Subterms
In one of his famed self-portraits, Omar Victor Diop, a Senegalese photographer and artist, wears a three-piece suit and an extravagant paisley bow tie, preparing to blow a yellow, plastic whistle. The elaborately staged photograph evokes the memory of Frederick Douglass, the one-time fugitive slave who in the 19th century rose to become a leading […] More
ONE OF THE world’s oldest surviving theatrical arts, Japanese Noh grew out of various forms of popular entertainment at temples, shrines and festivals, including seasonal rites offered by villagers giving thanks for a bountiful harvest. During the Muromachi period (1336-1573), those varied productions were codified into an elaborately contrived entertainment for military leaders, some of whom, like the 16th-century warlord Toyotomi Hideyoshi, also acted in Noh. Presented using minimal props on a stage comprising a roof, four pillars and a bridge way, the plays dramatize myths and tales from traditional Japanese literature with monologues, sparse bamboo flute melodies, periodic percussion and tonal chanting. Often, supernatural beings take human form. The pace can be almost hypnotically slow, with the colors and elaborate embroidery of the actors’ costumes indicating their characters’ age and status.But perhaps the most distinguishing feature of Noh is the carved masks worn by performers. Of the hundreds of masks produced during the Muromachi period, about 40 to 50 form the archetypes for the masks made today, says the historian Eric Rath, who specializes in premodern Japan; many represent different characters, depending on the play. Master mask carvers have long been celebrated for their ability to create a static face that seems to come alive, its expression changing with the angle of the performer’s head and the way the light hits its features. While many Japanese people today have never seen a live Noh performance, the white visage and red lips of a Ko-omote mask (one of a few denoting a young woman) or the bulging golden eyes of the horned Hannya (one of the most famous of the demon masks, representing a wrathful, jealous woman) are both intrinsic to Japan’s visual culture.Nakamura in her Noh-inspired mask “Okina” (2022).Before World War II, only men were allowed to perform Noh professionally; now, some women play leading roles. But until recently, mask making, in which blocks of hinoki cypress carved in high relief are hollowed out, then primed with a white mixture of crushed oyster shells and animal glue — with mineral pigment for lips and cheeks, and gold powder or copper to give the teeth and eyes of masks depicting supernatural beings an otherworldly glow — was a craft largely handed down from father to son.THAT’S CHANGED SOMEWHAT in the years since the Kyoto-based Mitsue Nakamura, 76, started learning the craft in the 1980s. When she began, she knew of only one other woman in the field, but this year, all four of her current apprentices, some of whom study for as long as 10 years, are female. Some adhere to the traditional archetypes and techniques, while others radically reinterpret them.For purists, Nakamura says, a true Noh mask is never entirely decorative: It has to be used onstage, and its maker must hew precisely to a narrow set of centuries-old parameters. Today, Nakamura says, actors prize masks that are antiques or appear to be. Her pieces, each of which takes about a month to complete, often look older than they are thanks to the shadows she smudges into the contours of the face, or a weathering she achieves by scratching the paint with bamboo.Nakamura wearing her mask “Ikkaku Sennin” (2020).In 2018, the Kanagawa-based playwright and screenwriter Lilico Aso, 48, came to see Nakamura’s process firsthand because she was interested in developing a character who was a Noh mask carver; instead, she became a mask carver herself, drawn, she says, to the idea of being “both a craftsman and an artist.” She’s been studying with Nakamura ever since and, last fall, in a show titled “Noh Mask Maker Mitsue Nakamura and Her Four Disciples” at Tokyo’s Tanaka Yaesu gallery, she exhibited a series of four masks called “Time Capsule” inspired by celebrities and fictional characters. Rihanna became an earth goddess with pearlescent blue lips and eye shadow. Ariana Grande morphed into the moon princess Kaguya, who, in an ancient tale, rejects all her mortal suitors and returns to her lunar home; in Aso’s rendering, she has the high, soft eyebrows of a Noh beauty.For some female Noh artisans, subtle changes to traditional forms emerge from a deep personal connection. Keiko Udaka, 43, who also works in Kyoto, grew up steeped in Noh, with a father who was both a performer and a mask maker. She began studying with him when she was a teenager; in 2021, after he died, she took over an unfinished Noh play he was working on, commissioned by a town in Ehime prefecture, on the island of Shikoku. While one of her brothers completed the script, Udaka created a mask for the main character, a folk hero who starved to death while cultivating barley for future generations, imbuing it with the features of their late father. Such homages aren’t an uncommon practice among Noh artisans, and the allure is obvious: As Udaka says, a painstakingly crafted carving is more indelible than a photo. “Memories can be recorded too easily in many places now,” she says, “and they don’t remain in our minds.”Nakamura in her “Ryoshuku no Tsuki” (2022) mask.While Udaka’s departures from tradition are subtle, those of the Tokyo-based Shuko Nakamura (no relation to the Kyoto mask maker), 34, are unignorable. Inspired by Noh history, folklore and her own imagination, she makes masks out of modeling clay and paper rather than wood. One mask depicts an old woman, a crown of blue-black crows circling above her forlorn face, alluding to the ubasute story — which appears in both folk tales and Noh — of an elderly family member abandoned in the forest. With deep smile lines, a long horsehair beard and bushy pompom eyebrows, another mask honors the form of Okina, a spirit who appears as an old man. A gnarled pine tree sprouts from the mask’s head in place of hair; at the roots nestle a pair of turtles. The conifers and reptiles, she says, are references to the characteristic illustrations on the fan Okina holds when he dances.Out of respect for the ancient art, Shuko Nakamura refers to her creations as “creative masks” rather than Noh masks, but the tribute is clear. And even a traditional mask maker like Mitsue Nakamura sees the place for works that expand the boundaries of Noh’s conservative culture. “Of course, the best masks are those used onstage,” she says, “but I think we should also make Noh masks that can stand on their own.”Photo assistants: Megan Collante, Orion Johnson More
Daniel K. Isaac’s stylistically daring play at La MaMa doesn’t quite fulfill its promise, but it suggests the playwright has more stories to tell.Korean fairy tales can trend macabre; a few skew more grisly than even the Brothers Grimm. In the Korean version of “Cinderella,” for instance, Cinderella dies. (For a while, anyway.) Murder, starvation, and sacrifice form the dark heart of this folk tradition, at least in the tales that Daniel K. Isaac tells in “Once Upon a (korean) Time,” a production from Ma-Yi Theater Company that opened on Wednesday at La MaMa.Isaac is better known as a stage and screen actor (“The Chinese Lady,” “Billions”); this is his first produced play. And if the ambition of this drama, which spans nearly 100 years and two continents, often exceeds his grasp — and that of its practiced director, Ralph B. Peña — it does suggest a lively theatrical intelligence and a willingness to grapple with some outsize themes.The play begins in 1930, mid-battle, with gunfire and screaming. Out of water, out of rations and — apparently — out of time, two wounded soldiers (David Lee Huynh and Jon Norman Schneider) cower in a foxhole. They soothe themselves by telling a story about a cruel older brother, a kind younger brother and some magical gourds. In a scene set a decade or so later, during World War II, three adolescents (Sasha Diamond, Teresa Avia Lim and Jillian Sun), kidnapped and forced into sexual slavery by the Japanese military, dissociate from their circumstances by recounting the story of Shim-Cheong, a woman who sacrifices herself to protect her blind father.David Lee Huynh, left, and Jon Norman Schneider as two wounded soldiers, with Jillian Sun, in “Once Upon a (korean) Time.”Richard TermineThese first scenes are the play’s most difficult. The circumstances are unimaginable in their horror, so it makes sense that Isaac and Peña struggle to envision them. In the scene with the soldiers, much of the initial dialogue comes down to screaming and moaning, with expletives flying around like shrapnel. In the scene with the young women, Isaac keeps most of the sexual violence offstage, but there is a lot of screaming here, too, and one act of tremendous brutality. The actors do what they can, but they strain to convey the dread and the panic of the characters, and in neither scene does the staging feel sufficient. An extended drag sequence — with Schneider playing the Sea King in a ball gown and sparkles — offers variety and brief respite, but it is a strange and dissonant choice.After a confusing Korean War sequence, “Once Upon a (korean) Time” settles into a more confident mode, in a scene in which a daughter finds her birth mother — unfortunately, at a Korean-owned liquor store in the midst of the Los Angeles riots — and then another, set in present-day Koreatown, in which that same daughter, now a mother herself, meets up with her friends, all of them Korean American adoptees. At this point, it becomes clear — though, if you’re a savvy spectator, it was probably clear already — that these scenes and stories have been braided together to tell the story of one woman’s family.Under Peña’s direction, the shifts between time periods, and between realism and fairy tale, are not always fluid. Se Hyun Oh’s set, which is mostly two monoliths, labors to suggest everything from a cave to a convenience store. Despite evocative lighting from Oliver Wason, flexible projections from Yee Eun Nam, and Phuong Nguyen’s judicious costumes, these spaces rarely feel fully invoked. The final two scenes, in which stories are narrated but not fully enacted, are the most successful. And that could be either because these scenes are the least formally ambitious, or because they feel the most personal.Isaac is not an adoptee, but, as he explains in the program notes, he grew up without much knowledge of his ancestry or Korean folklore. He has had to seek that out on his own, as an adult. And so the play, for all its temporal and geographical sweep, is also Isaac’s own story, one of longing for connection with history and place. He could have rendered this tale a lot more simply, but who wants to fault a playwright for big swings and stylistic daring? “Once Upon a (korean) Time” doesn’t quite fulfill its promise, but it suggests that Isaac has more stories to tell.Once Upon a (korean) TimeThrough Sept. 18 at La MaMa, Manhattan; ma-yitheatre.org. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. More
Huang Ruo and Basil Twist’s new choral-theater piece at St. Ann’s Warehouse borrows from traditional Chinese tales.The giant is immense and craggy-limbed, like some primordial creature hewed from the earth or forged from lava. His name is Kua Fu, and in Huang Ruo and Basil Twist’s new choral-theater piece “Book of Mountains & Seas” he is a puppet, towering above his team of puppeteers. When thirst strikes, he lies prostrate to lap up a whole river of white silk, which slips down his gullet and disappears.This is splendid puppetry, imbued with poignancy and the pulsing, drum-driven drama of mythic quest. A figure from Chinese legend, Kua Fu desires one thing above all, and he will chase it as far as he has to: He wants to capture the sun.We should be rooting against him, then, if we want the planet to survive. But at St. Ann’s Warehouse on Tuesday night, as “Book of Mountains & Seas” made its American premiere, I found myself solidly on Kua Fu’s side — and feeling consequently like I had aligned my sympathies with Thanos, the ultra-bad guy in Marvel’s “Avengers” movies, which also borrow from mythology to tap into something ancient in us.Originally scheduled for January at the now-postponed Prototype festival, “Book of Mountains & Seas” is the aesthetic opposite of that blockbuster film franchise — live and handmade, harnessing the power of music, puppetry and human gathering. With a dozen choral singers from the Choir of Trinity Wall Street, two percussionists and six puppeteers — excellent, all — the show retells four Chinese tales borrowed from “Shanhaijing,” a text that is often called in English “The Classic of Mountains and Seas.”If you’re not already versed in those legends, or fluent in Chinese, you may be lost if you don’t read up on them in advance. The physical program provides two pages of clear, concise synopses. Presented by St. Ann’s Warehouse and Beth Morrison Projects, the performance is sung half in Mandarin and half in a language of the composer-conductor-librettist Huang Ruo’s invention, without English supertitles. Projected Chinese titles give the full text of the stories, but the English text is much briefer — occasional plot updates that generally do the trick if you’ve absorbed those program notes.For non-Mandarin speakers, it makes for an impressionistic experience, your mind allowed to drift a bit as the vocal tones wash over you. Huang Ruo has said that the combination of song and percussion is as old as humankind, and certainly it feels that way in the first slender myth, about the birth of Pan Gu, who created the world: Out of the primal darkness come the voices, and softly lit faces, of the singers, with percussion sounding from both sides.Twist, the production’s director and designer, keeps the puppetry minimal in that opening scene, but the pieces he uses to make Pan Gu’s enormous visage — rice-paper lanterns; large, rough pieces of what look like driftwood or fossils or bones — recur throughout the evening. They are building blocks of this show’s world.The performance is sung half in Chinese and half in a language of the composer-conductor-librettist Huang Ruo’s invention.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe second myth, “The Spirit Bird,” is about a princess who drowns, transforms into a bird and becomes consumed with her attempt to get revenge on the ocean. But the puppetry — a silken bird, a silken sky that becomes a silken sea — is too simple in its repetition. When an undulating sea creature (made of those driftwood-like bits) swims by, the variety is welcome.This is also the one section of the show where the precision of Ayumu Poe Saegusa’s otherwise extraordinarily meticulous lighting gives way, allowing an errant shadow — of a singer, possibly? — to break the illusion of the ocean.The last two myths are where “Book of Mountains & Seas” gets exciting. That’s partly because they, unlike the others, have built-in drama There is no conflict in the creation of the world, and the fight between the princess and the sea feels nebulous. But “The Ten Suns” and “Kua Fu Chasing the Sun” have stakes.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesHow is it that the 10 puppet suns — rice-paper lanterns bobbing high in the air on long, slender stalks — are quite so charming and mesmeric? Glowing cherry-red when they first appear one by one, they are a happy band of siblings who share the duty of lighting the planet. Their fatal error is to go out together one day, which wreaks disaster. Twist makes it a menacing confrontation, with the suns aggressively approaching the audience — the show’s one real echo of climate change. Yet when nine of the suns are killed to save the Earth (the program, too, gives this away), the music and the moment have a mournful beauty.The pièce de résistance, though, is the appearance of Kua Fu, the giant we see awakening in the final myth. Never would anyone confuse this stony-looking creature with the mammoth King Kong puppet we saw on Broadway, yet as Kua Fu looks around, getting his bearings, that’s exactly who he resembles.With propulsive, high-tension music to match his urgency, Kua Fu runs in place at center stage, as the sun, a rice-paper lantern, moves around him, out of his long arms’ reach. It is mysteriously gripping: this huge, wordless being so filled with longing for what he cannot and should not have; this giant who, if he keeps going, will drink all of the fresh water of the Earth.He fails in his quest, of course; the program tells you that as well. But here the projected English text, at least, hedges a bit. Because in the legend, when Kua Fu dies, forests of peach blossom trees grow from his walking stick.The puppet has no walking stick, and no puppet peach blossom trees grow. But wouldn’t they have been magnificent?Book of Mountains & SeasThrough March 20 at St. Ann’s Warehouse, Brooklyn; stannswarehouse.org. Running time: 1 hour 15 minutes. More
A theatrical reworking of Wagner’s “Ring” and a feminist revision of some Greek classics show how ancient legends can illuminate contemporary obsessions.ZURICH — At the start of “Der Ring des Nibelungen” a new play at the Schauspielhaus Zurich, the writer Necati Oziri makes the audience a promise: During the next four hours, we won’t hear a single phrase from Richard Wagner’s operatic tetralogy about gods, giants, dwarves and dragons.In an eloquent and deeply personal address, Oziri, a young German playwright, describes his conflicted feelings at being asked by Christopher Rüping, an in-house director at the Zurich theater, to tackle Wagner’s epic in a new stage work.After Elfriede Jelinek’s Marxist gloss in the book-length essay “Rein Gold,” and a “Ring” rewrite with an environmental message by Thomas Köck last season in Berlin, Oziri is the latest in a recent series of playwrights who have mined Wagner’s dramas for contemporary relevance. Although he rejects Wagner’s text, Oziri takes the composer’s characters and themes seriously, and treats them, for the most part, with respect.In his lengthy prologue, Oziri grapples with the perceived elitism of opera and the difficulty of approaching a work regarded as the apotheosis of German genius. He compares himself to a “cultural terrorist planning an attack at the opera.”Oziri then introduces “The Ring’s” dramatis personae through a series of involving monologues for the seven actors who share the stage with him and the American poet and rapper Black Cracker, who D.J.s for much of the evening. (The original soundtrack, contributed by eight artists and musical groups, quotes Wagner only a handful of times.) The house lights remain on for much of the lengthy production, with the entire cast onstage to listen to one another’s speeches.Rüping is particularly adept at creating a relaxed and even playful environment for the piece to develop organically and at an unhurried pace. The down-to-earth performances and the pulsating music help make this a loose-limbed production that quickly settles into a comfortable groove. In the best possible way, the production cuts the myth down to size.As Alberich, the dwarf who sets the saga in motion by forging an all-powerful ring from stolen gold, Nils Kahnwald delivers a rancor-filled monologue about loneliness. Maja Beckmann’s Fricka first appears on a video screen to record a message to her husband, Wotan, the chief god, recalling the bliss of their early love. Wiebke Mollenhauer, as Brünnhilde, the daughter whom Wotan punishes for disobedience, bids a tearful farewell to her Valkyrie sisters and rails against the patriarchy. “The only way to rise to the throne is by sitting on daddy’s lap,” she says, bitterly. When Wotan finally appears, toward the end of the evening, he unleashes an epic whine that parodies white male fragility.Matthias Neukirch’s comically raving, mansplaining performance in that role won him spontaneous applause at the performance I attended, but the segment feels less original or pointed than some of Oziri’s other writing, for instance a soliloquy he gives the exploited giants who construct Wotan’s castle, Valhalla. Oziri recasts them as Gastarbeiter, the migrant workers who were invited — as cheap labor — to help rebuild West Germany in the postwar period.This isn’t the first time that Rüping, one of Germany’s most celebrated young directors, has created startlingly contemporary (and lengthy) theater out of ancient myth. His 10-hour, classically inspired “Dionysos Stadt,” unveiled at the Münchner Kammerspiele in 2018, is a monument of recent German-language theater. (The epic production will return to Munich later this season). “The Outrageous Ones: Technoid Love Letters for Ancient Heroines” at Munich’s Residenztheater, directed by Elsa-Sophie Jach.Sandra ThenAnother young German director, Elsa-Sophie Jach, attempts something like a feminist version of “Dionysos Stadt” with “The Outrageous Ones: Technoid Love Letters for Ancient Heroines,” at Munich’s Residenztheater. With its long narrations, installation-like set and percussive live music, there’s much about the production that feels similar to Rüping’s work.In the intimate confines of the Marstall, a small Residenztheater stage in the former imperial stables, six actresses cavort around a hot-pink fountain as they recount the myths of Echo, Medusa, Cassandra, Medea, Philomela and Penelope — some of antiquity’s best-known and bloodiest. There’s no shortage of killing, sexual violence and wanton cruelty in these tales, often narrated in the first person, about women who suffer at the hands of gods and men. (The performing text is itself a patchwork of ancient and modern texts, from Homer, Aeschylus, Euripides and Sappho up to modern feminist authors, including Christa Wolf and Hélène Cixous.)Although these stories are well known, the actresses succeed in making us feel discomfort and rage at the sickening violence enacted against women over and over. By giving voice to wronged or misunderstood female figures, “The Outrageous Ones” sticks it to the patriarchy, as represented by Zeus, Poseidon and Apollo.It’s a stylish and assured production. An onstage band, Slatec, helps to channel the female fury with its dynamic improvisations. The eclectic quartet — two sets of percussion, synthesizers and a trombone — performs what might best be described as techno meets big band.The musicians drive the evening with momentum and energy, while the band’s colorful outfits contrast with the somber black worn by the actresses for most of the performance — as does the blood that shoots out of the fountain by the gallon toward the end of the evening. Aleksandra Pavlovic’s playful set and Barbara Westernach’s stark, dramatic lighting help turn the small brick interior of the Marstall into a kooky nightclub with a haunted-house vibe.As the performance draws to a close, however, it strains for relevance by including the real-life story of Nevin Yildirim, a woman who in 2015 was sentenced to life imprisonment in Turkey for killing a man who had raped her. Jach’s decision to add Yildirim to the pantheon of cruelly mistreated queens, princesses and nymphs feels out of place. Such editorializing seems tendentious, as if Jach and her performers lacked faith in their classical material. Before this modern-day interpolation, however, the production speaks up for the silenced women of antiquity in sensitive, eloquent and artistically unexpected ways.“Myths are public dreams; dreams are private myths,” wrote the American literary scholar Joseph Campbell. Can it be any wonder that theatermakers continue to turn to our most ancient legends to dream through our contemporary worries, obsessions and fears?Der Ring des Nibelungen. Directed by Christopher Rüping. Schauspielhaus Zurich. Through March 27; guest performances at the Wiener Festwochen June 1-3.Die Unerhörten. Directed by Elsa-Sophie Jach. Residenztheater Munich. Through April 26. More
The musical “Hadestown” and the opera “Eurydice” aim to offer new twists on a Greek myth. But when it comes to their heroine, they only go so far.When Orpheus turned around to look at Eurydice during the closing performance of Matthew Aucoin and Sarah Ruhl’s “Eurydice” at the Metropolitan Opera, the audience’s collective gasp seemed to shake the grand theater. I recalled another time I heard such a gasp: from the character of Eurydice near the end of “Doubt Comes In,” a song in the Broadway musical “Hadestown.” Then, too, the audience gasped along with her.A lifelong classics nerd, I was surprised both times by the reaction: Does the tale of Orpheus and Eurydice really require a spoiler alert?The myth has been kicking around for over two millenniums, after all. Orpheus, the greatest musician of all, marries Eurydice, who dies when she’s bitten by a snake on their wedding day. He descends to the underworld, where the god of the dead offers him another chance at love: He can leave with Eurydice, but only if he walks ahead and never turns around. Here’s that spoiler: Orpheus looks, and Eurydice is damned to Hades forever.For such an old — and short — story, the tale of Orpheus and Eurydice is still frequently told and adapted, much like that of another famous ill-fated couple, Romeo and Juliet. Operatic renditions by Monteverdi and others date back to the early 1600s. Renowned filmmakers like Jean Cocteau created their own narratives in the 20th century.In 1922, Rainer Maria Rilke used the tragic story as a launchpad for his deeply ruminative 55-poem cycle “Sonnets to Orpheus.” Countless other poets have followed suit, many revising the myth to give its sad dead wife a voice — perhaps in a contemporary vernacular, as in Carol Ann Duffy’s “Eurydice,” or in the measured verse and elevated diction of A.E. Stallings’ “Eurydice’s Footnote.”And of course there’s Ruhl herself, who created a revisionist mythology in her 2003 play “Eurydice,” which she adopted into the opera’s libretto.Modern-day adaptations like “Hadestown” and “Eurydice” reveal more than just the imaginations of their creators; they reflect a gender politics that gets to the core of how men and women are mythologized, who has agency and whose stories are most valued.Morley, as Eurydice, surrounded by the dead.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesLet’s face it: Orpheus has always been the star of the myth. Eurydice is simply the young bride. She has no background and no future; she only serves as the vehicle of tragedy for Orpheus.Both “Hadestown” and “Eurydice” interrogate that starring role. In both, Orpheus remains a genius musician who, though in love with Eurydice, is preoccupied with his art above all. Her death is a touch of bad luck — you never know when a venomous snake will slither underfoot on your wedding day. But both adaptations draw a line of causality from Orpheus’s behavior to Eurydice’s death.Perhaps, the productions suggest, Orpheus was the original slacker musician boyfriend, so concerned with his next big hit that he neglected the love who inspired his best work. But Eurydice doesn’t merely get dragged down into the underworld; in both versions she’s tempted by the offer of something she wants.In Aucoin and Ruhl’s “Eurydice,” the new bride wanders off from her own wedding party. She’s bored and missing her dead father, who has been secretly trying to write to his beloved daughter from the underworld. In comes Hades, the ruler of that realm, as sleazy as a back-alley hustler, to manipulate her grief; he baits her with one of her father’s letters.In Anais Mitchell’s “Hadestown,” the seduction is twofold: financial and sexual. Orpheus and Eurydice are trapped in some otherworldly version of the Depression era. In the lurid “Hey, Little Songbird,” Hades draws in Eurydice with promises of security and comfort, while undermining Orpheus, mocking him as a starving artist: “He’s some kind of poet and he’s penniless?/Give him your hand, he’ll give you his hand-to-mouth./He’ll write you a poem when the power’s out.”But the pressure goes further; in Patrick Page’s beguiling performance, Hades is explicitly predatory, exploiting Eurydice’s feelings of displacement and neglect in her relationship.That each of the two Eurydices actively makes a choice, as opposed to being passively buffeted by fate, is telling. But the result in both cases is still tragic.Whether it’s via a gradual transformation, as in “Hadestown,” or an abrupt change, as in “Eurydice,” our heroine loses her sense of self. In the underworld of “Hadestown,” Eurydice joins Hades’s army of souls, forgetting her identity like the deceased around her. Her counterpart in “Eurydice” also forgets Orpheus, her own name and even how to read; she meets her dead father but is unable to recognize him at first.Reeve Carney, foreground center, and Eva Noblezada, far right, as Orpheus and Eurydice in the Broadway musical “Hadestown.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesI’ve already told you the spoiler, that the myth ends in death. Opera has an easier time going there; it’s difficult for a musical to pull off a somber ending — the upbeat finale that practically demands a standing ovation feels so much more typical for the form.And yet “Hadestown” bravely, if self-consciously, resolves that way, announcing that the tale of Orpheus and Eurydice is an “old song” and “a sad song, but we sing it anyway.”“Eurydice” commits more explosively to woe in its stellar third act, after two acts of tedious exposition. Orpheus, Eurydice and Eurydice’s father all end up in the underworld together, but they find no peace. Eurydice’s father, having lost all hope of reuniting with his daughter after her husband arrives to save her, takes another dip into the Styx, causing him to die a final death. Eurydice, having lost both her husband and father twice, follows her father into oblivion.So the grand tragedy of the piece isn’t contingent on Orpheus’s inconvenient rubbernecking and the implications about trust (though that’s in there too); it’s the ways death has riven these relationships. In trying to outmaneuver their mortality and reconnect with one another, Orpheus, Eurydice and Eurydice’s father each arrive at an oblivion more desolate and lonely than what they’d known before.For all I appreciate about the way both productions offer Eurydice more agency, I do think they give her short shrift.“Hadestown” sticks to the plot of the classic, with some twists and embellishments. But in performance, the musical positions her as the more interesting half of the couple. As played by Eva Noblezada, she is a plucky, streetwise heroine — “no stranger to the world,” as one lyric goes. She may love a juvenile dreamer lost in his own head (Reeve Carney, with a beardless falsetto). But she’s practical; she’ll do what it takes to survive in a world of gross inequality, where Hades is an industrial fat cat and artists and workers are largely servile. If her death becomes the focal point over her character, that may be more the myth’s fault than the musical’s.“Eurydice” allows its heroine the power to decide: head back with her husband, or remain in the underworld with her father. She chooses to call to Orpheus — in effect separating from him and reuniting with her father.But even with this often intriguing revision, the opera still defines Eurydice solely by her relationship to men. Take the scene of their marriage proposal: Orpheus slyly ties a red string around Eurydice’s ring finger, and suggests using her to create his art — quite literally, making an instrument from the strands of her hair. She laments her father’s absence at the wedding itself, because, she claims, she was married to her father first. She doesn’t seem to exist outside of these men.When Eurydice dies the second time, vanishing without a trace, it’s as though she’s a figment of Orpheus’s imagination, more an archetype than anything else — the ill-fated lover, the tragic dead wife, another muse.Still gone at the turn of a head. More
#masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }At HomeBake: Maximalist BrowniesListen: To Pink SweatsGrow: RosesUnwind: With Ambience VideosAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyCritic’s Pick‘Live From Mount Olympus’ Review: Oh My Godsss, Who Am I?This audio series translates the Greek myth of Perseus for teens, making its hero a young man still figuring out his destiny.The cast, crew and producers of “Live From Mount Olympus.”Credit…via the Onassis Foundation and PRX’s TRAX podcast networkFeb. 17, 2021, 4:54 p.m. ETPuberty, curfews, fights with parents: Adolescence is hard enough without having to face down a Gorgon. Perseus has his work cut out for him.In the delightful new six-part audio series “Live From Mount Olympus,” a classic Greek myth is translated into a story for teens — and for adults who fancy a lively reimagining of the tales they learned in English class.Bulfinch? Hamilton? Eat your heart out.Presented by the Onassis Foundation and PRX’s TRAX podcast network, and produced with the Brooklyn theater ensemble TEAM, “Live From Mount Olympus” tells the tale of Perseus, the demigod hero who killed Medusa, the Gorgon with deadly peepers and a reptilian hairdo.This Perseus, though, isn’t the macho beefcake hero often portrayed in artworks and other adaptations of the story; here, he is an eager and naïve young man just figuring out his destiny. When he can focus enough to do so, that is. Divine Garland plays the excitable demigod with boyish charm and touches of the same brand of arrogance the Greeks loved to grant their mighty male protagonists.Perseus must travel to the far reaches of the human world to battle Medusa; good thing he’s got gods on his side. Libby King’s Athena, goddess of war and wisdom, comes off as an exasperated older sister — well, half sister, as she pointedly reminds Perseus, who is also a child of Zeus. “Let’s not get carried away, mortal,” she says, clearly irked by their kinship.The series’ biggest treat is a crossover from another work of mythic translation: André De Shields, who was the fleet-footed Hermes in “Hadestown,” appears as the messenger god again, and also serves as the suave narrator of the tale.Open-armed, fleet-footed: André De Shields plays the messenger god Hermes in “Mount Olympus,” as he did in “Hadestown.”Credit…Erik Tanner for The New York TimesDirected by Rachel Chavkin (“Hadestown”) and Zhailon Levingston (“Tina: The Tina Turner Musical”), “Mount Olympus” is an accessible entryway into mythology. Running just about 15 to 20 minutes each, the episodes (written by Alexie Basil and Nathan Yungerberg) are snappy yet satisfying; the dialogue is set at a contemporary clip, with modern-day language. “Oh my godsss,” Perseus exclaims repeatedly, like a teen running into his crush at the mall.The grittier bits of the stories (violence, assault) are softened and maneuvered around gracefully without losing a sense of the problematic relationships and themes at work, especially when it comes to gender.David Schulman’s appropriately cartoonish sound design rises to the pep of the action and gameness of the dialogue, like the shuffle and flutter of Hermes making a hasty exit (he has to check on his “godcast” subscribers; popularity comes with a cost). And speaking of cartoons, this may be an audio production, but Jason Adam Katzenstein — whose often punny, sometimes droll and always comic illustrations make regular appearances in The New Yorker — provides eye-catching art for each episode.Perseus isn’t the only classic hero who’s gotten a teen makeover; theater makers have already been using Greek myths to appeal to this demographic. “The Lightning Thief,” based on Rick Riordan’s popular YA “Percy Jackson” series, targeted younger audiences on Broadway when it opened in September 2019. That same month, Public Works premiered “Hercules,” based on the 1997 Disney animated movie.Between the rivalries and the affairs, it’s everything tweens catch between the morning bell and sixth period, with the added bonus of fantastical landscapes and magical happenings. But there is also heft to these stories, which represent a belief system and vision of the world that no longer exists as a reality for a community of people, but nevertheless survives.So why not try on a pair of winged sandals and venture to a “cavern of serpent doom” as this young hero does? Grab your phone, too, in case you want to drop a quick TikTok with some nymphs on the way. Just be back by 10 p.m.: When in the heavenly realm of Mount Olympus, the worst thing you can do is get grounded.Live From Mount OlympusNew episodes through March 23; onassis.org.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More
AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyBeyond ‘Black Panther’: Afrofuturism Is Booming in ComicsA bumper crop of graphic novels and comic books melds African culture and science fiction, with influences as wide-ranging as space travel, Caribbean folklore and Janelle Monáe.“Hardears,” set on a mythical version of Barbados, is among the titles coming from Megascope this year.Credit…Abrams BooksFeb. 7, 2021, 5:00 a.m. ETWhen Barack Obama was elected president in 2008, it struck the author and illustrator John Jennings as so unprecedented, such a break from American history, that it was like an event from some far-flung future.“Before then, the only time you would see a president who was Black was in a science-fiction movie,” he said in a phone interview last month. Jennings compared it to the sorts of imaginative leaps one finds in the most forward-thinking works categorized as “Afrofuturist.”This year, fans of Afrofuturism will see a bumper crop of comics and graphic novels, including the first offerings of a new imprint devoted to Black speculative fiction and reissues of Afrofuturist titles from comic-book houses like DC and Dark Horse.Afrofuturism, whether in novels, films or music, imagines worlds and futures where the African diaspora and sci-fi intersect. The term was coined by the writer Mark Dery in 1993 and has since been applied to the novels of Octavia Butler (“Kindred”), the musical stylings of the jazz composer Sun Ra and more recently films such as “Get Out” and “Black Panther,” which presented a gorgeously rendered vision of the technologically advanced, vibranium-powered nation of Wakanda.“Afrofuturism isn’t new,” said Ytasha L. Womack, a cultural critic and the author of “Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci-Fi and Fantasy Culture,” a primer and history of the movement and aesthetic. “But the plethora of comics and graphic novels that are available is certainly a new experience.”Graphic novels published in January included “After the Rain,” an adaptation of a short story by the Nigerian-American author Nnedi Okorafor, and “Infinitum,” a tale of African kings and space battles by the New York-based artist Tim Fielder.For “Infinitum,” released by the HarperCollins imprint Amistad, the artist Tim Fielder created Aja Oba, an African king cursed with eternal life. Credit…Harper CollinsThis month marks the long-awaited return of the “Black Panther” comics written by Ta-Nehisi Coates, which the National Book Award-winning author began in 2016, as well as the latest installment of “Far Sector,” a series written by N.K. Jemisin and inspired by the actor and musician Janelle Monáe, about the first Black woman to become a member of the intergalactic Green Lantern Corps.Even older works are getting new looks. Black superheroes from the ’90s-era comic company Milestone — including Icon, a space alien who crash lands on Earth in 1839 and takes the form of an African-American man — are finding new readers on DC Universe Infinite, a subscription service that launched in January. Meanwhile, the Oregon-based publisher Dark Horse plans to release the comics of the Nigerian-born writer Roye Okupe, who previously self-published them, including his Afrofuturistic series “E.X.O.,” a superhero tale set in 2025 Nigeria.Comics are particularly well suited for Afrofuturism, Womack said. Many Afrofuturistic narratives are nonlinear, something that comics, with their ability to move and stack panels to play with notions of time, can convey. Comic artists can also employ visual elements such as images from the Black Arts Movement, or figures from Yoruba and Igbo mythology, in ways that aren’t available to prose writers.“Afrofuturism is constantly moving into the future and back into the past, even with the visual references they’re making,” Womack said.John Jennings is the founder and curator of Megascope, a publishing imprint “dedicated to showcasing speculative works by and about people of color.”Credit…Jamil Baldwin for The New York Times“After the Rain” marks the launch of Megascope, an imprint of the publisher Abrams “dedicated to showcasing speculative works by and about people of color.” Its advisory board includes the scholar and author Henry Louis Gates Jr.“Afrofuturism is the catchall,” Jennings, the imprint’s founder and curator, said. “It’s really Black speculative fiction. But that’s sort of a mouthful. I just don’t want people to think that Megascope is only Afrofuturist. We’re dropping horror books, crime fiction, historical fiction.”Okorafor, the author of the imprint’s leadoff title, “After the Rain,” considers her work “Africanfuturism,” a term she coined to describe a subcategory of science fiction similar to Afrofuturism, but more deeply rooted in African culture and history than in the African-American experience. “Nnedi is a very hot author right now,” Jennings said, “so I thought it would be a great kickoff.”In April, the imprint will publish “Hardears,” a fantasy-adventure story set on Jouvert Island, a version of Barbados populated by mythical creatures — giant “moongazers” and shape-shifting “soucouyants” — drawn from Caribbean folklore. “Black Star,” a cat-and-mouse tale of two astronauts stranded on a desolate planet, comes out in May.“After the Rain,” adapted from a short story by Nnedi Okorafor, was published in January.Credit…Abrams BooksA professor of media and cultural studies at the University of California at Riverside, Jennings has devoted much of his career to Afrofuturism, writing scholarly works about it and leading panels devoted to Afrofuturist comics. He has worked with the artist Stacey Robinson, as the duo “Black Kirby,” to reimagine the work of the Marvel artist Jack Kirby through an African-American lens: for example, “The Unkillable Buck,” based on “The Incredible Hulk.”To Jennings, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was an Afrofuturist. “The mountaintop that Dr. King spoke about does not exist in this universe,” Jennings said. “It’s an imaginary construct of what the future could be.”For “Infinitum,” released by the HarperCollins imprint Amistad, Fielder created Aja Oba, a powerful African king cursed with eternal life. Oba travels from Africa to the United States and beyond, witnessing Hannibal’s crossing of the Alps, the rise of American slavery, the civil rights movement and (spoiler alert) the death of our solar system.Despite the fleet of spaceships on the cover, much of Fielder’s narrative is set in history. “Afrofuturists do not have the privilege, like general futurists, of just looking forward constantly,” Fielder said. “There’s so much of our work that was ignored, discarded or destroyed that, as an Afrofuturist, I’m forced to work on projects that are based in the past.”“Black Star,” a cat-and-mouse tale of two astronauts stranded on a desolate planet, comes out in May.Credit…Abrams BooksFielder’s immortal hero is also a response to the longstanding cinematic trope of Black men dying before the final credits roll. One of his strongest childhood memories was watching the Black hero’s untimely end in the 1968 horror movie “Night of the Living Dead.” “The white guys are all losing it, and it’s the one brother who keeps his wits about him,” he said. “And then he’s killed. I never forgot that.”“Infinitum” has a distinctly cinematic feel — Fielder’s influences include the “Star Wars” artist Ralph McQuarrie — and the shared references and influences between comic books and movies are likely to continue. After Coates restarts (and ends, after three issues) his run on “Black Panther,” Marvel Studios is expected to release “Black Panther II,” while over at Disney, producers are working with the comic-book company Kugali on “Iwaju,” an animated series set in a futuristic Lagos.Perhaps more than anything, Afrofuturist comics are a means of staking a racially inclusive claim on a multitude of futures. “And just because it’s about a Black subject doesn’t mean it’s just for Black people,” Jennings said. “I love Daredevil, but Marvel would never say: ‘Oh, you know what? This is just for white, poor Irish-American people.’ These stories are for everyone.”Follow New York Times Books on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, sign up for our newsletter or our literary calendar. And listen to us on the Book Review podcast.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More
