The Magic Maker

by Susan Cooper

  But not just yet. He hadn’t finished. For one thing, there was an unfulfilled idea for a Christmas Revels that he had been talking about for years. Each time there had been the same conversation.

  “Children’s books. Come on, Susan. A Storybook Revels. Something to do with children’s literature.”

  “You’ve always had children in the show — the games, all those songs —”

  “Yes, yes, but children’s books . . . There just has be a way to do it.”

  “I don’t know how.”

  “Neither do I. It’s very provoking.”

  But there came a point when he was so determined to make this happen that we did find a way; it was the only time a Revels took on the shape of a play. The script was full of characters from classic children’s books, starting with a magician and his boy helper who perform the puppet play of St. George and the Dragon at a party in Edwardian London (another echo of those Langstaff carol parties). Visually, the puppet theater would be a copy of a Pollock’s Toy Theatre, idiosyncratic Victorian paper cutouts that Jack used to love buying on visits to London.

  At a crucial point in the performance, the Boy finds he has lost the St. George puppet, and the Magician, furious, banishes him on a quest to find St. George. There’s a blackout, with lightning and thunder, and suddenly we are inside the puppet theater. The Sanders stage has become a Pollock’s proscenium, and within it the Boy finds himself with the puppet characters from the play, now life-size — including the magnificent Dragon.

  The Dragon roars off in pursuit of all the other characters — except the Fool. He is a mime (Jack had used a wonderful mime, Trent Arterberry, in several previous Revels, and this show was written for Trent to double the parts of the Fool and the Magician). With him, and of course with the audience, the Boy sets off through the Land of Storybook, to find St. George, and the Revels becomes his quest.

  Once Jack had approved the script, the real work began. Many people exerted much time and effort to raise money: this was a high-budget show, like the Light and the Dark Revels the previous year. The designers began work on costumes, masks, props — even the prop list for this Revels was two pages long, single-spaced. And Jack managed to persuade Trina Schart Hyman to design the proscenium for the Pollock’s Theatre, which was no mean feat; Trina was not only a Caldecott Medal winner but one of the best and busiest artists in the world of children’s books, and an outspoken lady with firm opinions.

  Jack, the set designer Eric Levenson, and I drove up to see her in New Hampshire, we all talked a great deal, and eventually Trina sent Jack a beautifully detailed design for a proscenium arch, all twining trees and vines. He brought it to Eric, Raine Miller, and me and we all studied it. It was perfect — almost.

  “There’s just one thing,” Jack said. “Look at those rabbits.”

  At the foot of each pillar of the arch were some adorable little bunny rabbits. They looked so real you wanted to stroke their velvety ears.

  “Cute,” said Eric drily.

  “Eeuuw,” said Raine. “They’ve got to go.”

  Jack said carefully, “I’m afraid they’re not exactly . . . I hope Trina won’t be offended, but . . . Susan, maybe you could write to her.”

  “Me?” I said in horror.

  “Well, you know her . . . you’re both authors . . . you’d know just what to say.”

  So with enormous reluctance I composed a letter to Trina, all about the exigencies of theatrical collaboration and the myth-based nature of Revels and please would she mind getting rid of the bunnies. It took a long time.

  On August 31 Trina wrote back. Her letters were always elegant and unmistakable, written with a fine black pen in little narrow capital letters; only the “Trina” at the bottom was ever in script.

  Dear Susan,

  Of course I don’t mind. I say “of course” although my first reaction was to be very pissed off — so I put your letter aside for a day until your sentence “I shouldn’t dream of interfering if this were a book . . . ” had a chance to sink in. You are quite right; in the theater things are interdependent. Besides which, this isn’t really the most creative or personal project for me. (I still don’t know quite why I’m doing it at all — I was, as I think I said, quite satisfied with the Christmas Revels as they were ten years ago — but I suppose time marches on, and creative innovation must have its day, and Jack is such a bulldozer personality that he carries all along in his path. I actually have no idea why I’m doing this, and actually I hate doing “vegetation,” although nowhere near as much as I hate drawing horses. Do you know what I mean? Do people ever say to you, “Oh, do us a dark fantasy, Susan — you’re so good at it!”? Which is the only reason why I wanted to put something else in there.) So, I shall do whatever you think is best, honestly; no problem.

  But if Jack doesn’t send that proscenium puppet-theater mock-up along to me very soon, all this agonizing will be for naught — I’m starting work on a book October 1st, and once I’ve started a book, I’m gone. Which I’m sure you know about too. . . .

  It was good to see you, and thanks for writing that letter. I know it wasn’t easy, and you did it well.

  Best, Trina

  Three weeks later she sent us the finished design. It looked wonderful; the rabbits had gone and the cover letter came, as Jack said, from a true Revels person.

  Dear Eric, Jack, and Susan,

  I think this is more or less what you wanted for the fantasy proscenium arch. In case you hadn’t noticed, the tree branches coming together around the moon is also an echo of the ring of swords that lop off St. George’s head. (Sometimes I can’t help myself.)

  Eric, I know you’ll understand that you’re to adapt this as you see fit. I know that colors may have to be simplified and shapes altered to get this thing to work at a distance. Never having had to work for distance, as you can see, I’m bad at it. The important effect is the intertwining branches working toward the moon. I guess. What about using silvered Mylar for the circle of the moon? Or is that too tacky? In any case, do with it what you will. If this is completely off base and stupid, just tell me what to do next.

  The panels are — or will be — as you see from the sketches.

  I’d love to just throw glitter over this whole thing. I should have joined the circus long ago.

  Best, Trina

  Eric and his crew built the set, and it looked wonderful.

  The script involved a Storyteller, a disembodied voice; the actor Hume Cronyn, with whom I’d worked for years in my other, non-Revels life, agreed to play it for us. He came to Cambridge to tape the voice-over, being as fond of Jack as the rest of us were. Jack sent him a fee, and Hume sent it right back as a donation to Revels.

  December came, and the first performance. After a splendid overture written for brass by George Emlen, Hume’s quiet storytelling voice filled the theater to set the scene:

  “Once upon a time.” That’s the way every good story begins. Now, the story I am going to tell you is about a boy on a midwinter’s quest, and it starts — but only starts — in London, in England.

  And out of the carol party, the story rolled its magical way through incident and song; past Merlyn, past the Green Knight, past the looming giant of “The False Knight in the Road,” sung by Jack, past Robin Howard as the Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe, and all her singing children, past David Coffin as the Pied Piper. Merlyn had given the Boy a riddle to follow, but it wasn’t helping him much.

  Look at him and you shall see

  Your ally and your enemy;

  His face is hard for you to find,

  Harder yet his secret mind,

  Yet when all his heart you know

  Safely through the world you’ll go.

  In “The Lord of the Dance” Jack took the Boy’s hand as he danced down to lead the audience out, making our small Everyman the link between performers and audience. And through more storybook incidents and some masterly mime devised by Trent, the Boy followed his quest until at l
ast he found himself among a crowd watching the Mummers’ Play.

  The play took its traditional course, the Dragon killed the Turkish Knight — and the Boy was happy and expectant, knowing that now at last he would find St. George, because this was the moment for the hero of the play to come to the rescue.

  Here’s the script. Father Christmas says, as always:

  St. George shall come and die by swords

  Which circle round his neck;

  As Winter dies, so shall he die,

  And then to life again like Spring!

  The Boy is peering offstage like everyone else, waiting anxiously for St. George to enter. But as he peers, every other person onstage turns his or her head deliberately to look at him. Still staring, they move a step or two away from him, isolating him. The stage lights go down, all but a spot on the Boy.

  And the Fool comes to the Boy, carrying a sword and shield and a small white tabard with a red cross. The Boy stares at him, puzzled. The Fool puts the tabard over the Boy’s head and the sword and shield into his hands. Then he kneels briefly at the Boy’s feet.

  And in Sanders Theatre there was a soft Oh sound from the audience as they realized, like the Boy, that he himself had to be St. George. Jack said it was his favorite moment in the show. It was mine too: somehow I’d always thought of my Boy as an echo of choirboy Jack.

  So the Boy was St. George. There was a splendid dragon fight (“Look out, St. George!” cried a child’s voice from the audience at one crucial moment); the Boy slew the Dragon, the Morris men slew the Boy; the Fool revived him with a magic sprig of mistletoe. The Boy sat up and began to sing:

  Good morning, gentlemen,

  A-sleeping I have been. . . .

  Suddenly the Fool swung a cloak around his shoulders and was the Magician again, and he pulled off the Boy’s tabard, crumpled it, and handed it back to him — and lo, it was a St. George puppet. There was a great flash of light, a crash of thunder, and stage and theater were suddenly dark for a second time as the Revels crew worked like demons to achieve their own magical change of scene. And, said the script:

  From the speakers, on tape, we hear the Boy’s voice softly singing the last words of his final verse as St. George.

  . . . The dancers shall have a dance

  And the mummers have their pay!

  The stage lights go up, and we are back in the Victorian Christmas party. Beside the little stage of the puppet theater the Magician and his Boy are bowing, as the guests applaud them.

  The voice comes conversationally over the speakers once more.

  STORYTELLER

  So our tale is done.

  And who is to say whether the people on one stage are more real than the people on another? Once upon a time, a boy achieved a midwinter quest, and began the long business of growing up. Once upon a time, a family celebrated a rather unusual Christmas in Victorian London. Once upon a time, a thousand people filled a midwinter theater in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and lived, for a while, inside a story, once upon a time. . . .

  Jack had announced that this Revels would be his last. It had been seamlessly directed by Melodie Arterberry, who like her mime husband, Trent, had a long-standing association with Jack and the Revels, and it was dedicated to the memory of Marleen Montgomery, who had died untimely that year. Jack wrote to the cast and crew:

  Let me tell you again how much this Revels meant to me, because of each of you and what you did to make it all happen — my fellow singers, dancers, musicians, our production staff and team in every aspect of the show . . . It was my last in Cambridge, and I can’t think of a more beautiful production in which to end my performing here. Many of you will carry on this Cambridge tradition, and I’m sure we will meet again in other productions at some future time.

  You all made the midwinter quest — now safely through the world you’ll go. . . .

  With all good wishes to each of you.

  In friendship’s name,

  Jack

  He didn’t retire, of course; he just stopped performing in Cambridge — in order to perform in the other cities. He was still Artistic Director of Revels, Inc., and his Revels family was still expanding; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, was about to become the sixth. After that, Houston, Texas, would become the seventh, thanks largely to the continued enthusiasm of Jack’s nephew David, now a successful Texas-based entrepreneur.

  A copy of Jack’s schedule for the fall and winter of 1989 shows him zigzagging between the cities of Cambridge, New York, Philadelphia, and San Francisco. Every month he visited all four, sometimes with Paddy or George: in September for chorus auditions; in October for production meetings; in November for rehearsals; in December for performances. He devoted particular time and care to Philadelphia, this being its first Revels — and on the way from Philadelphia rehearsals to San Francisco rehearsals, he made a side trip to the opening night of the Revels in Washington, D.C. He was about to have his seventieth birthday, and from time to time there were pains in his chest, and he paid neither of these facts any attention at all.

  He still had one more long-cherished idea to accomplish. He had been trying to make it happen for years; it was a Russian Revels, and he managed to bring it both to California and Cambridge in 1990 — a year after the Berlin Wall came down, and a year before the USSR broke up.

  Jack had discovered Dmitri Pokrovsky when he first visited the U.S. in 1988; he was a musician, conductor, folk-song collector, the father of the seventies revival of folk song and dance in the USSR They had been planning to collaborate ever since, but the process was long and painfully slow. As the Sanders Theatre program eventually put it: “By mail and fax and recalcitrant telephone (and the occasional exchange of text hand-delivered by people like the Ensemble’s American representative, Abigail Adams, or the Revels’ assistant producer, Kate Grant, who spent last year living in the Soviet Union), work went on for two years to make a Russian-and-American Revels a reality here and in San Francisco.”

  Though Dmitri was twenty years younger than Jack, the two men were astoundingly similar: dedicated, charismatic performer-teachers who generated instant enthusiasm and affection in their choruses. They had the same ebullience, the same urge for communication, and of course the same passion for folk song. When we all first met in 1990 it was wonderful to watch them talking nonstop to each other, like two rivers tumbling into the same course.

  Born in 1944, Dmitri had grown up in the bleak Communist culture personified by all those elephantine stone statues of Soviet Hero Tractor Driver. He studied music — principally balalaika and orchestral conducting — in Moscow and graduated as a classical musician. But, he said, when we were all getting to know one another:

  As a balalaika player, I couldn’t understand where the music was for me to play. I hated what was called “Russian folk song”; it was awful music. In the thirties, you see, the authorities had said, “We must get rid of the kulak culture, there will be no more peasants, instead we have workers.” So in music as in all the other arts, they replaced everything with this workers’ culture, and the real folk song had gone.

  It hadn’t really gone, though; it was still surviving underground. In the summer of 1969 Pokrovsky, by then teaching classes in conducting at the October Revolution School of Music, went off on a trip to Archangelsk, in the far north of Russia.

  There was the midnight sun, you know? Kids playing football at two o’clock in the morning. And outside a house I heard this amazing sound, music like I had never heard before, and I found five old women sitting on a bench singing folk song. I can still see them, outdoors there, singing. It was the real Russian folk song, from the old days — the old people had kept it alive.

  So he and his students began to collect these hidden treasures. In villages and country districts all over the huge republic of Russia, they sought out singers and musicians — some of them amazingly good — who still privately played and sang the hymns, carols, ballads, and ritual material forbidden since Stalin’s time. It was a s
low process, since the country people were often suspicious and nervous, and the government was hardly likely to approve; the “workers’ culture” of the Soviet Union had no use for ethnomusicologists.

  But Dmitri and his researchers persisted, laboriously recording endless improvisations of songs and dances never written down before; eventually they had more than two thousand, and a lot of original folk costumes and early musical instruments as well. The Pokrovsky Ensemble became first a school of folksinging and then a performance group, touring cities all over Russia, taking Russian folk music back to the people whose hidden heritage it had always been. They had to wait for the arrival of Gorbachev and glasnost to be able to take it to the rest of the world.

  As Dmitri and Jack talked and talked in Cambridge, it rapidly became clear that there were striking similarities not just between the two men but between the two sets of folk material they spent their lives translating into performance. Both cultures had North European roots; both were focused on the winter solstice. Nearly everything was based on the image of darkness swallowing the old year, and the need for propitiation so that light would return as the new year was born. Our Anglo-American culture had had waits and wassailers, once upon a time when communities were small and television free; the old Russian villages had carol singers too, traveling from house to house with images of stars and a boat, to represent the winter sun sailing through the darkness of the underworld. Carols, circle dances, children’s games, even Mummers’ Plays centered on death and rebirth: they all echoed to and fro, and so they did in the many drafts of the Revels program that was gradually built that year.