SPRING 2012-2013 SPOTLIGHT GREAT PLAYS BEGIN WITH GREAT STORIES INVISIBLE MAN P.2 A RAISIN IN THE SUN P.6 “M” P.10 RAPTURE, BLISTER, BURN P.14 2013 SPOTLIGHT SPECTACULAR P.22 REIKEN HUNTINGTON NEWS P.26 ASTRID Teagle F. Bougere in Invisible Man. PERFORMANCE CALENDARS P.27 DIRECTED BY CHRISTOPHERcELROEN M “Theatrical brilliance! A must-see!” – CHICAGO TRIBUNE POWERFUL AMERICAN CLASSICADAPTED FOR THE STAGE BY ELLISON OREN JACOBY “Ravishing!” BASED ON THE NOVEL BY – THE WASHINGTON POST INVISIBLERALPH “STUNNING! MAN Teagle F. Bougere gives a tour de force performance!” – BROADWAYWORLD.COM AVENUE OF THE ARTS BU THEATRE “ I am an invisible man.” An idealistic young African-American man searches for identity and his place in the world in AN.4-FEB.3this epic journey through 1930s America. Ellison’s landmark American novel J about race, power, freedom, and liberty comes to life in this gripping theatrical adaptation. “This blazingly theatrical adaptation of one of the most important books of the 20th century confronts us with a blistering perspective on race in America.” – PETER DUBOIS Ralph Ellison Oren Jacoby INTEGRATING IMAGINATION: STAGING INVISIBLE MAN When Ralph Ellison insisted that no adaptation of his iconic novel literary and the performative, Ellison wanted to “take advantage of the Invisible Man be made until after his death, he wasn’t merely being novel’s capacity for telling the truth while actually telling a ‘lie,’ which possessive. “Ralph was a stickler and a perfectionist and he was not is the Afro-American folk term for an improvised story.” persuaded it could be done,” explained his friend and literary executor, Though Ellison’s meticulous writing was hardly “improvised,” he was John Callahan. A panoramic tale of race in America told through one profoundly aware of signifying, that self-aware reshuffling of meaning man’s experiences, Invisible Man is as monumental in length as it is in that is a vital feature of black culture. Reviewing Henry Louis Gates, stature, an instant classic continuously in print for sixty years. Jr.’s The Signifying Monkey, John Wideman defines signifying as While its author’s censure, its narrative scope, and its legendary status “serious play that serves as instruction, entertainment, mental exercise, might seem daunting to the adaptor, Invisible Man is a work primed preparation for interacting with friend and foe in the social arena” — for performance. “Ellison was completely theatrical in his language,” a description that also expresses theatre’s role in society. Wideman adaptor Oren Jacoby explains. “The book is poetic, dramatic, further explains that signifying “is a sign that words cannot be trusted, rhetorical.” Jacoby’s text uses only the words of the novel, realized that even the most literal utterance allows room for interpretation, that through director Christopher McElroen’s striking imagery and the language is both carnival and minefield.” voices of a ten-member ensemble. For Ellison, linguistic flexibility was not only fundamentally black — it By bringing Ellison’s language to the stage, Jacoby continues the was also fundamentally American. “America is the land of masking project that the novel began — recognizing the voice of a young black jokers,” he wrote. “We wear the mask for purposes of aggression as American as the collective voice of his nation. well as for defense, when we are projecting the future and preserving the past.” Black experience is American experience; and American Though written as a monologue, Invisible Man is rife with voices. experience is performance. “When American life is most American it is In re-conceptualizing the American novel, Ellison captured the apt to be most theatrical,” Ellison stated — a compelling argument for polyphonies of American speech. “Compared with the rich babel realizing this nation’s creative visions on the stage. of idiomatic expression around me,” he wrote, the language of modern fiction “was embarrassingly austere.” In the South and in In Ellison’s introduction to the thirtieth anniversary edition of his novel, Harlem, Ellison heard people speaking “a mixture of the folk, the he wrote, “human imagination is integrative.” It seeks to combine Biblical, the scientific, and the political. Slangy in one instance, disparate parts in the search for a higher meaning. The United States, academic in another, loaded poetically with imagery at one moment, which Ellison loved as fiercely as he critiqued, idealizes this same mathematically bare of imagery in the next.” He transcribed this rich quest for synthesis. So does the theatre, in which a range of creative chaos in Invisible Man, a profusion that allows the novel’s narrator to impulses must be brought into harmony. By linking the power of become the myriad voices of an ensemble. Ellison’s words to actors’ voices and the visual imaginations of director and designers, Oren Jacoby’s Invisible Man embarks on the same By embracing the contradictions of the vernacular, Ellison altered the journey. scope of his tale. It became grander and more intimate, tuned to both magic and the mundane. Much as Jacoby’s adaptation combines the - SAM LASMAN LEARN MORE ONLINE Visit huntingtontheatre.org/invisibleman to listen to an NPR interview with Oren Jacoby and Christopher McElroen, watch video from the world premiere production, read reviews of this production. HUNTINGTONTHEATRE.ORG 3 THE ENDURANCE OF INVISIBLE MAN On the 60th anniversary of its publication, Ralph Ellison’s landmark novel remains as compelling and provocative as on its first publication, treasured by scholars and casual readers alike. Several scholars reflect on why Invisible Man has remained a touchstone of American literary culture. “ Few writers in any tradition create a metaphor that accounts for the political condition of a group of people as well as the human condition. And he created this truly universal novel by delving deeply — deeper than anybody before him — into the fullest range of African-American culture: music, art, folklore, storytelling traditions, signifying humor. It’s an encyclopedia of black culture.” — CRITIC AND SCHOLAR HENRY LOUIS GATES, JR. “ It’s probably the first post-modern American novel. It’s probably the most influential novel in the second half of the 20th century. It influenced two or three generations of writers, black and white, and the reason is because Ellison raised the artistic and intellectual standards of the American novel.” — NOVELIST AND CRITIC CHARLES JOHNSON “ Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man encapsulates so much of modern American history and literature that it counts for several books at once. The deathbed advice of the protagonist’s grandfather — ‘affirm the principle’ — seems to signal Ellison’s own refusal to reject the potential of American democracy, despite the nation’s failure to live up to its stated ideals of liberty and equality.” — SCHOLAR JAMES KLOPPENBERG “ The Invisible Man…takes on the world, body and soul. And at the novel’s end, he only wants to last, as Hemingway put it, and to get his work done: to tell his story truer than the facts.” — ELLISON SCHOLAR ROBERT G. O’MEALLY “ The novel’s power to compel others to see their reality through the prism of African-American experience follows from Ellison’s fidelity to ‘a whole unrecorded history’ whose variable, vernacular richness equaled the range of spoken idioms Shakespeare heard in the streets and inns of Elizabethan England.” — ELLISON’S LITERARY EXECUTOR JOHN F. CALLAHAN ASTRID REIKEN From top, Teagle F. Bougere and Deidra LaWan Starnes; the cast; SEE PAGE 23 Teagle F. Bougere and Johnny Lee Davenport in Invisible Man. FOR SHOW PERFORMANCE CALENDAR AND EVENT LISTINGS 4 BOX OFFICE 617 266 0800 CURTAIN CALLS NAME Teagle F. Bougere NAME Edward James Hyland ROLE Invisible Man ROLE Mr. Norton, Brother Hambro, Ensemble HOMETOWN Smoke Bend, LA HOMETOWN Staten Island, NY WHEN HAVE YOU FELT THAT PREVIOUS HUNTINGTON ROLE YOU WERE INVISIBLE? Boss Mangan in Heartbreak House Being dismissed and stereotyped are forms WHAT IS ONE UNIVERSAL THEME OR of invisibility that I experience to varying degrees everyday. MESSAGE PRESENTED BY THE PLAY? They are insidious forms that occur in stores, museums, and Self-awareness is a quality that we all strive to attain, and the even in the park when I go for a run. Invisible Man demonstrates throughout that striving should be a IS THERE ANYTHING YOU WANTED TO DO WHEN YOU constant in our lives. WERE YOUNGER BUT NOT NOW? WHAT CHANGED? IS THERE ANYTHING YOU WANTED TO DO WHEN YOU WERE I wanted to be many different things when I was a younger YOUNGER BUT NOT NOW? WHAT CHANGED? (airline pilot, broadcaster for the San Francisco Giants, travel As a young man I tried my hand in many different professions with the circus etc.). Becoming an actor struck me as a way but was never satisfied until I found the theatre. It was there that of doing everything for a time. I felt not only at home but fulfilled by being able to reach out and touch people in a way that I had never before experienced. NAME De’Lon Grant ROLE Ralston, Tod Clifton, Ensemble NAME Deidra LaWan Starnes HOMETOWN Born in Providence, RI / ROLE Singer, Kate, Mary Rambo, Ensemble Raised in Duluth, MN HOMETOWN Washington, DC WHEN HAVE YOU FELT THAT WHAT IS ONE UNIVERSAL THEME OR YOU WERE INVISIBLE? MESSAGE PRESENTED BY THE PLAY? Performing in the show has made me acutely aware of Invisibility is perpetuated by allowing others to moments in life when I am forced into invisibility as opposed define and determine who you are. I think that one must have a to those in when I make myself invisible. As a tall, broad man, clear understanding of self so that what others think, say, or feel who can be courteous to his own detriment, I try and make about you does not end up affecting you.