THE KING AND I by Lincoln Center Theater

Spring 2015 Issue Number 65

THE KING AND I

Production sketch from The King and I © Micheal Yeargan.

Lincoln Center Theater Review A publication of Lincoln Center Theater Spring 2015, Issue Number 65 Alexis Gargagliano, Editor John Guare, Anne Cattaneo, Executive Editors Tamar Cohen, Art Direction, Design David Leopold, Picture Editor Carol Anderson, Copy Editor The Vivian Beaumont Theater, Inc., Board of Directors J. Tomilson Hill, Chairman Eric M. Mindich, President Brooke Garber Neidich and Leonard Tow, Vice Chairmen Augustus K. Oliver, Chairman, Executive Committee John W. Rowe, Treasurer Elizabeth Peters, Secretary André Bishop Producing Artistic Director Dorothy Berwin Jessica M. Bibliowicz Allison M. Blinken James-Keith Brown H. Rodgin Cohen Jonathan Z. Cohen Ida Cole Donald G. Drapkin Curtland E. Fields Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Marlene Hess Judith Hiltz Linda LeRoy Janklow, Chairman Emeritus Jane Lisman Katz Betsy Kenny Lack Kewsong Lee Memrie M. Lewis

Robert E. Linton Ninah Lynne Phyllis Mailman Ellen R. Marram John Morning Elyse Newhouse Robert Pohly Isabel Rose Stephanie Shuman Josh Silverman Howard Sloan David F. Solomon Tracey Travis Barbara Walters David Warren Robert G. Wilmers William D. Zabel

John B. Beinecke, Chairman Emeritus, Mrs. Leonard Block, John S. Chalsty, Constance L. Clapp, Ellen Katz, Susan Newhouse, Victor H. Palmieri, Elihu Rose, Daryl Roth, Lowell M. Schulman Honorary Trustees Hon. John V. Lindsay Founding Chairman

The Rosenthal Family Foundation—Jamie Rosenthal Wolf, David Wolf, Rick Rosenthal and Nancy Stephens, Directors— is the Lincoln Center Theater Review’s founding and sustaining donor. Special thanks to the Drue Heinz Trust for supporting the Lincoln Center Theater Review. This edition of the Lincoln Center Theater Review is also supported by the David C. Horn Foundation. TO SUBSCRIBE to the magazine, please go to the Lincoln Center Theater Review website—lctreview.org. © 2015 Lincoln Center Theater, a not-for-profit organization. All rights reserved.

audiences into a time and place and by telling compelling stories that make us feel and think deeply about the world of the play and about our own world. A particular alchemy of creativity and vision is essential to achieving such a transformative act. This special, expanded edition of the Lincoln Center Theater Review celebrates this iconic musical and the collaboration, inspiration, and imagination necessary to make a production of this scope possible. We have featured some of the inspiration for the original production, including excerpts from Anna Leonowens’s An English Governess at the Siamese Court and from Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. And our conversation with the production’s director, Bartlett Sher; the set designer, Michael Yeargan; and the costume designer, Catherine Zuber, offers a glimpse into the amazing collaboration that has revived this classic musical for our own time. The editors of the magazine were particularly

THE KING AND I King Mongkut’s Siam by Tamara Loos A Modern Twist: An Interview with Bartlett Sher, Catherine Zuber, and Michael Yeargan

struck by Sher’s observation that the story of Tuptim—a young, well-educated woman who was given to King Mongkut by the king of Burma as a gift and who, in love with someone else, advocates for her freedom—resonates even today in the stories of young women like Malala Yousafzai, whose 2014 In this issue you will discover the correspondence of King Mongkut, along with history about Siam and previously unpublished material from the original production of The King and I; you will also get

The Happiest Girl in the World: Malala Yousafzai’s Nobel Lecture

A Story in Motion by Amanda Vaill

A Woman Adventurer by Frances Wilson

Houses vs. Cabins by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins

The Heart Has No Tears to Give: An Excerpt from Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe

What’s in a Name? by Katori Hall

Shadows & Whispers of the Harem: An Excerpt from The English Governess at the Siamese Court by Anna Leonowens

A Happy Tune: An Interview with Sandy Kennedy

On the “I” in The King and I by Todd Decker

Corresponding with a King

Front cover artwork by Omnivore. www.omnivorous.org

Nobel Peace Prize lecture we have reprinted here.

an inside look at the choreography of the famed ballet “The Small House of Uncle Thomas.” We look at the big ideas that the musicals of Rodgers & Hammerstein distill with such deceptive lightness, and the Review explores the themes that anchor The King and I—from the role of women during the late nineteenth century to the issue that defined the century, the transition from slavery to freedom, and the complexity of modernization, Westernization, and the final end of colonization. We are delighted to present an issue that is as wide-ranging as this magnificent production, and which, like it, includes a wonderful roster of talented contributors. Finally, we thank the Rodgers & Hammerstein Organization, and Theodore Chapin for his ideas and his support. —The Editors

CONCUBINES WITH CAMERAS © National Archive of Thailand, courtesy of Dr. Leslie A. Woodhouse.

Lincoln Center Theater is grateful to the Leon Levy Foundation for generously supporting this issue of the Lincoln Center Theater Review, devoted to The King and I.

Rodgers & Hammerstein’s The King and I embodies theater’s power to transform—both by drawing

King Chulalongkorn ruled Siam from 1868 to 1910; his reign is extolled as a time when the country maintained its independence in the face of encroaching colonial powers and marked a period of significant modernization. Photography was one of the monarch’s passions, and he took many photographs; so did his concubines and his children. The palace womens’ photography wasn’t simply a nineteenth-century lark but reflected a significant shift in Siam’s culture and politics. The photographs were transformative. For the first time, these images made the royal women, who had always been hidden behind the walls of the inner palace, visible to the general public of Siam. The royal women themselves exemplified the King’s

belief in modernity and a degree of Westernization. Many of the photographs by the royal women were taken by Chao Chom (royal consort) Erb Bunnag and her sister Uen. They were descendants of a family that had been a powerful force in Siamese politics since the sixteenth century. They were among the first royal women to live in Dusit Palace, whose architecture was inspired by the garden palaces the King had seen during his time in Europe. These rarely seen photographs by and of the royal consorts in the harem during King Chulalongkorn’s reign, rediscovered and researched by Leslie Woodhouse, accompany the Review’s opening article. 3

Production sketch from The King and I © Micheal Yeargan.

THE KING AND I King Mongkut’s Siam by Tamara Loos A Modern Twist: An Interview with Bartlett Sher, Catherine Zuber, and Michael Yeargan

The Happiest Girl in the World: Malala Yousafzai’s Nobel Lecture

A Story in Motion by Amanda Vaill

A Woman Adventurer by Frances Wilson

Houses vs. Cabins by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins

The Heart Has No Tears to Give: An Excerpt from Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe

What’s in a Name? by Katori Hall

Shadows & Whispers of the Harem: An Excerpt from The English Governess at the Siamese Court by Anna Leonowens

A Happy Tune: An Interview with Sandy Kennedy

On the “I” in The King and I by Todd Decker

Corresponding with a King

Front cover artwork by Omnivore. www.omnivorous.org

Nobel Peace Prize lecture we have reprinted here.

CONCUBINES WITH CAMERAS © National Archive of Thailand, courtesy of Dr. Leslie A. Woodhouse.

Lincoln Center Theater is grateful to the Leon Levy Foundation for generously supporting this issue of the Lincoln Center Theater Review, devoted to The King and I.

Rodgers & Hammerstein’s The King and I embodies theater’s power to transform—both by drawing

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King Mongkut's Siam

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BY TAMA RA L OOS

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A MODERN TWIST:

An Interview with Bartlett Sher, Catherine Zuber, and Michael Yeargan

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THE HAPPIEST GIRL IN THE WORLD: Malala Yousafzai's Nobel Lecture

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Mosquitoes and mangroves greeted intrepid visitors tacking upriver to Bangkok in the mid-1800s. Siam’s king, Rama III, ordered blacksmiths from across his realm to contribute links to a great iron chain that hung, like a choker checking the passage of warships, across the river’s throat. In the 1850s, village life along the river shores struck newcomers as rural. No phones, no electricity, no railway, no trams, no mint, no bank or post office yet graced the banks of the canals that provided the main passageway through the capital of Siam. Despite the lack of these modern amenities, Bangkok bustled with commerce conducted by market women and Chinese immigrants, boisterously hawking their wares. Before world travelers like Anna Leonowens began writing about their experiences in Siam, only a handful of books about the kingdom existed. It was perhaps best known among Europeans and Americans as the birthplace of the famous conjoined Siamese twins, Chang and Eng, who had toured Europe and the U.S. in the early 1830s. The West’s insatiable desire to seek out the exotic East did not blind Siam’s ruling élite to the politics behind such exhibitions. By the time Prince Mongkut, who was born in 1804, came of age, Western imperial nations occupied the new center of political and economic gravity for Siam. Prince Mongkut spent decades in the Buddhist monkhood before he became the king of Siam in 1851, but he was no stranger to politics. From his spartan quarters in Bowonniwet temple, in Bangkok, the princely priest keenly observed the world changing around him. Tectonic might be the term that best describes those shifts, both inside and outside Siam. To avoid a succession struggle, the young prince was ordained as a monk when he was twenty and remained in the monkhood until his older half brother, Rama III, passed away. He ascended the throne at the age of forty-seven, by which point French forces and the British East India Company had begun colonizing Siam’s greatest foes in the region—Burma and Vietnam. On Siam’s southern and eastern flanks, the British occupied Singapore, Penang, portions of the Malay Peninsula, and more than half of Burma. France aggressively sought to catch up with Britain by laying claim to parts of southern Vietnam and Cambodia on Siam’s west. King Mongkut’s Siam, with its as yet fuzzy boundaries, sat anxiously between these two aggrandizing imperial powers. King Mongkut wrote perceptively about this predicament: “Since we are now being constantly abused by the French because we will not allow ourselves to be placed under their dominion like the Cambodians, it is for us to decide what we are going to do; whether to swim upriver to make friends with the crocodile [France] or to swim out to sea and hang on to the whale [Britain].” Crocodiles bite, and whales crush. His options were limited, but options did indeed exist. King Mongkut and the ruling elite who supported him had the luck of geography and timing on their side: Siam offered a buffer zone between the British and the French empires in Southeast Asia. King Mongkut also recognized that modernizing Siam’s military would not save his relatively small kingdom from colonialism. He observed that “the only weapons that will be of real use to us in the future will be our mouths and our hearts.” To this end, King Mongkut conducted a voluminous correspondence with various heads of state abroad, including Pope Pius

IX; his “affectionate sister” of the “same royal race,” Queen Victoria; and U.S. Presidents Pierce, Buchanan, and Lincoln. Western rulers often wrote back with similar affect. President Lincoln referred to him as “Great and good friend.” Strategically, King Mongkut and his cohort believed that if they prevented any single country from having dominance within Siam and, instead, balanced them against one another, they could prevent colonization of the kingdom. They met the challenge head on by, paradoxically, signing treaties with more than a dozen countries, including Britain and France. The treaties gave foreign nations economic and legal advantages within Siam that obviated the rationale for colonization. Britain came to dominate Siam’s export trade through such measures. Foreign and even Asian subjects of treaty powers could break Siamese law with impunity. So while Siam, alone among its Southeast Asian neighbors, formally maintained its political independence, it suffered, instead, a form of indirect colonization. In return for these concessions to foreign nations, Siam’s king and his faction maintained their positions at the helm of an “independent” Siam. One of King Mongkut’s strongest supporters, Chuang Bunnag, makes an appearance in Anna Leonowens’s books as the Prime Minister or Kralahome (Minister of Defense). During King Mongkut’s reign, Chuang Bunnag became the patriarch of the Bunnag family, and ruled Siam as King Chulalongkorn’s regent after Mongkut died. Although he was a nobleman rather than a member of royalty, he had no rivals to his power which was based on his command of most of the army and his occupation of key positions in the government. When asked by a relative why he never usurped the throne himself, he replied, “Why should I bother? I have everything a man could desire.” After signing the unequal treaties with foreign nations, Siam’s élite wrestled with managing the ensuing seismic shifts not just in Siam’s economy and foreign relations but in its domestic political hierarchy as well. The kingdom opened to new markets, new technologies, and an imperial context that continued to threaten Siam’s independence. Straddling this transformation was King Mongkut, himself a paradox reflecting the pressures and the limits of his context. On the one hand, he was an intellectual omnivore with an insatiable appetite for knowledge about science, geography, mechanical clocks, astrology, and language. He also stood on the progressive end of the scale within Siam when it came to foreign relations and openness to the world. On the other hand, King Mongkut maintained a rigid conservatism in regard to his kingdom’s social hierarchy, the elevated position of the monarchy, polygyny, royal rituals, and Buddhist reforms. As a monk, Mongkut created a new Buddhist order that followed a stricter monastic discipline. He also became an amateur astronomer as part of his larger mission to combat superstitious beliefs that he felt too strongly tainted Siamese spirituality. He learned languages—Pali, royal Thai, English, and Latin—and engaged in debates with members of Siam’s foreign community—missionaries, merchants, and diplomatic representatives. He preferred to sign letters to foreigners with his Latin appellation. From American Protestant missionaries, Mongkut learned English. While it is unlikely that he ever uttered the words “I think your Moses should have been a fool!,” as he does in the musical. King Mongkut’s English was indeed imperfect. Yet he 5

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King Mongkut's Siam

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

BY TAMA RA L OOS

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A MODERN TWIST:

An Interview with Bartlett Sher, Catherine Zuber, and Michael Yeargan

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THE HAPPIEST GIRL IN THE WORLD: Malala Yousafzai's Nobel Lecture

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families, polygynous liaisons with the monarch ensured that there would be sufficient numbers of male elite to fill the highest posts in the government. Staffing officialdom with royalty was possible only because of polygynous procreation, which provided more than three hundred children to the first five kings of the Chakri dynasty (1782–1910). Clearly, polygyny’s political purpose dovetailed with its sexual function, at least for the King. Aside from the King and his prepubescent sons, no men—not even eunuchs—lived in Siam’s Inner Palace. As soon as young princes reached the auspicious age of eleven or thirteen, they received quarters outside the Grand Palace, along with a retinue and consorts. Prince Mongkut obtained his when he turned thirteen. By the time he was ordained as a monk, at the age of twenty, he had already fathered two children. For the next twenty-seven years, Prince Mongkut lived a life of celibacy. While in the monkhood, he suffered a partial paralysis of the muscles on one side of his face. His rather full lips drooped on the left side. He rarely smiled, at least for photographs. This may have been because he had lost his teeth by the time he became king and had replaced the lower set with hard, deep-red-colored sappanwood. Foreign observers described him as homely, old-looking, austere, thin, severe, grave, and haggard. Others more generously considered him a pleasant, intelligent-faced man. Regardless of his appearance, once crowned King Mongkut immediately obtained dozens of wives and fathered more children within a year. By the time he died, in 1868, the King had more than eighty children: no mean feat for someone who had spent nearly thirty years as a celibate monk. He felt affection for his children, particularly his eldest son, Prince Chulalongkorn, by a royal queen who died shortly before Anna Leonowens arrived. He also cared for many of the women who graced the halls of his Inner Palace. Anna’s depiction of harem life certainly suggests that King Mongkut behaved callously toward his wives, who existed only to afford him pleasure and progeny. Yet royal consorts were not exactly victims. They and their families benefited materially from their position in the palace, where they engaged in feuds, developed friendships, raised families, and continually sought the King’s favor. Their relationships with one another depended, ultimately, on the quality of their connection with King Mongkut. King Mongkut hints at the precarious nature of their relative positions in the palace pecking order in a letter written to his new favorite in 1854. While out in his royal barge, the King watched as a very fast boat, heavily curtained and full of women, sped toward him. He shouted at the passengers several times, demanding to know who owned the boat. The women giggled with merry abandon and ignored the King’s inquiries, which annoyed everyone on the royal barge. King Mongkut considered opening fire on the boat as it brazenly attempted to race with his barge. When the King’s men finally caught up with the insolent craft, they discovered that it was owned by one of his royal consorts. He wrote, “She still regards herself as my favorite and would follow me just to ridicule me in front of my new young wives.” For her boldly public act of teasing the monarch, she was chastised and fell further from the King’s favor. The merry laughter and

The West’s insatiable desire to seek out the exotic East did not blind Siam’s ruling elite to the politics behind such exhibitions.

was proud of his ability to speak it. As a monk, he studied for several years with the Reverend Jesse Caswell, an American who considered Prince Mongkut’s desire to learn English indefatigable. By the time Mongkut became king, he could communicate in quaint, imperfect English with foreign heads of state, none of whom could speak Thai. He also used English to dispute erroneous details published about Siam and his kingship in the newspapers then debuting in the kingdom of Siam. King Mongkut challenged the accuracy of reporting about his wives in the pages of Siam’s first English-language paper, the Bangkok Calendar, published by Dan Beach Bradley, an American missionary doctor. In its pages, Mongkut took issue with Bradley for claiming that the King had more wives than one of his debonair half brothers. Bradley printed the correction in his paper, along with a persnickety retort: “Does it not show a great stride towards reform in that most pernicious sentiment, that the honor and glory of princes is enhanced by the number of his wives?” Bradley’s views against polygyny—the system by which one man can have multiple wives—aligned with that of most foreigners, even when some of them, too, practiced it. In their view, the institution of polygyny offered proof of Siam’s uncivilized status. However, polygyny served a crucial political function that Westerners, including Anna Leonowens, failed to recognize. King Mongkut was caught between two systems of belief: one that considered numerous wives to be a sign of barbarism, and another that regarded marriage between powerful families as indispensable to building political alliances. Historically, polygyny performed at least two kinds of political work in Siam. First, it integrated geographically disparate settlements into the kingdom. Unlike Europe, land was abundant in Siam, but the population density remained very low until the late nineteenth century. Across empty, jungle-filled territory, Siam’s king forged personal alliances with heads of smaller settlements through marriage with the latter’s daughters. In return for offering protection (or agreeing not to send punitive forces), the King expected annual tribute in the form of natural resources, symbolic items, laborers, and, later, taxes. As a consequence, the kingdom operated through a network of personal bonds. In this context, polygyny was not reducible to a sexual relationship, a feature of patriarchy, or a marital form, as many Western observers narrowly interpreted it. King Mongkut’s dynastic rule was made possible by the institution of the Inner Palace—the “harem”—founded upon the gifting of women, which cemented the bonds among powerful men. The presentation of female relatives to the King by provincial and urban elite families provided a concrete and continuous connection of blood, communication, and loyalty between the monarch and his subordinates. As a result, the Inner Palace became the home of several thousand women who were connected to the King through blood, marriage, service (as slaves or maids-in-waiting), or as officials who helped run the small all-female city within the palace walls. Far from being an institution that was parasitical or peripheral to political history, polygyny helped integrate the kingdom both socially and politically. The second function of the institution of polygyny was no less significant. In addition to cementing bonds among ruling

the public display of bravado suggest both the upside and the downside of being part of the King’s retinue. The institution of polygyny, linked as intimately as it was to Siam’s political structure, began to change permanently during King Mongkut’s reign. The treaties signed with foreign powers intensified Siam’s integration into the world trading system. This, in turn, effected structural changes in the economy and in the political relationship between subjects and rulers. This restructuring depoliticized the function of polygyny. While men of royal blood and relatives of royal consorts continued to staff the administration at the highest levels, the integrative function of polygyny began to weaken under King Mongkut. Cartography gradually changed notions of belonging from one based on personalized ties between outlying settlements and the monarch in Bangkok to one based on cadastral maps. Finally, the harem was all but abolished after King Mongkut’s son King Chulalongkorn died in 1910. This is not to say that polygyny ceased to exist. However, its function as a mode of political strategy ended, and it was gradually transformed into a marker of élite class status and a passionately debated moral concern. In any case, Siam’s rulers failed to adequately convince foreigners of the political role of marital alliances, making it easy for Western observers to condemn the Inner Palace as a site of sexual depravity. Their narrow castigation of polygyny as a sexual perversion, an injustice to women, and a sign of an uncivilized nation, reframed the practice within Western imperial discourses of civilization. Most famous and controversial among Western observers was Anna Leonowens, who cemented the interpretation of polygyny as slavery in the popular imagination of Westerners. Her books, The English Governess at the Siamese Court (1870)

and Siamese Harem Life (1873), were well-nigh required reading by Westerners, particularly women heading to Siam as missionaries, travelers, and wives of Western men working in Siam. Leonowens’s friendship with Harriet Beecher Stowe undoubtedly influenced her treatment of polygyny as a form of bondage. Combining the issues of women’s rights and abolition also sold well to the American public. Anna Leonowens creatively reinvented herself through her publications, written several years after she left Siam in 1867. In contrast to fictive versions of her relationship with King Mongkut, Leonowens did not witness King Mongkut’s death in 1868. That year, he set out to prove to court astrologers that the science of astronomy, rather than the mercurial moods of the gods, could predict an eclipse. To that end, King Mongkut brought an entourage of more than a thousand people—Siamese and foreign—to view the event from a beach along the Gulf of Siam in August. As observers saluted the King’s accurate prediction of the eclipse with a flute of champagne, malaria spread through the camp and infected the monarch. About a month later, King Mongkut passed away. King Chulalongkorn, an orphaned teenager, ascended the throne and began a new reign, in a new era. More than thirty years later, the King happened to meet his former tutor, Anna Leonowens, in London. Her portrayal of his father pained him, and he is said to have asked, “You made all the world laugh at him, Mem [sic]. Why did you do it?” His heartfelt inquiry continues to haunt the memory of Anna Leonowens and her controversial legacy in Siam to this day. Tamara Loos is an associate professor of History and Southeast Asian Studies at Cornell University. She published Subject Siam: Family, Law, and Colonial Modernity in Thailand in 2006. Her new book, Bones Around My Neck: Silence and Secrets Under Siamese Absolutism, is forthcoming.

The West’s insatiable desire to seek out the exotic East did not blind Siam’s ruling elite to the politics behind such exhibitions.

Last fall, co-executive editor Anne Cattaneo discussed Lincoln Center Theater’s upcoming production of The King and I with its director, Bartlett Sher (LCT’s resident director), set designer, Michael Yeargan (South Pacific, Awake and Sing!, Woman on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown) and costume designer, Catherine Zuber (South Pacific, Awake and Sing!, The Coast of Utopia).

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A MODERN TWIST:

An Interview with Bartlett Sher, Catherine Zuber, and Michael Yeargan

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! All set sketches © Michael Yeargan. All costume sketches © Catherine Zuber.

Anne Cattaneo: I’m curious about where this production began. Bartlett Sher: Because we had done a production of South Pacific, which went pretty well, André Bishop, our fearless leader here at Lincoln Center Theater, had been talking about doing The King and I. The initial phases, during which we talk about the very broad ideas, began while the three of us were doing Gounod’s Faust in Baden-Baden, in Germany. Over several weeks we spent a lot of time working daily on that show, and in the evening enjoying a lot of time together and discussing this production. AC: So you went to Baden-Baden knowing that you’d be working on The King and I. To prepare, had you all read the script? Or seen the movie? Catherine Zuber: I’ve seen the movies in the past, but I don’t like to see any reference material until I’m finished with the design; I find it gets in the way. I like to know that my responses are truly from myself and not influenced. Once the design is finished, I look at the films. Michael Yeargan: Well, I grew up with the movie, and as a kid I always wondered why this guy was running around in his pajamas all the time. So, as an adult, it has been fascinating for me to read about King Mongkut and Anna Leonowens, who is such an interesting character, and whom I knew so little about. It was wonderful to do that kind of research rather than just looking at sketches, pictures, and other visual materials.

AC: Everyone who creates a work of art based on a real life has to pick and choose what aspect of the core story he or she wants to use. BS: Yes, there are two aspects to this. One is the purely historical aspect of Thailand in the mid-nineteenth century, and Anna Leonowens’s life; the other is the interpretative aspect of what Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein did with the story in the early 1950s and how the story they wrote has come to be reinterpreted. So you stand inside a couple of corridors of interpretation. This becomes this kind of highly hermeneutic exercise, where you’re really trying to plumb through all these different layers of how the thing is perceived. From my point of view, setting parameters for the design really had to do with how to represent the key questions in the piece that were most resonant at the time it was written in the 1950s and what questions are most resonant now. So my entrance point came from the journalist Nicholas Kristof, who writes a lot about the problem of transitioning from traditional to contemporary modern culture in the Islamic world and developing countries. This transition to modernity is exactly what Rodgers and Hammerstein were addressing in the original piece, and it is what resonates most fully today. Kristof would say that the most dangerous thing in the developing world now is the education of women and giving a young woman a book. So in 1862, when Anna Leonowens, whatever she represents as a Westerner, gives Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin to a young woman who is involuntarily given to the King as a present and is forced to join this household of many wives under the rule of the King, it is an experience of freedom that is really complex. That same problem resonated in 1950, and it resonates now and sheds light on the immediate significance of The King and I

today. Once we understood that, we could branch out and begin to build a design. One of the problems of the past designs is that they obscure this issue through decoration. MY: Exactly. BS: The opulence of past productions—and I’m not criticizing them—which are very ornate and very exotic in a way that contemporary critics would call Orientalism, is the very trap we have to avoid as we delve into the important question that Rodgers and Hammerstein were addressing, that Anna Leonowens brought up, and that historians look at inside this story. AC: How do you do that, Michael? MY: First, I looked at every picture I could find of the Royal Palace of Siam and was terrified, because all the other designs of The King and I are based on the palace’s actual architecture. It’s like an explosion in a tile factory. You’ve never seen so many tiles and colors, and all put together in the most amazing way. But when you imagine doing a play in front of it where do your eyes go? Also, in talking to Bart and in reading all this material, I felt like you couldn’t do the play in that rich world. You had to strip it down. You had to find a more iconic way to do it. So we found these pictures of Buddhist temples with teakwood and gold that was meticulously put on by monks, and this gave it a whole different quality. It’s still ornate, but you can look at it, you can find people in it. The key was this one picture of a temple, with this big canopy over it, that just became the basic thrust of the set. Because you’re also dealing with the space of the Beaumont, which is amazing—there’s this intimate platform downstage, and then this vast world upstage, and the challenge is to link those two worlds so that one can inform the other. AC: So you’re really looking at focusing on the actors, as opposed to focusing on the exotic atmosphere. MY: Exactly. 9

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A MODERN TWIST:

An Interview with Bartlett Sher, Catherine Zuber, and Michael Yeargan

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! All set sketches © Michael Yeargan. All costume sketches © Catherine Zuber.

In this production, we have to try to strike a sparer tone that reflects something truthful about the inner life of the people rather than just putting them in big exotic clothes for a kind of dress parade or a gallery of exoticness.

BS: You have to be very careful. Looking at the research, there’s a kind of powerful reality to the life. It’s not quite so many decorative headdresses. The women actually had very simple hair. The kids would have worn mostly small white shirts. We learned that there is no distinguishing dress between sexes up to the age of twelve. In terms of clothing and space, the Thai have their own history, which stands in juxtaposition to the exotic imagination of the 1950s or the exotic imagination of the 1990s. In this production, we have to try to strike a sparer tone that reflects something truthful about the inner life of the people rather than just putting them in big exotic clothes for a kind of dress parade or a gallery of exoticness. So the spatial relationship to the events of the play is built to create a kind of open clarity and simplicity. MY: There’s one section of the Royal Palace that no one knows much about, and that I always thought was this big seraglio, like a harem with all these women sitting around, but it wasn’t. The King built specific mansions within this palace. Like a suburb, almost—these huge Western-style houses for his wives. It was a whole city. BS: A complete city of women, with its own guards, its own judges, its own laws. It had almost five thousand people in it. All women, except for the youngest of the boys. The real goal of the entire city within the palace is to protect the royal line of the King. That’s the central issue of Tuptim and the threat of Lun Tha. I don’t think the King really cares one way or another about her. It’s not about love; it’s that in order to maintain power you have to protect the royal line. The King wasn’t necessarily the most powerful man in the kingdom. The Kralahome, the Prime Minister, was easily as powerful, as he controlled trade, but he wasn’t royal. CZ: I think we all approached this with a respect for Thai culture and an understanding 10

that it has its own set of rules and traditions. The King is a very complex, interesting man. He’s very charming, very open to Western ideas, as demonstrated by the fact that he had Anna come tutor his children. AC: She’s open to him and his culture, and he’s open to hers. CZ: But of course, part of the reason he wanted a woman to teach his children was that he was threatened by having a man come in and be so intimate with his wives and his children. BS: He was also dealing with serious issues, given that Thailand was being surrounded by colonizing forces—England, France, the Dutch. He protected his culture, he supported it, and he was trying to pull it slowly into modernity. Similar questions are still arising in the Middle East with regard to how women are treated, where they can go and what they can do, and protecting levels of male power. The best example of where the Rodgers and Hammerstein stuff kind of falls in the middle of the problem here is one number called “Western People Funny,” which, in the traditional sense, is an extremely stereotyped song of the Thai, in their naïveté, trying on Western dress and talking, ha-haha, about how Western people are so funny. Whereas now I think all you have to do is flip it in the same way we did with “Happy Talk” in South Pacific. You flip it and you suddenly look at it from the point of view of the dominant culture instead of the subordinate culture, which is the way, I’m sure, Rodgers and Hammerstein looked at it, as the superior Westerners. So if you flip it “Western People Funny” becomes ironic. To me, that’s an interesting exploration. The same thing has to work for the clothes. How the clothes in these weird silhouettes of the antebellum hoops and big things flip to something else. AC: They’re barbaric.

CZ: Yes. They are quite ridiculous and impractical. And, in studying the clothing of Siam in this period, I find that it’s quite beautiful and quite practical. It’s similar to a sari in the way it wraps around the body, but it has its own unique details. They’re beautiful garments, and much more modern than what Westerners were wearing at the time. AC: Actually, now that you’ve mentioned it, I would say that the enormous hoopskirt from the movie is probably the iconic— BS: Protect-your-woman outfit. (Laughter) It’s a demonstration of southern power in relationship to maintaining white superiority over slavery. So the fun design challenge is how to get to the center of the culture without unnecessary appropriated decorations. And how to get at the core of a design that represents the culture honorably and operates within the play effectively. I would say that the set looks like a kind of ruined temple built into a mountainside where a great myth of the culture is reenacted. And framing the production that way allowed us to have some respect for history, as opposed to worrying about the decoration and the exoticness, particularly of women as objects in such a world. The women have to be vibrant, alive, strong, active, powerful people who, in the case of Tuptim, are like Joan of Arc, and actually challenge authority. That was the key. So we wanted the set to have a kind of templar quality to it, so it could be a place in which you could theatrically enact and operate this piece--from the boat’s arrival to the world behind the palace walls. This set would also show this great transition in the culture. CZ: One thing that I found interesting was that the King, and some of the wives, gravitated toward some details of Western dress. There are a lot of images of the King and his son with Western-style military jackets. There are also a lot of pictures of the women who are in traditional dress but have little

Victorian boots on with button sides. We decided not to do that in our production, because it’s a dramaturgical note that could be confusing. But I found that interesting in terms of their embrace of all the people they met. MY: The same holds for the props. In the photographs there are lots of Western props, like crystal chandeliers. It’s this crazy mixture of Western things juxtaposed with the Thai architecture and aesthetic. BS: It’s strange—the farther you get from the original production the deeper you can look. It’s odd that history and time give us a chance to learn more about what they were beginning to understand in, say, 1951. So the benefit of a revival is that we can actually not only stand in awe and incredible devotion to what Rodgers and Hammerstein were able to accomplish way ahead of their time but perhaps pull even more out of the piece than people had ever understood could be there. And, at the same time, keep it entertaining and buoyant and beautiful. The other thing about casting is that you have to be able to get somebody like Ken Watanabe and Kelli O’Hara to help rename and reinvestigate the parts at every level of the experience, make it something in which each new thing can be brought freshly into the current world. Strangely, a lot of these issues have not gone away, and we are only beginning to understand them. And women’s position in the world’s cultures is paramount. AC: It’s interesting—you really cannot say the year 1951 too often when talking about the original production. Just think about the position of women, about what the world looked like, about people’s houses, what they wore, what the international world was like. It is so distinct, and we’re so far away from that now. BS: We have a Nobel Peace Prize winner in Malala Yousafzai, who was attacked for being an educated young girl in a traditional

Islamic culture. But she stood up. It is kind of weird how these things come around when you need them. At the beginning of the piece, Tuptim is brought in as a present from the king of Burma. We went through a long process where we did the kind of traditional carrying her in on a palanquin and having her in a very decorative outfit and having the King look at her. But, looking

at that moment after we’d pushed ahead in the overall design, we began to think that, instead of the clothes being a sort of armor of decoration, maybe they were extremely exposing and showed a more disturbing image of what she was being presented as. The reality of the gift shocks Anna and leads Tuptim to become this incredible hero. 11

I felt like you couldn’t do the play in that rich world. You had to strip it down. You had to find a more iconic way to do it.

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THE HAPPIEST GIRL IN THE WORLD:

Malala Yousafzai's Nobel Lecture

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had an experience where Kelli won’t wear something for reasons of personal vanity. She’s always very, very careful that she become the character and whatever that may mean. But if she feels that we’re not serving the character with a particular design, we get together with Bart and talk about it and see what other solutions we can come up with. But, with any performer, it’s important to make sure they’re not told, “Here’s your costume, go wear it.” The more you engage a performer, I think, the more successful the costume is and the more they feel like it’s a combination of themselves and the character they’re playing. AC: Does anything change when you see a costume onstage? CZ: One thing that’s interesting about the hoopskirts is the scale of the hoop. A few weeks ago, we had a test on the Beaumont stage with Bart. AC: A hoop test? (Laughter) CZ: Yes, a hoop test. And it was interesting, because we thought the hoop looked quite large, but, seeing it on the Beaumont stage, we realized the hoop needed to go bigger. BS: In order to really fill that volume

of space, it had to be the largest one we had. They move beautifully and they’re very graceful, but this one had to be pretty big. AC: That’s the Beaumont. MY: Of all the sets I’ve ever done working at the Beaumont, there was no way to sketch this one. You just had to get in, like a sculptor, and put pieces of wood into it. You have to build a model of the whole theater. You can’t fake it. That really led us in a whole other direction. AC: Will we be mostly three-quarters? BS: It’s full thrust. Yeah, the glories of the Beaumont and the glories of a thrust are absolutely critical to the relationship of epic to intimate that you get in that space, and it’s really going to make a huge difference for something like The King and I. It’s really great for a musical of this scale. It’s huge. Fifty-one people are in it, plus twenty-nine in the orchestra, and only a place like Lincoln Center Theater can kind of pull this off. In order to live up to the scale of its ambition, we have to go both backward and forward in time. It’s like having one foot in the past as deeply as we can, one foot in the present, and our eyes looking out as far as we can see.

Nobel Lecture by Malala Yousafzai, Oslo, 10 December 2014. © The Nobel Foundation, Stockholm, 2014

MY: So that was a part of the evolution in the design. From the original sequence of design meetings, we went off and made stuff. Cathy and I went through a long period in the middle, after she’d done one pass in the design, of taking this information and going back and reinvestigating the color and how decorative the looks should be. AC: Where are you in the process now—are you done? BS: Oh, God, no, we’re never done. The bids have just come back for the sets. We’re trying to decide which shop is going to build them, and that’s always a difficult process. And what kind of changes we have to make to bring the production in underbudget. We’re also looking at all the things that we’ve sort of been throwing out there, and saying, “This is the look we want.” Now we have to really go in and refine details. AC: How do you begin to dress Kelli O’Hara for an iconic role like this? Does she have any say? CZ: Of course, I think any actress playing a lead role should have a say. She’s seen the sketches. And then in the fitting it’s great to have the input of a performer. And a performer like Kelli is usually very attuned to what the character needs to be. I’ve never

Bismillah hir rahman ir rahim. In the name of God, the most merciful, the most beneficent. Your Majesties, your royal highnesses, distinguished members of the Norweigan Nobel Committee, Dear sisters and brothers, today is a day of great happiness for me. I am humbled that the Nobel Committee has selected me for this precious award. Thank you to everyone for your continued support and love. Thank you for the letters and cards that I still receive from all around the world. Your kind and encouraging words strengthen and inspire me. I would like to thank my parents for their unconditional love. Thank you to my father for not clipping my wings and for letting me fly. Thank you to my mother for inspiring me to be patient and to always speak the truth—which we strongly believe is the true message of Islam. And also thank you to all my wonderful teachers, who inspired me to believe in myself and be brave. I am proud, well in fact, I am very proud to be the first Pashtun, the first Pakistani, and the youngest person to receive this award. Along with that, along with that, I am pretty certain that I am also the first recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize who still fights with her younger brothers. I want there to be peace everywhere, but my brothers and I are still working on that. I am also honoured to receive this award together with Kailash Satyarthi, who has been a champion for children’s rights for a long time. Twice as long, in fact, than I have been alive. I am proud that we can work together, we can work together and show the world that an Indian and a Pakistani, they can work together and achieve their goals of children’s rights. Dear brothers and sisters, I was named after the inspirational Malalai of Maiwand, who is the Pashtun Joan of Arc. The word Malala means grief-stricken, sad, but in order to lend some happiness to it, my grandfather would always call me “Malala – The happiest girl in the world,” and today I am very happy that we are together fighting for an important cause. This award is not just for me. It is for those forgotten children who want education. It is for those frightened children who want peace. It is for those voiceless children who want change. I am here to stand up for their rights, to raise their voice…it is not time to pity them. It is not time to pity them. It is time to take action so it becomes the last time, the last time, so it becomes the last time that we see a child deprived of education. I have found that people describe me in many different ways. Some people call me the girl who was shot by the Taliban. And some the girl who fought for her rights. Some people, call me a Nobel Laureate now. However, my brothers still call me “that annoying bossy sister.” As far as I know, I am just a committed and even stubborn person who wants to see every child getting quality education, who wants to see women having equal rights, and who wants peace in every corner of the world.

Education is one of the blessings of life—and one of its necessities. That has been my experience during the seventeen years of my life. In my paradise home, Swat, I always loved learning and discovering new things. I remember when my friends and I would decorate our hands with henna on special occasions. And instead of drawing flowers and patterns we would paint our hands with mathematical formulas and equations. We had a thirst for education, we had a thirst for education because our future was right there in that classroom. We would sit and learn and read together. We loved to wear neat and tidy school uniforms, and we would sit there with big dreams in our eyes. We wanted to make our parents proud and prove that we could also excel in our studies and achieve those goals, which some people think only boys can. But things did not remain the same. When I was in Swat, which was a place of tourism and beauty, [it] suddenly changed into a place of terrorism. I was just ten [when] more than four hundred schools were destroyed. Women were flogged. People were killed. And our beautiful dreams turned into nightmares. Education went from being a right to being a crime. Girls were stopped from going to school. When my world suddenly changed, my priorities changed too. I had two options. One was to remain silent and wait to be killed. And the second was to speak up and then be killed. I chose the second one. I decided to speak up. We could not just stand by and see those injustices of the terrorists denying our rights, ruthlessly killing people and misusing the name of Islam. We decided to raise our voice and tell them: Have you not learnt, have you not learnt that in the Holy Quran Allah says: if you kill one person it is as if you kill the whole humanity? Do you not know that Mohammad, peace be upon him, the prophet of mercy, he says, “Do not harm yourself or others.” And do you not know that the very first word of the Holy Quran is the word “Iqra,” which means “read”? The terrorists tried to stop us and attacked me and my friends, who are here today, on our school bus in 2012, but neither their ideas nor their bullets could win. We survived. And since that day, our voices have grown louder and louder. I tell my story, not because it is unique, but because it is not. It is the story of many girls. Today, I tell their stories too. I have brought with me some of my sisters from Pakistan, from Nigeria and from Syria, who share this story. My brave sisters Shazia and Kainat, who were also shot that day on our school bus. But they have not stopped learning. And my brave sister Kainat Soomro, who went through severe abuse and extreme violence. Even her brother was killed, but she did not succumb. Also my sisters here, whom I have met during my Malala Fund campaign. My sixteen-year-old courageous sister, Mezon from Syria, who now lives in Jordan as [a] refugee and goes from tent to tent encouraging girls and boys to learn. And my sister Amina, from the 13

I felt like you couldn’t do the play in that rich world. You had to strip it down. You had to find a more iconic way to do it.

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THE HAPPIEST GIRL IN THE WORLD:

Malala Yousafzai's Nobel Lecture

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Nobel Lecture by Malala Yousafzai, Oslo, 10 December 2014. © The Nobel Foundation, Stockholm, 2014

schools. Now it is time to call them to take action for the rest of the world’s children. We ask the world leaders to unite and make education their top priority. Fifteen years ago, the world leaders decided on a set of global goals, the Millennium Development Goals. In the years that have followed, we have seen some progress. The number of children out of school has been halved, as Kailash Satyarthi said. However, the world focused only on primary education, and progress did not reach everyone. In year 2015, representatives from all around the world will meet in the United Nations to set the next set of goals, the Sustainable Development Goals. This will set the world’s ambition for the next generations. The world can no longer accept, the world can no longer accept that basic education is enough. Why do leaders accept that, for children in developing countries, only basic literacy is sufficient, when their own children do homework in Algebra, Mathematics, Science and Physics? Leaders must seize this opportunity to guarantee a free, quality primary and secondary education for every child. Some will say this is impractical, or too expensive, or too hard. Or maybe even impossible. But it is time the world thinks bigger. Dear sisters and brothers, the so-called world of adults may understand it, but we children don’t. Why is it that countries which we call “strong” are so powerful in creating wars but are so weak in bringing peace? Why is it that giving guns is so easy but giving books is so hard? Why is it, why is it that making tanks is so easy, but building schools is so hard? We are living in the modern age and we believe that nothing is impossible. We have reached the moon forty-five years ago and maybe will soon land on Mars. Then, in this twenty-first century, we must be able to give every child quality education. Dear sisters and brothers, dear fellow children, we must work… not wait. Not just the politicians and the world leaders—we all need to contribute. Me. You. We. It is our duty. Let us become the first generation to decide to be the last, let us become the first generation that decides to be the last that sees empty classrooms, lost childhoods, and wasted potentials. Let this be the last time that a girl or a boy spends their childhood in a factory. Let this be the last time that a girl is forced into early child marriage. Let this be the last time that a child loses life in war. Let this be the last time that we see a child out of school. Let this end with us. Let’s begin this ending...together...today...right here, right now. Let’s begin this ending now. Thank you so much. Malala Yousafzai is a Pakistani activist for female education and the youngest-ever Nobel Prize laureate. She is known mainly for humanrights advocacy for education and for women in her native Swat Valley, in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province of northwest Pakistan, where the local Taliban had at times banned girls from attending school. Yousafzai’s advocacy has since grown into an international movement.

north of Nigeria, where Boko Haram threatens, and stops girls and even kidnaps girls, just for wanting to go to school. Though I appear as one girl, one person, who is five foot two inches tall, if you include my high heels. (It means I am five foot only.) I am not a lone voice, I am many. I am Malala. But I am also Shazia. I am Kainat. I am Kainat Soomro. I am Mezon. I am Amina. I am those sixty-six million girls who are deprived of education. And today I am not raising my voice, it is the voice of those sixty-six million girls. Sometimes people like to ask me why should girls go to school, why is it important for them. But I think the more important question is why shouldn’t they, why shouldn’t they have this right to go to school. Dear sisters and brothers, today, in half of the world, we see rapid progress and development. However, there are many countries where millions still suffer from the very old problems of war, poverty, and injustice. We still see conflicts in which innocent people lose their lives and children become orphans. We see many people becoming refugees in Syria, Gaza and Iraq. In Afghanistan, we see families being killed in suicide attacks and bomb blasts. Many children in Africa do not have access to education because of poverty. And as I said, we still see, we still see girls who have no freedom to go to school in the north of Nigeria. Many children in countries like Pakistan and India, as Kailash Satyarthi mentioned, many children, especially in India and Pakistan, are deprived of their right to education because of social taboos, or they have been forced into child marriage or into child labour. One of my very good school friends, the same age as me, who had always been a bold and confident girl, dreamed of becoming a doctor. But her dream remained a dream. At the age of twelve, she was forced to get married. And then soon she had a son. She had a child when she herself was still a child—only fourteen. I know that she could have been a very good doctor. But she couldn’t...because she was a girl. Her story is why I dedicate the Nobel Peace Prize money to the Malala Fund, to help give girls quality education, everywhere, anywhere in the world, and to raise their voices. The first place this funding will go to is where my heart is, to build schools in Pakistan— especially in my home of Swat and Shangla. In my own village, there is still no secondary school for girls. And it is my wish and my commitment, and now my challenge, to build one so that my friends and my sisters can go there to school and get quality education and to get this opportunity to fulfil their dreams. This is where I will begin, but it is not where I will stop. I will continue this fight until I see every child, every child, in school. Dear brothers and sisters, great people, who brought change, like Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela, Mother Teresa and Aung San Suu Kyi, once stood here on this stage. I hope the steps that Kailash Satyarthi and I have taken so far and will take on this journey will also bring change—lasting change. My great hope is that this will be the last time, this will be the last time we must fight for education. Let’s solve this once and for all. We have already taken many steps. Now it is time to take a leap. It is not time to tell the world leaders to realise how important education is—they already know it—their own children are in good

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A STORY IN MOTION

A WOMAN ADVENTURER

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a paradigm for the action of the entire show. The duo’s ideas about it had sent Robbins “off his head” with excitement when he was approached about the project, according to the producer Leland Hayward; but now its confrontation between Eastern conventions and Western ideals was proving to be an almost unsolvable conundrum for the choreographer, and a source of agony for his dancers. An insatiable autodidact, Robbins was obsessed with the idea of keeping the show’s movement authentic. He had schooled himself in the conventions of Southeast Asian court dancing, with its hyperextended fingers and flexed feet; and now, bringing in experts in Indian Bharata Natyam and Cambodian apsara dance, he put the entire company through weeks of grueling training, eight hours a day, in movement conventions that were as foreign to their bodies as Bangkok had been to the governess Anna Leonowens. They stretched their hands, they knelt on the cold marble floor with one leg crossed beneath them, they rolled in the dust. They growled like tigers, ran like deer. “You need more urgency,” yelled Robbins at Yuriko Kikuchi, who played Eliza, the runaway slave; then, when he had chased her around the lobby for what seemed like hours, he complained, “You’ve lost your Oriental quality.” Yuriko, who would later become a perennial stager of “The Small House of Uncle Thomas” in a succession of revivals, said, “The only way to counter this is to produce what is wanted.” Robbins himself, however, couldn’t produce what was wanted. “He did maybe five minutes of choreography in about two or

Photo by Martha Swope, courtesy of the Rodgers and Hammerstein Organization.

In the cold winter of 1951, the choreographer Jerome Robbins was rehearsing dancers for a new musical in the grubby lobby of the empty Broadway Theatre, and he was having a hard time. Although he was already a hugely successful master of both ballet and musical theater, his work in both genres had been largely jazz-inflected and bore a made-in-America stamp; and the show that he was creating dances for now, by the legendary duo of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein, could not have been more different. Based on the fictionalized biography Anna and the King of Siam, by Margaret Landon, it told the story of a Victorian English widow who becomes governess to the children of King Mongkut of Siam and precipitates a fateful cultural conflict when the King’s reluctant junior wife, Tuptim, runs away, following the example of the slave Eliza in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s abolitionist novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin—a book the governess has given her. The King and I, as the musical version was to be called, had an opulent score full of quasi-Asian motifs, and a nearly unprecedented budget of $360,000, mainly for lavish and exotic sets and costumes aimed at re-creating nineteenth-century Bangkok. It was also supposed to have a second-act ballet, “The Small House of Uncle Thomas,” a re-creation of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in traditional Thai court dance, which was the heart of The King and I, for it was an anecdote about a royal concubine’s fascination with Stowe’s book that had first drawn Hammerstein to the project, and he and Rodgers saw the ballet as

three weeks,” Yuriko recalls. Confessing himself “stumped,” he showed the result to Rodgers and Hammerstein. “Rodgers said to Jerry, ‘I write the sense of the place into the music, but I don’t try to create Asian music. You don’t have to stick so close, to try and make it authentic.’” The composer encouraged Robbins to use his Broadway instincts to shape his Asian material. “And Jerry said, ‘That frees me.’ ” Yuriko recalls. Over the next weeks, he created a ballet that was an embodiment of the cultural dialogue that is the substance of the show, and became almost as famous as The King and I itself. As Robbins had to learn how to balance authenticity and showmanship, the team behind Lincoln Center Theater’s new revival of The King and I must find an equilibrium between tradition and innovation. Both the director, Bartlett Sher, and the choreographer, Christopher Gattelli, share common ground with the creators of The King and I: Sher’s attraction to the project, like Hammerstein’s, was sparked by “Anna’s offering of Uncle Tom’s Cabin to Tuptim, [which] sets in motion a whole story of radicalization and transformation”; and he and Gattelli took pains to immerse themselves in Robbins’s sources for his choreography, “so we could stand in his shoes.” For his part, Gattelli, who first experienced The King and I when he performed in a high-school production, thought the “Small House” ballet “staggering” when he saw the film version on video and then again in Jerome Robbins’ Broadway. But he also finds it exciting “to get my hands on that ballet, to be able to peek behind the curtain and learn what every move is about, to spend time reinvigorating it in this new production.” How do you reinvigorate something as iconic as “The Small House of Uncle Thomas,” which—restaged by its choreographer— helped win a Tony Award for Jerome Robbins’ Broadway and is still available on film (and on DVD and Blu-ray)? Interestingly, Sher and Gattelli started with a device that Jerome Robbins himself used: a ten-day dance workshop for dancers, instrumentalists, the director, the choreographer, and

the coaches, including a specialist in Chinese opera performance. For ten days, the participants worked at “combing out the twenty-first century physicality from the dancers’ bodies,” as Gattelli puts it. Although the workshop was situated in the comfort of the LCT studios instead of in an underheated disused Broadway theater, it pushed everyone beyond their comfort zone in true Robbins fashion. “Partly to adjust to the Beaumont’s thrust stage,” Sher says, “partly to expand it, we came up with what I call Robbins on steroids—more kicks, more jumps, more people. It’s not like we changed it, but what bodies can do now is more amazing even than in 1951.” Gattelli adds, “We’re dialing up the temperature.” Where the original “Small House” ballet was framed by a proscenium and had the air of a pageant, with the King and his audience off to one side, “now the ballet is danced specifically to and at the King,” he comments. There will be other changes threaded through the production: new dancing to accompany newly discovered music, used in the original to cover scene changes; new choreography for the entrance of the King’s children; moments where, as Gattelli says, “we realized we don’t have to do it the way it has been done, but we can put our own stamp on it.” One thing, however, remains unchanged, and it’s possibly the thing the original choreographer would be most insistent about. In LCT’s dance lab last fall, every dancer learned every other dancer’s part, “as if they were all a part of the royal ballet company,” Gattelli says. Back in 1951, Yuriko recalls, Jerome Robbins told them the same thing. “You are all born dancers in the royal family,” he said. “From generation to generation, an honored family of dancers. So whatever you do has dignity.” Amanda Vaill is the author of Somewhere: The Life of Jerome Robbins, as well as of the screenplay for the Emmy-winning PBS documentary Jerome Robbins: Something to Dance About. Her most recent book is Hotel Florida: Truth, Love, and Death in the Spanish Civil War.

Half a century before Anna Leonowens met King Mongkut of Siam in 1862, Lady Hester Stanhope, the adored niece of the former British prime minister, clip-clopped out of London never to return, her aristocratic nose high in the air. It is important to mention Hester Stanhope’s nose, because, Lytton Strachey said, !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! it was a nose “of wild ambitions, of pride grown fantastical, a nose that scorned the earth, shooting off…towards some eternal eccentric heaven.” It was a nose, in other words, that would open doors for a woman adventurer. The deaths of her uncle, William Pitt the Younger, and of both !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! her brother and Lieutenant General Sir John Moore in the Battle BY BRANDEN JA CO B S- J EN KI N of Corunna, the man she might have married, put paid to any prospect of conventional life for Lady Hester. Had she and her nose remained in London, they would have wed themselves to a man of power and ruled Regency drawing rooms. As a political hostess, Hester Stanhope would make polite tours of Europe. Like other women of her abilities, she would have lived her husband’s life to the full. It was therefore an act of defiance, courage, and great originality to leave the world she knew for terra incognita. But while Hester Stanhope made a decision to live outside the "#"#"#"#"#"#"#"#"#"#"#"#"#"#"#"#"#"#" bounds of conventional society, Anna Leonowens had no choice. Packed in Hester’s trunk was one of Moore’s blood-stained gloves, the blue dress she had worn as a child, and a lock of her brother’s hair. This was the last she would see of gloves, locks, or " frocks. Shaving her and attiring in " the garb of"""""""" " """ """" "head """ "" """herself """" "" "" an Asiatic monarch, Hester Stanhope rode in state through the BYworK ATO R I H AL L desert with weaponry clanking at her side. In Cairo she was shipped as a deity, in Damascus she was hailed as a queen, in Palmyra she was crowned as the new Zenobia. “The Arabs,” she coolly observed, “have never looked upon me in the light either of a man or of a woman, but as un être à part.” Anna Leonowens, apparently addressed as “Sir” in the Siamese court, was also un être à part and equally adept at reinvention. Conversant in Hindi, Marathi, Sanskrit, and Persian, to take on the role of royal governess she adopted the clipped tones of a dyed-in-the-wool English school ma’am. She had not yet stepped foot in England, and remains the only foreigner to have lived inside the court of Siam. The truth about Anna Harriet Emma Edwards, as she was christened, is buried beneath a palimpsest of fictions, many of which she herself propounded. While Lady Hester belonged to the cultural and political center, Anna was raised in the margins. Born in Bombay in 1831 to an Indian or half-Indian mother, who was thirteen years old when she married, and a father who was a lowly employee of the East India Company, Anna later doctored her biography so that her maiden name became Crawford, her birthplace Caernarfon, in Wales, and her father’s rank that of a major. “The most important thing in your life,” she noted, “is to choose your parents.” That observation, which might have been made by Oscar Wilde, was typically resourceful. At the age of

HOUSES VS . C

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A STORY IN MOTION

A WOMAN ADVENTURER

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Photo by Martha Swope, courtesy of the Rodgers and Hammerstein Organization.

HOUSES VS . C

WHAT’S IN A

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woman to reach the forbidden city of Lhasa, the capital of Tibet. Describing herself as a “lone wolf,” Annie Taylor made the thousand-mile trek across China in traditional Tibetan dress, carrying a homemade Christmas pudding in her luggage. And, on the other side of the world, Mary Kingsley, the daughter of a London doctor, landed in Sierra Leone and journeyed on to Angola, where she worked as a nurse, embarked on a study of cannibalism, collected specimens of unknown fish, and campaigned against twin-killing. The minute they were off their native soil, this breed of women could be anyone, and do anything, they liked. Meanwhile, in a cold London bedroom Florence Nightingale experienced the odd woman’s “joy of advance” and “glory of conquering” propped up on her pillows. It comes as a surprise to recall that Nightingale spent only two of her ninety years, 1854–56, away from her homeland, that her work among the dying and wounded soldiers of the Crimean War barely registered on the Richter scale of her achievements. An invalid herself from the age of thirty-six, she encountered her adventures mostly inside her fabulously energetic mind. From her bed she changed the world, organizing the Florence Nightingale School of Nursing at St. Thomas’s Hospital and a drainage and sewage system for India. Her skills lay less in hands-on nursing than in managing chaos, and she was happiest demonstrating the causes of mortality in colorful pie charts. From solid bourgeois stock, Nightingale spent her childhood “pining for excitement”; her longing to nurse the sick, she said, was “eating out my vital strength.” When she left home in her thirties to work in a German infirmary, she had the full support of her loving family, but Anna Leonowens embarked on her career as an educationalist with no one to look out for her. They have both become the stuff of myth, but their stories are as different as a still-life is from an epic. Few women lived as inventively as Anna Leonowens, who blew about the globe like chaff and needed neither Hester Stanhope’s nose nor Florence Nightingale’s lamp in order to be taken seriously. In 1870, she wrote her memoir, The English Governess at the Siamese Court. Seventy years later, the book was turned by Margaret Landon into the best-selling novel Anna and the King of Siam, which was itself transformed, in 1951, into the legendary Rodgers & Hammerstein musical The King and I. It is fitting that a shape-shifter like Anna Leonowens should find her life story morphed into so many genres. And equally fitting, for a woman with her sense of theater, that she should count among her nephews a boy named William Pratt, who would grow up to be the actor Boris Karloff! Frances Wilson was born in Malawi and moved to England in the 1970s. Having been a university lecturer in English literature for fifteen years she took the plunge, at the age of forty, of becoming a freelance writer. A critic and biographer, she now lives in London, where she teaches a Life Writing master class. Her books include The Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth (winner of the British Academy Rose Mary Crawshay Prize) and How to Survive the Titanic, or: The Sinking of J. Bruce Ismay (winner of the Elizabeth Longford Prize for Historical Biography).

BY BRANDEN JA COB S-JE NKINS

Classics Illustrated courtesy of Trajectory Inc.

seventeen, Anna married her sweetheart, Thomas Leon Owens, and they moved to Australia, then Malaysia, and finally to India, where, in 1856, he died, leaving behind an impoverished widow and two young children. For many women in her position— poor, unprotected, not entirely white—the only direction would be down. Remarriage was the only viable option, but Anna, who would never marry again, instead worked her way upward as a widow. Blending together her deceased husband’s middle and last names to form the exotic “Leonowens,” she elevated his status from clerk to English army officer and knocked three years off her age. The adventures of Anna Leonowens and Hester Stanhope began with the deaths of the men they loved. Independent, unconventional, and possessed of limitless imagination, they were what George Gissing might have identified, in his 1893 novel The Odd Women, as “odd.” Gissing’s “odd women” were like the cycling, smoking, educated New Women of the 1890s, but with a difference. The Odd Women homed in on a social problem: a surplus of baby girls had led to half a million British females being remaindered in the marriage equation. The “oddness” of Gissing’s women is therefore numerical as well as sociological and psychological. Extraneous to requirements, the odd ones out were free to do as they wished. An underacknowledged masterpiece, The Odd Women explores the emotional lives of a circle of politically committed “spinsters.” “It’s better to be born a woman, in our day,” insists Miss Barfoot in Gissing’s novel. “With us is all the joy of advance, the glory of conquering. Men have only material progress to think about. But we—we are winning souls, propagating a new religion, purifying the earth!” Hester Stanhope would agree. Keeping a horse in the stable of her Lebanese fortress in preparation for the Messiah, she waited for the day when, “clothed with the sun,” she would become the “female leader of the twelve tribes of Jerusalem.” More practical in her own ambitions, Anna Leonowens sought neither to propagate a new religion nor to purify the earth, but she did win her soul in a harem consisting of nine thousand children, wives, sisters, consorts, and concubines. As well as teaching rational thought to the King’s eighty children and English grammar to his scores of wives, she introduced both underwear and silverware to court life, and advised His Royal Highness on matters of state policy. After five years, she left Siam—a court built on what she dramatically described as “slavery, polygamy, flagellation of women & children, immolation of slaves, secret poisoning and assassination”—and immigrated to America, via England and Ireland. Ever restless, Leonowens then crossed Russia and settled for a time with her daughter in Nova Scotia and her grandchildren in Germany. In the year that The Odd Women was published, three other women were spreading their wings. It was in 1893 that Gertrude Bell, the daughter of a country squire, paid her first visit to Persia, the land she would, after the First World War, help turn into the modern state of Iraq. Diplomat, explorer, writer, and spy, in books such as The Desert and the Sown (1907), Bell introduced Western audiences to the desert world. At the same time, another English rose, Annie Royle Taylor, became the first Western

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A confession: I’ve never read Uncle Tom’s Cabin. I’ve certainly owned it. Several copies have wound their way into my life, and each one has wound its way right out again via a sad little box I keep near my overfull bookshelves marked GIVE AWAY. Why have I never managed to hunker down with the thing and figure out what all the fuss is about? I suppose a century and a half of spoilers has dampened my enthusiasm. Like many Americans (I imagine), I feel I already know it all, having absorbed the bones of its plot and themes through some kind of cultural osmosis. I’ve heard all about runaway light-skinned Eliza, crossing that frozen river, baby in tow. I already know about precious little white Eva, who dies. (Not to mention mischief-maker Topsy, who never will.) I already know about cotton-haired Uncle Tom, who is likely no one’s actual uncle, and his trials—lots of whipping and praying, I suspect. And I’ve also read “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” James Baldwin’s seminal essay on the book, many, many times. So there’s that. But, then again, this strange ubiquity is exactly what makes Uncle Tom’s Cabin such a valuable, fascinating artifact. Perhaps more than any other example of American letters, it has managed to do the very thing every artist secretly desires for her work: pollinate, metastasize, approach the realm of myth. Time and civilization have broken Uncle Tom’s Cabin into any number of bits and pieces and sent them floating through the American imagination, some having lodged themselves in our language, literature, and popular culture, and taken root. We all know what it means to be “sold down the river.” We expect every slave movie to give us a runaway or two. We may not know who Uncle Tom is, but we certainly know what an Uncle Tom is. Of course, what no one talks about is that this has everything to do with the theater. Historically, more people have seen Uncle Tom’s Cabin than have read it. It often goes unremarked how intensely illiterate this country was in the nineteenth century, how theatricals were actually the most widely digested form of storytelling. Months after its publication, Uncle Tom’s Cabin had spawned flocks of unauthorized dramatic adaptations—flocks that, over time, would turn

to broods that dominated the American stage for nearly a century, becoming almost a genre of their own. These Tom Shows, as they were called, were estimated to have been seen by more than three million people, and, like all things of noble origins, by the end of their evolution were no more than perversions of the original: wildly unfaithful, grotesque parades of caricature, replete with countless dancing slave numbers and kitschy, “Dixie”-like crooners. As uncomfortable as it may be, we are talking about a bedrock of our theatergoing heritage, this development having coincided with that of blackface minstrelsy. (T. D. Rice, the guy credited with the invention of blackface—not to mention coining “Jim Crow”—was one of the first actors to gain notoriety playing the part of Uncle Tom.) The Tom Show is ground zero when discussing theater as a culprit in the dissemination of racial myths. So in a sense we’ve got Uncle Tom’s Cabin to thank for anything that makes us uncomfortable today when it comes to race and the theater. And maybe a little with the evolution of the musical itself. That having been said, it’s worth taking a moment to admire the jewel of genius that sits at the very heart of The King and I: “The Small House of Uncle Thomas,” Tuptim’s Tom play. I openly profess an interest in all things having to do with slaves (being descended from a whole bunch of them), especially when they intersect with American drama, so, logically, “The Small House of Uncle Thomas” has become a cherished and key piece of musical theater for me. I came to it by way of the 1956 film version, with all that cotton-candy Technicolor and Oscar-winning art direction turning Jerome Robbins’s choreography into something like a sweet, sumptuous dream always teetering into nightmare. Whenever I see it, I don’t know what else to do with myself except watch. My mouth falls open in amazement. A tickle inside tells me I should be offended, but I can’t be. Though I certainly can’t seem to just enjoy it, either. And why? I don’t know. Likely because of the sincerity of the enterprise. It is literally what it claims to be—an adaptation of Uncle Tom’s Cabin as told through “Thai dance.” There’s nothing to be offended by. No one is being lampooned. If anything, the film bizarrely attempts to honor every element it appropriates—the story, the foreign dance— 19

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BY BRANDEN JA COB S-JE NKINS

Classics Illustrated courtesy of Trajectory Inc.

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THE H E A R T H A S NO TEA R S T O GIV E ########################### BY HARRIET BEECHER STO W E

Collage by Tamar Cohen. Classics Illustrated courtesy of Trajectory Inc.

and the results are ingenious, elegant, beautiful. And then there’s just the power of spectacle itself. Every question I can ask myself spirals out to the point that I lose myself. I believe someone once called this “the sublime,” but I might be wrong. I do not know if Rodgers and Hammerstein were in any way aware of the phenomenon of the Tom play (though Tom Shows were reported to be touring as late as the 1950s), but I do love the way these two moments in the evolution of the art touch each other. I also love the detail that the events in The King and I are more or less taking place at the same time as the actual Tom Shows, half a globe away. Are we to think of Tuptim as a prophet? A pioneer? A true artist on the cutting edge? Because Tuptim is certainly not a particularly strong reader her adaptation is, ultimately, as bad as the original exploiters of Stowe’s opus—which might be a mistake, but might also be Tuptim’s particular genius. (When it comes to a play within a play, it is difficult to figure out at whose feet to lay blame. It is difficult to tell whether the flaws of the play-within-the play are the flaws of the playwright-within-the play or those of the playwright of the play in which the play-within-the play plays. You begin to worry: Is everything giving me pause intentionally? Whom do I blame for the inaccuracies, the cut corners? Richard and Oscar? I suppose for our purposes I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt.) As far as I can figure (second hand), Eliza was never pursued by Simon Legree. (She had been owned by the Shelbys!) Only Tom had any real interactions with Legree, who actually beats him to death in the end. (Spoiler alert, I think?) Speaking of which, I believe it’s Tom’s death that ends the tale. We lose Eva a couple of plantations back. And, uh, Tuptim, what about this actual cabin? “Small House?” I can understand cutting corners, but “cabin” isn’t so hard for a foreigner to pronounce. It’s much easier than “small.” (Though I imagine the seven-syllable staccato of “Small House of Uncle Thomas” seems a little more music-friendly than the original.) But who am I? No one. I’ve never written a musical in my life, and, most important, I’ve never actually read the source material, though I love Rodgers/Hammerstein/Robbins/Tuptim’s version, with alternating glee and guilt. And I suppose that is the curse, joy, and ultimate betrayal of the theater and the well-intentioned folks in, around, and in front of it: a taste for revising history for the sake of the show. In the same way, perhaps, that the real-life encounter between a Buddhist monk turned emperor and a mixed-race Anglo-Indian woman can become a musical comedy about the East meeting the West. Maybe, to get solid houses for your little theater, you’ve always got to deface a few cabins. Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s plays include Neighbors, Appropriate, An Octoroon, and War. He is currently a Residency Five playwright at Signature Theatre and a Lila Acheson Wallace fellow at The Juilliard School. He has taught at New York University and at Queens University of Charlotte, and his honors include a Paula Vogel Award, a Helen Merrill Award, and the inaugural Tennessee Williams Award.

An Excerpt from Uncle Toms‘s Cabin Communicating with their apartment was a large closet, opening by a door into the outer passage. When Mrs. Shelby had dismissed Eliza for the night, her feverish and excited mind had suggested the idea of this closet; and she had hidden herself there, and, with her ear pressed close against the crack of the door, had lost not a word of the conversation. When the voices died into silence, she rose and crept stealthily away. Pale, shivering, with rigid features and compressed lips, she looked an entirely altered being from the soft and timid creature she had been hitherto. She moved cautiously along the entry, paused one moment at her mistress’ door, and raised her hands in mute appeal to Heaven, and then turned and glided into her own room. It was a quiet, neat apartment, on the same floor with her mistress. There was a pleasant sunny window, where she had often sat singing at her sewing; there a little case of books, and various little fancy articles, ranged by them, the gifts of Christmas holidays; there was her simple wardrobe in the closet and in the drawers:—here was, in short, her home; and, on the whole, a happy one it had been to her. But there, on the bed, lay her slumbering boy.... “Poor boy! poor fellow!” said Eliza; “they have sold you! but your mother will save you yet!” No tear dropped over that pillow; in such straits as these, the heart has no tears to give—it drops only blood, bleeding itself away in silence. She took a piece of paper and a pencil, and wrote, hastily, “O, Missis! dear Missis! don’t think me ungrateful,—don’t think hard of me, any way,—I heard all you and master said tonight. I am going to try to save my boy—you will not blame me! God bless and reward you for all your kindness!” Hastily folding and directing this, she went to a drawer and made up a little package of clothing for her boy, which she tied with a handkerchief firmly round her waist; and, so fond is a mother’s remembrance, that, even in the terrors of that hour, she did not forget to put in the little package one or two of his favorite toys, reserving a gayly painted parrot to amuse him, when she should be called on to awaken him. It was some trouble to arouse the little sleeper; but, after some effort, he sat up, and was playing with his bird, while his mother was putting on her bonnet and shawl. “Where are you going, mother?” said he, as she drew near the bed, with his little coat and cap. His mother drew near, and looked so earnestly into his eyes, that he at once divined that something unusual was the matter. “Hush, Harry,” she said; “mustn’t speak loud, or they will hear us. A wicked man was coming to take little Harry away from his mother, and carry him way off in the dark; but mother won’t let him....Saying these words, she had tied and buttoned on the child’s simple outfit, and, taking him in her arms, she whispered to him to be very still; and opened a door in her room which led into the outer verandah, she glided noiselessly out. Harriet Elisabeth Beecher Stowe (1811–96) was an American abolitionist and author. Uncle Tom’s Cabin reached millions as a novel and as a play, and became influential in the United States and the United Kingdom. It energized antislavery forces in the American North. 21

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THE H E A R T H A S NO TEA R S T O GIV E ########################### BY HARRIET BEECHER STO W E

Collage by Tamar Cohen. Classics Illustrated courtesy of Trajectory Inc.

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WHAT’S IN A NAME?

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A HAPPY TUNE:

An Interview with Sandy Kennedy

!" I soon garnered the wrath of those black folks who were less fortunate. Just as Kyle had been taunted in elementary school, I, too, began to be called Oreogirl by the kids who were being bused in from another impoverished neighborhood. But the girl with the quick lip looked at her bullies and smiled: “Suits me just fine.” I knew that the meanings of words ebb and flow, dipping into the oceans of bad connotation only to land off the shores of good. Perhaps history will be kinder to Oreogirl than it had been to Uncle Tom. Probably not. But let it be said: To be dismissed as a traitor to your race, during whatever time, is traumatic, especially if you’d die for your brethren as Uncle Tom did for his. Katori Hall is a playwright/performer from Memphis, Tennessee. Her plays include The Mountaintop (2010 Olivier Award for Best New Play), Hurt Village (2011 Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, Signature Theatre), Children of Killers (National Theatre, UK; and Castillo Theatre, NYC), Hoodoo Love (Cherry Lane Theatre, NYC), and most recently, Our Lady of Kibaho at Signature Theatre.

An Excerpt From The English Governess at the Siamese Court Next morning, passing the house again, I saw the lad sitting I was often alone in the school-room, long after my other in the same attitude at the window, his eyes bent in the same charges had departed, with a pale, dejected woman, whose name direction, only more wistful and weary than before. On questiontranslated was “Hidden-Perfume.” As a pupil she was remarkably ing him, I found his mother had not yet returned. At the pavilion diligent and attentive, and in reading and translating English her I was met by the Lady Tâlâp, who, seizing my hand, said, “Hidprogress was extraordinary. Only in her eager, inquisitive glances den-Perfume is in trouble.” was she child-like; otherwise, her expression and demeanor were “What is the matter?” I inquired. anxious and aged. She had long been out of favor with her “lord”; “She is in prison,” she whispered, drawing me closely to her. and now, without hope from him, surrendered herself wholly to “She is not prudent, you know,—like you and me,” in a tone her fondness for a son she had borne him in her more youthwhich expressed both triumph and fear. ful and attractive days. In this young prince, who was about ten “Can I see her?” I asked. years old, the same air of timidity and restraint was apparent as “Yes, yes! if you bribe the jailers. But don’t give them more than in his mother, whom he strikingly resembled, only lacking that a tical each. They’ll demand two; give them only one.” cast of pensive sadness which rendered her so attractive, and If it ever should be the reader’s fortune good or ill to visit a her pride, which closed her lips upon the past, though the story Siamese dungeon whether allotted to prince or peasant, his attenof her wrongs was a moving one. tion will be first attracted to the rude designs on the rough stone It was my habit to visit her twice a week at her residence, for walls (otherwise decorated only with moss and fungi and loathI was indebted to her for much intelligent assistance in my study some reptiles) of some nightmared painter, who has exhausted "#"#"#"#"#"#"#"#"#"#"#"#"#"#"#"#"#"#"#"#"#"#"#"#"#"#"#"#"#"#"" of the Siamese language. On going to her abode one afternoon, I his dyspeptic fancy in portraying hideous personifications of BY TO DD DE CKE R found her absent; only the young prince was there, sitting sadly Hunger, Terror, Old Age, Despair, Disease, and Death, tormented by the window. by furies and avengers, with hair of snake and whips of scorpi“Where is your mother, dear?” I inquired. ons,—all beyond expression devilish. Floor it has none, nor ceiling, “With his Majesty up stairs, I think,” he replied, still looking for, with Meinam so near, neither boards nor plaster can keep out anxiously in one direction, as though watching for her. the ooze. Underfoot, a few planks, loosely laid, are already as soft This was an unusual circumstance for my sad, lonely friend, as the mud they are meant to cover; the damp has rotted them and I returned home without my lesson for that day.

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SHADOWS & WHISPERS OF THE HAREM

Illustrations by Margaret Ayer from The English Governess at the Siamese Court.

been bused in from neighborhoods that were predominantly black and challenged with a history of forced social and political exclusion. The neighborhood kids we had all been afraid of were the ones from New Chicago. I knew how to drop the ends of my words, just like them, and was quick with a cuss word (blame it on my daddy), so they left me alone. April was an enigma to them. But then there was Kyle. The perfect victim. That day, they formed a tight circle around her. I thought they were going to beat her ass, but they were all more bark than bite. But the bite of “Oreogirl!” left its invisible scar regardless. I remember Kyle falling silent, her big owl-like eyes blinking back tears. Her sassy best friend-cum-bodyguard, a white girl named Karen, was nowhere to be found. “Oreogirl!” they yelled. “Black on the outside and white on the inside.”

!" Years later, we were assigned Uncle Tom’s Cabin to read. April, Kyle, and I had gone from elementary school to junior high together, linked by the same gifted program in another school. Oddly, we were not the best of buds. We respected one another, but confiding in one another was something that had to be left to another life. Imagine my surprise when we finally read the book and realized the truth. Uncle Tom hadn’t exactly been a traitor to his race. Neither did he have a white wife. In fact, he was truly a sympathetic character who refused to beat slaves or reveal the whereabouts of black women who had escaped slavery—a revolutionary by any other means. The character had inspired the epithet, but the epithet had betrayed its origins by being shades off in its meaning. Why had it been misconstrued so? Time and derivative interpretations had made a Christ-like figure into a traitorous scoundrel. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s book certainly has it flaws, but at a time when black male literary characters were either nonexistent or negative, Uncle Tom managed to be central (at least in name) and bluntly good. Yet prominent black writers found him too simplistic and foolish. Perhaps this was because, even in sympathy, Uncle Tom represented a scab of shame, a truth: that we were once slaves and, indeed, did do the bidding of white folks.

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!" There were three of us in the gifted program: Kyle, April, and Katori. Three black girls on the ruler stick of “blackness.” April descended from a lawyer and a doctor—truly upper-echelon black folks. I—the product of a phlebotomist and a factory worker—was truly a representative of working-class black folks. And then there was Kyle. Her mother was a nurse and her father was a news cameraman. She was neither upper nor lower but resided smack-dab in the middle, proof of the fact that black folks, post the movement, had choices. After lunch at recess, we played our usual elementary games. The three of us played with the white folks by virtue of our having more classes with those children due to the special-education program we had been placed in. The majority of the other black children had

Kyle had white girlfriends, spoke “proper,” got good grades, and wouldn’t be caught dead hanging with “the bad kids” (a euphemism for the other black kids and two white ones), all of which were hallmarks of being a traitor to the race. Oreo was that newish, Generation Y’s cheeky linguistic mutation of a vile archetype in the black community. “Well, at least they didn’t call her an Uncle Tom,” April said under her breath.

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“That niggah ain’t nothing but a Uncle Tom.” I was ten years old at the time. The Clarence Thomas hearing was playing on the barbershop television, and the men were filling the air with well-timed barbs amid the buzz of the shavers. I had followed my father to his weekly haircut appointment at Warner’s, his childhood barbershop in North Memphis. Ensconced like a fly on the wall, I soaked up the unapologetic, brash, comedic, and always political but seemingly apolitical talk that fell like honey into young ears. I remember that my father leaned back in the barber chair as Clarence Thomas, the future Supreme Court justice, dismissed the proceedings as a “high-tech lynching.” Anita Hill’s testimony had done nothing to skewer his chances. The men at Warner’s were suspicious of this black Republican, saying that he was only there to do the “white man’s bidding.” My father and his friends joked, “Lord, his wife is white, too. See there, see! Lynching, my ass. He a traitor to the race.” An Uncle Tom was something to be avoided at all costs. And becoming one even more so.

THE “I” IN “THE KING AND I”

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A HAPPY TUNE:

An Interview with Sandy Kennedy

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SHADOWS & WHISPERS OF THE HAREM

Illustrations by Margaret Ayer from The English Governess at the Siamese Court.

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THE “I” IN “THE KING AND I”

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A HAPPY TUNE:

An Interview with Sandy Kennedy

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patriotism, and seeking to justify himself by condemning her, he sent one of his judges to bring her to him. But before the myrmidon could go and come, concluding to dispense with forms, he anticipated the result of that mandate with another,—to chain and imprison her. No sooner was she dragged to this deadly cell, than a third order was issued to flog her till she confessed her treacherous plot; but the stripes were administered so tenderly, that the only confession they extorted was a meek protestation that she was “his meanest slave, and ready to give her life for his pleasure.” “Beat her on the mouth with a slipper for lying!” roared the royal tiger; and they did, in the letter, if not in the spirit, of the brutal sentence. She bore it meekly, hanging down her head. “I am degraded forever!” she said to me. When once the king was enraged, there was nothing to be done but to wait in patience until the storm should exhaust itself by its own fury. But it was horrible to witness such an abuse of power at the hands of one who was the only source of justice in the land. It was a crime against all humanity, the outrage of the strong upon the helpless. His madness sometimes lasted a week; but weeks have their endings. Besides, he really had a conscience, tough and shrunken as it was; and she had, what was more to the purpose, a whole tribe of powerful connections. As for myself, there was but one thing I could do; and that was to intercede privately with the Kralahome. The same evening, immediately on returning from my visit to the dungeon, I called on him; but when I explained the object of my visit he rebuked me sharply for interfering between his Majesty and his wives. “She is my pupil,” I replied. “But I have not interfered; I have only come to you for justice. She did not know of the appointment until she had sent in her petition; and to punish one woman for that which is permitted and encouraged in another is gross injustice.” Thereupon he sent for his secretary, and having satisfied himself that the appointment had not been published, was good enough to promise that he would explain to his Majesty that “there had been delay in making known to the Court the royal pleasure in this matter”; but he spoke with indifference, as if thinking of something else. I felt chilled and hurt as I left the premier’s palace, and more anxious than ever when I thought of the weary eyes of the lonely lad watching for his mother’s return; for no one dared tell him the truth. But, to do the premier justice, he was more troubled than he would permit me to discover at the mistake the poor woman had made; for there was good stuff in the moral fabric of the man,—stern rectitude, and a judgment, unlike the king’s, not warped by passion. That very night he repaired to the Grand Palace, and explained the delay to the king, without appearing to be aware of the concubine’s punishment. On Monday morning, when I came to school in the pavilion, I found, to my great joy, that Hidden-Perfume had been liberated, and was at home again with her child. The poor creature embraced me ardently, glorifying me with grateful epithets from the extravagant vocabulary of her people; and, taking an emerald ring from her finger, she put it upon mine, saying, “By this you will remember your thankful friend.”

Photograph of Anna Leonowens courtesy of Wheaton College Special Collections, Wheaton Illinois.

through and through. Overhead, the roof is black, but not with smoke; for here, where the close steam of the soggy earth and the reeking walls is almost intolerable, no fire is needed in the coldest season. The cell is lighted on one small window, so heavily grated on the outer side as effectually to bar the ingress of fresh air. A pair of wooden trestles, supporting rough boards, form a makeshift for a bedstead, and a mat (which may be clean or dirty, the ticals of the prisoner must settle that) is all the bed. In such a cell, on such a couch, lay the concubine of a supreme king and the mother of a royal prince of Siam, her feet covered with a silk mantle, her head supported by a pillow of glazed leather, her face turned to the clammy wall. There was no door to grate upon her quivering Anna Leonowens, 1860. nerves; a trap-door in the street overhead had opened to the magic of silver, and I had descended a flight of broken steps of stone. At her head, a little higher than the pillow, were a vase of flowers, half faded, a pair of candles burning in gold candlesticks, and a small image of the Buddha. She had brought her god with her. Well, she needed his presence. I could hardly keep my feet, for the footing was slippery and my brain swam. Touching the silent, motionless form, in a voice scarcely audible I pronounced her name. She turned with difficulty, and a slight sound of clanking explained the covering on the feet. She was chained to one of the trestles. Sitting up, she made room for me beside her. No tears were in her eyes; only the habitual sadness of her face was deepened. Here, truly, was a perfect work of misery, meekness, and patience. Astonished at seeing me, she imagined me capable of yet greater things, and folding her hands in an attitude of supplication, implored me to help her. The offence for which she was imprisoned was briefly this:— She had been led to petition, through her son, that an appointment held by her late uncle, Phya Khien, might be bestowed on her elder brother, not knowing that another noble had already been preferred to the post by his Majesty. Had she been guilty of the gravest crime, her punishment could not have been more severe. It was plain that a stupid grudge was at the bottom of this cruel business. The king, on reading the petition, presented by the trembling lad on his knees, became furious, and, dashing it back into the child’s face, accused the mother of plotting to undermine his power, saying he knew her to be at heart a rebel, who hated him and his dynasty with all the rancor of her Peguan ancestors, the natural enemies of Siam. Thus lashing himself into a rage of hypocritical

THE “I” IN “THE KING AND I”

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CORRESPONDING WITH A KING

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A HAPPY TUNE:

An Interview with Sandy Kennedy

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Photograph of Anna Leonowens courtesy of Wheaton College Special Collections, Wheaton Illinois.

THE “I” IN “THE KING AND I”

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CORRESPONDING WITH A KING

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At one point somebody—I think it might’ve been Dick Rodgers—said, “Hey, can the kid sing?” And I said, “Yes.” And so in my pretty little-boy soprano I started to sing, “I Whistle a Happy Tune,” and they said, “No, no, no, no, forget it. Nobody’ll hear that.” So I said, “I can sing this way, too.” And I belted it, and I guess I hit the back of the house.

SANDY KENNEDY’S SCRAPBOOKS AND MEMORABILIA FROM HIS TIME PLAYING LOUIS IN THE KING AND I.

TOP: YUL BRYNNER AND GERTRUDE LAWRENCE DANCING TO THE LEGENDARY SONG “SHALL WE DANCE?.” RIGHT: GERTRUDE LAWRENCE AND SANDY KENNEDY IN REHEARSAL.

#################################################### This winter, André Bishop, the producing artistic director of Lincoln Center Theater, and our co-executive editor, John Guare, spoke with Sandy Kennedy about playing Anna’s son Louis in the original Broadway production of The King and I, which starred Gertrude Lawrence.

no fuss, no fancy. She said, “Hello, Louis. I’m your ma.” And, from that time on, we were very close. At the initial read-through both Dick Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein were there, John Van Druten was there. I don’t remember who else. JG: You were ten. How could you remember? SK: Well, you know, it’s funny, the uncluttered mind of a child, as one of my directors once said....Everything went in, and I remember a remarkable amount of it. At the time, I knew every note of the overture; I knew every facial movement by Yul Brynner, which he duplicated in both revivals that he did. JG: Coming off the success of South Pacific, were people optimistic about the new Rodgers and Hammerstein production? SK: What I’m going to say now comes partly from memory and partly from my mother, who kept her ear to the ground. The bigwigs were worried about The King and I. It was going to follow South Pacific, everybody was going to say this has to be a blockbuster. There has to be a “There Is Nothing Like a Dame” to really set it off. And here we have this quiet little opening scene of

All photographs and memorabilia courtesy of Sandy Kennedy.

John Guare: Were you always a stage child? Sandy Kennedy: My life was a funny mixture. My mother came from a family of theater buffs. My mother inherited that. She never was an actress, though she would’ve loved to have been. I went to a small children’s theater called the King-Coit Children’s Theater. Edith King, Dorothy Coit, two elderly ladies who were remarkably talented, put on beautiful shows with children based on Shakespeare, William Blake, Thackeray, you name it. JG: How old were you when you started there? SK: I was four, about to be five. And then when I got to be nine I felt I had become far too old and sophisticated to continue. JG: Too old for Thackeray? (Laughter) SK: I had the lead in that one, and got a Katharine Cornell scholarship. And because of the King-Coit Children’s Theater I had

auditioned for a fair number of Broadway shows. I had a why-not attitude: Nothing’s going to come of this, but why not? Mom loved being in the theater atmosphere. AB: How did you get the part in The King and I ? SK: There was no professional children’s school in those days, and so the King-Coit School was often asked to recommend child actors for Broadway. In fact, I had done one television show based on a recommendation from them the autumn before. I was in the original segment of the Ellery Queen mystery series, starring Richard Hart. Then, one day, when I was ten, we got a call from Johnny Fearnley’s office. He was the casting director for Rodgers and Hammerstein’s new musical to follow South Pacific, starring Gertrude Lawrence and directed by John Van Druten. My mother nearly died when she heard this. JG: Did you meet Gertrude Lawrence? Did she have a hand in the choice of who would be her son? SK: She apparently did not, because I only met her at the first rehearsal. She was this very normal-looking woman—no makeup,

the Captain and Anna and Louis until the Kralahome comes in with the slaves. Gertrude Lawrence apparently had insisted on John Van Druten as the director. JG: Rodgers and Hammerstein had produced I Remember Mama in 1944, by Van Druten. SK: True. So they knew him. But he was definitely a straight-theater guy. He had never done a musical. He was certainly not a musical-comedy guy. And he said, and, again, this is all hearsay through my mother, “This is not a musical comedy. It’s not going to be a musical comedy. It is a musical play. It is a play with music.” And he directed it accordingly, in terms of all the relationships, in terms of the pacing and all of that. Rodgers and Hammerstein and others were very concerned about this, because they were afraid it was going to be a bomb and everybody was going to be disappointed because South Pacific was such a success. JG: They didn’t ask you to open up singing “Dites-Moi”? SK: (Laughter) No. I can remember Jerry Robbins, who had been hired to do the “The Small House of Uncle Thomas,” being brought in to see whether we could jazz up the first scene. So there was sort of a little bit of song and dance. John Van Druten

apparently was being torn apart by this. Miss Lawrence was very much on Van Druten’s side. She knew that this was a beautiful story of relationships. And at one point somebody—I think it might’ve been Dick Rodgers—said, “Hey, can the kid sing?” And I said, “Yes.” And so in my pretty little-boy soprano I started to sing, “I Whistle a Happy Tune,” and they said, “No, no, no, no, forget it. Nobody’ll hear that.” So I said, “I can sing this way, too.” And I belted it, and I guess I hit the back of the house. Because the one thing kids got from Dorothy Coit at King-Coit Children’s Theater was presence and projection. JG: Did you pick up on all that emotional turmoil? SK: I picked up on absolutely none of it. JG: Were you friends with the other children in the cast? SK: I think there were fourteen or fifteen kids. It was fun for us. Between shows on Wednesdays and Saturdays, in good weather, we’d play stickball out in the alley. Miss Lawrence would join us in her pantaloons. She was just wonderful fun all the time. There was a very playful quality about her. JG: Did you drop out of school?

SK: My father, who was not as stagestruck as my mother was, said, “Look, if the headmaster of Sandy’s school says this is okay then he can do it. If not, I’m sorry, he’s not going to do it.” The headmaster of the Buckley School said, “This is the chance of a lifetime. If a ten-year-old kid has to repeat a year, who cares? Do it.” And I did it—and I did not have to repeat. I went to school at eleven o’clock every morning, except I didn’t go at all on Wednesday, because it was matinee day. This meant that I missed math and science every day. I never caught up on those. The rest of it was fine. It also meant that I kept my friends. It was kind of a schitzy existence. I had my Upper East Side classmates and I had the kids from all over New York trying to pass for Thai, because there weren’t any Asian actors around at that point. They were two very separate worlds. JG: Did your mother take you to the theater every day and then pick you up? SK: No. Charles Francis, who played Captain Orton in the first scene and the very last scene, took me to the theater and brought me home. His wife had taught my sisters at the Brearley School. My parents paid for Mr. 27

SANDY KENNEDY’S SCRAPBOOKS AND MEMORABILIA FROM HIS TIME PLAYING LOUIS IN THE KING AND I.

TOP: YUL BRYNNER AND GERTRUDE LAWRENCE DANCING TO THE LEGENDARY SONG “SHALL WE DANCE?.” RIGHT: GERTRUDE LAWRENCE AND SANDY KENNEDY IN REHEARSAL.

All photographs and memorabilia courtesy of Sandy Kennedy.

She was always supportive onstage. Actually, we both were. And she commented on this once. We both gave each other what we needed in that first scene. I mean, we played together absolutely beautifully, but that came from her and I picked it up, and it worked.

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GERTRUDE LAWRENCE IN HER DRESSING ROOM WITH THE ACTORS WHO PLAYED THE ROYAL CHILDREN.

Francis to come pick me up in a taxi and take me home in a taxi. AB: Would you tell us about Gertrude Lawrence? SK: She and I hit it off very well right from the beginning. It was a nice coincidence that my real mother was also named Anna, and they became friends. She did sort of adopt me. It was just a very warm relationship. We corresponded when she was up on the Cape, taking time off from the show, and I was doing the show with Connie Carpenter. I would go to her house for lunch. JG: Just the two of you? SK: Yes. AB: Did she have children of her own? SK: She had a daughter, much older, whom I don’t think I ever met. But Brynner scared me, even though he had a young son, Rocky, who was about four then. I never felt any sort of connection to him. He was closer to the “Siamese” kids. Ronnie Lee, who replaced Johnny Stewart as Chulalongkorn, was very close with Brynner. Once, while we were being interviewed together for a radio thing, I said I was never really close to Mr. Brynner. And

Ronnie said, “Well, hell, he was my father, not yours.” Which is kind of the way it worked out in real life. JG: Were you aware of Gertrude Lawrence’s illness? SK: She died in August of 1952, and I was not aware of it until the spring just before she died. AB: You left before Gertrude Lawrence died? SK: Yes, the June before Miss Lawrence died. JG: Why did you leave? SK: I was run-down, and I was clearly going to be too big in the fall. I was already just about as tall as she was, and they didn’t want to lose the smallness of Louis also visà-vis Chulalongkorn. AB: What did you give Gertrude Lawrence when you left the show? SK: Well, I can’t recall if I gave it to her when I left the show or for that last Christmas, but I gave Miss Lawrence—and, I have to admit, this was not my idea—a dollhouse we had a carpenter build. It was a brick residence adjoining the Royal Palace and was decorated with two puppets: one a woman with red hair and hoopskirts and the other a little boy in a suit.

JG: Did you leave before she started losing her voice? SK: There are those who will say that that was a problem from the very beginning. She was, what, fifty-two, I guess. I always said, even back then, and certainly now: Ladies, you don’t have to be a soprano. Bring it down. “I Whistle a Happy Tune” was modulated down for me, and when we sang together in my key she was really comfortable and it felt fine. It wasn’t supposed to be particularly pretty. “Hello, Young Lovers,” to me, was such a strain for her to sing up there always. I think you can hear that on the record. JG: Did Lawrence and Yul Brynner get along? SK: They got along very, very, very well. During the overture every night, he would come backstage right and give her hugs that made you think he had a lot more on his mind. (Laughter) But that was the kind of guy he was. I remember Miss Lawrence saying, “Yul, the boy’s here.” He said, “Well, the boy’s got to see it sometime.” They were playing around, but they got along very, very well. Whether there was any honest-to-God fire between them I honestly don’t know. I was too young to care. 29

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GERTRUDE LAWRENCE IN HER DRESSING ROOM WITH THE ACTORS WHO PLAYED THE ROYAL CHILDREN.

GERTRUDE LAWRENCE, SANDY KENNEDY, AND LOUIS LEONOWENS, THE GREAT-GRANDSON OF ANNA LEONOWENS.

TOP: PRODUCTION PHOTO OF GERTRUDE LAWRENCE AS ANNA WITH THE ROYAL WIVES. RIGHT: SANDY KENNEDY GAVE THIS PHOTO TO GERTRUDE LAWRENCE IN JULY OF 1951. SHE KEPT IT ON HER DRESSING ROOM TABLE, AND IT WAS REURNED TO HIM AFTER HER DEATH IN SEPTEMEBER 1952.

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ways supportive onstage. Actually, we both were. And she commented on this once. We both gave each other what we needed in that first scene. I mean, we played together absolutely beautifully, but that came from her and I picked it up, and it worked. JG: Did you get bored in the show? SK: Never. As people always say, it’s different every night. JG: How many performances did you play? SK: Four hundred and seventy-four, but who’s counting? (Laughter) Not that I counted, but it was counted for me. JG: Tell us about your awareness of when her illness began. SK: I really can’t tell you much. I sensed onstage that she was perhaps trying harder or the voice was not quite what it was. But I didn’t realize it was anything serious. Again, I was so young I’m not sure what I would’ve done with that information anyway. JG: Did you go to her funeral? SK: Oh, yes. I was with my family in Maine when she died, and my mother and I flew down and we went to the funeral. AB: There are very few movies of Gertrude Lawrence, so people are always trying to describe what she was like. “Charm” is a word

they use, or “grace” or “beauty.” What was she like onstage, such as you can remember? SK: To me, onstage she was wonderful. I now know, as an adult, how supportive she was of me. To the point where we really were equal in that scene. She was not stealing one thing from me, and I wasn’t stealing anything from her. We were giving to each other, which is why the scene worked. Not that I was aware of this at the time, but that’s what it was. She made me feel like a real person and not like a little child in the presence of an adult who was a star. As I remember, what carried through her whole performance of Anna was a lot of heart, a lot of love, a lot of solid strength. There was none of what she, I gather, was so well known for, which were the games she would play with Noel Coward, whether it be brassy or clever or cute. She was a very mature, solid, lovely woman. Old enough to have a ten-year-old child and young enough to fall in love with the King. Of course, those characters do fall in love, which some people don’t recognize, but duh. JG: Well, it depends on the chemistry of the actors.

Ronnie Lee, who replaced Johnny Stewart as Chulalongkorn, was very close with Brynner. Once, while we were being interviewed together for a radio thing, I said I was never really close to Mr. Brynner. And Ronnie said, “Well, hell, he was my father, not yours.” Which is kind of the way it worked out in real life.

JG: When you were out of town for six weeks in New Haven and Boston, were there lots of changes in the show? SK: We opened with a four-hour show. JG: No! SK: I think it was in New Haven that they brought Joshua Logan in to play-doctor. They said, “We’ve got to cut an hour out of this.” Our curtain was 8:25 and the unions had to be paid more at 11:30. They literally cut an hour. I don’t remember who, but one of the top dogs came to explain to me very nicely that they were cutting a scene that Johnny Stewart and I had. From a character standpoint, it was a lovely scene—we played chess and talked about our parents. I didn’t feel bad at all, since it was replaced by “A Boy’s Puzzlement,” which accomplished the same thing in song. It was the knitting of the two boys, the two cultures in that generation. There were a lot of changes on the road. JG: Was Gertrude Lawrence in a different state while the show was coming together? Was she a nervous wreck out of town? SK: Not to my knowledge, but she wouldn’t have shown me that anyway. She was al-

GERTRUDE LAWRENCE, SANDY KENNEDY, AND LOUIS LEONOWENS, THE GREAT-GRANDSON OF ANNA LEONOWENS.

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RIGHT: GERTRUDE LAWRENCE AND SANDY KENNEDY AS ANNA AND LOUIS ARRIVING IN BANGKOK. BOTTOM: THE CAST OF THE KING AND I WITH QUEEN JULIANA AND PRINCE BERNHARD OF THE NETHERLANDS BACKSTAGE AT THE ST. JAMES THEATER, 1951.

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In good weather, we’d play stickball out in the alley. Miss Lawrence would join us in her pantaloons. She was just wonderful fun all the time.

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A HAPPY TUNE:

An Interview with Sandy Kennedy

########################## Philip Burke, Sandy Meisner, Hanya Holm, and Lehman Engel, and it was a very exciting place. And three-quarters of the way through the year I said, “I’m driving myself crazy trying to be an actor. Why am I doing this? I never would’ve done this if I hadn’t been a child actor.” So I joined the Navy, and that was it. JG: Was your mother disappointed? SK: (Sighs) Yeah. But by that time she understood that I wasn’t going to open in Hamlet next year. JG: Did you keep going to plays? SK: Yes, but not a whole hell of a lot. For twenty-odd years I have been a member of the Blue Hill Troupe here in New York, which does Gilbert and Sullivan. I’ve done principal parts with them and am now very happy in the chorus. JG: What was your day job? SK: My day job was a banker for many, many years, and then I switched and became a substance-abuse counselor, which I was right to do. I was good at that. I did that for twenty years, and I’m now retired. JG: Amazing life. SK: It has been interesting.

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Farley Granger. But the offer meant leaving the show, it meant leaving my school friends, it meant going to California, and I said, “I don’t want to do that.” And my father was hugely relieved. My mother was fifty percent disappointed. So an unknown kid called Ricky Nelson got the part. JG: When you left the show, did you realize that that would be your farewell to Broadway? SK: Actually, what it was, John, was that as I got older I kept being identified with what I had done when I was ten, which hadn’t been my idea anyway. Not that I didn’t like it; I had a great time. But I am still introduced: “Sandy was the little boy in The King and I.” I constantly did plays at school and at college. I was very, very active in the Triangle Club at Princeton, following in the footsteps of Jimmy Stewart and Josh Logan and José Ferrer. JG: But those were all people who went on to have careers in the theater. SK: Well, I assumed I was going to because everybody else assumed I was going to, so I said, “Okay.” After college, I spent a very instructive year at the Musical and Dramatic Theater Academy of New York, whatever they called it at the time. It still exists. But it was in its second year. So it was

THE “I” IN “THE KING AND I”

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theme runs throughout the literary source for the musical, Margaret A return journey to the Kingdom of Siam in The King and I promises Landon’s Anna and the King of Siam, a 1944 adaptation of two a rich and varied array of exotic delights. The composer Richard Rodbooks written by the real Anna Leonowens in the nineteenth cengers’s unfailingly tuneful score glitters with bright details: cymbals tury. Almost every character and incident in The King and I finds a and gongs, xylophones and glockenspiels, fanfares and glissandos. direct origin in Landon’s book. Hammerstein read it closely. The setting, in a royal palace and gardens, has invited scenic splenIn adapting the book, Rodgers and Hammerstein tapped a trieddor on an operatic scale, and the show’s characteristic costumes— !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! and-true formula familiar in mid-century popular theater and film: the small round hats, the tartan fabrics, the bared male chests— the battle of the sexes as a contest between players who are equally add further layers of color and texture. Even Anna Leonowens, the matched. The deeper pleasure of the show derives from the constant “I” of the title, proves pleasingly foreign for a Broadway heroine. verbal between and King. She’s British—Welsh, Anna might correct us—and so possessed of $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$ $ $and $ $even $ $physical $ $ $sparring $$$$ $ $ $Anna $$$ $the $$ $ $Re$ move their respective accents and the differences in their nationality a charming accent heard against the differently accented English of and rank and the pair’s tit for tat could be taken for a Hollywood the Siamese characters. In like fashion, Anna’s capacious wardrobe romantic comedy set in the workplace. By the end of Act I, their of hoop-skirted dresses and, in one scene, her bared shoulders, offer mutual admiration is evident. We smile at their détente and cheer a walking European contrast to the Asian fashions of the court. Add their shared efforts. Unlike many shows with children, The King and a bevy of princes and princesses and a stunning, stylized play-withI centers on adults who have work to do, children to raise, a nation in-the-play, and the sheer abundance of surface charm would seem to modernize in a changing world. Anna and the King’s relationship to crowd out any serious content. But, despite its glistening, tinkling, hints that the chasms separating men and women might be bridged burnished presentation, The King and I resonates with a deeply Amerby a meeting of the minds. But this meeting of the minds—which ican theme that occupies much of the work of Oscar Hammerstein II, the lyricist and librettist: the undeniable claims of human dignity. This

CORRESPONDING WITH A KING

SK: It depends on the production. If it’s being done as a straight play with music, then it’s pretty darn clear: “You really like him, don’t you, Mother?” “Yes, Louis, I like him very much. Very much indeed.” JG: Who replaced you when you left? SK: I was replaced by Rex Thompson. In July of 1951, I had had a physical and the doctor told my parents that I was really getting run-down. I was getting anemic, I should stop doing the show. The schedule was too tough. I should get out of New York in the summer. So I left the show. JG: On a vacation or permanently? SK: No, it was permanent. Then the fall came and, having been in correspondence with Miss Lawrence the entire time—not Mom but me—she got me hired back at $175 a week. Meanwhile, I had been replaced by Rex Thompson, who, with amazing niceness from him and his mother, became my understudy. JG: Did your father come to terms with your being in the show? SK: Oh, yeah, he had to. (Chuckles) He had no choice. But while I was in the show I did get one Hollywood offer, which I turned down. It was to be in The Story of Three Loves, starring Ethel Barrymore, Leslie Caron, and

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SHADOWS & WHISPERS OF THE HAREM

In good weather, we’d play stickball out in the alley. Miss Lawrence would join us in her pantaloons. She was just wonderful fun all the time.

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A HAPPY TUNE:

An Interview with Sandy Kennedy

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THE “I” IN “THE KING AND I”

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CORRESPONDING WITH A KING

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some will watch closely for any slippage toward romance—ultimately founders on the issue of human dignity as expressed in the exercise of human freedom. Hammerstein found this theme waiting for him in Landon’s book. Her Anna is revolted by the slavery, servitude, and groveling of the Siamese court. She spends much of the book intervening to improve or even save the lives of individual women in the court, all of whom are presented as desiring some greater measure of control over their lives. Landon’s Anna also expresses disapproval of European colonial powers—Britain included—that subjugate Asian nations by force of arms or paternalistic condescension. And she was a fervent abolitionist, enthusiastically supporting the American antislavery cause. Anna’s direct intervention in the beating of Tuptim in Act II of The King and I—a confrontation between Anna and the King that does not occur so directly in the book—is completely in character. Anna believes in individual human dignity as a standard that tests the actions of all: principle is at the heart of her being. She gently sounds sentiments that echo in the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a document that dates to the same period as Landon’s book and The King and I. Anna’s perspective surely resonated with Hammerstein, who had already made a practice of confronting Broadway audiences with questions of human dignity and freedom. Often, he framed the issue in terms of the freedom to love, and he offered few easy answers.

“The King and I” resonates with a deeply American theme that occupies much of the work of Oscar Hammerstein II, the lyricist and librettist: the undeniable claims of human dignity.

In South Pacific, the optimistic nurse Nellie Forbush might overcome her own racial prejudice and embrace the mixed-race children of the man she loves, but Lieutenant Cable proves unable to commit himself to the island girl Liat. Painfully aware of his own shortcomings, Cable understands how he came to be prejudiced—the title of his song “You’ve Got to Be Taught” captures this in a nutshell—even as he admits to himself that he doesn’t have the strength to overcome an education that schooled him in hatred and fear. Unable to choose love, Cable dies offstage. In Carousel, the carnival barker Billy Bigelow is unable to express or act on his love for his wife and daughter in positive ways. Billy fails to treat either with dignity: his stunted spirit lashes out violently more than once. But Billy is granted a measure of forgiveness at the final curtain, when the anthem “You’ll Never Walk Alone” holds out a vision of human life as a journey not taken alone as long as hope remains. And, well before his partnership with Rodgers, Hammerstein explored human dignity and freedom from several angles in the 1927 musical Show Boat, which includes a sober meditation on enduring racial prejudice (“Ol’ Man River”) and a subplot centered on the indignities of racial segregation in the Jim Crow South (the story of Julie). Human freedom as essential to human dignity runs like a shining thread through the sumptuous fabric of The King and I and proves to be the costliest element in the show’s unfailingly gorgeous design. It’s no accident that Abraham Lincoln and Moses—men who freed slaves—come up in the conversations between Anna and the King.

The boldest articulation of this theme, building brilliantly on a handful of references in Landon’s book, is “The Small House of Uncle Thomas,” a re-imagined version of the classic novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe. In The King and I’s retelling—ostensibly created by Tuptim—the story centers on the slave girl Eliza, who escapes thanks to the intervention of the Buddha. Many in the original 1950s audience of The King and I would have greeted “The Small House of Uncle Thomas” as yet another version of a familiar story retold in countless earlier plays, musicals, films, and even cartoons, many of which offered frankly racist stereotypes. (Today’s audiences probably know Stowe’s characters only by way of Tuptim’s version.) “The Small House” challenges these earlier theatrical stereotypes, especially in its brief presentation of Stowe’s character Topsy. Topsy was for decades a comic blackface role, an uncontrollable child who needed the firm hand of a white master—a racist’s object lesson in the supposed inferiority of African-Americans. But in “The Small House” Topsy’s moment in the spotlight segues into Tuptim’s confrontation with the King. As she challenges the King during his liberal display for the visiting British diplomats, Tuptim slips from Topsy’s voice into her own. She is silenced by a gong, but the passion behind her plea is palpable. The King and I reaches its climax in this scene, during which a slave asking for freedom is silenced. For a moment, Tuptim becomes the “I” in The King and I. Then, by herself, she steps into the role of Eliza for real, fleeing the court with her lover, Lun Tha, in an attempt to live as she wishes, to love whom she wishes. Tuptim and Lun Tha’s ravishing duets— one in each act—communicate the intense love between this pair, who stand in for any two lovers who have been denied the right, to quote Hammerstein’s lyrics, “To kiss in the sunlight and say to the sky / Behold and believe what you see / Behold how my lover loves me.” These are strong words about the dignity of human choice and freedom. They resonate still. They are worth hearing again. The witty battle between Anna and the King comes to its end over the question of masculine pride (the King’s right to flog a runaway slave) versus feminine love (Tuptim’s for Lun Tha, boldly defended by Anna). Anna wins, as she must. The King crumbles under her disapproval and flees the scene. It is a crucial moment in Hammerstein’s work: naked power exits the stage; human dignity remains. Having stepped partway into the modern world, the King, like Lieutenant Cable, cannot embrace the full humanity of those who he has been taught are beneath him. But Hammerstein is gentle with the King at the close, recognizing the well of affection that has built up for him in both Anna and the audience. And so the King dies watching his son outlaw the practice of groveling on the floor as a sign of servitude, witnessing the birth of a new world in which men and women, rulers and subjects bow to one another in mutual recognition of a shared human dignity. Todd Decker is an associate professor of musicology at Washington University in St. Louis, and the author of three books on popular music and film: Who Should Sing ‘Ol’ Man River’?: The Lives of an American Song (2015), Show Boat: Performing Race in an American Musical (2013), and Music Makes Me: Fred Astaire and Jazz (2011).

No. 108 12th May 1864

Grand Royal Palace, Bangkok

To Lady Leonowens My dear Madam

I beg to inform you I shall have liberty to do enquiry in regard to 2 slave girls, complained by you to me, of respective name Maa Cheng and Maa Dang: the said slave girls are now in possession of the Lady Khoon Peeah, being of previous slave-parents, born on the estate of her, the said Lady Khoon P’s father, paternal. For me, even King of Siamese people, to grant said girls freedom from obligation to serve their lawful mastress, will be greatest violation of Siamese law and custom, or to afford facility unto you of buying of said girls and then setting free, without obtaining first full consent of Lady Khoon Peeah their mastress, would be equal great violation. But you may go and visit said lady herself, and doubtless you will obtain by wise and persuading discourse, required permit of purchasing of said slave-girl on cost of ticals not too large perhaps100 T’s for both, to appease the strong desire on your part to set free the said slave girls I beg to remain Madam!

Yours faithful friend and well-wisher. S.P.P. Maha Mongkut R. S.

To the King of Siam February 3, 1862 Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States of America.

To His Majesty Somdetch Phra Paramendr Maha Mongut, King of Siam, &c., &c.

Great and Good Friend: I have received Your Majesty’s two letters of the date of February 14th, 1861. I have also received in good condition the royal gifts which accompanied those letters,—namely, a sword of costly materials and exquisite workmanship; a photographic likeness of Your Majesty and of Your Majesty’s beloved daughter; and also two elephants’ tusks of length and magnitude such as indicate that they could have belonged only to an animal which was a native of Siam. Your Majesty’s letters show an understanding that our laws forbid the President from receiving these rich presents as personal treasures. They are therefore accepted in accordance with Your Majesty’s desire as tokens of your good will and friendship for the American People. Congress being now in session at this capital, I have had great pleasure in making known to them this manifestation of Your Majesty’s munificence and kind consideration. Under their directions the gifts will be placed among the archives of the Government, where they will remain perpetually as tokens of mutual esteem and pacific dispositions more honorable to both nations than any trophies of conquest could be. I appreciate most highly Your Majesty’s tender of good offices in forwarding to this Government a stock from which a supply of elephants might be raised on our own soil. This Government would not hesitate to avail itself of so generous an offer if the object were one which could be made practically useful in the present condition of the United States. Our political jurisdiction, however, does not reach a latitude so low as to favor the multiplication of the elephant, and steam on land, as well as on water, has been our best and most efficient agent of transportation in internal commerce. I shall have occasion at no distant day to transmit to Your Majesty some token of indication of the high sense which this Government entertains of Your Majesty’s friendship. Meantime, wishing for Your Majesty a long and happy life, and for the generous and emulous People of Siam the highest possible prosperity, I commend both to the blessing of Almighty God. Your Good Friend, ABRAHAM LINCOLN.

“The King and I” resonates with a deeply American theme that occupies much of the work of Oscar Hammerstein II, the lyricist and librettist: the undeniable claims of human dignity.

No. 108 12th May 1864

Grand Royal Palace, Bangkok

To Lady Leonowens My dear Madam

Yours faithful friend and well-wisher. S.P.P. Maha Mongkut R. S.

To the King of Siam February 3, 1862 Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States of America.

To His Majesty Somdetch Phra Paramendr Maha Mongut, King of Siam, &c., &c.