Carmel Dean has done Edna St. Vincent Millay an extremely generous favor. She has set the revered poet’s “Renascence” to glorious, moody, insistent music. Doing that, she has also given audiences an equally uplifting gift.
How so? Her “Renascence” composition serves as the enthralling finale to Renascence, now at the Abrons Center. This is the latest unique Jack Cumming III project for his always-unique Transport Group presentations. The “Renascence” music piece includes all of Millay’s 105 iambic tetrameters and, with its urgent choreography by Scott Rink, takes perhaps 10 minutes to perform.
The poem—written when Millay was 19 and submitted to a contest for which the $1000 first prize would be a boon to her family whose ineffective father had fled—prevailed only after some complications. (A previous recipient was announced and anger ensued.) Nevertheless, the correction ultimately established Millay for its wiser-than-Millay’s-years appreciation of nature, of premature death and jubilant rebirth. “Renascence” still remains one of her most beloved works.
Pointedly, the poem “Renascence” also begins the intermissionless piece, as its six cast members walk into the Abrons Center auditorium aisles and begin speaking only the introductory lines as if they—not Millay—are thinking it up on the spot. The tactic is a charming way to suggest how poems come to be: how verbal images, how metrical requirements are taken into consideration. Maybe this isn’t news to poetry lovers, but it has its strengths.
When the ensemble members finish the appealing prologue, they hurry onto the temporary thrust stage and start telling the story of how “Vincent” (Hannah Corneau), as the poet called herself, fought to be acknowledged as the contest winner. (Up until then, she had walked off with every contest for young poets she had ever entered and wasn’t about to let this one go.)
Alternating throughout the economic yet impassioned narrative, crafted by Dick Scanlan, the plot features her mother (Katie Thompson), sisters Norma (Mikaela Bennett) and Kathleen (Danny Harris Kornfeld), absent father (Donald Webber, Jr., also taking on other roles) and an editor (Jason Gotay, also taking on other roles).
With an emphasis on the making of “Renascence,” the actors alternate at recounting Vincent’s impoverished Maine childhood and the dire need for whatever prize money she could accumulate, her attending Vassar thanks to an admiring donor, her moving to New York City and becoming a toast of the literary town and allowing that to go to her head. Nothing is stinted about her early activism or her busy social and sexual life. (Granted, no mention is made of her Bedford Street tourist-attraction home with its 9.5-foot-wide façade.)
Other Millay works are regularly inserted, and Dean treats them with the same fervor. Incidentally, Dean has any number of credits as a conductor and arranger, but this score deserves to go far towards establishing her as a writer for the stage. That’s especially likely, since the always-imaginative Michael Starobin orchestrated for an eight-member group that Geraldine Anello, at the piano, conducts.
At the moment there seems to be no impending original cast recording, although that would be a welcome development—not the least for the crystalline singing delivered by every member of the cast. Singling out any one of them for special praise isn’t necessary since they’re all handed solos and other combination numbers and perform like angelic pros. Nonetheless, Corneau, who does bear a striking resemblance to Vincent, is asked to do more heart-wrenching singing than the others.
For the climactic sequence, co-directors Cummings and Scanlan and choreographer Rink drop an upstage wall which scenic designer Brett J. Banakis has placed. Revealed is a large space behind which is a mural showing a sky like the “tented” one mentioned in “Renascence.” That’s when the audience is encouraged to come up and sit on benches placed in a semi-circle in front of the mural.
The new area is where Dean’s tone poem is performed, and a stunning conclusion it is. Anyone who’s been following Cummings’ insistence on never repeating himself—since, say, the days of The Audience—will understand he’s done his chameleon act again. Some may even decide he’s outdone himself this time.
Renascence opened on October 25, 2018, at the Abrons Center and runs to November 17. Tickets and information: transportgroup.org
