AN ELEGANT OBSESSION - Book by George L. Mabry and Richard Gildrie, Music & Lyrics by George L. Mabry, Orchestrations by Paul Carrol Binkley - receives a premiere staging on the campus of Austin Peay State University.
Synopsis
“An Elegant Obsession,” book by Richard Gildrie and George Mabry and music and lyrics by George Mabry, is an allegorical fantasy/musical drama based on the lives of three 19thcentury United States Senators, Daniel Webster, Henry Clay, and John C. Calhoun, known honorifically by their colleagues as “The Great Triumvirate.”
In 1957, they were named by a Senate sub-committee, chaired by then Senator John F. Kennedy, three of the greatest Senators ever to grace the halls of Congress. Their contemporaries believed them to vie for the title of finest orator/debater since Cicero and Demosthenes. They were second-generation leaders following the “Founding Fathers,” and were clearly the most powerful and influential leaders of the young nation as it struggled to find itself, to establish its unique identity, and to assure its survival and advancement as well as its unity.
Rounding out our quartet of players is a contemporary female senator from Montana, Kelsey Tate, only the second African American female to be elected to the U.S. Senate since Carol Mosely Braun, senator from Illinois from 1993-1999. The year of our play is 2023. Tate has been in the Senate for only a short while and is striving to carve a niche for herself as well as learn the ropes, so to speak.
Along with 97 other distinguished historical figures from America’s past, Clay, Webster, and Calhoun are honored with larger than life statues placed in the Congressional Statuary Hall in Washington. As the curtain rises, we see these three statues. Senator Tate is on her cell phone involved in a rather heated conversation with one of her colleagues. Unbeknownst to her, the statues of Clay, Webster, and Calhoun begin to move and talk to one another, coming to life (or spirit if you wish) during our opening musical number.
The men or apparitions do not know where they are, the time, or the year. Spying Tate across the way, they ask her where they are. Our brilliant, egomaniacal, obsessive, and cantankerous 19thcentury senators, who all died around 1852, meet head on, a brilliant, ambitious, liberated, vulnerable, yet determined young woman who is a Harvard and Yale law school graduate. Thus, as you might well expect, we are off on a precipitous journey of discovery.
Through their interactions, we learn how each man in his own way reinforces and confirms Tate’s beliefs in liberty, justice, freedom, and equality for all. Their conversations, at times polite and at times hostile, result in a joint affirmation that these values are inherent in and guaranteed by America’s most sacred document, the United States Constitution.
Webster’s most quoted phrase, “Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable!