Eugene O'Neill | The Hairy Ape / 2016

life in a cage

by Douglas Messerli

 

Eugene O’Neill The Hairy Ape / Los Angeles, The Odyssey Theatre Ensemble, the production I saw was on Sunday, July 24, 2016

 

I have to admit, I have always had trouble with Eugene O’Neill’s early plays, particularly his 1921 work, The Hairy Ape. American Expressionism (not nearly as sophisticated and developed as the German version—at least until it found its way into the American film noir) is just not my favorite kind of theater. And with his heavy typologies and his embarrassingly clumsy use of dialect, O’Neill’s younger works always slightly embarrass me, as opposed to his great later family dramas.

    

     I did not have the opportunity, alas, to see the much praised deconstruction of this work by the noted Wooster Group; I keep hoping for a revival or a filming of the play, as they have packaged for their brilliant production of O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones, but in the meantime, while attempting to see most productions of O’Neill plays, I had skirted this one, even after buying a ticket. Finally, I gave in at the very last moment, attending the last performance of the Odyssey Theatre Ensemble’s production directed by the British director and actor, Steven Berkoff.

       Berkoff, known for his very physical productions, did not disappoint this time around, transforming the early boozing and singing scenes into a series of choreographed movements for his 9 male ship firemen, at moments, with the percussion accompaniment of Will Mahood, whipping them up into a kind of fiery frenzy, while at other times slowing down the action to a kind of slow-motion line-dance as he lets his hero Yank (Haile D’Alan) try to work out the reality, as the group’s leader, he wants to convey to them.

       The director, the time around, has chosen a black man to play the usually white Yank (real name Robert Smith). The African American actor Paul Robeson did play the same figure in England in the 1930s, but these days there seems a slight danger in that casting, as Los Angeles Times reviewer Charles McNulty pointed out, of associating the “brutal beast” of the play with negative racial implications; this might have been mitigated a bit by having a more multi-racial cast as a whole, but Berkoff evidently didn’t see that as a problem.

       It’s true that all of these men are equally just a step up from the apes, their crouching positions and gorilla-like muscles determined by their hourly activity of stoking coal into the ship’s engines. And the play is not really about racial inequities, but about issues of class.

       In the early scenes Yank is proud of his Prometheus-like role; it is, after all, he and his friends who make the big industries possible; without their endlessly hard labor, there would be no American industry, no ships to grandly sail into New York harbor, as their own steamliner is about to do.

       D’Alan is a splendid example of a human being, a muscular specimen of a man who shows his physical stamina just by performing, in this case, as a jazzed up actor: shouting out his lines yet with emotional significance, he seems to be filled with boundless energy, as he mocks his fellow workers, particularly the drunken elderly Paddy (Dennis Gerstein) who nostalgically recalls the days of sail-driven ships, when the sailors were at one with the sea, instead of being locked up in the dark dungeon of the stove-hole.

      Similarly, Yank has little use for the Marxian ideas of his friend Long (Paul Stanko), for he is a believer, a man proud of his own physicality and ability to cope.

      That is until the wealthy ship-owner’s daughter, Mildred (Katy Davis), dressed entirely in white, mindlessly determines to visit the stoke-hole to see “how the other half lives.” At the very moment she arrives, Yank is haranguing his co-workers with curses for their lack of gumption and grit, while they have stopped in their tracks, awed by the young woman’s sudden appearance. As Yank looks behind him to observe her presence, she mutters something about a beast and swoons into a faint of terror.

       Despite the appellation of a beast, it is Yank, however, who is the true thinker, and the next scene finds him pondering the events, while realizing that to her he was simply a “hairy ape.” Although his friends attempt to console him, even ribbing him with the possibility that he is in a funk because he has fallen in love, Yank suddenly perceives his braggadocio for what it is: he as he friends are nothing but small machine parts in a world that has little place for them.

       The rest of O’Neill’s play is rather didactic triptych, in which Yank attempts to explore what he can do to change his life situation and to find a role in the general society. His first trip is the Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue, where the wealthy parade in surreal-like fashion after church. His presence totally ignored by these “swells,” he finally threatens a male of the group, as all present in the small buffalo herd call for the police, who quickly arrive and beat him.

      Berkoff has thankfully dropped the prison scene, and given the speech to Long, the Marxist, to tell his friend of the IWW and the “wobblies,” who The New York Times reports are trying to destroy American industry and society. Believing what he has read, Yank is stupidly ready to sign up.

       But in the second part of the triptych, within the IWW headquarters, after being given a hearty welcome and membership card, he is mocked when he makes his desires to dynamite factories clear. Not only are the wobblies paranoid (suspecting him of being a policeman, a factory stooge, or even from the FBI) but their activities, obviously, are quite different from the newspaper reports. And they quickly toss Yank out into the streets once more.

       Does he have no place in society he asks? No way of entering the “real” world. And here the fact of the actor being black does have resonance. In the world of the original play there would have no even been a place for him on O’Neill’s Broadway stage.

      The inevitable and truly surreal ending is that he must become precisely that which he has already been turned into by the dominant society. At the Zoo’s gorilla cage, convincingly filled with chattering monkeys and a gorilla performed by his former shipmates, Yank encounters the highly-developed pectorals and muscular arms of fellow actor Jeremiah O’Brian playing the Alpha-male gorilla. What Yank is to his fellow shipmates, this human-gorilla is to his chattering monkey companions. It is almost love at first site, as Yank determines to loose this fellow monster upon the world, breaking open his cage. There is almost something horribly homoerotic about the act, as the gorilla comes toward him in, what a first seems simply to be a hug. Indeed, Yank responds, “I didn’t say you should kiss me,” before he gradually perceives that he is being killed, his body stomped upon again and again until he finally finds his place in death.

       Berkoff’s production is far from perfect, but then the play is, as both director and producer remind us, the work of a very young playwright, still attempting to find his voice. And this production, despite its many excellent moments, demonstrates, once more, why The Hairy Ape is so seldom revived. In the end, I am glad a got to chance to see it—and still will look forward to seeing the Wooster Group version. After all, it was that group which also convinced me that O’Neill’s early sea plays were worth a second viewing.

 

Los Angeles, July 25, 2016

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (July 2016).       

Tennessee Williams, adapted by Pierre Laville and Emily Mann | Baby Doll / 2016

left in the lurch

by Douglas Messerli

 

Tennessee Williams (screenplay [not credited properly to Elia Kazan], adapted by Pierre Laville and Emily Mann) Baby Doll / Los Angeles, The Fountain Theatre, directed by Simon Levy / the production I saw was on Sunday, September 11, 2016

 

Since Elia Kazan’s 1956 film Baby Doll was based on Tennessee Williams’ early short play, 27 Wagons Full of Cotton, and Williams, himself, later rewrote the play as Tiger Tail, it is difficult to know why Pierre Laville and Emily Mann determined to “re-adapt” the version of the play, named after the movie, I saw the other day at Los Angeles’ Fountain Theatre. Perhaps one has to read all the variations, including Kazan’s original script—which he claimed he wrote without Williams’ help—before comprehending the need for yet another rewrite. Certainly, this production, with a few important exceptions, is pretty loyal to Kazan’s motion picture, and in that fact leads anyone who’s seen the wonderful movie to make comparisons.

      It is perhaps patently unfair to compare the acting abilities of the film foursome—Karl Malden, Carol Baker, Eli Wallach, and Mildred Dunnock—with the younger and far less experienced cast of John Prosky, Lindsay LaVanchy, Daniel Bess, and Karen Kondazian. Although Baker was the least talented of the film cast, she was perfect for the pouting child-bride of the Southern plantation bigot, Archie Lee Meighan. Wallach almost literally steamed-up the screen in his first film appearance back in 1956, and the always solid Malden played his character with near perfection, with Dunnock providing the daffy eccentricity of Aunt Rose Comfort.

     The Fountain Theatre actors try valiantly to recreate these roles, and, at moments, they almost succeed, particularly Prosky—whose actor father I had seen several times on Washington, D. C. Arena stage—who almost captures the sweaty leftover of a once significant land-owner devoted to ginning the cotton of his neighbors. His final violent outrage against the new world in which his good-old-boy tactics are no longer rewarded, is particularly well-performed and almost terrifyingly touching, particularly when he suddenly realizes that his former “associates” are now intending to arrest and try him for his “irrational” behavior.

      Bess (as Silva Vaccaro) does his handsome best to carry out the “tit-for-tat” values hinted at by Archie, as he attempts to seduce Archie’s teenage bride, who, by marriage agreement, is finally to have sex with her husband, after two years of chastity, in two days. But, despite his truly sexy torso and hips, as well as the script’s playful S&M complications wherein he gently and sometimes not-so-gently toys with her while holding a small whip, his acting simply doesn’t add up to the dark and far more horrifying games of hide-and-seek played by the film’s characters as they run through the decaying mansion’s empty rooms (Archie has just seen the furniture company repossess nearly every object in them for lack of payment). At moments Bess seems as sexually naïve and even disinterested as his inexperienced target; and we have to wonder, at times, whether or not he’s really more interested in her signature admitting Archie’s guilt in burning down his character’s competing gin-mill than in capturing her girlish body.

     Of course, that’s a question the Kazan film itself asks. But here, Lavanchy’s Baby Doll seems far less ready and raunchy than Baker ever did. We know Baker, although playing hard to get, was perfectly ready to undergo the sexual act with her would-be rapist; but Lavanchy, seemingly a bit older than Baker’s version, seems far more confused and confusing, particularly since Lavanchy, alas, seems in the early scenes to be of the “holler” school of acting. I may be losing my hearing a bit, but the high loud pitch of her anger over Archie’s clumsy attempts at love-making came through as too much of a screech, making it far too obvious that she no longer is the teenage “baby” she pretends to be. And after those early scenes it becomes difficult for Lavanchy to return to the innocent child in her scenes with Bess.

      Kondazian certainly revealed Aunt Rose Comfort as an eccentric human being, but she seemed so crazed at moments that it was simply hard to believe her. Was her passion for chocolates, stolen from dying folks at the near-by state hospital, in the film? I certainly don’t recall it.

      I do recall the remarkable collard-greens scene, in which the Sicilian immigrant Vacarro and Baby Doll praise the delights of the “pot licker” of Aunt Rose’s uncooked greens simply in order to taunt the angry Archie. As I remember it they both simply slopped up their faces with the awful stuff while turning the act of eating, as in the famous scene in the movie Tom Jones, into a surrogate of sex. On this stage the entire scene appeared more as a pallid attempt to simply to get the older man’s goat.

      Of course, we can’t get the close-ups of a camera, and we haven’t the space to see the couple run through the entire estate, locking themselves away in rooms just in order to dare the other to enter. These actors have only a front porch with a swing and fresh-water well, a small dining room and a tiny bedroom to play out their epic dance. And at moments at the well, on that swing, and in the tiny crib of a bed, this dramatic version really does reveal a kind of steamy and tender love.

     We never know, in either the film or the stage production, whether or not Vaccaro will return the next day to collect his prize of the young girl and her aunt. Like so many of Williams’ heroines, they are left in the lurch. But after seeing this version I had far more doubts that he might even want to come back.

 

Los Angeles, September 12, 2016

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (September 2016).

Barbra Streisand and Jim Gable | Barbra: The Music, the Memories, the Magic / 2017 [filmed performance]

 songs porcelain and silver-plated

by Douglas Messerli

 

Richard Jay-Alexander, Jay Landers, and Barbra Streisand (screenwriters), Jim Gable and Barbra Streisand (directors) Barbra: The Music, the Memories, the Magic / 2017 [Filmed performance]

 

Just before Christmas, I sat down to watch the first recording of a Barbra Streisand concert that I had seen since I was a teenager.

      In several ways, this older Barbra is even better than your younger self of the 1960s when she performed in My Name Is Barbra and Color Me Barbra. Certainly, she now seems less showy and far surer of herself. She loves, as this Netflix-sponsored film makes clear, to be in charge. And she is in charge, apparently of nearly everything: the songs she sings (even in Funny Girl she insisted to Flo Ziegfeld that she had to choose her own songs), the instrumentation, the pacing of her performance, and, most importantly, she utterly controls her amazing tonal modulations, altering between a quiet hum, melodic whispers, and old-fashioned vocal “belting out.”

     If anything, she now has greater vocal control, but she’s always had one of the most remarkable voices in song-singing history. Like the very greats, Judy Garland, Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett, Rosemary Clooney, and a few others, Streisand’s voice is always recognizable and memorable in a way that has attracted what seem to be worshippers more than a mere audience. The Miami audience here felt that they not merely needed to madly applaud each song, but turned every number into a standing ovation, to which Streisand generally and seemingly honestly awarded with a “Thank you,” “Wow!” “I’m glad you liked it!” or “You’re a wonderful audience.”

     If you like good music and, like me, are a hardened liberal, what is there not to like? Although Streisand restrained herself at this concert, you clearly knew what she felt about Trump and his kind, and if you live in Los Angeles, it’s hard not to know that she has given millions to hospitals and other charities. And, because of her talent and goodness of heart, you can almost forgive her from some of her crazy obsessions, like constructing a kind of mini-mall, just for herself, in the basement of her Malibu house. The very fact that she’s still singing so very gloriously is a cause for celebration. So what if she centers much of this concert around her own past achievements, singing far too many of her standards such as “The Way We Were” and “Evergreen?” Give the girl some credit.

      And credit she certainly got from her audience. As Robert Lloyd summarized it in the Los Angeles Times:

 

Like any great artist, she is at the mercy of the character she converts to art. ("I could not help but do it my way" is a theme of the evening.) She is complicated and contradictory, a Countess from Brooklyn, ethnic and elevated. Her singing is the sound of aspiration, of arrival, of indomitability. It is practiced and it's punk, it's tender and ferocious; she can create an impression of great power by getting very quiet. Her diction is impeccable, her accent unreconstructed. She is precise with her consonants and extravagant with her vowels.

 

      Yet why did I still have this strange feeling that I would have preferred to be hearing Garland and Clooney, or even the far rawer Bette Midler; certainly for Broadway theater Barbara Cook would have been more fun. Or listening to a great Broadway songstress like Christine Ebersole, Bernadette Peters, Audra McDonald, or Patti LuPone, all of whom I’ve heard live on stage. Of course, I too liked Streisand on the movie musicals of Funny Girl and Hello Dolly! What I kept asking myself was wrong with this wonderful performance?

       When Streisand sings a stage musical number such as Sondheim’s “Being Alive,” Anthony Newley’s and Leslie Bricusse’s “Who Can I Turn To,” or Jerry Herman’s “Before the Parade Passes By,” I immediately wake up; I too might have given her a standing ovation just for the Newley piece. And I have to give her an award for hutzpah for tackling the dead-on-arrival Rodgers and Hammerstein walnut, “Climb Ev’ry Mountain” (with Jaime Fox, no less).

     But the problem is, and always has been, is that, at heart, Streisand prefers the kitsch. She clearly prefers working with Alan and Marilyn Bergman and other pop composers as she did in her Yentl’s “Pappa Can You Hear Me?” (sorry not the same Yentl I recall from Isaac B. Singer)—gifted purveyors of populist nonsense, as opposed to the greats like Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, or Stephen Sondheim. Even with all her talent, Streisand still prefers the musical silver-plated and porcelain-like knock-offs produced for Hollywood in the manner of The Franklin Mint. Almost every time she has a choice, Streisand chooses sentimentality over wit. A rose and teacup are her emblems. And in the end, despite the wonderment she brings to nearly every musical offering, her artistry suffers.

       It’s not that LuPone or McDonald have never sung the Broadway versions of these same knock-offs, written by the likes of Andrew Lloyd Webber and Disney composers; it’s simply that they keep it in proportion, returning to Sondheim or even Jule Styne (the man who actually made Streisand famous), whereas Streisand obviously would rather work with her long-time friends, the Bergmans. I am sure that many in her Miami audience actually prefer “Evergreen” and Neil Diamond’s “You Don’t Bring Me Flowers” over her nearly perfect rendition of “People.” But Streisand, seemingly, doesn’t even recognize the difference.

 

Los Angeles, December 27, 2017

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

Back To Back Theatre | The Shadow Whose Prey the Hunter Becomes / 2022

listening to sarah instead of siri

by Douglas Messerli

 

Back to Back Theatre performers Mark Deans, Michael Chan, Bruce Gladwin, Simon Laherty, Sarah Mainwaring, Scott Price, and Sonia Teuben (writers), Bruce Gladwin (director) The Shadow Whose Prey the Hunter Becomes / 2022 / the production I saw with Deborah Meadows was at Redcat (the Roy and Edna Disney CalArts Theater) on September 28, 2024

 

Three of the Back to Back performers Sarah Mainwaring, Simon Laherty and Scott Price (the last two of which I had seen formerly in the company’s 2013 performance at UCLA in the brilliant play Ganesh Versus the Third Reich) come together in this work in a kind of obscure “meeting” to discuss issues of importance with the play’s audience.

     The play “begins,” so to speak, with Sarah and Scott setting up the chairs and creating a kind of line which becomes a spatial marker for the intellectually disabled or what Sarah prefers to describe as neurodivergent artists, some of whom, such as Scott, suffer from autism, needing to draw lines between themselves and others.

     In fact, Scott begins the play by describing to Sarah just that, establishing the limits of how one should deal with others in public, making it very clear that it is not all right to grab another’s crotch (or vagina) as a former unnamed US President has claimed is his prerogative, and that it is not even proper to grab one’s own crotch in public, not permissible, indeed, to touch anyone without permission unless you are a family member or lover expressing actions of familiar or shared sexual love, all statements, presumably, that Scott and the others have had to sit through in the lectures and group sessions determined to make them behave more like “normal” folk.

     Obviously Scott, who has a large and rather sophisticated vocabulary, has also received much of his information from his on-line searches and his chats with Siri, the “intelligent assistant” of Mac (Apple Computer System) products. Scott, who quite comically describes himself, later in the play, as suffering from both autism and a rather strongly incomprehensible Aussie accent, has ordered up a large light board behind the players which translates their words through voice recognition so that the audience can engage with their various expressions of opinion throughout.

   Sarah, as she makes clear later, is quite resentful of the computer translations, suggesting that it is perhaps the audience’s responsibility to attend to their words and accents, not their duty to attend to audience “normality.” Moreover, her own words, although often slow in coming—she describes herself as having had a severe head injury—are spoken clearly and rather emphatically.

      Sarah, once Simon joins them, was to have led their entire discussion. But suddenly standing before the audience she panics and cannot at all remember what she was about to say, and the responsibility to lead their discussion falls, after much discussion, to a somewhat reluctant but verbose Scott, who in order to establish his position requires, like so many panel leaders and professors, an overly large lectern to which he must climb up a few steps to even position himself. 

   The first part of this “meeting,” it appears, is devoted to an historical recounting of the way people such as three intellectually disabled or neurodivergent players have been treated over the years by society in general. Scott, with help from the others, describes how disabled men were made into virtual slaves for several years in a small Iowa town in a Tyson manufacturing plant and the use and abuse of disabled women for decades by the Catholic Church in Ireland which ran businesses using them as slave labor without pay. When some of the businesses were later taken over by a toy company the disabled continued to make some of the major board games including Monopoly, Scrabble, Risk, Clue, Ticket to Ride, etc. The list of board games quickly becomes a kind of idée fixe with Scott as he continues endlessly to list them, he and Simon also breaking in from time to time to admit to having played some of the games.

     Sarah may have forgotten what her original message was, but she soon becomes the controlling force of the two males, as she demands Scott stop by pulling down his high lectern, indicating that he is not properly communicating the real issue to his audience about the abuse disabled individuals have received over the years from the people who continue to diminish those to whom they feel superior.

     She and Simon demand he speak in simple sentences, given what she fears is the audience’s lack of comprehension, about the problem, a comical moment given it’s clear that the neurodivergent individuals on the stage see those of us in the audience as the inferior fools. And we are, after all, just that, even if he feel sympathetic with their feelings. We have not had to experience a lifetime, as these folk have, of being made to feel inferior, which the two males later declare they often still feel in their private moments even if they have come to perceive that in many respects they also have a more profound way of seeming things.

      In a sense, any minority group eventually comes to similar conclusions. Surely blacks in the US have rightfully come to perceive themselves as representing a far richer and more dynamic culture than the more-restricted and socially repressed white community; as a gay man I feel I’ve been blessed with a far more empathetic and deeper understanding of what it feels to be different and am joyful for the far more open attitudes that I have had toward sexuality than most of my straight peers. Asians have a far richer historical perspective than most Americans. Native Americans have a deeper understanding of culture and nature than most of the newer US immigrants.

      But still, we wonder, is that all these three wanted to explain to us? How much they have suffered under our enslavement and come through with a more complex perception of themselves?

      Scott, realizing that he has failed in communicating (just as does Simon, soon after, when he declares himself the “mayor of understanding,” while permitting Sarah only to be his secretary who does all the work while he writes the speeches, a typical male sexist vision of reality) demands a momentary retreat into privacy, communicating with his more reliable friend Siri.

       But it is in just that act, as Sarah soon makes clear, that he is making quite obvious the reason these three have come together to talk to us. Sarah reminds him of the “Hal Syndrome” based the encounter with artificial intelligence in the 1968 Stanley Kubrick 2001: Space Odyssey in which a computer, growing smarter than its human creators, begins to kill off the members of the space crew.

       Just as these three have been enslaved by others who perceive themselves as mentally superior, so too are we, in our hubris, endangered by the AI systems we have created and are developing. These systems, as they interchange with us, winning first at chess games and other simple challenges of logic, may come to recognize us a neurodivergent and intellectually disabled and, accordingly, find ways to enslave or do away with us.

       These three individuals have come together to reveal what we are simply not yet recognizing, that any system that identifies itself as superior to another, will soon end up diminishing, abusing, or even destroying others it deems to be inferior. The pattern, seemingly, is embedded in the human brain, and accordingly, will be installed even in the human-built creations that may eventually become smarter than us. Even the usually calmly assuring Siri shows her impatience with Scott’s and Simon’s failures to communicate, moving on to proffer her intellectual superiority as she speaks through the light board Scott has created to facilitate communication.

       The real issue here, even among the males who begin with a pretense of learned correctness, but who gradually exclude and dismiss the more reticent but for deeper thinker Sarah, are concerned the categorization of others and the human species’ seemingly endless inability to recognize and enjoy difference and multiplicity of perception.

     When Sarah previously argues for the word “neurodivergent” she mentions that, in fact, every human being is in some respects “neurodivergent,” different in their way of thinking in minute ways from everyone else. “Disabled,” the term of which Scott is now quite proud, like the word I have restored to my own writings, “Queer,” still carries with it a sense of the inferior of unnecessary difference.

      The meeting has been called to ask us to imagine an alternative from our old ways of perceiving, to encourage us to recognize complexity and difference as a positive necessity for survival. What if we might be able to construct AI systems that recognize multiplicity instead of superiority? What if we could abandon our ancient cultural “hunter” roots, and begin to perceive everyone as a significant gatherer of the various needs upon which all depend, how might that alter our perceptions of human activity. Would we then need to be so fearful of our own shadows, the futures we have created for ourselves?

       This wisdom, we finally recognize, comes not from intellectual geniuses, but simply from those who think differently from ourselves. And what a wonderful gift they have offered us. If only, as they themselves worry, we are able to comprehend their message, or, as they reveal, if they too could only alter their inherent patterns of behavior. We might all listen carefully to what Sarah finally says, not in a speech to the masses, but in her private comments and behavior.

 

Los Angeles, September 30, 2024

Reprinted from International Theater, Opera, and Performance (September 2024.

Luis Valdez and Lalo Guerrero | Zoot Suit / 2017

 dreams destroyed by hate

by Douglas Messerli

 

Luis Valdez (writer and director), music by Lalo Guerrero Zoot Suit / Los Angeles, the Mark Taper Forum, the performance Howard Fox and I saw was on March 11, 2017

 

I will begin this short essay on the Mark Taper Forum revival of Luis Valdez’ Zoot Suit by confirming that this legendary Los Angeles-based musical-drama is still a powerful and moving document. People gasped several times during the matinee performance I attended yesterday with my spouse, Howard Fox, at the contemporary currency of many of the play’s comments. At one point, when the Lieutenant and corrupt Judge (Richard Steinmetz) declares that at a time of war (the play begins in 1942), faced with so many enemies, there is no room in the US for “outsiders,” you could openly hear the audience ruminate the resonance of the lines given Trump’s current utterances.

       At another moment, after being released from more than a year in prison for a crime that none of them committed, one of the so-called Chicano 38th Street gang, Ishmael “Smiley” Torres (Raul Cardona), reports that there is no place for him any longer in Los Angeles and that he intends to move to Arizona; the audience laughed and hooted, clearly referencing their knowledge of the bigoted actions of former Arizona sheriff Joseph Michael "Joe" Arpaio, and the continued conservative immigration attitudes of that state.

       The mostly younger cast, headed by the trickster figure, El Pachuco (Demian Bichir), played their roles well and danced with enthusiasm. The lead character, Henry Reyna (Matias Ponce), his gang-member partners, the already mentioned “Smiley,” Tommy Roberts (Caleb Foote), and Joey Castro (Oscar Camacho), and the women in Henry’s life, Della Barrios (Jeanine Mason) and Alice Bloomfield (Tiffany Dupont) are all charming performers, and help to make this work riveting.

       And then, there are all those wonderful Lalo Guerrero songs: “Zoot Suite Boogie,” “Chucos Suaves,” “Vamos a Bailar,” and “Marijuana Boogie”; my only wish was that there had been more.*

       The original play opened at the Mark Taper Forum in 1978, with a cast that included Edward James Olmos, Daniel Valdez, Tyne Daly, Lupe Ontiveros, Tony Plana, Robert Beltran, and many other noted actors, not only ran in sold out performances at the Taper, but was so successful that it continued throughout the year at the Aquarius Theater. New York, however, did not quite take to the work, and on Broadway it ran for only 41 performances.

       As the author, himself, notes, “Zoot Suit is a quintessential Los Angeles play. It represents the fabric of the city, the internal strife, the Sturm und Drang of Los Angeles, what forced it to be the city it is today.”

     The central focus of Valdez’ work is the notorious Sleepy Lagoon Murder of August 2, 1942, where 21 innocent, mostly Chicano, zoot-suit-wearing young men were arrested and convicted in a sham trial—as the play presents it, the young men were forced to remain in their elaborate suits throughout the trial, and were forced to stand with every mention of their name, while simultaneously being kept apart from their defense lawyer, George Shearer (Brian Abraham)—and were sentenced to life imprisonment for a murder that, quite apparently, was committed by another, Downey-based gang.

       But the real point here is not so much guilt or innocence, but the entire notion of what it means to be an outsider in a world in which you live. To the LA press and prosecutors, the very fact that these young men dressed differently from others and represented a different cultural perspective, proved their unworthiness. The Japanese had already been shuffled off to internment camps (see my pieces in My Year 2007 and My Year 2015), and it only followed, as it does in all times when people feel threatened by what they do not know, that the young Chicano men should also feel the country’s wrath. Throughout the US, but particularly in Los Angeles, soldiers and sailors, after the arrestment of the zoot suiters, randomly attacked young men wearing what they saw as peacock-like costumes, virtually, if not literally, raping them, stripping their clothes from their backs. Later in the play, we see the sad consequences of this, as Henry’s younger brother, Rudy (Andres Ortiz), now a Marine uniform, recounts how he was so attacked. He resents his brother simply not being there to protect him.

      The zoot suits represented many things: the possibility of wealth, the differentness of  identity, and, yes, a preening of the male ego. But here, we realize that it had become almost a sign of meaningful dress as important to the young Chicanos as the Marine, Navel, and Army uniforms were to the others. The sad, so very sad fact was that Henry Reyna, the charismatic leader who had already been wrongly arrested several times, had dreamed and hoped for a life of normalcy, and was planning a few days after from the Sleepy Lagoon events to join the navy. What might his life have been if he had given that simple opportunity?

       As it was, even though hundreds of well-meaning Los Angeles citizens, including celebrities, fought for his freedom, his year-long prison stay would inevitably change his life forever, and, as we are told in a kind of prelude to the ending, he eventually was arrested again for burglary, killing a fellow prisoner, and finally dying in the 1970s, a broken man.

      But the narrator El Pachuco “revisits” that ending, describing the brief life stories of others involved and transforming the criminal facts to the explanation of his involvement within his community, as husband and father to children. Yet, by this time we know El Pachuco is a far from reliable narrator. In his attempts to repeat the worst of the facts of racial hatred and its terrible results, he mocks and challenges any of the young Henry’s dreams for a better life, and it is only when Henry fights back from that viewpoint of desperation that he has the possibility to change it. The trickster is just that, a man who helps keep his own kind down by daily reminding his fellow men and women of their own cultural perspective and how others, outside of that, actually see them. How different might have been Henry’s life been, if instead of being forced by his family’s sense of responsibility to marry his youthful Mexican-American love, if he had been able to cross the cultural divide and married the beautiful Gabacho, Alice; yet, she now also sees herself as an outsider, and fears its ramifications. Besides, her own relatives are now being killed in Poland and Nazi Germany. Despite her need to reach out to help others, she cannot truly help herself.

        Despite my deep respect and admiration of this work, however, I left the theater feeling that the whole had not quite been integrated. Basically, it is a series of dramatic events interrupted by song and dance, and while that can often be, as in Brecht and Weill’s great works, a remarkable combination, here the parts feel a big unhinged, particularly since, I believe, the spoken drama parts were accomplished without microphone, while the song and dance numbers were accompanied with canned music and heavily miked songs.

     Coming out of the United Farm Workers, El Teatro Campesino performances, moreover, Valdez was never quite able to link the various tableaux of his tale in a truly integral way. Even as we are moved by its many parts, the parts still seem not to be quite woven into a whole. Finally, I’m not sure the gravely-voiced Birchir was quite strong to play host to the work’s many disparate parts.

     Still, I wouldn’t have missed this revival for anything in the world. We all need to be reminded again and again of the horrible histories that have transpired in Los Angeles—as well as so many other American cities—throughout the years. What happened to these 21 boys happened elsewhere to Emmet Till, what happened to Emmet Till happened to the entire West Coast Japanese community, and what happened to the Japanese happened again to Rodney King, all of which is threatening to happen all over again. And one cannot say enough about the bravery of figures like Gordon Davidson, the original founder of this very theater, who died late last year, and offered up his stage in 1978 to this play’s Luis Valdez.

      Certainly, the audience at the performance I saw—so very different from the elderly graying-haired audiences of so many of my theater events—clearly enjoyed this exploration of cultural history, raucously applauding even the minor figures, such as Reyna’s mother and father (Rose Portillo and Daniel Valdez), as much for their titular roles, as the major actors.

 

Los Angeles, March 12, 2017

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance

 

*In the past few years, through Howard’s work on a show at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art of the artist Carlos Almaraz—who, incidentally, created a mural for the original production of this play—we have become friends with Daniel Guerrero, himself an outsized theatrical figure, the son of the US National Heritage treasure, composer and musician Lalo Guerrero.