The Rosenbach Company

Last Tuesday I attended a workshop performance of the latest music-theatre piece* by Ben Katchor and Mark Mulcahy, The Rosenbach Company.

(*Why the squeamishness about calling it an opera? Some thoughts in a future post.)

I wrote an advance about their first collaboration, The Slug Bearers of Kayrol Island. (Don't miss the beautiful Village Voice review by Ed Park.) Little did I know that in a musical season featuring three major appearances by Juan Diego Flórez, Slug Bearers would be the event that most blew my mind. Singer-songwriter Mulcahy is a genius, wounded-healer poet. (Check out the unreleased video of one of his best songs, "The Way That She Really Is.") He is also a quietly demented stage animal who channeled multiple characters in Slug Bearers with uncanny skill.

The story of brothers Abe and Phil Rosenbach, whose emporium and rare book business became the basis for Philadelphia's Rosenbach Museum & Library, The Rosenbach Company is cooler and more haunted than Slug Bearers, without the latter's manic whimsy and cheery melodic hooks. That Abe and Phil's tense relationship, à la Jacob and Esau, unfolds in the "city of brotherly love" is only the first of Rosenbach's many ironies.

The visual overture consists of images of precious tomes from the Rosenbach collection. (There's one entitled Fairy Night Caps: cocktail recipes for folks in my neighborhood, no doubt.) We then plunge right into the queasy dance of mortality and consumption at the heart of Rosenbach. Antique children's books, we learn, are rarities because babies typically teethe on and ingest their tiny volumes. Katchor's lyrics describe in lingering, sensuous detail the organic and industrial stuffs that make up 19th-century books. The "lambskin contraceptives" evoked in Rosenbach's early numbers are mentioned throughout the show: when Phil sires but refuses to recognize a son who dies in infancy; and when Abe, equally loath to reproduce, recalls babies' tendency to destroy their reading matter: "Fewer children, more books: the equation may seem unkind."

The nexus between death and collecting is a recurring theme of The Rosenbach Company. Abe builds up his rare book practice by feeding on the calamities of others (Harvard's unhappy Harry Elkins Widener among them) and sings, "I most keenly feel alive when I'm at an auction." He even purchases Napoléon's "mummified tendon" (the imperial schlong, supposedly) and makes of it an object of fetishistic delight.

Whether wrought by teething babies or just by time, decay is a natural consequence of life. Abe's obsession with possessing and preserving ephemera, then, seems to partake of the death drive described in Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle: the desire to "re-establish a [quiescent] state of things that was disturbed by the emergence of life." Dandyish Phil, by contrast, revels in fads, whether commercial or sentimental:

Let's drink deep of superficiality.
What matters most is the color of your eyes.
I've decided to live for the moment.
I'm sick and tired of knowing what preceded me.

For Phil, the shelf-life of women and merchandise rarely exceeds months: "by then the novelty is gone." Neither brother establishes significant relationships because of the difficulty in confining one's affection to a single human being when "a vast array of items" beckons. (Phil and Abe, often in soliloquy, dominate the proceedings, and Rosenbach features only one other performer: a woman who serves interchangeably as the narrator, the brothers' mother, and their fleeting erotic interests.)

Ben Katchor's projections for Rosenbach are even more gorgeously acid-drenched than his work for Slug Bearers, and his book is stunning: trenchant, erudite, with a kind of autistic loveliness about it. Snaking through the text is a meditation on the links among desire, market capitalism, and snobbery, as well. Mulcahy was both remote and moving as the bookish Abe, and Ryan Mercy, a wisp of a boy with a swanky trombone of a voice, conveyed Phil's oily charm with panache. Katie Geissinger brought a plangeant grace to her multiple roles. Mulcahy's kaleidoscopic score evokes the brothers' culture and lifespan, combining elements of jazz, spirituals, cantorial song, and his own inward, deeply vulnerable style.

Get thyself onto Ben Katchor's mailing list for advance notice of future performances.