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Saturday, January 16, 2016
The Mystic, the Monk and the Play Brought to You by Powerball
Roy Cockrum, left, the producer of “The Glory of the World,” with the director Les Waters, center, and the playwright Charles Mee.
The Mystic, the Monk and the Play Brought to You by Powerball New York Times It sounds like the setup for some kind of droll joke: A lottery winner and a rhinoceros arrive at the birthday party for a dead mystic. Art, and a blowout brawl, ensues.
An unusual stew of ingredients, some onstage and some off, has resulted in this strange spectacle’s move from Kentucky to the Brooklyn Academy of Music, which, beginning Saturday, Jan. 16, will present “The Glory of the World,” a new play by Charles Mee that takes a silence-and-strife-filled look at the life of Thomas Merton, the 20th-century American Catholic thinker who “remains a source of spiritual inspiration and a guide for many people,” as Pope Francis put it in an unexpected shout-out during his address to Congress in September.
Pope Francis Recommends Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King, Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton
The production is being financed by one of the newest and more unexpected patrons of American theater: Roy Cockrum of Knoxville, a onetime Episcopal monk who bought a Powerball ticket at his local supermarket in 2014 and won $259 million.
The back story of “The Glory of the World,” in some ways, includes Mr. Mee’s childhood, in a Catholic home where the living room shelves were lined with dozens of books by Merton. It also involves Mr. Cockrum’s time as a monk, when, while living under a vow of poverty, he decided that if he were ever to have money, he would use it to fund theater.
Bruce McKenzie, left, Eric Berryman, Aaron Lynn and Andrew Garman in “The Glory of the World.”Credit Bill Brymer
But, most of all, it starts with a walk.
Les Waters, the British-born artistic director on a plaque commemorating the street corner where Merton once had a revelation. Merton went on to spend much of his life at the nearby Abbey of Gethsemani, and Mr. Waters, whose theater’s mission includes the mounting of works inspired by Louisville and its inhabitants, was intrigued.
Mr. Waters set about reading, or trying to read, 10 of the roughly 70 books Merton wrote, and in 2014, he called Mr. Mee, a New York-based playwright and author who had often worked at the Actors Theater. The next year, 2015, would be the centennial of Merton’s birth; would Mr. Mee be interested in a commission to write about the mystic for the theater’s 39th Humana Festival of New American Plays?
Mr. Mee was enthusiastic. He had been raised in a family with several priests and nuns and a fondness for Merton’s work. “I think I know Merton pretty well,” he said. But he also issued a warning, telling Mr. Waters, “I’d love to do that, except, you know I’m an ex-Catholic, so whatever I do might get you thrown out of Louisville.”
Mr. Waters was unfazed, and the work began.
"The terrible thing about our time is precisely the ease with which theories can be put into practice. The more perfect, the more idealistic the theories, the more dreadful is their realization. We are at last beginning to rediscover what perhaps men knew better in very ancient times, in primitive times before utopias were thought of: that liberty is bound up with imperfection, and that limitations, imperfections, errors are not only unavoidable but also salutary. The best is not the ideal. Where what is theoretically best is imposed on everyone as the norm, then there is no longer any room even to be good. The best, imposed as a norm, becomes evil.”
"Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander,” by Trappist monk, Father Thomas Merton
The writer and director have been collaborating for years, most notably on “Big Love,” which also started in Louisville and moved to BAM, and they quickly agreed on a few basic elements for “The Glory of the World.”
The play would be set at a 100th birthday party for Merton, at which the celebrants would quarrel over how to describe a multifaceted man who was a Trappist monk, a prolific writer, a champion of nonviolence and a friend to Eastern religions before dying at 53 of an accidental electrocution in Thailand.
All of the actors would be men, reflecting the community in which Merton lived. And the play would begin, and end, in silence.
“The Glory of the World,” which requires an unusually large cast of 17, is neither a biography of nor a tribute to Merton but rather an exploration of how to think about a complicated historical figure, and, in the process, how to think about ourselves. Over the course of the play, the characters offer different takes, often in the form of toasts to Merton — celebrating him as a pacifist, a Communist, a meditator, a bohemian and so on.
“People who want Merton to be like a box full of kittens may not find this to their liking,” said Mr. Waters, who described the production as “a party.” Mr. Mee said the play “takes Merton as one of the fantastic examples of how really rich a human being can be” and the production is “this fantastic physical spectacle.”
Les Waters in “The Glory of the World.”Credit Bill Brymer
The rhinoceros appears because Merton once wrote an essay called “Rain and the Rhinoceros.” The brawl is unusually long (14 minutes) and vivid. And the silence can be, intentionally, unsettling; at the start of the play, an actor (often Mr. Waters) walks onstage and sits, with his back to the audience. The length of the silence is “either interminable, or shockingly short,” Mr. Waters said, depending on your tolerance.
“It makes some people in an audience uncomfortable, because it denies something that you think is going to happen in a theater piece — something is being withdrawn, and it throws you off balance,” he added. “Sometimes the tension is very palpable. There was one night in Louisville when I heard very distinctly a woman’s voice, ‘Is this all it’s going to be?’”
The reception of “The Glory of the World” in Louisville was positive, although, as with any experimental theater, it also left some mystified. The Louisville Eccentric Observer, an alternative publication, described a “collective sense of confused delight that most audience members felt upon exiting the theater.” The Courier-Journal called it “perplexing but fascinating.”
Among the enthusiasts was Mr. Cockrum, who has been traveling the country visiting regional theaters as he looks for projects to support. The play was the seventh production he saw in three days at the Humana Festival.
“I was just smitten,” he said. “I fell in love. It drew me in. I leaned to the person next to me, as the house lights came up, and said, ‘If ever I’m going to be a commercial producer, this is going to be it.’”
The cast of “The Glory of the World.”Credit Bill Brymer
He was particularly struck by the audience response.
“There was this buzz — people were talking about the play,” he said. “People were really engaged with each other about what the play had done for them, or to them, or with them.”
Mr. Cockrum said Merton had been “very influential in my own spiritual journey” and that “I didn’t read all 70 of his books, I don’t think, but I might have, or pieces of all of them.” When Mr. Cockrum was a monk, living at the Society of Saint John the Evangelist’s monastery in Cambridge, Mass., he kept a prayer by Merton framed on a dresser in his cell.
He is a lifelong theater lover — before becoming a monk he acted and worked in other jobs in the industry — and his commitment to the art intensified when, while still in religious life, he saw “His Dark Materials” at the National Theater in London. He found himself simultaneously amazed and depressed, because he realized that nonprofit theaters in the United States could not afford to mount shows with such a large cast and elaborate set and score.
“I promised myself then that if ever I had a pile of dough for some reason, that’s what I would try to make happen,” he said.
Photo
Stacey Sargeant, left, and Rebecca Naomi Jones in the Signature Theater’s revival of Charles Mee’s “Big Love" in 2015.Credit Sara Krulwich/The New York Times
After the lottery win — which he calls his “liquidity event” — he established a foundation to make grants to nonprofit theaters in the United States. His Roy Cockrum Foundation has awarded two initial grants, of undisclosed amounts, to the Goodman Theater in Chicago for a five-hour adaptation of Roberto Bolaño’s novel “2666” and to the Steppenwolf Theater Company, also in Chicago, for a production of “Mary Page Marlowe,” by the Pulitzer Prize winner Tracy Letts. And the foundation has pledged $1.2 million over 10 years to support stipends for the apprentices and interns at the Actors Theater of Louisville (where Mr. Cockrum had once been an unpaid apprentice).
“The Glory of the World” is Mr. Cockrum’s first venture as a commercial producer, through a separate entity he established called Knight Blanc, which is, in theater industry parlance, “enhancing” the production at BAM. Neither Mr. Cockrum nor BAM would say how much he is spending, although he said, “it’s not inconsequential.”
As for the play’s future, he said, “I’m focused strictly on this production — I want to make this the best it can be.”
For Mr. Cockrum, the play was an obvious choice.
“It has a monastic resonance for me that I recognized — the conversations that these men had between each other onstage were not unlike the conversations that happen in a cloistered environment,” he said. “That kind of examination, that kind of deep, philosophical, what is sacred, what isn’t sacred, goes on all the time in religious communities.”
But, he added, “I’m not doing this because it’s religious; I’m doing it because it’s a great play that spoke to me.”
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