William DuBois | Haiti / 2018

to the hills

by Douglas Messerli

 

William DuBois Haiti / directed by Ellen Geer at Will Geer’s Theatricum Botanicum (Topanga Canyon, California) / I attended the performance on Sunday, September 2, 2018 with Pablo Capra and Christina Carlos

 

It’s difficult to believe that in the very same year, 1938, that saw the premiere of Thornton Wilder’s absolutely pared-down modernist, almost anti-theatrical play Our Town on Broadway, that William DuBois’—a Columbia University graduate who later became an editor The New York Times Book Review, not the famed Black author and founder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909—Haiti was produced, as part of the Hallie Flannigan’s Federal Theatre Project (under the auspices of the Negro Theatre Unit) at the Lafayette Theatre in Harlem, a work at almost the opposite spectrum of theatrical emotional intensity.

  

      If Wilder’s play is almost abstract in its barebones attitude, DuBois’ play hearkens back to the theater traditions of high melodrama and historical documentation that clearly lays out the moral ground of its figures. How can an audience not root for the Haitians, whose Creole citizens fought against British rule, and were the first country in the Western Hemisphere to abolish slavery and the first free Black nation, not side with this country’s anti-colonialist heroes, Touissant L’Ouverture (Rodrick Jean-Charles) and his General Christophe (the dashing Max Lawrence) in their strategic retreat and later battles with Napoleon’s army, who has arrived via a frigate, complete with Napoleon’s sister, to “sway” the Haitians to return to the fold of obeisance to their rule.

      The Haitian leaders of 1804, who now occupy the last of the large colonial estates, argue between themselves on how to protect their territory and government. The sly Touissant wants his soldiers to take to the hills—such an appropriate desire, given this production in the Geer family Theatricum Botanicum lies literally in the middle of the Topanga Canyon hills—to gradually wear-down their opponents, as opposed the more radical Christophe’s insistence that they begin the fight at the port where the French are about to arrive.

     Yet Touissant knows better; the French will not be able to survive their mountain fights with the Haitians nor the climate, with its malarial mosquitoes, and the lack of protection from the island’s storms (all of which, of course, now reminds us of just how resourceful the Haitians, given the storms and earthquakes, despite the lack of organized US help, during they have managed, at very many times throughout history, their almost impossible survival). Indeed, the actors themselves literally do take “to the hills” before our very eyes, as the company uses, as in so many other Theatricum productions, the craggy landscape in which the theater sits. In this case, the hills are quite actually alive with Haitian revolutionaries.

      When the French peevishly arrive at the former mansion, once owned by the family of the now royal consort, Odette (Tiffany Coty), along with unhappy Colonel Roche (Tavis I. Baker) and his nearly always complaining wife, Pauline (Lea Madda), they discover no one around except for one seemingly obeisant servant, Jacqueline (the powerful Earnestine Phillips) who hides throughout most of this work behind a kind of stereotype of the Aunt Jemima-like maid, a woman who bows to her conquerors as if she were still the slave which she once was.

        

     In fact, Jacqueline had an affair with the owner of the estate, birthing Odette, and has determined to stay on in this ridiculous position simply to care after her daughter, or, as she puts it, “rehear her lover’s voice.” 

     Although it might have been to the eyes of the 1930s US viewers terribly controversial to have an “octoroon” heroine (DuBois evidently kept his cast of blacks and whites from touching one another), in French culture such issues of miscegenation were often easily assimilated for French colonialists in Martinique, Haiti, and even New Orleans. For the French is was not so much a matter of skin-color, but a matter of class, of the proper education, and pedigree. Dozens of famed French writers, including Balzac, recount just such women and males, easily and sometimes not so easily, enfolded into high French society.

     Odette, who if nothing else, knew that this was once her father’s estate, does not know the identity of her mother, and that becomes the central theme of this complex oedipally-centered work.

      Moreover, despite her marriage to the nasty Colonel Boucher (Jeff Wiesen), she is in love with the young, newly named Captain Duval (Dane Oliver) (a title awarded because Boucher has sent him into the wilds to destroy the Haitians, a journey he has incredibly survived).

      Gradually, the French forces lose too many soldiers to the native resistance, while the Colonel is slowly consumed by malaria. Christophe jumps in and out of the scene, at one point revealing Odette’s true paternity to the girl, the fact of which pulls her away from her beloved young hero, Duval. Discovered to be a spy, Jacqueline insists that her daughter escape with the others, that she return to the world that she, herself, has made possible for Odette to enter.

      Yet perhaps it is too late, and as she is discovered as a spy and kills herself with a deadly potion, Odette is trapped in the world into which she was born, her lover murdered by the Haitian insurgents.

       But not before a series of marvelous swordfights and battles that might have made Earl Flynn jealous. Never, on stage, have I seen a more convincing sword fight, with remarkable acrobatics, grand theatrical gestures, and heart-throbbing events. The mostly West Side Los Angeles audience, but this time, fortunately, joined by a large contingent of LA’s black community, reacted with boos, pleas of salvation, and, at times, open laughter, that I might never have imagined in contemporary theater. Suddenly I realized just how much had been lost in the rise of modernism over this kind of old-fashioned melodramatic writing, a theater that didn’t mind mixing up politics, love, fate, and just plain high-jinx.

     In the end you could only laugh and cry and root for your favorite heroes. If a bit like Hamlet, a lot of those figures lay dead on the stage by play’s end, their resurrection for curtain-call was as uplifting as theater gets. And at the wonderful Theatricum (despite their need to get ready for the late-night performance of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, a play with also has deep political roots, but with a kind of cold modernist objectivity that has always annoyed me), the actors all stand in front of the stage to greet and shake hands with the audience as it disperses. This is theater at its very best.

     The director Ellen Geer has done something quite marvelous with her very large ensemble cast, children included, particularly given the fact that she determined to revive a play that should have never been lost.

 

Los Angeles, September 3, 2018

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (September 2018).

Giacomo Puccini, Luigi Illica and Giuseppe Giacosa | La Bohème / 2008 [Filmed opera]

facing the cold

by Douglas Messerli

Giacomo Puccini (composer), Luigi Illica and Giuseppe Giacosa (libretto,based on Scénes de la vie de bohème by Henri Murger) , Robert Dornhelm (director), La Bohème / 2008 [Filmed opera]

On Sunday, September 27, 2009, Howard and I attended a movie presentation of the opera La Bohème at the Music Hall theater in Beverly Hills.

 

      Although my intention in this short piece is not particularly to evaluate the film or opera itself, I should mention that I found a great many of the filmic details to be quite annoying. Dornhelm's aerial flights between scenes gave the "realist" drama a kind fairy-tale like quality, as if God-in-all-his-wisdom were looking down on these poor folk, which was further enhanced by a presentation of the Latin Quarter—which in this version looked more like some Alpine village—in black and white before fading into color.

      Continuity throughout the film was poor, with obviously false snowflakes alternating between blizzard and gentle snowfall in a matter of seconds. Mimi's eyes in some scenes looked less like a victim of consumption than that a prize-fight boxer who'd been terribly roughed up; yet a few seconds later her makeup lightened and she was relatively pale.

      Dornhelm also presented some of the operatic duets as internal dialogues rather than sung recitatives, giving the characters a strangely mute appearance, often at the most lyrical moments of the music.

     For the most part, the singing was admirable, with beautiful performances by Rolando Villazón as Rodolfo, Anna Nerebko as Mimi, and Nicole Cabell as Musetta. But why Dornhelm could not find two Baritones, Marcello and Schaunard, who could both act and sing (George von Bergen's and Adrian Eröd's performances were sung by Boaz Daniel and Stephane Degout) is beyond me. I thought every young Baritone cut his teeth on these roles? I found the lip-synching distracting.

      For all that the opera was as joyful and emotionally wrenching as any La Bohème, and most of the rather geriatric audience could be observed weeping at opera's end.

      Normally, I might not have even written on such a well-known chestnut, presuming there is little more to be said. But a few observations might be useful, nonetheless. Throughout the opera the characters seek, other than food and the money to purchase and sustain them, primarily only three things: heat, light, and love. Of course, love can also provide some spiritual heat and light, and light, in turn, often results in heat and, particularly in the Spring, emanations of love.

     The problem for these bohemians however, one they daily face, is that they have little of the first two. Luigi Illica's and Giuseppe Giacosa's Paris has always seemed to me to be more like a Siberian settlement than the City of Light. Yes, we know it snows in Paris, and the temperature can be frigid; in January of this year, thousands of travelers were stranded at Charles DeGaulle International Airport, the Eiffel Tower was closed, and temperatures for several weeks plunged to 10 Celsius. But most would tell you that while it snows in Paris, it is not a common event. Yet the world of La Bohème is a particularly dark one, in which, so it seems, every day is a frigid challenge.

      Roldolfo and his friends begin the opera singing of their cold bodies, determining to burn either the room's only chair or Marcello's new painting; Rodolfo offers up the pages of new play, which "perform" very badly. The "play," so they jest, is not one that will last. Schaunard arrives just in time, food and wood for the fireplace in hand; he has been paid for playing the piano for a parrot.

      Soon after, with Rodolfo alone in the room, Mimi knocks, claiming her candle has gone out, and much of the rest of the scene is spent with the two of them crawling about in the dark as they look for her lost key and fall madly in love. Rodolfo's first touch of her shivering hand reveals what will remain the theme throughout the opera, how to keep Mimi warm. As their candles both dwindle, they sing of their dreams, love of the Spring and light, Mimi explaining her pleasure in roses.

      One of the first of Rodolfo's acts after meeting Mimi is to buy her a bonnet, his attempt, symbolically, to warm her. The Second Act continues the warming theme with food, drink, and the emotionally-wrought and comic song of Musetta, aimed primarily at her former lover, Marcello. Sparks fly. All in all, this is the most well-lit and warmest scene in the entire production.

     For Act Three, performed entirely in the cold winter air and, symbolically, at the very gate of the City, is the coldest of the opera. The characters remain not only outside of society and at the very edge of the City, but literally outside on the street. It is here, after suffering her lover's symbolic heat of his jealousy and fury that Mimi tells Marcello of Rodolfo's behavior and determines to leave him. But, as we know, she does not return home, staying to overhear Rodolfo's woeful tale of her tuberculosis and her certain death, all made worse by the fact that he has no way of altering their fate. His own poverty provides no warmth for the frozen woman, no light, and, in this context, no proper expression of his love. In this regard Puccini and his librettists literally create a "frieze," placing their characters costumed, in this movie version, in dark coats and dresses set against the white frozen world in which they are attempting to survive. As if Rodolfo's sorrow and Mimi's shocking discovery of her own condition were not enough, Marcello and Musetta also begin to fight, the terrified foursome revealing even further that love is nearly impossible in the world they inhabit.

      Rodolfo and Mimi are too deeply in love, however, to separate in this frozen landscape; they can only wait until April, when, at least, light returns and the flowers, and with them come the warmth of Spring and Summer.

     The end of this constant struggle, the necessity of having to continually face the cold, is played out in the last act, inevitably with Mimi's death. Yet even here, as they try to symbolically warm her, Musetta and Marcello running out to buy Mimi a muff, there is little warmth and even less light. Even trying to warm Mimi's medicine is an effort, as the flame threatens to go out. Singing to his coat—the only thing he has to keep the cold away from his flesh—Colline prepares to pawn it, sharing the money with his fellow sufferers. Love, it is clear, has survived in all of these good people, but without heat or light their love cannot heal or salve the living.

Los Angeles, September 28, 2009

Reprinted from Green Integer Blog (September 2009).

   

Margaret Leng Tan | Curios and Metamorphoses (Book I) / 2018

a queen of the piano

by Douglas Messerli

 

Margaret Leng Tan Curios (by Phyllis Chen) and  (by George Crumb) / the concert I attend at REDCAT was on November 1, 2018

 

At the wonderful REDCAT performance space in the heart of the Walt Disney Concert Hall in downtown Los Angeles, I saw a performance by Margaret Leng Tan, often described as “the queen on the toy pianos.” Well, if there is a queen of such small instruments, it must surely be Tan, yet I cannot help but feel that in describing her as such, it somehow diminishes her immense talents.

      There is no doubt that Tan is often playful—in all senses—particularly in the first work of the evening while performing Phyllis Chen’s Curios, what the program describes as a “cabinet of curiosities,” which, in this case, connects with the German circus and carnival traditions (although it also appears in several French works, such as Jean Renoir’s famed film Rules of the Game, in one of the central figure’s collection of mechanical musical instruments, perhaps a nod to the war that Germany was soon to engage with France). Here Tan, playing the comic-musician, dons various costumes, winds us various toys which briefly march across the performance space, blows on a mini-pipe organ, chirps out a bird whistle, and plays her famed toy pianos, all with such a whimsical joy that you can only be convinced that this “cabinet,” at least, is filled with a clownish spirit that is highly worth listening to.

 

     The real gems of the evening, however, are to come in George Crumb’s evocative  Metamorphoses-evoked work which, a bit like Mussorgsky’s too oft-performed Pictures at an Exhibition, steals images from modernist painting, but takes them in entirely new directions—with images from Paul Klee, Vincent van Gough, Marc Chagall, James McNeill Whistler, Jasper Johns, Salvador Dalí, and Vasily Kandinsky performed mostly on amplified toy pianos and, after an intermission, on a grand Steinway, with prepared piano and grand swirls of musical composition on keyboard, along with accompanying moans, grunts and squeals by this remarkable artist, with its highly memorable Perilous Night, a response to Jasper Johns’ 1990 composition itself a response to John Cage’s 1944 composition.                   Despite her wonderful toy-piano playing, I can only say that the second half of Tan’s concert on this particular evening, mostly with her playing, in very John Cagean, but with highly original Crumb techniques, the embedded strings of the instrument (in one instance, apparently, forcing her for a short period off the stage for a temporary finger or finger-nail injury).

 

    I’ve never been a true admirer of Chagall’s painting The Fiddler, but in Crumb’s experimental rendition, the fiddle strummed upon the piano’s innards created an entirely new vision, reinforced, moments later, with the very slightly Jewish-inspired chords Tan played out on the keyboard.

     If Dalí’s The Persistence of Memory, with its melting clock faces, is not your favorite vision of contemporary art, Crumb, with Tan’s great artistry, plucks up an evocative sense of finitude and loss of something slightly now slightly out of reach, reiterating that memory is simply something that needs to be recaptured and reiterated.

     The Tahitian death chant of Gaugin’s rather terrifying Contes barbares, sung by Tan as she performs, is a slightly sinister and horrifying movement into the grave.

     The little Blue Rider of Kandinsky’s work, in Crumb’s insistence and in Tan’s performance, rides into the landscape so forcefully that you simply have to applaud his presence upon the much larger space unto which he has launched himself. He is a hero, in this musical version, in the making, a figure on the verge of reality which in his relentless rhythmic forward drive forces himself upon the scene.

      The span of the toy to the grand, prepared, piano, in short, represents a world in Tan’s significant shifts throughout her theatrically-gifted performance, that spans the comic to the tragic, moving from a world of childish wonderment to a deep immersion into the human psychology.

      If Tan is a queen, it is of total piano performance. The “toy” is only the half of it.

 

Los Angeles, November 2, 2018

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (November 2018).