Mawrdew Czgowchwz

by James McCourt

NOIA

  A Music Drama by Merovig Creplaczx

  The Composer’s text translated into English by Mawrdew Czgowchwz and Jameson O’Maurigan

  Conducted by the Composer

  Production designed and directed by Valerio Vortice

  Produced for The Czgowchwz Endeavor Life Trust by Tangent Percase

  The Father Odo Bost

  The Mother Roxanne Sauvage

  The Older Brother Turiddu Stameglio

  The Twins Mawrdew Czgowchwz/Jacob Beltane

  The Fiancé Achille Plonque

  The Fiancée Laverne Zuckerman

  Remembering the turbulence of that operatic matinee in vain pursuit of the elusive act, attempting any definition of the commotion, attempting analyzing NOIA—to pin it down—one fails. The truth forbids conveyance.

  The path to madness winds through darkness in a tempest. The protagonists whirl helplessly through the tragedy, which seemingly tells at the outset of a family entertaining guests, of a father, a mother, an older brother, younger brother-sister twins, each matched with a visiting fiancé. The initial mise en scène depicts a garden on a late summer afternoon at the turn of the present century. The locality is “Anywhere.” The characters are nameless.

  As they endure the passing hours, a succession of tormented monologues, sung between bits of trivial conversation, then fused into a fugal agon whose impact is as devastating as anything in twentieth-century music, compels the characters, each, all, alone and together, to reveal themselves in mythic terms. Façades crumble, masks corrode. (The scenic design itself begins to alter.) Fissiparous influences wreak terrifying effect on time. Years fall out of any reckoned sequence. Nightmare family secrets explode in shrieking anguish. The family Romance, the ageless conflict of unconscious archetypes, incest taboos branded upon all human intercourse, the crises of identity and self-encounter interweave thematically to precipitate a mangled denouement. Characters playing identity charades stalk through one another’s memories like wretched fiends.

  In titanic rage and terror the central, paternal force collapses, releasing the protagonists (the twins) from their bondage in the world of real time. They flee down paths to all-embracing madness. Fantasy gains full control. (The scenery has undergone an entire transmogrification.) The characters onstage metamorphose, becoming a king, his queen, their princess and her adored, adoring fool, a scheming, wicked courtesan, a menacing foreign prince, and a lord of the Inner Chamber.

  At a spectral masked ball intended to celebrate the betrothal of the princess to the foreign prince, the intended is repulsed. (The odious lord of the Inner Chamber had overseen the betrothal intrigue in the privy service of the tyrant king and his limp, impassive queen.) The fool, in gibberish incantations, sings of mournful things—death, anguish, lost bliss. Raising himself to a frenzy, he calls upon night’s demons, raising a violent storm, the climax of the work. The princess and her fool escape the palace and their hateful kingdom in the tempest and, in a golden coracle, cross miraculously unharmed to the shore of the land of “Whereas.”

  The initial scenic picture, Home, slowly re-forms. Pale lights discover the twins, parted from the others, free of family, of tyrannous espousals, of fearful carnal initiations, and of the thrall of desiccate time. Retreating mystically into one another, seeking out that secret place at the bottom of the garden—rendezvous of their childhood—they remain interlocked, alone together, awaiting death. They dismiss the world and its occasions.

  Taking his single bow in the final moments of a howling ovation, Creplaczx, embracing both his oltrano protagonists together, kissed each one gratefully, then walked off the stage, up the aisle, and out of the Mawrdew Czgowchwz Theater as the skies broke open, spilling brilliant sunlight over the island of Manitoy. He flew to New York directly, overcome.

  The most dazzling sunset imaginable signaled a perfect finish to the First Annual Czgowchwz Endeavor Life Trust Festival of Music and Dance. They all went back to New York.

  Summer came to an entirely good end. Its passing saw the resolution of a crucial cycle in the life of Mawrdew Czgowchwz. Years of diverse bounty lay ahead for the diva—in opera, on the recital platform, in the film world, in conjugal life. She would delight millions on the screen. She would bear another child—to Beltane. She would sing for years and years. She would approach perfection.

  All that lay beyond the autumnal equinox, in the unmeasured duration stretching on past now/then, in unworded future perfect hopes in seasons yet unschemed. A single grand occasion loomed between the end of the festival on Manitoy and the sailing of the oltrano couple on the first day of autumn on the Arcadia to Cobh: the CELT Autumnal Equinox Bazaar and Costume Ball, in honor of themselves.

  This festive extravaganza was initiated by Czgowchwz stalwart Goodman Tangent Percase. The same fierce dedication he had displayed in bringing the Neaport festival to happy issue now energized Percase and the Secret Seven to seek out everyone and everyone’s connections to produce a carnival: a classless, proletarian, anarchic, posh blowout the town took to “like so many ecstatic tots to Toyland, tootsie!” (Paranoy, to the Countess Madge, floating in regatta).

  Ralph, related matrilineally to certain of the several heads of groups who twice each year organize those Italian street festivals south of Houston, was able, after fending off some initial flak from diehard Neriacs (chastised in absentia one Sunday in a pointed sermon delivered by Dom Gesualdo Svelato, O.M.F.), to contract for a reproduction of the famous carnevale uptown in the Park. Bands, food stalls, street singers, money wheels, a Ferris wheel, midway booths of all descriptions, and a downtown opera company—the Adorato —were engaged.

  Arpenik summoned the New York Armenian crowd. Hundreds of women came away from their stoves that day, exuberant broods in tow, to cook and serve, dance and sing. They took over the entire wine tent.

  Paranoy contracted show-biz professionals of various talents for a nostalgic vaudeville interlude.

  Gaia della Gueza, with her apprentice craftsmen, hastened to the boathouse at dawn on the very day, to graft elaborate, disguising façades—plywood and gauze canopies, baroque poops, and festooned decks—onto scores of drab little workaday rowboats. They fashioned gondolas, sampans, floating norimons, toy triremes, frigates in miniature, model Egyptian barges, and Polynesian reed rafts in riotous designs and colored them with paints that glow in the dark. (The regatta’s participants, selected by lot over WCZG, were allowed the luxury of devising their own costumes.)

  Consuelo Gilligan booked gypsies and flamenco dancers, two trained bears called Bertram and Matilda, and a brigade of midget clowns.

  Pèlerin Deslieux rounded up his mime troupe.

  The Countess Madge, truculent, agreed nevertheless to engineer the Feis appearance, for Czgowchwz. Never having been on the best of terms with the mass of her expatriate compatriots in the diocese, she nonetheless reckoned blood thicker than bile, so set about getting the boyos to come to the shindig. (“They will keep saying, ‘The one hand washes the other!’”)

  Well before dark, the evening took off and flew away. The gypsies wove in and around the throngs, scaring sociables to distraction. The bears got drunk. (They would go swimming during the revolving regatta, provoking disruption afloat and merriment ashore.) The flamenco dancers practically caved the bandstand in, stomping berserk under a “blood moon.” The midget clowns made naughty mischief together under the tables in the wine tent.

  Pèlerin Deslieux’s mime troupe proved to be the most fantastical of all. Erecting a tiny platform at the north end of the meadow, the “Campo Czgowchwz,” the comedians reread the exquisite pantomime style of the nineteenth-century Parisian Funambules. Pèlerin, playing the white-faced Pierrot, hypnotized throngs with his luminous anguish. The troupe turned every ancient Commedia lazzo—pratfalls, somersaults, mocking duelli, improbable recognitions. Yet it was always Pèlerin, desperate Pierrot, the audience would best recall.

  Groups representing every county in Eire came, loquacious crowds s
porting green-plaid kilts and Tara brooches, tuning their skirling bagpipes, dancing the Stack o’ Barley, reciting their bardic tales, singing ballads, laughing-weeping, drinking the beer kegs bone dry.

  For if anyone enters Love’s door when he has not been admitted from within, this cannot be accounted Love: it is either Deceit or Force.

  The sun had set. Mawrdew Czgowchwz, sitting dreamily, contentedly alone at the long window of her tower suite looking down on Central Park, thought: “Enfin! This time tomorrow—” Then she stopped, remembering: There can never be this time tomorrow. (Her father had insisted that in Were It But So.) She reflected: In the next brilliant sunset, oltrano for oltrano, they would be together out upon the Atlantic making for Ireland, intending a perfect life. The New York/ Neaport idyl, a truly enchanted patch, must give way, she reasoned, to some calmer, gentle, whispering stretch. A quiet, evolving constancy must operate, binding them together in privacy. They must scheme to shut out glare.

  A knock sounded at the door—four formal, inquiring raps, steady, firm, and civilized. Czgowchwz thought fleetingly of Creplaczx and his commanding habit of rapping once, then barging straight in. She rose, saluting Fortune.

  Soon they were together at a window.

  Jacob stood devouring a pint of cherry-vanilla ice cream.

  “You will one day quite soon turn into ice cream, my singing warlock.”

  “Then you may eat me with a spoon.”

  “Yuk! Good thing we can’t be heard!”

  “Good job we can talk at all.”

  “All that is changing. Why tomorrow at this time—Oh!”

  “Oh, come, come. We say ‘This time tomorrow,’ after all!”

  “What we don’t say!” She corrected Jacob on the nice point.

  “Bewitching scion of a Fenian firebrand and a Bohemian metaphysician!”

  “Oh, why don’t you...what was it?”

  “Why don’t you belt up, disruptive Beltane?”

  “Yes, I love that. Do ‘belt up!’”

  “Nam-myoho-renge-kyo.”

  “That’s better. You do that entirely well.”

  “I learned it from a lady oltrano.”

  “Being with you resembles...”

  “Life in the nineteen forties—‘stylish, smart.’”

  “Oh, you—malapert upstart!”

  “Soit. Popinjay. Gigolo. The Pretender. The Rake. The Parvenu. The Enigma. The Kid.”

  “You’re full of quarts of ice cream.”

  “Cherry-vanilla. Have some.”

  “Do I look the cherry-vanilla type?”

  “You look your part: Titian Love Goddess.”

  “Oh, do go on!”

  “Look at yourself. Resplendent!”

  “Resplendent? Be more precise.”

  “Look in the mirror at the mass of that thick, rich, real, gorgeous bog-Irish hair.”

  “You’re impossible. Get out!”

  “I’m gone...I’m back. Kiss me! Capitulate!”

  They lay back together. In the next while, the while they moved into one another in the shadowy room, blue street lights outside below, white park lights, mellow rose lights in windows, and the freaked clusters of carnival lights on the Campo Czgowchwz flashed on to burn into the growing dusk.

  She spoke to him on their way. “That’s perfect. That manages.”

  “You don’t prefer baritones?”

  “No, oltrano man. Do you, all told?”

  “No, woman. Too dominant.”

  “We agree on essentials. I find that so consoling. In this world of so many collisions...”

  “I couldn’t be happier.”

  Now interlocked in darkness, lying north-south along the polar force lines, they voyaged. Flaring, they vanquished time against all odds, then slept a little while. Waking, they found one another—just there.

  “Jacob, let’s go anywhere.”

  “We must go to them, and to this do, this one last time.”

  “I love them all—but do you?”

  “Teach me how to love them all.”

  They bathed, dressed, and put on scent. They were to attend the do as Oberon and Titania. Before leaving, they stood there embracing at the window.

  “Jacob, I cherish the absent-minded constancy, the unstated promise, the lilt of you—the insistent courtesy.”

  “I love comprehending you. I love knowing you, all told. I love your voice. I love Czgowchwz, finally.”

  “And no one is listening at all.”

  “No one may. No one is here.”

  Moments later, walking over the bridge across the Pond, amazing creatures—he got up in pale green and black, she involved in gray and gamboge, both costumes diaphanous, both figures regal, seemingly unreal—they halted, turned, looked back up at the tower window they had so lately stood behind exchanging their vows. The skyline, vaulting in silhouette against a falling horizon to the west, piercing a blue-black eastern sky with stone-slab shafts illuminated randomly, lying banked to the south beneath an indigo expanse midway between the dusk and the dark, embraced the Park. To the north as they turned, masses of amorphous trees and low-slung opaque clouds reflecting splashings of light beckoned the guests of honor. A brilliant orange moon rose over the town. The nearer they came to the meadow, the louder the music and the merriment clarioned, until before they knew where they were, they were there—at the center of a splendid assembly of frolicking courtiers: the Italians, the flamenco dancers, the Armenians, the midget clowns, the bears, the reeling Irish, the raucous show-biz troupers. Stars, co-stars, chorus, and extras, the Funambulistes of old, society dames, socialite debs, college kids on a dizzy “sophisticated” spree, everyone from the Village, genial mounted police (“How chic. They’ve laid on the hussars”—Dame Sybil, to Cassia Verde Dov’è) made carnival together throughout the Equal Night.

  The variegate costumes: the Countess Madge as Norma; Ralph as Falstaff; Alice as mad Amneris; Carmen as Black Swan Odile; Dixie as Fafner; the remaining Secret Seven as Mime, the Forest Bird, and Nothung; Dame Sybil Farewell-Tarnysh as Astrafiammante, the Queen of the Night, in sequins; Gaia della Gueza as Thaïs, in paste jewels; Cassia Verde-Dov’è as demented Donna Elvira; Consuelo as Dido, lachrymose, all in black; Arpenik as Anoush, Oriental; Paranoy as Don Giovanni, bent on conquest; Percase as Prospero, wielding a long wand; Dolores as Cio-Cio-San, drunk and lost; Gloria Gotham as the Girl of the Golden West (or else Annie Oakley); Trixie Gilhooley as the Lady of the Camellias—“Such a swell tragic story!”; Dolly Farouche as the Lady in the Dark; Rotten Rodney Bergamot as Héloïse, the nun, wearing black fishnet hose; Grace Jackson-Haight as Lady Bountiful (benign); Boni de Chalfonte as Capability Brown (smug); Roxanne Sauvage as Azucena—looking the part; Achille Plonque as Achilles (causing certain eyes to roll); Laverne Zuckerman as Puck (causing eyes to pop right out); Annamae as the Lost Chord, revealing...; Leah Lafin and Moe Mohr together as Gothic gargoyle bookends, giggling, impish; Jameson O’Maurigan as the Roman actor Mnester, his two masks set front to back; Jonathan and Lavinia as Bacchus and Ariadne; Creplaczx as proud Orpheus; Thalia Bridgewood as Jack the Ripper; Valerio Vortice as Caligula... Others came as other heroes and villains.

  Perched at the top of a gigantic rainbow Ferris wheel while throngs below danced and sang, ate and drank, won and lost cash, laughed and cried, Mawrdew Czgowchwz and Jacob Beltane, like twin aerial monarchs, looked down upon creation.

  There was the Countess Madge doing the Stack o’ Barley like a wanton washerwoman, her flowing costume hitched up to her thighs. There was Consuelo Gilligan conceiving definitive reality. There was Ralph, devouring sausage and peppers, meanwhile holding forth to a mindful claque of rapt tots. There—over there—was Pèlerin Deslieux, onstage at the Funambules, acting Pierrot. They observed him, feeling just like the Children of Paradise, in the topmost reaches of “the gods.” There, behind them, was the great regatta being assembled on the Lake. Again there—just below—was Achille Plonque, dancing (almost naked) with Laverne Zuckerman (almos
t entirely so). There was Trixie, cavorting. There were the remaining Secret Seven, arguing. There sauntered Jameson, his comic-tragic masks seeming irretrievably at odds in mute, defiant, agonized argument. There was Rotten Rodney Bergamot, chastising himself outrageously with crepe-paper flails to the raucous applause of the show-biz crowd. There was Dolores, her wig askew, sozzled. There was Arpenik dancing intricate, grave, arching, twirling patterns, with an attendant group of Armenian women, accompanied by their fluting voices. There glowered Gloria Gotham, pointing a mocking finger at Dolores. There sat regal Dame Sybil in a quiet glade, strumming a lute for an audience of acolytes. There stood Percase, enraptured of the night. There stalked Cassia Verde-Dov’è, seeking something. There stood Paranoy, taking it all in.

  The rainbow Ferris wheel lurched forward, downward, carrying the oltrano couple back to earth in order to allow the waiting crowd to ride up in pairs to the top of the town to look down upon them. (They were the talk of the town.)

  Down on the ground again, pacing about the electric Campo Czgowchwz, Jacob quizzed. “What do you think of it all?”

  “I think it goes its own way.”

  “Yes. Don’t you think that’s a sign?”

  “More. I think it’s an absolute command.”

  The regatta was launched. Czgowchwz and Beltane boarded G-G’s opulent barge. (G-G, supine on a rose-velvet couch, attended by her many rhinestone-cocaine minions, drifted along in dreamland, puffing away on the best Moroccan from a long, silver pipe.) All around the Lake, under bridges, past pagodas, dozens of metamorphosed rowboats floated through the equinox carrying hundreds of costumed revelers from nowhere to nowhere else, in ellipses, to their general bemused delight.

  From the shore the regatta seemed a dream collection of giant fluorescent toys. Revelers kept on waving and shouting at the crowd of boaters out on the Lake. On the gondolas, they crooned of love. On the floating norimons, they enacted pastiche Kabuki. On every toy trireme, singing salty sea chanteys off-key, they wrestled. On the Polynesian rafts, they danced about, in and out of their flowery garlands and sarongs.