EudoraWeltyOnstage.com
The stories of America's great writer performed onstage

About June Recital (a.k.a. Sister and Miss Lexie)

The short story written by Eudora Welty titled June Recital is from the collection The Golden Apples. It tells the history of Miss Eckhart, the piano teacher, who, Miss Welty confided in her autobiographical One Writer’s Beginnings, she could view as representative of herself, not for external reasons, but for shared passion.

The stage adaptation, also called June Recital, departs from the story of Miss Eckhart and spills over into other Welty stories and characters, some of them accompanied by A Fantasia on Beethoven’s Fifth Piano Concerto inspired by a Beethoven Fantasia described in the original tale.

The performance begins with a metronome and driving directions. It includes the story of the heroic schoolteacher Miss Julia Mortimer from the novel Losing Battles. Also on the program is the comic classic “Why I Live at the P.O.” and the themes of five other short stories. Every word is written by Welty, though stitched together in sometime startling way to the music of Beethoven with which it also shares passion.

To hear a sample of June Recital or download from audible.com click here

Interview April 2002

by Edwin W. Schloss
With Brenda Currin and David Kaplan

Question: The form of the June Recital Adagio and Rondo are quite unusual. How did you develop these two sections?

David: We wanted to theatricalize the lyricism of Welty's writing. There was no one story, however, that seemed to us capable of carrying that burden onstage.

Brenda: Until one Monday morning rehearsal I came in and showed David a page from my notebook. I didn't say anything. It was a collection of names. The first name to appear was of course, Eudora Welty -- that name! I had started a list of names. William Wallace Jamison from The Wide Net, Virgil Thomas, Edna Earle, Sam and Robbie Bell, The Malones, The Doyles, Mr. Marblehall, Little Leroy, Keela the Outcast Indian Maiden, Phoenix Jackson, Mrs. Fletcher, Leota, Mrs. Pike, Mr. Pike, Mrs. Hutchinson, Billy Boy, Teeny, Lady Evangeline, Mr. Petrie. That's as far as I got and I didn't say a word to David I remember. I handed this to him and he said "What an elegant idea"

David: We re-read all of Welty's work for names. We made lists of three syllable names, four syllable names. We had no idea what we were going to do with them. None.

Brenda. We had a list of the dead, people who work, names that rhymed. We had lists of the rivers, the roses, the quilts, the names of the animals. We wrote little notes to remind ourselves who was who.

David: Brenda would read the names and the notes out loud to me. About a week into it she sat down and read Princess Labam sits on her roof at night and lights up the whole city. I thought, that's very beautiful and then she read The King of the Snakes has a body like thick necklace. I forget what was next, perhaps Cassiopeia sits on her chair. So I went to my record collection (it was 1979) and I pulled out and played the Adagio from Beethoven's Fifth Piano Concerto because that's what hearing the words felt like to me. I asked Brenda to say the words on top of the music. This went on for days She read names and I would listen and set them at night to the music and then we would refine it together.

Brenda: The name of the next movement of the Beethoven is the Rondo and that, of course was the name you hear from Sister in "P.O.": Stella Rondo, Uncle Rondo. So it was irresistible to go ahead and try to work on the Rondo.

David: A rondo is the repetition of a musical theme, and in the Fifth Piano Concerto when the theme repeats I set five different Welty stories: The Robber Bridegroom, The Burning, Delta Wedding, Petrified Man, Powerhouse. In between I set rolls of names out of which the stories and the music rise. That is the architecture of the piece.

Question; Brenda, would you talk a little bit about what it was like meeting Eudora Welty one on one in New York City?

Brenda: It was a dark, rainy fall afternoon. Ms.Welty was staying at the Algonquin Hotel and I was sent up to the seventh floor where she met me at the elevator. She had a cardigan around her shoulders. She invited me into her room, which was extremely dreary in the back of the hotel with no view at all. She had a soap opera on and she had a Ross McDonald book by her bedside and there was a straight back chair. She sat on the bed and I sat in the chair and our knees were knocking and we couldn't get a flow going. We were both shy. She looked at the floor this way and I looked at the floor that way and it was not going well. Then we started to somehow talk about Stella Rondo and the characters in "Why I Live at the P.O." and we both started to laugh as if they were members of our family and it just broke the ice. Then we just talked and talked. She was a lover of the theatre. One of the things she told me is that she received adaptations of "Why I Live at the P.O." where all the members of this family were played out by different actors. She told me that is so not the point because, she said, all of this is coming through the point of view of Sister. You only get to know them through the distorted way Sister decides to tell you.

Question; What do you think gives Eudora Welty's writing universal appeal despite its regional specificity of time, place and subject?

David: For Eudora Welty everyone has a story and every thing has a story and those stories, when told, evoke a path to a world. The path is what's universal about Welty's writing: anyone can walk down it, proud or humble, black or white and hear the echoes within themselves of stories.

Brenda: Laura McRaven, the nine year old visitor in Delta Wedding, expresses the echo of my story. She senses in her Aunt Ellen's eyes as she gazes at her own adored children some "unused love". Laura wonders: "Could she get it?" I loved those ladies from my childhood in Oxford, N.C. playing Bridge at 8 in the morning, fully dressed with lipstick and nail polish, smoking and drinking Coca Cola. And their talk, which to me, bespoke a generosity and voluptuousness, an excess of love. Welty's ladies are sexy to me and a curative to homesickness.

Question: In what way does translating the words on the page to the stage and then to a recording change the way a story is told?

David: Losing Battles is a novel where many family members at a reunion share the telling of a single story among other stories. Onstage those many voices transmute into an unnamed narrator who relates the point of view shared by the family in the novel. For recording "P.O." we've deliberately used the sound obstacles -- feedback, a fly caught in the studio, microphone pops - to represent Sister's physical obstacles in a stage performance.

Q: What is the hardest aspect of this work to convey both in recording and in performance?

Brenda: I don't know about the hardest. Certainly the most important is that the issues that are being discussed are life and death. The most important line of the entire recording is that "the music was too much" The performance and the recording are meant to resemble the experience of being around someone who's too much: like Miss Eckhardt or Miss Julia or Sister. You see, they care too deeply. They're impassioned. Not always an acceptable characteristic, and it sometimes comes from an unexpected person.

David: That's another connection to the unexpected use of Beethoven. Eudora Welty's work has the scope of Beethoven. It ain't pretty; it's thunderous!