The fascinating story behind FEBRUARY HOUSE

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Posted: 5/4/12 at 7:37pm

This sounds extremely interesting. Hope it turns out well... From yesterday's edition of The New York Times:

Boho Brooklyn, 1940s Edition
By Dwight Gardner
“NO opera plot can be sensible,” W. H. Auden wrote, “for people do not sing when they are feeling sensible.” More than any major poet of his era, Auden, who died in 1973, dabbled in serious forms of musical drama. Opera’s wildness and implausibility took him places where poems, or intellect alone, couldn’t go. He longed, on occasion, to break into song.
The 33-year-old Auden is among the central figures in a word-drunk new musical, “February House,” that shuttles organically between literary sense and harmonic sensibility. Auden, I suspect, would have admired “February House,” which begins previews Tuesday at the Public Theater, and not just because this snippet of his poem “Refugee Blues,” sung by its young cast, seems to set the play’s emotional tone:
Say this city has 10 million souls,
Some are living in mansions, some are living in holes:
Yet there’s no place for us, my dear,
Yet there’s no place for us. 
Based on actual events, “February House” is about the serendipitous discovery, amid New York’s crush of souls, of an almost perfect place. In this case that means a dilapidated house in Brooklyn Heights that became, in the early 1940s, a bohemian commune of sorts for intellectual misfits that included Auden, the novelist Carson McCullers, who was 23, and the composer Benjamin Britten, then 27.
The burlesque entertainer and aspiring writer Gypsy Rose Lee, then 29, also crammed herself into the house on 7 Middagh Street. Stirring Lee into this imposing bunch reminds you of something once said about Pauline Kael and The New Yorker magazine: She gave it sex, and it gave her class.
This group home was the brainchild of a fiction editor and bon vivant named George Davis, then 34, who acted as papa bear, therapist and swizzle stick. It was a utopian experiment like Brook Farm, the transcendentalist commune in 19th-century Massachusetts. Thankfully, as Auden declares in the play, it was Brook Farm “without the vegetarians.”
“February House” is based more specifically on a nonfiction book of the same name by Sherill Tippins that was published in 2005.
The gifted young composer Gabriel Kahane was commissioned by the Public Theater to write the play’s music and lyrics. The book is by Mr. Kahane’s former Brown University classmate Seth Bockley. They’re an imposing team.
“The mistake we didn’t want to make,” Mr. Bockley told me recently, “was to simply deliver a history lesson, an eat-your-vegetables vehicle about famous people. We wanted a genuine theatrical experience, with characters who have obstacles and argue and fall complicatedly in love.”
I saw an early workshop of “February House” last July at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, N.Y. — a lively evening, and not just because Natalie Merchant, who was in the audience, opened a door for me when I sneaked out at intermission for a cigarette. (The show later had a well-received run at the Long Wharf Theater in New Haven.)
Sparks fly early and often. When Auden pretentiously blurts to McCullers that “I am a thinking-sensation artist in the Jungian sense, whereas you are clearly a feeling-intuitive type,” she takes out a flask, eyeballs him as if were a space alien, and says: “Uh huh. Gin?”
Auden seemed to enjoy McCullers’s impudence. He is, after all, the man who said, “Among those whom I like or admire, I can find no common denominator, but among those whom I love, I can: all of them make me laugh.”
Auden and McCullers are a pure and defiant literary odd couple. Both stoke your imagination in “February House,” in part because of their youth, in part because both wrestle with where their obligations to art end and their obligations to politics begin. They are increasingly obsessed with what Lionel Trilling, in “The Liberal Imagination,” called “the dark and bloody crossroads where literature and politics meet.”
The play takes place during the early days of World War II, and a sense of doom lingers in the air. A radio broadcasts reports of the bombing of London, where some writers and intellectuals criticized Auden for remaining safe and utterly unbombed in America. Auden declares early in the musical: “One’s life and private conduct are the most important political statements one can make.”
Yet Mr. Kahane’s music and lyrics move from mournful to antic. Gypsy Rose Lee emerges in a fur coat in one scene, and she sings: “If you want to get my hair in a tousle/Talk to me about Bertrand Russell.” Davis was helping her write what would become her best-selling thriller, “The G-String Murders.”
The emotional heart of “February House” shifts with its scenes and moods, but it often seems to reside in the McCullers character. The waiflike Georgia-born writer was already the author of a well-received novel, “The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter.”
That novel included these plaintive lines, which seem to speak to her experience in Brooklyn: “Some kind of music was too private to sing in a house cram full of people. It was funny, too, how lonesome a person could be in a crowded house.”
Estranged from her husband and already drinking too much, McCullers may have had a sexual relationship with another of the house’s residents, Erika Mann, a 34-year-old refugee intellectual and cabaret performer from Germany.
McCullers is portrayed in the Public Theater’s production by the actress Kristen Sieh. In addition to poring over McCullers’s fiction, and attending to biographies, Ms. Sieh has worked diligently on perfecting McCullers’s accent.
Her “voice was a strange and beautiful sound of the old South,” Ms. Sieh told me, “a type of voice that has nearly vanished. I listen to recordings of her speaking whenever I can. And luckily for me, this play’s director, Davis McCallum, is from Georgia, as is my boyfriend.”
Part of capturing McCullers onstage is nailing her youthful awkwardness; she thought of herself as a blunderbuss and a bit of a klutz. “When people talk about McCullers,” Ms. Sieh said, “they often recall how she was always sitting in odd positions. I do a lot of unusual sitting in this play.”
The house in Brooklyn Heights was called February House — by Anaïs Nin, who dropped in — because so many of its residents had birthdays that month. Other than that, however, they seem to have had little in common except a commitment to their art and to not ever being bored. Cocaine is snorted in “February House”; bedbugs are extravagantly shuddered over; a good deal of whiskey is poured.
It is impossible, alas, to visit the actual 7 Middagh Street. The house was demolished to make way for the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. Auden may have disapproved of such a pilgrimage anyway. As he put it, “Art is our chief means of breaking bread with the dead.”

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Posted: 5/5/12 at 2:17am

I'm so excited for this, both for the fascinating premise and because Gabriel Kahane, the composer, is brilliant. He did a couple of songs (I think from Feb House) at the NAMT New Musicals showcase which were lovely and his album is one of my favorites of recent.

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Posted: 5/5/12 at 5:56pm

This sounds really interesting!