Emily Dickinson (Caitlyn Louchard) "does the
work" under the guidance of her "Master"
(Michael Sommers) (from the Tell It Slant
Web site)
The program book for Tell It Slant describes it as a "play with music about Emily Dickinson;" but, with my longstanding interest in the relationship between music and drama, I feel more comfortable calling it an oratorio. The focus is heavily on a body of source texts (Dickinson's poems) compiled to serve a biographical thread that focuses on Dickinson but elaborates considerably on those closest to her. The poems are sung, declaimed, and even woven into the thread of narrative dialog; and purists might take this as a refutation of my oratorio claim, as they might hold to the tradition that an oratorio should not be enhanced with stage directions. However, words evolve with the ways in which we use them (three cheers for Ludwig Wittgenstein); and Tell It Slant does as much service to Dickinson's poetry as any oratorio by George Frideric Handel provided to its Biblical sources.
The work is a collaboration between playwright Sharmon J. Hilfinger and composer Joan McMillen, premiered at the Pear Avenue Theatre in Mountain View in September of 2009 under the direction of Rachel Anderson. Under the auspices of Hilfinger's BootStrap Foundation, it has been restaged by Virginia Reed for a production at the Southside Theatre in the Fort Mason Center (Building D), with performances on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday through May 16. Alva Henderson is assisting Reed as Music Director.
Dickinson is one of those poets whose texts stand so well on their own that any music faces a serious risk of sounding superfluous. Aaron Copland's 1950 Twelve Poems by Emily Dickinson set a very high bar for any subsequent composer; and one of the ways in which Tom Cipullo dealt with that bar in 1999 was to broaden his scope to prose sources, rather than sticking to the poetry. (There is also the old joke that one can sing any Dickinson poem to the tune of "The Yellow Rose of Texas.") It might be fair to say that McMillen, who also served as onstage pianist for this production, was less interested in setting Dickinson's texts (in the traditional sense of art song) in favor of providing conducive environments for those texts. When the music depicts at all, its subject is nineteenth-century Amherst, often evoked through suggestions (and occasional quotations) of what one might have heard in the salons of that place and time. Her score and Henderson's music direction were well served by a cast of solid (while not operatic) voices; and three members of the cast even assisted with obbligato instrumental parts for drum, flute, and (believe it or not) trombone.
The title of the work refers to Dickinson's preference for slant rhyme, described by Wikipedia as follows:
Half rhyme, sometimes called slant, sprung, near rhyme, oblique rhyme, off rhyme or imperfect rhyme, is consonance on the final consonants of the words involved.
The overall motto is:
Tell the truth, but tell it slant.
The implication is that the "truth" about Dickinson's life lies more in her verse than in any scholarly effort at autobiography. Tell It Slant provides an effective warrant for this motto, particularly in the creative decisions it has made regarding the interplay of music and text.
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