Waiting for the Barbarians (6 page)

Many elements here, both large and small, reminded you that although Glass’s historical work isn’t bound by conventions of traditional chronology,
Satyagraha
as a whole does chart Gandhi’s evolution—the trajectory that is alluded to, however delicately, by the titles of the three acts. The use of costumes was subtle but crucial. We first see Gandhi lying on the ground before the Kuru Field of Justice scene, a tableau that alludes to a notorious incident that occurred soon after his arrival in South Africa, when the young lawyer, holding a first-class rail ticket, was physically pushed from a train onto the platform, a moment that marked the beginning of his outrage against racial injustice. At this point he is wearing the proper, dowdy black-and-white getup of the Victorian lawyer, the frock coat and the well-shined shoes. As the opera progresses he gradually, almost
imperceptibly sheds more and more of these clothes, so that by the end he’s the Gandhi you recognize: the slender, stork-like figure in the white loincloth. Also wonderfully effective were the costumes in the scene when Mrs. Alexander rescues Gandhi: lurid, vaudeville colors and horizontal stripes for the bigoted Europeans, with Mrs. Alexander and Gandhi in dazzling white, as if to suggest their moral likeness despite their ethnic and national difference.

Acts of disrobing have, indeed, an extraordinary power in this staging. At the end of the battle scene in Act I you know that Gandhi has the support of the chorus because suddenly they take off their shoes and line them up, dozens of them, downstage—a first step, you’re meant to feel, in the process of self-revision, and perhaps self-humbling, necessary to appreciate
satyagraha
, to understand the necessity of abjuring violence in favor of a new kind of conflict. This symbolic gesture is amplified in the “Vow” scene at the end of that act, when the assembled supporters of Gandhi’s resolution to fight the British racial law start removing their outer garments and then hang them on hangers that have been lowered from the ceiling. When the dozens of frock coats and ladies’ coats and shawls and veils suddenly float toward the ceiling, it somehow becomes a moment of deep emotion—it’s a stage picture that gets across the potential beauty in self-abnegation, the exaltation that lies in the abandonment of the “I” for the “we.” “Let a man feel hatred for no being … done with thoughts of ‘I’ and ‘mine,’ ” goes one line from the
Bhaghavad Gita
cited here.

Humble objects and small gestures, repeated over and over, sometimes altered, sometimes enlarged: it would be hard to think of a better way to represent, theatrically, not only what Philip Glass has done in his score for
Satyagraha
but what Gandhi himself was doing in eschewing violent “action” and championing the telling gesture as the foundation of his political philosophy. The sense that you get—because
McDermott and Crouch’s production wants you to get it—that this philosophy derives from a higher source is something that the production, like the work itself, underscores at every level. Its spare but elevated abstractions, the inventive use and reuse of ordinary objects as exalted symbols, have something of the hieratic about them. It feels like a mystery play.

That sense was, if anything, only heightened in the last scene, in which all of the elements of both the text and the production cohere beautifully. After the New Castle marchers have been removed by the soldiers, Act III (“King”) concludes with Gandhi alone, downstage. Upstage, throughout the latter part of the act, a black man playing Martin Luther King Jr. has been standing atop a lofty podium, silently and in slow motion pantomiming King’s famous gestures as he gave the “I Have a Dream” speech. (He’s facing away from the audience, as if addressing a crowd in the far distance.) The notion of Gandhi communing with his latter-day avatar is perfectly conveyed by the
Bhagavad Gita
text that Gandhi sings at this moment: “The Lord said, I have passed through many a birth and many have you. I know them all but you do not.” These and the other sacral lines are sung to a single, ethereal musical figure: an ascending scale of eight notes, in the Phrygian mode, repeated thirty times and yet never quite the same from repetition to repetition. (Once again in this piece, repetition is gripping rather than boring.)

As this goes on, the flats obscuring the back of the stage float away, revealing an expanse of improbably blue, celestial sky; the clouds that had scudded thickly across it while King was giving his speech suddenly evaporate, leaving a clear space. (Another suggestive image.) One white, rather fluffy cloud remains, and slowly, unexpectedly, this cloud starts to morph into an image of a group of Gandhi’s followers. This is exactly per Glass’s stage direction: “Gandhi, standing down stage, turns, looking toward platform where King
reappears and a moment later Satyagraha army appears behind him, up in the starry, night sky.” Seated in serried rows like people posing for one of those Victorian group photos, the image is characterized by a stiffness meant, perhaps, to remind you of this specific moment in history to which Gandhi did, after all, belong.

And then something wonderful happens. Raising their forearms in a formal yet warm gesture—of greeting? of farewell? I couldn’t make it out—they wave right at you as you sit in the audience. At that moment I burst into tears. Perhaps because it seemed so much like a gesture of benediction, I felt as if something real had actually happened in the auditorium—that I had been blessed, maybe. Made out of insignificant things and yet achieving a large effect that exceeded, finally, the boundaries of the theater, this marvelous work made you feel that it had
done
something. And what is that, if not drama?

—The New York Review of Books
, June 12, 2008

THE TRANSFORMATION OF
humans into monsters or animals is a standard feature of two great genres: classical myth and American comic books. As those of us know who spent our childhoods and teenage years greedily hoarding the latter, such transformations are only occasionally effected by a mere change of costume. Batman, for instance (introduced in 1939), is an ordinary
Homo sapiens
who simply dons his bat-like hood and cape when he wants to battle evildoers; his extraordinary powers are the fruit of disciplined intellectual and physical training. More often—and more excitingly—the metamorphoses occur at the genetic level. The Incredible Hulk, who debuted in 1962, is a hypertrophied Hercules-like giant, the Mr. Hyde aspect of an otherwise mild-mannered scientist named Bruce Banner, created during a laboratory accident involving gamma rays. Wolverine, one of the X-Men, who sports lupine traits following his transformations, belongs to a despised race of “mutants” with remarkable powers. (The comic-book series, now reincarnated as a hugely popular film franchise, debuted in 1963.)

Perhaps most famously of all, the crime-fighting Spider-Man—the character was introduced in 1962 and got his own comic series the following year—is really just an ordinary teenager from Queens named Peter Parker who undergoes a kind of human-arachnid hybridization after being bitten by a radioactive spider during a class trip to a science fair. It can be no accident that popular narratives involving gamma rays, mutants, and radioactivity should have gripped the imagination of young people in the early 1960s, when the Cold War—and with it the seemingly constant threat of nuclear catastrophe—was at its height.

Two millennia before the Cuban missile crisis, the popular fascination with metamorphosis was already firmly in place. The gods of Greek myth regularly transform themselves, abandoning their everyday humanoid shapes for those of animals—often (if not always wholly explicably) for the purposes of seducing mortal girls: Zeus ravishes Europa in the form of a bull, Leda in the shape of a swan, and, in one odd variant, his own daughter Persephone in the shape of a snake. But the gods clearly enjoy transforming humans, too. Hence, for instance, the story of Actaeon, a young hunter who offends the virgin goddess Artemis and is turned into a stag that is then torn to pieces by his own hunting dogs—the hunter become the victim, in other words. Myth is rich in such cruel inversions. Actaeon’s first cousin Pentheus, the ill-fated king of Thebes, is similarly torn to pieces in a horrific “hunt” after his own mother, in the grip of Dionysiac frenzy, mistakes him for a young bull calf—an episode dramatized at the end of Euripides’
Bacchae
, a play that ends, curiously, with a final and literal transformation: that of Pentheus’ perhaps insufficiently religious grandfather, Cadmus, into a snake. A closing prophecy informs us that the old man, having taken the form of a serpent, will lead an army of bacchants throughout Greece, destroying the altars of the old gods and establishing the worship of Dionysus.

These by no means atypical examples from classical myth and drama suggest a crucial difference between the ancient and modern models of human-to-animal metamorphosis. For today’s audiences, such transformations are liberating—literally “empowering”—whereas for the ancients, they were, more often than not, humiliations, punishments for inappropriate or overweening behavior.

One of the most famous examples of this moralizing strain in ancient tales of shape-shifting is the comparatively late myth (there are no traces of it in the extant Greek material of the Classical Age) of Arachne, the girl who ended up a spider. The story is suavely retold by Ovid in his
Metamorphoses
—an entire verse epic devoted to tales of human transformations, completed when Jesus Christ was a boy of eight or so. In the Roman poet’s version, Arachne is distinguished by her marvelous artistic talent at the loom and with the embroidery needle—a gift she rather dangerously refuses to credit to Athena, whom she goes so far as to challenge to a contest. Both females furiously weave their tapestries, which are described at considerable length. Athena’s, unsurprisingly, features mythic scenes of mortal arrogance punished by the gods (who transform the offending humans into trees, or mountains, or birds), while Arachne’s, just as pointedly, features mythic scenes of divine duplicity—among which are featured Jupiter’s seductions of Leda, Europa, and Persephone. Offended by her rival’s work, Athena strikes Arachne with her shuttle; in her great shame, the girl hangs herself, but is turned by the goddess into a spider, destined forevermore to “ply her ancient art of weaving.”

As it happens, a recent work for the popular theater puts both Spider-Man and Arachne on the same stage. I am referring to Julie Taymor’s ill-fated musical
Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark
, a work that has,
Titanic
-like, already assumed the proportions—and, more importantly, the moral suggestiveness—of myth. Its costs ran upward of a
staggering $65 million (a record for the Broadway theater); its previews—as of April 2011 the show had still not opened, after five months of performances—were plagued by legal headaches, increasingly bitter squabbling among the artistic principals, and a number of horrific accidents resulting from the director’s Daedalus-like ambitions to make young men fly; and its confidence was dented by crushingly negative reviews from critics who decided they couldn’t wait any longer for the official opening, which was constantly being delayed to make time for improvements that, it seemed, couldn’t possibly improve things enough to make a difference.

The whole sodden mess may be said to have sunk, finally, when in early March the producers fired Taymor. Long the creative force behind the show, Taymor both wrote the book and directed what must have seemed, early on, like the culminating moment in a long and distinguished career as a director of serious theater, opera, oratorio, and film—and of more popular entertainments that, in her nimble hands, were able to transcend the prefab, corporate aesthetic of the Disney Corporation (
The Lion King
). After Taymor was fired, it was announced that
Spider-Man
would close for three months, during which period it would undergo an extensive retooling at the hands of the commercially savvy director Philip William McKinley, whose successes include stints at the Ringling Brothers Circus. In November 2011, she sued the producers; a countersuit followed, triggering nasty revelations on both sides. (The retooled show has been a box office hit.)

As with the story of Actaeon, there was the unmistakable noise of baying in the air when Taymor went down; after all these centuries, it seems that we still find it hard to resist what looks like a story of hubris finally brought low. As innumerable critics have by now made clear, pretty much everything was wrong with the show—the incoherent, metastasizing plot (which grafts some Greek mythic material onto the iconic comic-book narrative of Spidey’s career); the banal
music and risible lyrics (by the pop stars Bono and The Edge of U2); and, not least, a series of breathtakingly gratuitous and overcooked production numbers that made “Springtime for Hitler” look like
Die Winterreise
. One such number featured a monstrous female spider being shod with expensive shoes.

But these are merely symptoms. If Taymor’s show is a failure, it fails for interesting reasons—as it were, for genetic reasons. For the show itself is a grotesque hybrid. At the heart of the
Spider-Man
disaster is the essential incompatibility of those two visions of physical transformation—the ancient and the modern, the redemptive and the punitive, visions that Taymor tried, heroically but futilely, to reconcile. As happens so often in both myth and comic books, the attempt to fuse two species resulted in the creation of a monster.