Forever Jung
Tricksters triumphant in 2 new operas from John Duffy Institute
Carl Jung, the canny Swiss psychiatrist who gave us the term “collective unconscious,” is every critic’s friend.
He and his followers noted that similar archetypal figures reappear in very disparate cultures; for example, the trickster (sometimes a fool or jester) shows up as Anansi the spider in African lore; Loki in Norse mythology; Coyote, Rabbit or Raven in Native American stories. Then there’s Bre’r Rabbit in African American stories (transmitted via the questionable work of white folklorist Joel Chandler Harris, 1848-1908, and the egregiously racist 1946 Disney musical “Song of the South”).
But a living loaf of French bread named The Dough as a trickster?
Please stand by for an explanation. (Don’t be too kneady.)
Hungry trickster characters dominated two John Duffy Institute for New Opera short pieces presented by the Virginia Arts Festival on June 3 and 5 at Attucks Theatre. The evening opened with a world premiere entitled “Bre’r Rabbit (from
Tales from the Briar Patch)” by composer Nkeiru Okoye and lyricist Carman Moore, both on hand for the occasion. Directed by Anthony Mark Stockard, founding director of Norfolk State University’s Drama and Theatre department, “Briar Patch” featured a dynamo cast of singer-actors.
The second offering was a new, though previously produced, longer work called “Companionship” by composer and librettist Rachel J. Peters, also in attendance.
Both were well sung and well acted, though overproduced visually. There were enough clever multidimensional stage projections in each (especially “Companionship”) to keep the viewer’s eyes spinning for a week.
The very name Uncle Remus is a battle cry to critics. For pure racist cant in praise of Harris, one can read John M. McBryde’s “Brer Rabbit in the Folk-Tales of the Negro and Other Races” in the now-respectable but back-thenracist Sewanee Review of 1911. McBryde lauds Uncle Remus as a happy slave stereotype conveying to whites the “strange superstitions and childish beliefs” of the “Negro” as well as his “primitive processes of thought” as he dreams his “disturbing dreams of social equality.”
For a razor-like rebuttal, read Alice Walker’s 2012 essay “Uncle Remus, No Friend of Mine,” in which she excoriates Disney’s derivative of Harris’ work. The film “Song of the South: Uncle Remus in the movie saw fit to ignore, basically, his own children and grandchildren in order to pass on our heritage — indeed our birthright — to patronizing white children who seemed to regard
him as a kind of talking teddy bear.” Walker recalls her own first reaction as a child to Disney’s film: “I experienced it as a vast alienation” both from family and the stories themselves.
Given the painful history of the Uncle Remus stories, it is a blessing to encounter such material in the hands of Black artists such as Okoye, Moore and Stockard. The libretto is now in contemporary Black English, a far cry from the 19th-century dialect Harris and then Disney tried to capture.
The opera began with a clever chorus of avian characters perched on a small footbridge. They are Sister Sparrow (Christine Jobson), Sister Robin (Sequina DuBose) and Madame
Partridge (La’Shelle Allen), the latter two of whom had roles in the evening’s second opera as well.
The three birds, dressed in the predominate colors of their plumage (e.g., red for robin) combined their bird-like qualities with those of preening church ladies, singing and chatting a mile a minute upon the proceedings. Delightfully hammy baritone Damian Norfleet strode onstage in pimp’s clothing, but including a fox’s tail, announcing in song his ravenous hunger for rabbit.
(“I can’t afford no duck,” he explained.)
Bre’r Rabbit (tenor Robert Mack, clad in overalls) soon entered, rabbit ears atop his human ones, hungry for carrots and wary of tangling with his nemesis Bre’r Fox. Bre’r Fox employed the inanimate Tar Baby ruse, baiting his trap by ventriloquizing trash talk into Tar Baby’s mouth. Tar Baby seemed to diss Bre’r Rabbit and (ultimate insult!) Bre’r Rabbit’s mother. The bird ladies sang, laughed and gossiped about how silly men are to engage in their fits of machismo. Bre’r Rabbit punched Tar Baby once, twice — becoming entrapped. Bre’r Fox exulted at his victory, but then is outsmarted by Bre’r Rabbit’s “please, please don’t throw me in the briar patch.”
You know the rest. Bre’r Rabbit proved trickster supreme, scampering away into his native briar patch while Bre’r Fox howled in pain at the pricking briars and his escaped dinner.
After the raucous success of “The Briar Patch,” which seemed over too soon, we moved from the all-projected green forest setting to a rather dreary urban apartment, soon to be swarming with projections.
The sole human inhabitant was Leslie Sinclair (admirable actor and singer Maren Weinberger Maddry), the lead character in “Companionship.”
The program gave us a plot summary, quite necessary given the difficulties of understanding the recitative as sung. Leslie, the victim of a recent mental breakdown, was compulsively baking to reclaim her life. The 207,345th baguette called The Dough
(Kate Tombaugh) came alive and proceeded, by trickery, to take over Leslie’s whole life, starting with her bed. Leslie’s purpose became feeding said bread its favorite food (thyme). One day she returned to find Dough had a male mate (also hungry, demanding, and sung by Robert Osborne). The Dough couple produced a bevy of baby baguettes, sung by six students from The Governor’s School for the Arts.
All this seemed absurd enough, but the plot is further complicated by the intermittent appearances of Leslie’s family including her sympathetic father (sung by David A. Small), shrewish mother (Allen), insincere sister (DuBose) and an ineffectual exterminator (Kevin Gwinn) who can’t kill the baguettes because they smell so good. No amount of family intervention can save Leslie from her ridiculous fate: the needy/kneady baguettes smother her to death.
The endings of both need additional work with Briar Patch’s happening too quickly and Companionship’s too slowly and indistinctly. “Briar Patch” likely has a future, especially if joined by its companion pieces, “Bre’r Rabbit and the Pot of Sense” and “Madame Partridge and Her Eggs,” to form a single entity. “Companionship,” perhaps too successful in replicating its hero’s insanity, would seem, like most baguettes, to have a sell-by date. Tricksters prevail in both, however, proving Carl correct and his ideas forever Jung.