The Mother of Us All
PROGRAM NOTE
Museums are places where histories are unlocked through the imagination. In exploring the MetMuseum’s American Wing, my team and I were captivated by the extraordinary American quilt collection, with pieces whose origins span centuries, class, regions, denominations, but are united in that they are all women’s work: often collectively made, sometimes the only permissible creative outlet for its maker, works of long patient hours, which are at once beautiful and intensely practical. Some quilts are abstract, some figurative, some contain recognizable, found snippets from the real world. One even tells the story of a woman leaving her baby with her husband to drive her horse cart to a Women’s Rights meeting!
Suffrage: women’s work, frequently uncredited, oh-so-patient, intensely collaborative -- a kind of quilting across history. “It was a continuous, seemingly endless, chain of activity. Young suffragists who helped forge the last links of that chain were not born when it began. Old suffragists who forged the first links were dead when it ended.” (Catt/ Shuler) Susan B Anthony was, among many other things, a collaborator, a coalition-builder. She had a deep understanding of political movements, which like quilts, are made of disparate patches, but held together by a greater design.
And isn’t The Mother of Us All a kind of intricate quilt, woven collaboratively by Stein and Thomson? It is history, reinvented. Not linear narrative, but dealing, like quilts, in patterns, repetitions: combining abstract patches with bits and bobs found, borrowed, quoted, remembered, invented. “Quilts are not crazy — they are kind!” shouts a character, out of the weave. Contrast this form of colorful, whimsical commemoration with the cold white marble which is the fate of Susan B Anthony at the end of the opera. What happens, Stein asks, when a fighter, a doer, a tireless worker like Susan B, becomes a mute stone icon, raised on a pedestal? What of her struggle, her provocation, her inconvenience is lost? Surely, instead of commemorating her, Susan B would have wanted us to live anew, and push forward, her questions, her struggles -- and while there is much beauty and pattern in this unusual opera to admire, it can also serve as a blanket to keep us warm for our fights ahead!
— Louisa Proske
The Mother of Us All
by Virgil Thomson and Gertrude Stein
a historic collaboration between MetLive Arts, New York Philharmonic and Juilliard Opera
February 2020
"Five Stars … ingeniously staged production ... Proske’s direction of the individuals is matched by her ingenuity in dealing with this imposing but awkward setting, including the balconies." - John Rockwell, Financial Times
"densely packed, visually rich, and perfectly pitched production" - Parterre Box
"Louisa Proske's bravura staging .... makes some telling points, focusing the start of the show on Anthony's feverish attempt to drop her vote into a bright red ballot box, a moment denied her by smirking Victorian gentlemen in black." - Musical America Worldwide
"The rest of the story was the success of director Louisa Proske's often-pageant-like production ... [which] was filled with small but meaningful directorial touches: The crushing of the ballot box to show that real opposition to suffrage remained, the poignant mounting of Anthony into a monument to her battle in a room filled with real sculpture-were riveting." - BroadwayWorld
Directed by Louisa Proske
Music Directed by Daniela Candillari
Choreographed by Zoe Scofield
Designs by Sara Brown, Beth Goldenberg, Barbara Samuels, Kit Fitzgerald