VOICES FROM SANDOVER
Having been published in three separate
volumes, then as a collected trilogy (winning a National Book
Award and a Pulitzer along the way), James Merrill's "The
Changing Light at Sandover" has now become a film.
Merrill adapted a scenario from his 17,000-line poem, a mystical
epic stimulated by his "20 year adventure around an Ouija
board." Produced by Peter Hooten, who also plays one of the
roles, VOICES FROM SANDOVER -- after final preparatory stages
were completed in Cambridge, Mass. -- was shot over several days
and completed within a week.
"I worked on the poem five or six years," Merrill said.
"It details a particular experience, my 20 year adventure
around a Ouija board with my friend David Jackson. We talked to
not only human shades, such as our dead friends like Auden and
Maria Mitsotaki, but also to voices you could either think as
fallen angels, or as volatile subatomic particles, who took the
aspect of rather intimidating bats, a sort of kindly demon. These
voices would educate us to the point where we were capable of
receiving instruction from four archangels. There's a point in
the poem -- and the script -- when we hear the voice of God
singing outward into the universe to the pantheon.
"The gradual story is not only (about) our instruction but
the adventures of Auden and Maria who, at the end of our lessons,
are going back into a world in one form or another. The final
episode is our farewell."
In 1988, he decided "to extract strands" from his poem
that eventually became a scenario titled "An Evening at
Sandover," a version of which was read two years ago at the
Hasty Pudding under the auspices of Poets Theater. The cast
included Merrill and Leah Doyle. They are now in the film, along
with Elzbieta Czyzewska (a recent Obie winner), Keith David and James
Morrison, and William Ball (formerly artistic director
of the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco) in the
role of W.H. Auden.
The film is a collage drawn from this mysterious Miltonic epic,
which some critics have ranked above T.S. Eliot's "The
Waterland." "It's a way of explaining the universe
through the personification of gods and angels and devils. But
I'm very clear -- always -- that these are personifications and
that we are doing this through language. As for the doctrine --
or the belief -- behind the poem, well, I've always tried to be
of two minds, skeptical about what comes over the Ouija board;
accepting of it's metaphoric beauty and validity," Merrill
said.
VOICES FROM SANDOVER was directed by Joan Darling. PBS showed interested in seeing a rough cut and there was a plan to preview it for BBC. Synopsized from review by Kevin Kelly for The Boston Globe
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