It is, as you may imagine, a real challenge to transmute Mee’s imagination to the stage, and one person who has done it is choreographer/director Martha Clarke (with Vienna: Lusthaus and Belle Epoque) and another is the down-to-earth, insightful Anne Bogart, who goes all the way back with Mee to Another Person Is a Foreign Country, the extraordinary piece they did with a group of lame, halt, blind, and other walking wounded in an old ruin of an abandoned nursing home at 106th Street off Central Park West in the fall of 1991. The cast, if that’s the right word, sat around a large dinner table breaking bread with the audience. The show, a huge hit, ran a couple of months.
It is Anne Bogart who now directs the Hotel Cassiopeia that opens the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s 2007 fall theater season in five performances, October 9-13, by Ms. Bogart’s SITI Company.
Why that title, Hotel Cassiopeia?
“Because,” says playwright Mee, “Cassiopeia the constellation lasts through all eternity, while a hotel is where people check in for a couple of nights.” Also, he gently points out, because Joseph Cornell gave the name Cassiopeia to one of his boxes. And had a thing about French provincial hotels even though he had never been to France.
Cornell also had a thing about the movies he adored, and achingly romantic exchanges from two such films -- Bogart and Bacall in “To Have and Have Not” (1944), Boyer and Lamarr in “Algiers” (1938) -- pop up at discreet intervals in the kaleidoscope that is Hotel Cassiopeia.
The spark for a play about Cornell and his boxes originated in the head of Richard B. Fisher (1936-2004), investment banker, philanthropist, and Charles Mee’s good friend over many years.
“He also became my patron,” says Mee. “We met when we were each in our 20s, and used to pick up our kids at summer camp. I went into every money-losing venture I could find, and he thought investment banking was fun. When he started, Morgan-Stanley had 120 employees; now it has 62,000 worldwide, and he did that.
“We would sit around the kids’ swimming pool and talk about Edna St. Vincent Millay and Kinglsey Amis. One day I said: ‘I have a great idea. You put up all the money and I’ll write all the plays.’ Richard went home, came back, and the next day said: ‘Jeannie [Mrs. Fisher] thinks it’s a great idea.’ You know, he and his wife made the Medicis look like cheapskates. And he never ever told me what to write. But one day Dick called and said: ‘I just saw this exhibit of Joseph Cornell’s work at the Allan Stone Gallery, and it’s wonderful.’
“So,” says Charles Mee as he and Anne Bogart kick the gong around (for benefit of the press) in her SITI Company’s headquarters, Eighth Avenue and 36th Street, “I went over to see the exhibit, walked in the door and said: ‘Oh, right, this is a theater piece.’ And went home and called Anne and said: ‘Hey, Anne, how about Joseph Cornell?’ And she said: ‘Right!’ And that was it. It was done.”
Previous Bogart-Mee projects include 2003’s Bobrauschenbergamerica, a vision of this nation as Rauschenberg might have seen it – and as Bogart and Mee did see it.
“Charles and I knew each other socially before we ever worked together,” says Ms. Bogart, “and loved each other from the beginning.”
“And we loved the same kind of theater,” says he. “Anne and I believe in theater as a 3-D event – theater, music, and text – so when I sit down to write, I’m already placing a text inside her kind of world. With most theater, a playwright writes a play, hands it to a director, and that’s that.”
Not with this combo. And where Hotel Cassiopeia, the script, will come out in the final staging, no man knows at this writing. (But maybe one woman does.)
“Anne married me and my wife,” Mee throws in. “Married us at a Chinese restaurant in Queens, upstairs in the banquet room.” There must be something about Queens, though it is now known if that restaurant was on Joseph Cornell;s mother’s Utopia Parkway.
Mee’s wife, the actress Michi Barall, has several roles in the Cassiopeia play. “We met at a Sundance theater lab.” Pause. “I’ve been married several times.” And is the father of four grown children. He and Michi live in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn. Anne Bogart and her wife – a woman – and the wife’s daughter (“my stepdaughter”) live on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.
Charles Mee was born September 15, 1938, in Evanston, Illinois, and grew up in Barrington, Illinois – “a town run by the criminals who were run out of Great Barrington, Massachusetts.” His father, Charles L. Mee, Sr., worked for Commonwealth Edison in Chicago, and that father’s father was a member of the D’Oyly Carte Opera Company when he ran away from England to St. Louis.
It was in the summer of 1953, when the Charles Mee of this story was 14 years old – a kid who liked swimming, football, comic books, and girls – that he was hit by the infantile paralysis that put him in hospital for three months and left him walking, slowly, with two canes and considerable difficulty, for the rest of his life.
It hasn’t stopped Harvard graduate Mee’s remarkable and remarkably prolific output, in and out of the theater. The drama part of it is being celebrated at this very moment with a Signature Theatre season, on West 42nd Street, of Mee’s Iphigenia 2.0, through September 30 (Iphigenia 1.0 is by Euripides); Queens Boulevard (aha!), November 6-December 30; and Paradise Park, February 12-April 6, 2008.
Anne Bogart was born – at Newport, Rhode Island, 1951 --into a Navy family. Indeed, her maternal grandfather was World War II’s Admiral Raymond R, Spruance. She believes her father, Captain Gerard Bogart, was indeed a distant relative of To Have and Have Not’s (better yet, the Caine Mutiny’s) Humphrey Bogart.
“I always directed, never acted,” says Bard and NYU graduate Anne Bogart, who in 1977, together with director-writer-philosopher Tadashi Suzuki, founded the Saratoga (N.Y.) International Theatre Institute that now lives on in acronym only, since SITI – a theater company of some 20 actors, directors, designers, and one playwright named Mee -- no longer has anything to do with Saratoga. (“We threw out the name and kept the initials. Tadashi is now a kind of godfather from a distance.”)
And are you a collage-ist too, Ms. Bogart?
“Yes, very much so,” she answers. “On what is now called ‘the aesthetics of sampling,’ heard on hiphop records. But even with classical work, if you’re doing Streetcar, let’s say, what do you do about Marlon Brando? Already you’re collage-ing the baggage of the play with the play.”
She looks across at Mee and says: “Chuck unleashed my imagination.”
And opened the doors to what Joseph Cornell called the palaces of memory.
HOTEL CASSIOPEIA. By Charles Mee, directed by Anne Bogart. October 9-13, 7:30 P.M., BAM Harvey Theater, 651 Fulton Street, Brooklyn, tickets $20, 35, 50, 60. BAM TICKET SERVICES, Mon-Thurs, 10 A.M.-6 P.M., Fri, 10 A.M.-3 P.M., (718) 636-4100, Fax (718) 636-4106, E-mail tickets@BAM.org.
BAMdialogue with Anne Bogart and Charles L. Mee, October 10, 6 P.M., at BAM Rose Cinema, tickets $8.
