TORONTO – Productions like Montparnasse remind me that I need to keep more booze in the house. When Mags, an American model living in 1920s Paris, awakes mid-day in her slip and looped pearls (a rare clothed moment) and grabs the champagne bottle by her bed as she begins to relate the spasmodic, erotic details of her previous night’s tryst with a celebrated painter, I think—I need to get out more. What am I doing, sitting here thinking about how I’m going to write about this later? I shouldn’t spend my time typing! I need to live, like Mags! Go, Mags, to the corner bars and nightclubs, to the studios and bedrooms of grossly talented and sensually obsessed men. Go mostly for your plugged up roommate, Amelia, newly arrived would-be painter, escaping the Christian Temperance Union America but not yet ready to enter the raunchy haunts you inhabit, where inspiration wets the walls and is more easily absorbed than a soixante-quinze cocktail, liberally poured. Go for Amelia, but also for us who want so badly for art to exist in these places, these dark, smoky, stinking, dizzying, only half-real dens of urban dawn, where nothing—beauty, morality, freedom—stands up to examination. It’s too dark in there, and everyone is too drunk. (more…)

Tags: montparnasse, muse, paris 1920's, summer works, summerworks
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