Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune Notes on the Production
FRANKIE AND JOHNNY
In 1912, the song “Frankie and Johnny” was published by Ron Shields and the Leighton Brothers, a blackface vaudeville troupe. This surely came as a shock to the countless people, most of whom probably had never heard of the troupe, who had already been singing, performing, and listening to the American folk song for years. Over three hundred versions of this seemingly origin-less song have been documented, but a common story runs through them all. Frankie and Johnny are a couple, as a popular opening to the song tells us:1
Frankie and Johnny were lovers
Lawdy, how they did love
Swore to be true to each other
True as the stars above2
Johnny, however, is not as interested in being true as Frankie is. In every version of the song, he manages to get himself mixed up with another woman. The other woman’s name and the graphic nature of their activities vary from song to song, but there is always little sympathy for Johnny, usually with the lyrics:3
He was her man
But he was doing her wrong4
Frankie always catches him and shoots him. In some versions Frankie is hanged for her crime, in some she manages to escape. In one very surreal version by Charlie Patton, Johnny is the one who goes on trial for killing himself.5
In the 1930s, the song was often used in films as a way to get around morality laws and show characters’ less-than-moral intent. As the law forbade characters from so much as mentioning activities of an illicit or sexual nature, a couple bars of “Frankie and Johnny,” which has plenty of both, got the point across just as well. By 1936, the censors got wind of the song’s meaning, and production companies were politely asked never to include the song in their films again.6
CLAIR DE LUNE
Clair de lune, which is French for moonlight, is a movement of music from Claude Debussy’s Suite Bergamasque, published in 1903. Bergamasque refers to an ancient Italian city and its inhabitants, often satirized for their rusticity and clumsiness, who were the initial inspiration for the much later Harlequin character, known and performed all through Europe as a sad, clownish, buffoon.7 Notably, Maurivaux’s play The Game of Love and Chance features a character named Harlequin who, despite his tattered appearance and outrageous behavior, manages to find love.
Debussy’s Clair de Lune is called by one character in Frankie and Johnny “the most beautiful music in the world.” The song is inspired by a poem of the same name, written by Paul Verlaine, the 19th century French poet. Despite almost constant strife involving alcoholism, schisms with his wife, and imprisonment, Verlaine wrote beautiful poetry described very well by Brian Hull, a translator of Verlaine’s poetry. “There are no epics in [Verlaine’s] work, nor does he attempt any answer to the great problems of man’s existence; but again and again he crystallizes in a few lines a feeling common to everyone, an ordinary occurrence in everyday life, a passing thought, a flash of emotion.”8 The closest translation of the original French is as follows:
Your soul is a chosen landscape
Where charming masked and costumed figures go
Playing the lute and dancing and almost
Sad beneath their fantastic disguises.
All sing in a minor key
Of all-conquering love and careless fortune
They do not seem to believe in their happiness
And their song mingles with the moonlight.
The still moonlight, sad and beautiful,
Which gives the birds to dream in the trees
And makes the fountain sprays sob in ecstasy,
The tall, slender fountain sprays among the marble statues.9
TERRENCE MCNALLY’S FRANKIE AND JOHNNY
Terrence McNally says that Frankie and Johnny began for him with an image of the couple in his head, though he is not entirely sure where the image came from: “Maybe it has something to do with getting older, my feeling how fragile life is and how terribly important relationships are. No one dies in Frankie and Johnny, but there’s this sense of getting on, of making life happen.”10 Someone did die in McNally’s life as he was writing Frankie and Johnny. Two someones, in fact. Robert Drivas and James Coco, whom McNally called his “two best friends and dearest collaborators,”11 died at 47 and 56, respectively, Drivas of AIDS. Frankie and Johnny opened the following year.12
While no one in the play has AIDS, Frankie and Johnny has been touted as an AIDS commentary. Frank Rich, the New York Times theatre critic, praised the opening Broadway performance, saying that McNally may have “written the most serious play yet about intimacy in the age of AIDS.”13 A Variety review saw Frankie and Johnny as an exploration of “the difficulty of romantic connection in a post-AIDS, terminally cynical age.”14 In his review, Rich cited the play’s “blank, Edward Hopperesque solitude of the couple’s existence” and the “end of the world feel” of the set.15 A more obvious citation comes from Frankie herself, who says “I don’t know about you, but I get so sick and tired of living this way, that we’re gonna die from each other, that every so often I just to want to act like a Saturday night really is a Saturday night, the way they used to be.” In 1987, at the height of the AIDS crisis, this wasn’t an unusual thing to say, but it is telling. It gives us insight into the motivation behind characters’ actions, and behind McNally’s reason for writing them.
Frankie and Johnny do not seem to believe in their happiness, a valid feeling for anyone still struggling to make it. But Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune isn’t only a story about fear. It’s also about love. It’s a great argument about whether or not to believe in your happiness. Marlon, the late-night DJ whose name you’ll soon recognize, says he wishes he could believe in love, could believe in happiness. McNally himself says he doesn’t fully believe in it, calling the play a fairytale: “I don’t think I’ve ever written anything even remotely naturalistic. The closest probably would have been Frankie and Johnny and that’s only ‘cause they eat a sandwich and make an omelet in Act Two. But it’s a romantic fairy tale, and I’m very aware of that.”16
PRODUCITON HISTORY
The original production of Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune opened off-Broadway at the Manhattan Theatre Club in 1987 and starred Kathy Bates and Kenneth Walsh. Under the direction of Paul Benedict, the play ran for eight weeks before it transferred to the Westside Theatre, where it continued for fifteen months. The first Broadway production, directed by Joe Matello, starring Edie Falco and Stanley Tucci, opened on August 8, 2002 at the Belasco Theatre. This production ran for 243 performances and was nominated for a Tony Award for the best revival of a play. Both Falco and Tucci were nominated as well. After a successful run Rosie Perez and Joe Pantoliano took over the roles of Frankie and Johnny before the production closed on March 9, 2003.
Program Notes by: Elizabeth Baessler
ENDNOTES:
1-6 Peter Stanfield, Body and Soul: Jazz and Blues in American Film 1927-63 (Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2005).
7 Robert Schnitz, The Piano Works of Claude Debussy (New York: Duell, Sloan & Pearce, Inc., 1950).
8 Trans Brian Hull, The Sky Above the Roof (Soho Square, London:
Rupert Hart-Davis, 1957).
9 http://classicpoetryaloud.podomatic.com/entry/2008-04-14T12_45_47-07_00
10-16 Ed. Toby Silverman Zinman, Terrence McNally: A Casebook (New York and London:
Garland Publishing Inc., 1997).
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