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Composer
Kent Hewitt's passion for the seacoast charm and historic
mystique of Noank is so deep-seated that it's probably encoded
in his DNA.
Hewitt
celebrates the all-American, small town qualities of Noank (a
picturesque section of Groton) with a suite of musical
portraits on his evocative, reverential album called
"Little Town by the Sea-Soundscapes by Kent Hewitt."
For Hewitt, who lives in Noank by the Mystic River and grew up
in Groton Heights, a historical part of Groton, the CD's dozen
selections represent his reflections on how the maritime
village's character has been shaped by its people, history,
topography and umbilical link with the sea.
The
CD, which portrays Noank as a virtually mythic town that time
forgot, has been released in conjunction with Groton's
Tercentennial (300th) Celebration that runs through 2005. The
Noank Historical Society and the Groton Tercentennial
Committee sponsored the recording project that features Hewitt
on piano and synthesizer in combo settings featuring his
frequent collaborator, the well-known Connecticut saxophonist
and flutist, Tim Moran.
A
democratic melting pot of influences, Hewitt's mini-tone poems
on the town's historic legacy, sites and vistas range
stylistically over jazz, classical, contemporary, rock, Latin,
pop, New Age, funk, hymns and ragtime. His moods are mostly
exuberant and always in the American grain, whether he's
painting a sonic portrait of a quaint, frozen-in-time soda
shop; his beloved hamlet's venerable house of worship, or its
summer festivities and social gatherings at the town dock.
His
compositions are as true a slice of Americana as cherry pie,
or works by Charles Ives, Scott Joplin, Norman Rockwell,
Robert Frost, Thornton Wilder, or the American Impressionist
painters who tramped over the idyllic Connecticut countryside
in pursuit of its alluring light and atmosphere. Hewitt's
homage to his hometown was inspired by two plays written by
Noank poet/playwright Melanie Greenhouse. One called
"Point of Land" extols the scenic district's history
from colonial times. The second, "The Duchess of Noank,"
is a loving portrait of one of the town's most colorful
characters, Mary Virginia Goodman (1897-1988), best known to
locals as the Duchess of Noank.
In
"Point of Land," a prose poem play that debuted in
1997, Greenhouse presents a panoramic view of three centuries
of Noank history from the time it was the hunting and fishing
grounds of the Pequots to the present. Much like a good film
score, Hewitt's compositions on the CD, "Point of Land
Prologue" and "Point of Land Theme" echo the
play's idyllic world in which there seems to be a moratorium
on time. Capturing the savory flavor and variety of Noank
history, Greenhouse orchestrates the voices of some 70
characters who once walked the seaside town's streets, built
or sailed its wooden ships, gossiped, fornicated, worshipped,
loved, lived and died. A blend of mostly historic fact and
imaginatively fabricated fable and metaphoric levels of
meaning, Greenhouse's "play for voices" does for
Noank what the great Welsh poet Dylan Thomas did for the
small, mythical Welsh seacoast town of Llareggub in his 1953
masterwork, "Under Milk Wood."
Mary
Virginia Goodman, the lf-proclaimed Duchess of Noank and, by
far, the most flamboyant of all Greenhouse's cast of naughty
or nice Noankians, makes only a cameo appearance in
"Point of Land." (Point of Land is the English
translation of the original Native American word that white
settlers eventually came to pronounce and spell as Noank.)
But
the regal, charismatic teacher, historian, local journalist,
orator, world traveler, eccentric and avid collector of much
older men as husbands, has center stage in "The Duchess
of Noank," a modern dream play that premiered in 2000.
Again, Hewitt complements Greenhouse's written word with his
classy sounding theme, "Waltz of the Duchess," one
of his CD's brightest, catchiest creations.
How
this crusty, self-confident Nutmeg doyenne becomes the Duchess
of Noank while travelling in Scotland, where she sprains her
ankle and strains the truth, is an amusing anecdote worthy of
Mark Twain in his "The Innocents Abroad." Three
actors, who simultaneously interact with one another in
Greenhouse's play, represent the Duchess at three stages in
her life: youth, middle age and old age. Individually, they
play the Duchess as a precocious girl in her early to
mid-teens; as a cocky, middle-aged, revered yet feared teacher
and as a popular, breezy local newspaper columnist; and,
finally, as an elderly but still razor-witted, proud woman
waiting not for Godot, but for death.
Seasoned
with symbolism, "The Duchess of Noank" opens with a
thudding fall from grace and ends with death as a kind of
mystical ascension on a stairway to the unknown. Between fall
and ascension, scenes freely shift back-and-forth across time
periods, moving in and out of dreamtime. Sometimes they even
split, like cinematic images, so action occurs concurrently or
even overlaps.
With
her Down East accent, the Duchess was as proud of being a
descendant of the legendary Mohegan chief, Uncas, as she was
of her Yankee ancestry. Her proudest claim, which she
announced to everybody, was that she could count from one to
12 in what she called "the Mohegan tongue." So who
was this complex, contradictory character who mocked
suffragists as a young girl, but as an adult, liberated woman
marched boldly to the very loud beat of her own drum? Think of
some brilliant hybrid of Maggie Smith, Judi Dench, Dorothy
Parker, Hedda Hopper, Zsa Zsa Gabor, Queen Victoria, Katharine
Hepburn and the best and the brightest, most intimidating
female teacher you ever had in elementary school, and you'll
get a glimmer of what this regal, New England original must
have been like. The dark secret-or at least semi-dark secret
at the core of the enigmatic Duchess's erotic life-- is that
she never got over her hot, girlhood crush on her grandfather.
Even long after the gentlemanly gaffer's death, he remained
the Platonic standard for the Duchess's selection of her
mostly infirm, ancient but well-to-do husbands. Greenhouse
lets this "secret" fixation unfurl gently in the
play, never exploiting it as a geriatric variation of the
Oedipus complex.
An
only child of Czech refugees who emigrated to Virginia in the
late 1940s, Greenhouse, 55, has been a devout Noankian since
moving to town from Mystic in 1984 with her husband Sandy, a
physician who practices in Gales Ferry. It was love at first
sight for the transplant whose favorite creative pastimes
today are gardening or sitting on her patio in the sunshine
writing her first drafts by hand.
Hewitt,
the native Groton son, first crossed paths with Greenhouse in
1994 while playing a gig at the Arts Café-Mystic's literary
and music series. The ongoing, innovative series is noted for
presenting such noted poets as Pulitzer Prize winner, Stephen
Dunn, and the dissident Chinese poet, Xue Di. Greenhouse, a
former soccer mom who wrote her poems and plays at home while
her three sons were at school, coordinated the innovative
series from 1994 to 2004 at the Mystic Arts Center. Impressed
by the spirit that she heard in Hewitt's playing, Greenhouse
asked the pianist in 1996 to collaborate with her by composing
music for her writings on Noank.
A
musical maven who's at home in any genre from jazz to
classical, Hewitt had already composed music for poetry
written by Marilyn Nelson, Connecticut's poet laureate. A
reader with varied intellectual and philosophical interests
far afield from music, Hewitt, who's now 61, jumped at the
chance to collaborate with a playwright. Especially because
this would give him the opportunity to compose music inspired
by the cherished coastal world where he grew up and has deep
ancestral roots, including solid bourgeois merchants as
forebears. And, after all, it was the history-drenched,
lyrical seacoast atmosphere that helped form his emerging
worldview in many ways.
Especially
his lifelong love for the environment and fascination with
rivers, most particularly his personal holy trinity of the
Mystic, the Thames and the Connecticut. Since growing up in a
historic cupola-capped, sea captain's house that overlooks the
Thames, Hewitt has lived much of his life not far from these
three rivers. Except, of course, when he's on the road plying
his craft as a peripatetic pianist throughout the United
States and even Europe. Not surprisingly, one of the most
fluent programmatic pieces on his CD is "Flow Like the
River," his tribute to the Mystic, which he praises in
the liner notes as "a source of spiritual renewal in a
tumultuous world."
By
focussing on the particulars of Noank's historical legacy,
both Hewitt and Greenhouse strive to get across a uiversal
message about the importance of preserving the environment and
a shared, communal sense of historical consciousness. Most
especially, they fear commercial incursions on the precious
but vulnerable ambiance of small coastal burghs like Noank.
The threat comes from what they call "the boutiquing"
of old, traditional downtown areas, and "the
McMansionizing," or building of gargantuan trophy homes
with a disregard for their impact on historic sites or on the
timeless village aura portrayed by the pair in word and music.
By using their art to exalt Noank's priceless historic legacy
and its virtues as a classic New England seacoast haven,
Hewitt and Greenhouse hope to help preserve all the Noanks of
America, maybe even for another 300 years.
Hewitt's
CD is available for $15, plus $3 for shipping at khewitt@snet.net,
860-572-7720. The pianist performs with his Noank Jazz Trio
June 3 at 7:30 p.m. at Main & Hopewell, 2 Hopewell Road,
South Glastonbury. No cover. Call: (860) 633-8698.
"The
Duchess of Noank" will be presented June 23 through June
26 by the Groton Regional Theatre at the Groton Senior Center,
102 Newtown Road (Rte. 117), Groton. The play will be preceded
by dinner at 6:30 p.m. June 23-June 25 and at noon June 26.
Tickets: $20 includes dinner and play. Information: (860)
441-6785.
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