Ionarts wonders if there are any sharks left to jump. “Carmen Is a Man, Baby!”
The comment was prompted by Cabaret de Carmen, “American Opera Theater’s reshaping of Bizet’s operatic classic,” which is based on Peter Brook’s 1981 revision, Tragedie du Carmen. Mary Carole McCauley writes in the Baltimore Sun:
But [Timothy] Nelson out-Brooks Brook by turning Carmen into a drag queen. Thus, the crime for which Don Jose initially is driven out of town isn’t murder, but homosexuality.
This is the second time in recent memory that Nelson has mined a heretofore unsuspected homoerotic element in classic stories; he recently did the same for David et Jonathas, a 1688 opera about two biblical characters by the French Baroque composer Marc-Antoine Charpentier. In Carmen, the lead character is portrayed by a woman playing a man playing a woman; in David, a lead character (Jonathan) is portrayed by a woman playing a man.
This all seems a bit confusing and over-complicated, but it kind of works. If Don Jose is gay, that adds a new tension to the romantic triangle between the soldier, his virginal fiancee, Michaela, and his Gypsy lover.
If Bizet had been at Theatre Project, the grand old composer himself (or his ghost) probably would have led the applause.
Might as well recast Bizet as a modern metrosexual while we’re at it.
Inserting homosexuality into classical plot lines is easy, but it doesn’t tell us anything about homosexuality and it doesn’t improve the plot. One can posit that David’s love for Jonathan was erotic, but if so, it would tend to prove that homosexuality is a curable condition given that David matured into a full-fledged heterosexual. Casting Don Jose as a homosexual paints Michaela as a simple mistake and deprives her of significance in the love triangle.
It takes no real imagination to “discover” these “heretofore unsuspected” homosexual twists. Any fool could turn Tamino’s trials into an elaborate “coming out,” after which he wins the affections of Papageno. Juliet could be recast as a man and the Capulets and Montagues feud as caused by homophobia. Violetta could be a female impersonator and Germond a simple prude. Pinkerton could return with one of his sailor buddies to see how Cho-Cho-San’s family feels about gay adoption. There’s really no end to this kind of buffoonery.
Speaking of jumping the shark, what about all that homosexual imagery in Jaws: three guys out on a boat chasing a big fish with red meat and spear guns, oral fixations, coming out of that cage in the end, . . .
{ 4 comments }
I’m a bisexual (ugh, pretentious), gun-loving Republican. I think you’re right to regard the deconstructionist claims of “discovery” with loathing. I might go see some of these movies/plays, but exactly because the author created the new subtext and material.
One example of how this can be gold.
Another.
“designed to awe the sophomoric tastes of the self-appointed critical class”
A beautifully constructed phrase.
Did you see the production by any chance? Just curious – there is nothing more ignorant, and literally brainless, than forming an opinion with no personal evidence. If you did see it than at least you have that going for you – though I would be surprised you could write this if you actually had been there.
You might be aware that reviews only give one person’s opinion of a work, and without seeing it for yourself you have no idea whether this review accurately reflects the experience, let alone the motivation of the performance or artists creating it. Much like right-wing book-banners that wanted to take the “Grapes of Wrath” out of libraries without ever reading it. Ultimately the opinions of people that form them without enough integrity to actually experience what it is they are critiquing is utterly inconsequential. Such people are lucky if they are forgotten by posterity, for no doubt the other alternative is that they are the laughing stocks of history.
You have many ignorant points in your post.
Here are a few:
a) The production never claims to have uncovered a homoerotic side to the narrative. It happily admits to creating it. You should do your homework.
b) Only an idiot would not consider a man struggling with his sexuality pulled into a love triangle with a transexual in the social climate of the early 20th century not dramatic – it maybe be tasteless, it certainly is not Bizet, but it is definitely dramatically charged. No wind is lacking in those sails.
c) Michaela not significant? Again idiotic. Portraying the struggle of a woman in love with a man who is not attracted to her is socially relevant and very significant. Again, it isn’t Bizet, and it may not be to narrow-minded conservative afraid-of-change standards, but to say she is insignificant just because her affection is unrequited shows a complete lack of an understanding of the genres you claim to defend. If you don’t understand what makes for dramatically compelling narrative or characterization, you really should find different blog topics. You may not like it, or politically buy it, but you have to be a fool to deny its dramatic potential.
d)”One can posit that David’s love for Jonathan was erotic, but if so, it would tend to prove that homosexuality is a curable condition given that David matured into a full-fledged heterosexual.” Perhaps if you can only see the world in black-and-white…for the rest of us that have a clue as to how fluid sexuality is and three-dimensional the world is, all it would tend to prove is that David played for both teams and his sexuality defied the box the right-wing tries to put everything into. Regardless that opera isn’t like Handel’s “Saul”, there is no mention of the rest of the story and the David of that text is very much centered only on Jonathan. Artists mounting a work are only responsible for the text before them, not the history of what happened before or after – the David of this opera is Charpentier’s David, not the David of the people, nor should he have to be.
Nelson didn’t write “David et Jonathas”. If you knew the work, and your writings lead me to believe that you don’t explore the things you comment on, you would know that there is no escaping the homoerotic elements of the librettist’s text. Nelson isn’t claiming it is in the Bible, just that it is in this particular opera. The last thing Jonathan says dying in the arms of David is “despite the harness of my fate, at least I can still tell you that I love you”. Try to escape that with any viability – at the very least you can’t claim that an erotic relationship is a stretch from that text.
This is EXACTLY why great art and artists from Bach to Beethoven to Shakespeare to Woolfe (the list goes on and on) have also prospered artistically in face and despite of the right-wing. You think you are defending their art and you just don’t get it at all. Poor blind souls.
Your list of possible scenarios is cute, and shows why you aren’t, or at least I hope you aren’t, a director. This production works not because of some gimmick sexual twist, it is so much more than that. It works in ways your scenarios wouldn’t. One can tell when watching it that the plot twist was the product of the cabaret concept, not the impetus. The fact is, though the reviewer got it, most audience members didn’t. And that was fine. The production worked all that much more because, get the twist or not, the concept was engaging and the staging affecting. If you knew Nelson’s work at all you would know that it is many things, many things I’m sure you would neither like nor grasp, but it is absolutely not sophomoric. The ability to craft a nice sentence doesn’t make you qualified as a critic.
Ultimately I will end where I began. This isn’t buffoonery. Buffoonery is commenting on it, drawing a conclusion, without ever having seen it. In fact, buffoonery is being kind.
The Baltimore Arts Supporter has raised too many issues to be addressed here, so the discussion continues in a second post, “Jumping the Gay Shark II.”
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