| Bar Bulletin |
August, 2004 |
Calling Out the Tune
By Patrick Tandy
 |
UP, UP AND (WORLDS)
AWAY
Mary Goulet's musical Worlds Away opens in New York City on August 26. |
“I had started talking about an opera, but
it seemed like so many people were put off by ‘opera’,” explains Mary
Goulet, whose musical Worlds Away debuts on August 26 at the
Producers Club II in New York City. “To me, it’s just a question of
nomenclature.”
To many others, however, the bigger
question might be how exactly the Reston, Virginia-based patent law
attorney with Baltimore roots came to pen a piece of metaphysical musical
theater in the first place.
But before the curtain goes up on this
show, perhaps it would be best to first learn a bit about Goulet herself…
♦♦♦
“My background was mainly scientific,”
explains Goulet, who had already obtained a natural sciences degree from
Johns Hopkins University by the time she enrolled in the University of
Maryland School of Law. “After a few years in general practice here in
Baltimore some people said, ‘You’re crazy. Why don’t you take your science
background and go do patent law?’ So I got back into the science there.
That was what put me into these groups of people who had different science
backgrounds.”
It was at the recommendation of one such
colleague that Goulet read Hyperspace, by Dr. Michio Kaku, a
theoretical physicist at Princeton University. The book had a profound
impact upon Goulet, and it would ultimately provide the inspiration for
Worlds Away.
“[Kaku] was writing about what technology
it’s going to take [for humankind] to move to the next level of
civilization,” says Goulet. “They’re talking about things like controlling
the weather – we don’t even predict the weather now. But this whole idea
of how you control the weather, how you travel faster...
“In modern physics, there’s been some
writing about [the existence of] other dimensions that we don’t really
understand or know yet,” she continues. “These are real physicists that
are writing about this, not science fiction [writers].”
It was upon these fundamental principles
that Goulet set upon writing what would ultimately become Worlds Away.
“I started writing the music for it in the
late ’90s,” says Goulet, who studied piano under Julio Esteban at the
Peabody Conservatory during her school days in Baltimore. “The songs each
had their little life, [but] they didn’t yet have a place to go. I knew
there were certain things I had wanted to write about, but Worlds Away
hadn’t started.”
Then a spirited exchange with a friend over
New Year’s resolutions a few years later resulted in Goulet’s decision to
write a musical.
“The concept was to frame a story with
three different worlds,” she explains. “A world that’s our earth and our
universe, our dimensions, everything that we know, plus all the space
that’s been charted – that’s one world, the first world.
“For this story, we created a second world,
which is the world of those other dimensions that we don’t really know
yet. What we know is what they’re not; they’re not x, y, z and time. And
then we’ve created a third world that kind of sits on top of those other
two worlds. It’s the world of what we call the Hyperbeings – we portray
these characters as more ephemeral, more spiritual. We have characters in
each of these worlds who are interacting with each other and wanting to do
and accomplish certain things, wondering what they’re supposed to be
doing.
“The main character, Monet, is here in our
world, the earth world,” Goulet explains. “[Monet] is somewhat based on my
experience, but taken to wide extremes of my experience. So as a child she
was way more gifted than I was and now, as an adult, she’s way more
successful than I [am].
“An important aspect of the story is how
this character [Monet] who has gotten away from some of the talents and
abilities and strengths of her [childhood] to instead go in a more
commercial, lucrative direction starts to question how 15 or 20 years [in
the] past she got off on this tangent or sidetrack. So a large part of the
story is her reaching out and questioning what she’s meant to be doing and
how her life unfolded this way. And in her reaching out and stretching out
to ask herself those questions, she captures the attention of one of the
Hyperbeings, a character in the quote-unquote upper world…I mean, when
you’re a kid you feel like you can accomplish anything. And you have plans
for yourself, and the adults have plans for you, and then over time most
people I think get away from the plans that they have for themselves as
children, and they take a particular approach that’s suited to their
talents and what they’re getting As or Bs in and what’s looking like a
sensible approach. What makes them go in that – you know, the more
commercial, the more routine [direction]? Like the brilliant kids who are
blowing things up – how could you get them directed so that instead of
becoming problems they flourish?”
Other characters include Monet’s non-Earth
world counterpart, the dimension-hopping explorer Stefan, and Adu, a
Hyperbeing from the “non-physical” top world “who can look upon and change
the physical worlds,” such as those of Monet and Stefan.
Needless to say, Goulet has given thought
to life beyond what’s known, beyond the here and now.
“I think there’s always this hope that
there’s something, that it’s not just us,” she suggests. “But what I
really like to think about is who would be – like of our candidates
running for office – who would be really good if we had to suddenly
confront some sort of extraterrestrial life situation? How would George
Bush do with that? He’s not even doing all that well with same-sex
couples, how’s he going to do with E.T.?”
♦♦♦
With her ideas and characters in place,
Goulet next needed her words to make the transition from page to stage.
“People would say, ‘You really need to do a
reading,’” she says. “You need to hear how it sounds spoken – how things
sound on the page as you’re silently reading are different than how it is
when the people talk. Something that you thought sounded very brilliant on
the paper...suddenly the characters are saying it and even you think, ‘Oh
my goodness, that’s so pedantic!’ or ‘That’s so bossy and preachy!’”
To facilitate the search for a cast of
players, Goulet set up an “E-Audition,” by which prospective actors and
actresses could try out for the various roles through the production’s
website,
www.worldsawaymusical.com.
“Since I’m not Andrew Lloyd Webber, I can’t
just say, ‘I’m going to do a musical in a year, isn’t that great?’” jokes
Goulet, who in large part credits the Internet for enabling her to access
the tools necessary to stage the musical. “It’s not a ‘my people will call
your people’ sort of thing. If I call somebody and they’re not recognizing
the name, they’re not really going to call back. So we needed something to
start to get people’s attention.”
The E-Audition proved just the thing, and
in January 2003 a full-cast reading of Worlds Away was given to a
sold-out crowd at the Lyceum in Alexandria, Virginia. Close observation
and audience feedback enabled Goulet to further hone the work-in-progress.
To Goulet, staging a full-scale production
in the Northern Virginia/DC area “seemed like the natural thing to do at
first. But when I did the research and looked for theater space and
investigated cost – you look at parking, how far in advance they will
book, you look at everything – a lot of the theaters in one of the
counties that I was looking at had rules where if you weren’t with the
county or if you were other than a nonprofit you couldn’t book or you
couldn’t collect money. Okay, well, we’re not looking to just do it for
free.
We want to pay our actors and make it all
equal out, but we’re not a nonprofit, so we’re not going to try to scamper
and become a nonprofit. So having researched the Northern Virginia/DC
area, I just thought that it wasn’t terribly friendly to proceeding in an
economical fashion. So...I thought, ‘Let’s start to check New York.’ I
found that New York really is definitely set up to do even small theater –
not just Broadway, but you can go and rent theater space. And people there
are very cooperative.”
Once in New York, Goulet secured a director
(“my first-choice guy”), and from there Worlds Away gradually fleshed out
into the full-fledged production that will premiere on August 26. The
musical’s success in New York, Goulet admits, will largely determine
whether the Baltimore/DC area will see its own full-dress presentation.
“Hopefully, but we don’t have any current
plans [for a Baltimore/DC production],” says Goulet. “I think that would
be great, [but] I don’t know if it will happen. I’m good at seeing one
thing happen [at a time] and then gathering up the things that need to
happen for that to go forward.”
♦♦♦
So why has Mary Goulet chosen to express
her ideas in the medium of musical theater?
“I guess I just think that music speaks to
people, that you have more of a chance of reaching them, that they’re more
interested sometimes in something that’s conveyed through music,” says
Goulet, who is already working on her next theatrical endeavor: composing
the musical score for David Whiteree’s Jamestown the Musical (www.jamestownthemusical.com),
an unconventional look into Virginia’s 400-year heritage. “If I have
something that I want to say, if I have a theme and I just comment and
say, well I want to tell people that I think there’s too much materialism
in the world, does somebody want to read that as a message in a story, or
are they going to be more inclined to think it over and mull it over if it
has somehow found its way into a character who’s singing a song?”
But what will the critics think of
Worlds Away?
“Like our director told me, ‘A critic could
come, and he could write bad things,’” says Goulet. “I read the
autobiography of Richard Rodgers, and he was saying it’s not really fair
to judge a musical the first time you go see it. I was kind of surprised
when I read that that’s what he had to say. I’m thinking, ‘Well, why not?’
I think a critic had written something about the song structure or
something, and [Rodgers] was saying, ‘That’s not fair because you really
can’t judge it until you’ve gone several times.’ And I thought, ‘Well,
that might be one of the few things I don’t necessarily agree with because
you’re going there the first time – shouldn’t it be directed toward you,
the first-timer? Shouldn’t it be able to reach that person? Should they
have to attend multiple times to pick up on what’s being said? Is that the
right way to communicate with an audience?
“You can’t let other people make your
decisions for you. People are always going to be telling you negatives
because that’s just how people think. There’s always going to be somebody
who has some explanation why what you’re doing is weak. If you believe in
something and it’s your own dream, you can’t expect other people to just
pick it up and make it happen. The best you can do is to give it your
maximum effort and see what happens.”
But perhaps for Mary Goulet, the ultimate
barometer of success will come when the house lights go down on that
opening-night audience.
“You really don’t know what’s going to
happen until there’s a live audience,” Goulet admits. “At least, that’s
what they say in the books, and it sounds right. You can’t force people to
come. And once they come…I hope that they walk away questioning and
wondering whether they’re doing what’s right for them. I’m not so much
interested in telling people what they should think or who they should be,
but I would be really happy if even just a couple of the audience members
walk away thinking, ‘Am I where I want to be in my life? Have I done
everything that I was meant to accomplish? Is there more that I should
expect of myself?’”
Indeed, perhaps Goulet’s working
relationship with her audience is not wholly dissimilar to that between
Oscar Hammerstein II (curiously, a student of the law himself) and his
most famous collaborator, the aforementioned Mr. Rodgers.
“I hand him a lyric,” Hammerstein once
noted, “and get out of his way.”
