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Straight Outta Broadway
A quarter century on, hip-hop has barely cracked the theater.
But it could be its salvation.
By Jeremy McCarter
(Photo: Carol Rosegg/Coutresy of New York Theatre Workshop)
Hip-hop can save the theater; I am not kidding. At a time when
playwriting has grown timid, the musical is irrelevant, and young
audiences quite understandably stay away, along comes a highly theatrical
form of music that happens to be the planet’s dominant youth
culture. Someone looking for a way out of theater’s current
mess could scarcely dream of a more direct route.
Of course, to say hip-hop can save the day doesn’t mean it
will. Already it has been around for a quarter century and registered
barely a flicker on the New York theatrical radar. Whether its potential
will ever be realized depends a great deal on what’s going
on right now at New York Theatre Workshop, where the playwright
Will Power has written a hip-hop adaptation of Aeschylus’
Seven Against Thebes. The critical response so far has been favorable.
Still, even the play’s champions appear not to realize the
full extent of what hip-hop and theater can do.
Power’s all-rhyming treatment of the story of Oedipus’
two cursed sons might seem an egregious break with tradition. (Aeschylus
nowhere depicts Oedipus as a Caddy-driving seventies pimp, for example.)
But in a more fundamental way, the approach makes perfect sense.
The great Greek tragedies blended poetry and music. Chanted and
sung, they continued a tradition of oral storytelling that stretched
back through Homer. An Athenian audience would have been mightily
confused by the woman with two turntables and a microphone, but
not by a chorus reciting verses over a beat.
BACKSTORY
Will Power was born in Harlem, but only recently has he become an
East Coast presence. He got his hip-hop in San Francisco, where
he was raised in the Fillmore district, and his theater from summers
in New York. After co-founding the theater-rap group Midnight Voices,
Power wrote rap musicals before taking his breakout solo piece,
The Gathering, all over the U.S. and Europe—a Sarah Jones
for the West Coast. The Seven premiered in San Francisco in 2001,
but the following year it closed out Danny Hoch’s New York
Hip-Hop Theater Festival. Power has since moved here for good—another
East Coast victory in the musical-theater throw-down.
That hybrid nature—speech and song—is what makes hip-hop
uniquely suited to the stage, so different from rock or even jazz.
Although rappers once fought to be taken seriously as musicians,
what seems vital now is that we take them seriously as poets. “Laffy
Taffy” won’t knock “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”
out of any syllabi, but the best tracks by the likes of Nas and
the late Tupac Shakur have undeniable power and literary effect.
Appreciating what hip-hop might do onstage requires appreciating
what the sharpest rappers have already done.
In the Hudson Review three years ago, Dana Gioia cited rap as a
leading factor in the resurgence of popular poetry in America. As
oral verse, he wrote, rap is both novel and traditional, reversing
a decades-old trend away from rhyme and narrative. Specifically,
rappers favor accentual meter, a form that keeps the same number
of strong beats, not the same number of total beats, in a line.
This allows for shifts in tempo and extravagant syncopation—for
flow.
Consider Eminem, who, before cooling off a couple of years ago,
squeezed more success from his rhymes than almost anyone. His pseudo-biopic
8 Mile was sleepy until the ending, when his screen alter ego fought
freestyle battles against various rappers—a climax achieved
entirely through competing literary effects, through words. On his
albums, he has pushed the limits of how rap can establish mood and
sustain narrative. “Stan,” a four-minute song about
a deranged fan, is one of the most popular short radio plays of
all time. Even Seamus Heaney has applauded his “verbal energy.”
You’ll be hard-pressed to find that quality around a theater
these days. This is a strange moment for playwrights. For most of
its history, the Western tradition has been essentially poetic.
Shakespeare and his Elizabethan contemporaries wrote mainly in verse,
as did Molière and Goethe. Only since Ibsen, Chekhov, and
Shaw a century ago has prose been edging out formal poetry; only
50 years ago did changing fashion finish off the last-gasp verse
dramas of T. S. Eliot and Christopher Fry. That’s given plays
a great deal of verisimilitude, of course, but it has all but eliminated
the elevation, the heightened attention that verse creates, and
the intrinsic pleasure of hearing poetry. Hip-hop, almost miraculously,
could combine all the old power of verse and all the new appeal
of pop.
The Seven begins to show how real hip-hop theater might look and
sound. Though the music dips into funk, soul, and doo-wop, the actors
keep a steady verbal beat throughout. Mostly this helps sustain
momentum, but sometimes there’s a genuine dramatic payoff,
as when one of Oedipus’ sons describes a nightmare about being
choked by his father. The rhythm reinforces the finality of the
family curse:
’Cause he got some hands squeezing his neck too
His daddy Laius makin’ my daddy face turn blue
And Laius gettin’ choked by his daddy, and he by his daddy
And all the mack daddys back to the beginning of time
Choking each other on the family line
And my daddy starts to look small
His curse just a piece of it all
Power’s show ultimately works, but he doesn’t make
it look easy. All the obstacles to realizing hip-hop’s potential
are evident here. It’s clear that Power and director Jo Bonney
had to do plenty of searching to find a dozen performers who can
act, sing, dance, and rap. Power has also described the near-impossible
task of finding a co-composer (in Justin Ellington) who understood
both hip-hop and theater, even though such gifted artists as Danny
Hoch and Toni Blackman have been spreading the gospel for years.
http://www.nymetro.com/arts/theater/reviews/16020/
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