The opera Fire Shut Up in My Bones puts everything out there in the first three minutes. Before the curtain rises, we see a projection of a verse by the prophet Jeremiah from which the title comes, a signal that a truth "shut up like fire" will be spoken. The curtain rises on a young man with a gun singing to us "they're here," the tears and anger walled in since childhood. A woman enters his space but stays behind him as she urges him to use the gun to fulfill his destiny. We understand that she personifies Destiny, and that she is tempting him the way the Devil tempts Everyman in the medieval drama.
But where's the angel who should be standing on this Everyman's other side? When the scene is repeated in the dramatic context of Act Three, the identity of the character who fills that angel space has meaning and great emotional impact.
[I'd forgotten many specifics of the opera when I revisited this article months after the broadcast, but just re-reading the previous sentence brought back the impact full force, with tears.]
Based on the 2014 memoir by New York Times columnist Charles M. Blow, the opera's three acts tell of his childhood in rural Louisiana before an incident of "betrayal" by an older cousin, his adolescence after that incident, and his freshman year at Louisiana's Grambling State. In an inspired choice, the librettist Kasi Lemmons has grown-up "Charles" (baritone Will Liverman) on stage shadowing his childhood self "Char'es-Baby" (13-year-old Walter Russell III), to amplify emotions and interpret the significance of certain memories.
Lemmons writes mostly in couplets, the rhymes assisting us to follow the development of each thought. She re-introduces certain phrases throughout the story so that different scenes "rhyme" in a way, too. I recall Kiss me, hug me... You've got to break up the dirt to make things grow... sometimes you have to leave it in the road... love with a laugh [isn't worth much -- pardon my incomplete memory of this and the other phrases].
Composer Terence Blanchard propels the action with a variety of colors and tempos in the orchestra with incidental references to gospel, blues, and even disco. From repeated phrases in the libretto, he creates musical "hooks" that, like the opening scene, gain new meaning as they repeat in new contexts. Like rhymes, these repetitions serve as benchmarks for the development of the protagonist. For the specially-paired "Charles" and "Char'es-Baby," Blanchard has written vocal lines that the boy handles with power and self-assurance and the baritone enriches with his trained sound.
During the Live in HD broadcast Saturday October 23, different singers and members of the creative team spoke of what the piece says about perseverance and survival of trauma.
For me, the theme that emerged even more than perseverance is an exploration of what it means to "be a man." From the first time we see "Char'es-Baby," he's being told not to skip, not to be such "a mama's boy"; older Charles describes him as "a child of peculiar grace." For his father, being a man is about playing around. His sons echo him, showing their youngest brother that love is something men laugh and brag about.
His brawny uncle Paul models physical strength, but more than that, a man's responsibility to provide for his sister's family when the boys' father cuts out.
The mission to "make a man" out of Charles opens an opportunity for the traumatic betrayal. His older cousin Chester rooms with Charles and teaches him to steal candy, because, he says, a man makes up his own rules. Then Chester introduces a new "game" behind the closed door to Char'es-Baby's bedroom. The creative team makes the tension of the scene unbearable. There is no enactment: the actors stand apart from each other, facing the audience. But the effect is powerful and painful to watch (or recall). The music draws out the tension while lyrics repeat what the cousin said about a game, stealing candy, implying what's happening from an oblique angle.
[By coincidence, I saw the opera on the same day that I heard an interview on NPR's Fresh Air with actor/singer Billy Porter, whose stepfather abused him under the same pretext of "making a man out of him."]
Keeping the event as a secret shame, Charles continues to doubt his own manhood. When his brothers learn that he "got laid," they say, "You're a man, now." But he's disturbed by erotic dreams suggested on stage by an ensemble of male dancers, and thinks something's wrong with him. The Kappa Alpha Psi fraternity, step-dancing with their "Kappa canes," presents another model for masculinity that involves service, military discipline, and self-sacrifice for sake of brotherhood.
In the very satisfying resolution, being a man isn't about sex or sexuality, physical strength or dominance. Charles has the courage to be honest and the strength to leave those other games behind.
Terence Blanchard, composer / libretto by Kasi Lemmons
adapted from Charles M. Blow’s moving memoir
co-directed by James Robinson and Camille A. Brown. Brown also choreographed the production.
Baritone Will Liverman as Charles, soprano Angel Blue as Destiny/Loneliness/Greta, soprano Latonia Moore as the mother Billie, and 13-year-old Walter Russell III as Char’es-Baby.
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