‘A Scots Lodge in England’

     

RW Trevor Stewart presenting the 2011
Wendell K. Walker Lecture at The Players.

With results of Scotland’s plebiscite expected momentarily, and having just gotten home from The Old Lodge, the Wendell K. Walker Lecture of 2011 is an apt choice for today’s Flashback Friday. None other than RW Bro. Trevor Stewart was chosen to present the lecture to Independent Royal Arch Lodge No. 2, highlighting a great evening at The Players. I just wish I could remember what he said.

The lecture is an annual tradition, and this one was part of the 250th anniversary celebration of “Old Number 2.” It is named for a notable figure in the world of Masonic learning. MW Bro. Walker was one of the forces who made the Chancellor Robert R. Livingston Masonic Library the world renowned institution we know today, and who helped launch The American Lodge of Research in 1931. And what better lecturer to bring to the podium than Trevor? The then Right Worshipful Master of Sir Robert Moray Lodge No. 1641 in Edinburgh is no stranger to the First Manhattan District. He came, as he phrased it, “to make announcements of small discoveries that I have made that make a contribution.”

Unfortunately, that quotation is the extent of my notes from the night of March 24, 2011 to have survived to this day, and I have that little notebook page thanks only to a phone number on the back, although I don’t know now whose number it is. So I apologize for this anti-climactic conclusion, but all I remember for certain is that Trevor told us how Robert Moray’s initiation into Freemasonry not only predates Elias Ashmole’s by almost six years, but also that the event bears the bizarre significance of it being the work of a Scottish military Masonic lodge at labor on English soil at Newcastle, while the Scottish army was besieging that city. There were other very odd circumstances at work, but I cannot remember with any accuracy what Trevor shared with us. That’s no reflection on Trevor’s research or delivery, of course, but simply is my own failing. (Trevor, if you happen to see this and care to e-mail me your lecture, I’d love to share its salient details here.)

So, on that disappointing note, have a nice weekend. Oh, the 2015 Wendell K. Walker Memorial Lecture is scheduled for Thursday, March 19. Details TBA.

The other memorable event that evening was the arrival of New York's Bravest, prompted by the accidental triggering of the establishment's fire alarm. Sadly, The Players had to kick us out and lock up for the night, by order of the Fire Marshal. There's Trevor in the foreground, trying, I think, to use his considerable powers of persuasion to keep the party going.

     

‘Transformation is the name of the game!’

     
It’s been a long time since I last wrote about the value of Shakespeare and language to the art of transformation, but I witnessed something pretty spectacular the Friday night before last at The Players worth mentioning here.

The Players hosted a theater troupe from Cape Cod named Elements Theatre Company—and, yes, that’s elements as in earth, air, fire, and water—that performed an amazing “montage,” I suppose I’ll call it, of scenes culled from eight great dramas in a program titled “Labyrinth: A Legacy of Language.” It is part of this theater company’s year-long celebration of this 450th anniversary year of Shakespeare’s birth. These scenes were linked thematically by their explorations of love, trust, infidelity, vengeance, and remorse. They segued into each other obliquely, but effectively. My point is not to write a review, but just for your information the plays sampled, in this sequence, were: The Real Thing, by Tom Stoppard; A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams; A Doll’s House by Henrik Ibsen; The School for Scandal by Robert Sheridan; Much Ado About Nothing, Hamlet, Titus Andronicus, and The Tempest by William Shakespeare. The goal was to present immortal moments of the Shakespearean stage and more recent writers’ words clearly influenced by Shakespeare. To showcase the immortality of these words. Words that were here before us, and will be here after we are gone. Words to be acted in “states unborn and in accents yet unknown,” to borrow from Julius Caesar.

The simple set employed by the Elements Theatre Company
at The Players in New York City February 7.

Anyway, after the performance (and an appreciated wine and cheese reception), a panel discussion delved into various implications of transformation in the processes of theater. For instance, there is the obvious external transformation of actors putting on their costumes and make-up. (Take your seat 20 minutes before the curtain goes up at Twelfth Night on Broadway, and you can watch that process.) There is an internal adjustment of the actor as he becomes the role and identifies with it even when off-stage. But there was this other progression they spoke of. Something I would liken to spiritual alchemy—a reorganization of the conscious mind to unlock its greater potential.

Getting back to the title “Labyrinth: A Legacy of Language,” the panelists spoke of language itself as key to the art of transformation. “Transformation is the name of the game!” said Louis Colaianni, a voice coach and author of How to Speak Shakespeare. The panel tore into the concept of “The Word Made Flesh,” to paraphrase St. John’s Gospel. (That actually is the title of another great project the theater company is working on. Click here and check it out.) “We’re in an age when speaking well is suspect,” Colaianni also said, “when it doesn’t sound like telling the truth. We need to foster a natural eloquence in the young.” Panelist George Drance related an anecdote about a friend prompting some laughter by speaking the phrase “burst like a pomegranate” in casual conversation. “No one talks like that!” came the predictable admonishment. “Well, we would if we could,” the guy replied.
     

‘Serious times for The Players’

    

Trevor Stewart delivering the Wendell K. Walker
Lecture, March 24, 2011 at The Players

Declining membership, financial debt, personnel controversies, and enough existential uncertainty to worry its members, neighbors, and admirers are dogging The Players, the venerable private club at Gramercy Park that is a beloved destination of several lodges and other Masonic groups in New York City.

The club even has resorted to selling and pawning its Sargents to pay for capital improvements.

DNAinfo.com-New York has been reporting the sad story, with numerous heart-breaking details, for more than three weeks. Read all about it here. I know this will interest many of the brethren, ergo this edition of The Magpie Mason.
    

‘Wendell K. Walker Lecture 2011’

    
Independent Royal Arch Lodge No. 2 has announced the Annual Wendell K. Walker Lecture will take place on the evening of Thursday, March 24.

Bro. Trevor Stewart

on “Masonic Lodges in Colonial North America.”

The Players

16 Gramercy Park South

Manhattan

Cocktails at 7 p.m. in the Sargent Room (cash bar)

Dinner at eight in the Ball Room – $65 per person

Attire: Business

Open to Freemasons and their guests

Advance reservations are essential, and must be received no later than 5 p.m. on Friday, March 18. Leave a note, with your e-mail address, in the Comments Section below (which will not be published) and I’ll send you the contact information.

Bro. Trevor Stewart is a retired lecturer who was educated at Birmingham, Sheffield, Durham and Newcastle universities. His academic work specialised in 18th century English literature, and his doctorate research focused on a coterie of gentlemen Freemasons who lived in the north of England during the Enlightenment period.

Trevor has continued to give fully documented papers on various Masonic subjects in American, Belgian, French, German and Scottish lodges – at both lodge and Provincial Grand Lodge levels – as well as in many English Lodges and Royal Arch Chapters, and in London’s ancient Guildhall. He also has taught in history seminars at Cambridge, Oxford and Harvard universities, which focused on newly discovered contributions which early 18th century English Freemasons made to the development and spread of Newtonianism. In October 2007 he was invited by the Pennsylvania Academy of Masonic Knowledge to give his paper titled “A Way Forward – Some Seminar Techniques.”

Trevor contributed papers on Freemasonry in the Enlightenment period to international conferences held at the Canonbury Masonic Research Centre in London, the University of Bordeaux, and the International Conference on the History of Freemasonry in Edinburgh in both 2007 and 2009. He has published several other papers in Ars Quatuor Coronatorum, the annual book of transactions of Quatuor Coronati Lodge No. 2076; for Leicester Lodge of Research; for Hibiscus Masonic Review; and The Ashlar, the leading Masonic quarterly in Scotland. He edited the 2005 and 2006 editions of The Canonbury Papers for the Canonbury Masonic Research Centre in London. He also has edited From Across the Water, an anthology of eight past papers from AQC on North American Freemasonry in the colonial era.

In 2004, Trevor was appointed by the United Grand Lodge of England to be the Prestonian Lecturer, during which time his speaking tour brought him to the United States. He is a Past Master of three English lodges, including Quatuor Coronati Lodge No. 2076, and is currently Master of Lodge Sir Robert Moray No. 1641, a research lodge in Edinburgh. In December 2007 he was elected to Honorary Membership in both Alpha Lodge No. 116 in East Orange, and St. John’s Lodge No. 1 in New York City. He recently was elected to Honorary Membership in Cincinnati Lodge No. 3 in Morristown, and Atlas-Pythagoras Lodge No. 10 in Westfield, and he is particularly delighted to be associated so strongly with New Jersey Freemasonry. He was created a IX° (Magus) by the Masonic Rosicrucians in Washington in 2007.

Trevor has held office in all of the Orders which grace the English Masonic landscape; is a Life Member of various Scottish Orders, including the Grand Lodge of the Royal Order of Scotland; has been honored with Grand Rank in the Rectified Scottish Rite in Belgium; and has achieved the 30° in the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite in Germany. In the SRIA, the earliest modern Rosicrucian society, he was a member of its High Council, a Chief Adept of a Province, Director-General of Studies, and an active member of its Executive Committee. He edited the SRIA Transactions of 2005.

The Players is a private club founded in 1888 by Edwin Booth, Mark Twain, William T. Sherman, and a dozen others for the “promotion of social intercourse between members of the dramatic profession and the kindred professions of literature, painting, architecture, sculpture and music, law and medicine, and the patrons of the arts.”

The Wendell K. Walker Lecture is an annual event in memory of Bro. Walker, a beloved leader in the field of Masonic education.

Independent Royal Arch Lodge No. 2 is one of the oldest fraternal and social institutions in continuous existence in the City of New York. Chartered on December 15, 1760, “Old No. 2,” as it is popularly styled, has, for two-and-a-half centuries, exerted a civilizing and fraternal influence in New York.