The Three Blue Cats shortly before their performance at Gallery in the Field, Brandon, Vermont, July 5, 2007: Frank Reeve, Don Davis, and Joe Deleault
The Blue Cat is back. He's a couple of years older, but he's still the actor he was. Perhaps more so, for the world is more somber than ever and the threats both to human life and to the earth itself are greater than when The Cat was a kitten. In fact, the only way he can get people to listen is to pretend he's not saying what he says--that he's an illusionist making an illusion of himself. Of course, he's telling the truth. Of course, you don't have to believe him. Nine times out of ten, the truth is unbelievable.
The Three Blue Cats shortly before their performance at Gallery in the Field, Brandon, Vermont, July 5, 2007: Frank Reeve, Don Davis, and Joe Deleault
Performances of The Blue Cat Walks the Earth, twenty-four poems by F. D. Reeve ranging from the sassy and saucy to the the passionate, the profoundly serious, and the elegiac accompanied by improv jazz by Joe Deleault and Don Davis began on July 4, 2007 at New London's Hygienic Art Gallery. Next came a gala evening in Brandon, SRO at the Old Red Mill Inn in Wilmington, a benefit for the Performing Art Center in Ogunquit, Maine on September 23 at 7.30. Still to come are a performance at Harvard's Adams House for the Grolier Poetry Book Shop on November 7th at 7.30, at the Manchester Music School on January 9, 2008, at the Dream Farm Cafe in Hollis, New Hampshire next February 10 at 7 pm, and places whose dates need to be fixed in New York City, Miami, San Francisco, and still other New England venues.
Audiences are receiving the new Cat poems even more enthusiastically than those of his first return two years ago. "This is poetry engagé if ever there was such," commented one listener. "The off-center rage with loving care for earth and fellow human--is utterly fine; and if there were an audience to hear and follow, you wd be like the figure of Liberty flag-bound mounting over the barricade."
A new long poem has been put to instrumental and vocal music by Eric Chasalow, leading contemporary electronic/acoustic composer, head of the Brandeis music department and author of a wide range of compositions. A retelling in modern mode of the classical Daedalus-Icarus myth, it offers a sassy, penetrating look at our world's political performances and cultural values.
Verse text for a chamber oratorio
Characters:
Delling, a world-famous engineer-inventor
Ingram, his twelve-year-old son
Caribes, a mixed chorus containing all other roles including Delling's nephew Thane, Queen Prue, King Milo, their daughter Princess Arabella, her lover Theodore, and the islanders themselves as commentators and comforters
Synopsis
The setting is an imaginary island in the Caribbean where Delling (Daedalus) has ended up after a fantastic career. The Chorus begins by introducing him and his son Ingram (Icarus) and by reenacting the early episode with his nephew Thane for which Delling was accused of jealously pushing the young man off a cliff.
Scene by scene we then get reenactments of the crucial events in Delling's life starting with his fleeing the city with his son by hot-air balloon to King Milo's island. There Queen Prue lustily persuades him to invent a contraption whereby she can have sex with a bull (which she does). Milo compels him to build a maze for keeping the man-eating man-bull she bears. Each month the king's daughter Arabella then guides a victim in until Theodore appears, slays the bull and is guided out by Arabella's thread. Delling is punished by being put into his own maze.
Although he promised to marry Arabella, Theodore sails away without her, and young Ingram takes up her cause. When Delling fits himself and his son with artful wings to fly out of the maze, the boy seeks to prove his manliness to Arabella and his general defiance of restrictions by outflying his father. Alas, he goes too close to the sun, his wings burn, and he plunges into the sea, where beautiful nymphs cradle his body and assuage his soul.
That brings us back to the present and Delling alone with his conscience on the island, his last stop. The Chorus summarizes his life while he ponders the significance of new information technology for future engineering projects and blames himself for the loss of the boy, who, like his father, "insisted on his immortal right to be free."
The Puzzle Master in an hour-long, abbreviated form had its premiere May 6 and 7 at Brandeis as the opening event of the 2007 Boston Cyberarts Festival and was warmly reviewed in the Boston Globe:
"Reeve's modern libretto is eloquent and sly, and Chasalow,,...who specializes in electro-acoustic music, has set the text with integrity, supple craft, and at times arresting beauty. Delling often sings in a kind of lyrical and expressive sprechstimme and the writing for the 'chorus' ranges from a bracing style full of wide leaps to a very poignant madrigal-like setting spiked with pungent dissonances. For the passage where the chorus comforts Ingram's soul after he has fallen into the sea, Chasalow writes a kind of church-like music that sounds at once both ancient and very modern."
In the second week of February 2008, Chasalow and Reeve will be guests at Grinnell College in Grinnell, Iowa. Reeve will give a poetry reading on Thursday the 14th at 7.30; on Friday afternoon they together will discuss collab orative art work; and on Saturday evening in the theater at 8 pm there will be a full-scale production of The Puzzle Master.
August saw publication by Bayeux Arts of a new book of lyrics, The Toy Soldier, a collection of more than three dozen new lyrics, new translations, and new sequences including one on father/son conflict, five translations from Russian, and the small series, "The Causes of War," that ends with the closing stanza of "Greed":.
Now, past the Virgin, we have come to autumn
again; the street is patrolled by a different family;
in the cold nights of despair we imagine Alice
a saint in blue as pure as the Holy Mother
impatient to have our sacrifices box
after box like Christmas presents In the window
of heaven the world parades her everlasting beauty
and the men who kill to get her.
"Home in Wartime " closes the book with the same arresting simplicity, one reader said, and poignantly conveys what war, however remote, does to the landscape and the heart.
Joining Diana Der-Hovanessian, Reeve gave a reading from the book under the auspices of Gloria Mindock’s Cervena Barva Press at the Pierre Menard Gallery in Cambridge on September 19, 2007 and will again read from the book at Memorial Hall in Amherst on April 10, 2008, sharing the evening with Susan Snively.
A New House in April
In late afternoon light the hemlocks shine like old silver;
a woodpecker drills its tattoos on a dyng ash;
my father walks ahead in the woods by the river
where the marbled water rolls off the mountain’s back.
A warm wind softens the past, like the snow,
making him lighter, quicker, to every taker the giver
explaining, “ One must possess one’s ignorance
like knowledge.” He sweeps like a hawk along the river.
I shout to him through the speckled air, “Wait!
When you came to the end of your life, did you measure
from failure down or up from success?”
Silence. The wind in the hemlocks. A kingfisher’s cry.
Next June, 2008, Reeve will be in the Bay Area with readings in Livermore on the 1st, Crockett on the 8th, and Sacramento on the 9th; radio interviews on KPFA, KKUP, and KRCB in between.