Adapting Dorothy Parker: Men I’m Not Married To
Dorothy Parker has been one of my top literary heroines for as long as I can remember. One of the highest compliments a collaborator ever paid me is “You’re like a self-deprecating Jewish Dorothy Parker.” My own work undoubtedly pales in comparison, but I have recently had the honor of stepping into her shoes for a little while with the libretto for a loose adaption of her 1922 story, Men I’m Not Married To. This story was a companion piece to Franklin Pierce Adams’s Women I’m Not Married To and mirrors its form exactly. You can find the original texts to both here.
In summer of 2020, Scott Skiba, who I’d met while working on the premiere production of The Wild Beast of the Bungalow at Oberlin, asked if I’d be interested in writing something for his upcoming Operas in Place festival, a program of micro-operas presented virtually by Cleveland Opera Theater, Baldwin Wallace Conservatory, and On Site Opera. Luckily, as short form is my jam, I had a veritable smorgasbord of potential projects to pitch to him, and he chose this one. Though Scott only knew me as a composer, I was delighted that he was open to bringing me on as a librettist instead. It so happened that composer Lisa DeSpain and I had dreamed up this short opera a while back, and now it finally found its home to become our third operatic collaboration. (The lesson here is: hang on to every rejected proposal— another company may take you up on it someday!) The cohort of composers and librettists Scott has gathered is pretty spectacular, and Lisa and I are honored to count ourselves among them.
When choosing underlying source material to adapt, the first question is always, “Why does this story specifically need to be an opera?” Though Men I’m Not Married To has been adapted for the stage a couple of times, to the best of my knowledge, it has never been a musical work. To be sure, there is plenty that resonates a century later. Parker’s brief, breezily sarcastic sketches of the men encountered by her narrator immediately recalled plenty of, um, personal parallels. Her heyday fascinates me in part because the concept of romantic and/or sexual interaction at that time took a completely new shape that quickly exploded traditional norms of courtship. I saw the possibility for a theatrically compelling statement about societal pressure for women to “find the right man”, which can be…a challenge, if that’s even one’s goal in the first place. And here we are a century later, with seemingly endless alternatives to what life with or without a romantic relationship may look like, yet staring down a depressingly endless supply of formulaic rom-coms still converging at a single brand of Happily Ever After, We still see you today, Dorothy Parker!
But I would obviously be an absolute fool to set this story in the present! This was a welcome excuse for a deeper dive into 1920s American culture (a subject of which I never tire), leading me to the framework this piece needed in order to be theatrically viable. (By the way, y’all who talk about throwing “Gatsby parties” know how that book ends, right?) In my research preparing to write the libretto, I learned that, contrary to the popular image of 1920s American woman as completely unencumbered by fashions of the past, women still wore as many as 11 layers of undergarments well into that decade! At parties, they often removed these layers, placing them in piles in the ladies’ room or coatroom and putting them back on at the end of the night to avoid any suspicion of wanton behavior. (I recommend this really fun lecture on the subject that includes a vintage fashion show at the end!) That central image of a pile of slips, corsets, petticoats, and bloomers led me to set the piece in the powder room of a 1924 wedding reception. In our version, the men Parker described are groomsmen assigned to our three bridesmaid characters, who are all hiding from their dates. Parker’s original text is from one woman’s perspective (or at least it reads as such), but in the interest of creating multiple characters for the Baldwin Wallce students and facilitating harmonies, there are three singers in our adaptation, as well as one nonsinging male actor tying the three condensed stories together. Since we knew the piece would be presented in a virtual format, he portrays the various men referred to during instrumental interludes with title cards introducing each character, a la the silent films of the period.
The language of that time is just so tasty and joyful! There are several “flapper glossaries” out there, and I was tempted to include every word. The music of the era is firmly within Lisa’s wheelhouse and has been a feast for our singers to absorb.
It’s been a long road to this premiere (indeed, I drafted this blog post over a year ago!) as the conservatory has had plenty of unwelcome hurdles to clear due to COVID-19. Lisa and I are grateful for all they are doing to bring our characters and the work of all the other writers to a screen near you!
UPDATES: Below are the videos of both the final project described above, as well the 2023 live workshop performance by Brigham Young University. The latter link is a playlist containing the complete opera as well as shorter snippets we would love to see performed on recitals, scenes programs, etc. Please enjoy!
