Fear of modernism

Two contemporary operas are playing in upstate New York: A Blizzard on Marblehead Neck by Jeanine Tesori with a libretto by Tony Kushner, and Later the Same Evening by John Musto, with a libretto by Mark Campbell. Both are costume dramas of modernism; Blizzard stages a scene between Eugene and Carlotta O'Neill in 1951, and Later animates figures from Edward Hopper's paintings of New York, including his 1927 Automat. The general idea seems to be to love modernism into nonexistence. Later is especially egregious: solitary characters from the paintings are given "stories" and eventually brought together at a Broadway musical(!). Hopper's point is not missed as much as negated: he wanted to show isolation that wasn't chosen and could not be alleviated. (Or so, at least, the contrast now makes clear.) The whole idea of having Hopper's figures sing is negating, since their solitude isn't articulable; their states of mind could only be captured in a Brechtian way, maybe, by the performers' singing things that the characters couldn't possibly know as individuals. Musto and Campbell, however, go so far as to have the young working-class woman in Automat claim that she enjoys being "lonely in New York." They also get confused about which they're evoking, realist painting or the aesthetic of the Broadway musical; the desire is to eliminate the conflict. And in this way Hopper's wordless depression gets to be a celebration of New York City cosiness. Blizzard is more competent at the same game. Kushner's casual profanity lets the audience feel knowing and edgy; we get to laugh when O'Neill observes, "Mary McCarthy is a tedious dyke." The story is based on an actual incident in which the O'Neills quarreled so violently that Eugene O'Neill left the house in the middle of a snowstorm and had to be picked up, almost frozen, by the local police. We see that the O'Neills lived O'Neillian lives and that by 1951, their auteurism was already kind of absurd. Like Hopper and even more so, O'Neill himself had middlebrow appeal, and was his own parody. But again, that doesn't seem to be enough now. In Kushner's retrospection the O'Neills ultimately do violence to one another as a way of loving one another; love is the reality beneath the violence. Given the conversion of modernist personages into characters in their own work, this conclusion functions as Kushner's reading of O'Neill as well. I don't see O'Neill as the most insightful writer in the world, but I don't think he implies that; something closer to the opposite.