hbachrach essay

historical accuracy is Good, Actually

So the Hamilton discourse is back. The #Hamilcourse? (why does no one on that marketing team get how plays on words work? you can’t just put ‘hamil’ in front of literally any word!!!) Part of this has entailed historians tweeting to point out various historical inaccuracies in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s musical, and fans responding, ‘who cares?’ Which all in all is probably fair enough.

I hate accuracy nitpicking. Nothing annoys me more than someone saying they refuse to watch a Jane Austen film because of the modern-looking hair. When you’re condensing the vast sprawl of historical events into a play or movie or book, things have to be omitted and changed to make something you can actually contain in around two hours, and frankly a lot of those things (like hair) do not matter. This is inevitable and fine.

Historical accuracy also becomes a stick with which to bludgeon people, especially marginalized people. I saw Emma Smith give a fantastic talk on this topic, referencing the infamous Margaret of Anjou swan tweet. Basically, the (itself inaccurate!) rallying cry of ‘it’s historically inaccurate for Black people to exist in that time period/women to do anything/homosexual romance to happen before the modern era/etc!’ is an inevitable and deeply annoying part of the backlash to any historical story that attempts to talk about anyone but white men.

Depictions of marginalized people are also left vulnerable to these accusations because their presence in standard historical records is almost inevitably less robust. It’s hard to find queer stories that aren’t located in police records, or personal lives of enslaved people, or pre-modern (and later, frankly) women existing beyond the registration of their marriage. Historical inaccuracy, anachronism, creative gap-filling, what-have-you is an important tool for people to find a place for themselves within a history that has not recorded the presence of people like them.

Now for the inevitable… but. Hamilton is a myth-making tool. The creators have claimed it’s just a story, not a historical document, and if we accept that as true and ignore the fact that the producers invited high school history students to see it, curated museum exhibitions around it, a historian gets royalties for it, and it explicitly in the text refers to itself as designed to preserve Alexander Hamilton’s unjustly lost legacy… it’s still an adaptation of a (historical) text, and therefore it’s still interesting to think about what it chose to amend, erase, or ignore from its source materials. It’s interesting to think about the image of early America and the lost, ideal founding father that Miranda wanted to create/rescue from centuries of white supremacist history-telling, and what had to be changed to allow that to happen.

So sure, someone pointing out that the tomcat line– you know, the one Hamilton explicitly breaks the fourth wall to reassure us is true– isn’t true… doesn’t really matter. It’s just a fun fact! That’s fine! People sneering in the comments that it’s just a story and no one cares are seriously missing the point, no one is saying this invalidates the whole musical.

But what about slavery? What about immigration? What about the core, inclusive messages that the musical takes such pains to allude to? Does it matter that the Schuylers owned slaves and Hamilton, despite belonging to the New York Manumission Society, hired slave labor throughout his life and never seems to have made any effort to push abolitionist ideals in law? Does it matter that he advocated for nativist immigration policies, perhaps out of his own shame at his illegitimate Caribbean background– a background he successfully hid for his entire career? Does it matter that Hamilton’s disdain for the French Revolution, painted with the benefit of hindsight as sharp pragmatism, was probably rooted in his belief that poor people, Americans included, were generally too stupid to be trusted with having a hand in government?

(Citation… I was obsessed with Alexander Hamilton in high school, fully ten years before the musical existed. Yes, really.)

Hamilton is fairly overtly by and for people who are desperate to be allowed to believe in America. They know that Thomas Jefferson is Bad Now because he was a rapist and a brutal slave owner; they kinda know the same about George Washington, though the musical doesn’t want them to think about that too hard because he’s Hamilton’s daddy figure. We aren’t able to like the guys on our dollar bills anymore, the guys we grew up hearing were heroes. But what if the founding was reimagined as the story of young, scrappy and hungry immigrants? Marginalized people fighting for a land of their own against smug white guys? What if we told you there was a way, despite the racism and sexism and xenophobia and brutality, to be inspired by the story of America’s founding– and by extension, America itself and being American– just like they taught you to be in elementary school?

But because of its omissions, Hamilton seeks to grant this permission not by grappling with the actual problems we now have with these guys– a task that might be impossible– but instead by unearthing a new, squeaky-clean founding father who we can love without complications. Sure, Hamilton is a #problematicfave because he cheats on his wife and is a bit of a loudmouth, but that’s nothing compared to, you know, enslaving people. And this is why I think historically inaccuracy in favor of progressive ideals can be just as frustrating and potentially damaging as inaccuracy in favor of regressive or bigoted ones.

Remember that great part in ‘Yorktown’ when Hercules Mulligan bursts out of a bunch of coats to reveal that while working as a tailor, he was also a spy? Yeah, he was doing that in partnership with his slave Cato, who was allowed through enemy lines because he was enslaved and therefore nobody suspected him of anything. And the shown never even alludes to him. Because our good guys have to be good people, they have to be a version of early Americans we can root for now (and obviously because having a Black actor directly depicted as owning a slave desperately complicates the conceit behind the casting). They have to believe what we believe. But doing that doesn’t just erase inconvenient facts for the sake of ‘just good storytelling,’ as the case of Cato demonstrates– it erases actual people and the realities of their lives.

This is where the question of identity that I mentioned before gets sticky. I understand the urge to find– to speak, as an example, from my own experience– not only cool queer people in the historical record, but cool queer people who recognizably share that identity. I understand, even though I don’t share, the frustration with being told that it’s ahistorical to think about those categories of identity before a certain point in history. The same can be said for race, disability, and a lot of other identities. It feels like yet another use of the historical accuracy bludgeon: “He wouldn’t have called himself gay, you people didn’t exist then.” But I don’t think that’s always what’s being said.

At least when I think about or say these things, it’s an attempt at nuance. The things we see as immovable and inevitable about identities just… aren’t. Our present era is not the apex of understanding, where suddenly we fully grasp every human category in an objectively correct way. If you want to do justice to the experiences of marginalized people in the past, you have to try understand them in their own language and on their own terms. Doing so will sometimes result in something much more contemporary-feeling than we expect, and the historical accuracy bludgeon will come out, but oh well.  And sometimes it won’t… but it may still result in something more interesting and radical than just painting the present over whatever’s there.

Of course it’s also fine to say you don’t care and Emily Dickinson is going to be a lesbian girlboss. But I think that creates problems.

I’m digressing slightly because Hamilton doesn’t really deal with those kinds of identities (even though in 2014, Lin-Manuel Miranda implied to me in tweet that there would be a Hamilton/Laurens/Lafayette love triangle and that was a lie, this show is super straight). But the show does do this with immigrants, using Hamilton and Lafayette to suggest that not only was the concept of an immigrant exactly the same back then as it is now, but immigrants– especially Caribbean immigrants– faced exactly the same types of prejudices. And maybe it doesn’t matter that thinking about Lafayette as an immigrant just… does not capture who he was or what he was seen to be doing by others. Isn’t it more important for a group of people who, especially now, are treated not only as less than American but often as less than human, to be granted an essential, heroic piece of America’s founding? I mean, yes, obviously (if they even want it). But as with the case of Cato, there were also people who were actually perceived as immigrants by the culture at large, people whom Hamilton’s own exclusionary rhetoric targeted, a category that was inevitably complicated in ways that have no contemporary parallel by the fact that the new USA had just been a colony, who are thereby erased. Both things can be true at once.

And because I’d be betraying my #brand if I didn’t mention women… we see this constantly in historical stories about women, where a patina of contemporary feminism is apparently a requirement. Angelica Schuyler sings that she wants to meet Thomas Jefferson (which, incidentally, she did) and “compel him to include women in the sequel” to the Declaration of Independence. And listen, maybe this is descending to the level of stupid nitpicking, but why not have Angelica shout out the female intellectual tradition that was already emerging at that point? Why not have her be a fan of Phyllis Wheatley’s pro-revolution poetry (which would have brought the show’s references to specific historical Black people up to… two)? Why frame her as the only woman, even amongst her sisters, who cares about or understands politics, or who recognizes the limits of her gender role in society? I realize it makes no sense for her to pop up in the second act like “I was also in Paris and just read this amazing pamphlet by Mary Wollstonecraft, it really is a sequel to the Declaration of Independence, wow, other women do think like I do but also not exactly the same as all you out there in the audience because it’s the 1790s!”, but the deeply cliche framing of one of the romantic leads as Not Like Other Girls (“some men say that I’m intense or I’m insane”) is, once again, such a disservice to all the  historical women who were trying to do that work, just in terms that can seem insufficient from the vantage point of the twenty-first century.

And I just want to be clear: I think Hamilton is an amazing show. Some of the songs and lyrics make my brain hurt, they’re so good. The line ‘I imagine death so much it feels more like a memory’ was one of those moments in art where you’re like, ‘it’s extremely rude of you to have put my own personal individual thoughts and feelings on a stage for everyone here to look at.’ I think the second act is kind of a mess, but most second acts of musicals are. Hamilton is great. 

And that’s why we need to offer it the respect due to a great, popular, influential work of art and actually rigorously examine it. It’s not enough to dismiss a cultural juggernaut as ‘just a story,’ partly because nothing is ever ‘just a story’– but especially not when it’s dealing with a country’s founding myths, and especially not when it’s a once-in-a-generation artistic phenomenon. More people will see Hamilton calling out Jefferson (but not Washington) about owning slaves in a rap this year than will see the musical 1776‘s number where a southerner calls out all the northerners in the room, including the historically explicitly anti-slavery #problematicfave protagonist John Adams, for their participation in the triangle trade, for their deep embeddedness in the slave economy despite the fact that they have not enslaved anyone and disdain those who do.

1776‘s triangle trade song doesn’t offer any solutions. Jefferson, mortified at being called out for hypocrisy for including anti-slavery passages in the first place, allows them to be stricken from the draft of the Declaration of Independence. Adams is furious, but can’t do anything. The room full of white men move on, kicking the can down the road in order to pursue the immediate goal. It’s not very satisfying. But then again, it wasn’t a very satisfying moment in our history. The musical’s climax of hard-won victory, startlingly triumphant for a scene that’s literally names being read out while dudes sign a paper, is irrevocably tainted by what we know has been left out of that paper. We feel good, but not that good. I’m not saying it’s a perfect musical by any stretch, but it does what Hamilton by definition cannot do: allows historical accuracy to complicate its message, to make us uncomfortable.

And I get the impulse to say, ‘Hamilton is just a story! Let me have this story I can feel good about!’ because that’s exactly the impulse the musical itself is expressing and hoping to tap into in its audience. Please, please, just let me feel like America isn’t absolute shit. Let me feel like it doesn’t hate BIPOC on some sick, primal level. Let me feel the way I felt my freshman year of college when I stood in a tent on the lawn and watched Obama be elected for the first time on a giant outdoor screen and just wept while around me, students fully, unironically chanted ‘USA!’. Even typing that makes me want to crawl out of my skin now. I was so, so ignorant then, it’s embarrassing. But man that complete ignorance felt good.

We don’t get to have that. Because Hamilton’s inaccuracies demonstrate what letting American history be ‘just a story’ costs. Yes, there’s a Black George Washington. But there are no Black Patriots. Our heroes are “just like their country… young, scrappy, and hungry” but there are no Native Americans remind them that the land really isn’t that young, and isn’t theirs. It’s a nice story about what America might have been, but it’s no less false and no less troubling– though perhaps more subtly so– than the versions about glorious white guys in wigs. Those omissions matter. No matter the story.

 

hbachrach essay

reading between the lines

A few years ago, a friend and I were talking to a third friend, who was watching the animated TV series Steven Universe for the first time. The one mentioned to the other a backstory detail about one of the central characters, and I reacted with dismay– that’s a spoiler! It’s supposed to be a reveal! They were both surprised by my response: the friend who had seen the show didn’t think of this detail as a reveal, and the friend who was still watching had sort of guessed the information already, and didn’t feel like anything had been ruined by having it confirmed.

So let this somewhat convoluted paragraph serve as two things: a warning that I’ll be giving what I consider spoilers both for Steven Universe and the animated Netflix series She-Ra and the Princesses of Power, and that you might not consider the information spoilers at all. But for me, the feeling of surprise– I’ll go so far as to say of shock– at what both of these series revealed about their central characters was an essential part of my enjoyment of both shows.

I want to start with Pearl.

If you follow me on Twitter, you’ve likely seen Pearl: she’s the one in my profile banner. When I started watching Steven Universe the summer after I tentatively and awkwardly kind of came out (on Facebook, kill me) because two friends insisted I had to, as a sort of baby-gay rite of passage. “There are two women* who love each other so much, they have merged into one person,” one of them said.

(*The question of the gender identity of the show’s sci-fi/fantasy race of not-human sentient space rocks is not worth going into, but suffice it to say the space characters all use she/her pronouns and present as female.)

These characters eventually get married, a much-discussed and groundbreaking gesture that the show’s creator Rebecca Sugar reportedly had to fight for tooth and nail. They are the headline examples of the show’s deservedly lauded queer representation. Neither of them is Pearl.

Pearl seems, at first glance, like a character type we have seen before: the neurotic sidekick, who is just a little too obsessed with the memory of her group’s deceased leader, Rose Quartz. The hints mount gradually that Pearl cares about Rose’s legacy in a slightly different way from the others: in an episode where they return to a fountain that Rose built, she is driven into a frenzy by the sight of the garden overgrown with weeds, and at other characters’ smashing through the remnants of the structures to find their way. That episode was when the radar first really pinged for me.

I was attuned to these kinds of hints long before I came out. I remember joking to a friend in college that I had no gaydar in real life, but my intuitions when it came to literature were flawless. Perhaps because my own questions about my identity were something I kept so private, I enjoyed– and continue to enjoy– reading between the lines, seeking out encoded hints about who characters really were and feeling, when I found them, like I’d uncovered a secret truth. I liked that it was something not everyone could see, and yet was starkly obvious to me. I mean, I am a literary scholar, it’s probably not a surprise that close-reading is more fun for me than being told outright what something means.

So I enjoyed picking up these hints about Pearl. She’s a little too insistent that Rose had secrets only Pearl knew. She’s too worshipful when projecting a holographic memory of their lost leader. She’s too suspicious in a flashback to first meeting Greg, the human man Rose falls in love with. We’d been here before. I understand why people get frustrated with this kind of hinting, these stereotypical ways of encoding queer desire. But as I said, I enjoyed it.

What I enjoyed even more, though, was the dawning realization that this wasn’t an accident or a coy secret. As the seasons progressed and the hints at the specific nature of Pearl’s feelings for Rose grew more and more overt, I found myself watching with a growing sense of anticipation and shock. Surely not– surely not— surely, at any minute, they’d swerve away as television shows and movies always do, stop just short of saying whether they mean what the seem to mean. But they didn’t. Pearl sang a song ostensibly about Steven’s relationship with his friend Connie, but blushingly kept mixing up pronouns until it became obvious that she was really talking about herself and Rose. And then, a season later, she sang another song.

With that song, Pearl dancing alone on a balcony in a tuxedo, explicitly describing herself and Rose’s human lover Greg as in competition over Rose, it became impossible to read the relationship any other way. I had always found pleasure in reading the secret identity between the lines, but even more exciting was having that guess confirmed, having that implication made explicit. Not a cliche coming-out storyline, but a logically delayed revelation of what the character herself has always known, and therefore never needed to say. It’s a character we’ve seen before– but this time, the subtext is text. You’re not seeing things, it says. Pearl’s a little too obsessed with Rose because Rose was the love of her life.

And now, with the final season of She-Ra and the Princesses of Power released on Netflix, it’s happened again. Again, it’s a dynamic we’ve seen before: Adora, who is also the titular She-Ra, and head villain Catra are former best friends turned antagonists and rivals who care a little too much. It is the seed from which a thousand fanfictions have sprung. In watching this final season, where She-Ra and Catra finally find themselves on the same team to face down a galactic villain, I found myself reliving the same pattern. Yes, we see those sparky looks. Yes, we see the thoughtful glances and the blushing. But surely not– surely… 

Even when the dam seemed to break, I couldn’t quite believe it. Catra has run away from the group, certain she’ll never be truly valued, especially by Adora.

“Adora doesn’t want me,” she says. “Not like I want her.”

But surely not. 

It’s partly, of course, a lifetime of what I hesitate to call queerbaiting because, as I’ve said, I don’t necessarily mind it. But the reality for most of my life was that the explicit revelation is always avoided. Creators did what the could, and what the could do was drop hints, clues to a mystery that could only be solved outside of the show’s actual text. It happened just six years ago with another animated show, when the creators of The Legend of Korra were happy to confirm that their two female leads were in love in interviews, but still had to frame it within the series in a way that, as the existence of these confirmations suggests, left some doubt.

But in the show’s climactic moment, the gesture that gives Adora the strength to defeat the big bad and save the world, is that Catra says ‘I love you.’ And Adora says it back. And even then part of me was thinking but they won’t let them mean it like that– and then they kiss. They kiss and their kiss saves the universe.

Forgive me for reveling in the details. Forgive me for summarizing what you may have already seen. This is how I got used to reading. Piecing together a secret, private journey and enjoying the secrecy, enjoying that only certain other people could see it, or cared enough to see it, and feeling a connection that surely, if we’re going to get Freudian about it, had probably everything to do with my own deep inclination towards privacy, my alienation from the constant repetition of coming out narratives, my wish to just be seen and known in a way that doesn’t need to be explained.

But both Steven Universe and She-Ra revealed a different kind of pleasure, a best of both worlds: the enjoyment of reading between the lines, and the surprise and satisfaction of having the puzzle revealed. Yes, you were right about what you thought you were seeing. Yes, I know what you were going to guess. Yes, you’ve seen it– and I see you. 

hbachrach essay, review

Quilted History: Emilia and Swive

Leaving Swive a few nights ago, I found myself thinking about story quilts, which I dimly remember learning about in elementary school. Some of the most famous examples are the late nineteenth century work of Harriet Powers, who used quilted squares to tell Bible narratives and records of events of her lifetime, such as a meteor shower. It’s believed, therefore, that the style originated with American slaves, though early evidence seems (understandably) scant.

I also found myself thinking about Emilia, another recent Globe new writing commission that sought to reimagine a famous early modern woman through a contemporary feminist lens.

Both Swive (which is about Queen Elizabeth from the accession of her brother King Edward to the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots, sort of) and Emilia (the highly fictionalized life and times of poet Emilia Lanyer) share a fragmented structure, a vision of history that is more episodic than smoothly narrative, and is concerned less with direct cause-and-effect continuity of either event or character development than in creating what comes to seem like a collage of a life–or, perhaps, like a narrative patchwork.

It’s a structure that’s partly enabled by both plays’ framing devices, which place the older version of their central character character looking back on and partially narrating her own life. The narration can fill the gaps the patches leave, or draw out implications they don’t have time to show; it also enhances the impressionistic and highly subjective feel of this structure. This is not the entirety of these women’s lives, but their recollections of the moments that really mattered, partly enacted by a second actor playing their younger selves, someone who both is and is not the person they are now.

It seems important to this structure that both of these plays are at their core not really about a woman who must discover herself, as the traditional biographic coming-of-age narrative depicts, but one who must make herself seen by others in spite of the constraints of early modern English culture. Through the patchwork recollection of their lives, both Elizabeth and Emilia are able to make the audience see and understand truths about themselves and their remarkable abilities that their contemporaries could not. The essential relationship of the play faces outward, demonstratively, not inwards. It’s sort of logical, therefore, that other characters in both plays are almost exclusively antagonists, representatives of society and its oppressive attitudes. Swive emphasizes this with its tightly doubled cast of four: Dudley, Elizabeth’s would-be lover, is the same as her stepfather Seymour, who possibly molested her. Both plays have a difficult relationship with the idea of heterosexual romantic love (while simultaneously vilifying the notion of queer female desire) that perhaps stems from this sense that the men who love and are loved by these women also represent the threat of subsumption into the patriarchal, inferior position of ‘wife.’

Like most folk crafts, quilting and story quilts are a feminized art form. Similarly, I’ve been wondering how or if Emilia and Swive’s structural similarities can been seen as reaching towards a feminized form of historical narrative. There are certainly similarities between this style and the historical works of Caryl Churchill– I think Light Shining in Buckinghamshire is probably more effective than either of these plays at creating a collage effect, a fuller expression of this impulse to undermine traditional historical narratives not only through destabilizing narrative linearity, but by rejecting the notion of ‘great man’ history that can be told through focus on the achievements of a single figure rather than the experiences of a collective.

Thus Light Shining in Buckinghamshire makes no effort to centralize around a single character and thus can use its diffuse structure to achieve scope without worrying about specificity in the same way these biographical plays have to. These plays seem to be seeking a dramaturgical middle ground between innovation and tradition, attempting to simultaneously appropriate and deconstruct the dramaturgy that has long been used to spotlight male historical figures by casting that light on women– at once skeptical of the storytelling structures that have held men up, but wanting women to get their chance to stand center-stage anyway. 

hbachrach essay

SIX’s Sexist Agency

The announcement that the West End rock musical SIX, about the wives of Henry VIII, will be transferring to Chicago for what is probably a stealth pre-Broadway tryout has finally nudged me to write a post I’ve been meaning to write since first listening to the album on Spotify. It is about how much I loathe the musical’s depiction of Catherine Howard.

Catherine Howard is, in my opinion, the saddest story of Henry’s wives– though this is the question that the musical asks the audience to adjudicate, because pitting women against each other is very feminist. Its ultimately-barely-subverted premise of the wives duking it out in a ‘who had it worst’ contest takes what could be an interesting and pointed historical and political critique of that whole Henry mess and our fascination with it, and reduces it down to a scale of individual experience and responsibility. Catherine Howard’s song exemplifies this, and why this is a framing that cannot escape becoming subtly but extremely sexist.

So, Catherine Howard: married Henry when she was 16 or 17, was executed for treason less than two years later, after a new law was introduced specifically to find her guilty of treason because she’d lost her virginity to another man but failed to tell Henry, and supposedly committed adultery with another courtier.

Howard’s historically dubious sexual past is exploded, in her solo in SIX, into the persona of a teenage coquette who preens about her superior beauty and proceeds to lay out, in an admittedly catchy song, the series of sexual liaisons that brought her to being beheaded by Henry. It’s the kind of set-up that one is tempted to describe as inappropriate in a ‘post-#MeToo’ world, but really it would have been terrible at any point, we just have no excuse to pretend otherwise now.

Howard gigglingly opens by telling us that “ever since I was a child / I’d make the boys go wild,” before launching into the tale of her first sexual encounter: she was “thirteen going on thirty” when she had a liaison with her 23-year-old (historically 36) music teacher. The lyrics take pains to insist that this encounter was consensual, if not actively instigated by Howard– who was, again, thirteen years old. In this context, the series of sexualized music puns about g-chords and “pluck[ing] strings … from C to D” become appalling.

Next up is Francis Dereham, whom the historical Howard appeared to have wanted to marry, and who was part of the pretense for her treason accusation. She was 15, he was around 25– though the song dispenses with specific ages from this point forward.

Arguably, Howard, comes to a realization in the final verse of the song, when her disappointment at being seduced by Thomas Culpeper– the courtier with whom she was  accused of adultery, who the song frames as someone she saw as just a friend– transforms into frustration at always being a sexual object. But this is in direct contrast to the tone established the first three-quarters of the song, where the sex jokes, musical style, and performance establish Howard as a voracious pursuer despite her age.

The finale confirms that the creative team ultimately see Howard as a victim of her own bad decisions. A fantasy of happy endings for the wives, this song is like the musical version of counseling women not to get raped rather than telling men not to rape them. Each wife sings a verse about how her life, in this alternate universe, turned out differently– and in each case, it’s because she, not Henry, made a different choice. It’s agency, I guess, but in preposterous, victim-blaming terms. Katherine of Aragon chooses to leave Henry before he can leave her, Anne rejects his initial advances, and most appallingly, Catherine’s downfall is linked to her music teacher, and her happy ending comes by rejecting him. If only she’d had the presence of mind not to be molested! Then it all would have turned out fine.

I feel confident assuming that SIX’s creative team wanted to give their female leads agency, and think that they’ve done so. That’s the definition of Howard’s version of the story, after all: she’s not a victim! She chose to sleep with all those men twice her age! But as the fantasy finale reveals, the difficulty of telling the stories of the wives is finding a place for strength and agency in a culture within which they fundamentally have no power. The only thing that could have changed their stories is not being forced to marry Henry. But the creative team takes an exciting opportunity to use fantasy and anachronism to offer a serious subversion of the stories we have told about Henry’s wives, and of the patriarchal culture that both caused and is fascinated by their downfalls– and instead offers shallow girl-power posing that perpetuates harmful stereotypes rather than challenging them.

hbachrach essay

Staging History in The Lehman Trilogy

I’ve been thinking about how the structure of a play itself can reflect its historiographical interests– conscious or otherwise. An interesting case in point is The Lehman Trilogy, adapted by Ben Power from an Italian play by Stefano Massini, and now playing at the National Theatre. It tells the story of the rise of the Lehman Brothers firm, from the arrival of the founding brothers in America in the 1840s to its dissolution during the crash of 2008. It is performed by only three actors– Simon Russell Beale, Adam Godley, and Ben Miles– who between them take on dozens of roles– all of which, through this casting, become refractions of and variations on the original brother they played.

This multi-role casting lends cohesion and continuity to what is otherwise a sprawling story, generations passing on and passing off the torch to the next. It allows us to feel some attachment to later-generation characters who are not as fully developed as their forebears. I was surprised to learn that this was not the case with Massini’s original play: either Powers or director Sam Mendes decided to reduce the original large cast to just three. I think it works artistically for these reasons, but it also is a huge historiographical shift. Instead of an epic story with a cast of dozens, reflecting the sprawl of history, it becomes the story of three great men.

I mean this not in the sense that they are necessarily good or awesome, but that they were powerful and influential– the sense intended in the ‘great man’ theory, or great man history, a historiographical concept first attributed to Thomas Carlyle in the 1840s. It’s a succinct idea, in his words: “The history of the world is but the biography of great men.”

By filtering the entire history of the Lehman Brothers through three actors– and attributing to them the invention of a variety of essential concepts, like that of brokers between farms and manufacturers, government-subsidized building projects, and other economic concepts I only barely understand– they become (literally, in terms of onstage imagery) the only people who can or do make history. The modern banking system is shaped by them and no one else.

This also places the emphasis on the man part of great man. Unsurprisingly, there are a fraction as many female characters as male characters, and none are very important. And because the way the female characters are depicted by these male actors– with exaggerated falsettos and coy expressions– the audience on the night I saw the performance laughed, without fail, every time a female character entered or spoke. The very presence of women in history became laughable, their very speech a joke. Naturally, the casting means that anyone who isn’t white (admittedly not many people in the world of banking, but the Lehman Brothers do get their start dealing with plantations, and there is an oft-referenced but never depicted black overseer character) also cannot exist.

While it can feel inevitable that historical stories center on men in particular– they were the ones doing everything, how could women be involved?– the case of a play like The Lehman Trilogy draws attention to the fact that such assumptions really are just assumptions, not givens. The extreme narrowing of focus forces attention onto everything that is squeezed out of the three-man frame, a reminder of all the stories that this play– and so many histories– leave out. Though artistically successful, and buoyed by three splendid performances, the decision to make three white men the center of history is not the only way to tell this, or any other story.

 

hbachrach essay, Shakespeare

OSF 2018 Part 2: How Do You Solve A Problem Like White Men?

(part one)

None of the program notes or publicity materials for this season’s shows use the phrase ‘toxic masculinity,’ but the concept saturates the season even so. Across the plays, the rage and resentment of white male characters is the corrosive force that causes communities to crumble. And always it is aimless, baseless violence, unmoored from any sense of proportion or logic– this season takes, in short, the opposite of Hollywood’s favored anti-hero tack, asking not what pain caused this anger, but instead whether there is any remedy for the free-floating rage of men who think the world should, by rights, be theirs.

Jud Fry (Michael Sharon), Oklahoma!‘s only true villain, is also the only (apparently) straight, white man amongst the named characters: the peddler Ali Hakim (here stripped of his clownishly racist trappings, not least through being played by Barzin Akhavan, who is actually Persian) is bisexual, Ado Andy’s father is now his mother, the local Federal Marshal and Will Parker are both black. His toxicity therefore becomes linked, just as it so often is today, with thwarted privilege: not merely that he cannot bear losing to or being thought less than Curly, but that he cannot bear losing to a black woman. He cannot conceive of the idea that he has caused Laurey’s fear of him by lurking outside her window at night. He is someone who has learned no outlet for his disappointment and frustration except violence– violence that will turn, as the noose he keeps in his shed implies, either against others or against himself. But by the end of his first full scene, it is clear he has chosen others. 

Oklahoma! ends with the frankly shocking implication that once they have made that decision– once they have decided that harming other people is the only way to soothe their own hurt– men like Jud must be permanently removed from the community one way or another if that community is to peacefully survive. It’s a radical and perhaps disturbing thought. Directors often want to resist the idea that Jud is irredeemable, and to see the ending as written as an awkward oversight in the rush to a happy ending. But it clearly seems to be what Rodgers and Hammerstein intended to suggest. Laurey’s kindness only made him feel entitled to her; Aunt Eller’s praise of his work can’t undo his past resentments. Curly mocks him, but mockery doesn’t justify threats of rape and violence. Recent productions (including, apparently, the one now bound for Broadway) have tried to play up sympathy for Jud and point a more skeptical finger at Curly and the eleventh-hour mock trial that acquits him. But that’s a reading Rauch’s production undercuts in part by casting Tatiana Wechsler as Curly. Just as contemporary political discourse makes Jud’s violent threat seem all the more urgent and frightening, who today (as I discussed in the previous post) is going to argue in favor of turning a black woman over to the police?

In Othello, it’s masculinity in all races that is, perhaps, too destructive to endure, which leaves the tragedy fittingly answerless. This production, also directed by Rauch, is not really one that has any answers for the suggestion that the play is racist and sexist as much as it is about those things, but set alongside Oklahoma!, it paints an intriguing picture of the ways the corrosive anger of white men eats away at communities that might otherwise remain whole. Unlike Oklahoma!, however, Iago’s power lies not only in his own toxicity, but in spreading it to others: Cassio (Derek Garza), drunk by Iago’s engineering, spews Islamophobic mumblings at Barzin Akhavan’s Muslim Montano and readily mocks Bianca (whom he otherwise seems to like) at Iago’s urging; Othello (Chris Butler), of course, murders his wife. The question that makes Othello so uneasy today is whether Iago is merely revealing the darkness that was already present in these men– in Othello’s case, a frankly racist implication, given the stereotypical associations between black men and violence– or if his power is to explode the niggling fears and petty weaknesses we all have into something strong and uncontrollable enough to destroy these men. But whether he engenders the spark of violence or only fans it, the seething envy and obsessive hatred of Danforth Comin’s disturbingly changeable Iago is the center from which the play’s darkness springs, the force that drags Othello, Desdemona, Cassio, Bianca, and Emilia– all of them, in Rauch’s production, people of color– into a spiral of destruction, the women just collateral damage in a crusade whose true purpose he refuses, at the last, to reveal.

In one of the more intriguing cases of cross-play casting this season, Comins also plays Jakob, a 17th century Dutch fur trader in Manahatta, a new play by Mary Kathryn Nagle. It’s not hard to imagine the destructive role white men play in a play partly about the Dutch settlement of New York and the native Lenape people who encounter them. Unlike The Way The Mountain Moved, the season’s other play to touch on interactions between Native Americans and white settlers, Manahatta doesn’t believe in good intentions. Jakob, like Iago, comes to represent how the most brutal betrayals come from the people you thought you could trust– from the white men who were supposed to be different than the rest. The play’s parallel plot takes place in 21st century New York City, and Comins’ character there is altogether more open, and might provide a spark of hope for a more harmonious future: he expresses a willingness to learn to be better, and actually follows through with it. But then again, it’s 2008, and he’s an executive at Lehman Brothers. There are all kinds of ways to ruin lives.

hbachrach essay, review

OSF 2018 Part 1: The Promise of the West

This year, several of the shows at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival begin by thanking not only the subscribers and members in the audience, but the Native American tribes who once lived on this land in Southern Oregon, the Shasta and the Takelma people. It’s fitting that the Festival’s commitment to inclusion has at last brought them closer to home, to considering the role of their home state in a long history of injustice. But onstage, this season’s plays that look westward propose a different, intriguing vision of what the American West can mean: they propose a lost, brief moment of promise. There was an instant, these plays suggest, when everything might have been different– when westward expansion might have been the beginning of something new, not the repetition of something brutal and as old as the idea of America itself.

This idea finds cheerful but surprisingly nuanced expression in Bill Rauch’s production of Oklahoma!, which changes the genders of two of the leads to turn Laurey and Curly into a lesbian couple (played by Royer Bockus and Tatiana Wechsler, respectively) and cowboy Will Parker’s (Jordan Barbour) beau into Ado Andy (Jonathan Luke Stevens), a boy who just can’t say no. Lyrics and pronouns are altered accordingly throughout, but nothing else is changed, including the other Oklahomans’ cheerful acceptance of these young couples– and of Aunt Eller (played by Bobbi Charlton and is not, according to Rauch, a trans performer playing a cis character, but a trans character). Wechsler and Barbour are both black, and the ensemble is diverse as well, including Native American actor Román Zaragoza (who, delightfully, also played a gay man in the early American West last season).

This idyllic setting is described by Rauch as “an alternate utopian community that reflects progress and acceptance for our time.” It is, obviously, a fantasy– though no more a fantasy than the original Oklahoma!, a vision of Western expansion that saw the fundamental conflict over the land as one between ranchers and farmers. Rauch’s fantasy of radical acceptance, however, lends a very different tenor to the show’s probing of the odd liminal space inhabited by people who will “soon be living in a brand-new state”– but aren’t yet. That in-between status that allows for Curly’s abrupt and highly dubious trial for murdering his rival Judd, a sense that they aren’t really, fully bound by the laws of the country they’re soon to be part of. For now, they can still handle things their own way– and when the crime they’re adjudicating is a black lesbian murdering a white man in self-defense, given what we know about the country they’ll be joining, it suddenly seems for the best that Curly isn’t hauled off to answer to an official United States judge and jury.

Idris Goodwin’s The Way The Mountain Moved, a gorgeously messy new play, does not tie off its threads so neatly. Exploring the intersection of various characters in the deserts of what will someday be Utah, Goodwin’s west is diverse and chaotic: Mormons, Mexicans, scientists, and soldiers collide and cross paths and force one another to question their purposes and desires. There is violence, and death: the play begins with a Native American man (Christopher Salazar) insisting he cannot continue to help guide the military forces of westward exploration despite his initial promise to do so, and ends with a woman (Shyla Lefner) clutching a rifle and insisting that only the weapons of the enemy can save them. And yet, as director May Adrales writes in the program, it is “a moment in history where America might have changed its course.” In the railroad he has been sent to help plan, a botanist (Rex Young) sees hope for a country united, for the triumph of the scientific rationality that argues that all races are equal, all cultures nuanced and worthy of study and respect. A pair of runaway slaves (Rodney Gardiner and Christiana Clark) steadfastly maintain their Mormon faith despite their church’s tacit tolerance of slavery, and use that faith as a bridge of understanding. A mother chooses loss rather than vengeance on the Native American tribe that may or may not have kidnapped her son. A soldier is transformed by an experience with the wilderness that he cannot explain. Suppose, Goodwin seems to ask, these people had shaped the future of the West?

Both of these plays primarily focus on white and black people– the play of the season that is centered on the Native American experience is partly set (fittingly) in Oklahoma, but partly tells the history of the Lenape in New York, and focuses on a much earlier stage of violent conquest. Perhaps the potential alternate future that these plays tentatively suggest is irresponsibly naive, and only able to be imagined when the Native American perspective is erased. Perhaps it’s impossible to do better the second time, once a country’s hands are stained with slavery and blood. I find myself thinking of the common liberal refrain these days, that this– (insert absurd and cruel action by our government)– isn’t who we are. Which can seem laughable: hasn’t xenophobic cruelty long been exactly who America is, exactly what it’s done? But maybe that statement is really a way of saying, this isn’t who we want to be. We can be better. And by that token, can it be a good thing to look backwards and say, we could have been better?

And yet, tellingly, both of these plays are set in a moment before the land they take place on was American land. It is, as Adrales and the characters of Oklahoma express, a mere instant of in-between– just a flash before, in becoming the United States, they become the worst of the United States, too. But first, maybe, there was a moment when it could have been otherwise.

hbachrach essay, Shakespeare

What are we trying to censor in Shakespeare?

Between the Twitter discussion surrounding the Globe’s Shakespeare and Censorship event (which I fully recognize could not have captured the nuance of the speakers’ actual talks) and a conversation that came up during a plenary on teaching Shakespeare at this year’s BritGrad conference, I’ve been grappling with the question of what we’re talking about when we’re arguing for or against “censoring” Shakespeare (and that’s not even getting into the obviously biased moral weight of the use of that word). I’d like to try to define my take on this debate with a series of questions, because I think so many things are getting lumped under one umbrella, it’s almost impossible to actually discuss the problem.

What do we mean by censorship? 

First and foremost, two issues I think are actually completely separate have been lumped under one category. First, there’s the kind of censorship undertaken by the Bowdlers in The Family Shakespeare, which expurgated lines and passages that were deemed inappropriate for women or children by the standards of the day. Then, there is the kind advocated by Mark Rylance a few years ago: quietly removing out-of-context anti-Semitic remarks, in his specific example, or other instances of racism, sexism, ableism, or whatever else that were unremarkable in the period but have a different resonance now.

These are not, to my mind, the same issue, though I think the people who group them both under the banner of “censorship” would like them to be. The question comes down, for me, to one of harm: no one is going to be hurt by a bawdy joke, the word ‘damn,’ or a reference to suicide (all things the Bowdlers cut). Casually using “Jew” as a synonym for “a disgusting idiot,” or “Ethiope” as a synonym for “dark-haired and ugly” is startling and harmful, particularly because the text provides no space for unpacking, undermining, or lingering on these words: they just pass by.

But those who cry “censorship” would surely say that it’s essential we confront these ugly parts of Shakespeare.

Who are we asking to confront these things? 

Who is unaware that the past was sexist and racist and ableist and a bunch of other things? Who actually needs to be reminded that there were periods in history (including, you know, the present) where aspects of one’s identity were so hated that the words themselves were insults? Probably mostly people who don’t hold any of the identities that Shakespeare is casually demeaning. The assumed audience therefore becomes one that is white, able-bodied, not Jewish or Muslim, probably not poor, probably male, and many other intersections of privilege. People who don’t need to learn the lesson that they have been and still are often dehumanized by the dominant culture are doubly  alienated, both by the assumption that they too need to ‘confront’ something they already know, and by being forced to confront it for the benefit of the more privileged members of the audience.

Adults, at least, can decide they don’t want to put themselves in that position. I don’t have to go see The Merchant of Venice or The Taming of the Shrew. But what about educational Shakespeare, where this conversation often gets especially vehement? Maybe a school trip to Othello can be a learning experience about racism for white children. But what burden is being placed on the black children in that class, both to witness and then presumably have to discuss and become the emblem of a lesson they already know too well? How completely alienating, to be forced to publicly grapple with the fact that the writer you are going to see because he is The Greatest English Writer in fact casually but explicitly demeans you and your identity, to realize in front of all your classmates that apparently Shakespeare’s supposed universality doesn’t include you.

Maybe this is an important lesson to learn. But I argue that it’s a lesson to be learned on one’s own terms, not by surprise at a school matinee– and certainly not a lesson one learns before being forced to continue studying Shakespeare anyway.

What is this confrontation supposed to empower us to do, if not reject Shakespeare– or parts of Shakespeare– if we so choose? 

Every generation re-evaluates the art it has received and decides whether or not it is still worthy and relevant to their interests, but it feels like we’re in a moment of particularly intense scrutiny right now. Maybe it’s important to remind Shakespeare-lovers that much of Shakespeare’s work is deeply problematic. But if we’re going to force people to confront Shakespeare’s problems, then what is the point if we’re not allowed to then say, “Actually, you’re right, this is incredibly offensive, hopelessly out of date, and I want to walk out of this play/stop studying this subject/decide never to watch, read, or produce Shakespeare again.” I think that’s a legitimate response, but not the one, I suspect, that people who are most precious about censoring Shakespeare would support. And in the context of a school or even just being in the middle of a performance, it’s not actually one that’s allowed (at least, not without causing a scene).

I personally still think Shakespeare’s plays are worth doing (otherwise this degree would be a massive waste of time). But how can we negotiate the terms under which we do them in order to do more good than harm? If we have decided to do Shakespeare, how can we do the most welcoming Shakespeare possible?

I completely understand the impulse to say that it’s equally problematic to whitewash Shakespeare and pretend he never wrote anything bad. But I have to ask again: who exactly are you trying to educate that in that instance? People who experience some form of oppression already know they are and have been oppressed. I can assure you that anyone who loves Shakespeare and is a member of a group he demeans has already grappled with that fact. Maybe they want to come to the theatre and watch a playwright they generally like and also not hear their identities casually derided in order to shock and educate others.

I can’t help but feel that an insistence on retaining the most casually bigoted parts of Shakespeare, feelings be damned, is an insistence on maintaining Shakespeare’s air of exclusivity. Such a producer doesn’t care who he is alienating or insulting: Shakespeare, a dead guy, matters more than the living people who might encounter this play. The privileged audience members who need to learn a lesson matter more than the less privileged audience members, the ones whose actual, lived identities are being treated as no more than a thought experiment.

Plays like Othello, The Merchant of Venice, and The Taming of the Shrew raise their own sets of problems in this respect. Their offensiveness is baked into their story and structure, and while I think we should ask more questions than we do about why we not only continue to produce them, but continue to produce them a lot, there are cases that are so much simpler. Despite all the furor that followed his comments, Mark Rylance was talking about quietly amending individual words. It’s not that hard. It makes a big difference.

hbachrach essay

Yes, We Need Critics (A Predictable Reply)

The city of Chicago now only has one full-time theatre critic. In the wake of this news, the Chicago Reader published a piece with the (presumably) intentionally click-baity title “Do we really need theater critics?” (yes, I am taking the bait). Though the column ends on a tentative yes, it spends a lot more time in the middle arguing for no. For one thing, artists don’t care: “From their perspective, critics are unreliable, arts reporters are unreliable, and they’ve found that they can drive ticket sales on social media.”

Even the concluding rallying cry in favor of critics is depressingly pragmatic: “They’re an historical record; they have value for advancing the careers of playwrights, directors, and actors, and for theater companies applying for grants.”

If all people think theatre reviews are for is generating ad copy and pull quotes for grants, no wonder they don’t mind if critics disappear. Social media’s better at both of those things, anyway. But that’s also not actually why theatre criticism matters.

If theatre artists aren’t scared of losing critics, they are scared of losing relevance. Does theatre matter anymore? Why are audience numbers falling? Is there anything live performance can do in the face of endless entertainment options you can access from the comfort of your own home? If theatre wants to reclaim a place in the mainstream of American culture, critics are how that will happen. They are the people who articulate the relevance of the work the theatre does to what is going on in the world, who explain why these local, unscaleable pieces of art are part of a bigger, broader conversation.

In 2016, after the Chicago Reader revealed years of systematic abuse of young actresses by the leadership of the local Profiles Theatre, Christopher Piatt, one of the co-authors of the exposé, wrote a mea culpa. An actress he contact for the story said she assumed the press must have known what was going on, given the subject matter the company continually presented. Yes, Piatt agrees in the column, they should have. He writes, “The city’s theater press corps salivated for a nonstop cavalcade of brooding antiheroes, vacant serial killers, misogynist dickheads, Lolita-chasing lotharios, and literally somehow almost the entire canon of Neil LaBute protagonists—often opposite a scantily clad, nubile female acting pupil—while never directly or strongly questioning what [predatory artistic director] Cox might be telegraphing about his worldview in a completely nonsubliminal way.” This is another potential power of the full-time critic, though one that was not used in this instance. And it is a power that depends on full-time, or close to full-time work: the ability to see a company or an artist’s shows consistently enough over a long enough period of time to notice patterns– and, of course, to have a recognition from their editors that their job is not just consumer reviews, but to report, in a sense, on the state of the local industry.

This sense of continuity is what smaller markets in particular need, and what they are least likely to have. There’s plenty of coverage of Broadway and London. Critics will swoop into the regions if there’s a show that seems destined for the commercial pipeline. But smaller cities are having their own conversations. Artists in smaller markets know this already, obviously. But a strong local critical corps is how that conversation gets lifted beyond individual shows or groups of friends talking amongst each other.

So let the bloggers do it, you may say. I love bloggers– I am a blogger and have been a blogger, after all. And I’ve been a freelance critic. And so I know that it’s very difficult to do this kind of broad-scope work without the time and resources to see a whole lot of shows. Like all the time. Like as if it’s your job, say. And it is a job, one that’s fundamentally based in the belief that theatre is good and wonderful and important, and thus worth thinking deeply about.

If you want theatre to matter, critics have to matter, too.

 

hbachrach essay, Shakespeare

“I defy you, [script]!” (or, changing Shakespeare)

There is (and has been for a while) a tendency in Shakespeare performance which implies that the more miserable your female characters end up, the more feminist your production is. To wit, Hero should be all but dragged to the altar at the end of Much Ado About Nothing, Jessica in The Merchant of Venice should seem like she’s made a terrible mistake, and no one in Twelfth Night should want the partner they’ve got. And, of course, we must keep on physically and psychologically abusing poor old Katherine Minola, just in case.

The opposite pattern– to try and smooth over the endings that are more obviously unsettling, like Measure for Measure and The Two Gentlemen of Verona, feels much less common these days. But that’s the angle I found myself thinking of while watching the Globe’s current production of Two Noble Kinsmen, which does its best to make the bizarre subplot of the Jailer’s Daughter, who goes mad for love of one of the titular kinsmen, as sweet and palatable as possible. As with so much in that play, the intended tone of her plot’s resolution is difficult to discern: a local doctor commands a local boy to pretend to be Palamon, who she loves, and have sex with her, at which point she’ll either be cured and they can marry, or she can just think she’s marrying Palamon. There are certainly some disturbing seeds there, particularly in a play that is overall so skeptical as to whether heterosexual marriage is really all it’s cracked up to be anyway. But in director Barrie Rutter’s version, there are no such concerns. Though there’s much joking about the Jailer’s horror at the doctor’s casual suggestion of extramarital sex, the fact of having sex with a girl under false pretenses is not really given much weight. The Jailer’s Daughter is eager enough, but as her final scene progresses, the softness and sweetness with which she and her faux-Palamon address each other seems to suggest either that her delusion is lifting and she is seeing and loving him for who he really is– or that we as audience are meant to set aside any concerns and accept that this lie-based love might be a kind of real anyway.

From a contemporary performance perspective, brightening up this subplot makes some sense, as the central plot’s resolution is murky and not particularly happy or satisfying. I’m not inherently opposed to this approach. The Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s 2014 production of Two Gentlemen of Verona, which I loved, took a similar tack, reassigning some of Valentine’s ending lines to Julia, so that she, too, had the opportunity to openly and explicitly forgive Proteus. Despite our tendency to devalue the power of forgiveness, this was an empowering and moving gesture. It was a choice that made the play better, from my perspective as a contemporary audience member, but they did have to change the play in order to make it.

Is changing Shakespeare in this way sort of like taking the n-word out of Mark Twain– censoring the past and attempting to turn a blind eye to the many shortcomings of the most iconic English-language playwright? If we are going to continue to produce Shakespeare, do we have a moral duty to then grapple with all the most troubling elements of his work and lay them bare– and to say, if we find certain elements too troubling to retain, then maybe we shouldn’t be performing the play at all? Or is it better to say that replicating offensive 16th and 17th century patterns is unnecessary, especially when it is often relatively simple to find an angle that allows for more hopeful and empowering readings?

I don’t have an answer, obviously. As you can probably tell, I was a little unsettled by Rutter’s take (though Francesca Mills, who plays the Jailer’s Daughter, is herself one of the highlights of the production), but I loved OSF’s very similar changes to Two Gentlemen. In general, I think in fact it’s more empowering to find ways for female characters to be happy than otherwise, particularly because subverting apparent happy endings often has the unfortunate side-effect of suggesting that even though these characters have told us what they want, we are not to believe them. Perhaps this is the difference between the cases of Julia and the Jailer’s Daughter: Julia is given new words, a new way to consent to what is otherwise unnervingly done on her behalf. The Jailer’s Daughter, on the other hand, has only her old words used a new way– but this new way requires that we take at face value what we know to be a lie.

It’s a trickier question, in other words, than ‘is it okay to change Shakespeare?’– and for now, it’s interesting to see the results of both approaches.