“Sometimes a name says more about the people who bestow it than it does about those bear it,” sings Mayo Buckner in Tom Cipullo’s opera of that name, which will be performed at Seagle Festival in Schroon Lake on August 6, 7 and 9 at 7:30 pm and on August 8 at 2 pm.
Mayo, of course, is the lifelong resident of the Iowa Home for Feeble Minded Children, whose story Cipullo stumbled upon in a 1958 article in Life magazine by Robert Wallace titled, “A Lifetime Thrown Away by Mistake 59 Years Ago: Mental Homes Wrongly Hold Thousands Like Mayo Buckner.”
“The topic can seem somber, but the show isn’t,” said Cipullo. “I think it’s very optimistic.”
Darren Woods, the Seagle’s Artistic Director, agrees.
“Somehow, people will manage to craft a life that can bring them some happiness, or at least make them feel normal,” said Woods. “What I love about this opera is that it isn’t a tragedy, which it could be, but, rather, the story of someone who makes do with what he’s been given and makes a life for himself.”
Mayo, far from feeble, is extraordinarily bright though perhaps, in retrospect, somewhere on the spectrum of autism, like many of his fellow inmates, all of whom are branded feeble-minded, dumb, stupid, simple – even Valeria, the girl who becomes his sweetheart.
When SUNY Potsdam’s Crane School of Music mounted the opera in 2018, a member of an audience of school children told Cipullo, “this is the first time I’ve ever seen one of us portrayed on stage.”
According to Woods, all the opera’s main characters are fully developed, complex human beings, including Mayo’s mother, who abandons him at the institution because, at least in part, his father “can’t abide him.”
“Someone asked Tom why he wrote such a beautiful aria for the mother who’s giving her child away,” said Woods. “And he replied, ‘I believe in every character. No one is completely good or bad. And when I present a character, I want the audience to put themselves in that position and imagine that they might have made the same decision.”
A Domenic J. Pellicciotti Opera Composition Prize enabled Cipullo to complete “Mayo Buckner” and to see the opera realized on stage in the Crane School of Music’s production with a full orchestra.
“Some of my other pieces may sound dissonant. “Mayo Buckner” has more in common with musical theater,” says Cipullo, whose father was a jazz musician and who grew up surrounded by the music of Frank Sinatra, Puccini and Broadway composers like Frank Loesser.
Plans for additional productions were interrupted by the pandemic; Woods hopes that Seagle Festival’s staging will be the first of many to come.
“I’ve been involved with this piece from the very beginning, when Tom offered to play me one of the first arias he had composed for it, long before it won the competition that enabled him to complete it,” said Woods. “Tom says that he is always looking for a moment that could become an opera, and this one has many such moments.”
Woods produced an earlier opera of Cipullo’s – “Glory Denied” – in Houston, Texas, whose beautiful arias are among contemporary opera’s most popular, said Woods. Like that earlier opera, the music of “Mayo Buckner” “is beautiful,” said Woods. “There are definitely arias that you will want to interrupt and applaud, that you will find yourself humming as you leave the theater.” For tickets and information, visit https://seaglefestival.org/
