Floyd, Dramaturg

My happy task today is to give an on-camera interview about Carlisle Floyd.  Elfin, tireless Yuval Sharon, the administrator of VOX during my last year in residence at City Opera, arrives at the apartment with a video crew at 5:30: the National Endowment for the Arts will be awarding Carlisle (along with Leontyne Price, James Levine, and Richard Gaddes) its first Opera Honor, and NEA is preparing a five-minute film on each of the honorees.

I have any number of good things to say about Carlisle: most of them here, in an essay I wrote for City Opera when the company revived Of Mice and Men in Rhoda Levine’s lustrous production in 2004.  What I didn’t get to say in that piece was how brilliantly Carlisle had criticized the libretto of Little Women.  When I ran the first draft by him in ’97, he applauded all the hard things he thought I’d done well: the supporting characters were clearly etched, the narrative arc was clear, &c: bravo! “There is, though, the small matter of your leading lady,” he said.  “What does Jo want?”

What do you mean, what does she want? I thought. What I said was, “She wants to keep time from changing the ones she loves.”

“When does she show us that?” he asked.

Now feeling infinitely superior, I purred, “I think if you’ll turn to the lyric of Jo’s first aria at the end of the Prologue, she expresses that desire pretty clearly-”

“Actually, no,” Carlisle said.  “What’s clear is that she’s very upset about something that has to do with the passage of time.   That’s terrific, as far as it goes: the aria spikes the emotional temperature of the show very early on.  But she never shows us what she wants, as opposed to hinting at what she’s failed to achieve.”

Of course he was right; and, flipping madly through the text, I knew exactly where that aria needed to go: the end of the first scene, which then ended with Laurie hinting to Jo, “You never know, Jo: things change,” and vanishing down the stairs.  But in that draft I’d decided against writing it, because, as I protested to Carlisle, “I can’t just write a solo about ‘gee, how happy I am: let’s keep it this way,’ can I?”

“Only if you want the audience to follow her through the evening,” he said.

“But how do I make that interesting?”  I wailed.

“I’m afraid that’s your problem,” he said.

(The electrifying Stephanie Novacek sings my solution here.)