Odds & Ends About Musicals

 

[These short, random articles from various sources have been such fun to gather and post that I’m doing it again.  This time, the selection is again all about theater, but the pieces are all devoted to some aspect of musical theater. One of the articles is relatively old, from the member’s magazine of the union representing Broadway musicians nine years ago.  The other two are less than a year old.  I found them most interesting—I hope you will, too.] 

“A VIEW FROM THE PODIUM”

by Joseph Church 

[The article below was published in volume 115, number 6 (June 2015) of Allegro, the member magazine of Local 802 of the American Federation of Musicians (AFM), the union that represents members of the pit orchestras for all Broadway and many Off-Broadway shows (among other gigs around town).  Its author, a member of the union, is the author of a book about music directing, a specialty I certainly know little about, and it seems it’s not well understood by most non-musicians.  It is, however, a vital profession in the world of musical theater, and in the spirit of my occasional series on theater jobs most theatergoers know little about, I’m presenting an insider’s own view of his work.]

Broadway music director gives an inside story in new book

As well as being a great honor, it is especially fitting to introduce my new book, “Music Direction for the Stage: A View from the Podium” [Oxford University Press, 2015], here in Allegro, as my involvement with the musicians’ union was one of my first incentives for my undertaking the book’s writing.

In the book I recount how in 1994, a group of music directors instituted a committee within local 802 to address a concern that their work was encroaching into areas for which they were not properly compensated or recognized, in particular extensive transcription and arranging, composing additional music, and doing music preparation. Several of us were helping composers realize their work as elaborate Broadway scores. Among our campaigns was an appeal to the Tony Awards committee to reinstate the Tony for music direction, discontinued after 1964. We presented our case in person and with a meticulously detailed and well-produced demonstration video about music direction, showing the transformation of a raw piece of music to its final form. The Tony committee were unmoved by the impassioned plea. They still expressed bafflement at a music director’s work, and were unable to remember the criteria by which they had judged the award until 1964, even though some of them had been on the awards committee then. Ironically, and very gratifyingly, one outcome of our failed attempts to explain our occupation and lay a groundwork for acknowledgement thereof was the American Theatre Wing’s establishing a Tony award for orchestration, beginning in the 1996-97 season. [ATW, along with the Broadway League, presents the Antoinette Perry Award for Excellence in Broadway Theatre, more commonly known as the Tony Award.]

Our quest revealed how misunderstood, or more accurately “un-understood,” the job of music direction was then, and it continues to be. Its impenetrability is not difficult to accept, for a variety of reasons, two foremost among them: first, because the job varies so greatly from situation to situation, and second, because when a music director does his or her job well, the music is woven almost invisibly into the fabric of a larger entertainment, and the music director disappears.

The definition of music direction that I propose in the book sheds even more light on the confusion, so to speak. A music director is responsible for all aspects of preparing and performing the music for a musical production: a varying, fluid combination of creative, technical, and administrative functions. He or she is the nominal head of any music department that might exist within a production organization. Among the duties: accompanying (usually, but not always, at the piano), conducting, rehearsing, giving notes, coordinating with technicians and designers, explaining or demonstrating music to others, teaching singing, instruction in harmony and counterpoint, composing, arranging, orchestrating, determining music cues, contracting and managing music staff and instrumentalists, overseeing the physical and technical aspects of the music, maintaining and revising performances over time, acting as a supporter, mediator, counselor, psychotherapist, and executive decision-maker when musical indecisions and disputes arise. To prepare for each job, music directors acquire a comprehensive understanding of every aspect of the musical score, and of the on-stage content – the story, the style, and so on. They must execute their work in an effective union with many other creative and production personnel.

Local 802 and the AFM make many appearances in “Music Direction for the Stage,” partly because I use Broadway production as a model of stage production, regardless of whether the discussion is of Broadway theatre, a stock theatre, a community theatre, a nightclub or a university. The standards and practices that the union upholds on Broadway are applicable in all work situations, with regard both to reliability and excellence of the product – the musicians and music – and to the working conditions. Though the union makes no reference to music directors in the Broadway agreement, many of the tasks that fall under the heading of music direction are under the union’s protection, including, of course, conducting, playing, and arranging. (The managerial duties of music directors prohibit their coverage under a collective bargaining agreement.) Music directors are both management and rank-and-file, and during the contentious negotiations between employers and the union, music directors often find themselves with one foot on each side of the border.

There is little doubt in the writing of my pro-union bias, and my strong preference for live music performed without undue orchestra reductions. An audience member deserves to hear the energy of a living horn player blowing into a metal mouthpiece or bamboo reed, deserves to hear the sound of the player’s spit, and even deserves the musician’s mistakes, which confirm the sound’s reality, its personality, and its immediacy. Surely the few dollars that might be saved with reduced and synthesized orchestras cannot be worth the loss in humanity.

[Support of live music over the use of recorded or synthesized music in the production of stage musicals has been a policy of AFM for well over a decade, as has the campaign against reducing the size of the orchestra from that for which the score was originally composed. On Rick On Theater, I’ve published several posts on the subject beginning with my editorial post, “The Sound of Muzak” (16 June 2011). Other posts include “‘Big Sound’” by Mary Donovan with Marisa Friedman (27 September 2011), “Making Broadway Babies” (25 November 2013), and “Music Theater Programs for Kids” (18 May 2018).]

In my book, I give strong cautions against nonunion work. These are the least excusable production situations, and least advantageous for a music director. The presenters of these shows egregiously decimate orchestras and casts and employ low-fidelity electronic emulation, yet they bill their productions as “Broadway” shows. Musicians on these productions can be worked at will, going weeks without days off and traveling nightly by bus to the next stop, all at subpar wages. On the road, when not under a union contract, with many or all of their belongings in tow, including perhaps their instruments, exploited musicians have little remedy should their situation become dire. In my opinion, music directors (and all musicians) should avoid these productions entirely, even when looking to build a resumé. Nonetheless, my book addresses music direction situations of all kinds, even those at the amateur or semiprofessional level.

Finding the balance between instruction and information, between depth and comprehensiveness, and between theory and practice were among my many challenges in organizing the wealth of knowledge related to the subject matter. While it’s certainly meant as a textbook for aspiring and curious music directors, my hope is that my book will be read by all those who work with and experience the work of music directors, including orchestra musicians, singers and dancers, directors, producers, and of course the interested, enthusiastic audience member – a typical profile of a Broadway attendee in the 21st century. The material covered within is relevant not just to conductors and pianists but to all musicians and instrumentalists who might someday find themselves in the position of music director, for a singer or club act, for a revue or a benefit concert, for a local gala or an awards ceremony, or even for a Broadway musical.

Many of my colleagues, professional and academic both, encouraged me to write the book, and were supportive throughout the process. I have done my best to include their insightful and inspiring voices in the chorus of approaches, methods, and opinions I present. As I state in the introduction, it is mostly the lack of understanding of music direction that creates space for a study of the subject. A music director is not just an interchangeable part, nor just someone who plays the piano really well, nor just someone who happened to be available when a music director was needed, but rather an individual who can provide a unique and significant creative contribution to a production, as well as absolute musical and accompanimental proficiency. If I have a loftier goal, it is the desire to improve upon the discipline and its execution in both professional and amateur situations. . . What qualifies this author as a resource or an expert? In no way whatsoever do I profess to be the sole or utmost authority. It is not boldness, but rather inquisitiveness that motivates this work.

[Joseph Church (b. 1957), a member of Local 802 of the American Federation of Musicians since 1983, is best known for his work as music director and supervisor of two groundbreaking Broadway musicals, The Who’s Tommy (music and lyrics by Pete Townshend, book by Pete Townshend and Des McAnuff; St. James Theatre, 22 April 1993-17 June 1995) and The Lion King (music by Elton John, lyrics by Tim Rice, book by Roger Allers and Irene Mecchi; New Amsterdam Theatre, 13 November 1997-Present).  

[He’s worked on countless other productions as music director, conductor, keyboardist, and/or arranger, on and Off-Broadway, nationwide, and worldwide, among them, In The Heights (music and lyrics by Lin-Manuel Miranda, book by Quiara Alegría Hudes; Richard Rodgers Theatre, 9 March 2008-9 January 2011; associate conductor, keyboardist), Sister Act (music by Alan Menken, lyrics by Glenn Slater, book by Cheri Steinkellner and Bill Steinkellner; Broadway Theatre, 20 April 2011-26 August 2012; associate conductor), Les Miserables (music by Claude-Michel Schönberg, lyrics by Herbert Kretzmer, English book by Claude-Michel Schönberg and Alain Boublil; Broadway Theatre/Imperial Theatre, 12 March 1987-18 May 2003), Little Shop Of Horrors (music by Alan Menken, lyrics by Howard Ashman, book by Howard Ashman; Virginia Theatre, 2 October 2003-22 August 2004), Randy Newman’s Faust (music, lyrics, and book by Newman; La Jolla Playhouse, 24 September-29 October 1995, music director), and Radio City’s Christmas Spectacular (1988).  Also an active composer, he has written for film, television, the concert stage, and over 30 plays and musicals.] 

*  *  *  *

“WHY WAS THIS TREASURE OF MUSICAL THEATER

ALL BUT LOST TO THE AGES?”

by John McWhorter 

[The piece below is the 9 May 2024 John McWhorter newsletter, published for New York Times subscribers only.  It’s not only about musical theater, but also about Black theater—in this instance, a vintage play.  A version of this article appeared in print on 12 May 2024 in the “Sunday Opinion” section of the New York edition, with the headline: “A Lost Treasure of Black Theater.”]

A Columbia University linguist explores how race and language shape our politics and culture.

Three Black book musicals were Broadway hits in the 1970s: “Purlie” in 1970, “The Wiz” in 1975 and “Raisin” in 1973, based on Lorraine Hansberry’s [1930-65] “A Raisin in the Sun.” That was Blacker than Broadway had been since 50 years earlier, when the 1921 hit “Shuffle Along” inaugurated a string of jolly all-Black shows that petered out during the Depression.

“Purlie” and “The Wiz” — along with “Dreamgirls,” which landed just past the decade divider in 1981 — have been well attended since the 1970s. “Purlie” was filmed for a video that got around a lot in the 1980s [it aired on 18 June 1981 on Showtime], and City Center’s Encores series revived it in 2005. “The Wiz” was made into a film that many Black people regard as iconic [released by Universal Pictures and Motown Productions on 24 October 1978], and a revival is playing on Broadway now [Marquis Theatre, 17 April-18 August 2024]. “Dreamgirls” was also successfully filmed, in 2006 [by DreamWorks Pictures and Paramount Pictures], was revived on Broadway in 1987 and has had various touring versions; its original cast recording won two Grammys.

“Raisin” was a hit in its day. It is a faithful rendition of the play, the script written by Hansberry’s ex-husband, Robert Nemiroff (with Charlotte Zaltzberg), with music by Judd Woldin and lyrics by Robert Brittan. It ran for over two years [at the 46th Street and Lunt-Fontanne Theatres, 18 October 1973-7 December 1975], won the Tony for best musical and best actress (Virginia Capers) and Theatre World awards for three other leads [Ernestine Jackson, Joe Morton, and Ralph Carter]. Its cast album, too, got a Grammy.

And yet you may never have heard of it. Even if you are old enough to have seen it back in the day, you probably have not thought about it in a very long time and might be hard pressed to hum even a few bars of any of the songs. Musical theater historians tend to blow by it with a couple of respectful sentences. That’s because “Raisin” basically dropped from sight after it closed. It’s had a regional revival or three, but compared with “Purlie,” “The Wiz” and “Dreamgirls,” it is a dead property.

I first encountered “Raisin” in 1986, by way of its cast album. I found it weak and wondered how the show had run so long. This was when I was first becoming interested in musicals (a bug that didn’t bite me until the end of my senior year in college). Compared with the Sondheim and Porter and Kander and Ebb stuff I was drinking in, the music of “Raisin” sounded to me like just the R&B on the radio from 10 or 15 years before, except with fewer hooks and stretched beyond what it could support.

Recently, however, a friend asked me what I thought of it, so I pulled out my LP and gave the score a listen. Now I am better equipped to hear what in 1986 sounded too recent in style for me to assess. Now I can see that the “Raisin” score was golden work, and it deserves more attention. (Encores, are you listening?) [Encores! is a concert series presented by New York City Center since 1994, dedicated to reviving neglected musicals.]

Even the overture music is so infectiously gritty — roughly, the “Shaft” soundtrack meets Duke Ellington’s “Far East Suite” — that I suspect the most determined hater of musicals would hearken to it. In “Man Say,” Walter and Ruth’s early disagreement over his ambitions, each time Walter sarcastically imitates Ruth, the arrangement jabs in a high, dissonant sting of a chord from muted brass, perfectly conveying the mocking irony in Walter’s words. The score is full of unexpected touches like that, such as Ruth’s affectionate tribute to her son. An ordinary orchestration would have started it with violins purring long notes and some comments by a solo flute. But in the beginning of “Whose Little Angry Men,” Ruth is accompanied only by an acoustic guitar, which sounds more intimate, vernacular, down to earth — that is, like a mother talking to her son. I might still rate the “Dreamgirls” score higher, but “Raisin” is a close second.

I knew the composer, Judd Woldin, for a bit when I played a role in an early pre-professional tryout of “The Prince and the Pauper” that he scored. He borrowed a musical theater history book of mine and for some reason left a piece of duct tape on the spine. I still have it on my shelves. He was a sterling mensch. I think it was only chance that kept him from making a bigger mark. Had “The Prince and the Pauper” ever made it to Broadway, two of the ballads, “Mother Is Here” and “Kiss Away,” could have become audition staples. His musical adaptation of Langston Hughes’s play “Little Ham,” which did make it to Off Broadway for a bit in 2002 [at the John Houseman Theatre on Theatre Row], had a smart, plangent R&B lament, “Big Ideas,” that has never left my hippocampus.

So why are “Dreamgirls,” “Purlie” and “The Wiz” remembered and revived, while “Raisin” is all but forgotten?

Lack of authenticity is not the reason. Its score was written by white men but so were the scores of “Purlie” and “Dreamgirls.” A lack of flash may have been a factor: “The Wiz” and “Dreamgirls” are spectacles, as much about costumes and dancing as how they sound. But “Purlie” is about a few people in a couple of rooms talking about problems, just like “Raisin.”

A likely reason “Raisin” isn’t much revived is a sense that a play as important as Lorraine Hansberry’s should be preserved as it was, that setting it to music is intrusive or at least unnecessary. Ethan Mordden, a historian of musical theater whom I hold in the very highest esteem, wrote: “The songs are finely judged. But they add nothing to what Hansberry wrote. They are what Hansberry wrote; that’s the trouble.”

People said the same about turning “Pygmalion” into “My Fair Lady.” I myself view Hansberry’s play as something close to scripture, but the musical pulls off some things that the play cannot. In the play, the little boy, Travis, can usually make only so much of an impression because the acting ability of kids that age is often limited (although the first person to play that role was Glynn Thurman [sic; Turman, b. 1947], the now celebrated veteran actor, and he was probably excellent). In the musical, however, Travis gets a captivating little song called “Sidewalk Tree” and comes across to us vividly. “He Come Down This Morning” gives us the Younger family singing in church, a central aspect of their weekly existence that the play, without music, can’t deliver. And while “A Raisin in the Sun” unwittingly initiated a genre that George C. Wolfe affectionately dissed, in “The Colored Museum” [1986], as the “[The Last] Mama-on-the-couch play,” “Raisin”’s music for the mother, Lena, — especially the unjustly neglected ballad “Measure the Valleys” — transcends any cliché.

“Raisin” is also special in being about Black people just having conversations. Clearing the table, standing around, answering the doorbell. Most Black musicals are about performers, flash, funk, scarecrows, witches, the Supremes or something like them, silvery gleaming, yellow brick, bluesy numbers that raise the roof. All great. But in the warm duet “Sweet Time,” “Raisin” has what may be the first Broadway song in which a Black couple simply converse with each other rather than proclaim and prance for the audience.

“A Raisin in the Sun” is certainly one of the best plays ever written in the English language. There is a reason it has been revived on Broadway not once but twice in the 21st century alone, as well as once Off Broadway, and is often done by regional and community theater groups. (I think I have seen it seven times.) However, it is increasingly distant from us in time. It was valued in 1959 as giving white theatergoers their first sustained look into Black life, but they have had many more such looks since. Housing segregation still exists, but not in the overt form of the covenants that the play so searingly depicts. Ambivalence about assimilation to white ways persists among many Black people, but the color line is not what it was. Today if Black people assimilate, it’s to a whiteness that is no longer as pure as it was in the 1950s, having been transformed by the “browning” of the culture.

This all means that “A Raisin in the Sun,” mythic though it is, is a look at history. Space opens up for new approaches, including Bruce Norris’s hit 2012 play, “Clybourne Park,” which revisited the mise-en-scène both before the play’s events and 50 years after them. Meanwhile, music has a universalizing essence, leavening characters who might otherwise seem like people of another time and making them more archetypal. “Raisin” complements “Clybourne Park” as an expansion upon the original material, keeping it alive as part of an ongoing artistic conversation.

“Raisin” is a property that audiences of all races can relate to just as they did 51 years ago. Its obscurity is accidental and undeserved, and a theater company that gives it a chance is likely to find itself with a smart, happy hit that sheds new light on a classic work of art.

[John McWhorter is an associate professor of linguistics at Columbia University.  He is the author of Nine Nasty Words: English in the Gutter: Then, Now and Forever (Avery, 2021) and, most recently, Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America (Portfolio/Penguin, 2021).

[I saw Raisin in October 1974, one of the first plays I went to after I arrived in New York City that summer after five years in the army, the last 2½ of which I’d spent in West Berlin.  I remember the play quite vividly because of one thing: Virginia Capers’s performance as Lena Younger, the mother

[At that time, I was keeping a mental list of the most outstanding individual performances I’d seen.  I never committed the list to paper, and I stopped keeping it maybe a decade later, but Capers was high on it.  (A few others on the list were James Earl Jones’s Jack Jefferson in The Great White Hope, Alec McCowen’s Frederick William Rolfe in Hadrian VII, and Pat Carroll’s Gertrude Stein in Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein.)  Like the others’, her performance is indelible.

[I also saw a touring performance of Dreamgirls in 1990, and as far as I’m concerned, it doesn’t come close to Raisin in quality.  (I saw The Wiz, too, in its Broadway première.)  While Raisin has stuck with me for 50 years now—I, too, have the cast album—I barely recall Dreamgirls as anything more than a wan facsimile of the Supremes (who were a strong musical presence in my college years).

[One additional personal note: George C. Wolfe’s Colored Museum premièred in New Brunswick, New Jersey, at the Crossroads Theatre in 1986, directed by L, Kenneth Richardson, one of the theater’s founders.  (The Crossroads production went on to its New York début at the New York Shakespeare Festival’s Public Theater (where Wolfe was then artistic director) for 198 performances from November 1986 to July 1987.)

[The Crossroads was founded in 1978 by Ricardo Khan and Lee Richardson, two of my MFA classmates at what is now Rutgers University’s Mason Gross School of the Arts.  It was a small program in those beginning years, 1975-77, so we all knew each other pretty well, but Lee became a friend—Ric was a directing student while Lee and I were actors.

[Crossroads was a big success.  Aside from premièring Wolfe’s play, it was New Jersey’s first professional African-American repertory company, and in 1999, it won the Tony Award for Outstanding Regional Theatre.]

*  *  *  *

“EQUAL ACCESSIBILITY FOR DEAF

AND HEARING AUDIENCES? IT’S POSSIBLE!”

by Brian Andrew Cheslik 

[From the American Theatre website of 26 July 2024—it didn’t appear in the print edition of the magazine—comes this article on a production of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Cinderella with a cast of hearing, deaf, and hard-of-hearing actors and a similarly mixed staff and crew.  The author of the piece, Brian Andrew Cheslik, himself deaf, was the director of the production.]

How a new staging of ‘Cinderella’ is bringing Deaf/hearing theatre out of the ‘shadows.’

The beautiful thing about theatre is that there is never just one way to do it. Directors are able to take a piece and stage it in new and creative ways, while holding true to the story and the text. As a director who specializes in Deaf theatre, I look at each script to find ways to increase the accessibility. My goal is always to ensure that the show is accessible to both Deaf and hearing audiences, while finding ways to challenge the traditional theatre norms.

Traditionally, Deaf theatre has been staged with “shadow” actors or interpreters—i.e., every role is double cast with a Deaf actor and a hearing actor. This method has been used for many years. But in my opinion, it is quite oppressive to the Deaf actors. It requires that the Deaf actor share the spotlight with a hearing actor who is only providing the voice, while the Deaf actor is performing the embodied role. This method has often troubled me, because it sends the message that the Deaf actor’s language, American Sign Language (ASL), is not enough. Many companies will say that this bilingual approach is designed to make the show accessible to everyone. While the logic is sound, the result is that Deaf audiences have to focus harder on the signing actor, while having the visual distraction of the hearing actor. While hearing audiences’ attention may be split as well, there is never a danger that they will miss anything.

Take Deaf West’s Spring Awakening, for example. First, some qualifiers: I highly respect Deaf West [Los Angeles] and everyone involved on the show, as many of the Deaf artists involved are close personal friends. I am grateful for the show, as it really helped to put Deaf performers on the map in the industry and brought about an awareness that was needed, and I applaud the theatrical and Broadway community for welcoming this version of the show. I was lucky enough to see it on its closing night on Broadway. [The production ran on Broadway at the Brooks Atkinson Theatre from 27 September 2015 to 24 January 2016 (23 previews and 135 regular performances).]

All that said, while I was thrilled to see Broadway audiences falling in love with my friends and this production, as a Deaf audience member, I have to say it was not fully accessible to me, as it was designed for a hearing audience. I will admit that I do have the privilege of having some residual hearing left, and my hearing aids to help me experience the music. I saw the original Broadway cast years before and fell in love with the story and the music, so I knew the show by heart. This allowed me to note what was lacking in terms of accessibility.

During intermission, I spotted another audience member I knew from my time as a student at Gallaudet University [prestigious university in Washington, D.C., for the deaf and hard of hearing]. I knew he was profoundly Deaf, with no residual hearing. I asked him if he was enjoying the show so far. His face dropped, as he told me he could not follow the story; it was often hard to see the signing due to the lighting design, and the periodic projection of text on the set was often illegible due to placement and font choice, while the constant dual shadowing of hearing/Deaf casting was distracting.

I have met numerous Deaf people who felt the same way. When I have been contacted by theatre companies that want to do inclusive shows in the mode of Spring Awakening, I have to explain the problems with this model, which is entertaining for hearing audiences but inaccessible to many Deaf audiences. It was time for a change. I had been wanting to push those boundaries of accessibility and try something new. Enter ZACH Theatre in Austin, with an offer to collaborate with my company, Deaf Austin Theatre, on an ASL/English production of Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Cinderella, with a new book by Douglas Carter Beane [see my post Cinderella: Impossible Things Are Happening (CBS-TV, 31 March 1957) (25 April 2013); the Beane script was written for the Broadway production which ran at the Broadway Theatre, 3 March 2013-3 January 2015 (41 previews and 769 regular performances)]. We brought on Michael Baron, artistic director of Lyric Theatre of Oklahoma, to co-direct the show with me because of his experiences co-directing with Sandra Mae Frank on a Deaf/hearing version staging of The Music Man at Olney Theatre Center [Olney, Maryland] in 2022.

As a Deaf director myself, I understand how important representation is, and Michael 100 percent agreed. So the first thing that we did was to carefully select a production team that was mixed with both Deaf and hearing professionals. The production team included music director Allen Robertson (hearing), lighting designer Annie Wiegand (Deaf), choreographer Cassie Abate (hearing), assistant choreographer Mervin Primeaux O’Bryant (Deaf), costume designer Jeffrey Meek (hearing), set/projection designer Stephanie Busing (hearing), and a director of ASL, Kailyn Aaron-Lozano (Deaf).

When discussing the storyline and the integration of Deaf culture, I had to decide which characters were Deaf, which were hearing, and which were hard of hearing. We already knew that Ella was going to be Deaf and Prince Topher was hearing. Jean-Michel, Ella’s friend, would be Deaf, while the Prince’s buddies, Sebastian and Lord Pinkleton, would be hearing and Deaf, respectively. Madame, Ella’s stepmother, would be hearing, while stepsister Charlotte would be hearing and stepsister Gabrielle hard of hearing. These distinctions also served the story: Madame, the stepmother, valued speech over any other communication, sharpening her dislike of Ella, who could not hear or speak, in contrast to her hearing and hard-of-hearing daughter.

In casting the show, we put together a group of 15 actors, seven Deaf and eight hearing. Sandra Mae Frank, best known for her work on NBC’s New Amsterdam [2018-22] and Deaf West’s Spring Awakening, stepped into the glass slippers as our Ella. To star opposite Sandra Mae as Prince Topher, we found Trey Harrington, a hearing actor who had been studying ASL for years; we decided to make the Prince a CODA (child of deaf adults).

In our staging of Cinderella—which ran at ZACH in early 2023 and is about to reopen at Lyric Theatre of Oklahoma [30 July-4 August 2024] in Oklahoma City—Michael and I threw out both what is traditional in musical theatre and what is traditional in Deaf theatre. We created a production where accessibility was an even platform for everyone, regardless if you were Deaf, hard of hearing, hearing, fluent in ASL, or completely ASL illiterate. Unlike the “shadowing” practice noted above, the Deaf characters Ella and Marie had no vocal counterpart for most of the show, including during songs like “My Own Little Corner” and “There Is Music in You.” The same was true in reverse for hearing/speaking characters like Madame and Sebastian, who had no ASL counterparts. Prince Topher would shift from speaking to signing to SimCom (simultaneous communication: signing and speaking at the same time), depending on who he was with.

How did these various audiences follow everything that was happening? The key: The entire production would have the English text and lyrics projected as supertitles onto the set throughout the show, so that at any point the text would be readily available when needed.

Throughout, I strove to use Deafness and hearing as part of the story. I wanted to bring in the dynamics of a typical Deaf/hearing relationship, along with all the hurdles and opportunities that presents. During the Prologue, we set the story in a modern library, with an ensemble pantomime that shows a modern-day Deaf girl bumping into a hearing boy. He tries to communicate with her but learns from the librarian that she is Deaf, so he finds an ASL dictionary and learns how to sign, “My name is . . .” But when he tries to communicate with her, he loses his nerve and runs off. Dejected, our modern-day Deaf girl dives into her favorite fable: Cinderella. As she opens the book, the story comes to life and the stage transforms.

Bookending this opening, at the finale we bring back our modern-day couple and see that he’s finally built up the nerve to talk to the beautiful Deaf girl and introduce himself, as the final notes of the music sound out, leading to a conclusion of hope and love for the young couple.

Signing, Not Singing

To spotlight the Deaf actors portraying characters we identified as Deaf, we wanted to honor their authentic language, which meant not adding voicing for their characters. So during Ella’s solo of “My Own Little Corner,” Sandra Mae Frank signs the song along with the music, but no vocals are heard. As a Deaf person, the first time I saw Sandra Mae signing the song along with the music, it gave me goosebumps because it was so empowering to see.

This inspired us to add more ASL songs without voicing, including songs between Ella and Topher, because it makes sense that he would want to communicate with her in her own language. Songs like “Ten Minutes Ago” and “Do I Love You Because You’re Beautiful” are performed in ASL, English voicing, and SimCom at moments that align with the progression of Ella and Topher’s relationship.

During ensemble songs like “The Prince Is Giving a Ball/Now Is the Time” and group songs like “When You’re Driving Through the Moonlight/A Lovely Night,” vocals of the lyrics are heard, but the singers are hidden among the ensemble or offstage so as not to distract from what was happening. Gabrielle, the hard-of-hearing stepsister, SimComs whenever Madame was around, but when it is just Ella and Gabrielle, they use ASL only, solidifying their relationship. This growing sisterhood is even more prominent in the reprise of “A Lovely Night.”

This device works the other way too: When Prince Topher is speaking with his right-hand man, Sebastian, with no other Deaf characters onstage, they speak only. But if Lord Pinkleton is around, the Prince uses SimCom so that Pinkleton is included in the conversation. For Pinkleton’s song, “The Prince Is Giving a Ball,” Sebastian voices the song while Pinkleton signs it. The Prince, meanwhile, progresses in his relationship with Ella, from SimCom to full signing with no voice. This corresponds with the natural development of a hearing person’s relationship with a Deaf person.

As Madame is one of the more oppressive characters, we wanted to make it clear that she does not like sign language and only values spoken language. This is a form of audism: i.e., the belief that the ability to hear makes you better than someone who cannot. So Madame crudely gestures with Ella and treats her as ignorant. Madame disapproves of Gabrielle’s relationship with Jean-Michel because he is Deaf and cannot speak.

Supertitles to the Rescue

Co-director Michael Baron was on board with the goal of full accessibility with the production, and also wanted to build on what learned from his experience with The Music Man, based on audience feedback regarding the placement of the supertitles.

Supertitles are captioning projected onto the set and ingrained within the set design. Captions, by contrast, are not fully accessible, because they are often placed in obscure locations, forcing Deaf audience members to look away from the stage/show in order to read the text. We wanted to ensure that the supertitles had a central home onstage, while also being free to move if the scenic action is happening stage right or stage left. Stephanie Busing, our set designer, was completely on board and integrated these surfaces into her design, while also taking on the role of projection/supertitle designer. This allowed for a streamlined vision of cohesion between the physical set and the projections.

The supertitles are projected onto a large framed canvas descended from the fly system in the stage center position. But if Cinderella’s house happens to move far stage left or right, the supertitles are projected on the archway representing her house. The goal is to ensure that the text and the actors are all within the audience’s field of vision at all times throughout the show.

Some people have asked me why we have songs and dialogue without voicing, and my response to that is . . . why not? Why does everything have to be voiced? If Deaf audiences are always having to determine which mode of accessibility they will take advantage of during a show (ASL interpreters or captions), then why can’t hearing audiences also adapt? With this staging, everyone has to do a bit of work, turning to the supertitles when the text onstage is not accessible to them. No person has an advantage over the other—unless you are a hearing person who is fluent in ASL. Then you have the best of both worlds.

Honestly, while I’m very proud of what we’ve done with Cinderella, this should not be a rare or special occasion. Deaf actors should be considered, and supertitles included, in every production. That way Deaf audiences would not be limited to booking tickets on specific nights, but have the equitable option of choosing any night to attend the show.

This new wave of accessible theatre can be implemented in any venue across the U.S. and beyond. Want to see how it is done? Cinderella is playing at Lyric Theatre of Oklahoma City, July 30-Aug. 4 [2024].

[Dr. Brian Andrew Cheslik is the managing artistic director of Deaf Austin Theatre and the program director for the American Sign Language & Interpretation program at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley [multiple campuses], as well as a Certified Deaf Interpreter.

[I referred to a post on R&H’s Cinderella above, with an embedded link.  That post is founded on my recollection of watching the original, live broadcast of the television version of the musical in 1957.  It starred a young British actress named Julie Andrews, who’d been making a splash on Broadway in My Fair Lady, from which she’d taken a break to do the only musical Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II wrote for TV.  

[I was 10 and was already an incipient theater buff, especially musicals—I’d seen several shows in Washington, D.C., my hometown, and in New York City, I’d been to Fiorello! and MFL already.  There were many more to come—as I relate in my post “A Broadway Baby” (22 September 2010).  Needless to add, I loved that Cinderella, and a day or so later, my dad came home with the cast album, a monaural vinyl LP—which I still have.]

Two Theater Personages of Note: James de Jongh (1942-2023)

 

[As I stated in the introduction to the memorial post for Ralph Lee on 9 June, when I read of his death, I wanted to put something on Rick On Theater in his memory, but I didn’t want just to republish his obituary.  A few days later, the report of the passing of playwright James de Jongh appeared, and I decided to post an homage to the two theater artists together.

[I began assembling various articles and reports to accompany the two obituaries.  As I developed the memorial post, it began to grow longer and longer, eventually outgrowing my maximum length for a stand-alone post.  So, now the memorial to “Two Theater Personages of Note” has become two posts.  I started with Ralph Lee and now I’m posting the homage to James de Jongh.]

“JAMES DE JONGH, 80, PLAYWRIGHT WHO TOLD STORIES OF SLAVERY, DIES”
by Neil Genzlinger

[Neil Genzlinger’s obituary of playwright and English professor James de Jongh was published in the New York Times on 23 May 2023.  I’m accompanying it on ROT with three reviews of his best-known play, Do Lord Remember Me: first, from the New York Times of the 1978 Off-Off-Broadway world première; second, of the 1982 Off-Broadway première from the New York Amsterdam News; and third, from the Associated Press, also of the Off-Broadway production.] 

His play “Do Lord Remember Me,” constructed from interviews with formerly enslaved people in the 1930s, was first staged in 1978 and has been revived multiple times since.

James de Jongh, a scholar and playwright best known for fashioning oral histories left by formerly enslaved people in the 1930s into “Do Lord Remember Me,” a 1978 stage work that painted an unflinching picture of the human cost of slavery, died on May 5 in the Bronx. He was 80.

Robert deJongh Jr. [sic], a nephew, said the cause was cardiac arrest.

Professor de Jongh was a longtime member of the English department faculty at City College and the City University of New York Graduate Center, where he specialized in African American literature and the literatures of the African diaspora. But briefly in his early career he had been an actor, and he continued to maintain an interest in the theater. In 1975, together with Carles Cleveland [sometimes identified as “Charles” and by one source as “Carlos”], he wrote his first play — “Hail Hail the Gangs!” — about a Black teenager who joins a Harlem gang.

“I wanted to go in a completely different direction for the second play,” he told the public-access cable channel Manhattan Neighborhood Network in a recent interview.

He was drawn to a book called “The Negro in Virginia” [Hastings House, 1940], a collection of interviews with formerly enslaved people started by the Federal Writers’ Project, part of the Works Progress Administration under the New Deal, and completed in 1940 by the Virginia Writers’ Project. At first, he said, his idea was to construct a fictional story using that material as background, but as he delved further into archives of interviews at the Smithsonian Institution and elsewhere, his thinking changed.

“Many of them were quite eloquent, were quite moving, were quite touching, and some of them were in, really, the voices of the people themselves,” he said. “In other words, the interviewers had actually recorded word for word, rather than simply summarizing the content of what they said. And those words were striking.”

He realized that he could create a play made primarily of the recollections of the men and women who had experienced slavery firsthand, augmented by the words of Nat Turner [b. 1800; hanged, 1831], the leader of an 1831 slave rebellion, and by some gospel and work songs. The result was “Do Lord Remember Me,” which premiered in 1978 at the New Federal Theater on East Third Street in Manhattan [at the Pilgrim Theater, 30 March-9 April 1978], with a cast that included Frances Foster [1924-97], a leading actress of the day.

“The play, strongly felt and single-minded, has an impact far greater than one would receive from reading historical documents,” Mel Gussow wrote in his review for The New York Times [5 April 1978; see below]. “The seven actors, portraying slave owners as well as slaves, transport us, showing us the auction block in our nation’s past — when people were a commodity for speculation — linking arms and embracing a collective consciousness.”

A revised version was staged in 1982 at the American Place Theater in Midtown [24 October 1982-26 February 1983], with a cast that included Ebony Jo-Ann [b. 1945] and Glynn Turman [b. 1947]. In a fresh review [“Stage: Slavery Recalled,” 26 October 1982], Mr. Gussow called it “a moving evocation of shared servitude.”

The play, which has been restaged a number of times over the decades, has dashes of humor and a theme of triumphing over adversity. But it is also blunt in its language and its depiction of the cruelties of slavery, the kind of historical realism that is being erased from educational curriculums in some schools and libraries today. In one scene, a woman shares the back story of her facial disfigurement: As a child, she was punished for taking a peppermint stick by having her head placed beneath the rocker of a rocking chair and crushed.

In the interview with Manhattan Neighborhood Network, Professor de Jongh said that although he was not a particularly religious man, he saw creating the play as a sort of calling.

“Somehow, I felt I had a task,” he said, “and the task had found me.”

James Laurence de Jongh was born on Sept. 23, 1942, in Charlotte Amalie on the island of St. Thomas, in the U.S. Virgin Islands. His father, Percy, was the commissioner of finance for the government of the Virgin Islands, and his mother, Mavis E. (Bentlage) de Jongh, was an assistant director for the U.S. Customs Service and ran a poultry farm and plant store.

Professor de Jongh attended Saints Peter & Paul Catholic School on St. Thomas and then Williams College in Massachusetts, where he appeared in theatrical productions and earned a bachelor’s degree in 1964. He received a master’s degree from Yale in 1967 and a Ph.D. from New York University in 1983.

Professor de Jongh continued to act for a time after his days at Williams College, but teaching was his vocation beginning in 1969, when he spent a year as an instructor at Rutgers University. The next year he joined the CUNY faculty; he remained there for decades and added the Graduate Center to his portfolio in 1990. He took emeritus status in 2011.

Professor de Jongh wrote numerous academic articles on Black theater, the art scene in Harlem and related subjects, and in 1990 he published a scholarly book, “Vicious Modernism: Black Harlem and the Literary Imagination” [Cambridge University Press, 1990]. He also served on the board of the New Federal Theater, whose current artistic director, Elizabeth Van Dyke, called him “a quiet, gracious powerhouse.”

Professor de Jongh, who lived in the Bronx, leaves no immediate survivors.

The 1982 production of “Do Lord Remember Me” was also presented to inmates at Rikers Island [in the week of 7 November 1982; reported in “‘Do Lord Remember Me’ visits Riker’s” by Lionel Mitchell in the New York Amsterdam News on 20 November] — according to news accounts, it was the first complete professional production staged at the prison [Robin Herman and Laurie Johnston, “NEW YORK Day by Day: Chance for a Playwright And His Young Audience,” New York Times 12 November 1982]. Professor de Jongh attended and found the inmates more boisterous than traditional theatergoers.

“There was an element of risk in the entire situation,” he told The Times that year [see note above]. “The audience reacted with anger as well as humor. It was not just a play about remembering — their own freedom was circumscribed.

[Neil Genzlinger is a writer for the Obituaries desk.  Previously he was a television, film, and theater critic.]

*  *  *  *
“STAGE: FORMER SLAVES REMEMBER ‘DO LORD’”
by Mel Gussow

 [James de Jongh’s Do Lord Remember Me (the title comes from a 19th-century spiritual) began when the writer was doing research for a play to be set during the Civil War period.  He came across the collected interviews of former Virginia slaves [Virginia Writers’ Project, The Negro in Virginia (Hastings House, 1940)] that had been an oral-history undertaking of the Federal Writers’ Project of the Works Progress Administration, published as the Slave Narrative Collection in 1936-38.

[Woodie King (b. 1937), the founder and artistic director if the New Federal Theatre (which produced the world première of Do Lord, told Leo Seligsohn, theater reviewer for Long Island’s Newsday (“on theater: The PAF play-picker,” 31 March 1978), at the show’s opening that de Jongh had been inspired by some photographs of slaves that had been found in Boston in 1975 and published. 

[“They aroused DeJongh’s [sic] interest and mine, too,” declared King.  Searching further, de Jongh found the WPA interviews in a Harvard University archive, some in long-out-print books and others unpublished.  As Earl Caldwell quoted the writer and teacher in the New York Daily News (“Some good words from a bad time,” 27 December 1982), he “decided to become in a sense a medium for the voices of these former slaves.  They had in effect done their own playwriting.” 

[De Jongh wrote no dialogue for Do Lord; he used the words of the interviewees verbatim, adding nothing,  He used only people who’d been enslaved in Virginia, in their 80’s and 90’s when they were interviewed (making them young children when the Civil War ended and slavery was abolished nationwide).  They were all residents of  an “old folks home for the colored.”

[De Jongh relied heavily on Weevils in the Wheat (University Press of Virginia, 1976), a book of the unedited transcripts of 15 of the former Virginia slaves edited by Charles L. Perdue, Jr.; Thomas E. Barden; and Robert K. Phillips.  The only words that weren’t from the WPA interviews were those of Nat Turner, the rebellious slave, added for balance from the confessions of Nat Turner.  

[The playwright used slave spirituals and work songs to transition between scenes, but they were songs the elderly men and women spoke of in the recollections.  The Civil War-era title spiritual, “Do, Lord, Remember Me,” is sung from off stage.

[Satisfied with the results of his work, de Jongh decided not to return to the original Civil War drama he’d planned when he began his research.  After its world première, Do Lord was revived by theaters all across the U.S. and beyond.  Perhaps counterintuitively, the play had tremendous appeal to children—perhaps because, though the characters are old folks, what they are remembering is their own childhoods.

[I’m presenting three critical notices of two productions of Do Lord from different publications.  

[The only review I could find of the world première of Do Lord, Off-Off-Broadway at the New Federal Theater was in the New York Times.  Mel Gussow, who would rereview the play when it reopened Off-Broadway at the American Place Theater in 1982, published his notice on 5 April 1978 in “The Living Section” (sec. C).

[The two-hour, intermissionless play’s début ran at the Pilgrim Theater, home to NFT productions at this time, on Thursdays through Sundays, 30 March-9 April; admission was free.

[Directed by Regge Life (sometimes identified as Reggie), with a cast of seven actors (reduced to five when it débuted Off-Broadway), each playing multiple roles, the setting was by C. Richard Mills, the lighting by Sandra Ross, the costumes by Benny Parks.

[NFT revived the show several times, often in different venues, before, during, and after the American Place mounting.  Well into the 2000s, Do Lord was presented by regional theaters, community groups, and schools—high schools and colleges (one of which even increased the cast to 13).  It easily became de Jongh’s best-known and most-produced play.  It’s also been the subject of scores, if not hundreds of newspaper and magazine articles, including reviews, and even a few dissertations and theses.]

There is a transcendent moment at the end of “Do Lord Remember Me” when Frances Foster, as a woman of 86; casts her mind back to the days when she was 8 and was treated as human chattel. The recollection is clear-eyed, unmarred by myopia or the withering of time. For almost 80 years the woman’s past has been her daily reminder of a nation’s inhumanity.

The significance of the scene can be partly attributed to the authenticity of the story. As dramatist, James de Jongh has compiled and structured this anthology from interviews with former slaves conducted in the 1930’s under the Federal Writers Project. It is also a tribute to the authenticity of Miss Foster’s performance.

In previous roles, this admirable actress has played everything from foxy grandmothers (“The River Niger” [Negro Ensemble Company (Off-Broadway, 1972-73); Broadway (1973)] and “First Breeze of Summer” [NEC; Broadway (1975)]) to the stoical young Lena in Athol Fugard’s “Boesman and Lena” [NEC (1975)] In a single scene in “Do Lord Remember Me,” she straddles a century. Through octogenarian eyes, she communicates the stain of childhood memory and the horror of slavery.

Dramatically, the moment reminds us of Gloria Foster’s [no relation to Frances Foster] Soliloquy at the end of “In White America” [Sheridan Square Playhouse (Off-Broadway, 1963-65)]—a mature actress transformed into a 15-year-old black girl trying to go to school against impossible opposition.

“Do Lord Remember Me,” a Henry Street Settlement production, is not the searing experience of “In White America.” Despite the conviction of these first‐hand impressions, there is a repetitiveness about some of Mr. de Jongh’s selections and there is a slowness in Regge Life’s staging that makes the evening less than completely enthralling. The anthology is interspersed with occasional songs, in which we see the antidote to injustice—the determination and the will for survival. More music would help.

Nevertheless, the play, strongly felt and single‐minded, has an impact—far greater than one would receive from reading historical documents. The seven actors, portraying slave owners as well as slaves, transport us, showing us the auction block in our nation’s past—when people were a commodity for speculation—linking arms and embracing a collective consciousness. Whether in the kitchen or in the fields, pampered or brutalized, “it was slavery no matter where you are.”

The actors are all inseparable from their material, but special mention should be made of Louise Stubbs, Brel Barbara Clarke, Miss Foster and Joe Attles. Tall, slim and angular, the ageless Mr. Attles, a 50‐year veteran of the American Theater, is himself an icon of indomitability.

“Do Lord Remember Me” will play tomorrow [Thursday, 6 April 1978] through Sunday [9 April] at the Pilgrim Theater, 240 East Third Street [far East Village, between Avenues B and C in Alphabet City].

[There were no other reviews of the first production of de Jongh’s play that I could locate using the Internet.  (I didn’t make a trip up to the Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center to look through the review scrapbooks and the clipping folder; I may do so at some point, and I’ll make corrections if I find this isn’t accurate.)  The Amsterdam News ran an announcement of the upcoming production on 1 April 1978 (“Ex-slaves speak in new play”), but didn’t review the play until the American Place production opened in 1982 (see below).]

*  *  *  *
“JAMES DEJONGH’S ‘DO LORD REMEMBER ME’”
by Lionel Mitchell
 

[The review by Lionel Mitchell, the New York Amsterdam News’ longtime theater reviewer, of the Off-Broadway première of Do Lord was published on 30 October 1982.  (The Amsterdam News is one of the oldest newspapers in the United States aimed at an African-American readership.)  The show ran at the American Place Theater, 111 W. 46th Street in the Theatre District, from 24 October 1982 to 26 February 1983.]

James DeJongh [sic] was looking through some slave narratives and came across the materials that form his newest work at American Place Theatre, “Do Lord Remember Me.” It’s all authentic stuff with nothing added or taken away. I found it difficult to keep a dry eye — that’s how moving it was.

Perhaps W.E.B. Du Bois [1868-1963], in his own words, conveys the mood of this period in his “Black Reconstruction in America” [1935; latest edition: Black Reconstruction (Library of America, 2021)]. He has a chapter called “The Coming Of The Lord,” the eve of Emancipation, the great Union advance into the South (1864-65): “There was a joy in the South. It rose like perfume — like a prayer. Men stood quivering. Slim dark girls, wild and beautiful with wrinkled hair, wept silently; young women, Black, tawney, white and golden, lifte[d] shivering hands, and old and broken mothers, black and gray, raised great voices and shouted to God across fields, and up to the rocks and the mountains.”

That is the mood which the play conjures once again. Something about that material is absolutely irresistible. It makes one feel pure, justified, confirmed, affirmed, as in the old spiritual: ‘Done Got Ova AT [sic] Last!”

Blending past and present

The long millennium of the African Diaspora opens up. The past and present re-link. One dances on the streets of the Rebel capital as Grant and Sheridan ride up through the Shenandoah and with Black troops at their head, break into Richmond [3 April 1865].

One is there as Lincoln, a few days later, steams down to the broken Confederate capital to walk through the streets unguarded by anyone except the joyous ex-slaves [4 April 1865].

But more than that, more than seeing history through the eyes of the slaves, that cast, consisting of dynamos Frances Foster, Ebony Jo-Ann Pinckney, Glynn Turman, Lou Myers, and the indomitable Charles H. Patterson, paints the agony with wonder and exuberance. One experiences the personal tragedies, triumphs, the human victories over slavery. I kept recalling my German-Jewish professor of history, himself a survivor of the Lotz Ghetto [sic; Łódź (or Lodz) Ghetto in Poland, second-largest Jewish ghetto in Nazi-occupied Europe] where he had weathered the Final Solution, exclaiming before a predominantly red-neck history class: “In one century, the Negroes have outstripped your slave system and they are sitting beside you in this classroom. Who knows what will happen, what relation they will bear to you in another century?”

I never failed to score in the upper 90’s in that class! This play is like that — every Black man and woman ought to make it a holy obligation to see it. In addition, all people in this country ought to see it.  “Do Lord Remember Me”, [sic] as I pointed out in the discussion last Sunday at the American Place Theatre [opening night, 24 October 1982], rediscovers perhaps the best lost literature of the Civil War period. It is material that even the great Edmund Wilson [writer, literary critic, journalist, and dramatist; 1895-1972] overlooked in his study of Civil War literature, “Patriotic Gore” [1962].

Reggie Life gets authenticity

Reggie [sic] Life has the cast doing some very authentic foot-stomping slave spirituals and Ebony Jo-Ann takes the lead in these. Madame Frances Foster is far the most powerful dramatic Black actress on the scene in years.

Glynn Turman both acts and dances to a fare-thee-well and I suspect he choreographed some of the movements he does as well.

That is a chromo [a color lithograph] for directing, for visual statement. Charles Patterson deserves applause for his narration — through a street man’s eyes. Absolutely superb!

[The cast, still under the direction of Regge Life, was largely the same (minus two actors) at the American Place as at the Pilgrim Theater 4½ years before.  The Off-Broadway set was designed by Julie Taymor (soon to be well known in her own right as a director), the lighting by Sandra L. Ross (who lit the Off-Off-Broadway début), and the costumes by Judy Dearing.

[Lionel H. (for Hampton—his father was a jazz musician in New Orleans) Mitchell was a journalist, poet, novelist, memoirist, and playwright, who wrote for the East Village Other in the 1960s, where some of his poetry was also published occasionally, and reviewed theater for the New York Amsterdam News.  He was born in 1942 in a small town in Louisiana before coming to New York City and settling in the East Village, where he was a fixture until his death in 1984 from an AIDS-related illness.  His one known published book was an autobiographical novel, Traveling Light (Seaview Books, 1980).] 

*  *  *  *
“NEW PLAY OFFERS AN EVENING OF ORAL HISTORY OF THE SLAVERY ERA”
By Mary Campbell, Associated Press

[Neither Mel Gussow’s notice for the Off-Off-Broadway world première, nor Lionel Mitchell’s of the Off-Broadway début (both above) were particularly detailed about the production, but I wanted to get them on record.  I’ve selected one more review, the Associated Press notice of the American Place mounting published in the Bridgewater, New Jersey, Courier-News of 30 October 1982, for its description of the play and performance.]

new york – James de Jongh, who wrote “Do Lord Remember Me,” playing off-Broadway at the American Place Theater, has taken oral American history – of slavery – and made an engrossing evening of theater out of it.

The oral history was recorded in the 1930s. Among the New Deal jobs created to give people something to get paid for doing was the job of asking former slaves what slavery had been like. Most still alive in the 1930s were infants or children during slavery.

But they had memories and memories of stories told to them. De Jongh, who teaches at the City College of New York, has given this theatrical form. A fine cast of five – four of them acting like old people – string the anecdotes together and act them out.

The tone of it all is interest in America’s past, not an incitement to racial hatred or guilt.

Many of the anecdotes are brief. Few detail atrocities. Those that do are vivid enough to be memorable.

One striking thing is how often one hears of a lively individual spirit that slavery did not quench or sour. Sukey, whose master tries to undress her while she’s boiling lye soap, pushes his backside into a pot of the stuff. When he sells her and hands pry open her mouth to look at her teeth, she still has something saucy to say. Uncle Jackson, left on guard in slave quarters while the men hold a meeting in the woods, leads the suspicious master a chase, outsmarting him.

“Do Lord Remember Me” tells of things from slavery that one may know, like children being sold and the parents never seeing them again and marriage by jumping over a broomstick. And it tells of things that one may not know, like slave church services only allowed when a white preacher is present and slaves who escape from the fields into the woods, not forever, and are allowed back.

De Jongh found the interviews stored in Smithsonian Institution archives. He used them verbatim and he used only those with slaves who’d lived in Virginia.

There is one section in which Glynn Turman speaks as Nat Turner. This gives variety – he thought he was a prophet. But the play probably would be better without it. It’s a very jarring note to have a man hanged in the 1800s among those reminiscing in the 1930s.

[A number of other review-writers expressed this same sense of displacement.

[Nat Turner (1800-31) was an enslaved African-American preacher who organized and led a rebellion of enslaved and free black people in Southampton County, Virginia (21-23 August 1831).  The rebellion was quickly suppressed, but Turner went into hiding and wasn’t captured until 31 October and imprisoned.

[He was tried for rebellion and insurrection on 5 November, found guilty, and hanged at 31 on 11 November.  The rebellious African Americans killed 55-65 white Virginians, and after the revolt was suppressed, the local militia and frightened mobs killed up to 120 blacks, most uninvolved with the rebellion. 

[In 1967, William Styron published The Confessions of Nat Turner, a popular novel, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1968.]

Lou Meyers, bald, Charles H. Patterson, gray, Ebony Jo-Ann and Frances Foster are the four old folks, going stiffly up and down porch steps and telling almost all the stories. They break the two hours without intermission into sections with occasional hymns. Reggie [sic] Life directed. The show opened last Sunday.

[Turman, the fifth cast member, plays various manifestations of The Slave, who, de Jongh said, “gets called into being” by the recollections of the four older characters. In Turman’s words in an interview with Marie Moore in the Amsterdam News (“Glynn Turman returns in ‘Do Lord Remember,’” 23 October 1982), the role is “sort of like the thread that is used to weave through the piece.” He’s “the spirit that either starts these people to talk or [is] conjured up as a result of their conversation.”]

In case one feels “Do Lord Remember Me” is too soft or has too much humor, it ends with Foster, 86 years later, telling of being a girl house slave, almost starved.  She stole a piece of candy and the mistress held her face down under her rockingchair’s [sic] rocker so she could beat her.  Facial bones were crushed on one side, her eye was permanently reddened and she was never again able to chew.

[Back in 1985, when I was a grad student at NYU, I took a production dramaturgy class that focused on stage adaptation of non-dramatic material, a dramaturg’s frequent assignment.  The instructor was Cynthia (C. Lee) Jenner, who’d been literary manager at the American Place Theater before taking the Performance Studies teaching gig.  She had served as a dramaturg on APT’s 1982 presentation of Do Lord Remember Me.

[Needless to say, Do Lord was one of Cynthia’s prime examples of a successful adaptation.  In February, James de Jongh was Cynthia’s guest in the class.  The discussion was principally focused on de Jongh’s work on the script (which was where a dramaturg’s efforts would have been directed).  Here’s a transcription of my notes (lightly edited for readability) from that sessions:

De Jongh:  A playwright’s work is invisible.  S/he doesn’t write just dialogue – writes behavior, creates scenes.  Plays that read well don’t necessarily play well.

With Do Lord, de Jongh wrote no dialogue – all language was from the interviews.  He created the structure of the play.  The arrangement of the scenes shapes the pay.  He found his ending early – knew where he was going.  Had to decide how to get there.  Assembled material into “categories” – but was it a scene?  Did it have an action?

Had to create a through-line – created an outside character (“The Slave”).  Looked for pieces that “felt like present action.”  Occasionally had to “distort” pieces to make it feel like present action.  (Idea derived from a distorted memory of Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy.)

De Jongh had 3 structures operating in Do Lord – string of beads (categories of slave memories), through-line (from The Slave), and action peaks (builds and climaxes of action).

[That last comment, about the unifying and cohesive structures evident in Do Lord, was a later remark by Cynthia, made after the guest session with de Jongh.  (I said Do Lord was a frequent touchstone in the class for a successful adaptation.)  I don’t know if the playwright created those structures intentionally, with forethought, or if they came organically from his intuition.

[I suspect that, whether these structure were intuitive or purposeful, they were something that Cynthia picked up on independently—that is, de Jongh didn’t point them out to her—either while helping the writer develop the script or from a post-mortem analysis to determine why Do Lord worked on stage. 

[If I apply the analytical method I learned from Michael Kirby in his Theatrical Structure class (see my two-part post on 15 and 18 February 2011), I can identify several more structural devices at work.  Two come to mind immediately: the unit setting, the same all through the performances (Continuity Structure), functions as a unifying device; the small cast with the same five (usually) actors throughout the show is a variation on Character Structure as a small ensemble of actors forms a constant, unifying presence.]