seekingferret | (no subject)

Parable of the Sower: the opera, music and libretto by Bernice Johnson Reagon and Toshi Reagon, adapted from the novel by Octavia E. Butler

The last time my friend Jon said "Hey, we should go see this show at the Public Theater, it's relevant to our highly specific interests," it was Hamilton. We failed to make it to the Public and neither of has seen Hamilton, still. So when we heard that an opera adaptation of Parable of the Sower, co-written by the founder of Sweet Honey in the Rock, was going to be playing at the Public, we vowed to go. And then we forgot for a couple weeks and it was sold out. But a few weeks after its short run at the Public, they were staging it for a couple of nights at the Quick Center at Fairfield University in Fairfield Connecticut. A two hour after-Shabbos drive for me and a shlep of a train ride for Jon and some other friends who live in the City, but we decided we would regret not going.

Parable of the Sower, the novel, is Butler's masterpiece post-apocalyptic road novel, about things falling apart in future LA and then being slowly reassembled into a new shape, guided by the strange and powerful leadership of Lauren Olamina, a teenaged empath raised in a dystopian adaptation of the Black church.

Safety in Butler's future LA has grown to be an even more massive problem than it is today as, more and more, people erode the force of community (and to some extent government) to work together to solve conflicts. Those who can afford to build gated, walled in communities of rich people and never leave their 'safe' enclaves. Outside the enclaves, things get worse and worse. (When I first read the book, I observed that in a lot of ways Butler is mirroring and translating the LA dystopia of Stephenson's contemporaneous Snow Crash, published the year before Sower. Snow Crash tells the story of the chaos outside the walls, or at least a whitewashed version of the same, the forces that eventually destroy the Olaminas' complex.)

Lauren grows up in a walled in church complex run by her preacher father, largely isolated from the rest of LA. But because of her empathy, she recognizes that the status quo cannot hold. Walls keep people apart, and people need to be together. God is change, she concludes, in a line that is both affirmation of and rejection of her childhood religion, and is the novel's centerpiece.

All this is basically conventional post-apocalyptic SF utopianism, but what makes Sower so powerful a reading experience is the specific way in which her world is not a conventional dystopian novel- it looks an awful lot more like our modern world than most dystopias. There is a not so covert argument in Sower that black people in America have been living in a dystopia already. (

freeradical42 has made the point to me that Sower was written immediately in the wake of the LA Riots, and imagines if they were a permanent condition.) Because of this, the utopian thrust of the novel's conclusion is often tremendously uplifting for those living in that dystopia. Whereas white SF fans often love the novel and consider it an important part of the modern SF canon, black SF fans hold it to their hearts. I've met a lot of African American fen who say that discovering Sower is what made them science fiction fans- they hadn't realized that stories like that could exist before Butler showed them. They hadn't understood the way that science fiction could speak to their lives.

So unsurprisingly, an opera version of Sower was in large part an opportunity for that community to get together and share a communal experience. I felt fortunate to be a part of that crowd, but it was not about me. With Toshi Reagon's encouragement, the crowd sang along with choruses, shouted approval of good lines, and generally involved themselves in the show. It was fabulous.

There was a Q&A afterward with Toshi Reagon that gave greater context to the work. Initially, she began writing alongside her mother, co-writing songs or writing songs in parallel, not necessarily envisioning a full opera but just writing songs inspired by the novel. Her mother, who is now 75, stepped back from the project over time and Toshi Reagon took over and eventually started progressing toward a full narrative over the course of the past ten years. At no time in her decade of work, Reagon said, did she ever feel that this was not a relevant and timely work.

The final shape of the piece is strongly defined by Toshi Reagon as a personality. She performs as a sort of active narrator and guide to the story. She sits in a chair in the middle rear of the stage for the whole show with her guitar on her knee and periodically interrupts the actors to fill in narrative gaps they chose not to stage as acted theater, both with spoken narrative and with interpolated songs. Sometimes this was jarring or ineffective when it reminded you that this was a piece of theater, but mostly it worked to keep the show moving and get you to the good parts.

And there were so many good parts. The music leaped all over the map, evoking gospel and soul, Parliament-style space funk and Jefferson Starship style psych rock, prophetic Bob Dylanesque folk ballads and Sweet Honey in the Rock style harmonic jams. That diversity of styles let the show convey the complexity and the difficulty of the choices faced by Lauren, her adversaries, and her allies. It actually surprised me by how well it handled that diversity- much of the second act put Lauren in the background to tell the individual stories of her followers and how they joined her band.

In sum, though I don't think it's going to be the next Hamilton, it was an incredible work of theater and I feel blessed to have gotten the chance to see it. And I really want a cast recording, the music was amazing.