It would seem this June is Great Female Mavericks in History Month off-Broadway. Hot on the heels of Roundabout Theatre Company’s world-premiere staging of Toni Stone, Lydia R. Diamond’s homage to the Negro League athlete who became the first woman to play professional baseball, Lincoln Center Theater presents another spanking new work, a musical account of the life of Hildegard von Bingen.
Name doesn’t ring a bell? Allow Grace McLean, who wrote In the Green’s book, music, and lyrics and performs in the show, to introduce her: “Hildegard was the author of the first mystery play and numerous groundbreaking compositions of music, science and exegesis, an intimate of popes and kings, a conlinguist and an exorcist,” McLean writes in a note folded into the program. Green‘s heroine, born to German nobility around the end of the 11th century, also had mystical visions and, eventually, became a saint—all that despite having spent 30 years of her life, reportedly from the age of eight, cloistered in a cell attached to a monastery.
[Read Michael Sommers’ ★★★ review here.]
It’s this period that Green focuses on, tracing Hildegard’s relationship with her mentor and only companion during that time, Jutta, who is played by McLean. Countess Jutta von Sponheim was another noblewoman who abandoned the outside world—by her own choice, it’s made clear—to serve as “anchoress” to God. In McLean’s interpretation, this means that Jutta, the role she plays, rejected living itself. “When life is darkness, death is dawn,” she sings at one point, while Hildegard—identified as “a girl in three pieces,” and accordingly played by a trio of young actresses—comes to view her time on earth with a great sense of purpose.
That’s about all that’s made entirely clear, at least for this observer, in McLean’s beguiling, unsettling, and mystifying work, driven by a score as calculatedly unconventional as her characters. A performer who has applied her sinuous, theatrical voice and sensibility to other original compositions, as well as forward-thinking (and polarizing) musicals such as Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812 and Alice By Heart, McLean and her co-orchestrator and music supervisor Kris Kukul fill Green’s tunes with dissonant harmonies and propel them with rhythmic vocal loops that can turn McLean into a beatbox between the terse melodic phrases.
The orchestrations for instruments other than the human voice are spare and intensely percussive, with conductor Ada Westfall playing bass and keyboards and drummer Hiroyuki Matsuura delivering eclectic, sometimes frantic grooves as John Murchison and Peter Pearson add the bittersweet or ominous strains of, respectively, qanun (a Middle Eastern stringed instrument) and cello. The visuals are similarly eerie, as McLean and the powerfully voiced women playing Hildegard—Rachael Duddy, Ashley Pérez Flanagan, and Hannah Whitney—pace their sanctum, starkly designed by Kristen Robinson and lit by Barbara Samuels so that multiple silhouettes of each figure can loom behind and above them.
The three Hildegards each bear a sign representing a corporeal function or appetite that Jutta will try to suppress. Flanagan, a comely brunette whose tough, shiny soprano suggests a virtuosic rock diva, carries a reddish brown structure resembling a pair of lips—Robinson makes the props fanciful but instantly recognizable—and is pressed to lead the others in quelling their character’s hunger. Duddy holds an outsized painted eye, while Whitney, who contributes the production’s warmest, earthiest singing, clings to a fake hand of similar proportions. Jutta will demand the Hildegards (sometimes referred to in the libretto as Hand, Eye, and Mouth) relinquish these parts connecting them to the sensory world and embrace rigid discipline in order to equip them—I guess—for their particular plight as women.
The subject of menstruation comes up quickly, leading Jutta into “Eve,” a ditty in which she spells out the legacy left by the Bible’s first lady: “We carry her curse in our blood in our breathing/ You have to learn to hold your breath/ You have to learn to feel some death.” If that’s not rough enough for you, a woman called Shadow wanders in—”a forgotten piece of Jutta,” according to the text, played as a stern, haunted figure by Mia Pak—and recalls an apparent rape. The Hildegards are confused and upset; Jutta tells them to shut up and get back to work. She is, it’s plain, as broken as they are.
If Green‘s story encompasses healing—the title refers to Hildegard’s belief in fertility and growth, and later segments in the musical are called “Rebirth” and “Integration”—its spirit is pretty bleak, and not cathartically so. McLean, in her note, describes Jutta as having committed a “radical feminist act” in locking herself away, but the witchy antics she gives the character, however quirkily compelling (especially when she’s making those trippy, syncopated noises), give us little sense of what could have made this woman tick other than her capacity for suffering. Even Hildegard, in her shattered pieces, emerges as less of a life-affirming force than a scarred survivor; “Hildegard’s Confession” recalls a traumatic event involving a beloved, lost older sister and, again, a lot of blood.
In the Green ends abruptly, and bewilderingly, with a showcase for a supporting character described as “an outsider” and tellingly assigned to the same actress cast as Shadow. The brief scene offers little sense of integration, or resolution, for that matter. But perhaps McLean means to remind us that history isn’t a succession of neatly wrapped episodes—and that even saints and pioneers cannot separate themselves from all the complications.
