When I started this blog, I wanted readers to consider the following question: "Why is this a movie, and not a play, or a book?" In other words, I would like readers, as they analyze the works they view, to consider form, genre and structure, as I believe that it helps to measure the value of a text. I have been focusing on films in my blog, but I wanted to reprint my Facebook review of the last Kander and Ebb musical because it demonstrates use of the theatrical form in a way that is clear to the beginner. This was designed to be a play presented on stage at a theatre; it's not a movie, or a book.
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Just returned from The Scottsboro Boys. It was an excellent production of a musical that might rank with the better Kander and Ebb shows. It's no Chicago, let alone Cabaret, but it is certainly miles above The Act. Like their masterpieces (both of which start with "C"), Boys is staged in a presentational style. It employs the structure of the "minstrel show" for satirical purposes, and uses props and costumes in a manner that calls attention to the act of performance, as opposed to attempting to create "realism" through detailed sets and props. (Chairs, boards and bed sheets are reconfigured to create trains, buses, court rooms and prisons.) Several performers play multiple roles, changing sex and race in order to make an incisively ironic comment on social injustice. I assume that the play remained faithful to the facts of the case; it would be a shame if it had not. All of the actors, with one or two exceptions, were African-American, and their performances were both technically brilliant and emotionally heartbreaking.
As I watched the show, however, a question has haunted me. I trust the political sincerity of the authors, and I understand their rage at the cruelty of Southern white racism. It's clear that writers can choose to write about any subject, and it is not the place of a critic or an audience to dictate what should be written. That said, I cannot deny that race is the most sensitive of themes, and the medium must be examined along with the message. I kept thinking that Spike Lee satirized the legacy of racism, particularly with the trope of the minstrel in America, in Bamboozled, in a definitive manner. I wondered what Lee might have done with the story of the Scottsboro Boys. Is this story a story that can be told by non-black authors? There's the idea of one "speaking for" the other, and the absent voice of the other denied the right of speaking for him/herself.
Kander and Ebb have addressed themes of race and nation in other works, notably Kiss of the Spider Woman. They can be contrasted with, say, the work of Stephen Sondheim, their contemporary among Broadway musical composers. Only once has Sondheim addressed racial and national difference, and that was in Pacific Overtures. (Merrily We Roll Along was his first musical designed to feature an ethnically diverse cast.) Virtually all of his other work can be interpreted as variations on the construction of whiteness. I would be willing to argue that Follies cannot be understood unless one takes into account the social construction of Anglo identity in American popular culture. Sondheim has been criticized for seeming to avoid issues of diversity in his musicals, and yet, in retrospect, he might have made the right decision.
I am not saying that Kander and Ebb are "racist" in writing The Scottsboro Boys, but it begs the question whether they left something important out: their own viewpoint as outsiders, as sympathetic progressive political thinkers who nevertheless did not experience racism in the way that the people of the Scottsboro Boys did. The musical is presentational, yes, and self-reflexive, but it might have gone even further in its self-referential position, by including the drama (indeed, the conflict) of playwrights writing a musical, and bringing that into the show itself, the challenges and limitations of attempting to see "black experience" through the lens of whiteness. (In a way, I'm recalling the criticism faced by documentarian Jennie Livingston when she filmed, in a deliberately "objective" and self-effacing position, the drag queens in Paris is Burning. I don't want to over-rely on rhetorical questions, but I wonder if Kander and Ebb could not help but view The Scottsboro Boys as anthropology, as history, as "the other," despite their anti-racist stance.)
As I watched the show, however, a question has haunted me. I trust the political sincerity of the authors, and I understand their rage at the cruelty of Southern white racism. It's clear that writers can choose to write about any subject, and it is not the place of a critic or an audience to dictate what should be written. That said, I cannot deny that race is the most sensitive of themes, and the medium must be examined along with the message. I kept thinking that Spike Lee satirized the legacy of racism, particularly with the trope of the minstrel in America, in Bamboozled, in a definitive manner. I wondered what Lee might have done with the story of the Scottsboro Boys. Is this story a story that can be told by non-black authors? There's the idea of one "speaking for" the other, and the absent voice of the other denied the right of speaking for him/herself.
Kander and Ebb have addressed themes of race and nation in other works, notably Kiss of the Spider Woman. They can be contrasted with, say, the work of Stephen Sondheim, their contemporary among Broadway musical composers. Only once has Sondheim addressed racial and national difference, and that was in Pacific Overtures. (Merrily We Roll Along was his first musical designed to feature an ethnically diverse cast.) Virtually all of his other work can be interpreted as variations on the construction of whiteness. I would be willing to argue that Follies cannot be understood unless one takes into account the social construction of Anglo identity in American popular culture. Sondheim has been criticized for seeming to avoid issues of diversity in his musicals, and yet, in retrospect, he might have made the right decision.
I am not saying that Kander and Ebb are "racist" in writing The Scottsboro Boys, but it begs the question whether they left something important out: their own viewpoint as outsiders, as sympathetic progressive political thinkers who nevertheless did not experience racism in the way that the people of the Scottsboro Boys did. The musical is presentational, yes, and self-reflexive, but it might have gone even further in its self-referential position, by including the drama (indeed, the conflict) of playwrights writing a musical, and bringing that into the show itself, the challenges and limitations of attempting to see "black experience" through the lens of whiteness. (In a way, I'm recalling the criticism faced by documentarian Jennie Livingston when she filmed, in a deliberately "objective" and self-effacing position, the drag queens in Paris is Burning. I don't want to over-rely on rhetorical questions, but I wonder if Kander and Ebb could not help but view The Scottsboro Boys as anthropology, as history, as "the other," despite their anti-racist stance.)
The question I rose is a question that preoccupied me during my dissertation research, and I had a great professor who was interested in issues of "cross-identification" in spectatorship: the idea of, say, a gay man identifying with a woman in a 40s women's picture, or a young woman being more fascinated by boy culture. I definitely think it's possible for white writers to represent people of color in their creative works, but those aforementioned white writers would need to be aware of the delicate nature involved in the history of racism, and how white "cross-identification" often resulted in such cultural texts as the minstrel show and Amos and Andy. Of course, it also resulted in, say, Porgy and Bess. I've never read the book, but I've always meant to read Eric Lott's Love and Theft, which explored the ways that whites appropriated black art forms for their own gain. (The histories of both jazz and rock and roll involve white appropriation of black art, to varying degrees.) There is such a thing as imagination. There is also such a thing as influence. However, it's important that the original group (in this case, African-Americans) be granted a voice to represent their own experience in their own way.
As I watched The Scottsboro Boys, the play seemed to me all about Kander and Ebb's exploitation of this story of social injustice, yet they (Kander and Ebb) weren't in the musical per se. It was Kander and Ebb "doing" the black mens' tragedy as if it were Roxy and Velma in minstrel drag. I appreciate a reader's point about the importance of finding similarities between races and cultures, and working toward common ground and understanding. I also think there is still some case to make for "universally resonant truths" displayed in art. At the same time, however, I think it's important that difference be recognized while attempting to depict similarity. In other words, I can't claim to know what it's like to be black or Jewish, and it might be more personal (and, strangely, universal) to write a play about being a gay white man who identifies with the history of black oppression, or the Holocaust in WW2. In other words, instead of me "pretending" to be a Jewish camp survivor, I could explore what fascinates me about that experience, so that I'm not telling someone else's story, but telling my own, and exploring the similarities and differences between homophobia and anti-Semitism.
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