Adrienne Kennedy Funnyhouse of a Negro / 1964 [reading of play]

hersevles: a chamber piece

by Douglas Messerli

 

Adrienne Kennedy Funnyhouse of a Negro / 1964

Adrienne Kennedy Collected Plays & Other Writings, ed. by Marc Robinson (New York: Library of America, 2023)

 

One is tempted to describe Adrienne Kennedy’s 1964 play, Funnyhouse of a Negro, as a kind of chamber piece in black and white. The play takes place in the bedroom of a young woman, Sarah, lit in harsh white played behind a bright white, torn, cheaply-made curtain. Surrounding this spot of “ghastly” white is an “unnatural” black, in which the various imaginary encounters with other “herselves”—the Duchess of Hapsburg, Queen Victoria Regina, Jesus, and Patrice Lumumba—the interior companions of Negro-Sarah, as she is referred to in the cast listing, take place. Accordingly, the very stage set sets up the central tension of this play, an interchange of black and white. And interestingly, despite Sarah’s self-detestation of her own “blackness,” it is in the “unnatural” darkness where all her creative activity occurs. The “white room” of her world is only vaguely defined by the author: “Her room should have a bed, a writing table and a mirror. Near her bed is the statue of Queen Victoria; other objects might be her photographs and her books.” It is a world, in short, of commodities.     

     Yet Kennedy’s startling play is not simply about the basic dichotomies at the heart of this work—the American culture’s long history of breaking down everything into black-and-white (both racially and intellectually)—but is more about all that lies in between, both in terms of racial makeup and in terms of reality—or perhaps what I should speak of as “surreality.”

      Sarah might be to the society at large a “negro,” but to herself she is of mixed heritage, her mother appearing so white that her hair as not even “frizzy,” evidently the product of a mixed marriage. Sarah’s father, whom she detests and is terrified of, is described of as very black, a man haunting Sarah each night from the jungle he once inhabited. Through bits and pieces of dialogue and various retellings from the imaginary characters of Sarah’s mind, we begin to perceive that, upon marrying Sarah’s mother, the father moved his family to Africa where he might, as his own mother wished, “save the race.”

 

                              You must return to Africa, find revelation in the midst

                              of golden savannas, nim and white frankopenny trees,

                              white stallions roaming under a blue sky, you must walk

                              with a white dove and heal the race, heal the misery, take

                              us off the cross…..

 

Her vision of this paradisiacal Africa, in short, is as absurd as Sarah’s own desire to live at the edges of things, in anonymity:

 

                              I am an English major, as my mother was when she went

                              to school in Atlanta…. I am graduated from a city college

                              and have occasional work in libraries, but mostly spend my

                              days preoccupied with the placement and geometric position

                              of words on paper. I write poetry filling white page after

                              white page with imitations of Edith Sitwell. It is my dream

                              to live in rooms with European antiques and my Queen

                              Victoria, photographs of Roman ruins, walls of books, a

                              piano, oriental carpets and to eat my meals on a white

                              glass table. I will visit my friends’ apartments which will

                              contain books, photographs of Roman ruins, pianos and

                              oriental carpets. My friends will be white.

 

Sarah, in sum, wants everything that a bourgeois consumer might desire. Yet each night she is haunted by the return of her dead father—a man whom we are told by the other two “other” figures of this play hung himself in his Harlem hotel upon the death of Patrice Lumumba, but whom Sarah insists she herself as killed by bludgeoning him with an ebony mask—reminding her of her societal position as a “nigger,” and all that dreadful aspersion signifies in a racist world.

     Sarah’s desired world contains no love, and she herself is unable to forgive. She admits to not particularly liking her friends, and makes it clear, despite her occasional sex with him, that she does not love her neighbor, Raymond. She is a product of both passion and hate, born from a mother who ceased having sex with her husband and a father her raped her. Her own writing is pointless, an imitation of a poet, Edith Sitwell, who, dressed in velvet and turbans, poured out often abstract rhythmical works, which, despite their modernity, often earned her the label of poseur.

      A major problem, one shared by all “herselves,” is a clearly Freudian one; each of them is losing their hair, like Sarah’s mother, now locked away in an asylum: fear, humiliation, failure, and embarrassment is at the center of Sarah’s life.

       Yet it is these very fears and the almost mad manifestation of Sarah’s fractured selves that is at the center of any real love and creativity she exhibits. Unlike the white frozen world of objects and vague relationships at the center of her “dream,” the horrible terrors of her own past and the dark world with which she is associated—her always “knocking” obsessions—are at the core of this play, a work which critic Deborah Thompson has observed is “‘founded’ in groundlessness, alienation, errancy, transience, and multiplicity,  written, Kennedy has explained, during a sea voyage: "Away from all my old books, but now besieged and surrounded by a myriad of real, astounding new imagery (ocean, staterooms, the decks, standing at the rail), my unconscious and conscious seemed to join in a new way."

     Tragically, in the world in which Sarah lives—a world filled with a gossipy and uncaring landlady, a cold cynical lover, and those white friends, “shrewd, intellectual and anxious for death”—there is no way to mend the rents and tears of Sarah’s fractured world. The society, in its racist distinctions, does not allow such bourgeois aspirations from a woman of color. And, accordingly, Kennedy’s play must end in Sarah’s destruction, another victim in a culture that does permit one to accept the multitudinous realities of life.

      In full gothic irony, Raymond suggests at play’s end that, in truth, Sarah’s father did not hang himself in a Harlem hotel, but is a “doctor married to a white whore”: “He lives in the city in rooms with European antiques, photographs of Roman ruins, walls of books and oriental carpets. Her father is a nigger who eats his meals on a white glass table.”

 

Los Angeles, January 9, 2015

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (January 2015).

Edward Albee | At Home at the Zoo / 2017

explaining things

by Douglas Messerli

 

Edward Albee At Home at the Zoo / the performance that Howard N. Fox and I saw, presented by the Deaf West Theatre, was at the Wallis Annenberg Center for Performing Arts, Lovelace Studio Theater, on March 16, 2017

 

Over the last many years, the Deaf West Theatre Company (DWT) has presented several wonderful works in American Sign Language in conjunction with spoken words, including their memorable adaptation of Big River: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn—performed first at DWT’s own intimate theater and later at the Mark Taper Forum before being transferred to Broadway’s American Airlines Theater at the Roundabout—garnering two Tony nominations.  Their 2014-15 production of the musical adaptation of Frank Wedekind’s Spring Awakening, presented at the Wallis Annenberg Center for Performing Arts in Beverly Hills (see My Year 2015)—which also moved on to Broadway at the Brooks Atkinson Theatre, again receiving several Tony nominations—was one of the highlights for me of that year.

      Now Deaf West Theater has turned their attention to a very different kind of writer in Edward Albee, undertaking the daunting task of performing two of Albee’s mostly “talk” plays, the playwright’s first play The Zoo Story, which late in his life Albee paired with a prequel about Peter’s home life, melding them together (and demanding that all larger companies perform them that way) as At Home at the Zoo.

    Director Coy Midddlebrook, has taken this pairing quite literally, performing them in “chronological” order, with the prequel first to be followed by the notorious encounter between Peter and Jerry in the park. Actually, I might have preferred to seen these two works done in the opposite order, backing up the stunningly absurdist early play, The Zoo Story—a play I so revered that I republished it as the first work in Mac Wellman’s and my From the Other Side of the Century II: A New American Drama 1960-1995—with its more literal explanation of events in the “at home” segment. But then, I don’t think the later written section is a very good play, and am disappointed in Albee’s decision to recast his remarkable early work—the reaction of an old man seeking to explain things.

      The entire issue of At Home at the Zoo, is Peter’s inability to lead anything but a safe and careful life, with two daughters, two cats, two birds, and a wife who he safely loves as he tucks himself away at work on editing large academic texts, currently reading the most boring book in the world, but, which he quips, might also be one of the most important. His wife, Ann (Amber Zion), is still in love with her husband Peter (Troy Kotsur), despite the years of detachment. But recently she has been having difficulty in sleeping, and has imaginings of hacking off her breasts and acting in strange ways, such as walking to the apartment lobby and exposing herself.

      Aghast, Peter cannot comprehend her “imaginings,” and wonders what has happened to the good life they have worked to develop. Gradually Albee reveals that the major problem is that Peter has become a domesticated animal, a bit like the family’s birds and cats, with none of the wild animal human desires which help to make life exciting, and Ann is bored by their quiet shell of a life.

       Set designer Karyl Newman has subtly reiterated these issues by placing, at the sides of their comfy apartment, decorative lines of a cage, suggesting that even in this family’s normalcy, there are elements of wild animal urges which Peter refuses to face, only in this afternoon conversation revealing that back in his college days he had actually given in to just such dangers urges at a fraternity party, harming a young coed through violently anal sex.

     Yet, even after, he cannot comprehend the ideas Ann is trying to express, and leaves her in confusion, determining to retreat to his favorite bench in Central Park to read a book.

 

     It is there that he encounters the wild beast, Jerry (a role, here split by two actors, Russell Harvard and Tyrone Giordano; I believe we saw Russell Harvard in the role). Through Jerry’s frontal assault of the quiet Peter, his outright challenges, his attempts to “get to know” the reticent reader, and his increasingly disturbing and violent tales—particularly the one about his nasty landlady and her threatening dog—which gradually converge into an outright attack as he demands ownership of Peter’s bench. Along with Albee’s subtle (and not so-subtle) distinctions of class, and the homoerotic overtones (again, sometimes not as subtle as we might be led to believe), the conversation eventually ends with the unexpected murder of Jerry by Peter; in short, where Ann has failed, Jerry succeeds, quite successfully, in bringing out the animal in the now utterly confused Peter, told by his victim to pick up his book and run; in so doing, Jerry becomes almost a sacrificial lamb to verify Peter’s bestiality. By the end, it is clear that Peter is more moved by the male relationship he has suddenly developed with Jerry than his more standard heterosexual one his has with Ann.

     One might argue that these became Albee’s standard themes throughout his career: how the animal in us was always ready to break out at any moment. In numerous of his plays, including Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, A Delicate Balance, Seascape, and The Goat, we can observe these same dynamics, almost empty banter and bored conversation quickly turning into violent threats which result in a behavior that shows we are much closer to the animal world that we suspect.

     But the art of Albee lies in the early pretense, in each play, that we have weaned ourselves from our bestial natures, representing the ordinariness of our lives just before we bear our fangs. 

    Shamefully, I don’t know anything about the difficulties of expressing complex concepts in American Sign Language, but it appeared to me that the deaf actors of this company were exaggerating what in the voiced roles (by Jake Eberle, Jeff Alan-Lee, and Paige Lindsey White) was expressed much more subtly. Watching this play, it appeared that there was simply a problem in translation, as particularly Kotsur in the first act and even more so, Harvard as Jerry in the second, acted in a way that seemed overstated, literalizing a work that is mostly internal and ruminative.

 

    Of course, as I suggested earlier in this piece, I think the author himself also literalized this work in his additions to the original. Do we really need to know that Peter’s wife had previously goaded him into standing his ground and defending his manhood before we see Jerry slowly ground down Peter’s “high” moral values? Alan-Lee was particularly good as the voice of Jerry, almost purring out his taunts rather than visually ranting and raving as the actor of Jerry did. The bench-centered game between Jerry and Peter is almost entirely one of spoken words and voice. Except for the shocking appearance of a knife at play’s end, hardly any motion, other than a few paces back and forth, a circling of his enemy, and the final sinking into his rightful place upon the public bench, followed by a few jabs, is all Albee’s play requires. 

      I would not want to insist that Albee is simply the wrong author for a signed performance, that the process might be a bit like translating the densest “language” poetry into Russian or Japanese; but that may be the case. I admit, I don’t know the answer. I certainly admire DWT’s challenging attempt, and was pleased to be able to see the results; and I am looking forward to their other performances. This small company has done more to give voice to deaf actors than almost any other company I know of.

       

Los Angeles, March 19, 2017

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (March 2017).

George Frideric Handel and Nicola Francesco Haym | Tamerlano / 2009

the sacrifice

by Douglas Messerli

 

George Frideric Handel (music), Nicola Francesco Haym (libretto), Tamerlano / LA Opera, Dorothy Chandler Pavilion / the performance my companion Howard and I attended was on November 25, 2009

 

The Tartar emperor Tamerlano, with the help of the Greek Prince Andronico, has just defeated and captured the Turkish sultan Bajazet, who makes it clear he would rather die than remain in the hands of his foe. Only the love of his daughter, Asteria, also held captive, keeps him from death.

     Meanwhile Tamerlano, who is betrothed to Irene, Princess of Trebizon, has fallen in love with Asteria, and hopes to marry her, offering his ally Andronico Irene if he will help in obtaining Bajazet's permission for Asteria to marry him.

     The story grows quickly more complex when we discover that Andronico and Asteria are in love, and, accordingly, Andronico has been asked to help in his own ruin; yet he owes very kingdom to the Tartar.

     The sultan rejects the proposal outright, insisting his daughter will never marry Tamerlano; but when Asteria hears of Andronico's plea on Tamerlano's behalf, she is heart-broken that her lover seemingly no longer cares for her, and she refuses to speak out against Tamerlano's proposal, which in turn leads the Greek Prince to doubt her love for him.

     Like many a Baroque opera, the plot quickly grows even more complex; Irene, determined to thwart Asteria's and Tamerlano's relationship, arrives on the scene, encouraged by Andronico to pretend she is simply an emissary from the Princess, which will give her time discover his true feelings.

     The very set of circumstances Handel has set in play. Borrowed from Agostino Piovene's 1710 opera of the same name, results in a kind of standstill: to protect her father and out of anger over what she sees as Andronico's betrayal, Asteria must go forward with Tamerlano's wishes; Andronico cannot speak out for fear of destroying both Asteria and her father; Irene out of pride has no choice pretend she is not herself. In short, no one, save Bajazet, can or will speak out. As in all tyrant-controlled worlds, the truth dare not be uttered.

      Placido Domingo plays the Baroque hero almost as if he were on a Nineteenth-century stage, often dominating the action with his full and rich tenor voice. Since he is dramatically the most forceful figure, however, perhaps this is not as ineffective as it may first have seemed. Dressed, unlike the other modern-suited figures, in a glorious Turkish robe, he is the perfect foil for countertenor Bejun Mehta's high-pitched fascist rage. Andronico, sung by mezzo-soprano Patricia Bardon, is nearly perfect as the quieter lover, unable to speak out until Act III. With soprano Sarah Coburn, playing Asteria, their duet at the beginning of that act, a love song sung in a dissonant melody, is one of the best moments of the opera.

      Again and again through this opera, the tyrant Tamerlano is rejected or betrayed, first by Bajazet, then by Asteria who admits she had hidden away a dagger to kill him on their wedding night and later attempts to poison him, and finally by Andronico, his supposed friend. By opera's end he has little left but to threaten to destroy them all, and the frenzy that his hate arouses is perfect for Mehta's expressive voice.

      Yet the opera remains at a kind of stasis, Tamerlano outwardly plotting his revenge while being unable to destroy two of the people he has most loved and the other, who in his courageous outspokenness, he can only admire. Bajazet, moreover, threatens to haunt and hunt him down even from the grave.

      The only release possible is Bajazet's suicide by poison. As he sways forward after ingesting his "hidden treasure" he moves between threats to Tamerlano and sweet goodbyes to his daughter and her lover Andronico. As conductor William Lacey appropriately writes of this scene:

 

                          The scene ends with Bajazet stuttering his final words,

                          gasping for breath, as the orchestra describes his fading

                          heartbeat with slowly receding repeated notes. It is an

                          amazingly vivid and inspired piece of work, which antici-

                          pates the later innovations of Gluck, Berlioz, and Wagner.

 

     Although Asteria, demanding a dagger, threatens her own suicide, Bajazet's "sacrifice" is enough to soothe Tamerlano's hate. He is appeased. He will marry Irene and Andronico can be united with Asteria in Greece.

     The final chorus of this nightmare opera is a gentle hymn to the slowly rising sun, a celebration of the transformation of night into day, the shadows reaching out to the morning light.

 

Los Angeles, Thanksgiving day, 2009

Reprinted from Green Integer Blog and USTheater, Opera and Performance (November 2009).   

Giuseppe Verdi and Antonio Ghislanzoni | Aida / 2009

buried alive

by Douglas Messerli

 

Giuseppe Verdi (composer), Antonio Ghislanzoni (libretto, based on a French scenario by Auguste Mariette) Aida / the production I saw was the Metropolitan Opera live HD, in encore on Thursday, November 12, 2009

One of the aspects of Aida that interviewer / singer Renée Fleming suggested several times in the intermissions of Verdi's great opera was that, despite the huge size of the cast, except for the scenes in court and the triumphal march of Act 2, Scene 2, the opera is an intimate work, centered around a love triangle of the characters Aida (Violeta Urmana), Radamès (Johan Botha), and Amneris (Dolora Zajick).

     What particularly struck me this time through the opera was not only how truly intimate most of the work was, but how psychologically isolated each of these figures are from one another, despite the fact that their every action has enormous effect on the others.

 

   In few other operas do the major characters sing so many arias consisting of what we might describe as internal dialogue. In Se quel guerrier io fossi!...Celeste Aida, Radamès sings of his love and the beauty of Aida to himself, terrified that Amneris might get wind of it. Amneris sings of her need to discover the name of Aida's lover, and later describes her plots to expose her slave.  Aida, who secretly is the Princess of Ethiopia, sings of numerous things she cannot share with others, her love of her country, the identity of her lover, her father, and herself. Radamès' desire to lead the Egyptian military into victory can also only be expressed in private thoughts. Like Eugene O'Neill's 20th century drama Strange Interlude most of the characters of this 19th century opera spend a great deal of time in soliloquy. Without these private interludes, in fact, there would be no story left to tell. For the public events of the opera, Radamès' victory over the Ethiopians, his plea that the captives be saved, and his reward of marriage to Amneris, are the forces that doom them all, and speed two of them to their death by being entombed alive.

     It is apparent from what I have just suggested, accordingly, that all three characters have lived buried lives long before the final scene from the very outset of the work. Radamès must hide his love and his ambition both as he tries to balance opposing forces, for his desire to be made general will mean destroying Aida's kin and perhaps even losing Aida's love. Rebuffed by Radamès in love, Amneris hides her sorrow while, at the same time, pretending deep friendship with Aida as she attempts to expose what she senses is a growing love between her and the general. Aida must hold nearly everything inside: her love of Radamès, her hatred of Amneris, the name of her father, even her own identity. Although all sing of their deep love for one another, because of buried secrets those loves are transformed into destruction, betrayal, and, ultimately, death.

     The numerous choruses of the Egyptian priests calling for war, vengeance, and punishment, although seemingly set apart from the deep loves of this trio, are psychologically played out by the three major figures of the opera. Each of these figures, in short, sweeps up the others into a kind of vortex that draws them into the void.

     By the final "real" entombment, strangely enough, Aida and Radamès are released. For the first time, hidden from all other eyes, they can openly show their love and, accordingly, are freed from the sorrows of their previously hidden lives. Amneris remains entrapped in life while feeling only death.   

 

Los Angeles, November 19, 2009

Reprinted from Green Integer Blog and USTheater, Opera, and Performance (November 2009).

George Gershwin, DuBose Heyward, and Ira Gershwin | Porgy and Bess / 2020

it ain’t necessarily so

by Douglas Messerli

 

George Gershwin (music), DuBose Heyward and Ira Gershwin (libretto and lyrics, based on the fiction by Dorothy and DuBose Heyward’s Porgy) Porgy and Bess / Howard Fox and I attended the HD-Met Performance presentation on February 1, 2020.

 

What can you say about the great American opera, Porgy and Bess? Yes, there are some of the greatest Gershwin brothers’ songs which include “Summertime,” “I Got Plenty of Nothing,” “I Loves You Bess,” “It Ain’t Necessarily So,” and “Oh, Lord, I’m On My Way”—“Who could Ask for Anything More”?

      Yet there is so much more to this opera, now finally redeemed by the new MET production I saw on an HD live performance with my husband Howard on Saturday, February 1, 2020, in a production so blessed that I can’t imagine why this “folk opera” was not previously perceived as one the most significant of US opera conceptions. It is definitely not a Broadway musical, at least the way I heard it this time round.

 

    

      And yes, we know this was a work is conceived by white boys and a woman, the original book being written by DuBose Heyward and his wife Dorothy (who deserves her own special tribute), and then reconceived by George and Ira Gershwin. And, we recognize, years later, that they translated their work into a South Carolina dialect and sometimes stereotypical behavior of the denizens of Catfish Row. Yet, this great operatic presentation asks us, straight-forwardly, to recognize its unintentional racist flaws and get over it. There were dialects that blacks spoke, at that time, different from white idioms of speech, and even if they aren’t quite rendered precisely by their white interpreters they do not necessarily demean their characters. American language is all about its distinctive idioms, which is also what makes it so lively.

      And no one who sees this opera can really proclaim that these figures are entirely stereotypes: in fact these characters, at least in this production, are amazing individuals, each in their own way suffering and challenging us to comprehend their particular identities in a manner that no previous US musical or opera performances had previously demanded.

      Clara (Golda Schultz) hushes her baby by declaring her own ascendency into the black community in which she resides:

 

Summertime,

And the livin' is easy

Fish are jumpin'

And the cotton is high

 

Your daddy's rich

And your mamma's good lookin'

So hush little baby

Don't you cry

 

      Her son, later adopted by Bess and then the entire community, will ascend eventually into this all-black world as a person able to “spread his wings.” The Gershwins, in short, made it clear from their first song, that this was not a closed community, but an expression of new possibilities. Catfish Row, although locked down each night, expressed the possibility of the new, of something outside of the racist world in which most of the opera’s figures, faced always with their mortality, knew also that their desolate community was stunningly alive, willing to create a new world outside of their limited confines.

      Beyond that the central characters, with George Gershwin’s remarkable soaring orchestrations which conductor David Robertson evinces from the always remarkable MET orchestra, help us to perceive that the drug-driven and highly abused Bess (the amazing Angel Blue) must, in order to survive, make the impossible decision to move away from both Crown (Alfred Walker) and the truly satanic figure of this opera, Sportin’ Life (a devilishly loveable Fredrick Ballentine).

     As much as she loves Porgy (the always engaging Eric Owens) and much as he loves his Bess, she is doomed by her own past. Another “crippled,” like Porgy, destroyed as an individual in this community—Porgy cannot quite save her, even if he successfully protects her from the brutal Crown’s attempts to reconnect her to a world of Eurydice and Hades (if there was ever a “them and us” world it is here in Catfish Row); they protect one another while still slightly being ostracized their own community members. The balance is nearly impossible; at one moment you are at home, the very next moment thrown out for you own natural proclivities.

      Bess is one of the most tragic figures in all of opera. She loves her Porgy but cannot truly escape the errors of her past. She is hated and loved in a community that would embrace her but, in the very next moment, which send her, as the last song proclaims, “on her way.”  This is, in fact, a story about community—all of our communities—which love us and hate us for our variances at the very same moment. The tragedy of this great opera—and in this production I did perceive it as a great opera—was that Bess, despite her love of Porgy, cannot get rid of her demons.       

 

     Porgy, in his last song, has to embrace them, presumably moving on New York City, to where drugs and Sportin’ Life has taken her, but also to where we know will also be his own death, “The Promised Land.”

     Of course, his reverse travel from South to North (I recall the impossible journey in Irving Reis’s The Big Street, wherein Henry Fonda moves Lucille Ball by wheelchair to Florida), will probably result in his “promised land” death. He will never recover his Eurydice surely, and if he might, he will obviously turn back to see her following him, resulting in her death again. The turning back to check whether she will or will not follow her is an expression of his inability to forgive. His journey to “the promised land” is a certain statement of his sorrow and breakdown.

      Porgy and Bess is as tragic as any European opera. Catfish Row is Venice, Rome, Paris, Berlin, Moscow, and all the communities of the world that have witnessed tragic deaths of divas and their tenors, baritones, and even contra-tenors who loved them. Forget the dialect and the white writers and composers who created them. These are major statements of love and desire that remain eternally located in all of our imaginations. Porgy is always in love with his beautiful Bess no matter how we might reimagine them.

 

Los Angeles, February 5, 2020

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (February 2020).