#muselee

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This is when you know you’re on Broadway (in the greatest city in the world (on a perfect day) (and Andrey isn’t here))

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The artwork reflects its creator. Raúl de Nieves discusses his own pieces with us at the Whitney Biennial--what an honor to hear him speak!

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The theater of belonging

In Hilton Als’ review of “Dear Evan Hansen” in the New Yorker, Als writes that the musical “is a profound evocation of how the need to belong can be as ugly as the need to exclude.” I’ve been thinking all day about the complicated ideas about belonging raised by the four theatrical performances we’ve seen so far this week: “887,” “Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812,” “Dear Evan Hansen,” and “The Hairy Ape.” 

Continue reading under the cut.

In “887,” belonging is deeply tied to place: physical place, social place, the place Robert Lepage called home. And, in Lepage’s conversations with his friend Fred about the cold cut that will be televised after his death, he also seeks to understand his place in other people’s memory. 

“Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812″ features a character who yearns to be part of the outside world, but admits that he is too afraid to do so. “Life and love/I don’t deserve,” sings Pierre in his big aria.

These lines may as well have been sung by Evan Hansen, the lonely high school student who frequently expresses fear that if other people truly knew him and his struggles with mental illness, they would turn away from him in disgust. This is a character who not only doesn’t belong, but also, like Pierre, feels deep down that he doesn’t deserve to belong. He is self-admittedly “on the outside, always looking in.” “We start with stars in our eyes,” he sings. “We start believing that we belong.” 

While Hansen eventually comes to realize that he does deserve belonging, Yank in “The Hairy Ape” travels the opposite arc. Yank begins the play by repeatedly asserting that he belongs, and ends it by lamenting that as a laborer despised by the upper classes, he doesn’t belong anywhere--except, cruelly, in the sense that he belongs entirely to the industry he works for. He despairs, "Steel was me, and I owned de woild. Now I ain't steel, and de woild owns me.” (Well, maybe Yank does eventually find that he belongs somewhere, but that would be spoiling the play. Hint: look at the title.)

So, how do we claim belonging?

I think one answer is storytelling.

For telling a story is asserting your right to tell it. Telling a story is asserting your right to be “part of the narrative,” as Eliza Schuyler says in “Hamilton,” a musical which concludes with the questions, “Will they tell your story?” and “Who lives, who dies, who tells your story?” Telling a story means taking ownership of it--even if the story isn’t yours, for better and for worse.

I think that all the characters mentioned construct inner narratives about belonging, but let’s use Lepage and Evan as our main examples. Lepage, through performing his own memoir, and Evan, through inserting himself into a narrative he never inhabited, quite literally assert belonging through storytelling. These two characters also do so in ways that aren’t so literal: the former through protesting the way media will represent his life, trying to alter the story that will be told about him after his death, looking for his place in collective memory; the latter through using social media as collective memory and as collective storytelling. 

Evan repeats the following refrain throughout the show: “When you're falling in a forest and there's nobody around/Do you ever really crash, or even make a sound?” If it isn’t recorded online or over the airwaves, did it ever really happen? If your story isn’t told, was it ever even real? Thus unmoored from reality, from memory, how can we possibly belong?

Theater, too, is undoubtably a form of memory. And theater is an arena where questions of belonging are especially tricky. Is theater truly a place where all identities are represented? What about accessibility, theater history, and public perceptions about the art form--who really belongs in a theater? Whose stories are being told, and who are they being told to?

For just as much as stories are about belonging, about inclusion, I believe they are also about exclusion: pare away the irrelevant and unimportant, and you’re left with your story. Belonging itself implies exclusion. It is a word defined by its opposite. If someone can be deemed to belong, then that most certainly means there are others who just don’t fit the criteria. Perhaps this is why Als wrote that “the need to belong can be as ugly as the need to exclude”--perhaps, as these plays and musicals suggest, the need to belong is the need to exclude.

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The novel I’m currently working on ends with the following line:

“And, as I went to open the door to her room, I felt keenly how strange this all was: how we were so old and so young, absolved and innocent; how quickly we had let go of ourselves like those balloons in the night; how beautifully we disappeared.”

Taken in Central Park on the afternoon of March 28th.

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I haven’t listened to opera in years. For me, the art form is deeply tied to a past self, a past self that feels so far in the distance that I can hardly touch it anymore.

Today, we attended LoftOpera’s production of Rossini’s “Otello.” I found that now, opera almost feels like a physical place to me. The long melodic phrases are the aisles of the libraries that I used to wander in search of new opera recordings, back in middle school when I fell oddly, madly in love with the art form. The slow, romantic arias are the freeway on cold blue mornings, on the way to school, the voices of my favorite singers mingling with the steam from my cup of hot chocolate. The breathless cabalettas are the grand mirrored staircase at my local opera house on those rare, long-anticipated evenings when I saw for the first time in person the operas I had listened to over and over--I was way up in the nosebleed seats in jeans and a T-shirt, but just being there was enough. 

Even after tonight’s opera performance, I still couldn’t quite reach across the distance and touch that past self. But these chilly Bushwick streets, silvered with rain, were its sweetest encore.