Waiting for the Barbarians (5 page)

Within the acts themselves historical chronology is beside the point—an aspect of the work that has, no doubt, been responsible for the lazy assertions by many reviewers that
Satyagraha
has no narrative structure at all, as if chronological sequence was the only structure there is. (“Mr. Glass … was not interested in fashioning a cogent narrative”: thus Anthony Tommasini in
The New York Times
.) Rather, the progression of the three scenes in each of the first two acts represents a discernible and suggestive (and cogent) thematic progress. In each of the first scenes we witness a harrowing representation of armed conflict: a mythic battle in Act I, in which Krishna exhorts a young hero to fight despite his momentary lapse of confidence; in Act II, an ugly confrontation between Gandhi and a band of white hooligans in 1896, on his return to South Africa from India. The second scene in each act depicts a peaceful episode in which we get to see at work the creative energies of the communal movements Gandhi founded. In Act I, it’s a scene in which we see people building dwellings in 1910 at Tolstoy Farm, the commune he founded outside of Johannesburg; in Act II, we see people working on his highly influential newspaper,
Indian Opinion
, in 1906.

The third scene in each act climactically represents a nonviolent but forceful act of political resistance. Act I ends with “The Vow,” a
stylized depiction of the September 1906 protest resolution taken by Gandhi and three thousand followers after the passage of the notorious Black Act, which sought to limit Indians’ movements by mandating identity cards and fingerprinting for all Indian residents. “Protest,” which ends the second act, shows the outcome of that earlier vow: although Gandhi and his followers had gained concessions from the British following their 1906 resolution, the British reneged on their part of the deal, and to protest this treachery Gandhi and thousands of his followers burned their government ID cards in public.

So each act stages a kind of equation: to the violent confrontation of the first scene, Gandhi opposed the peaceable cooperative efforts shown in the second scene; the product of the reaction between those two incompatible modes owed, as the third scene suggests, a little bit to both: a new kind of “war,” a nonviolent conflict that was as forceful as what you saw in scene 1 but as peaceable as what you witnessed in scene 2.

All three strands twine together to create a strong and extremely moving climax in the third act, in which elements of all three kinds of scenes—armed conflict, harmonious cooperation, the triumph of Gandhi’s new vision—come together in a representation of Gandhi’s 1913 New Castle March, an enormous and enormously successful mass protest against yet another piece of political treachery on the part of the British. (This was the triumphant climax of Gandhi’s South African activism.) Here, the principles of
satyagraha
are seen enacted on the stage. By this point we have seen Gandhi reacting to the news of the British betrayal (his head is bowed in grief); Act III includes a tableau of solidarity as his
satyagrahis
mourn with him (they walk back and forth across the stage, unspooling hundreds of yards of shimmery, glassy tape: an arresting, symbolic enactment of their oppression), and ends with a scene of nonviolent resistance, as
Gandhi’s supporters are removed, one by one, by soldiers with whom they refuse to struggle. Eventually, Gandhi is left alone on stage to sing a final aria.

And just what is he singing? Another aspect of Glass’s antitheatrical theater is how he dispenses with the usual means of indicating what’s going on—not least, dialogue. None of the words uttered by the various characters—Gandhi; his longtime wife, Kasturbai; his secretary Miss Schlesen; a couple of Indian coworkers, Mrs. Naidoo and Parsi Rustomji; a European co-worker called Kallenbach; and Mrs. Alexander, the police chief’s wife who, during the first scene of Act II, rescues him from the ugly mob at the dock, brandishing her parasol like some mighty weapon—take the form of “dialogue” in any recognizable sense. Instead, Glass and his librettist, the novelist Constance DeJong, have provided fairly perfunctory directions about the historical background, setting, and staging for each of the seven scenes in the opera, clearly meant as guidelines for the stage director and designer, as for instance this set of instructions for the second scene of Act II—the scene in which we get to see
Indian Opinion
being produced:

What the characters are actually uttering as this scene progresses—what, in fact, all the characters are uttering all the time throughout
the various scenes—are passages from the
Bhaghavad Gita
, a text that had tremendous spiritual and aesthetic importance for Gandhi, and in which he found special significance for his life’s work. Naturally, this choice on the creators’ part may strike you as strange—the
Times
critic found “radical” what he referred to as “the complete separation of sung text from dramatic action, such as it is”—but the gesture is wholly of a piece with the larger project of
Satyagraha
, which everywhere forestalls our expectations of what should take place in an opera house.

It is, in any case, inaccurate to characterize the
Bhaghavad Gita
texts as “completely separate” from the action: if you actually take the trouble to read the libretto, you can see that the Sanskrit texts have been chosen with great care. What the workers in the
Indian Opinion
scene are saying as they fold and pass along great sheets of newspaper is a highly poetic expression of what they are, in fact, doing: “Therefore, perform unceasingly the works that must be done, for the man detached who labors on to the highest must win through.” When Mrs. Alexander berates the mob that attacks Gandhi as he returns to South Africa, she angrily decries “the devilish folk” in whom “there is no purity, no morality, no truth. So they say the world has not a law nor order, nor a lord.” In the current Met production, no translation has been provided of the entire libretto, but as the production design incorporates projected portions of the sung texts, audience members get the gist of the necessary texts in each scene.

If, indeed, what
Satyagraha
aims at, in both its text and its music, is a kind of meditative state of spiritual elevation that allows us to think clearly about Gandhi’s goodness and its effects, rather than to get wrapped up in his “drama,” the use of these incantatory texts only enhances our sense that we’re participating in a kind of exalting ritual, rather than spending a couple of hours at the theater. Many
New Yorkers I know, opera lovers, balked at the idea of “sitting through four hours of Sanskrit”; but those same people would happily sit through a Te Deum (or bar mitzvah) while understanding little of the text. It’s when you see
Satyagraha
as a symbolic action that you can begin to appreciate it.

In an interesting comment he made apropos of another of his historical operas, Glass explained that he wants us to have that kind of experience—one, that is to say, which, unlike traditional theater, does not intend to ape reality, but which creates its own, new kind of reality:

Satyagraha
may be the strongest of his portrait operas precisely because its meticulously manipulated poetic text hovers at the midpoint between abstraction, on the one hand (a quality perhaps too heavily in evidence in
Einstein
, with its sometimes dauntingly abstruse metaphorical allusions to things Einsteinian—the toy trains he enjoyed as a child, for instance), and concreteness, a too-obvious connection to the events on the stage, on the other. (The latter is a failing of
Akhenaten
, which relies on a clunky framing device—a modern-day tour guide explaining the ruins of the idealistic pharaoh’s crumbled
city—to make plain the connections between its ideas and its action.) That mediation between the abstract and the real is, of course, a quality of religious rituals, one powerfully evoked by
Satyagraha
in particular.

This rigorous, ingeniously assembled spiritual work received an ideal production at the Met. The relatively young director, Phelim McDermott, and the designer, Julian Crouch, are partners in an innovative production company in England called Improbable, and they seem to have a taste for the irreverent. (They’re responsible for the Off-Broadway “junk opera,”
Shockheaded Peter
.) But it would be hard to think of a greater reverence than the one they have shown Glass and DeJong’s large and significant theater piece. They have clearly thought through not only the text and music but also the life of Gandhi himself, and for that reason virtually every image, every gesture that you see in this
Satyagraha
seems positively to resonate with significance.

Most striking is the way in which, as a homage to Gandhi’s own reverence for humble people and humble objects, almost the entire visual world of their staging is organized around two homely objects: pieces of paper and sticks. That they could make magic out of these things became evident very early on. In the scene of the mythical battle with which the work begins (“The Kuru Field of Justice”: titles projected onto the semicircular corrugated wall that was the production’s only permanent decor told you where you were in each scene), you saw at first two large groups, representing the opposing armies—and, by extension, the Indians and whites of the present-day conflict—one holding a bunch of baskets and the other holding a bunch of newspapers.

As the conflict got underway, however, these groups (who turned out to be members of the puppeteer group, Skills Ensemble, that McDermott and Crouch work with) started doing things with their bits of paper and humble baskets, twisting the former into rolls, manipulating the latter into clusters; and before you knew it, the paper had coalesced into a gigantic, vaguely arachnid monster, reaching nearly to the top of the proscenium, doing battle with an equally towering knightlike figure made entirely of baskets. The great battle announced by Krishna was symbolized by these artfully constructed champions, who fell to pieces suggestively after the musical climax, hinting at the futility of all armed conflict.

The procession of carefully paralleled scenes in Acts I and II presented many such astonishing and inventive tableaux; and yet what was so gratifying was that the eye-popping visual effects enhanced, rather than competed with, the message the text and the music were sending. Among other things, nearly all of the significant onstage action took the form of either accretions or removals of material objects—things being built up, things being stripped down—which suggests a theatrical analogue to the way in which Glass’s music achieves its effects, too.

Hence the Tolstoy Farm scene ingeniously conveyed the pleasure of cooperative labor, as the men and women manipulating bits of corrugated material back and forth across the stage were seen, suddenly, to be assembling one large dwelling place. The first scene of Act II, in which Gandhi is attacked by the mob, made use of a number of gigantic, leering papier-mâché puppet heads that marched around on sticks and stilts and clustered over the cowering Gandhi, indicating the force of European hatred for the Indian’s project. (Gandhi himself, at one point early in this scene, seemed to be represented by an endearingly awkward bird puppet, which evoked with curious accuracy his stick-legged, avian walk.)

Perhaps the most stunning example of subtle and ongoing transformations was to be found in the
Indian Opinion
scene. It began simply enough with a group of people kneeling on the floor passing impossibly long, continuous sheets of uncut newspaper along to one another; at a certain point these sheets were made to undulate horizontally across the width of the stage, creating an image of hypnotic power. Later, the sheets were bunched like ribbons and made into a kind of cape that trailed for a moment from Gandhi’s shoulder blades. A crucial cut was then made at the center of the bunch, creating streamers that were subsequently hooked to pulleys and wheeled heavenward, creating at that point a number of enormous streamers that hung down and—the final, heart-stopping climax—onto which vertically written texts in Sanskrit, Gujarati, and Roman characters were projected, sliding down the streamers like rainwater on a windowpane. This brilliantly inventive use of humble paper and characters made you feel powerfully—and quite rightly—the pleasure and beauty of words themselves: the greatest weapon in Gandhi’s arsenal.