More On Theatrical Intimacy

[On 26 May, I posted an article on Rick On Theater entitled “A growing theater trend: The art of staging love” by Matthew J. Palm of the Orlando Sentinel.  When I first saw the article, it was the first I heard of theatrical intimacy designers, the name of the position Palm used in his article.  I did a little poking about the ‘Net and discovered that it was, indeed, “a growing trend.”  Some months later, I got an e-mail from the Stage Directors and Choreographers Society.  SDC was getting on board with this new concern, growing out of the #MeToo movement. 

[Then a few weeks later, I got my copy of SAG-AFTRA, the member magazine for the film and television union.  In it was also an article on the same subject.  (SDC uses the title “intimacy choreographer” for the job Palm had written about, and SAG-AFTRA calls it “intimacy coordinator,” but the responsibility is the same.)

[I’m posting both the SDC e-mail, which arrived in my inbox on 23 July, and the un-credited SAG-AFTRA article, from the summer issue that arrived earlier this month, because I think this is an important move on the part of the professional entertainment industry—and I applaud the unions for getting out in front of the need and engaging their memberships in the issue.]

“Stage Directors And Choreographers Society & Intimacy Choreography”

[SDC, formerly known as Society of Stage Directors and Choreographers or SSDC (until 2009), was established in 1959, representing theatrical directors and choreographers, working on Broadway and on National tours, Off-Broadway, and in various resident, regional, stock, and dinner theatres throughout the United States.]

July 23, 2019

Dear Members and Associate Members,

As theatre artists and organizations encounter a changing discourse around staging sexual content and intimate moments, initiatives that provide awareness of the issues and positively shift our language and practices are essential in creating a safer and more empowered industry. We believe it is a part of SDC’s job to educate our Members on why the field of intimacy choreography has emerged and provide resources for building higher sensitivity and awareness around what is needed to ensure a context of consent in all rehearsal rooms. SDC recognizes that every project will need different resources and every director builds a rehearsal room in their own way.

Our approach, which will roll out over the next few months, is one of in-depth education that provides many paths and possibilities to staging intimacy versus mandating or endorsing a singular policy. That is not our place. But we do want to give directors and choreographers the tools for successfully grappling with intimacy onstage in our current ‘me too’ world and in doing so begin to set some best practices and standards. We deeply respect each individual Member’s unique approach to their craft, and we sincerely appreciate the emergence of intimacy choreography and support all artists to work purposefully and intentionally when it comes to issues of consent and sexual safety onstage, whether that be with an intimacy choreographer or not. 

To provide a wealth of information and resources to our Members, we will be creating an online and offline library where directors encountering sexual content or looking for guidance around intimacy staging may go. If you stage your own intimacy, SDC will offer you access to helpful language to assist you in creating the context for artists to speak up and actively set boundaries. If you want to learn more directly about the work of intimacy professionals, we will have information about what the field is, how it can help you, and where you can learn more. SDC will continue to provide our Members with resources for getting to know the community of intimacy choreographers and how to begin a collaborative dialogue with them.  And finally, we will develop resources to help Members navigate and negotiate the addition of an intimacy choreographer onto the collaborative team, whether requested by you, your employer, or an actor.  Everyone needs access to all the tools, even if they use them differently

Intimacy Choreography, A Vital & Emerging Field

In 2006, the field of intimacy choreography emerged primarily out of academic institutions as a training tool and research field for stage artists. This scholarly work then evolved into organizations outside the higher education field, which offer tools, education, consulting, and comprehensive resources for staging theatrical intimacy. The two primary organizations who offer training and who choreograph intimacy are Intimacy Directors International (IDI) and Theatrical Intimacy Education (TIE). In collaboration with specific intimacy choreography organizations, Society of American Fight Directors (SAFD) trains their choreographers in staging sexual violence. Many of these seasoned and trusted fight directors are now crossing over into intimacy choreography.

At the core of intimacy choreography is the use of a more formalized vocabulary and practice for staging intimacy or scenes of a sexual nature. The protocols of intimacy choreography give performers a common vocabulary that allows them to communicate with each other about the work they are doing and to define boundaries. There is a practice, a codified set of guidelines, that makes the process less intimidating and gives artists more agency in their own work.

Intimacy choreographers are experts in conversations of power and consent in any space where sexual content is being rehearsed. They aim to create cultures where artists are empowered to tell the clearest story possible without violating their own personal boundaries. And they ensure that throughout a run, the actors are continuing to have an open dialogue about the sexual staging, renewing consent and opening conversations to address the live and ever-changing nature of the theatre.

Techniques used by intimacy choreographers include: teaching languages of initial consent and renewal of consent, contact improvisation, checking in and out (making a ritual of intimacy, so actors have a mental separation of the work from their daily lives), and initiating channels for actors to communicate openly through the process about their experience. All of these tools give artists more agency to only agree to situations they feel physically and emotionally safe engaging in while continuing to respect the creative team and their process of telling a specific and compelling story.

With increased public awareness and discourse on sexual harassment and consent, many theatres, universities, and leaders in our field have felt a need to respond directly. Our field is addressing a critical need to improve the working conditions of our industry, and SDC is taking action as well.

Where We Stand

SDC believes that each director should have the freedom to tell the story they want to tell in the way they want to tell it. And we recognize a growing need in our industry to dismantle abusive power structures and respond to a tremendous outpouring of concern about how, on and off stage, we engage appropriately with one another. We look forward to leading the discourse around intimacy direction and providing vital resources for directors to uphold ethical practices and accomplish their best work.

With more resources to stage intimacy, we hope to give directors concrete tools to set-up systems in the rehearsal room and beyond. When actors are unified by a director around a specific language of consent, they are less likely to take actions that will put their fellow actors at risk. This shared awareness and work will ensure that stage intimacy continues to be consensual, even when directors have left the run.

“Uncomfortable” is not “unsafe.” SDC’s goal is to provide resources for safety. We understand that art can and often must be emotionally and physically challenging. We encourage our directors to make their most daring and rigorous work. And we believe that exciting and influential art can and should be done in spaces where consent and boundaries are firmly understood. With our comprehensive resources, our repository of points of view and research, we aim to give every director the support they need to build more awareness around issues of intimacy and create their own culture of open dialogue and consent.

While our comprehensive library is coming soon, CLICK HERE [SDC Member Portal] for immediate information about intimacy choreography and to share with us your experiences and needs on this topic. We look forward to being in dialogue with you, our Members and leaders of the theatre community, about this vital and ongoing issue.

In Solidarity,

Pam MacKinnon, President

John Rando, Executive Vice President

Michael John Garcès, First Vice President

Michael Wilson, Treasurer

Evan Yionoulis, Secretary

Seret Scott, Second Vice President

Leigh Silverman, Third Vice President

*  *  *  *

“Safety, Dignity & Integrity:

SAG-AFTRA to Standardize Guidelines for Intimacy Coordinators”

[This article appeared in SAG-AFTRA 8.2 (Summer 2019),  published quarterly by SAG-AFTRA, Los Angeles, Califormia.  The Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, known as SAG-AFTRA, is the union that represents film and television actors, journalists, radio personalities, recording artists, singers, voice actors, and other media professionals worldwide.  The organization was formed in 2012 following the merger of the Screen Actors Guild (SAG – created in 1933) and the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (created in 1937 as the American Federation of Radio Artists [AFRA], becoming AFTRA in 1952 after merger with the Television Authority).]

SAG-AFTRA has announced that it will collaborate with Alicia Rodis, the associate director and cofounder of Intimacy Directors International (IDI), the intimacy coordinators with IDI and other trained providers to standardize, codify and implement guidelines for on-set intimacy coordinators.

The guidelines will establish new, relevant policies for nudity and simulated sex and other hyper-exposed work; define the duties and standards for intimacy coordinators on productions; and specify acceptable training, vetting and qualifications of intimacy coordinators. Intimacy coordinators provide coaching for actors performing intimate scenes and ensure that proper protocols are followed while they are at their most vulnerable.

“Our goal is to normalize and promote the use of intimacy coordinators within our industry,” said SAG-AFTRA President Gabrielle Carteris, adding, “Intimacy coordinators provide an important safety net for our members doing hyper-exposed work. At a time when the industry still needs to make great changes, our initiative will ensure the safety and security of SAG-AFTRA members while they work, and it respects the boundaries of actors.”

Added National Executive Director David White, “These specifically implemented guidelines will allow productions to run more efficiently while the specialized support empowers both cast and crew. We look forward to working with our industry partners and allies to ensure these guidelines work for our members and others on set. Many productions are already using intimacy coordinators, so it is imperative to codify and standardize the work to best benefit SAG-AFTRA members and the industry as a whole.”

SAG-AFTRA’s efforts are not just limited to on-set work. The union is committed to defending the rights and dignity of its members on the job, while pursuing work and in the public sphere. It has elevated the conversation on sexual harassment and abuse through its public policy advocacy efforts, including several pieces of legislation and by hosting a groundbreaking panel discussion on image-based sexual abuse, such as “deepfake” non-consensual sex scenes.

The union continues to pursue its goal to change the culture of harassment and abuse in the industry once and for all. Over the past year and a half in particular, SAG-AFTRA has made great strides toward this vision, starting with the rollout last February of the Four Pillars of Change framework for confronting harassment and advancing equity. This comprehensive initiative strengthens protections for members and holds productions to high standards of conduct through new rules and guidelines, enhanced education and resources, and public policy advocacy.

Introduced early last year, Code of Conduct Guideline No. 1 calls for an end to professional meetings and auditions in high-risk locations such as hotels and private residences, and encourages members to bring a support peer to auditions and meetings where safety may be a concern. SAG-AFTRA has since codified Code of Conduct Guideline No. 1 into the Netflix, Commercials and Network Television Code contracts, along with provisions that provide explicit personal harassment protections.

In collaboration with the SAG-AFTRA Foundation and The Actors Fund, SAG-AFTRA has expanded existing intervention tools and survivor support services. At SAG-AFTRA, more than 100 first- and rapid-responder staff have been trained across the organization, including specialized assessment and intervention training for field representatives. Additional experts have been brought on for intake and case management of complaints, and the union’s long-running 24/7 safety hotline has evolved to include a specialized trauma hotline for members who are experiencing, or who have experienced, sexual harassment or assault.

In addition, SAG-AFTRA is leading a proactive legislative agenda at the federal and state levels that expands and strengthens sexual harassment laws, mandates training for nonsupervisory staff, aims to dismantle the legal barriers to reporting misconduct, extends protections to workers outside of a traditional employment relationship, prohibits the use of nondisclosure agreements in employment agreements, and targets image-based sexual abuse and on-set coercion.

In California, for example, SAG-AFTRA supported the passage of Senate Bill 1300, which prohibits an employer from requiring an individual to sign away their rights under the state anti-discrimination and anti-harassment law in exchange for a raise or as a condition of employment. The law also prohibits employers from requiring an employee to sign any documents that deny an employee’s right to disclose information about unlawful acts in the workplace, including sexual harassment. Senate Bill 224 expanded sexual harassment protections to explicitly prohibit sexual harassment in certain business relationships that exist outside of the employer-employee legal structure, and Senate Bill 820 prohibited secrecy provisions in settlement agreements following sexual abuse, harassment and discrimination.

In New York, the union supported the successful passage of several bills over a twoyear period. Senate Bill 6577 adjusted the statute of limitations for second- and third-degree rape from 5 years to 20 and 10 years, respectively; enhanced damages to include punitive damages and attorney fees in employment discrimination cases; and lowered the “severe and pervasive” standard in sexual harassment cases that denies many victims recourse. Senate Bill 4345 made it a second-degree felony to coerce someone to appear nude in a film. New York state and city have both broadened the statute of limitations for filing sexual harassment claims from one year to three years and have expanded sexual harassment training requirements to nonsupervisors, an essential tool to address the harassment that can occur among co-workers or co-stars.

Together, these victories take on the culture of silence that protects abusers and reflect an evolving understanding of workplace harassment and abuse. Yet, despite measurable progress, there is more work to be done.

When it comes to sexually explicit material, performers should control the use of their images. Unfortunately, sophisticated, free digital technology enables creators to depict an individual as engaging in virtually any activity without their consent or participation, including nude performances and realistic sex acts. While this technology is often used to make deepfake porn, mainstream filmmakers have also used it to create digitized performances of actors without their consent. This technology is just one example of the challenges the union faces in protecting performers from image-based sexual abuse.

In May, Rep. Adam Schiff, D-California, chair of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, joined SAG-AFTRA for a panel discussion on how deepfake technology can be weaponized to harass and defame individuals, spread misinformation and undermine national security. Moderated by NBC4 anchor Colleen Williams with an introduction by Carteris, the panel featured White, digital forensics expert Hany Farid, law professor Mary Anne Franks, and SAG-AFTRA members and activists Alyssa Milano and Heidi Johanningmeier.

To address the growing threat to members, SAG-AFTRA sponsored California Senate Bill 564, introduced by state Sen. Connie Leyva, which would ban the creation and dissemination of nonconsensual digitally created sex scenes and nude performances, including deepfakes. The first of its kind, this legislation would give individuals reasonable time to decide before consenting to a digitized intimate scene and the right to sue creators where no consent was obtained at all. SB 564 passed with unanimous support, only to unfortunately be shelved in the Senate Appropriations Committee a few weeks later. SAG-AFTRA continues to pursue avenues in Sacramento that would ensure these protections for members.

SAG-AFTRA also supports H.R. 2896, known as the SHIELD Act, a federal bipartisan bill that would prohibit the intentional disclosure of intimate images that the subject intended to be private, often referred to as “revenge porn.” Performers, especially women, are frequent targets of this misconduct and are at risk of having their cell phones hacked or sensitive behind-the-scenes footage leaked. The bill was introduced in May by Reps. Jackie Speier and John Katko, with support from Sen. Kamala Harris. At a press conference that day, SAG-AFTRA member and activist Amber Heard, a survivor of such a nonconsensual disclosure, spoke about the public humiliation she experienced, and White voiced the need for legal remedies.

As the work unfolds, SAG-AFTRA will continue to work with industry stakeholders, subject-matter experts, lawmakers and members to secure the right to work safely and with respect, dignity and integrity.

_______

REPORT: If you believe you have experienced workplace harassment or unlawful discrimination, call your union at (855) SAG-AFTRA / (855) 724-2387 and press 1.

FOR AFTER-HOURS EMERGENCIES: (844) SAFER SET / (844) 723-3773 IF YOU ARE IN IMMEDIATE DANGER, DIAL 911 TO CONTACT LOCAL LAW ENFORCEMENT.

These numbers are always available on the back of your membership card, the Help Center on the sagaftra.org website and on your member app.

SUPPORT: For workplace harassment support services, including counseling and referrals, call the number below for the office nearest you. This service is provided in partnership with SAG-AFTRA, the SAG-AFTRA Foundation and The Actors Fund.

The Actors Fund, Los Angeles (323) 933-9244, ext. 455 • intakela@actorsfund.org

The Actors Fund, New York City (212) 221-7300, ext. 119 • intakeny@actorsfund.org

The Actors Fund, Chicago (312) 372-0989 • shaught@actorsfund.org

'Native Son' (Acting Company)

Nambi E. Kelley’s adaptation of Native Son from the 1939 novel by Richard Wright is currently having its New York début at the hands of The Acting Company.  The play has a historical connection, admittedly tenuous but nonetheless interesting, with the troupe.

In 1937, John Houseman (1902-88) and Orson Welles (1915-85) collaborated in the establishment of the independent repertory company, the Mercury Theatre, which expanded into film (Citizen Kane, 1941, and The Magnificent Ambersons, 1942) and radio (Mercury Theatre on the Air, 1938-40; most famous production: 1938’s The War of the Worlds, broadcast on Halloween night), as well as stage productions. 

In 1941, the Mercury Theatre presented an adaptation of Native Son, composed by novelist Wright (1908-60) and playwright Paul Green (1894-1981), which ran for 114 performances from March to June at the St. James Theatre on Broadway.  Produced by Houseman, the adaptation was directed by Welles and starred Canada Lee (1907-52) as Bigger Thomas.  (The production was subsequently revived  at the Majestic Theatre in 1942.) 

(Lee, a pioneer among African-American actors and a champion of civil rights in the 1930s and ’40s, had previously starred as Banquo—opposite Jack Carter, 1902-67, as Macbeth—in the famous 1936 production of the so-called Voodoo Macbeth, adapted and directed by Welles for the Federal Theatre Project of the Depression-era Works Progress Administration.)

In 1968, Houseman established the Drama Division of the Juilliard School and founded The Acting Company with members of its first graduating class in 1972.  Over half of the current Acting Company’s membership is comprised of recent graduates of Juilliard’s Drama Division. 

(Aside from the original novel, published in 1940, Native Son’s been adapted for film three times.  A 1951 film version, adapted and directed—in English—in Argentina by Pierre Chenal, starred Wright himself as Bigger—despite that fact that the novelist was playing the 20-year-old protagonist at 42.  The film wasn’t well received and Wright’s performance was especially criticized.  In 1986, playwright and screenwriter Richard Wesley penned another adaptation, directed by Jerrold Freedman for the Public Broadcasting System’s American Playhouse; Victor Love starred as Bigger.  A third film, released in April of this year on HBO, was directed by Rashid Johnson from a script by Suzan-Lori Parks and starred Ashton Sanders as Bigger.)

In 2014, Nambi E. Kelley’s adapted the novel anew.  (An earlier adaptation, after Paul Green’s collaboration with Wright, was staged in Seattle at the Intiman Theatre; it was written and staged by Kent Gash in 2006.)  The playwright had felt a connection to Wright’s novel from having read it in her youth and because of its setting in the city where she lived, its story had stuck with her.  The chance to adapt it for the stage brought Kelley back to one of her first literary lodestars.

Kelley’s new rendering for the stage premièred at the Court Theatre in Chicago (in a co-production with the American Blues Theater, 11 September-19 October 2014), the city in which the playwright grew up and trained as a dramatist, and in which the story of Native Son is set.  With Jerod Haynes starring as Bigger Thomas, the première of Kelley’s adaptation was directed by Seret Scott, who’s also mounting the Acting Company production, becoming the highest-grossing non-musical play in the theater’s history and going on to win multiple awards. 

The new had productions across the country: Stray Cat Theatre, Phoenix (10- 25 March 2016); Marin Theatre Company in Mill Valley, Calif. (19 January-12 February 2017); New Theatre In The Square, Marietta, Ga. (20 April-9 May 2017); Yale Repertory Theatre in New Haven (24 November-16 December 2017); Kiki & David Gindler Performing Arts Center, Glendale, Calif. (19 April-3 June 2018); Paul Robeson Theatre, African American Cultural Center in Buffalo (18 January-10 February 2019); Mosaic Theater Company in Washington, D.C. (27 March-28 April 2019); Center Theatre Group (20 April-28 April 2019) in Los Angeles, and more.  The PlayMakers Repertory Company, the professional theater at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, will be presenting Kelley’s Native Son from 11 to 29 September 2019.  (In addition to the Chicago première, the Marin County and New Haven productions were all staged by Seret Scott before she mounted The Acting Company production.)

The text of Kelley’s adaptation of Native Son was published in an “acting edition” in 2016 by Samuel French.  (The Acting Company has trimmed Kelley’s script a little, deleting several characters who are still mentioned but never appear on The Duke’s stage.  Director Seret Scott’s mounting runs 90 minutes, but I gather from annotations about the published script, that’s how long the full script runs as well.)

The Acting Company is producing Native Son at The Duke on 42nd Street (229 W. 42nd Street) in rotating repertory with Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure (see my report, posted on Rick On Theater  on 14 August).  The production started previews on 17 July and opened on 25 July.   My frequent theater partner, Diana, and I caught the 8 p.m. performance on Friday, 16 July;  the production is scheduled to close on 24 August. 

I included a brief history of The Acting Company in my report on Desire, the last time (not counting last week’s Measure for Measure) I saw the troupe on stage, so I recommend the curious reader refer to that (https://rickontheater.blogspot.com/2015/09/desire.html).  The Duke on 42nd Street, a project of The New 42nd Street, formed in 1990 with the mission of the cultural revival of West 42nd Street between 7th and 8th Avenues, is a 199-seat black-box rental theater that offers nonprofit and commercial companies the opportunity to perform on famed 42nd Street, the heart of Manhattan’s Theatre District.  

Housed on the second floor of the New 42nd Street Studios, opened in 2000, The Duke, named in recognition of a grant from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, features customizable seating for various actor-audience relationships.  (It’s set up in a thrust configuration for The Acting Company’s rotating rep, with two small seating areas to the right and left of the performing space and a larger, main seating section in the center.)

Aside from The Acting Company, the theater, has hosted such companies as Playwright’s Realm, Red Bull Theater, Primary Stages, Transport Group, Theatre for a New Audience, Lincoln Center Theater LCT3, The Royal Court Theatre, Steppenwolf Theater Company, Armitage Gone! Dance, Chicago Shakespeare Theater, Naked Angels, Classical Theater of Harlem, and the National Theater of Great Britain. 

Nambi E. Kelley was born in New York City on 8 January 1973.  Leaving New York at the age of 3, Kelley’s family moved to Chicago, where Kelley grew up across the street from Chicago’s Ida B. Wells housing projects on the city’s South Side.  An excellent student, Kelley won a full scholarship to the Theatre School at DePaul University where she studied playwriting.  Graduating in three years with a bachelor of fine arts degree in playwriting (1995), Kelley embarked upon the professional world of the stage as a writer and actor.  The playwright-actor subsequently received an MFA in interdisciplinary arts from Goddard College in Vermont (2011); she was a member of the Goodman Theatre’s Playwright’s Unit for the 2011-2012 Season. 

Kelley has composed plays for Steppenwolf Theatre Company, Goodman Theatre, and Court Theatre/American Blues Theater in Chicago, Lincoln Center Theatre Company in New York, and internationally with LATT Children’s Theatre/Unibooks Publishing Company (South Korea) Teatri Sbagliati (Italy), and The Finger Players (Singapore).  She was named playwright-in-residence for the 2017-2018 Season at the National Black Theatre in New York.  

The Acting Company’s Native Son takes place over “two cold and snowy winter days in December 1939,” according to Kelley’s note in the published text, in what the playwright calls “Chicago’s Black Belt”—or, as Kelley also says: “a split second inside the leading character’s mind. 

Bigger Thomas (Galen Ryan Kane), a 20-year-old African American who lives in the impoverished South Side neighborhood, is employed as chauffeur and all-around handyman by a family of wealthy white philanthropists, the Daltons.  The money Bigger makes at his new job will be used to supplement his mother’s income; she’s raising Bigger and his sister, Vera (Katherine Renee Turner), and his younger brother, Buddy (Lorenzo Jackson), without their father, who was killed in a riot when Bigger was 8.  (In the novel, the father was lynched in Mississippi, where Bigger was born.)

As a chauffeur, he’s directed by Mrs. Dalton (Laura Gragtmans) to take Mary, the daughter (Rebekah Brockman), to the university.  Instead, Mary decides to pick up her communist boyfriend, Jan (Anthony Bowden), and to spend the time drinking and partying someplace “where colored people eat.”  The young whites treat Bigger as a friend and comrade, Mary naïvely and Jan earnestly, which clearly makes the chauffeur uncomfortable—a state to which the white couple are oblivious. 

Scenes of Bigger, Mary, and Jan driving through Chicago and drinking alternate with scenes of Bigger and Buddy planning to stick up a deli.  When Buddy taunts his brother for being scared, Bigger and Buddy fight and Bigger grabs his 16-year-old brother in a bear hug (the fights were choreographed by Emmanuel Brown).  “I can’t breathe!” calls out Buddy.  The line immediately registered as an evocation of Eric Garner’s cry when he died from being put in a choke hold by a New York City police officer on 17 July 2014.  This incident, which made “I can’t breathe” a protest chant for the #BlackLivesMatter movement, occurred two months before Kelley’s Native Son premièred in Chicago, but the final disposition of police officer Daniel Pantaleo was in the news at the very time I saw The Acting Company’s performance.

(Later in the play, when Bigger pulls a gun on Jan, the young communist utters “Don’t shoot,” another iconic slogan—”Hands up, don’t shoot”—from the same movement, a reference to the 9 August 2014 death of Michael Brown at the hands of a Ferguson, Missouri, police officer.  Brown’s and Garner’s deaths, following upon the fatal shooting of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin on 26 February 2012 in Sanford, Florida, started the #BlackLivesMatter movement, and whether or not Kelley intentionally called the deaths to mind, the words she wrote did just that, at least for me—and, I daresay, many others.)

Mary gets falling-down drunk and when Bigger gets her home (in the scene we’re shown when the play opens), he must carry Mary, who’s become increasingly amorous and aggressive, to her bedroom without being detected.  Mrs. Dalton, who’s blind, enters the room and Bigger panics at the thought of being caught with a white woman.  He accidentally smothers Mary by placing a pillow over her face to keep her quiet.  Terrified at what he’s done and the consequences of a black man killing a white woman even in an accident, Bigger disposes of Mary’s body in the furnace. 

At first, Jan is suspected by the police for Mary's disappearance and Bigger tells them, when he’s questioned, that it was Jan who carried Mary to her room.  Over several scenes of inquiries by a private detective (Henry Jenkinson) hired by Mr. Dalton and then the police (also Jenkinson), the remains of Mary’s body and an earring identified by her mother, are discovered in the ashes of the furnace and the search for a missing young woman becomes a hunt for a murderer. 

Suspicions turn to Bigger, who goes on the run through Chicago with his girlfriend, Bessie (Turner), in tow.  The trial of the novel takes place in Bigger’s imagination.  He takes refuge in a vacant tenement but, realizing he “Can’t leave her here and I can’t take her with,” Bigger beats Bessie to death with a brick and drops her body down an airshaft.  After fleeing to the roof, in a struggle with police, he falls (or is pushed) to his death.

Bigger’s last word as he falls is “. . . Fly,” an image of unattainable freedom for Bigger.  Early in the play, he expresses fascination with planes and flying, complaining bitterly that “white folks” won’t let him fly planes.  The notion of flying returns several times in the dialogue.

Kelley doesn’t tell the story chronologically or in Wright’s Social Realism style, but out of order and Expressionistically.  For example, she starts the play with a scene that belongs chronologically later in the plot; she calls it a flashback in the script, but it’s more like a flash-forward.  Her Scene One won’t make complete sense until Scenes Twenty Eight and Twenty Nine.  The chronology is disjointed throughout the performance and events, as Kelley presents them, are internal and non-linear.

Wright’s Bigger looks at himself in the mirror and what he sees staring back at him is a “black rat sonofabitch”—he’d killed just such a beast in his family’s apartment in the early pages of the book—the reflection created by the others that he’s come to accept is who he is.  It is a principal aspect of Kelley’s play that the Black Rat is embodied on stage by an actor (Jason Bowen) who shadows Kane’s Bigger, personifying the voice inside Bigger’s head.  Sometimes the Black Rat tells Bigger what he should do (not always wisely) and sometimes he voices what others will say, think, or do—sometimes in the guise of people whose words Bigger hears. 

Kelley frequently uses theatrical methods like the Black Rat conceit in her plays.  Since this device is an invention of Kelley’s and doesn’t exist in Wright’s novel, It’s not necessarily easy to interpret unless a theatergoer has read or heard about it before seeing a performance.  (I’d read about the construct in the New York Times, the one review I read before seeing a performance.  It’s also mentioned on the webpage for the play on The Acting Company’s website.)  Otherwise, it could be seen as confusing and intrusive—or as insightful and revealing.

With such alterations as the Black Rat, the non-linearity, and the 90-minute, one-act abbreviation of the  novel, Kelley’s adaptation changes the focus of Native Son  from the environmental circumstances of brutalization and poverty that cause Bigger to make the choices he makes to his internal struggle.  Thus, while Wright’s Native Son is an examination of racism in the U.S., Kelley’s take is an exploration of how racial oppression determines Bigger’s fate. 

I won’t recap here all the complaints critics of the novel, both black and white, have had over the years, but I’ll say that Kelley’s adaptation retains many of the faults reported.  Most salient is the character of Bigger Thomas.  He’s a thoroughly unsympathetic person—a coward, liar, violent young man who’s angry (not without cause, granted), impulsive, and inclined to commit armed robbery.  (I’m not sure how significant it’s meant to be, but the deli Bigger and Buddy are planning to rob is called “Blum’s Deli,” suggesting it’s owned by a Jew—so there’s at least a hint that Bigger has a touch of anti-Semitism in his character.)

Second, we see that not just white bigots like Britten, the detective, and the police who are chasing Bigger, have deliberately pushed him down, or even the ostensibly well-meaning whites like the Daltons, Mary, and Jan, but even his own family treats him with disrespect.  His mother and sister disparage him, Buddy teases him at every opportunity, and his girlfriend, Bessie, herself an alcoholic, berates him.  The Bigger we see isn’t oppressed by white people so much as by everyone in his life.  It’s little wonder that he thinks of himself as “a black rat sonofabitch.”  But putting the blame solely on white society rings false in the play, coming off more like scapegoating.  I’m not sure that’s what either Kelley or Wright had in mind for their points.

The play also adds some problems to those inherent in the novel because of Kelley’s abridgment of the plot (one of the main reasons I have difficulties with stage adaptations of novels), because of the Expressionistic style she employs over Wright’s Social Realism, and because of her shift in the point she makes over Wright’s intention (the reason for the style shift).  (The Acting Company’s mounting is a double adaptation, you’ll recall: Kelley’s adaptation is edited further.  I don’t think scenes have been cut, but characters have been deleted.)  

In the end, there are two serious problems for a drama: its point is cloudy and weak—like the book, this is a play with a social-criticism message—and, even at 90 minutes, the point is too insubstantial to sustain the performance so it comes off padded and attenuated.  For me, there’s a lot of what radio people would call “dead air.”  (It doesn’t help that, even without knowing the book, it’s so obvious pretty quickly what’s going to happen that I kept thinking, ‘Come on, get on with it!’  That’s usually not a good sign.)

Still, as a performance, The Acting Company’s Native Son was much better for me than its Measure for Measure.  Even  Neil Patel’s unit set—the same concrete staircase and platforms that Measure for Measure used—worked better here than in the Shakespeare.  Evoking the back alleys of Chicago’s South Side, basements, and tenement stairways, it sets the action in the world Bigger inhabits both in reality and inside his head.  Alan C. Edwards’s bleak, nourish lighting and Fred Kennedy’s soundscape together helped create the atmosphere that tells part of Native Son’s tale.  Sarita Fellows’s costume designs were appropriately and evocatively of the play’s period, milieu, and class distinctions.

Perhaps most remarkably, the acting was far more convincing and revealing than these same actors exhibited in Measure for Measure.  (Only one member of the cast, Rosalyn Coleman, who plays Hannah Thomas, Bigger’s mother, isn’t in the other play.)  I’d guess, from my experience as an actor, that the reasons are that the play’s closer to contemporary, especially in terms of language but also with respect to the situations and issues that play out in Kelley’s script, and that those issues, which have present-day resonances and echoes, are more meaningful to the performers and the director than those of Measure, even if you assert parallels between the plight of Isabella and the perfidy of Angelo and events of today. 

All in all, the company was more comfortable on stage in Native Son than I felt they were in Measure.  Kane’s Bigger, even though he’s not a sympathetic and innocent victim, creates a strong and vivid character, all his faults and failings laid open.  Bowen’s Black Rat, though he’s more disruptive and interruptive than revelatory, makes contrast to Bigger’s outward persona that sometimes parallels his alter ego and sometimes conflicts with it.  The two actors also worked the paring well off one another, which I imagine isn’t as easy as they make it look.

Jenkinson oversells the bigotry of both Britten, the PI, and the cop he plays, but I blame the script for that more than his performances.  To paraphrase Jessica Rabbit, they’re drawn that way.  Jan and Mary are almost clichés—the earnest young Red and the naïve, liberal-minded girl—but Bowden and Brockman pull the portrayals off well enough not to seem entirely flat or one-dimensional.  Gragtmans comes off as sincere as Mrs. Dalton despite the systemic racism of her class and the white privilege she can’t help demonstrating. 

As Buddy, Jackson depicts an almost prototypical little brother (that is, if your little brother plans a robbery with you) whose admiration for Bigger is undermined by his big bro’s constant failures.  Mother Hannah, as drawn by Coleman, is almost cruel in her chastisement of her older son and Turner’s Bessie is so hard, cold, and self-centered I had to wonder why Bigger would want to be with her even for the sex.

Despite Native Son being a better production and performance than Measure for Measure, it was still ultimately unsatisfying.  I haven’t read the novel, but I have read some of the critical commentary, and it isn’t universally applauded.  (Some analysts insist it was written for a white audience, not a black one—to reveal the life of a black American in an oppressive society.)  Neither Kelley nor Scott fixed this to my (or Diana’s) satisfaction.  Perhaps we’re more cognizant today of the points Wright wanted to make—I certainly hope so—and we know from very recent events that circumstances are only marginally better since Wright’s era.  The Acting Company’s Native Son, however, doesn’t really advance the conversation or suggest any routes to a solution. 

To paraphrase the Kennedy brothers—all three of them said this, originally quoting George Bernard Shaw: it’s one thing to see things as they are and ask ‘why?’; it’s another to dream things that never were and ask ‘why not?’  Kelley does the former, even though I think we already know the truth of what she says.  I wish she’d have suggested at least a little of the latter.

Native Son got more critical coverage than the company’s Measure for Measure.  (A couple of reviews of Measure appeared on the ‘Net after I posted my report.  Some Native Son notices also came out over the past 10 days.)  I found 12 reviews that I’ll summarize for ROTters.  (I remind readers, as I explained in my report on Measure, https://rickontheater.blogspot.com/2019/08/measure-for-measure-acting-company.html, that Show-Score no longer scores the published reviews, so the stats that I habitually reported are no longer being calculated.)

In the U.S. edition of the Financial Times, Max McGuinness interpreted Native Son as the embodiment of the lines in W. H. Auden’s poem “September 1, 1939,” “Those to whom evil is done / Do evil in return.”  Kelley and Scott’s shift from Wright’s “naturalist style” to “a fragmented narrative structure” creates “a haunting, enigmatic aura that offsets the deterministic thrust of Wright’s story,” thought McGuinness.  “It’s not quite enough, however, to make up for the theatrical limitations of their material.”  The FT reviewer found, “The essential problem is that, in keeping with Wright’s own portrayal, Bigger remains a cipher throughout” the play, adding that “Bigger’s near total absence of psychological complexity and self-consciousness make him an unengaging protagonist.”  Even with the Black Rat verbalizing Bigger’s “interior monologue,” Bigger’s “internal life still seems too barren to carry the play while the supporting characters . . . tend to be rather caricatured.”  McGuinness concluded, “There’s a lot of truth here, but not enough dramatic balance.”

Alexis Soloski of the New York Times announced, “‘Native Son’ . . . is a murder story without a mystery.”  Soloski called the adaptation “fluid, vigorous and somewhat nonlinear” and affirmed that it “neatly intercuts violent external events with Bigger’s equally violent internal landscape.”  Then she backed off, advising that “you won’t feel that you’ve faced anything particularly harrowing, either.”  The Times reviewer explained that “this ‘Native Son’ is so brisk and so film-noir stylish that you are more likely to applaud its theatrics than feel shaken by its implications.”  The missing speeches from the trial, Soloski asserted, “are among the elements that shift the novel from the particular to the general, from the story of one marginalized man to a story about all marginalized men.”  Kelley’s adaptation of Native Son “makes Bigger’s story fleet and lively.  It also makes it smaller.” 

Maya Phillips asked in the New Yorker, “How does one adapt Richard Wright’s classic novel for the stage?”  She reported that Kelley’s adaptation “attempts a solution in the form of a new character, the Black Rat (Jason Bowen), a tipped-hat, deep-voiced, film-noir rendering of Bigger’s interiority.”  Phillips complained, however, that “Galen Ryan Kane’s Bigger lacks the dynamism of the book’s character, informed by Wright’s musings on racial and social consciousness, and the production veers between being too on the nose in its racial ironies and too stylized in its drama.”  She concluded: “A mixed-up chronology and whiplash-fast scene changes, with the help of verbal cues—repeated words, echoed reactions—enliven the plot, but what’s lost is Wright’s hard edge and bite.”

On TheaterMania, Pete Hempstead characterized Kelley’s script as “a smart, at-times-confusing adaptation” but lamented that the production never “really wows.”  Hempstead did allow that “Kelley’s adaptation captures its hero’s interior life better than [past film] attempts.”  Scott “does a decent job blending scenes seamlessly as they pass through Bigger’s mind . . .,” acknowledged the TM reviewer, but adding, “Not so effective is the noirish atmosphere that she creates for this already lurid tale.”   In the end, Hempstead admonished, “Bigger’s story is bigger than this.”

Carole Di Tosti of Theater Pizzazz immediately complimented the “superb cast” of The Acting Company’s repertory and dubbed the production “astounding” and “dispel[s] any thought that Wright’s complex excoriation of racism in America makes the protagonist Bigger Thomas a stereotype.”  Di Tosti felt that “Kelley configures Thomas as a whole being” and “reveals his internal psyche, emotional being, the inner consciousness.”  She found, “We empathize with Bowen’s Black Rat and Kane’s Thomas and understand through their portrayals the emotional power inherent in every human.”  She offered high praise for both Kane’s and Bowen’s performances and labeled Scott’s direction “insightful and exciting.”  The TP  writer summed up by stating, “The ensemble . . . are uniformly brilliant as is the evocation, stylization and artistic rendering of this gobsmacking must see production.”

William Wolf of Wolf Entertainment Guide dubbed Kelley’s Native Son as “a harrowing, well-acted version” of the novel and called the director’s style “free form.”  Wolf reported, “It is a tribute to the production that there is consistent plot clarity as the tragic events relentlessly unfold.”  The WEG blogger further asserted, “The play creates tension all the way, fueled by Kane’s excellent acting” and that Scott’s “staging has the power to keep one riveted.” 

“If one didn’t know better, Nambi E. Kelley’s searing ‘Native Son’ . . . might seem like a ripped-from-the-headlines inspired drama,” declared Brian Scott Lipton on CititourNY, calling it a “bleak portrait of institutional and societal racism” which “remains all-too-shockingly relevant today.”  Lipton found The Acting Company’s production “imaginatively directed” and characterized Kane’s performance as Bigger “uncompromising” and Bowen’s Black Rat “equally excellent.”  He added, “The entire ensemble does fine work.”

On TheaterScene.net, Victor Gluck reported that Kelley’s adaptation of Native Son is “an ambitious work for the stage” but “is faithful to the spirit of the novel.”  Gluck, however, found that “one problem with the play is that Kelley’s expressionistic style goes counter to Wright’s mainly naturalistic writing.”   The TS.net review-writer asserted, “If one has not previously read the novel, it would be very difficult to put the pieces of this 52-scened play in order,” adding that ”Kelley has also made significant changes to the characters which are even more problematic.”  (Gluck gave a run-down of the story as told in the novel and then noted the variations Kelley made in her adaptation.)  While decrying many of the changes the playwright made, the reviewer praised the invention of the Black Rat as a “clever device . . . to give Bigger an alter ego.”  He backed off, though, complaining, “Unfortunately, she fails to give The Black Rat much to say or do so that the device is rather moot.”  Kane’s Bigger “is very low key,” Gluck found, “never showing us the seething confusion inside of this character.”  By contrast, Coleman’s Hannah and Turner’s Bessie “give the impassioned performances that heat up the play.” 

Gluck’s bottom line was: “Nambi E. Kelley’s adaptation of Native Son is an interesting attempt to put a dense and long novel on the stage.  However, in stripping the Richard Wright novel down to its basic elements, it eliminates most of the feeling of Chicago in the 1930’s as well as making Bigger a stand-in for all of the disaffected African American youth of his time.”  The TS.net editor-in-chief concluded by stating, “Despite the expressionistic and experimental nature of Kelley’s adaptation which dilutes the novel’s effectiveness, it is a laudable attempt to tell this powerful story of the effects of racism in our own time of the Black Lives Matter movement.”

Calling Kelley’s version of the story an “expressionistic fever dream” on Off Off Online, James Wilson (like many of his colleagues in the reviewing dodge) quoted W. E. B. Du Bois’s statement on the “fragmented black identity”: “It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others.”  Wilson asserted, “As directed by Seret Scott, this Native Son does not linger on metaphysical quandaries.  The action moves at a breathless pace as the play hurtles to its foregone conclusion,” benefiting, however, “from exceptional performances.”  The review-writer’s last word was: “Richard Wright’s Native Son first appeared more than two decades before the advent of Civil Rights legislation.  Sadly, the current adaptation demonstrates that the work is as relevant today as it was nearly 80 years ago.”

Gregory Wilson of CurtainUp (in the same review in which he covered Measure for Measure) pointed out that plays seen “in rotating repertory” can cause “even a familiar work [to] be seen in a new light when it’s placed in proximity (and dialogue) with another.”  He found this true of The Acting Company’s Measure for Measure  and Native Son, rendering “them more powerful through juxtaposition.”  Wilson went on, “The experiment is an admirable one, and at least partially successful.  But the danger of this approach is that it can minimize the complexity of the works in question.”  He lamented, “Ultimately, Wright and Shakespeare are larger than these interpretations give them credit for.”  The production “zoom[s] in on what [Kelley] view[s] as the critical aspects of [the] play” and “[t]he acting and directing are excellent.”  

Wilson continued, “The virtue of this approach, of course, is focus,” but “there isn’t even time to consider other aspects of the work.”  The CU reviewer emphasized, “everything boils down to one continually repeated idea, and the effect is unnecessarily reductive.”  Nonetheless, the review-writer felt the play was “solid, well-directed and acted,” and Wilson liked “the idea of juxtaposing” the two plays in rep.  He concluded, however: “But if it’s important not to lose the forest for the trees, it’s also important to avoid cutting down most of the trees for the sake of what one thinks is the forest. Richard Wright and William Shakespeare are justly praised for their depth and breadth of thought; I wish that in the zeal to focus them on single concepts, these productions didn’t reduce their works as much as they do.”

On Woman Around Town, Alix Cohen called Kelley’s adaptation a “first-rate interpretation” that “is taut and unnerving.”  Cohen characterized Scott’s staging as “creative,” “skillful,” and “inspired,” propelling “a relentless trajectory.”  Kane’s performance is “authoritative, . . . offering multiple shades of fury, resentment, desperation, and confusion.” The reviewer declared the production “never less than riveting” and reported, “Craft is not just excellent, but interesting.”

                               

Dan Rubins’s “Bottom Line” on Theatre Is Easy was: “[O[nly one of The Acting Company’s pair of productions burns bright: Nambi E. Kelley’s passionate adaptation of Native Son.”. He labeled Scott’s staging of Native Son a “taut, tense . . . production” and Kelley’s adaptation “ferociously theatrical.”  (In an interesting characterization, Rubins asserts that Bigger, “given seething, sorrowful life by Galen Ryan Kane,” is an “Othello with Iagos both inside his head and all around him.”)  In conclusion, the Theasy.com reviewer proclaimed The Acting Company’s Native Son “a searing, edge-of-your-seat ride through the psychological trauma of our nation’s past and present.”

Two Foreign Language Shows from the Archives

FABLES DE LA FONTAINE

Jean de la Fontaine

Adapted by Robert Wilson

Comédie-Française (Paris)

Lincoln Center Festival 2007

On Friday, 13 July [2007], my friend Diana and I went to the Gerald W. Lynch Theater at John Jay College on 10th Avenue between 58th and 59th Street [the theater’s former location until 2011, when it was relocated to 524 W. 59th Street] to see Robert Wilson’s Fables de la Fontaine with the Comédie-Française in the Lincoln Center Festival.  A friend remarked that the photo in the Times review (which was pretty close to a rave to boot; https://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/12/theater/reviews/12fabl.html) was “a stunner,” and his response to the photo pretty much sums up my response to the show itself—the stage pictures are stunning.  But a little of that goes a long way and an hour and 40 minutes of pretty pictures is more than enough. 

You all probably know that Wilson was a visual artist before he turned to theater—a painter and architect, as I recall.  His productions are usually visually stunning, from the sets and costumes to the actors’ sculpted movements and gestures.  When the material he’s staging has some depth and complexity, too, then the whole makes a hugely theatrical experience, as happened with The Black Rider, which I saw at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in November 1993.  (It didn’t hurt, I imagine, that his collaborators were William S. Burroughs and Tom Waits.)  When the material itself is less interesting, like The Temptation of St. Anthony, which BAM presented in October 2004, the visual splendor can get enervating. 

That’s what happened here, I’m afraid.  Jean de la Fontaine’s (1621-95) 17th-century fables—the Comédie-Française selected the “beast fables”—are often dark (unlike, say, James Thurber’s), but they are very short and tend to beat the same drum—the venality and selfishness of most creatures—so that the program ended up with 19 pieces that get awfully repetitive.  They even approached preciousness.  (One piece, “The Oak and the Reed,” had no living creatures in it—it was performed . . . well, by the set with voice-over narration.  I suppose that’s clever—but is it theater?  In the 19th century, when all kinds of new theater tech was being introduced, there were exhibits of miniature theaters in which the stage designs and sets “performed” all manners of wonders.  These dioramas were mechanical marvels, of course, but they were hardly drama.  Should we go back to that?  I vote no.)

So, after a while, it got hard to pay too close attention to what was happening, which wasn’t necessarily fair to the actors because they were doing some pretty terrific work.  (Diana said this was about as avant-garde as the Comédie-Française—the traditionally classic theater company of France whose usual fare is Molière, Jean Racine, and Pierre Corneille—gets, though they have opted to do more modern material in the last decade or so.)  Still, it was the look of the production that is its chief accomplishment, so let me dwell on that.

I’ll dispense with the set right off—it was minimal, stark, colorless, and functional—sort of a cubist-cum-expressionist module that represents nothing specific.  Even the lighting—both lighting and sets were designed by Wilson—wasn’t especially noticeable.  (The music, to take a quick step from visual to aural, is, as Ben Brantley notes in the Times, faux-Baroque and quite appropriate, if unobtrusive.  Composed by Michael Galasso, it works fine.) 

As to the costumes, et al., there were 30 different animals represented (by a cast of 15), plus several humans—including a narrator figure who is de la Fontaine (played by a woman, Christine Fersen.)  I’m certainly not going to describe each costume (by Moidele Bickel), mask (Kuno Schlegelmilch), and make-up design (Elisabeth Doucet), so let me just say that they were often very clever and many are striking.  I noticed a couple of things about the concept that were curious, too. 

For instance, not all the designs were of the same style.  Masks and costumes ranged from fairly realistic (the Cock, Gérard Giroudon, with “feathers” and the horizontal silhouette of a bird), to expressionistic (the Ant, Muriel Mayette), to totally anthropomorphic (the Cicada, which was a woman—Coraly Zahonero—in a pea-green evening gown and a ’20s-style cloche hat with two curved green feathers sticking up from the top like antennae!)—and some stops in between.  The Wolf (Christian Blanc) and the Fox, (Laurent Natrella; he’s in the Times photo), for instance, had pretty realistic masks, but the lion’s mask was more stylized. 

The Donkey (Giroudon) had a completely realistic mask—it was grey, of course, and so was his suit, a regular man’s dress suit—but the Stag’s (Charles Chemin) mask was realistic in outline, but looked like it was made of pewter.  The Frogs (Laurent Stocker, Grégory Gadebois), in contrast, were almost comic-looking, like something for a children’s play, but a full costume, not human clothing used symbolically.  The cutest costume was the Little Dog (Françoise Gillard)—a kind of furry 17th-century coat, breeches, and peruque that look as if they were made from a light-brown, curly shag rug! 

Another curiosity was that the same animal may have as many as three appearances.  (The main animals, like the Fox, Wolf, Lion—Bakary Sangaré—Stag, and others, which showed up in several tales, were consistently played by the same actors.  Other animals who were in one or two stories were doubled.) 

So the Fox had a moderately realistic mask in one fable, a very stylized one in another, and no mask (just a kind of head-wrap that left his face visible—like that leather thing old-time pilots used to wear).  They were unified by all being bright red—the actor also wore red gloves—and in the way the actor made his movements (which I’ll get to in a bit).  I didn’t really make anything of any of this, and I’m not sure if it enhanced the production any, but it was curious.

The actors, as you might guess, made sounds to emulate the animals from time to time—nothing obtrusive—but what really showed the actors at work here was the movement.  It was close to dance-like, though not quite dance.  It wasn’t mime, either—and it certainly wasn’t mimetic of animal behavior in any literal sense.  It seemed to be more related to the characters’ personalities as filtered through the animals’ zoological behavior—but not literally, more suggestively.  The result was often very non-realistic behavior (some of this looked like Bob Fosse on acid!) and whenever a particular beast appeared in a fable, this movement style helped establish the “character” regardless of the style of mask or make-up he or she was wearing that time around. 

I suppose the word for Fables is “charming.”  But over an hour-and-a-half of charming was really too much.  At half that, an hour at the most, it would have been far more enjoyable.  A friend of mine says that he thinks of Wilson’s shows as a kind of “meditation”:  If you’re willing to go into a trance and just let your mind go, you can watch them for hours and not worry about what any of it means. 

As it was, it became a sort of design curiosity, the stories having become irrelevant.  Brantley recommended reading the translations supplied with the program before the performance so as not to have to bother with the (somewhat truncated) supertitles, and he was right as far as that went.  (Once again, Brantley’s oversold the production.)  But after a point, it no longer mattered what the characters were saying anyway; it was the visuals that were dominating the stage.

DIVINAS PALABRAS

Ramón del Valle-Inclán

Centro Dramático Nacional (Madrid)

Lincoln Center Festival 2007

Then on Friday, 27 July [2007], Diana and I went to the Rose Theater in the Time Warner Center at Columbus Circle for our second (and last) Lincoln Center event for the season, the 1920 Spanish play Divinas palabras (Divine Words) by the innovative playwright Ramón del Valle-Inclán (1866-1936), whom I compared as the Spanish counterpart to Luigi Pirandello (and Wilborn Hampton, in the Times, equated to Bertolt Brecht, except without the worldwide rep).  Not that those playwrights’ work is similar, but as experimenters and envelope-pushers, they were situated in history at the same moment—Valle-Inclán and Pirandello (1867-1936) are almost exact contemporaries; they both precede, but overlap, Brecht (1898-1956)—and breaking the same rules. 

Valle-Inclán, who was also a novelist, hasn’t been translated into English much, which might account for some for his lesser renown outside Spain, but he is considered a major figure in world literature, especially in terms of using theater in new and provocative ways—one of the most prominent cultural phenomena of the years between the world wars.

(I’ve often fantasized about visiting that decade between 1920 and ’30—so much new theater was happening across the West, from France—Symbolism, Surrealism, Dadaism, Existentialism; Claudel, Cocteau, Sartre, Anouilh; Italy—Futurism; Pirandello, Betti; and Spain—Valle-Inclán, Lorca—straight across to Russia—Constructivism; Meyerhold, Vakhtangov, Mayakovsky, Michael Chekhov.  The rise of Stalin ended the experimentation in eastern Europe, the Spanish Civil War did it for Spain, and the Fascists and Nazis did it for the rest of the continent.  Upon the rise of Franco, Valle-Inclán’s plays could not be performed in Spain for 25 years.  WWII pretty much put the kaibosh on all cultural movement for everyone else, and we had to wait until the ’60s for another upheaval.  Here endeth the theater history lesson.)

The Lincoln Center Fest often carves out a special focus for the season, and this year they were spotlighting Spanish theater, including troupes from Spain and Latin America.  There will have been four major productions of Spanish-language works, including Un Hombre se que Ahoga (A Man Who Drowns), a gender-reversed adaptation of Chekhov’s The Three Sisters from Argentina’s Proyecto Chejov.  The Three Brothers, so to speak . . . .)  So, since I had read Divine Words back at NYU but had never seen it—I’m not sure anyone’s ever done it in New York, or very much elsewhere in the U.S.—I wanted to check it out.  The company was the Centro Dramático Nacional, the national theater of the country, and I always sort of feel that they have a special handle on the works of their culture—the way I like to see the late Ingmar Bergman do Swedish (and Scandinavian) classics with his Royal Dramatic Theater. 

The works of Valle-Inclán, one of Spain’s most politically subversive writers, attack the hypocrisy of bourgeois theater and often deploy obscene language and vulgar imagery to counteract theatrical blandness.  He wrote Surrealistic plays before anyone (the French!) coined the term, beginning with verse plays before the turn of the 20th century.  Valle-Inclán’s work anticipated Samuel Beckett, Eugene Ionesco, Jean Genet, and Fernando Arrabal (who acknowledged Valle-Inclán’s influence).  He apparently experienced a disillusionment around the time of WWI (maybe for that reason—it did launch the cynical Dadaist movement in Switzerland) and developed a concept he called esperpento, which is translated in the dictionary as “grotesque” or “weird” but which is also used to mean “absurd” (though that’s really too loose for Valle-Inclán’s style). 

The playwright described the concept as a distortion of theatrical conventions like a funhouse mirror distorts reality; it was intended to show the grotesque truth behind the façade of Spanish culture and politics.  Valle-Inclán’s later plays (including Divine Words) use a combination of comedy and horror to expose the tragedy of life in Spain. 

I don’t know if there’s a relationship between Valle-Inclán and Antonin Artaud (1896-1948), who was already writing his theories before the Spanish writer died (the French edition of The Theatre and Its Double came out in 1938 but was compiled from previously published essays), but Valle-Inclán’s plays certainly demonstrate at least some elements of Artaud’s theater of cruelty—they are grotesque, violent, and shocking.  Certainly the influence could be Valle-Inclán on Artaud—though my recent rereading of Artaud‘s writings didn’t reveal any refs to the Spanish writer.  (There’s apparently a 1967 Educational Theatre Journal essay by Felicia Hardison [Londré] that makes the connection—though I don’t know if she has evidence or is theorizing—so I guess I’m not far off.)

Forgive all the background info on Valle-Inclán, but since he’s so little known outside of Spain, I thought it would be helpful to situate him in the literary matrix of Europe.  I can only say, from my little exposure—having read and now seen one of his plays, arguably his best—that Valle-Inclán is the kind of writer theaters and artists attracted to Brecht, Arrabal, Pirandello, Alfred Jarry, and Artaud ought to find intriguing, if a little daunting.  An English translation of Divine Words and two other later plays came out in 1993; maybe that and additional attention to his work will raise his profile.  (It’s unfortunate in that regard, but the Times seems to have been the only paper here that reviewed Divinas palabras—and Hampton’s “review” was really inadequate as an evaluation of the work.  None of the other dailies did, and even the Voice and the monthly magazines didn’t come out with anything later.)

Written for 40 characters (performed here by a company of 23), the tragicomedy Divinas palabras is a spectacle that reveals the difficulties of rural life among peasants whose struggles are only relieved by religion and the hope of redemption after death.  Composed in 1920, Divinas palabras captures moments when crises occur and people must choose between the new ways and the old. 

The play portrays a family of Galician beggars, spotlighting two sisters-in-law fighting for the privilege of displaying their nephew, a hydrocephalic dwarf, at village fairs.  In addition to its corrosive satire of religious superstition and hypocrisy and its introduction of the theme of incest, the text calls for the appearance on stage of a nude actress.  (I don’t know if Valle-Inclán’s intention was to stage this literally in 1920, but it would have been anathema in Catholic Spain—and pretty much elsewhere at that time!) 

When Mari-Gaila (Elisabet Gelabert), the sexton’s adulterous wife, is caught in flagrante delicto by the villagers, they bring her naked to the church for her punishment.  Only by saying Jesus’ words in Latin (the divine words: “Let him who is without sin . . .,” identified by Hampton as John 8:7—not that I’d know)—incomprehensible, and therefore magical to the peasants—is the cuckolded husband able to prevent them from stoning his wife.  The play deals with the grittiness of life with grotesque humor and a feeling of redemption at the end. 

The plot of Divinas palabras is “relentlessly bleak,” as Hampton describes it, and it’s not insignificant.  It’s far too complex, however, to capsulize for you, so I refer you to the Times review (Saturday, 28 July [2007]; https://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/28/theater/reviews/28divi.html).  I said Hampton’s piece was inadequate as a review—it reads much more like an extended play-catalogue entry or listing description—but he does a pretty good job summarizing the text.  He had little to say about the performance, however. 

I seem to be spending a lot of space on the script and Valle-Inclán’s dramaturgy rather than the performance.  That’s for the same reason that I said so much about his background and literary style: The play’s not generally known and it’s Valle-Inclán’s and Divine Words’ places in theater history/dramatic literature that was the main reason I wanted to see this play. 

The production, as Hampton characterized it, was stark and spartan, but highly energized—actually, my word is “intense”; I wondered, after the first act, how the cast could sustain that level of intensity not only throughout the performance, but over an entire run of this production.  It was frightening just to watch it! 

There were decided Brechtian aspects to it as well, though some of those can be ascribed to the company’s modern (that is, post-Brechtian) take on the staging.  Some of the elements, however, are part of the script, which predates Brecht’s major works by at least half a decade.  Most obvious is the cart in which first Juana la Reina (Julia Trujillo), the dwarf’s mother, then the family that inherits him after her death wheels him around the countryside.  It’s a very vivid foreshadowing of Mother Courage’s canteen, both in its visual and its dramatic import.  (I have no idea if Brecht was influenced by Valle-Inclán any more than I had that Valle-Inclán was influenced by Artaud.  Might could be, as some folks say.)

I should add, too, that the Centro Dramático production is stripped down in playwright Juan Mayorga’s adaptation.  After reviewing some of the references to Valle-Inclán and Divinas palabras, I managed to recall that there are a lot more grotesque and strange elements in the play than are presented in this staging (goblins, birds that tell fortunes, singing frogs, and more).  (The Lincoln Center production was just about 2-2½ hours, including an intermission; I suspect a staging of the full text, without the cuts, would not only require many more actors, but an additional hour or two.)  In a way, that’s too bad, because my vague recollection of reading the script back when is that it’s not only strange and weird, but has elements of what later would be known as “magic realism” which was lost in this production due to the cuts. 

I remember the script being a little hard to sort out as I was reading it, and maybe it would be the same on stage, but the swirl of phantasmagoria would have provided an opportunity for some magnificent theatricality.  (And you all know how much I love theatricality!)  Maybe I’m wrong there, and my imagination, disadvantaged as it is by elapsed time, is misleading me and the stripped-down version is more stageworthy.  On the other hand, maybe it’s just more economic—which is not an artistic choice.

I had a problem with the supertitles again, so I just gave up on them and watched.  (I wish theaters would go back to earphones and simultaneous translations.  I know it costs more to hire readers than to project some slides, but I hate those damn things!)  I don’t understand Spanish at all, so I couldn’t follow the dialogue exactly, but I listened for intonations and rhythms.  I’m annoyed at myself because I thought I remembered the play better from reading it 20-odd years ago than it turned out I did, so I didn’t try to review it beforehand.  I wish I had; I think I would have enjoyed the performance more; I wouldn’t have devoted so much of my consciousness to trying to remember what I read all those years ago!  But that’s on me—no fault of the Centro Dramático cast. 

The acting wasn’t one of the Brechtian aspects of the production, so it was essentially Stanislavskian naturalism (within the context of the grotesque world of the play, of course), so reading the body language and speech patterns of the actors wasn’t impossible.  They were excellent.  I imagine that working on this play is one of the clearest examples of the necessity of immersing yourself in the world of the play—especially if you are going to maintain the intensity level I saw.  You have to commit to this world and essentially shut out the real one, or they’ll collide somewhere on stage, I’d think. 

There didn’t seem to be any Brechtian commentary on the situation of the characters—at least as far as I could tell—which suggests that from that perspective, at least, these actors were working more in the Stanislavsky vein than the Brechtian one.  The Verfremdung here is Artaudian, not Brechtian.  (Which is fine—the same task is accomplished.  Brecht wasn’t after a certain style of performance, but a result.)

I don’t consider it a Brechtian element, but the most striking bit on the stage for me was the fact that an almost ubiquitous figure in the story—the program called him the “guide to our journey”—was Coimbra, a dog.  Again, I don’t know how Valle-Inclán intended this to be staged, but here Coimbra was played by a man (Pietro Olivera) who wore no mask or dog costume—in fact, he was barely clothed at all—and only vaguely behaved like a dog. 

Well, that’s not really accurate: he did behave like a dog; he didn’t move like one much of the time—if you get my distinction.  This was no Fontaine Fables hound: he was vicious, snarling, and mean—and totally anthropomorphic.  My interpretation is that this is the clearest statement by Valle-Inclán (or the director, Gerardo Vera) about the beastliness of man—a dog who is a man (who is a dog!).  (The dwarf baby, Laureano, by the way, was also played by a man, Emilio Gavira—a very small but decidedly middle-aged man, but no dwarf in reality, and certainly not hydrocephalic.  Thought you might be curious.)

Ricardo Sánchez Cuerda and Gerardo Vera’s set (something else Hampton doesn’t mention, by the way) was an important element in this production.  (The lighting was designed by Juan Cornejo and the costumes by Alejandro Andújar.)  The characters did notice it from time to time—it wasn’t supposed to be invisible to them, apparently—but they hardly reacted.  It was more like this kind of ominous phenomenon was just part of their existence—threatening, dangerous, ghostly, and, if it didn’t happen all the time, frightening.  The tree sometimes flew out of the space altogether, only to return later (though that may have been an indication of changes of location). 

In any case, this was no benign or ambiguous Beckettian space—Estragon and Vladimir feel relatively safe by the side of their road, don’t they?  There were abstract, expressionistic structures stage right and left—mostly a sort of two-level bridge (to nowhere) or scaffold—but the most salient set devices were doors.  Big ones, small ones, huge ones—doors within doors—that opened or were opened (sometimes we saw who opened them, sometimes they seemed to open by themselves) admitting, along with the characters, shadows—or light that cast shadows. 

The huge ones were like dungeon doors—or the kind that you expect to have written above them “Abandon hope . . . .”  Now, I may have glommed onto this visual element because I was unable to follow all the dialogue, so my attention was less prescribed by the text, but the doors and the dog seemed especially significant to me in this production. 

Valle-Inclán was born in Galicia, a Celtic (and primitive) region—the name is related to “Gaelic”—so there is some resemblance to the work of Irish writers, especially in the characters who inhabit both worlds, but he worked in Madrid.  I don’t know enough about Spanish to distinguish between Galician and Castilian dialects or accents, but I assume, since the Centro Dramático is located in Madrid, that the company speaks Castilian Spanish.  In any case, it’s not the accent we are used to hearing here, a variety of South or Central American and Caribbean dialects. 

It was interesting to hear the European version of the language (which, of course, I used to hear from time to time when I lived in Germany—though that was 40 years ago!).  It’s not dramatically significant, I don’t think (though it may have been to Spanish-speakers in the audience), but it just struck me subliminally.

It’s a minor footnote, but this was not only my first time at a performance at the Rose Theater, part of the complex of performance spaces usually devoted to Jazz at Lincoln Center, but the first time I even set foot inside the Time Warner Center.  I can’t say anything about the TWC—I didn’t explore it, and it just struck me as large and cold—and almost certainly expensive—but I poked around the Frederick P. Rose Hall, of which the Rose Theater is a part.  (There’s also a jazz club, Dizzy’s Club—for Dizzy Gillespie, I’m guessing—which apparently also serves food; a couple of other spaces; the Jazz Hall of Fame; and a large double- or triple-height open space which looks like a lobby or reception area, but which has lights rigged in a way that suggests some kind of performance use as well.) 

It’s not exactly welcoming or friendly, but it seems functional.  The complex’s first floor is on the fifth floor of the TWC, and the Rose Theater, which seems to be the largest space and the only formal theater (it’s a 1200-seat proscenium) is a three-level house, with an orchestra, mezzanine, and balcony.  (Since the whole Rose Hall, which opened in October 2004, is devoted to music performance, I wonder what the intended use of the theater is—it has way too much backstage and fly space for just concerts.)