EINSTEIN ON THE BEACH: 20th Century Masterpiece

In the mid-1970s, when the country was in a deep malaise over Watergate, Vietnam, the failure of most of the late-60s protests, artists for theatre and film were producing some of the most outstanding works of art of the century. Somehow, in the midst of political upheaval, artists are a little more electrified. Hence, we have fewer great plays and films from the ‘80s than we do the ‘70s. In that latter decade, there was a new film almost each week by Scorcese, Bogdanovich, George Roy Hill, etc. In the theatre, there were the musicals by Sondheim and Prince and plays by fresh, engaging playwrights in a time when a play still had a following (today, a play makes almost no large cultural impact.)

The world of opera, however, was stagnant and staid with largely middle-aged and elderly crowds attending the standard repertory of Puccini, Verdi, and Wagner. Films were at least drawing in a new generation; opera, however, was strictly for the uptown and wealthy. That is, until an experimental stage director from Waco, Texas, Robert Wilson, and an experimental composer from Baltimore, Maryland, Philip Glass, collaborated on the monumental music-theatre work Einstein on the Beach.

Though a stage director, Wilson had come out of the world of painting and dance. Language was not his strongest suit as he was a stutterer from a very young age. So, many of his early “operas” (he was already using the term since it simply translates as “a work”) were largely silent, sometimes using abstract language often provided by an autistic poet named Christopher Knowles and using canned music for scant scenes. His operas moved at a glacial pace and lasted hours. One of his early works, KA MOUNTAIN AND GUARDenia TERRACE, lasted for a full seven-day period. He was mostly well-known in Europe, where his magnificent Deafman Glance, a silent opera, caused a sensation and he was crowned the new torch-bearer for the surrealists.

Glass virtually had no early audience except for friends in SoHo and young people, who were more receptive to his work due to their interest in hallucinogenic drugs, rock and roll, and Eastern-oriented music. Glass used amplified instruments for his self-named ensemble and had studied both traditional Western music at Julliard and with Nadia Boulanger, but also Eastern music with Ravi Shankar. The result was an extended period of additive, minimalist music which was shunned by critics as one work could be performed based on two simple notes or an additive piece of repeating notes. Glass cut his teeth theatrically with Mabou Mines, an Off-Off Broadway troupe who largely created pieces based on the works of Samuel Beckett. Glass and Wilson would inevitably work together because of the small pool of experimental theatre artists in New York.

As Wilson typically named his theatrical pieces after historical figures (even if they only had to do with the work incidentally), their piece became centered upon Albert Einstein, the central figure of science during the 2nd World War. Their work would not be autobiographical, but a series of stage pictures, dance, and music that were tangentially connected to Einstein: his clothing, the swift change of technology in the 20th century, the atomic bomb age, etc.

Einstein on the Beach is possibly the first opera where the libretto consisted almost exclusively of Wilson’s sketchbook where he planned what his stage pictures would look like. Glass wrote the score to these drawings rather than to a traditional libretto. Eventually, text would be included in the opera, though all spoken. Knowles contributed pieces in addition to two of the actors, choreographer/dancer Lucinda Childs and Samuel M. Johnson, who contributed two of the best moments of the opera—a monologue in one of the Trial scenes and the exquisite, tear-inducing finale. The only sung lyrics were numbers and solfege syllables.

The work would eventually be four and three-quarter hours long with no intermission. The piece would already be in progress when the audience entered the opera house and people were free to come and go as they pleased. After all, a single stage action in a Wilson piece could take a half an hour to perform.

I once saw Wilson speak in New York. He is as interested in the movement of a single finger as he is the entire stage picture. Actors may be asked to take fifteen minutes to walk from one side of the stage to the other both in auditions and the final product. It takes complete control of the body and tremendous stamina. That should give you a sense of the suspended time in which his works exist. 

I suppose I first encountered Einstein when studying the work of my mentor, Tony Award-winning playwright David Henry Hwang. Hwang and Glass had met after Glass had seen the former’s Sound and Beauty in New York (which he eventually adapted into the chamber opera The Sound of a Voice). Glass felt Hwang’s spare writing would lend itself well to the operatic stage and he has enlisted him in writing several libretti for him, including the innovative 1000 Airplanes on the Roof and, a rare commission from the Met, The Voyage in 1992, commemorating the 500th anniversary of Columbus’ arrival in the New World.

From there, I found a book in the library, Music by Philip Glass (by Philip Glass) which is my favorite book about the theatre. It is the telling of the creation of his trilogy of portrait operas, which includes Einstein as well as a work on M. K. Ghandi, Satyagraha, and a work on the world’s first monotheist, Akhnaten. The Trilogy concerns itself with men who changed the world in the realms of science, politics, and religion. That led me to borrow from the library the initial recording of Einstein—the music was originally difficult for my untrained ear, but it has now become so much a part of our musical culture that nearly every documentary score sounds like a plagiarism of Glass’ repertoire: the repetition, the tone, the timbre, the ambience. His musical vocabulary is now ingrained in the American arts—plus, he has become the most prolific composer of opera in the world.

While I could marvel over pictures from productions of Einstein and listen to the music (I once held the actual score in my hand and wept), the opera was rarely performed due to its immense performance costs, length, and general difficulty. Finally, in 2014, the opera’s third revival was forever preserved on DVD. That production, filmed at the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris. What a gift! Scenes I had only read about in narrative reports came alive through stunning videography.

When I think about a work of art that stands out as the singular achievement of a decade or century, I mostly can only do this with theatrical works. It is all subjective, of course, but such works typically emulate that century—both its horrors and its glories. The 20th century saw the greatest failure of human civilization (the Shoah), but also saw spectacular industrial and technological growth. I call Einstein the greatest 20th century work of art not only because it accomplishes that feat (in showing, in its final scene, the horrors of the atomic age, but also the hope in our continuing to dream up new ideas), but it also encompasses all the arts: visual, dance, music, writing, and drama.

But perhaps its best asset is that it is also open to as many different interpretations as there are people in the audience. The work was created with the intent that the audience completes the meaning. That was a dictum of Wilson and Glass’ early work and one that I wish more artists would undertake. It elevates the opera and theatre itself: the audience as collaborator.

Immerse yourself in Einstein on the Beach and more of Glass’ operas. Reach out and try harder works, works that make you work more for it.

Jefferson & Hemings

I was perhaps in my junior year of high school when the news broke that, after many years of speculation and debate, Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence and third President of the United States, did father children with one his slaves, Sally Hemings. Jefferson had always been my favorite Founding Father. John F. Kennedy once remarked at a dinner honoring a group of Nobel Prize winners, “I think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent—of human knowledge—that has ever been gathered together at the White House, with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone.” I always thought of Jefferson as a true genius—literarily, architecturally—but perhaps not politically in the sense that his presidency was so-so, and it seemed to me he was dragged kicking and screaming into most of the events that led to the founding of this nation. He was, in essence, a quiet man who wanted to be left alone.

Early in life, he lost his wife Martha and he never recovered. Reading Jefferson’s letters (and they are voluminous), you have a sense of how he changed. One of the most interesting of his correspondences is referred to as “My Head and My Heart,” written in dialogue form to the Anglo-Italian artist, Lady Maria Cosway. It is certain he loved her—he even broke his wrist permanently during one of their outings, attempting to impress her by trying to jump a fence. But that relationship was never to be as Cosway was married and Jefferson was staunchly opposed to dalliances with married women.

But, for nearly forty years, he fathered many children with Sally Hemings, his wife’s half-sister (Sally’s mother Betty belonged once to his father-in-law John Wayles). The cognitive dissonance of the man who wrote the Declaration of Independence which intoned that all men were created equal owning slaves and bedding one (and, coincidentally never freeing Sally, although he freed their children) is one many students of history can’t reconcile. The fact that most geniuses are flawed in deeper ways than we yokels can understand reveals itself more and more as time goes on. Yet people, in this activist age, have become rather tired of trying to reconcile these facts. Things are, to coin an unfortunate phrase, only black and white. No grey area allowed.

The obvious question becomes was love involved or was it what it was in many plantations of the South (sexual contact without consent). We will, of course, never know as an entire year of Jefferson’s letters was destroyed and, for years, historians denied the reports of James T. Callender, a muckraker who sold the story of Hemings to the papers in an effort to prevent Jefferson’s reelection because Tom would not give him a governmental post. Callender made the news of Sally a national scandal and, only by orchestrating the Louisiana Purchase, did Jefferson leave Washington unscathed.

The only historian for many years to even tell the tale was Dr. Fawn M. Brodie, a psychobiographer whose early work (No Man Knows My History, etc.) was inspiring, but later work (Richard Nixon: The Shaping of His Character) was perhaps blinded by hate and ill health. Her volume on Jefferson though, Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History, was finally vindicated by DNA results proving lineage through the descendants of Eston Hemings. Later scholarly inquiries include the work of Annette Gordon-Reed, whose massive The Hemingses of Monticello is a must read for anyone interested in the story. And indeed, I was.

I remember visiting Bennington College before I was accepted and being asked by the playwriting professor if I had any projects I was working on. I said I wanted to write something about Jefferson and Hemings (my idea being vacillating monologues from one character to the other through "letters"). He said, “Yeah, you have that idea and about a hundred other people.” Deflated, I abandoned my sketches.

Yet, certain dramatists and writers have tried to tell Hemmings’ story even though there is not much to tell. It is all left to conjecture. There are those who think it was rape and Stockholm Syndrome and those who believed it was love and those who believed it was somewhere in between. There is so much room for dramatic license that you could write anything, but the potency of the idea propagates more and more as our country sees itself further divided on racial lines and, while interracial relationships are more common now than when I was a child, one need only look at how such connections are mistreated in the media, whether by Spike Lee in Jungle Fever (though that mess of a film has its moments) or something more measured, like Jeff Nichols’ Loving (2016).

The first writer to try to tell the story from Sally’s point of view was novelist/poet/sculptor Barbara Chase-Riboud, whose 1979 novel Sally Hemings was a bestseller, so much so that CBS was interested into adapting it as a telefilm until staunch Hemings-deniers shut the project down. A historically minded playwright, Granville Burgess, who achieved some regional success, offered the story as a play onstage for the first time (and Dusky Sally was even published for licensing—I own one of the few copies in circulation), but a landmark court case deemed the play to be a plagiarism of Chase-Riboud’s novel and it was withdrawn.

The next time Sally was onscreen was for the Merchant-Ivory film Jefferson in Paris. The work of director James Ivory, producer Ismail Merchant, and screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala was praised for many years for elegant, prestige pictures like A Room with a View, Howards End, and The Remains of the Day. Though never money-making crowd-pleasers, they were well-respected and critically beloved. Their efforts on Jefferson in Paris (1995) were almost uniformly ignored—mainly because the film itself never makes up its mind as to what it wants to be. Cosway is there in the first half, played by Greta Scacchi, and Hemings is there in the second, played by Thandiwe Newton. An inspired (no, really!) casting choice was Nick Nolte as the lonely widower. But it was clearly Merchant-Ivory at their least strong—the film equivalent of lukewarm tap water.

It would take many years, but the heroic efforts of dramatist Tina Andrews to bring Sally’s story to the screen finally were realized in the early 2000s. Andrews had been the actress who played Valerie Grant on Days of Our Lives when it became the first soap opera to show an interracial kiss on national television. Shortly after angry, racist fan reactions, she was fired and scrimped by for many years until some took note of her plays and she had some success with her screenplay for Why Do Fools Fall in Love?, a biopic of Frankie Lymon.

Andrews necessarily believed the story of Sally should be told from an African American woman’s point of view and her view was that it was a love story—a deeply ironic and painful one, but definitely love. After all, 38 years? Due to life expectancy, that’s longer than most marriages lasted in that period. Andrews first wrote a theatrical version, The Mistress of Monticello, which was produced in the mid-80s in Chicago. This caught the attention of talent agents who shepherded her through early drafts of a screenplay version, which was never made. Many people, like her mentor Alex Haley (author of Roots), encouraged her to proceed. Her research, detailed in a book about the making of Sally Hemings: An American Scandal, was exhaustive—she visited Monticello many times and interviewed the black descendants of Jefferson.

It wasn’t until the DNA proved the relationship conconclusively that her screenplay became a four-hour miniseries starring Sam Neill and Carmen Ejogo, which premiered on CBS in 2000. I can remember my attempt to catch it on television because, by that point, I was obsessed. But bad weather in Birmingham, Alabama prevented it from being seen as the first night was wall-to-wall tornado coverage. Alas, it would be a few years until I found a VHS copy of it at a Blockbuster and finally saw it.

When comparing it with her final revised draft (printed in her book subtitled The Struggle to Tell the Controversial True Story), it is most certainly a compromised effort. The director, Charles Haid, apparently rewrote some of the scenes and, in the editing, rearranged many of the scenes for more ease of flow, sometimes with good results and sometimes not. Some elements, just being a TV miniseries from over twenty years ago, are “cringeworthy” as the kids say. Mario Van Peebles’ suicide scene (and, in fact, his entire trajectory as the freed brother of Sally) was mishandled to say the least. But Neill has great screen presence as Jefferson and Ejogo was probably seen for the first time to many American audiences (the British actress has gone on to a laudable career).

Still, when the series was screened for a crowd of 800 descendants of the Monticello manse (black and white), tears were flowing. Many of them lived their entire lifetimes being derided for knowing the truth and they felt like they saw a respectable portrayal of their family’s story for the first time. Andrews’ memoir of the production is more engaging than her teleplay in many respects (though terribly copy-edited by the folks at The Malibu Press). The story behind the story was a little stronger, but the miniseries did lead Andrews to win the 2001 Writers Guild of America Award for Original Long Form dramatic writing (as well as an NAACP Image Award)—quite a feat for the actress who shouldn’t have been fired from a TV show over twenty years before.

There have also been at least three operas of the story, two musicals, and a more recent play by Pulitzer Prize-winner Suzan-Lori Parks, Sally and Tom, which is a play-within-a-play about the writing of a play of the story (Say that three times fast). But none come close to at least asking the hard questions than Andrews’ miniseries. While she flatly denied the relationship was not coercive, she depicts many other such instances in the film and makes room for a complicated story of a complicated family, told in a no-holds-barred kind of way. Bravo for that.

As for Mr. Jefferson, my feelings on him have not changed. I accept him as a complicated man I’ll never understand. I feel for Sally and her descendants and for the scourge of slavery upon our nation. And yet, I’d like to think if Jefferson had put his money where his mouth was, he might not have had to live a secret life. But we all know, given how such stories play out even today, that would have never been possible.

O. J. and the Nature of Tragedy

In 1994, the family had rented a vacation home in Kissimmee St. Cloud, Florida so we could easily access Walt Disney World, Universal Studios, and SeaWorld (back when that park didn’t seem like such a terrible destination). It was my second or third trip to Disney. Whatever one thinks of the company as it is now, the park has retained its charm. To a child, it really is the most magical place on Earth except for, I guess, the limits of a child’s imagination. We were taking a break from the parks, swimming in the pool, and listening to the radio when the news came out that Orenthal James Simpson—"The Juice”—was a fugitive of justice, on the run from an inevitable arrest. Off to the television we went to watch the slow speed “chase” that captured the world’s attention and the magic of theme parks turned to thoughts of murder.

I was very young and suppose I only knew O. J. from The Naked Gun movies, the first of which I thought was top-notch and didn’t need the so-so sequels that followed. But suddenly the initials O. J. were on the lips of every American for good or ill—young or old, black or white, man or woman. The chase preceded my first year at the Alabama School of Fine Arts and the trial was in full swing by the time I was a seventh grader. One lunch period that year, I was discussing the case with an older African American student (the place was so small, there was little that divided us, so a seventh grader talking to a freshman was not uncommon).

She asked if I thought O. J. was guilty. I had spent the entire summer watching gavel-to-gavel coverage of the trial (I suppose a weird thing for a young boy to do, but I wasn’t exactly normal). To me, my answer seemed so self-evident. We were all so saturated with the media’s reportage, I repeated words I had heard on television: “I think he (long pause) brutally murdered both Ron and Nicole.” My “brutally” was as harsh as any of the prosecutors (and if you’ve ever seen the crime scene photos, the word is perhaps not enough to do the crime justice). But the student I gave this answer to was cautious in conversing with me from that time forward. Even in my small world (albeit in Birmingham, a town with a notorious past when it comes to race relations), the gap between races was widening. We were in a small war over a former football player turned broadcaster turned actor and the two people he killed.

It seems perverse to talk about a murder trial as being “must-see-TV” but, the entire summer before I started drama school, it was all one could think about. It did seem, as Larry King pointed out, like a show more so than a legal proceeding. All the lawyers and most of the witnesses became household names, the way you’d know any celebrity. (Even today, Marcia Clark, now a crime novelist and sometime journalist, is one of my favorite public figures—she has a bullshit detector like no one else). Young women pined for Kato Kaelin, the “Dancing Itos” were doing their Rockettes number on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, Norm Macdonald was ruining his career by landing joke upon joke about O. J. (I still regularly watch the YouTube clips of his infamous and damned funny jokes about the trial). And, of course, we first heard a name that we had no idea would become so ubiquitous today: Kardashian.

The racial divide the trial and acquittal exposed was indeed strong. When O. J. was found not guilty, like most white people, I was shocked while black people cheered. Even as a preteenager, I could see the evidence was so voluminous and the defense “Dream Team” so smug and self-righteous that “not guilty” couldn’t have possibly been the outcome. I suppose it was not until Ezra Edelman’s masterful 2016 documentary O. J.: Made in America that I truly understood why it all unraveled the way it did.

I am not much a fan of sport (save a live baseball or hockey game every now and then) but, for some reason, I always like sports documentaries. I have no “teams,” I suffer through football season with its requisite nonstop chatter, but I remember crying watching Ken Burns’ Baseball. Go figure. ESPN commissioned an excellent series of sports docs called 30 for 30. Many of the episodes were enthralling, especially the one by Alex Gibney, the only real successor to Errol Morris, though perhaps that’s an unfair comparison given Morris’ canonical strangeness. But the coup de grace was Edelman’s movie—a nearly eight-hour film you wished were eight hours longer. Deserving of its Oscar, I maintain it’s one of the finest films (not just documentaries) I’ve ever seen.

Beginning with O. J.’s rise to prominence as a Heisman Trophy-winner at the University of Southern California whilst also presenting an eagle-eye view of race relations in Los Angeles (with Rodney King’s beating being the catalyst for so much unrest), Edelman weaves the whole thing together so beautifully that it will be, for many years, the final word on the matter though, like all great art, it raises more questions than it answers.

In the film, we essentially have O. J.’s former manager telling us he confessed to the murders privately, we have jurors who fess up to the fact the verdict was not so much about O. J., but as retaliation against the acquittal of the policemen who nearly beat King to death. These items in themselves are maddening because, so many years later, there are still many of us whose hearts go out to the victims of the crime. When O. J. passed away (from a very painful form of cancer—karma?), most people on social media posted pics of Ron and Nicole. That’s the appropriate response.

Still, with his death, I realize how large a figure he loomed in all our lives, at least those of us born in the 1980s. The racial ramifications are still with us and conditions in that arena are perhaps worse than they’ve ever been. Yet, there are those who prefer to remember his athleticism. I rewatched Made in America this last weekend and, I must confess, watching him play football in historic footage was akin to watching a prima ballerina perfecting a Tour Jetée. He was remarkable player, but also a remarkably flawed human being. He lived a phony life. His charming smile belied the reality that he was a typical wife beater whose rage and jealousy, almost Othello-like, finally overcame him and brought about his downfall. The story of Ronald Goldman and Nicole Brown is indeed a tragedy. O. J.’s story, however, is a tragedy on the scale of Ancient Greek tragedy—perhaps the most precipitous fall for any major contemporary figure that we’ve seen in our lifetimes.

Now he’s gone, but our situation hasn’t improved. If anything, that verdict divided whites and blacks in an irrevocable sense. All the activists working on his behalf at the time—often as smug as the folks sitting at the defense table—made sure that race was the defining factor, the truth, the DNA, the obviousness, be damned. If he had been found guilty, perhaps L. A. would have turned Bedlam again, just like the riots of the ‘60s and ‘90s.

Racism in America is not a situation we will ever really live down, I fear. The stains of slavery will never be truly washed away. O. J.’s case simply put all the cards on the table (the race card, an unfortunate term, especially) and we watched with rabid interest. Then, because of Court TV and the like, we entered a new world where so-called “trials of the century” pop up every ten years or so. None of them, however, reach the level of societal significance that that trial did—its implications weigh on us every single day. That was the true “Trial of the Century” (at least in the U. S.)—maybe even a pivotal part of our national history, sadly to say.

Maybe that’s the greatest tragedy of all.