Full House: Brooklyn Bohemia Takes the Stage at the Public
Oh, Brooklyn. In Bloomberg-era New York, where the Upper West Side is for strollers, the West Village for Marc Jacobs, and the Lower East Side for pub crawls, Brooklyn is the place, we’re told time and again, for unconventional, creative young people to be unconventional and creative. It’s the borough where you’d find, for example, a sprawling, dilapidated, commune-like home shared by a novelist, a few poets, a composer, an opera singer, a European-refugee activist and a burlesque artist, all pulled together by a fiction editor and self-styled aesthete who lounges in caftans, planning parties.
February House, a splendid new musical at the Public Theater, is set in that commune-like home, and among its many achievements is to remind us that, despite what we’ve been told by innumerable New York magazine covers, Styles section features, and Lena Dunham, Brooklyn-as-bohemia is not a recent invention. This creative home was a real one—a house, granted, not an illegal loft, in Brooklyn Heights rather than Bushwick—and in 1940 and ’41 it was occupied by W.H. Auden, Carson McCullers, Gypsy Rose Lee and others. They wrote, sang, drank, danced, slept with each other, avoided paying rent and sniffed cocaine in back bedrooms at parties. They worked on their art, and themselves; they talked about art, and themselves; and amid all the chaos, they didn’t seem to get very much done. As the Brooklyn-frequenting if not actually Brooklynite David Byrne might note: Same as it ever was.
Their stories unfold—loves and heartbreak, artistic failures and triumphs, arguments about the artist’s political obligations in a world on the brink of war—in a haunting, minor-key production propelled by the character of George Davis (Julian Fleisher, a bald, nebbishy leading man charismatically campy and wonderfully wistful), the flamboyantly gay editor and erstwhile novelist who has assembled the house’s residents and dedicated himself to their care and feeding. February House, as 7 Middagh Street was dubbed because so many who lived there were born in that short month, is his work of art, his masterpiece. Read More
