Leddy’s ‘Susurrus’ whispers theater through the woods

Leddy, who acts as a specialist advisor for the Scottish Arts Council and sits on the council for the Scottish Society of Playwrights, created “Susurrus,” which means “rustling in trees,” so he could present a work that used a close, intimate voice like someone whispering in your ear.

“You can do that live if you wanted to, but it would be quite a disturbing thing for most audiences to have a stranger come and whisper in their ear over their shoulder,” said Leddy, who has a background in performance art, in an interview with the Daily.

He wrote the script in 2006 and recorded the four characters to be played through earphones. “Susurrus” is the second addition to “Auricula,” Leddy’s environment-specific audio series.

“Susurrus” premiered in botanical gardens in Glasgow, Scotland, and the piece has visited gardens around the world in the last few years. Glasgow’s gardens were particularly inspirational for Leddy’s play, being a Glasgow resident himself.

“The botanics in Glasgow have quite a mythic position for residents,” Leddy said. “Lots of people who grew up there would go every weekend when they were children, and it has this sort of great power for them.”

He wanted to present the play in the gardens as part of Glasgow’s Shakespeare festival, so he drew themes from Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” a play that captivated him when he first saw it at eight years old.

“I was a very fidgety child — I’m still a very fidgety adult, but I apparently watched it with complete, raptured attention. I was mesmerized by it,” he said. “I have no memory of this at all, but I’m told that I completely loved it.”

He added that “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” works well as inspiration because of its fantasy elements and that it’s set in a forest.

But above all he chose it because it’s his favorite.

“I think you have to go on instinct with these things,” Leddy explained with a warm smile.

But audience members, who are admitted into a carefully plotted path in the garden and set their own pace in groups of four, don’t need to be familiar with the Shakespeare play to appreciate “Susurrus.” It’s important to Leddy that the play be an original work in its own right.

Although Leddy used 40 to 50 quotes from “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” and worked with some of the play’s themes, including Oberon’s sensual obsession with the “changeling Indian boy,” he didn’t use any of the same characters, and the plot is entirely different.

The ultimately dramatic work containing what Leddy described as “flashes of humor” has four characters or voices, and centers on a fictional opera singer rehearsing for the premiere of Benjamin Britten’s 1960 opera of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” It follows the opera singer’s relationship with his children and Britten, and “how those relationships begin to break apart,” Leddy said.

“It is a play about intimacy and relationships and secrets and family secrets, and it has the sense of somebody whispering secrets in your ear in the middle of the night,” he added.

Of course, the play uses plenty of music, starting with Britten’s opera and expanding outward to opera singers like Janet Baker and Maria Callas and popular singers in the ’40s and ’50s like Nat King Cole and Edith Piaf.

The “power of the human voice” is part of the piece’s theme, Leddy said, particularly the “slightly super-human quality that opera singers have to draw out emotions of other people.”

Leddy prefers to experiment with the elicitation of intense emotional reactions in his theater, as well as pushing the boundaries of form. And he isn’t worried about his audience, in Ann Arbor or elsewhere.

“I don’t know who the audience is, anywhere really,” Leddy said. “I don’t try to communicate with a particular audience. I think you’d go a little bit mad if you try to do that as an artist.

“I make pieces that I want to make and then try to find the people who want to see the piece.”