The late Joseph Cornell, a strangely shy textile worker (though from a comfortably middle-class family until his father died) who collected bric-a-brac, cut-outs of birds, movie images, doll heads, small wrapped packages, and star maps along with other ephemera and preserved them in artfully arranged wooden boxes he made in his basement, is on display himself now at Actors Theater of Louisville.
Charles Mee's Hotel Cassiopeia, a hauntingly realized evocation of Cornell's life and art directed by the ingenious Anne Bogart and created and performed by her SITI Company, is the fifth play to be unveiled in this year's 30th anniversary Humana Festival of New American Plays. It's a major achievement in every way.
It helps to know something about Cornell, who lived most of his life with his demanding, possessive mother and his younger brother Robert, born with cerebral palsy, in a simple frame house on Utopia Parkway in Queens, New York. He died alone there in 1972. Cornell loved exploring Manhattan, however, and its bookstalls, dime stores, theaters, birds (even pigeons). He enshrined pieces and remnants from these and other bits of the city in his boxes that have since been acquired by collectors and museums throughout the world. As author/playwright Donald Windham, his friend, once wrote: "It is ordinary to love the marvelous; it is marvelous to love the ordinary. For Cornell the paradox was more complicated. He found the marvelous and the ordinary interchangeable. Objects were sometimes one, sometimes the other; and his inspiration often came from the interchangeability."
Mee's play, brought spellbindingly to life by Bogart's inspired direction, plunges us into Cornell's voyeuristic mind. Barney O'Hanlon is on stage even before the play begins, seated at a desk -- bare except for three lettered building blocks that children used to use. His desk drawers are filled with items he pulls out from time to time -- tea bags, postcards, a portable phonograph, eating utensils, and fabric. We hear Satie's "Gymnopedies" on the piano. A cheery cafe waitress (Michi Barall, the wife of playwright Mee) takes his order for the sweets he loves. An astronomer (Stephen Webber costumed as Pierrot), an Herbalist (Leon Ingulsrud), and a Pharmacist (J. Ed Araiza) exchange small talk with him. A ballerina named Allegra (for Allegra Kent) played by Ellen Lauren dances through in her tutu, bringing him a chocolate mocha cake that they share. She makes a newspaper hat to wear because the sun is so bright.
A pall falls over the pleasant occasion when Joseph's mother (Akiko Aizawa) harshly commands him to boil the dish towel Allegra used to wash and dry her hands. Mee amusingly incorporates scenes from two old films (Cornell was passionate about movies and actresses) -- "To Have and Have Not" (1944) with Lauren Bacall and Humphey Bogart and "Algiers" (1938) with Charles Boyer and Hedy Lamarr. These are flashed upon the screen, a recreation of the star charts loved by Cornell. Actors mouth the pretentious lines along with the characters on screen. Ellen Lauren is phenomenal whenever she's on stage -- as the flirtatious, toe-dancing Allegra, as jaded and tough talking Lauren Bacall (her ladder ascent behind a picture frame is a showstopper), and as a smoky-voiced cabaret chanteuse singing "What Is This Thing Called Love?". The excellent Barney O'Hanlon's inward-living Cornell, creating art in his isolation and loneliness, becomes uncharacteristically emotional and terror-stricken toward the end of Mee's play at the thought of losing his brother: "Who will I care for? Who will I give things to? Who will talk to me?"
Contributing immeasurably to the indelible impact of Hotel Cassiopeia are Neil Patel's scenic design, Brian H. Scott's lighting, Darron L. West's sound, Gregory King's projections, and James Schuette's costumes. As with Mee's wildly exuberant bobrauschenbergamerica about Robert Rauschenberg, which Bogart's SITI Company presented during ATL's Humana festival in 2001, Hotel Cassiopedia deals with another modern artist and is the second in a planned series of four. The final two will be about James Castle and Norman Rockwell.
