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The happy accident of two new musicals this season at Lincoln Center Theater--Dessa Rose and The Light in the Piazza--gives us the unusual opportunity to present you with a powerhouse issue celebrating the need, the art and mystery of storytelling. Committed as we are to idiosyncratic musical voices and story-driven, character-driven, emotion- and theme-driven musical theater, we thought it would be especially compelling to explore the source material that inspired these two shows. In these pages, we invite you to learn more about authors Elizabeth Spencer and Sherley Anne Williams, about stories told and untold, how stories dissolve into music and change over time. The celestial literary trio of poet Philip Levine and novelists Alice Walker and Toni Morrison reminisce about their friend and colleague, Sherley Anne Williams; scholar Walter Johnson vividly explicates the forced march of slave trading in nineteenth-century America; Rome Prize-winning novelist Eli Gottlieb and writer and long-time Rome resident Milton Gendel divine the particular lure of Italy; Elizabeth Spencer herself reflects on the inexplicable impulse and charged sense of longing that moves a person to set a story down on paper. And Ira Weitzman, Lincoln Center Theater's Associate Producer of Musical Theater, reveals the backstory behind these two productions and his auspicious first encounters with the creative teams of each show--Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty of Dessa Rose, and Adam Guettel and Craig Lucas of The Light in the Piazza, four voices who inspire us to reaffirm our dedication to lifting narratives off the page and developing the talents of new generations of music theater artists.
--The Editors
F A W N P O T A S H, C O V E R A R T I S T
Fawn Potash, a photographic artist living in Catskill, New York, created her Library Series from the worn encyclopedias, textbooks and classic literature that came with the 1870s schoolhouse that is her home. Inspired at a time when she was feeling too busy and, literally, overbooked, Potash began by making precarious piles of books, then she'd step back to her camera, pitch another book at a pile and try to record the moment of collapse. Except they didn't collapse, they kind of slumped, she says, laughing, "because I'm a pretty good builder." Potash then purposely built structures that explored a state of "messy grace" and "dangerous-looking asymmetry." The Library Series photographs, some of which are found on our cover, on this page and on pages 11 and 12, feel both monumental and organic, a testimony to texts.
Potash, who teaches at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, was Director of Workshops at the Center for Photography at Woodstock from 1990 to 2004. Her work has appeared in Harper's Magazine, The New Yorker and Art News, among other publications, and is in collections worldwide. She is represented by the Howard Greenberg Gallery in New York, the Anne Reed Gallery in Sun Valley, Idaho, and the Elena Zang Gallery in Woodstock, New York.
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