The view from our awesome seats - an early Christmas present from my family!
Last night I saw In the Heights, which I’ve been wanting to see for ages and which was everything I expected it to be and more. The whole show made me laugh and cry at the exact same time, as it recreated people and places and experiences that are simultaneously familiar and completely foreign. I know I can’t really articulate everything that it made me feel and think (in part because it’s one of those things that are just moving in ways that you can’t explain), but some initial reactions:
I think the show is really remarkable for how much it makes you conscious of the audience and your role as an audience in relation to the performance on stage, because you can’t help but notice that the people in the audience are not members of the society reproduced on the stage, and that the people represented on stage are not members of the audience. (The guy behind me actually told his companion during intermission that he’d love to steal the fire hydrant stage prop so that he could use it to save his city parking spot.) The show signals right away that it’s aware of this class and race divide, as Usnavi looks out at us and says, “I bet you’ve never been up past 96th street… Take notes, I’m going to test you later.”
And yet as the audience laughs, you know it’s because they’re recognizing things they see in life, characters they’ve encountered but probably don’t really know. I know I can’t speak for everyone in the audience – for sure, some of those people probably DO know people represented on stage and DO get jokes that I probably missed (and of course some of the laughter is because it is just funny). But sometimes it felt like the audience was recognizing things they hadn’t understood but which were now being explained to them in a way they could understand, or sympathize with. And at the same time the show was criticizing us for noticing these things without really trying to understand them—or worse, jumping to our own conclusions that assume the worst about other people.
It’s amazing to me that despite the fact that this Other culture is on display (literally) for us, it’s still very much not available to us. That this is no freak-show “look at these different people and how they live” but a recognition that we audience members do not understand and therefore do not appreciate this other society. I think we’re supposed to feel jealous that we’ve never had those experiences (and at the same time aware of how lucky we were not to). When everyone on that stage interacts in such a familiar way with each other (everyone knows everyone and accepts them and talks to them and jokes with them and dances with them, etc etc etc) and we are completely shut out from that, the show is proudly demonstrating that we are incontrovertibly on the outside. Enter ambivalence about trying to help other people, since it seems to me that the display of other cultures is most problematic when it comes with an assumption that we’re supposed to find what is “wrong” so that we, the outsiders can fix it.
That this world could be available to us (Columbia is so close to these neighborhoods) but isn’t is essentially the same message the elite institutions (of which I’ve been lucky to be a part) send to them. I have more to say about this, but that’s a whole ‘nother post that I’m not ready to write yet. In the meantime, see this article (courtesy of Melissa), written by a Barnard grad with almost the exact same background/experiences as me.
I also loved the show as an exposition on movement and displacement. The whole show bustles, with many dancers on stage doing different things – there’s so much movement on stage all the time, but it still stays within the space of the stage. No one ever goes anywhere (even “off-stage” is more likely to be shown as “somewhere inside one of the houses”). This movement evokes the bustle of the city and dance-like acrobatics necessary to negotiate your way down a busy sidewalk, but it also transforms the movement from a utilitarian act of getting from one place to another into an art form that deserves to be celebrated in its own right. The tension between moving and not moving is echoed in the overall structure of the show: there’s so much coming and going in and out of the neighborhood, as everyone’s families are coming from another country, but hoping to go to another place. But despite this movement, mobility still seems impossible.
On a somewhat related note: during the songs, when all of the different lines happen at the same time, the individual melodies and lyrics are obscured because everyone is singing. Everyone has individual hopes and dreams –- a story to tell, in short –- but when they’re all overlapping and conflicting with each other it turns into both a representation of the noise of the city and the sort of muddled chaos of life. There were moments when I wasn’t sure whether I was supposed to feel like the whole was smothering the part or that the parts were coming together to form a glorious cacophony – because the show and the real life experiences it’s depicting make that line a little bit ambiguous.
But to get back to the idea of movement: at the end of the show, I felt like they had demonstrated that a person is a body and a story. When you look at a place (especially a place so full of movement) from a distance, over time, everyone comes and goes, and the faster they do it, the more replaceable they are. Each person becomes a placeholder for the one before and the one coming after, a mere body (only it’s even more chaotic than that because it’s not like there are specific roles that get passed along from person to person). But there was this staggering sense of the uniformity of people who come in, open up a small business, and then leave for the next person to do the same. BUT, the show turns it around and presents the fighting cry of the individual who fills that mere body – it says that the infinite-time version of life doesn’t mean anything because within a pocket of time there are individuals with stories, and those stories are important, define who we are. (For more on people as stories, I recently read (and loved) “Individualism and the Mystery of the Social Self,” by Wayne Booth in Freedom and Interpretation (Barbara Johnson ed. New York: Basic Books, 1993))
Human beings naturally move a lot – this is why I’m interested in refugees and displacement in general. If people naturally move around so much, if mobility is part of the human experience, why is it sometimes celebrated and sometimes a problem? Why do people choose to leave? Why do people choose to stay? If our identities are shaped in large part by those around us and the places we call home, what happens when those people and places are always changing?
And now I really, really have to stop watching youtube videos of Lin-Manuel Miranda (creator of In the Heights) and start writing my last two big papers of the semester. In case you haven't seen the show yet, it closes on January 9, and this is why you should see it:
Love this post. I'm actually relating to a lot of themes you bring up (especially changing identities) lately--will try to see this before it closes! :)
ReplyDeleteYes, exactly, except that what I ALSO love about the show is the generous way in which the characters onstage -- knowing that most of the audience "out there" has never been north of 96th St, or in the case of the out-of-towners, what 96th St. even means as a boundary -- welcome the audience in to their lives, their experience. There's no mean-ness or defiance in it, just a loving attention to the individual and collective stories of the people on stage (played, at least in the original cast, by actual Latin@ actors, giving a break to a lot of people who deserved to be better known before this), and a warm invitation to the audience to connect to and experience those stories. As a decade-long resident of Hamilton Heights (also heavily Dominican, and culturally indistinguishable from Washington Hts., except with fewer Russians) I felt like I was finally being "allowed in" to the life of my own neighbourhood. (And as a longtime New Yorker, I appreciated the little insidery things like the reference to the "1/9" train -- I still call it that in absent-minded moments, and miss the "9" in the litany of trains among which one can transfer at various points along the IRT line.)
ReplyDeleteHilton Als panned the show in The New Yorker, saying dismissively that "there is nothing new about the spectacle of singing, dancing immigrants." Way to miss the point. This isn't a bunch of "singing, dancing" pseudo-Puerto Ricans distilled into a spectacle by Leonard Bernstein; this is a story BY and FOR the immigrants themselves, told from the inside and with an extraordinary sense of openness and generosity toward the audience that to me was profoundly moving.
I also loved the way they portrayed the inherent ephemerality of immigrant culture and experience -- most materially, in the "Rosario's" sign mounted over the traces of previous waves of immigrants to the same neighbourhood: the Irish ("O'Hanrahan's") and before them, the Germans ("Konditorei"). (When Usnavi says "This is our block," he's referring to a set of coordinates in time, as well as space.) There is also an incredible subtlety in the way they portray the differences between the experiences of the "in-between" generation -- the Rosario parents, the immigrants who come to America knowing that their own lives won't ever be easy but hoping that their efforts will give their children a head start -- and those of the "first generation" to be born and raised in the U.S. -- Nina and (effectively) Usnavi.
I love that they don't pull any punches in showing how Nina is smart, but naive ("Who would I be if I had never seen Manhattan,/ If I lived in Puerto Rico with my people?" -- oh, come ON!), unsure of how to understand her own ethnicity as someone who's Puerto Rican, yet not, and envious of those who (she imagines) have a more solid grasp on their ethnic identity. I love, too, the depiction of the immigrant's dual nostalgia, the impossibility of establishing the concept of "home" on the kind of bedrock Odysseus enjoyed in Ithaka.
And, I don't want to spoil it for your readers who haven't seen it, but the ending is GENIUS -- a truly original twist on the perennial Odyssey story.
...And, of course, as an immigrant myself, I really appreciated the matter-of-fact demonstration of a point too many USians (including my in-laws) habitually overlook: that merely choosing to live here, for whatever reason, doesn't erase one's connection to the place one is from.
ReplyDeleteAnd that having a connection to your place of origin doesn't make you less deserving of being here and doesn't mean that you have no connection to where you are now.
ReplyDeleteI have more things to say about this and the rest of your comment, but no time right now!
@Melissa: Yes, I think you will relate to many things in this show (it called to mind a lot of the conversations we've had) -- which is why I'm so surprised you haven't seen it yet!! Definitely do, and I look forward to chatting about it afterwards :)