It was beyond bold for writer, co-director and lead actor Phelim McDermott to create a show about composer Philip Glass that’s so much about himself. His The Tao of Glass had a weekend run at New York University’s Skirball Center, playing for the first time in the town Glass has long called. McDermott pulled off this act of hubris (or two long acts, more properly) by virtue of his sincerity and charm. Whether or not that humility was feigned didn’t really matter.
McDermott and Glass have collaborated in the past – McDermott has directed stagings of the operas Satyagraha, Akhnaten and The Perfect American – and, in a sense, this work is about their collaboration. Jointly commissioned by Manchester International Festival, Improbable, Perth Festival, Ruhrfestspiele Recklinghausen, Hong Kong New Vision Arts Festival and Carolina Performing Arts – University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Tao of Glass originally premiered at Manchester International Festival 2019. It no doubt charmed audiences there, as it seemed to in New York, and for good reason. It is an engaging and inventive piece of theatre (sometimes tiringly so) that is, at least half the time anyway, about its titular subject.
Glass’ music ran through much of the two and a half hours of the piece, played by a very capable, onstage quartet of piano, violin, clarinet and percussion. The pieces weren’t credited in the program, but were sometimes referenced in McDermott’s tales about discovering Glass’s music in college and later working with him on two projects that were never realized. The Tao of Glass would be their third, and in it he recreates what the previous two might have looked like, abetted by cleverly designed puppets and lighting and three onstage accomplices. His Mancunian accented monologues were carefully reverse engineered to mesh with the dramatic turns of the music, even when he strayed onto subjects such as tearing down the shed in his garden.
McDermott creates his own magic by conjuring and discussing the magic of the theatre, much like the way his puppets come to life even when the puppeteers are visible. And along with the reverence, the show inadvertently casts a sidelight on Glass’ artistry. By always occupying the front of the stage and the frontal lobe of the audience’s cerebral cortexes, McDermott’s casts the score into being incidental music. Glass’ work is generally too busy to function as soundtrack music and, at the same time, has a hypnotic quality that makes it work perfectly as such. That tension is what gives his music its momentum, it’s what (as they say) “transports” the listener. Glass’ music allows, even invites, the mind to wander. McDermott provided the destination. The audience was led into his daydreams.
It was all fairly endearing, which can be a terrible thing to encounter in the theatre. It could easily be cut in half without need for an interval by eliminating the extraneous (non Glassian) scenes, although it’s hard to say if that would have made it better or not. Perhaps another title (A Glass Menagerie, maybe?) would have been borne less false promise.
