Trey Parker, Robert Lopez, and Matt Stone | The Book of Mormon / 2017

look to the rainbow: a post-mortem

by Douglas Messerli

 

Trey Parker, Robert Lopez, and Matt Stone (book, music, and lyrics) The Book of Mormon / 2011, the performance I saw with Howard Fox was in Los Angeles, The Pantages Theatre, at the matinee on Thursday, July 6, 2017.

 

Well, now I’ve gone and done it! For years since its 2011 Broadway opening, I’ve studiously averted my gaze to save me from angrily pounding out my keystrokes on the hide of a musical I knew I would probably not like, The Book of Mormon.

 

     It’s not that I had any aversion to musical parodies of beliefs—I’m openly a non-believer of all religions—and certainly, given what I’d previously read about Mormonism, it appears to deserve some of the mockery of Trey Parker, Robert Lopez, and Matt Stone’s sweet assault. Their music and lyrics I’d heard from the South Park musicals and Q Street (I did not see these works, nor the Disney film Finding Nemo; but through Tony broadcasts and other sources, I’d heard several numbers) seemed, if not exactly glorious, nonetheless, full of puckish wit and pleasing to the ear—certainly a step-above the three-note choruses of some far more grandiose Broadway musicals which had become run-away hits. I knew the cast, filled with young and handsome Mormon missionaries and American black actors pretending to be illiterate Africans, at the very least, would sing pleasingly and dance up a storm. And even though I feared that the collusion of Mormonism and Ugandan natives would inevitably lead to racist situations, who was I, who as a child had even imagined and attempted to compose a musical about missionaries in the Congo set in the year of that country’s independence (see My Year 2011), to dismiss such an encounter.

      As a long-time lover and observer of the Broadway musical theater, perhaps I owed it to myself, I inwardly argued, to take in a musical that had received almost universal acclaim by critics and was beloved by its audiences. Even if I’d hated the entire idea of Cats (while enjoying a couple of its musical numbers), couldn’t bear to hear another bellowing chorus of Les Misérables (I eventually saw the movie), and had detested the righteous screaming British girls of Matilda, why was I behaving like such a curmudgeon over this seemingly infectious, irreverent confection. After all, if even the Church of the Latter Day Saints could embrace the work—wittily advertising their Book of Mormon in a Playbill ad by saying: “Our version is sliiiightly different. The musical is entertaining. The book? It’s life changing”—what right did I have to be so utterly standoffish?  

     What was I so afraid of in encountering in this belovèd American satire that I couldn’t even spend a few hours in its company? Some people have always described me as a slightly different kind of moral prig (this despite my constant embracement of what many in this culture might describe as utterly immoral artistic artifacts and behavior). Maybe I was a variation of a prig. If most all of the critics and audiences had had a great time at The Book of Mormon—all around us in the Pantages production I finally saw, other attendees were telling others that they’d seen the musical several times—what was my problem?

      The problem, I now realize, concerned my fears of writing the very review you’re about to read. And for that very reason, put it aside if you don’t care about the critical commentary I’m about to unleash. I am not trying to convince anyone about anything. I finally broke down and asked Howard to attend the musical with me when orchestra tickets were offered for a couple of days at only $49—this was, after all, the production’s 2nd or 3rd trip to Los Angeles—and the sold-out audience was entirely entranced, clapping enthusiastically after each number, laughing out-loud, and, of course, giving the entire production a standing ovation. They all seemed to have so much fun, I feel kind of embarrassed by some of my contradictory comments. If I seem informed or intelligent, please forgive me; I’d rather enjoyed this well-meaning satire the way everyone else around me did.

       So, big deal that this isn’t truly a musical, the way, say, all the Rodgers and Hammerstein, Frank Loesser, Lerner and Lowe, Bock and Harnick, or even the looser constructed works of Kander and Ebb were. Nor, is this a purposely genre-bending work in the tradition of Stephen Sondheim.  The Book of the Mormon harks back to an earlier time when, even as in some Cole Porter works, musicals were perceived as extended reviews, one song loosely connected to another with very brief verbal, interlinking skits. The songs, unlike in Oklahoma! or the even more fine-tuned My Fair Lady, are not emotional expressions of plot, but are themselves presented as plot, despite the difficulty of summarizing events in stanzas of basically rhymed couplets; the lyricists here use internal rhyme as well. 

     In her wonderful one-person review, At Liberty, Elaine Stritch recalls just such a production, Angels in the Wings, 70 years ago, where, after having only a speaking role, she was “awarded” a song, “Civilization,” which is not so very different from this musical’s  "Sal Tlay Ka Siti," sung by the character Nabulungi (Myha’la Herrold)—except for the important difference that Stritch’s native figure fears civilization and “wants to stay,” while Nabulungi most definitely wants to go:

 

                              I can imagine what it must be like

                              This perfect, happy place

                              I’ll bet the goat-meat there is plentiful

                              And they have vitamin injections by the case

                              The war-lords there are friendly

                              They help you cross the street

                              And there’s a Red Cross on every corner

                              With all the flour you can eat

 

     Part of the difference between the two is simply the changes in native societies over those 70 years. The Uganda in which Nabulungi lives is filled with violence, AIDS, female genital mutilation, famine, and other detriments to survival, to which the white intruders here appear to offer alternatives. But to the Congo native who Stritch played, even with its obvious racist attitudes—yet far less so that Nabulungi’s delusions—things were better in her world than civilization had to offer:

 

So bongo, bongo, bongo, I don't want to leave the

    congo, oh no no no no no

Bingo, bangle, bungle, I'm so happy in the jungle,

     I refuse to go

Don't want no bright lights, false teeth, doorbells,

     landlords, I make it clear

 (That no matter how they coax him) I'll stay

     right here

 

      However, I’m not yet talking about The Book of Mormon’s racist attitudes (I’ll come to that later), but about its structure. Like the review in which Stritch played in 1947, The Book of Mormon is a piecemeal affair. The story about the conflicts between Mormon missionaries and the small village members in Uganda is stitched together with songs that often times have utterly no relationship to the overall story or to one another. What does “You and Me (But Mostly Me),” sung by the self-centric Elder Price (Gabe Gibbs), and his wonderful tribute to his childhood memories of “Orlando” in the second act, have to do with the actual story except to point to his personal fantasies and a world outside of which the musical setting exists? Even his “Spooky Mormon Hell Dream”—one of the best numbers of the show, if only because of its costumes by Ann Roth—is a psychological portrait of the central character that has little to do with the overall plot structure, and offers very little connection to the work’s other characters, except for a delightful quip by another missionary, Elder McKinley (PJ Adzima) who, after discerning that Price has had a “hell dream,” probingly asks” “Was I in it?” That’s about as deep as plot gets in this musical.

 

      I don’t really mind the review structure. Even though as early as 1927 Oscar Hammerstein II and Jerome Kern had shown theater audiences in Show Boat that music and plot could be deeply connected, numerous major practitioners of musical theater, from George M. Cohan to George Gershwin (in Of Thee I Sing and several earlier and later musicals), along with Cole Porter, and numerous others, still preferred the revue structure, the songs dominating any plot connections that the librettist or book writer had woven into their works. I love Porter’s Anything Goes despite the fact that its overall story whips up a very daffy fantasy. With the witty songs by Porter, does it really matter? Irving Berlin’s music was interwoven into all sorts of silly Broadway and film illusions where plot was certainly secondary to the music.

      The problem, ultimately, is not that this work is simply a revue, but that it is almost a kind of “Forbidden Broadway” version of a revue, one of those off-Broadway shows that beautifully mock Broadway tropes. The latest in this tradition is the hit, Spamilton, making loving fun of the new hit Hamilton. In The Book of Mormon we see these satiric forces at work it its references to the musical Annie, replacing the notion of “Tomorrow” with “Latter;” and the musical The Sound of Music, particularly with the issue of “what to do we do with a problem” like Andy (Connor Pierson). Most importantly, obviously, is the complete pastiche of the famed “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” performance in Rodger’s and Hammerstein’s The King and I, mocked in the long Ugandan villagers’ production of their own version of Mormon history of “Joseph Smith American Moses.” And there are other inside jokes in the dancing as well as the songs (the missionaries often appear to be mocking Bob Fosse numbers). There is something absolutely lovely about this musical’s parodies of these other American classics; but, one has to wonder, is this simply another version of “Forbidden Broadway” or a really new significant American musical work?

       I might equally have loved The Book of Mormon, of course, if its songs to which the almost non-existent story was attached, were actually memorable. But most of these numbers, I am afraid, are simply ditties, even if some of them are quite clever; none of them are truly memorable offerings to the history of Broadway song library. A couple of them get quite close to actual musical significance, particularly in the second act’s “I Believe,” sung by Gibbs, where in the musical actually awakens, for a few moments, from its over-amplified loud declarations into an actual proclamation of identity:

 

I believe that the Lord God created the universe

I believe that he sent his only son to die for my sins

And I believe that ancient Jews built boats and sailed to America

I am a Mormon

And a Mormon just believes

 

You cannot just believe part-way, you have to believe in it all

My problem was doubting the Lord's will, instead of standing tall

I can't allow myself to have any doubt, it's time to set my worries free

Time to show the world what Elder Price is about, and share the power inside of me

 

I believe that God has a plan for all of us

I believe that plan involves me getting my own planet

And I believe that the current President of the Church, Thomas Monson, speaks directly to God

I am a Mormon

And, dang it, a Mormon just believes (a Mormon just believes)

 

    But even here, obviously, the satiric intent of the song drips so strongly upon the excited proclamations of the singer, that it diminishes the performance of the character himself. It is a kind of mockery without true feeling.

      Compare this, for example, with the similarly ridiculous song of belief of Finian’s Rainbow sung by Finian’s daughter, Sharon, in the equally ludicrous musical by E. Y. Harburg, Fred Saidy, and Burton Lane (the composer):

 

 Look, look, look to the rainbow

 Follow it over the hill and the stream

 Look, look, look to the rainbow

 Follow the fellow who follows a dream

 

 So I bundled me heart and I roamed the world free

 To the east with the lark, to the west with the sea

 And I've searched all the earth and I've scanned all the skies

 But I found it at last in me own true love's eyes

 

 Look, look, look to the rainbow

 Follow it over the hill and stream

 Look, look, look to the rainbow

 Follow the fellow who follows a dream

 

 Follow, the fellow, follow, the fellow

 Follow, the fellow who follows a dream

 

    The sentiment, sung by an identifiable Irish outsider, is similar to the Mormon musical, but the lyrics point outward to something else—another possibility, a new world viewed through the eyes of another. And, admittedly, Burton Lane’s music cannot be compared with the often tune-dead songs of Parker, Lopez, and Stone.

    Finian’s Rainbow is also a political and social satire, making fun of both racial attitudes and religious sensibilities, including a figure as improbable (Og, the leprechaun) as The Book of Mormon’s hobbits, Darth Vader, and Yoda, which the impulsive liar Edler Arnold Cunnigham incorporates into his Mormon teachings. Finian, also, is an absolute liar. If the Mormon missionaries of The Book of Mormon suddenly seem to discover—in an obvious satirical spoof of their intentions—that “I Am Africa,” in the 1947 musical (the same year as the Stritch review), a bigoted Senator of the older Lane and Harburg musical is actually turned black and must live with the consequences on his own racist terms. The natives in that musical—in this case poor Southern farm workers—also dream of better times in “That Great Come-and-Get-It Day,” and awaken to the fact that their dreams, just as the Ugandan villagers perceive, have all been a metaphor for what might really have happened. Perhaps, without even admitting it, The Book of Mormon has roots in this kind of fantastical musical theater.

     The Book of Mormon, accordingly, has Broadway roots, which might have allowed it to truly become the kind of classic that many proclaim it to be. The problem is that its writers don’t truly know how to control their satire to focus on what they might truly want to say. Finian’s Rainbow was a true socialist and anti-racist argument, while The Book of Mormon has no political or broad social aspirations.

     These Mormon missionaries seem, in large part, to be participating in a gay satire of the figures that exist—I’m sorry to report to the mostly heterosexual, family audience I encountered at the Pantages—on a lot of gay porno sites. There are number of such sites that present just such missionaries ringing the bells (celebrated in the musical’s first song, “Hello”) who encounter a seemingly willing believer who quickly seduces the innocent Mormon boys into his bed. (Perhaps there are heterosexual variants of which I’m unaware.)

     The musical actually makes a great deal of this metaphor, reinforcing the idea that the missionaries are sent out with “companions” with whom they are “attached” for at least two years. In this kind of strange “marriage,” the men often share a bed, and, at least in the case of the awkward and much unloved Elder Arnold Cunningham (Pierson), results in a relationship consummated through a great deal of hand-on-hand touching (the original Broadway Cunningham, Josh Gad, played just such a role in Disney’s Beauty and the Beast). Most of the original missionaries, who have lived long in Uganda without finding a single person to be converted, seem to have formed a kind of “underground” league with their leader, an obvious gay man, Elder McKinley, that clearly reminds one of the gay community of the earlier decades wherein, with their continually high-pitched, often shrieking voices the necessarily closeted men lived, nightly or weekly celebrating in an almost kind of gay hysteria, the comraderie—much like the one expressed in this musical’s number, “Turn It Off,” which might almost be a theme song for gay men seemingly trapped for life in the closet.

      As a gay man, I’m fascinated by this thematic, which, since it’s not very hidden, must be quite apparent to the lovingly diverse audiences who embrace this musical every afternoon and evening. I should delight in this fact, and the openness with which that the musical’s audiences seem to gladly accept it. I wonder, since the writers are reported to have interviewed several young returned Mormon missionaries as they developed the musical, just how much truth this structural element projects. I’m not sure I really want to know. As my friend Charles Bernstein suggested, when he first saw this work on Broadway, it all seems a bit surrealistic.

      It’s really not the issue, of course; the writers chose to make these overlaying gay insinuations, and even when their musical, for brief periods of times, imagines heterosexual relationships, as in Cunningham’s contemplation of baptizing his new convert, Nabulungi (who throughout the work he describes in various racially-motivated names: “Oreo,” Nutrena, etc. etc.) is wrapped up in sexual language and imagination.

      These Mormons, whether gay innocents or, possibly, male sexual aggressors, are still the controllers of the situation, despite their personal sense of inadequacy. Given my own white male social prerogatives, I will not attempt to judge this musical on racial grounds. Others, such as Cheryl Thompson and Kate Wilson have done so. Yet it does appear to me, as a first-time observer, that any musical that presents its black figures to be completely entranced by the Mormon religion, and willing, as in the musical’s last number suggests, not only to embrace a new book “of Arnold,” but to go door to door (in a reprise of “Welcome”) to promote their new religion, are not basically free-thinking beings. Apparently, they have now been complexly “saved” and are mentally controlled by their white (now “African-thinking”) visitor/intruders. Are Ugandans really so simple minded? I cannot imagine the reality that this musical dares to.

      Finally, however, I think the musical’s largest failure lies in its complete acceptance of religion as a kind of cynical thinking: whatever works to help individuals is more important than any true spiritual experience. The “Book of Arnold”—not only with its lies, but its free-spirited sci-fi incorporations—is just as good as The Book of Mormon, or, at least, it doesn’t matter, as long as it makes for better human communication.

     I might second that were it not for this new religion’s seemingly easy links with something like the fictional writings of Ron L. Hubbard, the creator of Scientology, than with any coherent set of religious beliefs. The idea that anything is good if it can bring people together, I fear, is as cynical, in the end, as Trump’s philosophy of giving believers what they want: himself, like Arnold, a congenital liar who can easily convince anyone of what he and others temporarily believe. Is the confused and unintelligent Andy really any different, in the end, from our current president?

     Since I don’t believe, some may wonder why I should even care about these issues. But, strangely enough, particularly since I don’t believe, I very much do care. Any perceived savior of the people, I am afraid, is a very dangerous obstruction to individual thinking. I suppose those ringing doorbells at the end might symbolize an entire community of individuals trying to reach out to one another, but I fear what may be at the other end. Hello, Darth Vader is calling you! Sorry, I’m not at home!

      In closing, I am somewhat embarrassed at having attempted to kill a sparrow with an anvil or, at least, a cleaver. There were moments when this sparrow of a musical actually moved me, and, admittedly, I was almost moved to tears. As I’ve often mentioned, when I am truly moved by musicals, the tears flow endlessly. Let the sparrow fly away! Let the audiences enjoy their entertainments. And both Howard and I noted that the excellent orchestra let loose, as the patrons were leaving the theater, in a kind of rock/jazz rendition of the score that might have energized this work had it been included.

     But I do pray that we think about what these entertainments are truly trying to say. Not any belief, surely, is a good as any other. And for all the laughs on Broadway, Hollywood Boulevard, or any other major performative space, there may be whimpers of the true believer’s sacrifice—whatever that belief may be. I’ll take the rainbow any day over the doorbell’s ring to convince me of something I can’t truly believe in. And I can only answer, if it rings, “Please, leave me alone, you might not want to hear what I need to say.” I was silent about this work for so many years with very good reason.”

 

Los Angeles, July 7, 2017

Reprinted from US Theater, Opera, and Performance (July 2017).

Harold Pinter | The Homecoming / 2008

the homecoming gift

by Douglas Messerli

 

Harold Pinter The Homecoming / 2007 / the production I saw was a matinee of January 20, 2008 at the Cort Theatre

 

While in New York City in January 2008, I attended the revival of Harold Pinter’s The Homecoming at the Cort Theatre.

     Although I’d read the play upon its first publication in 1967, I’d never previously seen a production of the play, and I’d forgotten much of its dialogue. The plot is not what this play is about, but I’ll briefly recount it for those readers unfamiliar with Pinter’s great work.

     Teddy, a professor of philosophy now living with his wife, Ruth (Eve Best in the production I saw) in the US, returns to his North London childhood home in the middle of the night. He suggests they retire to his old room—checking first to be sure it’s still “there” or, at least, empty—but Ruth prefers a short walk, the first sign there may be something amiss between the two, particularly when she promises Teddy, she’ll return. He goes to bed, and as she reenters the house she encounters the first of Teddy’s brothers, Lenny, a small-time pimp, who relates several violent stories about his relationship with women before he challenges his sister-in-law by insisting he remove her glass of water. Ruth refuses to give it up, suggesting he take a sip, and even offering for him to sit on her lap before she climbs the stairs to bed.

     Upon discovering the next morning that his son has returned home, Teddy’s father Max (Ian McShane), is outraged at not being told, and when Ruth is presented to him, vociferously insists that she is a tart until they can convince him that they are, indeed, married, blessed with two children. By the second act, Ruth has been introduced to Max’s third son, Joey, an inarticulate young man who desires to become a boxer, and Max’s brother, Sam, who works as a chauffeur. Except for Sam, this “family,” it soon becomes apparent, is more like a jeering and leering cannibal clan than a gathering of a loving father and sons. It also becomes apparent that, although she appears rather refined and well-dressed, Ruth fits quite easily into this brutal situation: she is, as she admits, originally from the neighborhood, and soon after we discover that she was, in fact, a prostitute in her previous life. Before long she is languidly embracing Lenny and sexually fondling Joey on the living room floor. By play’s end she has bedded down with Joey in the upstairs bedroom, and Lenny has offered her a flat where she can ply her trade a few hours every day in order to help pay for her boarding in their house. Sam collapses in a heart attack, revealing that the boy’s mother, Jessie, had sex in his cab with Max’s former friend, MacGregor. The nearly speechless Teddy leaves, to return to his two children, alone.

     This rather bizarre series of events was obviously quite shocking to theater goers in 1965, and many equally bizarre critical theories of the play’s meanings arose, including a suggestion by some critics that Ruth and Teddy were not truly married—an idea that is given no credence by the play itself. In fact, the “events” of this play seem, as strange as they are, almost inevitable given the grungy conditions of both house and inhabitants and the obviously stifling life and the husband Ruth leaves behind. While Teddy seems oddly unaware of any unusual behavior in his family, and has little to say about anything—he is proud of his “intellectual equilibrium,” his ability to operate on things, not in things—his family members are absolutely quivering with love, hate, sexuality and violence, which they brilliantly express to one another not only in their actions but through their lively language. Pinter’s play, accordingly, is not truly about what happens, but about how it happens and what is said.

     At the center of this linguistic battleground is Lenny, brilliantly played by Raúl Esparza. If in last year’s Company he was given little to do as an actor, in this play he is at the center of the verbal fireworks, pushing and probing through language for each character’s weaknesses. While his brother teaches philosophy, but has a focus so narrow that almost any issue is outside his “province,” Lenny is ready to consider the major questions of Western thought such as “a certain logical incoherence in the central affirmations of Christian theism,” and the “business of being and not-being.”

 

“…I’ve got a couple of friends of mine, we often sit around the Ritz Bar having a few liqueurs, and they’re always saying things like that, you know, things like: Take a table, take it. All right I say, take it, take a table, but once you’ve taken it, what you going to do with it? Once you’ve got hold of it, where are you going to take it?”

 

When asked what a table is, Teddy can only respond, “A table.”

     Max may not be brilliant, but he is hilariously clever in his never-ending abuse of those about him. To his brother, Sam, he lectures:

 

“Look what I’m lumbered with. One cast-iron bunch of crap after another. One flow of stinking pus after another. Pause. Our father? I remember him. Don’t worry. You kid yourself. He used to come over to me and look down at me. My old man did. He’d bend right over me, then he’d pick me up. I was only that big. Then he’d dandle me. Give me the bottle. Wipe me clean. Give me a smile. Pat me on the bum. Pass me around, pass me from hand to hand. Toss me up in the air. Catch me coming down. I remember my father.”

 

     Even the near mentally-handicapped Joey is a philosopher of sorts; when Lenny discovers that after two hours in bed with Ruth, Joey has not gotten any “gravy,” he calls her a “tease,” to which Joey responds that a man can be “satisfied” without “going any hog,” recognizing the fact that sex is far more than ejaculation.

     In short, these men may be self-destructive criminal-types, Max, a violent braggart whom Pinter hints may even have sexually abused his children in their nightly baths, Lenny, a misogynistic voyeur, and Joey, a brutal oaf, but they nonetheless are stimulatingly alive, and in the end, Ruth inevitably prefers their company to her frigid scholar.

     There is even a suggestion that Teddy has brought Ruth into his home and now her new home as a gift to his family, as a sort of return token of his esteem. His suggestion that she is very popular with the other faculty members hints that Ruth may have been sexually involved with his fellow faculty, endangering Teddy’s position. That would certainly explain his aloofness throughout much of the play, and his attempt to quickly escape his family’s embrace.

     By play’s end, however, Ruth has found much more than a home, she has rediscovered a career and is in control of this miserable family. As Max screams out for her attention, Joey fondles her knee, and Lenny stands simply watching, we recognize that she will not have too many familiar “duties” when it comes to her new household, that she can easily fulfill their desires for wife, mother, lover without ever having to give much of herself. Like Jessie, Max’s former wife, she will easily be able to have her own way.

 

Los Angeles, February 3, 2008

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (February 2008).

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).