As any reader of my blog knows, I am somewhat obsessed by the intersection of relevance and opera – two words that are considered to be mutually exclusive by many! This May, I will be traveling to Fort Worth Opera to create a new production of the most immediately relevant opera I have ever had the privilege to direct – Hydrogen Jukebox, the remarkable collaboration between poet Allen Ginsberg and Philip Glass. When my friends heard that I was directing Hydrogen Jukebox, the first question they asked was, “What is it about?” What a loaded question.
All of the possible answers point to the richness of inspiration for the opera, which of course is the poetry of Allen Ginsberg. I suppose the most accurate answer I could give is, “Hydrogen Jukebox is about us. It is about the journey we are on as a country. Where we have been, where we are now, and where we might end up.” In terms of creating an opera that is relevant – what could be more relevant than this journey?
Ginsberg said that, “all of my work is directed against those who are bent, through stupidity or design, on blowing up the planet or rendering it uninhabitable.” He was continuously disturbed by the state of the nation, and he felt compelled to raise his voice to express his disappointment with America’s unkept promises. But this particular self-assessment is only part of the story. Ginsberg’s poetry explores themes of deep personal significance that were just as often on a micro, autobiographical level as they were on a macro, societal level. Collectively, they provide us with a detailed road map of a man’s journey through the second half of the 20th century – no less powerful today, because the themes he explored are timeless.
For Hydrogen Jukebox, Philip Glass and Allen Ginsberg worked together to choose eighteen poems that they felt formed a portrait of America. As Glass explains, this portrait “covered the ’50s, ’60s, ’70s and ’80s. It also ranged in content from highly personal poems of Allen’s to his reflection on social issues: the anti-war movement, the sexual revolution, drugs, Eastern philosophy, environmental awareness — all issues that seemed “counter-cultural” in their day. Now… they seemed to have become more ‘mainstream’ and yet, because of the power of Allen’s poetry, still with their youthful energy intact.”
Ginsberg described the piece as “a ‘melodrama’…a millennial survey of what’s up-what’s on our minds, what’s the pertinent American and Planet News. Constructing the drama, we had the idea of the decline of empire, or Fall of America as ‘empire,’ and even perhaps the loss of the planet over the next few hundred years. We made a list of things we wanted to cover…there was of course Buddhism, meditation, sex, sexual revolution — in my case awareness of homosexuality and Gay lib. There was the notion of corruption in politics, the corruption of empire at the top. There are the themes of art, travel, East-meets-West and ecology, which is on everyone’s mind. And war, of course, Peace, Pacifism.” He further explained that “the title Hydrogen Jukebox comes from a verse in the poem Howl: ‘…listening to the crack of doom on the hydrogen jukebox…‘ It signifies a state of hypertrophic high-tech, a psychological state in which people are at the limit of their sensory input with civilization’s military jukebox, a loud industrial roar, or a music that begins to shake the bones and penetrate the nervous system as a hydrogen bomb may do someday, reminder of apocalypse.”
Ginsberg wanted his poems to be read aloud. Music and chanting were both important parts of Ginsberg’s live delivery during his own poetry readings, often accompanying himself on a harmonium, or being accompanied by a guitarist. The collaboration with Glass on Hydrogen Jukebox was borne out of a chance meeting between the two men at St. Mark’s bookshop in New York City. Glass explains that he asked Ginsberg if he would perform with him. “We were in the poetry section, and he grabbed a book from the shelf and pointed out Wichita Vortex Sutra. The poem, written in 1966 and reflecting the anti-war mood of the times, seemed highly appropriate for the occasion. I composed a piano piece to accompany Allen’s reading, which took place at the Schubert Theater on Broadway. Allen and I so thoroughly enjoyed the collaboration that we soon began talking about expanding our performance into an evening-length music-theater work. It was right after the 1988 presidential election, and neither Bush nor Dukakis seemed to talk about anything that was going on. I remember saying to Allen, if these guys aren’t going to talk about the issues then we should.”
A theatrical realization of Ginsberg’s poems provides us with an opportunity to explore them anew – or for many, to explore them for the first time – in multiple dimensions. Glass has provided a musical canvas upon which the poems now come to life, and it becomes our job as the production team to provide visual imagery and a physical realization that compliments the genius of Ginsberg’s text. For me, this is not the same as “interpreting” the poems, “choreographing” the poems, or even “dramatizing” the poems – though admittedly that all plays somewhat into the process of staging this piece. “Ginsberg liked the idea of writing in code and in secret for his fellow subterraneans, but he also liked the idea of writing open secrets that everyone could understand,” explains biographer Jonah Raskin. I feel our job as a production team is to help with the decoding process, but to also allow for enough space for every member of the audience to do their own decoding as well. For those who know a lot about Ginsberg and his circle of friends, there are many explicit biographical references in Hydrogen Jukebox that will resonate in a particular way. But the remarkable thing about Ginsberg’s poetry is that even if one has no previous knowledge of the “beat generation”, decades after the poems were written, the themes they explore are still incredibly relevant, always thought provoking, and often moving and even disturbing. They make us question who we are as a society. What we want to be. Where we are going. How we are getting there.
The renowned theatre director Anne Bogart says, “art, like life, is understood through experience, not explanations. As theatre artists, we cannot create an experience for an audience; rather, our job is to set up the circumstances in which an experience might occur… Should the whole audience feel and think the same thing at the same time or should each audience member feel and think something different at a different time?…It is not difficult to trigger the same emotion in everyone. What is difficult is to trigger complex association so that everyone has a different experience. Umberto Eco is his seminal book The Open Text, analyses the difference between closed and open text. In a closed text there is one possible interpretation. In an open text, there can be many.”
It is from this launching point that my design collaborators, Anya Klepikov, C. Andrew Bauer, Lisa Miller and I are approaching Hydrogen Jukebox. Poetry is among the most open of text – and Ginsberg’s poetry is among the richest ever written. In reading or listening to a Ginsberg poem, different associations are triggered in different people. There may be some common core to the responses elicited – but everyone’s personal experience, their personal history, their religious background, their politics, their sexual identity, their gender, their age, and everything else that makes them an individual influence how they receive the poem. Our hope with this production is not to impose a specific experience upon a collective audience, but rather, to empower each individual in the audience to share the experience with a community, while simultaneously allowing them the freedom to respond viscerally to what is before them, informed by their own personal histories, and where they are on their own personal journeys.
The poems that make up Hydrogen Jukebox take the singer and the listener on a journey. In some cases these journeys are quite literal, while others are more spiritual. Embracing imagery associated with travel, and going from one place to another – whether that is ultimately a real trip or a metaphysical one – became the launching point for our exploration of this fascinating work. While there are definitely themes that tie together different poems/songs in Hydrogen Jukebox, trying to construct a literal narrative – or impose a specific journey of a set of fixed characters – seemed antithetical to the entire idea behind the piece. In some ways, this opera might be considered a staged song cycle, or a sung poetry reading, or a collage of multi-sensory images…if one feels the need to place a label on what it “is”; but, it is definitely not a simple, linear narrative.
For audiences used to thinking of opera as a narrative art – the setting of a story to music – consider that opera is actually one of the least efficient ways to tell a story! Rather, the reason any “good” opera works is because it is a psychological art, richly enhanced by music and the visual arts, set in a somewhat narrative context. I will readily admit that I generally prefer operas with clear narrative structure. However, the degree of narrative really needs to be dictated by the type of story being told.
In Hydrogen Jukebox, the “story” is a slice of America – a national community facing a myriad of challenges as we travel through the decades: a community of six singers embrace the richness of Ginsberg’s text as set to music by Glass on behalf of the community watching. I am very excited to see how the audiences in Fort Worth react to this deeply relevant piece. Hydrogen Jukebox is not opera as a foreign, antique art form to be viewed passively from afar. It is a fascinating piece of theater that relies on the audience joining the performers on a deeply personal journey. What could be more exciting and relevant than that?!
