Do The Impossible Thing

- learn enough Chinese to say hello – carry Ming Cho Lee set model from NYC to Boston – weep

Back in the eighties, right out of college, I had this job with the Opera Company of Boston. I did about twenty productions with the company over a five-year span, but one production topped them all. Turandot. The artistic director of the opera company was Sarah Caldwell, a gigantic, hypnotic, boiling caldron of talent and raw attitude. Turandot was the incredible collaboration of hundreds of people on two continents. It took someone like Sarah to pull it off.

Ming Cho Lee was the designer, the Beijing Opera supplied the costumes and props (and martial arts training) Eve Marton sang the lead, and all that, my friends, became production beyond production.

The opera house in Boston was this old vaudeville theater from the nineteenth century modeled on the Paris Opera. It was classic east coast plaster palace; a dripping, flaking, smelly, dirty, sprawling auditorium of pure magic, filled with ghosts and transparent shadows of top hats and feather boas floating through the dark corridors. Working for the opera meant moving in and spending at least two weeks round the clock. We slept on piles of hemp and ate meals in the Grand Foyer. The outside world disappeared as we crafted Sarah’s incredible schemes.

Lee was possibly the most dynamic designer I ever worked with. His sets were simple, massive, breath-taking; a giant wall, a stunning palace. The costumes and props from Beijing were delicate, masterful, flowed across the stage in swirls of red and gold silks. And it all came down to this:

The emotional palette of Puccini in his prime, the lights dimmed, the curtain rising, the audience stunned, me standing in the back of the theater, exhausted, excited, watching our work appear and then Eva Marton, a small figure, beautiful, crowned, enters atop Lee’s wall and begins to sing.

Standing in back of the audience on opening night, a chilly wave of emotion swept up my spine when I realized I’d participated in a massive, complex, powerful, wrenching, beautiful, delicate, expansive, wall rattling expression pure art.

The basic idea is to weep, change your world, bring yourself to your knees, max out the commitment, bet your soul and strip your flesh to the bone. You don’t make it every time, I know you don’t make it every time, but what’s the point of ever putting pen to paper, note to stave, lips to horn, fingers to strings, chisel to stone, brush to canvas if you don’t plan on making the best damn attempt at something original, memorable and downright extraordinary as you possibly can? The thing that seems impossible; that’s exactly the thing to do.