oregon shakespeare festival 2011
Good Old American Music?
Todd Barton creates African Company soundscape
BY SUZI STEFFEN
P
Instead of having a character play the banjer, Barton plays the instrument
himself, mixed with a drum sample set, for the music under scenes between
Jimmy Hewlett (Kevin Kenerly) and Ann Johnson (Tiffany Rachelle Stewart).
For the white impresario Stephen Price (Michael Elich), who strongly believes
that he is a cultured, important man, Barton used opera, which contemporary
U.S. audiences may interpret as a bit stuffy or snobby,
and for the Irish constable (who has no name, and
is played by Mark Murphey), Barton placed some
subtle Irish fi ddle music in the mix.
He also wrote a waltz for a couple of scenes
involving Sarah (Gina Daniels), but it’s not the
kind of late 19th-century waltz some may
think of — “it’s not the ‘Blue Danube,’ it’s not
Strauss,” he says. “This is based on country
dances.”
Barton needed to show that the African
traditions of music, including the rhythmic,
deep djembe and the stringed banjer,
met and sometimes clashed with
European traditions, both folk
and classical. He says that
writing the music was actually
not so hard, considering that
much of the script contains
cues for this clash.
“The juxtaposition of
these two major cultures,
that was the point for me,
musically,” Barton says.
icture the sounds of New York, circa 1821: cows, pigs, horses, carriages,
boots glopping through mud and water. Tony white folks play Beethoven,
Schubert, Schumann as their servants, including a few last N.Y. slaves
and a lot of free blacks, perform their labor. In the evenings, some of the
African-Americans will travel to the African Grove, a theater company founded
by blacks, for blacks, with black actors and directors, costume designers and
scene painters.
When Todd Barton, the Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s resident composer,
started to imagine creating the sounds of the African Grove for the OSF’s The
African Company Presents Richard III, he found himself a bit stumped.
“White culture was just totally appropriated from Europe,” he says. “Likewise,
the Africans had brought their own music, which was of the djembe and the
talking drum.”
The mostly West African slaves of the U.S. and the Caribbean, and their
descendants, including many of New York’s free men and women, used the
talking drum to communicate. That drum originated, probably, within the Ghana
Empire. The djembe, or jembe, meanwhile, might have originated within the
Mali Empire, and it’s got a deeper voice. Carlyle Brown’s script for The African
Company Presents Richard III calls for both kinds of drums, so Barton knew he
needed to write music for them.
The character of Papa Shakespeare, played by Charles Robinson, had been
a griot both in West Africa and in the islands before he arrived in the U.S., and
he carries his talking drum with him to help translate meaning from one group
to another. “I imagined a talking drum in New York in the 1820s was possibly a
novelty, possibly unusual,” Barton says.
As he researched the sounds, he also learned that it’s likely Africans brought
the banjer or banza — aka the banjo — fi rst to the Caribbean islands and then the
U.S. “We were going to use one in the play, but it’s too cumbersome,” he says.
“It’s a huge gourd with skin.”
Lost Times, Claimed Places
The Revolutionary War ended in 1783, the U.S. Civil War began in 1861, and
between those two times African-Americans lived in a patchwork of ways, slowly
being freed in the Northern states or slowly being pulled into deeper and more
horrifying networks of harm in the cotton-growing Southern states. In New York —
where the slave trade was banned in 1788 and slavery was gradually abolished in
the state itself — free blacks born in the Colonies or the new United States mixed
with former Caribbean islanders. What did those African-Americans, many of whom
worked as servants for the middle- and upper-class whites of the burgeoning town,
do for fun?
One thing they did was form a company to present some of the plays of
Shakespeare, as OSF’s The African Company Presents Richard III attests. Set in 1821,
the play by Carlyle Brown depicts a clash of cultures, a time in which the African
Company (a real historical entity, founded by one William Brown, played by Peter
Macon in this production) and an upper-crust white playhouse, run by Stephen Price
(Michael Elich), plan to present Richard III on the same night.
To the thin plot of Billy Brown vs. Stephen Price the playwright adds a frustrated
love story between Ann Johnson (Tiffany Rachelle Stewart) and Jimmy Hewlett (Kevin
Kenerly), but at the moral center of the African Company are Papa Shakespeare
(Charles Robinson) and Sarah (Gina Daniels). One scene with those two is better than
most of the rest of the play which, however important it is — and oh, it is important
— plods along with the outcome assured. The fi nal scene, however, does suggest
something wonderful: Out of the ashes of denial, new talent will rise, new tales will
emerge, and free blacks will write their own way into history.
The African Company Presents Richard III runs through Nov. 5 at the Bowmer
Theatre. – Suzi Steffen
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