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ObiDirecting Obi in 2000Jerrold E. Hogle, University of Arizona
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| 1 | This entire new study of Obi;
or Three-Finger'd Jack revolved at first around two "performances."
These were stagings of segments from different versions of this play, in
which the segments were interspersed with oral presentations of the other
essays in this collection. The first such "production" combining scenes
and papers was performed on July 18, 2000, at the Playwrights Theater at
Boston University. Produced by Professor Charles Rzepka (who has ably led
this whole enterprise from its beginnings to this collection) and directed
by Vincent Ernest Siders of the New African Company and TYG Productions,
the Boston version—as I will refer to it from here on—presented
itself as primarily a celebration of the life and career of Ira Aldridge,
the African-American actor who played the role of Jack Mansong, among many
others, in England during the 1820s and after. It featured a cast of talented
professionals and students, including a Jack played by Jovan Rameau, a Harvard
MA who had just performed Shakespeare with the American Repertory Theater,
along with musical direction and piano accompaniment by Ryan Sandburg and
many-faceted technical direction by Karen Stanley. Vincent Siders himself
provided the narration and some critical reflections that bridged the scenes
he chose and linked them to the academic papers, all of which were first
delivered during this production, save for the piece by Robert Hoskins,
who could not come over from New Zealand that July. I attended this unique
and impressive performance myself, since Professor Rzepka had already asked
me to help with another version after learning that I was Program Chair
for an upcoming conference in our field. |
| 2 | This second production would be—and
was—staged for the year 2000 Conference of the North American Society
for the Study of Romanticism (NASSR), in part because Obi was a significant
(though now usually forgotten) piece of theater first performed during what
most scholars call "the Romantic period" in English and European culture
(roughly 1789-1836). With a modicum of theater experience in my background
far smaller than Vincent Siders' (hence my reliance in many of his choices),
I agreed to direct and narrate what I will henceforth call the NASSR production,
aided by funds remaining from the grant that Dr. Rzepka had obtained from
Boston University's Humanities Foundation to support both presentations.
This later one, based closely and admiringly on the Boston version but also
revising it here and there (for reasons I will discuss below), was staged
on September 14, 2000, in Neeb Hall at Arizona State University (ASU) in
Tempe, Arizona, a suburb of Phoenix. A plenary event for all the attending
faculty and students at an academic conference co-sponsored by Arizona's
three state universities, this production of scenes and papers added Robert
Hoskins to the panel of experts (now five in all) and featured students
from the University of Arizona (or UA) Schools of Music and Dance and Theater
Arts, with UA student Walter Belcher as Jack, musical direction and piano
accompaniment by Sean Schulze, and technical direction by my UA colleague
Professor Jeffrey Warburton. Complete cast, crew,
and panel lists for both versions accompany this essay. Both, in any
case, were well received by their audiences and, just as Professor Rzepka
had hoped (see his essay), served effectively
to return attention to this complex popular drama while raising all the
theatrical, cultural, racial, colonial, and widely political questions prompted
by a work that began in 1800 as a highly imperialist and racist serio-pantomime
and "changed its tune" in some important ways by the time of the altered
melodrama version that featured Ira Aldridge in the 1820s. |
| 3 | The basic structure was the same in both productions.
With both directors interested in reviving the stage conventions in England
from 1800 to 1830 as well as examining the cultural implications of this
play as it changed over that time, each version was divided into two halves
with an intermission between them. The first half focused on sung or pantomimed
sequences from the 1800 play, with commentary on these moments provided
by Charles Rzepka, Jeffrey
Cox, and at NASSR by Robert Hoskins
(especially since Hoskins is an expert on the songs and incidental music
for the 1800 Obi composed by Samuel Arnold). Both directors felt
that the serio-pantomime as scripted by John Fawcett could best be highlighted,
given our limited budgets, by the opening and closing musical choruses (I.i
and II.ix) and by selected scenes: the first meeting between Rosa and Captain
Orford at the plantation (also in I.i); Tuckey's comical dumb-show announcing
the initial wounding of the Captain by Jack (later in I.i), as well as the
bringing of the wounded Captain back to the plantation house (which I abbreviated
and overlaid with narration to make time for a fifth paper in the NASSR
version); the Overseer's sung charge to the plantation slaves to find and
capture Jack (the end of I.i); the duet between Quashee and his anxious
spouse as he sets off with his rifle (I.v); the solo lament of Quashee's
Wife—who calls herself "Ulalee" in her song—after he goes (II.i,
but sequenced by us right after his exit); and Rosa, disguised as a sailor-boy,
singing "A Lady in Fair Seville City" (a popular "hit" at the time) in Jack's
cave in an effort to lull him to sleep so that she can find the wounded
Orford now held by him (II.iv)—a Jack, stinking-drunk at this point,
who is never given a voice in the 1800 version, spoken or sung. Both directors
felt that these moments, once contextualized by narration and papers, epitomized
the key features of the first Obi play from its pantomime style through
its types of light-opera choruses and solos through its setting of black
characters against each other through its contrasting the heroism of Rosa
and Quashee over against the seemingly dissipated villainy of Jack, unquestioningly
assumed at the beginning and unmitigated by the end. Noting that the original
1800 play was performed (yes, offensively to us) by all-white players, most
of them in black face, Vincent Siders and I agreed on having each of our
performers wear an eye-mask (black or white) that symbolized his or her
race in the play, whatever the race of the performer. That way the original
face-masking was somewhat retained and emphasized but was also equalized
so that "whiteness" and "blackness" were both presented as mainly imposed
cultural roles for the characters in this play from 1800 through the 1820s.
In other respects, though, the characters were costumed according to period
and class styles around 1800, partly depending on what we could purchase
fairly cheaply or obtain on loan from a theater or theater arts department. |
| 4 | The second half in both productions
featured Jack, also called "Karfa"—now given an eloquent voice and
left entirely unmasked (unlike everyone else)—as he might have been
played by Ira Aldridge in a melodrama rendition of the 1820s. We therefore
followed the script, now full of dialogue, used for a production of that
decade at the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden (the same as the 1820s
version). Our narration in both cases mentioned where choruses and other
scenes, such as the play's opening, were the same from version to version,
keeping us from having to repeat any feature from 1800 still in use over
two decades later. Even though both of our productions made no costume changes
for the second half (except when I chose to remove a black mask and wig
worn by Jack in the first half of the NASSR production), the scenes we chose
from the 1820s consequently emphasized the altered or new elements in this
version compared to the earlier one. These included the early dialogue between
the planter (here called Ormond) and the Overseer, later shown to be quite
slanted, on why the former so hates and fears Jack, now the would-be rapist
and the murderer of the planter's wife in the not-so-distant past (I.i in
the 1820s script above); Tuckey's singing of the long-time folk song "Opposum
Up a Gum Tree" (I.ii), one of the few musical moments not used in
the 1800 version; an extended scene between the fervently anti-white Obi
Woman and Jack in her wilderness hut, where "Karfa" first expresses his
motives from his standpoint (I.iii); the expanded dialogue between Jack
and Rosa in his cave just before she again sings "A Lady in Fair Seville
City," where he asserts the justice of his now turning a white "boy" into
a black man's slave (II.iii-iv); and the crucial final sequence centered
on Rosa and Jack as he drags her across the wilderness from his cave, having
discovered her real identity this time, with the plantation party of slaves
in hot pursuit (II.vi). |
| 5 | This half provided apt moments in
both productions for Peter Buckley's comments on Ira Aldridge's acting background
in the culture of black American theater and for Debbie Lee's observations
on the extent to which actual (or fabricated) obi traditions were used in
this play. Both directors and companies, though, worked to build both second
halves—and indeed both evenings—towards the final Jack-Rosa sequence
where he finally makes her and the audience visualize the "blood and rapine"
in which he was snatched from his family, along with others, back in Africa.
Partly because we both asked our "Jacks" to play this moment to emphasize
how Aldridge gave Jack a rich voice and a commanding presence in
the 1820s, the ultimate thrust of the whole production in each case thus
became the transformation in cultural awareness and attitudes that allowed
for this major change, even though we also had to note that Jack is shot
dead by Tuckey this time as he finally struggles with the slaves who have
caught up to him at last, in this version even more clearly because they
have been promised their freedom and a reward if they capture him, dead
or alive. In this fashion both productions emphasized the difference between
this semi-tragic, action-based ending of the 1820s and the gleeful chorus
at the end of the 1800 version (the finale of our first half), where all
the surviving characters festively celebrated a renewed British supremacy
in Jamaica, in part by displaying the decapitated head of Jack before themselves
and the audience—a conclusion entirely removed from this play by the
1820s. |
| 6 | Despite all this common ground in
both of our productions, however, there were some sharp differences in the
ways the Boston and NASSR versions chose to enact and stage certain sequences,
even if several moments did remain virtually identical. In the rest of what
follows, I want to focus on these differences, not in order to make a case
for one set of choices as "better" than another, but to foreground the cultural
issues and practical problems involved in restaging and offering scholarly
commentary on this conflicted and changing play for two different types
of audiences in the year 2000. This drama and its history are clearly more
than curiosities that reopen forgotten aspects of theater and popular middle-class
entertainment, not to mention the career of a major black actor, from 1800
to 1830. Obi is a revealing touchstone that shows us, if not great
art, at least some of the undersides of British and imperialist culture
in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries that we have too often
overlooked in our studies of "Romanticism." Moreover, it confronts us with
the extent to which our attitudes today, however distant from those dominant
in Britain in 1800 and the substantially different 1820s, are still haunted
by the history of racism and slavery in the West, so much so that our choices
in representing such material are always complicated by many facets of cultural
memory depending on who we are, where we live, and whom we are addressing
at the turn of the twentieth into the twenty-first century. The differing
choices I now proceed to describe are ultimately indicators of our troubled
cultural identities, different for different groups, that can only benefit
from facing the cultural history revealed in Obi; or Three-Fingered Jack,
yet must also confront the mixed angry-and-guilty attitudes that surface
when these roots of our present existence are exposed for what they were—and
to some extent remain. |
| 7 | The different choices made in each
production initially stemmed from each director considering the composition
and likely concerns of his prospective audience. The Boston version came
close to being abandoned, despite the persistent efforts of Dr. Rzepka and
all involved, because its audience was sure to come in large measure from
that city's black community, as well as from Boston University or Harvard
students, in a racially mixed New-England hub with a long and lingering
history of conflicts between ethnic groups. Some possible African-American
directors and players, even considering the presence of modern commentary,
were understandably resistant to reviving a flatly racist, Jim-Crowish play,
blatantly so in its 1800 version and more than occasionally so in the revision
of the 1820s despite the latter's abolitionist elements. At least the first
half of the production would have to show that the 1800 play celebrated,
far more than it condemned, the existence of slavery in the West Indies,
provided that "white man kind massa be" (which was obviously not required
by law) and "No lay stick on negro's back" (which this plantation
master avoids only "when he good"). Consequently, Vincent Siders began the
Boston production by having Quashee's Wife and Sam's Wife, soon joined by
Quashee and Sam themselves, sing the entire opening chorus in fixed positions
with restrained gestures as though they were almost ghostly museum figures,
very much suspended in the past, in no way even seeming to endorse sugar-plantation
enslavement, whether it or not was under a non-violent master. Moreover,
after these performers had transitioned from the initial lament over the
loss of their extended families in Africa ("The white man comes") and shifted
into their celebration of "kind massa," Siders as narrator interrupted them
deliberately, calling on them to stop, and critiqued the obvious ironies
so as to raise the question of whether such deeply offensive scenes should
even be revived and discussed at all, thus leading quite effectively into
Dr. Rzepka's eloquent response, "Why Obi?"
For the Boston audience, clearly, no strategy could have been better. In
that setting any positive valuation of slave history, however burlesqued
or ironized, could only have been insensitive and hurtful, not to mention
taking too much attention away from the evening's focus on Ira Aldridge. |
| 8 | I made a somewhat different choice
for the opening chorus of the 1800 Obi because our NASSR audience
was so different from the one in Boston. As academics (mostly white, to
be sure), our observers were more interested in something approaching historical
recreation, a reenactment of the cultural conditions and theater conventions,
as well as the ideologies and imperialism, of a period and a "Romantic"
England they had all studied for years. I knew they would be especially
intrigued by the controversy in 1800 (noted in Jeffrey
Cox's paper) over the staging of the play: whether to present it in
the jaunty, even carnivalesque, serio-pantomime style being allowed to invade
London's Haymarket Theater—one of only three venues then licensed to
present Shakespeare—or in the style of "serious drama" ("high" culture
compared to which serio-pantomime and Obi were relatively "low,"
however popular and lucrative). Though I as narrator also interrupted the
opening chorus before its end to raise the questions that led into "Why
Obi?", I therefore directed the NASSR performers to be more offensive
(for our times, at least) than Vincent had wanted them to be. The opening
duet ("The white man comes") remained a lament with the two wives standing
in place before a plantation-house slide on the back stage-wall above them,
although their arm-movements were more expansive in keeping with the typically
broad gestures of the serio-pantomime style that all the first-half scenes
emphasized in the NASSR version. But once the two couples launched into
"Good massa we find," I had them dance with Arcadian gaiety (this setting
being a sort of Eden in 1800, as Hoskins would note), then cross the stage
in a music-hall chorus-line, each holding out three fingers (warning the
audience about the "Jack" they all fear), and then fall on their knees near
the edge of the stage when they start to reprise "Good massa"—with
my interruption coming only at that point, when I (of course) asked them
to rise from such abject positions. Samuel Arnold's music, as well as 1800
pantomime conventions, seemed to demand movement here, as I found to be
the case in other scenes as well. I could count on our NASSR audience to
catch the harsh irony in this approach at once and simultaneously to feel
the offensiveness while associating it with both the British racial attitudes
prior to Parliament's abolition of the slave trade in 1807 and the popular
theater conventions of the time. With that prospect in mind, I could also
use the contrast between stationary lamentation and celebratory movement
to play up the double ideological game that the 1800 Obi tries to
play from the start, where slavery is briefly condemned, but only as a tearing-apart
of families, and white owners are themselves cast as ambassadors of civilization
who bring advanced cultivation, fair labor practices, Christianity, protection,
and refined dancing to near-savage black "others" supposedly more raised
up than held down by such provisions. |
| 9 | This contrast in styles, right from
each opening sequence, was reinforced by our different casting choices,
even though these sometimes resulted more from happenstance than design.
Vincent and Charles, in addition to Jovan Rameau, employed as many African-American
performers as they could find. Quashee and the Obi Woman, the latter
often played by a male actor historically, were performed and sung by Jean
Connally of the New African Company of Boston, and Chris Johnson from Northeastern
University enacted Sam throughout this production. These choices added great
force to what may be for us the greatest shock in all versions of this play:
the setting of black against black, as the devoted male slaves still on
the plantation pursue the Jack who has rebelled against their master, in
part because they have been converted to Christianity and promised freedom
and gold but also because they have come to see themselves as protecting
their wives and children in memory (really!) of their even larger African
families, not to mention expressing loyalty to a generally "kind massa."
For the NASSR production, I admit, I at first sought to continue and even
intensify this shock by offering parts to several African-American students,
women as well as men. As interested as several such students were (I say
gratefully), even to the point of accepting roles initially, all but Walter
Belcher (our Jack) had good reasons to opt for larger parts or better-paying
engagements in other venues, which did materialize for these talented performers
during our production process. As a result, I finally had to use an all-white
cast, save for Walter as Aldridge/Jack, including my own spouse, Pamela,
as Quashee's Wife, our elder daughter, Karen, as Rosa, and our younger daughter,
Joanne, as both Sam's Wife and Tuckey—all of whom (thankfully) had
considerable stage experience, as well as extensive musical training. The
NASSR production thus found another way, inadvertently, to reproduce something
like the original type of cast for an academic audience interested in the
conditions of the first production and the cultural significance of those
conditions. One consequence in Tempe was a deliberate picture of a large-scale
white supremacy—which controlled by playing most of the black
slaves—"ganging up" on Jack Mansong, reinforcing his sense of oppression
the more he is allowed to speak in the 1820s segments. A related effect,
too, was a vision of Aldridge/Jack in the second half finally educating
a crowd of whites out of their complacency even on stage by awakening
them all—and a very white Rosa especially—to what the horrors
of slavery really meant in ways the Anglos surrounding him had not recognized
before. Once again, these differences in each production had their distinct
advantages for their contexts, especially for the audience to which each
version was carefully tailored. |
| 10 | Such very basic differences led
inevitably to others in the final renderings of many scenes, even as these
segments on paper remained mostly the same in both productions. At the point
where the Overseer sings his master's exhortation to the faithful slaves
to go hunt Jack down in the 1800 play, for example, Vincent placed all four
players (including Quashee, Sam, and Quashee's Wife) on the same level with
the Overseer, who sang to them simply by turning towards his stage left,
perhaps so that all the characters could be readily seen as, sadly, "on
the same team." I chose to play up the subordination of the slaves at this
moment, partly to underline the Overseer's thoughtless irony (unintended
by him, but intended by Michael Conran playing him) as he appeals to them
in the name of their "dear native land and children"—their race,
essentially—to make all of that their prime motivation for seeking
the head of a black escapee. Neeb Hall at ASU, I found, was mainly a lecture
room, with a shallow stage down front, not as intimate as the Playwrights
Theater in Boston. It therefore had a substantial "pit" space below the
apron of the stage, quite wide until the first row of spectators, a space
I had already decided not to use for the piano (which I positioned
below the stage to its right to allow the NASSR audience better sight-lines).
I placed the exhorted slaves down in this pit looking up at the Overseer,
who only later drew them up on stage when he finally united them in their
quest, whereupon they scattered slowly in different directions as a frightened
and uncertain posse after having promised (as apparently "low-lifes" must)
to "no swear loud," since Jack might then hear them coming. |
| 11 | In addition, I echoed this insistence
of white power in the 1800 duet scene where "Quashee he load his gun," to
the dismay of his wife, after being christened and promised freedom in return
for Jack's head. As it happened, Jean Connally as Quashee in Boston was
given no props and was placed in some isolation by Vincent near the front
of the stage to start this scene—making him seem alone as a black man
seeking another black's head for a white reward—until he turned towards
his wife (here a white performer) to soothe her before denying her appeal.
With resourceful help from Professor Warburton and jack-of-many-trades cast
member Seamus O'Brian, I was able to give the white Gerry Petersen's Quashee
an imposing flintlock rifle, which I even had him load on stage. I then
asked him to stand with it in the manner of a stock white frontier hero,
this time closely clung to by his wife throughout their scene together,
so that his being an instrument of white conquest would be emphasized alongside
what, for the character, is sincere dedication to a cause in which he believes,
even in the face his spouse's pleas, finally on behalf of their infant child.
The motif of family preservation that speaks against slavery in the
1800 version, the main justification for Ulalee's extended solo after Quashee
departs, was thus pointedly set against the valuing of Anglo-British supremacy
in the face of black defiance. Quashee in the NASSR production remained
unwaveringly resolute, however, since the imperial theme is ultimately given
decisive weight, in my reading of the 1800 script, when Quashee, by now
freed but still a willing subject of the Empire, exchanges his rifle for
a cutlass in the penultimate scene and visibly starts to cut Jack's head
off as the lights come down in preparation for their bright resurgence at
the finale of the 1800 pantomime. |
| 12 | The first play's finale itself ("Wander
now, to and fro") was also interpreted in notably different stagings. In
the Boston production, the severed head was brought on right as the lights
came up and placed at the front of the stage, all by Ulalee, the principal
soloist in the finale. Quashee then paraded proudly onto the stage immediately,
along with every other living character, moving downstage to display the
head with his upstage arm only for a brief period after his wife has reminded
everyone of his heroism. At this point the head was again placed at the
edge of the apron while everyone knelt for "God Save the King" prior to
coming forward for a communal final chorus, during which the head almost
disappeared from view. The effect was one of racial divides healed (or prevented)
and violence gradually effaced, with the scapegoating of Jack underscored
for a time but his destruction deemphasized—finally to be reversed,
as I will soon show—while this version of the finale swelled to a climax.
The NASSR production, by contrast, delayed the entrance of both Quashee
and the head during this whole sequence, waiting for that revelation until
all were reminded that "Quashee gave the blow." In what was for me a crucial
change, I gave that soprano-solo sequence back to the character who is assigned
it in the original 1800 script and score: Rosa, rather than Quashee's Wife.
Though I admire Vincent Siders for giving Ulalee more of a powerful voice
here, I believe that Quashee is supposed to be granted his ultimate seal
of approval from the white daughter and heiress of the plantation, not to
mention the future Mrs. Orford, as the scene begins moving decisively towards
a celebration of Anglo supremacy with Negro consent. Very much in line with
that drive, I had Quashee enter only at this moment and, in a wild-eyed
victory stance, brandish the severed head center-stage before the audience
and the other characters. Though he knelt momentarily with the head during
"God Save the King," as he must, the NASSR Quashee kept it and rose again
to his feet as the final choruses were sung, holding it aloft above himself
and everyone as high as he could, like Cellini's famous statue of Perseus
displaying the grisly face of Medusa, as the finale ended. I believe that
the 1800 Obi was similarly monumental, graphic, and insistent to
its audience in cathecting all racial conflict and arguments over slavery
ultimately onto the severed head of Jack (its Medusa) and, though his sacrificial
destruction, seeming to eradicate this teeming cacophony from the Empire
with deliberate force, supposedly to the benefit of slaves and masters alike.
Staging the 1800 finale so "in your face" in the NASSR production allowed
that particular "circulation of social energy" (in Stephen Greenblatt's
words) to be partly reenacted in the year 2000 with an effective balance
of repulsiveness and imperialistic force. That British audiences apparently
"lapped this up" in droves just over two hundred years ago is one of the
horrors of cultural history, along with slavery, that this whole revival
rightly makes us confront in the development of Western "civilization" and
the "Romantic" era. |
| 13 | Meanwhile, an additional reason
for making the 1800 ending so deliberately offensive was the contrast that
could thus be established during the NASSR version's second half with the
1820s melodrama, certainly with its ending but also with its entire revision
of Jack into a speaking character with a fuller and sadder history. For
the initial reduction of Jack to a silent object (ultimately only his lifeless
head) to be reversed as strongly as I wanted it to be, I felt the NASSR
first half needed to end with that reduction blatantly displayed—though
Vincent Siders had moved in this direction with a postlude to the final
1800 chorus, done in silent-movie style, where all the cast members tossed
the head between them under flickering lights before the intermission began.
The 1820s changes would then seem more pronounced, particularly as Jack
spoke more and more for himself, first undercutting Ormond's initial rendering
of "Karfa's" past life in the melodrama and then explaining his own violence
with the greater violence done to himself and his family, which the Planter
and the 1800 play had completely obscured. The contrast attempted in the
NASSR production succeeded with its audience, I believe, in part because
of the above decisions about the first half of the evening, but also in
part because I chose to keep most of the scenes from the 1820s version very
close to the way they were played in the Boston production, as strongly
and rightly constructed as that was to bring out the quality of Ira Aldridge's
presence as Jack once this character was allowed to speak more of the truth
about slavery. The 1820s scene between the Obi Woman and Jack (slightly
reduced for NASSR) and later the several between Jack and Rosa were thus,
in Tempe as in Boston, played in pools of amber light that isolated pairs
of characters, each time on a larger stage kept entirely in darkness, so
that the audience might concentrate on the words and gestures with which
Jack, in a series of soliloquies, tries to make his interlocutors see and
feel what his experiences have been. Vincent Siders and I were fortunate
to have the talents of Jovan Rameau and Walter Belcher, both with arresting
stage presences and quite resonant voices, so that such powerfully altered
sequences could truly be climactic revelations for Rosa and the audience
alike and the almost Shakespearean grandeur that Ira Aldridge brought to
these scenes in the 1820s could be revived in our renditions as much as
possible—again by actors experienced with Shakespeare, as Aldridge
(then especially noted for his Othello) most certainly was. |
| 14 | Even so, there were two major moments
in the 1820s half of the Boston and NASSR productions that were rescripted
and staged quite differently by the two directors for quite specific reasons.
First, Tuckey's musical sequence near the beginning of the melodrama ("Opossum
Up a Gum Tree") was extended backwards into the preceding dialogue by Vincent
Siders, who also cut the final verse of the song itself as it appeared in
the 1820s script and score. I chose, partly for reasons of running time,
to narrate what happened in the dialogue and then to have Tuckey perform
the entire song with only his/her spoken lines immediately preceding it.
These were equally valid reactions, in my view, to a multi-layered moment
in the revised play. Tuckey, frequently performed in the past by a young
woman good at trickster roles (Jeannette Ryan and Joanne Hogle, in our cases),
is the most betwixt-and-between character in the piece, even more than the
Obi Woman, also usually played by a gender-crossing actor. He is a once-enslaved
but now free black; no longer a slave but still only a servant; a spokesman
for freedom but the final shooter of Jack; a playful critic of many situations
(like the Fool in King Lear) but devoted to the safety and interests
of his white master, Captain Orford; and inclined to flirt both with the
opposite (or is it the same?) sex and with women of different or mixed races
(or are the races the same when both players in a flirtation scene are white
or black?). In the melodrama version of Obi, Vincent and I agree,
Tuckey extends this fluid status by becoming a vocal critic of race relations
during the one big scene focussed entirely on him. |
| 15 | The question is where that stance
begins and ends here. The Boston production made this critique plain, but
implicit by including Tuckey's flirtation with the mixed-race free servant
"Kitty" in the plantation kitchen (Erika Dyer, wearing a white/black mask),
in which she both admits his raffish appeal and chides him for being a "dingy
spark" too black for her, despite her own legally black status. Jeannette
Ryan's roll-with-the-punches approach to Tuckey led the character into jauntily
admitting the problems in his status once he was alone on stage; at this
point Vincent Siders had him interrupted by an audience request, music-hall
style, for "Opossum Up a Gum Tree," which he then performed to and with
the audience as a generalizing number about tricksters which rose above
issues of race. In my approach for NASSR, however, I saw this song—despite
its long previous history outside Obi (again, noted by Jeffrey
Cox)—as brought in to comment on Tuckey's own multi-racial situation,
among other things, since a free but "too low" black is like the opossum
that is sometimes forced up a tree and sometimes on the run, living by his
wits. I therefore asked Joanne to move, uninterrupted, right from Tuckey's
brief monologue on how "we poor blacks have a weary time of it" into a song
definitely about that very subject. Even more important, I had Joanne bring
Tuckey right out to the edge of the stage, pointing directly at the audience,
and quite sardonically sing the third verse of this number, the one cut
(surely because of its offensiveness) in the Boston rendition. In that verse,
which begins with "Black boy him love Jill Jenkins," Tuckey cuttingly objects
to the prevailing cultural onus against interracial relationships and reminds
his hearers that he stands a good chance of being "beat" (like
the slave he once was) for what he just attempted with Kitty, were it ever
widely known. This moment, to my knowledge, would have been unprecedented
in the history of Obi and quite rare before the 1820s in performances
of this song. It is a major indication, which I felt should be included
and underscored, of how much attitudes had shifted, though not completely,
between the 1800 and the 1820s versions of this play. It also shows how
the levels of being "between" cultural positions that came out, however
briefly, even in the 1800 script rose more and more to the surface the longer
this play was performed with increasingly transformed attitudes towards
its troubling subject matter. It was Ira Aldridge, after all, rather than
performers of Tuckey (see Cox again), who
ultimately became the most famous in England for performing "Opossum" on
stage, often apart from Obi, as he continued to give voice to the
conditions of a still-enslaved race well into the 1860s. |
| 16 | The biggest difference between both
recent productions, though, was in how each director chose to end the second
half and indeed the whole evening. Following Jack's final speech on his
past to Rosa, Vincent Siders did stage the closing fight scene between the
pursuing blacks and their object of pursuit—but only up to a point.
Once Tuckey shot Jack and the latter fell, as in the script, he was then
allowed to rise up again (as in the film Fatal Attraction), and when
Quashee moved to knife him once more, Vincent intervened as narrator, much
as he had in the opening chorus of the 1800 play. Donning part of the Obi
Woman's costume and thus assuming the powers of obeah in a positive
way, Vincent asked Jack to rise from his final position in the melodrama
and to keep living forever on an eternal stage, permanently embodying the
memory of all that his and Ira Aldridge's stories encompassed, from the
oppressive to the revolutionary dimensions, all of which could then remain
strongly in the cultural memory. Vincent further drew Tuckey from the on-stage
crowd and had him put the rifle down in exchange for a new cultural role
in the future where s/he would speak the truth, still a trickster, about
the multiple and complex lives of African-Americans through different stages
in their history. In this way the black-against-black problem in this play
was resolved in favor of a redirected, communal, and African-American sense
of time, reconstructed both from and against Obi to redress the imbalances
that Anglo accounts of Western history have too often left in force. Finally,
Vincent invited all the remaining cast members and the audience to envision
an obeah-generated condition in which the wounds inflicted by the
Obi plays and what they represented could be healed without the significance
of this drama being forgotten. We in the audience left with the sense that
history may have occurred in certain ways, but that future directions for
humanity are a matter of group choice that is not predetermined. We have
the capacity, this Boston production reminded us, to recast the fictions
by which we have covered history with cultural mythologies—in the way
Vincent Siders finally remade Obi—and to propose revisionist
mythologies that are inclusive instead of racist and equalizing rather than
hierarchical. Such a process, begun that evening, could indeed, if achieved,
become an even more transformed Obi for the twenty-first century. |
| 17 | I hope it is clear how much I admire
and applaud that choice for ending the Boston production. I also hope I
can adequately explain why I chose a different way of closing the NASSR
version. We in Arizona also moved directly from the final Jack-Rosa scene
into the action sequence where Quashee challenges Jack, Jack struggles with
him, Sam joins the fray, Jack recovers Quashee's knife in the melee, and
Tuckey comes on to fire a rifle at Jack as he is about to dispatch both
his other pursuers. At that point I chose to freeze the on-stage image at
the moment Jack, arching upwards in a stabbing motion, is hit by the bullet.
I then posed the still-unresolved questions for all of us that this whole
refashioned play and this final image leave us to pursue today: Has
this outcome sufficiently turned from comic to tragic? Have the changes
from one version to another led to enough further progress by now? In
what ways can Jack's story still live for us so that it leads to productive
change and does not become a forgotten anachronism? I did not leave the
actors frozen for too long and did ask them to rise as I had when I intervened
in the opening chorus. But I went on to note that there are more remaining
questions, some of which were key subjects in the rest of the NASSR conference
that had three days yet to run. Given the very academic—and thus "accurately
reconstructive"—setting that we were all in, I could not bring myself
to change the ending of the 1820s play as Vincent so powerfully did.
At the same time, though, I could stop its progress before it was finished
and, with Jack's moment of death held in suspension, could raise the lingering
issues of this work with that sad and now deeply-layered figure fully in
view and, I hope, burned into the memories of the audience along with the
cultural problems we still have to solve in the wake of what Obi
depicted and still depicts. |
| 18 |
All of us involved in restaging this drama knew and still know how fraught with contradictions it is for us as a new century begins and how carefully we needed and still need to avoid burying these problems by viewing such a play too simply or forgetting about it because it is not "great classic drama" (as Professor Rzepka and I are the first to admit). Even Vincent Siders agrees that it should not be forgotten, since it shows how a whole Anglo-Western culture can justify oppression by calling it civilization and then how that same culture can at least begin to undeceive itself. Still, Obi in the year 2000 does pose the question of how we face what we claim to have repudiated when that repudiation may not be complete enough for enough people—and how we position ourselves in a cultural history of racial injustice, of which the different versions of Obi are stages in a development that continues to unfold. If a revival of Obi is unsettling, that is all to the good in the view of all of us who participated. We cannot claim we are fully beyond it any more than we can accept its premises even in the 1820s. We also continue to disagree about how to approach it, even between black and white to some extent, given the issues it still raises. But there is also the fact that blacks and whites have been brought together somewhat by facing such a play and the quandaries it provokes, with due consideration for differing points of view. Certainly none of us remain the same after having wrestled with Obi; or Three-Finger'd Jack and its history of both myopia and change. Both directors are immensely grateful, as I am to Vincent, to all our cast members, musicians, technicians, sponsors, colleagues, and families, every one of them extraordinarily dedicated and talented in facing a difficult task. Yet we all hope that the difficulty does not stop with this effort or dissipate in some sort of complacency for any of us. The transformation of Obi, especially as Ira Aldridge played it, is the history of a cry for better world, and none of us should evade the responsibility each of us has to answer that cry in the years to come. |
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Notes
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Works Cited |
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Romantic Circles - Home / Praxis Series / Obi / Jerrold E. Hogle, "Directing Obi in the Year 2000" |