Class, Ritual, Time

Sean F. Edgecomb

Akhnaten, an opera by Philip Glass, directed by Phelim McDermott, The Metropolitan Opera, Lincoln Center, New York, NY, November 8–December 7, 2019.

he gala opening for Philip Glass’s 1983 opera, Akhnaten, at the Metro- politan Opera, was as glittering and upwardly mobile as the auditorium’s T iconic sputnik chandeliers. Conceptually imagined by director Phelim McDermott, this production originated with the English National Opera at the London Coliseum in 2016, but its transatlantic arrival seemed almost prophetic, blurring the temporal boundaries between the esoteric rites of ancient Egyptian religion and the arcane social rituals of contemporary New York’s privileged elite. This Akhnaten was about the human cost of class systems that have supported economic disparity across millennia.

Glass was inspired by the story of Amenhotep IV, the Pharaoh and iconoclast who attempted to streamline ancient Egypt’s religion from polytheism to henotheism. He elevated the sun disk Aten (and simultaneously himself as its embodiment to Akhnaten, meaning “effective for Aten”), to the apex of the Egyptian pantheon. Glass wrote the opera as the final in his “portrait” trilogy, following Einstein on the Beach (1975) and the Mahatma Ghandi–inspired Satyagraha (1979), dedicated to individuals whose transformative ideas changed the world in which they lived.

The libretto of Akhnaten liberally plays with the action of transformation as time travel by switching from the past to the present, mixing languages including Akkadian and Old Testament Hebrew to the modern language of the attendant audience (English at The Met). It engages a gradual, highly repetitive, percussion- heavy score that left the audience in a trance-like state, quite pleasantly unable to glean whether ten minutes or an hour had passed. Moreover, the opera’s narra- tive is structured episodically, bouncing between Akhnaten’s life and the present (a science lab, a classroom, and a museum), effectively juxtaposing Akhnaten’s extravagant life with the twenty-first century.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/pajj_a_00541 by guest on 02 October 2021 Glass’s trademark minimalism (for which there is no shortage of critical musicol- ogy analyses) was the perfect vehicle for McDermott to play with the concepts of time and power. The production commenced with a diaphanous show curtain, not unlike the gauzy linen garments favored by the Egyptian elite. Through the scrim was revealed a shadowy, fever dream of silhouetted characters in rhythmic unison, high on a precipice, wearing the anthropomorphic heads of Egyptian deities artfully designed by Kevin Pollard. As the curtain lifted and the mise-en- scène was slowly revealed, Tom Pye’s glittering three-tiered set of found materials appeared, symbolizing both the monolithic scale of the ancient Egyptian desire for Ozymandian permanence as well as the injustice of its class structure and the stratification of wealth. Pye’s anachronistic style for both the set and sleek projection designs of hieroglyphic symbols, including the winged sun and the eye of Horus, would have been at home in a Deco skyscraper or a contemporary Bushwick gallery show as much as in ancient Egypt. This design choice simultaneously upset the notion of time as fixed and linear while also highlighting the lasting impact of historical aesthetics after their creators were long forgotten.

Bridged by the Met’s Brutalist proscenium arch (topped by Mary Callery’s untitled 1966 sculpture that, if you squint, resembles the serpentine uraeus symbol of pharaonic crowns), the gilt, tiered auditorium extended the caste of ancient The- bes to uptown New York society, the wealthiest in the dress circle, trickling down to standing room in the far back of the auditorium. This divide of the haves and haves-less was particularly evident on gala night, where wealthy, jewel-bedecked patrons swanned to lounges for private champagne receptions, passing last-minute lottery winners who sported casual street clothing while waiting patiently for a free sip from the water cooler. Of course, this comparison is elitist at best, con- sidering the immense majority of New York’s population could never afford the price of even the cheapest ticket.

Although over three thousand years separate Egypt’s eighteenth dynasty and the present, marked class inequality continues to be performed, particularly in the haunts of the one-percent like Lincoln Center. The arrival of Akhnaten (Anthony Roth Constanzo) was yet another histrionic reminder of how wealth was (and continues to be) performed as a public ritual. First, the role of Akhnaten demands a countertenor, and Roth Constanzo’s dulcet, almost otherworldly voice trans- ported the audience to a world where kings were worshipped as divine. Second, Roth Costanzo’s movement and appearance were equally stylized—his arrival on the stage was a glacially paced descent down a staircase, fully nude. The countertenor’s otherwise hirsute body was waxed completely smooth (including a shaved head), revealing taught muscles that Roth Costanzo built through much- publicized electrical muscle stimulation workouts. The time and money invested

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/pajj_a_00541 by guest on 02 October 2021 Anthony Roth Costanzo in the title role of Philip Glass’s Akhnaten. Photo: Karen Almond. Courtesy Metropolitan Opera.

Scenes from Akhnaten. Photos: Karen Almond. Courtesy Metropolitan Opera.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/pajj_a_00541 by guest on 02 October 2021 to sculpt his physique set him apart from the other clothed actors as esteemed and otherworldly. Humorously, I encountered patrons no less plucked, tightened, or engaged in public performances of vanity exchange hushed sardonic whispers during the intermission after Act 1, mostly about Akhnaten’s exposed genitals.

The monumental legacies of the Pharaohs, whether monolithic or social, depended on lower classes accepting their essential roles in supporting system- atic oppression. Similarly, the cosmopolitan luxury of a Met Opera experience is no less dependent on the minimum wage custodians, bartenders, ushers, and other unseen labor that support every performance. This notion of the strug- gling many supporting the oligarchic few was represented on stage by a troupe of jugglers, tasked with constantly keeping balls in the air, both literally and symbolically. While the choreographed formations added to the cataleptic qual- ity of the audience experience, it also heightened any moment that a ball was dropped, leaving you to ponder the consequences of a misstep by the underlings, whether in Akhnaten’s ancient Amarna or the Upper West Side. The costumes of the juggling chorus, designed as baked-earth body suits by Kevin Pollard, further highlighted the incongruous distance between wealth: there were the extravagant, anachronistic garments of Akhnaten, Nefertiti, and Queen Tye, and their court, and to symbolize poverty, they used the actors’ bodies to expose the founda- tions on which empires were built. In contrast, Akhnaten’s chorus of daughters sported an immense, interwoven, cephalopod-like wig, which, beyond limiting their mobility, conveyed the near impossibility for even the wealthy to escape the caste into which they were born.

In the closing scene of the McDermott’s production, Akhnaten’s ghost appears in the ruins of his capital city, Akhetaten, which was rediscovered only in the nineteenth century. The spectral king melancholically contemplates his legacy, which appears to have disappeared beneath the undulating sands of Lower Egypt. Of course, the Met’s glittering production brings the ancient monarch back to life, especially an opera house resplendent with obvious wealth and privilege where legacies seemed assured, whether familial, purchased, or honorific. Lincoln Center itself is a memorial to John D. Rockefeller III, who forwarded Robert Moses’s theory of “urban blight/urban renewal” to build the complex in the 1950s and 60s. But who are the forgotten ghosts that haunt this space? Perhaps it is neither the prima donnas, directors, designers of galas passed, nor even the engineers and construction workers who labored over the buildings, but rather the thousands of poor New Yorkers forced from their homes so that the arts complex could be constructed for the leisure of the educated and wealthy.

The land reclaimed for Lincoln Center was once a neighborhood of immigrant tenements, marking one of the most immediate neighborhood gentrifications in

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/pajj_a_00541 by guest on 02 October 2021 New York City’s history. While little remains to remind the glitterati of the land’s previous, humbler history, only three days after Akhnaten closed, on Broadway, previews began for a show that celebrates the very people who were relocated from the Upper West Side—Ivo van Hove’s revival of West Side Story. The Belgian director’s radical concept, which revolved around a cast of primarily fresh-faced actors of color on a bare stage, intended to attract a younger, more diverse audience, though the closing of Broadway due to the Covid-19 pandemic makes it difficult to corroborate if van Hove’s inclusive vision succeeded.

Both Akhnaten and West Side Story bear testament to the human desire to tell our stories in hopes of not being forgotten. Although the profiles of audiences at The Metropolitan Opera House or the Broadway Theatre might seem different, the economic inaccessibility of these spaces for most Americans is closer to the unjust world of ancient Egypt than those of us who are privileged enough to attend such performances might like to admit.

SEAN F. EDGECOMB is associate professor of theatre and performance at The Graduate Center and The College of Staten Island, CUNY. He is cur- rently completing his second monograph, A Queer Bestiary: Ritual Anthro- pomorphism and Animal Symbolism in Contemporary LGBTQ+ Performance.

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