Tesla

Phil Kline, Composer-Writer
Jim Jarmusch, Writer-Director
Erik Sanko & Jessica Grindstaff, Visual Production
Thomas O. Kriegsman, Producer

Composer-Writer Phil Kline and Writer-Director Jim Jarmusch are collaborating on the creation of an evening length music theater piece, Tesla. Tesla will be a "more or less" true series of fantasies based on the incredible life of Nikola Tesla, and focusing on the years he lived in downtown Manhattan. Tesla was one of the most remarkable and enigmatic men of the twentieth century. An ethnic Serb raised in Croatia, he came to America as a young man to pursue a career in the new field of electrical engineering, with a special interest in electro-magnetism. He worked with Thomas Edison and was greatly admired by Mark Twain and Robert Wood Johnson. He invented the modern method of electrical distribution that powered the second industrial revolution, and was acknowledged to be the true inventor of radio. And yet, despite all that, he died impoverished and alone in his room at the Hotel New Yorker.

His story of an idealist ground down by the realities of competitive capitalism suggests Tesla as a subject for a modern baroque opera, mingling men and gods, the natural and supernatural. The aim of the production is an essential and symbolic, rather than literally detailed truth, rooted in the suggestive power of image and sound. Vivid hallucinations trump dull facts. As in Baroque music theater, economy of forces will be observed. Other than the person chosen to play Tesla, all the other performers will assume multiple roles. The musical ensemble will consist of string quartet, four electric guitars, keyboard and a small children's chorus. The staging will be reductive and symbolic, with liberal use of photography, film and video, in addition to lighting. A basic challenge to the production will be the creation of illusions: a man has conversations with birds, invents electric rayguns and makes a ship disappear. The reality presented will be that of dreams or memories. Or myths.

Tesla will not attempt conventional narrative, but rather a sequence of tableaus, beginning with a pastoral prelude set in Smiljan, Tesla's home in the Lika mountains of Croatia, where we are introduced to the young Tesla, communing with birds and insects at twilight. Then we are set down in the New York City of the late 19th century, where Tesla arrives and establishes a laboratory at 44 West Houston Street. It is here that he builds a gigantic wave generator that threatens to level the building and alarms the neighborhood. There will also be a conversation with Mark Twain and a crucial scene in which Thomas Edison reneges on a promise to reward Tesla for solving a problem by telling him "you don't understand our American sense of humor." Eventually, the US Army becomes interested in the potential of Tesla's devices for destructive power, and a turning point is reached when they demand that Tesla demonstrate his teleportation theories by making a ship disappear in New York Harbor. The final scene takes place in Tesla's pigeon-filled room at the Hotel New Yorker, where he dies at the age of 86, still talking to birds.

Both Jim and Phil will work together on all aspects of the project, from the original scenario to the final direction. One of the things that especially interests us about the project is that it lies directly at the intersection of where our work has been going. Phil has been moving toward music theater, though stopping just short of opera, writing songs and choral music for quasi-theatrical works and, most recently, writing his own lyrics. And although music has always been a critical component of his films, Jim has recently begun contributing his own compositions to them. Furthermore, we find the subject of Tesla fascinating for the way he is kind of a blank, a man of incredible accomplishments about whom we understand too little. In a way, the main character of this piece is what we understand to be his spirit, the desire to discover, not for profit, but for the betterment of all, and the stifling of that spirit is a tragedy all can identify with.

This project is currently being developed and will be available for touring in 2013.