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Hello Again
The relationship between love and sex is complex, and it’s been ever so, LaChiusa suggests in his wistful, engrossing 1994 song cycle. Suggested by Arthur Schnitzler’s La Ronde (perhaps the previous century’s most adapted play), LaChiusa’s work follows a daisy chain of pre- and post-coital couplings: The opening scene between the Whore and the Soldier leads to a vignette between the Soldier and the Nurse, and so on through ten such scenarios until we’re back to the Whore. LaChiusa takes liberty with the framework by setting his archetypes free of temporal trappings. While the Soldier seduces the Nurse in a World War II–era canteen, the Nurse’s encounter with the College Boy takes place in the ’60s; the intricate melodies sometimes reflect period styles. As his archetypes ping across the 20th century, experiencing the pain of being used and passing that pain on to their next partners, LaChiusa illustrates an abiding isolation that only intimate encounters can bring.
Like BoHo’s 2007 production of Songs for a New World, Jason Robert Brown’s thematically similar song cycle, Hello Again is well suited to the close quarters of the Heartland Studio space. Ryczek and Rader use Stephen M. Genovese’s clever backdrop as a kind of parabolic dish, focusing their performers’ intensity both musically (under the fine direction and accompaniment of Nick Sula) and emotionally. The talented, mostly very young cast finds plenty of humor in the material but also aptly conveys the aching behind connections that are missed in every sense but the physical.
