Not Your Ordinary Musical

by John Glore

Warren: an aspiring artist who takes care of a more successful artist’s cat while waiting to be discovered… Deb: a suburban girl who has come to the big city for grad school, although she doesn’t much like the city and she doesn’t much like grad school… Jason: who would just as soon flee this “hundred-story city,” but stays because he’s in love with one of its “hundred million” people… and Claire: the object of Jason’s ardor, a young woman who isn’t ready to commit to a future with Jason because she can’t stop seeing shadows of the past.…

These are the four characters in Adam Gwon’s Ordinary Days, a new chamber musical having its West Coast premiere at South Coast Repertory. A young New Yorker himself, Gwon understands how easy it is to get lost in that city, especially when the contours of your own life haven’t yet come into sharp focus. If you don’t quite know who you are, or you don’t quite know what you want, then New York City can be an especially unforgiving place. All four of Gwon’s characters have begun to face that reality as Ordinary Days picks up their stories.

Adam Gwon’s Ordinary Days makes specific reference to two paintings found in New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, one is  Claude Monet’s "Camille Monet in the Garden at Argenteuil."

Although Warren and Deb have the briefest of chance encounters during the show’s first song, they don’t actually meet until much later. And although Jason and Claire have been a couple for about a year, they are beginning to notice a widening gulf opening between them, which makes them both feel lonelier than if they were actually alone. This means that a substantial portion of Ordinary Days is rendered in the form of solo songs sung out to us rather than to other characters in the play. Like a succession of confessions and soliloquies (intermixed with the occasional duo or quartet), their songs detail their disconnected lives and their individual dissatisfactions in a way that is too funny to be sad and too heartfelt to be dismissed.

And then their separate story lines begin to converge and intertwine. Warren, an inveterate collector of the flotsam of other people’s lives, finds a notebook on the street, full of annotations and fragments compiled for someone’s thesis. Discovering an email address inside the notebook, he contacts the owner to let her know that her work has been found, and to arrange a rendezvous at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Deb, who’d been in a panic at the loss of her irreplaceable notes, reluctantly agrees to the meeting and then immediately regrets it when she discovers that the rescuer of her lost work is, as far as she can tell, a kook. But once the connection is made, Deb finds that Warren isn’t an easy guy to shake loose.

Meanwhile Jason and Claire have made the fateful decision to move in together, but this apparent step forward seems to have shaken their relationship to its foundation. Jason becomes increasingly frustrated at Claire’s unwillingness to open her heart to him, and the rupture reaches a crisis state on the day they decide to drop into the Metropolitan Museum of Art. 

The second piece specifically mentioned in the musical: Cezanne’s “Still Life with Apples and a Pot of Primroses.”  The show also makes more general reference to the works of Klimt, Dali, Manet, and Picasso, so if you’ve a mind to explore, the Met’s homepage www.metmuseum.org will help get you started.

Although Gwon brings his four characters together in the museum at the midpoint of Ordinary Days — and they cross paths with one another while exploring the artwork — they still don't fully connect with one another in spite of their proximity. But seeds are planted. New brushstrokes are applied to the canvas of their lives, and by the end of the show — when the four young urbanites almost-sort-of meet again — their day at the Met proves to have altered the course of their lives in quiet but profound ways.

As its title suggests, Ordinary Days is an appreciation of the unspectacular. Life may consist mostly of ordinary days, but every ordinary day has its moments of beauty, grace, insight and serendipity. Deb, who is all about the “big picture” — her five-year plan promises a glorious outcome but it’s a little fuzzy on the details — learns a valuable lesson from flaky Warren about how to take in the finer points of life and art: Slow down. Look carefully. Everyday things don’t have to be plain. Plain doesn’t have to be uninteresting.

And a world of feelings can be evoked by a single daub of red on a painting of an apple.

A Trip to a Museum Shapes a Musical Praise from the NY Times  “Ordinary Days introduces a promising newcomer to our talent-hungry musical theater, the composer and lyricist Adam Gwon. Mr. Gwon writes crisp, fluid and often funny lyrics that reflect the racing minds of four New Yorkers on a nervous search for their immediate futures. Ordinary Days… captures with stinging clarity that uneasy moment in youth when doubts begin to cloud hopes for a future of unlimited possibility.… “All four characters’ lives intersect briefly, if momentously, at the end of the show. Warren’s frustration with his going-nowhere career inspires a spontaneous act that has an unforeseen impact on the course of Claire and Jason’s relationship. But the two couples never interact, a sad-sweet comment on the anonymity of life in the city, where it is possible to change other people’s fates without actually getting to meet them.” -- New York Times I was writing Ordinary Days during a fellowship I had at the Dramatists Guild, a program that offers young writers a forum in which to develop new work. They would bring in guest artists to hear our work and talk to us about their own creative processes. One guest artist came in, and she said, whenever she got stuck, she would take a trip to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and, without fail, something there would get her unstuck. So when I hit a wall about a third of the way into my first draft, I took her advice and went to the Met. (She also said she wore a large hoop skirt to the museum so that the crowds of tourists would not invade her personal or creative space. Needless to say, I did not take her up on this part of the suggestion.) Looking back at my notebook from this trip to the Met, there are a lot of notes, in smudgy pencil, that didn’t make it into the show.… But that trip to the Met turned out to be a turning point in the putting-it-together of Ordinary Days, and, in the show, the characters actually spend some time at the Met as a direct result of that visit.… When I was at the Met that day, looking at this painting [‘Camille Monet in the Garden at Argenteuil,’ by Claude Monet] flipped a switch somewhere in my brain.… It’s a pretty random Monet in a pretty random gallery at the Met. But there was something about it… Of course I noticed the great wonder that is Impressionism — a beautiful metaphor that’s been noted by such great minds as Stephen Sondheim in Sunday in the Park with George and Cher in Clueless. But there was also something that struck me about the setting of the figure in this vast, impressionistic garden. The woman was made out of the same flickering, not-quite-cohesive specks of paint as the garden around her. It was a picture where the person and the place were almost impossibly tangled. To me, that entanglement was the story of that painting. — from a blog by Adam Gwon

The cast of Ordinary Days from left to right, Nick Gabriel, Deborah S. Craig, Nancy Anderson and David Burnham.

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