Setting: 5 P.M. (orange burning sun). Part of communal residence that houses Indian Opinion. Large, working press sits center stage. Blue grass field.
Staging: Farm residents set up, issue and distribute Indian Opinion. Gandhi, appearing late in the scene, inspects their activity in the printing process. All exit, leaving press to run alone during 3-minute orchestra tutti.
Kallenbach and Miss Schlesen, joined by principals.
What the characters are actually uttering as this scene progresses—what, in fact, all the characters are uttering all the time throughout the various scenes—are passages from the Bhaghavad Gita, a text that had tremendous spiritual and aesthetic importance for Gandhi, and in which he found special significance for his life’s work. Naturally, this choice on the creators’ part may strike you as strange—the Times critic found “radical” what he referred to as “the complete separation of sung text from dramatic action, such as it is”—but the gesture is wholly of a piece with the larger project of Satyagraha, which everywhere forestalls our expectations of what should take place in an opera house.
It is, in any case, inaccurate to characterize the Bhaghavad Gita texts as “completely separate” from the action: if you actually take the trouble to read the libretto, you can see that the Sanskrit texts have been chosen with great care. What the workers in the Indian Opinion scene are saying as they fold and pass along great sheets of newspaper is a highly poetic expression of what they are, in fact, doing: “Therefore, perform unceasingly the works that must be done, for the man detached who labors on to the highest must win through.” When Mrs. Alexander berates the mob that attacks Gandhi as he returns to South Africa, she angrily decries “the devilish folk” in whom “there is no purity, no morality, no truth. So they say the world has not a law nor order, nor a lord.” In the current Met production, no translation has been provided of the entire libretto, but as the production design incorporates projected portions of the sung texts, audience members get the gist of the necessary texts in each scene.
If, indeed, what Satyagraha aims at, in both its text and its music, is a kind of meditative state of spiritual elevation that allows us to think clearly about Gandhi’s goodness and its effects, rather than to get wrapped up in his “drama,” the use of these incantatory texts only enhances our sense that we’re participating in a kind of exalting ritual, rather than spending a couple of hours at the theater. Many New Yorkers I know, opera lovers, balked at the idea of “sitting through four hours of Sanskrit”; but those same people would happily sit through a Te Deum (or bar mitzvah) while understanding little of the text. It’s when you see Satyagraha as a symbolic action that you can begin to appreciate it.
In an interesting comment he made apropos of another of his historical operas, Glass explained that he wants us to have that kind of experience—one, that is to say, which, unlike traditional theater, does not intend to ape reality, but which creates its own, new kind of reality:
I’ve never felt that “reality” was well served in an opera house. And I think this is even more true when the subject of the opera is based on historical events. Surely those with a taste for historical facts and documentation would be better served in libraries where academic research is presumably reliable and readily available. The opera house is the arena of poetry par excellence, where the normal rules of historical research need not be applied and where, in the world of artistic imagination, a different kind of truth can be discovered.
Satyagraha may be the strongest of his portrait operas precisely because its meticulously manipulated poetic text hovers at the midpoint between abstraction, on the one hand (a quality perhaps too heavily in evidence in Einstein, with its sometimes dauntingly abstruse metaphorical allusions to things Einsteinian—the toy trains he enjoyed as a child, for instance), and concreteness, a too-obvious connection to the events on the stage, on the other. (The latter is a failing of Akhenaten, which relies on a clunky framing device—a modern-day tour guide explaining the ruins of the idealistic pharaoh’s crumbled city—to make plain the connections between its ideas and its action.) That mediation between the abstract and the real is, of course, a quality of religious rituals, one powerfully evoked by Satyagraha in particular.
This rigorous, ingeniously assembled spiritual work received an ideal production at the Met. The relatively young director, Phelim McDermott, and the designer, Julian Crouch, are partners in an innovative production company in England called Improbable, and they seem to have a taste for the irreverent. (They’re responsible for the Off-Broadway “junk opera,” Shockheaded Peter.) But it would be hard to think of a greater reverence than the one they have shown Glass and DeJong’s large and significant theater piece. They have clearly thought through not only the text and music but also the life of Gandhi himself, and for that reason virtually every image, every gesture that you see in this Satyagraha seems positively to resonate with significance.
Most striking is the way in which, as a homage to Gandhi’s own reverence for humble people and humble objects, almost the entire visual world of their staging is organized around two homely objects: pieces of paper and sticks. That they could make magic out of these things became evident very early on. In the scene of the mythical battle with which the work begins (“The Kuru Field of Justice”: titles projected onto the semicircular corrugated wall that was the production’s only permanent decor told you where you were in each scene), you saw at first two large groups, representing the opposing armies—and, by extension, the Indians and whites of the present-day conflict—one holding a bunch of baskets and the other holding a bunch of newspapers.
As the conflict got underway, however, these groups (who turned out to be members of the puppeteer group, Skills Ensemble, that McDermott and Crouch work with) started doing things with their bits of paper and humble baskets, twisting the former into rolls, manipulating the latter into clusters; and before you knew it, the paper had coalesced into a gigantic, vaguely arachnid monster, reaching nearly to the top of the proscenium, doing battle with an equally towering knightlike figure made entirely of baskets. The great battle announced by Krishna was symbolized by these artfully constructed champions, who fell to pieces suggestively after the musical climax, hinting at the futility of all armed conflict.
The procession of carefully paralleled scenes in Acts I and II presented many such astonishing and inventive tableaux; and yet what was so gratifying was that the eye-popping visual effects enhanced, rather than competed with, the message the text and the music were sending. Among other things, nearly all of the significant onstage action took the form of either accretions or removals of material objects—things being built up, things being stripped down—which suggests a theatrical analogue to the way in which Glass’s music achieves its effects, too.
Hence the Tolstoy Farm scene ingeniously conveyed the pleasure of cooperative labor, as the men and women manipulating bits of corrugated material back and forth across the stage were seen, suddenly, to be assembling one large dwelling place. The first scene of Act II, in which Gandhi is attacked by the mob, made use of a number of gigantic, leering papier-mâché puppet heads that marched around on sticks and stilts and clustered over the cowering Gandhi, indicating the force of European hatred for the Indian’s project. (Gandhi himself, at one point early in this scene, seemed to be represented by an endearingly awkward bird puppet, which evoked with curious accuracy his stick-legged, avian walk.)
Perhaps the most stunning example of subtle and ongoing transformations was to be found in the Indian Opinion scene. It began simply enough with a group of people kneeling on the floor passing impossibly long, continuous sheets of uncut newspaper along to one another; at a certain point these sheets were made to undulate horizontally across the width of the stage, creating an image of hypnotic power. Later, the sheets were bunched like ribbons and made into a kind of cape that trailed for a moment from Gandhi’s shoulder blades. A crucial cut was then made at the center of the bunch, creating streamers tha
t were subsequently hooked to pulleys and wheeled heavenward, creating at that point a number of enormous streamers that hung down and—the final, heart-stopping climax—onto which vertically written texts in Sanskrit, Gujarati, and Roman characters were projected, sliding down the streamers like rainwater on a windowpane. This brilliantly inventive use of humble paper and characters made you feel powerfully—and quite rightly—the pleasure and beauty of words themselves: the greatest weapon in Gandhi’s arsenal.
Many elements here, both large and small, reminded you that although Glass’s historical work isn’t bound by conventions of traditional chronology, Satyagraha as a whole does chart Gandhi’s evolution—the trajectory that is alluded to, however delicately, by the titles of the three acts. The use of costumes was subtle but crucial. We first see Gandhi lying on the ground before the Kuru Field of Justice scene, a tableau that alludes to a notorious incident that occurred soon after his arrival in South Africa, when the young lawyer, holding a first-class rail ticket, was physically pushed from a train onto the platform, a moment that marked the beginning of his outrage against racial injustice. At this point he is wearing the proper, dowdy black-and-white getup of the Victorian lawyer, the frock coat and the well-shined shoes. As the opera progresses he gradually, almost imperceptibly sheds more and more of these clothes, so that by the end he’s the Gandhi you recognize: the slender, stork-like figure in the white loincloth. Also wonderfully effective were the costumes in the scene when Mrs. Alexander rescues Gandhi: lurid, vaudeville colors and horizontal stripes for the bigoted Europeans, with Mrs. Alexander and Gandhi in dazzling white, as if to suggest their moral likeness despite their ethnic and national difference.
Acts of disrobing have, indeed, an extraordinary power in this staging. At the end of the battle scene in Act I you know that Gandhi has the support of the chorus because suddenly they take off their shoes and line them up, dozens of them, downstage—a first step, you’re meant to feel, in the process of self-revision, and perhaps self-humbling, necessary to appreciate satyagraha, to understand the necessity of abjuring violence in favor of a new kind of conflict. This symbolic gesture is amplified in the “Vow” scene at the end of that act, when the assembled supporters of Gandhi’s resolution to fight the British racial law start removing their outer garments and then hang them on hangers that have been lowered from the ceiling. When the dozens of frock coats and ladies’ coats and shawls and veils suddenly float toward the ceiling, it somehow becomes a moment of deep emotion—it’s a stage picture that gets across the potential beauty in self-abnegation, the exaltation that lies in the abandonment of the “I” for the “we.” “Let a man feel hatred for no being … done with thoughts of ‘I’ and ‘mine,’ ” goes one line from the Bhaghavad Gita cited here.
Humble objects and small gestures, repeated over and over, sometimes altered, sometimes enlarged: it would be hard to think of a better way to represent, theatrically, not only what Philip Glass has done in his score for Satyagraha but what Gandhi himself was doing in eschewing violent “action” and championing the telling gesture as the foundation of his political philosophy. The sense that you get—because McDermott and Crouch’s production wants you to get it—that this philosophy derives from a higher source is something that the production, like the work itself, underscores at every level. Its spare but elevated abstractions, the inventive use and reuse of ordinary objects as exalted symbols, have something of the hieratic about them. It feels like a mystery play.
That sense was, if anything, only heightened in the last scene, in which all of the elements of both the text and the production cohere beautifully. After the New Castle marchers have been removed by the soldiers, Act III (“King”) concludes with Gandhi alone, downstage. Upstage, throughout the latter part of the act, a black man playing Martin Luther King Jr. has been standing atop a lofty podium, silently and in slow motion pantomiming King’s famous gestures as he gave the “I Have a Dream” speech. (He’s facing away from the audience, as if addressing a crowd in the far distance.) The notion of Gandhi communing with his latter-day avatar is perfectly conveyed by the Bhagavad Gita text that Gandhi sings at this moment: “The Lord said, I have passed through many a birth and many have you. I know them all but you do not.” These and the other sacral lines are sung to a single, ethereal musical figure: an ascending scale of eight notes, in the Phrygian mode, repeated thirty times and yet never quite the same from repetition to repetition. (Once again in this piece, repetition is gripping rather than boring.)
As this goes on, the flats obscuring the back of the stage float away, revealing an expanse of improbably blue, celestial sky; the clouds that had scudded thickly across it while King was giving his speech suddenly evaporate, leaving a clear space. (Another suggestive image.) One white, rather fluffy cloud remains, and slowly, unexpectedly, this cloud starts to morph into an image of a group of Gandhi’s followers. This is exactly per Glass’s stage direction: “Gandhi, standing down stage, turns, looking toward platform where King reappears and a moment later Satyagraha army appears behind him, up in the starry, night sky.” Seated in serried rows like people posing for one of those Victorian group photos, the image is characterized by a stiffness meant, perhaps, to remind you of this specific moment in history to which Gandhi did, after all, belong.
And then something wonderful happens. Raising their forearms in a formal yet warm gesture—of greeting? of farewell? I couldn’t make it out—they wave right at you as you sit in the audience. At that moment I burst into tears. Perhaps because it seemed so much like a gesture of benediction, I felt as if something real had actually happened in the auditorium—that I had been blessed, maybe. Made out of insignificant things and yet achieving a large effect that exceeded, finally, the boundaries of the theater, this marvelous work made you feel that it had done something. And what is that, if not drama?
—The New York Review of Books, June 12, 2008
WHY SHE FELL
THE TRANSFORMATION OF humans into monsters or animals is a standard feature of two great genres: classical myth and American comic books. As those of us know who spent our childhoods and teenage years greedily hoarding the latter, such transformations are only occasionally effected by a mere change of costume. Batman, for instance (introduced in 1939), is an ordinary Homo sapiens who simply dons his bat-like hood and cape when he wants to battle evildoers; his extraordinary powers are the fruit of disciplined intellectual and physical training. More often—and more excitingly—the metamorphoses occur at the genetic level. The Incredible Hulk, who debuted in 1962, is a hypertrophied Hercules-like giant, the Mr. Hyde aspect of an otherwise mild-mannered scientist named Bruce Banner, created during a laboratory accident involving gamma rays. Wolverine, one of the X-Men, who sports lupine traits following his transformations, belongs to a despised race of “mutants” with remarkable powers. (The comic-book series, now reincarnated as a hugely popular film franchise, debuted in 1963.)
Perhaps most famously of all, the crime-fighting Spider-Man—the character was introduced in 1962 and got his own comic series the following year—is really just an ordinary teenager from Queens named Peter Parker who undergoes a kind of human-arachnid hybridization after being bitten by a radioactive spider during a class trip to a science fair. It can be no accident that popular narratives involving gamma rays, mutants, and radioactivity should have gripped the imagination of young people in the early 1960s, when the Cold War—and with it the seemingly constant threat of nuclear catastrophe—was at its height.
Two millennia before the Cuban missile crisis, the popular fascination with metamorphosis was already firmly in place. The gods of Greek myth regularly transform themselves, abandoning their everyday humanoid shapes for those of animals—often (if not always wholly explicably) for the purposes of seducing mortal girls: Zeus ravishes Europa in the form of a bull, Leda in the shape of a swan, and, in one odd variant, his own daughter Persephone in the shape of a snake. But the gods clearly enjoy transforming humans, too. He
nce, for instance, the story of Actaeon, a young hunter who offends the virgin goddess Artemis and is turned into a stag that is then torn to pieces by his own hunting dogs—the hunter become the victim, in other words. Myth is rich in such cruel inversions. Actaeon’s first cousin Pentheus, the ill-fated king of Thebes, is similarly torn to pieces in a horrific “hunt” after his own mother, in the grip of Dionysiac frenzy, mistakes him for a young bull calf—an episode dramatized at the end of Euripides’ Bacchae, a play that ends, curiously, with a final and literal transformation: that of Pentheus’ perhaps insufficiently religious grandfather, Cadmus, into a snake. A closing prophecy informs us that the old man, having taken the form of a serpent, will lead an army of bacchants throughout Greece, destroying the altars of the old gods and establishing the worship of Dionysus.
These by no means atypical examples from classical myth and drama suggest a crucial difference between the ancient and modern models of human-to-animal metamorphosis. For today’s audiences, such transformations are liberating—literally “empowering”—whereas for the ancients, they were, more often than not, humiliations, punishments for inappropriate or overweening behavior.
One of the most famous examples of this moralizing strain in ancient tales of shape-shifting is the comparatively late myth (there are no traces of it in the extant Greek material of the Classical Age) of Arachne, the girl who ended up a spider. The story is suavely retold by Ovid in his Metamorphoses—an entire verse epic devoted to tales of human transformations, completed when Jesus Christ was a boy of eight or so. In the Roman poet’s version, Arachne is distinguished by her marvelous artistic talent at the loom and with the embroidery needle—a gift she rather dangerously refuses to credit to Athena, whom she goes so far as to challenge to a contest. Both females furiously weave their tapestries, which are described at considerable length. Athena’s, unsurprisingly, features mythic scenes of mortal arrogance punished by the gods (who transform the offending humans into trees, or mountains, or birds), while Arachne’s, just as pointedly, features mythic scenes of divine duplicity—among which are featured Jupiter’s seductions of Leda, Europa, and Persephone. Offended by her rival’s work, Athena strikes Arachne with her shuttle; in her great shame, the girl hangs herself, but is turned by the goddess into a spider, destined forevermore to “ply her ancient art of weaving.”
Waiting for the Barbarians Page 4