Béla Bartók and Béla Balázs | Bluebeard’s Castle / 2014

locking up being

by Douglas Messerli

 

Béla Bartók (music), Béla Balázs (libretto, based on a story by Charles Perreault) Bluebeard’s Castle / LAOpera, Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, the production I attended was a matinee on November 2, 2014

 

Béla Bartók’s quite terrifying opera of 1911, Bluebeard’s Castle, steals from elements of the original Charles Perreault story, but expands the work into a psycho-dramatic work that shows the influence of Freud, whose writings on William Jensen’s novel Gradiva, a work which has links to the Bartok work in the sexual obsessions of its hero, had just recently been published in 1906-1909.

     One might make interesting parallels between the Jensen and Bartok works in how Judith (Claudia Mahnke), recently married to Bluebeard (Robert Hayward) struggles throughout this short opera to cure him, in the latter case by attempting to open up all the seven rooms of his castle which he has purposely locked. The rooms are, obviously, different aspects of himself, elements of his past that he no longer wishes to consciously admit in his present life. Her hope is that by opening each of these rooms, she will bring light into Bluebeard’s castle once again, while psychologically curing him of his inability to face the past errors of his ways.

     Yet librettist Béla Balázs makes his story more complex by suggesting that Judith is far more than a naïve do-gooder. In terms of this version of the story, Judith has been “raped,” carried off by Bluebeard unwillingly from her family, perhaps when she has already been promised to another man. Moreover, she has heard rumors of Bluebeard, including the suggestion that he has murdered his former wives. Despite these facts, however, she declares that she loves him and that her intentions are all directed at changing his life for the better.

      Even if we ignore the fact that as a “victim” she parallels the behavior of what we today describe as individuals suffering from the “Stockholm Syndrome,” wherein the captive bonds with the captor, we cannot ignore that Judith’s quite obviously tortured love of Bluebeard—quite brilliantly choreographed under Barrie Kosky’s direction as a kind of brutal dance in which the characters pull and push against one another, falling, embracing and drawing one another in opposite directions that reminds me of figures in certain Fassbinder films or American artist Robert Longo’s paintings of the late 1970s and 1980s—is inevitably fraught with emotional suffering. Although it might be difficult to pin down Bluebeard’s major psychosis, he is most certainly a kind of misogynist, both in his sexual objectification of women and in his violence against them. He may also be a closet homosexual—he lives, after all, in a completely closeted world—which also helps to explain Judith’s determination to “help” him. We all know of women and men who believe that can cure what they perceive as sexual aberrations in the opposite sex, one of the most noted examples in literature being Blanche DuBois in Tennessee Williams A Streetcar Named Desire, who unintentionally helped to cause the suicide of her youthful suitor. 

     Going room by room throughout his castle, demanding the keys to his empire which he reluctantly but also somewhat willingly awards her, she uncovers his terrible history that includes torture, violence, great wealth, but also a secret garden, other vast land-holdings, and a lake—all built upon the blood and tears of those who have come before. Indeed, every surface of Bluebeard’s castle is described as oozing water and blood.

     While in most productions of this opera the various contents of the six rooms are expressed with corresponding colors—red, yellow, golden, blue-green, white and black—Kosky has chosen to forego these for what seem to me as a few cheap tricks such as vines being pulled from the sleeves of inexplicable male alter-egos of Bluebeard (perhaps also suggesting Bluebeard’s male companions) for the garden scene and hands full of tinsel tossed to suggest Judith’s discovery of Bluebeard’s treasury. I have no difficulty with the round, moon-like sphere upon which the actors circle in their door-opening treks; the director has presented us with a kind of planetary manifestation that immediately tells us that this tale takes place outside of time and space. But the colors might have helped in clarifying what Judith actually witnesses, while the occasional props Kosky chooses to present are simply distracting.    

     The colors also seem to me to be of importance because they represent a kind of progression of tonal hues we might associate with the morning, noon, evening, and night which are emphatically reiterated by the three former wives Judith discovers in the seventh room.

     Each is linked up by Bluebeard as representing the time in which he first met them, and, accordingly, is associated with the passage of day from sunrise to sunset. In short, in marrying and then locking away these three women, allowing Bluebeard to gradually close himself off from any daylight routine in his determination to “kill time.” If he now lives in the shadow of time, his only hope of putting an end to it all is to also lock up the night, which he suddenly reveals is the modality he associates with Judith. Ironically, despite her attempts to bring light into Bluebeard’s life, she has actually brought him the one missing element he needs to bring an end to his existence, the pitch black of midnight. By locking her up as well, he locks away being itself.

     Here, once more, Kosky simply fails to comprehend the story in his directorial decision to keep the stage lit while the curtain falls. It seems to me that the moment Bluebeard has revealed Judith’s role, the moon-light orb upon should suddenly be plunged into darkness. But this is another minor flaw in an otherwise outstanding production of a work that should be performed far more often.

 

Los Angeles, November 4, 2014

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (November 2014).

 

Amiri Baraka | The Toilet / 1964; reprinted 1998 [reading of play]

 essential dichotomies

by Douglas Messerli

 

Amiri Baraka The Toilet, first presented in New York at St. Mark’s Playhouse, on December 16, 1964; reprinted from Douglas Messerli and Mac Wellman, eds., From the Other Side of the Century II: A New American Drama 1960-1995 (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press, 1998)

 

On the surface, Amiri Baraka’s short play of 1964, The Toilet, appears to be nothing but a documentation of a bullying incident in a high school, with a majority of black boys beating a frail white boy, Karolis, who has apparently written a kind of love letter to the head of the black gang, Foots (or Ray). It might be superficially represented as a kind of abbreviated “rumble” scene out of West Side Story.

 

     But the authenticity of Baraka’s language and his briefly catalogued “types” at the beginning of the script, quickly—and the play is performed, surely, at nearly lightning speed—transforms this work into a drama which, quite subtly, explores a whole series of dialectical issues: masculinity and its inverse, weakness, power and powerlessness, futility and hope, justice and brutal punishment, leadership and rebellion, and, most importantly, love and hate.

      The play begins, strangely enough, somewhat offstage, as several members of the gang, the “short, ugly, crude, and loud Ora” (a.k.a. Big Shot), the “tall, thin, and somewhat sensitive,” Willie Love, and the “big, husky, somber, and cynical” Perry report to each other that their would-be victim is upstairs hiding in various classrooms as others of their group attempt to seek him out. Like young, angry youths everywhere, these boys not only report the goings on, as they meet in the stinking, high-school boy’s bathroom, but swear at each other, and pretend to battle, all the while showing off their supposed virility and strength through their acts of urination and other uses of their sexual members. The following “attack” on Karolis, accordingly, is not only a response to his homosexual challenge to their leader, Foots, but is to be a kind of proving of the only thing these desperate kids have left, their “manhoods.”

     Through their jests with each other, we quickly learn that several of these young men do not even have parents, others live lives of destitution, and nearly all of them are doomed to failure in their future lives. They describe each other the way the society around them has, with words like “bastid,” “punk,” “muthafucka,” “sonofabitch,” and, yes, “nigger.” These are the lost boys of the street, forced to gather in the institution which they so detest.

      Only Foots (Ray) seems to have any intelligence, as he reports that the authorities, evidently, think highly of him, and hope that we will prevent any attack of another student. Baraka describes him, quite poetically, as “short, intelligent, manic,” a “possessor of a threatened empire.” That empire, of course, is a mean-spirited gang, ready to implode or explode, depending on which series of emotional responses they take. They have already exploded by the time they bring Karolis to their lair, having beaten him so badly that for much of the play he cannot even talk.

      Foots wisely refuses to beat him any further, insisting that to do so would be meaningless, since the white boy is already sprawled out upon the floor. But the others, particularly Ora, are determined to see more blood in revenge for his daring. Another white boy, Donald Farrell (“tall, thin, blonde, awkward, soft”)—who seems tangentially part of the gang, but is not very welcome in its midst—tries to talk them down from doing any further damage, bravely refusing to leave the toilet unless Karolis goes with him. He fails, and is literally physically expelled from their group.

     Foots, accordingly, is in a difficult position. If he does not show enough outrage for Karolis’ challenge, he will be seen as weak, possibly even in cohorts with the boys offer to “blow him.”; yet he rightly sees no pleasure in fighting someone who has already been felled. A lesser playwright may have had this character throw a couple of more sucker-punches and left it at that. But Baraka intensifies the situation by suddenly having Karolis demand a fight with Foots, a fight he knows he cannot win. It may be that the gay boy has even a lower self-esteem than the blacks in this work; or, at least, in fighting he might have some sort of physical contact with Ray, whom he describes as “beautiful.”

     Foots, now gradually being described by Karolis and the others by his ordinary name, Ray, continues to refuse to fight. But Karolis, quite eloquently (described by the playwright as “Very skinny and not essentially attractive except when he speaks”) continues to challenge his “rival,” bragging that he will “kill him.” Suddenly everything changes, as the gang members, eager to see the fight, move in on the two, egging on the fight Ray is trying to prevent. When the fight does get underway, it is Karolis who gets Ray into a stranglehold, while the gang head is rendered inoperative; when his power is suddenly thrown into question, the others, in response, enter into the fray, beating Karolis again into submission, as Ray lays also flattened across the floor.

      Finally getting their revenge, the others move off, as Karolis drags himself into a toilet cubicle to recover. And, here again, Baraka surprises us, as with the last of his stage instructions:

 

                    After a moment or so karolis moves his hand. Then his head moves

                    and he tries to look up. He draws his legs up under him and pushes

                    his head off the floor. Finally he manages to get to his hands and knees.

                    He crawls over to one of the commodes, pulls himself up, then falls

                    backward awkwardly and heavily. At this point the door is pushed

                    open slightly, then it opens completely and foots comes in. He

                    stares at karolis’ body for a second, looks quickly over his shoulder,

                    then runs and kneels before the body, weeping and cradling the head

                    in his arms.

 

I don’t know how this scene is represented in the stage production—I’ve never seen the play performed—but the way the scene is written seems more appropriate for film than for stage, simply because we are, at first, not told that it is Foots who is about to enter the cubicle, the fact of which is kept from us, in the directions, until the very last moment. Similarly, his actions—reminding us of both a kind of crucifixion and pietà, as well as an expression of sorrow and, finally, homosexual love—startlingly reveals that the young “skinny” white boy has won this battle, at least, that the bullied has defeated his tormentors through his unconditional love. What we might have perceived as a set and predetermined series of events is, in fact, flexible. The realities of youth, as we must always admit, are never quite what they seem to be. And with one fell swoop, this gifted playwright dispenses with the very essential dichotomies which he seems to have created. Everything in this play, we suddenly recognize, is not so “black and white” as it originally seems.

      That the angry revolutionary of 1964—by this time Baraka had already traveled to Cuba, arguing that art and politics should be indissolubly linked, the same year as The Toilet writing his screed of white and black hate, Dutchman—is equally surprising—unless you know the Baraka I and others knew—a man who might continually be seen, as The New York Times obituary yesterday reiterated, as a “provocateur”—but as a true “optimist,” even though he admitted his optimism was “one of a very particular sort.”

 

Los Angeles, January 11, 2014

Reprintted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (January 2014).