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'Fela!' and 'In the Next Room': When Art Meets Politics

2 years ago

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Mary C. Curtis

National Correspondent

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The name of this site is Politics Daily. Yet Woman Up crew members often turn to cultural touchstones that some might see as frivolous. That judgment would be wrong. It's surprising how often politics and pop culture mix and mingle, with subjects too touchy for tough talk frankly laid out in jokes and songs, on the stage and screen.

Who would have thought that holiday fluff like "It's Complicated" would prompt reflections by my colleagues Bonnie Goldstein, Luisita Lopez Torregrosa and Melinda Henneberger on the portrayal of women of a certain age going through the experience of both wrinkles and sexual fulfillment. Even the admittedly serious subject of emotional and sexual abuse of children in this year's "Precious" is discussed more openly since it hit the movies. Television's "Mad Men" examines the present through its perfectly art-directed 1960s past and its views on sexism, racism and the advertising industry.

On a holiday trip to New York, I got to indulge my passion for theater without abandoning my love of the political in two very different Broadway shows.

"Fela!" took a crowd-pleasing approach that mirrors its title subject. Fela Anikulapo-Kuti embedded critiques of the brutality and corruption of the Nigerian government and multinational corporations in infectious song, mainly throughout the 1970s and '80s. Nigerian officials weren't amused.

The show about a pioneer in the Afrobeat style of music -- which mixes jazz, funk, rock and traditional West African rhythms -- never stops singing or moving. It's framed as the last concert at his Shrine club in Lagos. While Fela (Sahr Ngaujah in the performance I saw) is front and center, women are always right alongside or often leading the way.

Hey, you knew a Woman Up post would be chock-full of strong women.

Fela's political consciousness was awakened by the lessons and the reading list of an activist he met in California. Fela's mother, Funmilayo (sung and acted by the magnificent Lillias White), was a woman's rights activist in her own right, who died from injuries after being thrown out a window during a soldiers' assault on Fela's compound.

Fela himself could hardly be categorized as a feminist -- he believed in polygamy and married 27 of the women in his complement of backup singers and dancers. But it's those women who, in the show, dance their way out of the background, with the help of Bill T. Jones' choreography. They cannot be denied.

"In the Next Room or the vibrator play" doesn't have singing nor dancing, but it does feature a very curious contraption that is a doctor's and his patients' best friend. In the 1880s, at -- according to the stage directions -- "the dawn of the age of electricity," a miracle device aids women, and occasionally a man, suffering from "hysteria," a catch-all that covers all manner of dissatisfaction. The doctor doesn't realize the longing of his wife, at home in the next room, with an infant she cannot nurse and desires she cannot name.

Sarah Ruhl's play is a love it or hate it affair as it explores -- as awkwardly as the characters sometimes do -- the power relationships between men and women at a time when "respectable" women hardly talked at about their needs and wants.

It's an odd kind of sex comedy, a checklist of messages covered in farce. "In the Next Room" tells its story on an intimate scale, pun intended. That this personal and political battle is fought in two rooms in a very proper home doesn't dilute the high stakes of the fight.

If you learn a little, while thoroughly enjoying yourself, then the politically aware artist has done his or her work.

Filed Under: Woman Up, Culture

Tagged: fela, Fela Anikulapo Kuti, FelaAnikulapoKuti, sarah ruhl, SarahRuhl

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