Journal

The Westfield Athenaeum will be presenting dramatic readings of two plays, Spoon River Anthology, by Edgar Lee Masters, and The Bald Soprano, by Eugene Ionesco, tomorrow, June 2 at 7:00 p.m., as part of its Spring Lecture Series. The readings will be directed by Bob Lehan, of Westfield, and will feature local actors Bob Lehan, Rock and Carol Palmer, Kathi Palmer, Chuck Weston, Susannah Adams and Chris Lindquist. If you have not seen Spoon River Anthology or The Bald Soprano before, here is your chance to see these celebrated plays in an intimate setting.

Lehan received his BFA and MFA in Directing from Boston University's School of Theatre Arts and became a professor of theatre arts. For 32 years he directed a lot of college plays and taught most aspects of theatre, including acting and playwriting, at Westfield State College. He spent many seasons working in summer stock and also wrote short plays, winning several awards along the way. Now retired and a Professor Emeritus, he devotes more time to scriptwriting.

Spoon River Anthology, which was written in 1916, has been described as “a collection of post-mortem autobiographical portraits of the former citizens of fictional Spoon River, Illinois,” who tell about the lives they lived with a stark honesty and realism that has captivated audiences since it was first produced.

The following lines evoke the elegiac feeling of the entire play:

In youth my wings were strong and tireless,
But I did not know the mountains.
In age I knew the mountains
But my weary wings could not follow my vision - -
Genius is wisdom and youth.

Many of the characters that make appearances in Spoon River Anthology were based on real people that Masters knew or heard of in the two towns in which he grew up, Petersburg and Lewistown, Illinois. Ann Rutledge, regarded in local legend to be Abraham Lincoln's early love interest, is the most notable, though there is no actual proof of such a relationship. Rutledge's grave can still be found in a Petersburg cemetery, as can many of the surnames that Masters gave to his characters.

The Bald Soprano, written in 1950, recreates an entirely different world that can only be described as “absurdist.” Indeed, Ionesco is considered one of the preeminent “absurdist” dramatists. The title is actually based on a verbal slip-up by one of the actors acting in the original stage production. The Bald Soprano is one of the most performed plays in France to this day (Ionesco was Franco-Romanian and the play was originally written in French). Following a somewhat conventional beginning, the play devolves into a series of non-sequiturs, with no resemblance to normal conversation. Like many plays in the theatre of the absurd, the underlying theme of The Bald Soprano is not immediately apparent.

Lehan has this to say about the plays: “Spoon River Anthology is a beautifully observed collection of poetic portraits of small town Americans at the turn of the last century. You will find parallels with your own friends and neighbors. The Bald Soprano is really not about people. It's about the theatrical form. You will find introduction, development and conclusion where you would expect. You will find a wonderful scene of discovery and an analytical reversal of that discovery by a famous detective. You will also find the necessary sex scene. Watch for it, it's hot.”

To the attentive eye, each moment of the year has its own beauty, and in the same field, it beholds, every hour, a picture which was never seen before, and which shall never be seen again.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson