Glass Half Empty
Full disclosure: I may be a bit bitter because I couldn’t get a press ticket to Phelim McDermott’s Tao of Glass at NYU Skirball.
Yet, when I arrived — on Thursday, April 6, having bought my own — there was a full row of empty seats behind me. And many more scattered throughout the theater.
So, take this review with a grain of salt — though I’ve tried to maintain some objectivity.
McDermott, the founder of Improbable Theater, is best known for his stage direction, including the Met’s productions of Philip Glass’s Akhnaten and Kevin Puts’s The Hours. But he also an actor.
This nearly one-man show — it was just McDermott, the puppeteers, and the musicians on an excessively smokey stage — suffered from its halting delivery.
After a slow introduction, McDermott told a story about “Billy’s Wonderful Kettle,” a play that he missed because of a childhood stomachache.
It was “the best piece of theater that I never saw,” he says — a statement that becomes Tao of Glass’s thesis of sorts.
This is followed by an anecdote about an adaption of Maurice Sendak’s In the Night Kitchen with Philip Glass that never happened. There were some funny details, including Sendak’s bizarre demand, before he died: “He’s gotta have the peepee.”
As well as an image of the boy protagonist swimming in a giant milk bottle (a sexual fantasy?), which comes back when McDermott discusses his adventures in a flotation tank.
But, for the most part, the anecdotes were just not that interesting. The best part was the puppetry.
There was the tissue-paper Glass “conducting the music with his hair,” the shadows cast by disassembled piano, the Bunraku puppet that suspiciously resembled the one from the Met’s Madama Butterfly.
In one, surprisingly self-aware scene, McDermott recounts how he once reduced the composer to snores. “I’ve bored Philip Glass!” McDermott says, positing that “He’s put more people to sleep in concert halls than nearly anyone else.”
It’s unclear how much Philip actually had to do with Tao of Glass. I wasn’t convinced that all the lazy vamps, played by the barefoot musicians, were really him.
The first act ends with “Opening” from Glassworks, which brings McDermott back to a play where he hid in an armoire — the vivid excitement of that moment.
At the intermission, I truly thought it was over. I found myself totally transfixed on a little lap dog who appeared to have a better attention span than me.
In the second act — following a discussion of the Japanese art of repairing pottery with gold — was a scene involving a broken coffee table, with the iconic line, “Kintsugi my ass!” Regarding Glass’s music, he says, “It’s driving me a bit mad!”
McDermott couldn’t have left it there — he really needed spell out Tao of Glass’s clever title.
There were allusions to Waiting for Godot — another play about something that never happens — as well as a scene were McDermott is covered in pieces of the I Ching .
But my favorite segment involved coma states and ghostly player piano. McDermott lay on the floor as Glass’s proxy (a Steinway programmed with his touch) formed a trio with the violin and clarinet.
It was the best music of the whole play, but it went on so long.
It couldn’t have ended there — McDermott had to have the last word. “My son, Ridley,” McDermott says, likes Glass’s music because it is “calm and dangerous at the same time.”
McDermott posits: Is music a place, like New York City, or is it more like a flowing river, which you can return to at any time?
Tao of Glass ends with the distorted sound of “Opening” on a record player, which is joined by live piano and percussion.
You suddenly realize that the stage itself is a giant, rotating record. The last thing you hear is the gasping sound of the needle catching at the end.
Tao of Glass put two of my previously-held theories to the ultimate test:
1. That, contrary to popular belief, Philip Glass music isn’t boring.
2. That you can make anything sound cinematic by adding Glass.
I really should be the target audience for Tao of Glass. Having listened to Glass’s music since childhood, I find it especially transportive. I associate it with family car rides, the smell of sun-warmed leather seats and stale coffee.
But I don’t think either of these theories stood up. For the first time, I understood those who find Glass a bit soporific.
