JLP Event July 7 (tomorrow) in Brooklyn Postponed

CHAOS MANOR, the outdoor JLP event scheduled for tomorrow (July 7) in Fort Greene Park, Brooklyn, has been postponed until September due to the record-breaking heat wave in NYC.  It was the right decision.

We’ll reconstitute the event in September, specific date to be named later.  CHAOS MANOR was shaping up to be unique.  Now we’ll have more time to hone it.  The innovative A Public Space founder and editor, Brigid Hughes, had come up with an idea to perform various pieces from the JLP book, with me reading my narrative segments and amateur actors reading the transcriptions from loft tapes and our oral history interviews.  The centerpiece of the drama would be the piece from my book on which this event was named, Chaos Manor, in which musicians Sonny Clark and Lin Halliday and Halliday’s girlfriend Gin McEwan were documented in the hallway of the loft overnight in September 1961.  Interspersed would be clips of Smith’s audio, such as Edna St. Vincent Millay reading her poetry and actress Julie Harris reading Emily Dickinson (which Smith taped from his Caedmon vinyl record collection), and CBS radio’s morning news of Fidel Castro protests in Central Park.  A live jazz quartet was set to perform a series of tunes throughout the program.

The closest we ever came to something like this was the Duke theater department’s 2007 performance, “Misterioso,” which was part of “Following Monk,” a series produced by Duke Performances’ Aaron Greenwald to commemorate Thelonious Monk’s 90th birthday.  “Misterioso” was an improvised student play, directed by Jay O’Berski, borrowing elements from Caryl Churchill’s play, “Hotel,” in which the audience had access to action in various rooms in the loft at once.

Recently a writer, David Keymer, compared the JLP book to Dylan Thomas’ radio play, Under Milk Wood, which concerns one day in the life of a Welsh coastal town, representing myriad voices of townspeople, dreams and ghosts.  I ordered the book when I saw Keymer’s review.  It turns out that in 1952 Caedmon Records recorded a live performance of Under Milk Wood which included Thomas (who died in 1953).  Eugene Smith owned most of the Caedmon collection, so he probably had Under Milk Wood. Was Thomas’ play an influence on his insane tape recording?  Maybe.

-Sam Stephenson