try it again.” I put my hands down, produced a different bizarre, hideous sound, and made another face. “One more time.” And this time the sound that rang from the hammered strings was bizarre…but not hideous.

In fact, it was kind of interesting. It was full of instability, ambivalence, doubt.

I looked down at my hands to see what notes they had struck to create the sound still echoing faintly in the air. The chord made complete theoretical sense; it just wasn’t anything I would ever have written on purpose. I scribbled the notes down and tried again. When I had found three or four chords I liked, I started playing with accompaniment patterns: Should the fingers of the right hand stay still while those of the left hand moved? Should both move at the same time but in opposite directions? Then I looked at the words my collaborator for the week had given me and considered possibilities for the vocal melody over the accompaniment.
Once more, you must go,
the lyric began,
and I pull you tight.
The musical line that came out was slow and tentative, almost in denial. My professor and I kept going, and by the end of the evening I had written a song that sounded like nothing I’d ever composed before. This was
bara,
what Director Gina had defined as bringing something into being out of nothingness. Certainly my previous songs had been the products of
bara
as well, but this felt fundamentally different—this felt vast, immeasurable. It wasn’t a completely comfortable experience, but I felt nonetheless a bubbling excitement utterly different from the joy of
asah
that had filled me when I sang. When I brought the new song in to workshop the next day my classmates applauded wildly, not because it was such a great song but because for once I hadn’t subjected them to the six chords they had come to know and loathe.

More important than the actual sound the pianist and the singer produced, however, was my growing understanding that I had been wrong about musical theater. A form in which characters feel emotions so powerfully the spoken word is insufficient to express them is not stupid; it’s revelatory. Yip Harburg, the lyricist for
The Wizard of Oz,
said, “Words make you think a thought. Music makes you feel a feeling. A song makes you feel a thought.” I don’t think there’s anything else on earth that can do that.

And along with my changing perspective on the form itself, I also began to learn that, in a piece of theater, a song doesn’t have the luxury of just sounding pretty, of just expressing love or rage or despair; it also has a job to do, in helping a character make or fail to make an emotional journey. Whether or not you want to hear it on the radio isn’t quite as important. In the year after my musical prison break, I set lyrics like this one by my friend Diana to music as unresolved as I could manage:
^*6

Last night we spent an hour on the phone.

We talked about our friends, and moaned about our jobs,

And laughed about the villain on that stupid TV show.

I hoped your voice would fill the empty spaces in my heart,

But all I heard was what you weren’t saying,

And I don’t know if those words will ever start.

For a song in which Lizzie Borden went mad, I wrote music in two different keys at the same time (imagine the dreadful sound of the first lines of “Happy Birthday” as sung by any large group before everybody starts singing the same notes, but lasting throughout the song and in fact getting more and more dreadful as the character’s sanity slips further and further away).

The project that takes much of my focus these days is a musical drama I’m writing with a brilliant lyricist named Len Schiff and a brilliant scriptwriter named Peter Ullian about Terezin, the concentration camp the Nazis filled with artists and musicians and intellectuals and then used as a propaganda tool to show the rest of the world how well Hitler was treating the Jews.

Whenever I tell people I’m writing a musical about a concentration camp, their brows wrinkle in disbelief. “What, with singing Nazis?” they say. “Why on earth would you want to write a musical about the Holocaust?”

To which my answer is that we’re not writing a musical about the Holocaust.
Terezin
is about what happens when art is co-opted by tyranny, about how people can assert their freedom when they are not free, about what truths might be worth dying for. We’re telling a story of the triumph of creation over despair. And where else should we tell this story but in a concentration camp, because where else but in the face of absolute cruelty do courage, generosity, and kindness put the forces of destruction more thoroughly to rout?

We do have singing Nazis in our musical, though they don’t sing much. But the song the younger one sings is among my favorites in the show, because often the most terrifying villain is the one who doesn’t know he’s a villain:
^*7

And to the ones who cry compassion,

Preaching, “Hate is not the answer,”

I say humans must hate Jews

The way the surgeon hates the cancer:

He reserves his share of pity

For preserving human life—

Attentive to his cause,

Unswerving with his knife.

When I saw this lyric, full of hate and anger, I understood that the worst musical response would be to set it to hateful, angry chords. Because it’s not illuminating at all to write music that communicates what
I
feel about the character; I have to communicate what the character feels about himself. So the music is some of the sweetest, most lyrical that I’ve ever written—and the song is
really
creepy, because the audience sees not a cardboard cutout but a man whose noblest impulses have so decayed that he can’t even recognize what he’s become.

And ultimately that nobility and that decay are the reasons I write musicals. What’s playing on Broadway now?
Mamma Mia,
a totally fun, campy show written around the songs of ABBA.
Hairspray,
a totally fun, campy adaptation of the John Waters movie, short on subversion but long on delight. And I really enjoyed these shows when I saw them, and God knows we need all the fun we can get. But if musical theater stops there, if its writers remain silent about the corruption and wickedness and greed around us, then we are complicit in our own destruction and in the destruction of everything we hold dear. “If I write about a hill that is rotting,” declared Wyndham Lewis in the introduction to his collection of stories
The Rotting Hill,
“it is because I despise rot.” If composers and lyricists and playwrights allow rot to pass unremarked, we are wasting our opportunities and squandering our talent. Hitler is dead and the Nazis are no more, but as far as I can see, our leaders still manipulate us and poison us and sacrifice us on the altar of their power, and if people who see
Terezin
aren’t led to consider the parallels, then Len and Peter and I have done our job badly.