Yi-Yi

In revisiting Edward Yang’s Yi-Yi, which I haven’t seen in about a decade, I was surprised by how much bad stuff happens. I remembered the wedding reception that kicks off the movie and the murder that more or less concludes it, but everything in between had vanished from my memory. I had no recollection of the grandmother having a stroke, of the brother going into debt, of the wife’s breakdown, of the husband’s emotional affair, of the daughter’s romantic misadventure. I didn’t remember that the neighbors existed, let alone everything that happens with, around, and to them. If I were to lay out for you the plot of Yi-Yi, such as it is, it would seem like an incredibly depressing movie, and I suppose in some ways it is.

It’s telling, then, and very much to the point of Yang’s film, that my immediate response upon seeing the first frames of Yi-Yi in a theater, of seeing the brother and his pregnant bride framed by the extended family in the middle of the wedding ceremony, was to smile. And I don’t mean a small, pleasant smile. I was so happy to spend time with these people that I was beaming. I was happy to see my friends again.

Yi-Yi comes as close as a film can to capturing life in its totality. We spent less than three hours with all of these people, but by the end, it’s reasonable to feel like you know them. Everyone you see on screen is a full person, funny and impulsive and selfish and kind. They are all fundamentally good, or at least they are all fundamentally trying. You don’t blame the wife for suddenly disappearing on a spiritual retreat for weeks. You don’t blame the husband for spending a week in Japan reliving the past with the first, and possibly only, woman he ever loved. You don’t blame the neighbor for having absolutely horrendous taste in men. Yang manages to show people in their entirety. He doesn’t reduce them in any sense.

For much of the movie, you’d be forgiven for interpreting the overall argument as a pessimistic one: life is full of regrets, and terrible things happen even to these good people. It isn’t until the closing stretch that Yang’s humanist argument snaps into focus. Coming back from Japan, the husband says, “I had the chance to relive part of my youth…I suddenly realized that even if I was given a second chance I wouldn't need it, I really wouldn’t.”

The daughter, alone in the apartment with her comatose grandmother, leaves her room and sees grandma sitting in a chair and humming “Ode to Joy.” By this point, Yang has carefully set up echoes of the past in the events of the present, and we understand without being told that grandma has experienced for herself many of the events that we’ve seen. She is at the end of her life, and still she is singing “Ode to Joy,” which is echoed in the opening bars of the score. In some small way, through all of the struggles and the ennui and the disappointments, it all works out alright.

It is no small feat, to make a movie about unfortunate event after unfortunate event without it ever feeling morose or indulgent. Yang pulls it off because his film is so matter-of-fact. These difficult stretches are as equal a part of life as the good times. The division is a false one. They coexist, much as the terrible moments of this film exist seamlessly alongside the funny, the sweet, and the endearing.

The Brooklyn Bridge

This evening, I went to Musical Cartoons Before the Code, an excellent retrospective at Film Forum that celebrated obscure animated shorts from the golden age of American animation. Not all of the shorts were good—if anyone ever asks you to watch Buster Bear, run—but this was more of an academic exercise anyway. I was there to see these cartoons in beautiful, recently restored glory, and to see the pencil tests at the end.

I have always loved pencil tests, which are assembled before any inking or painting has been done. Here’s an example, some of Milt Kahl’s work on The Jungle Book. Isn’t that magical? Nothing but charcoal on a page, and it’s so full of life. The pencil tests included in Musical Cartoons Before the Code were taken from the Fleischer Studios film Mr. Bug Goes to Town. The pencils looked even better than the finished scenes in a number of cases. Some subtleties in the animation get washed out by the coloring process. I love rough pencils because they remind you that there’s a person behind all of that work. If the animators disappear into the background of the finished product, pencil tests insist on their presence.

On my way home, I decided to walk over the Brooklyn Bridge, which I haven’t done in years. It was the perfect night for it. The moon, just past full, was still bright. There was a terrific breeze. It was crowded, as tends to happen on the Brooklyn Bridge on beautiful nights. In the midst of all my people watching, I was most struck by the level of production now involved in taking photos. I passed a group of four women in their early 20’s who were operating as a studio for one another. While one posed, another would hold their phone up as a light, experimenting with angles, while a third took the photos.

At right about the midpoint, I passed a family of five. One of the children, a boy around 12 years old, was wearing a Make America Great Again hat. You don’t see a lot of those in New York City. The last time I saw one was a year or two ago, when I shared a subway car with an Orthodox family—boy howdy, the layers—on their way to a protest. In day-to-day life in New York City, you can almost forget it’s a thing. But here was this kid, sitting on a bench on the Brooklyn Bridge at 10:30 at night, wearing a MAGA cap.

It feels overly-dramatic to say, “I almost stopped,” but I did feel the impulse to do so. I wanted to tell that kid that that hat isn’t welcome here, to ask him who he thinks built the Brooklyn Bridge. I didn’t, though even as I walked off the far end of the bridge I was still considering turning back. I still think I should have.

I wanted to tell him that the Brooklyn Bridge was designed by John Roebling, a German immigrant. I wanted to explain to him that the caissons, the foundations that allowed for cable suspension, were dug out by Irish immigrants in conditions so horrendous that Caissons Disease was a real thing. It wouldn’t have mattered, though, and I knew that. So instead I kept it to myself, and thought about it for hours.

The contradictions inherent in MAGA are well-documented. I’m not breaking new ground by pointing out that the bridge upon which they were enjoying their night was built by the very people their figurehead is illegally rounding up and illegally deporting. They are likely in full awareness of the irony of the fact that during their trip to New York City, their food gets made, laundry gets washed, streets get paved, pests get controlled, and lives are made possible by the labor of people who that hat seeks to harm.

The other problem, of course, is that that hat is intended as a provocation. It’s a dare. “Go ahead. Say something. Prove we’re not welcome.” I am again not breaking new ground by observing that MAGA-ism is entirely founded on the presumption of grievances like that. “The big city looks down on us and rejects our views. It’s unsafe.”

The fact that that child wore that hat in the city, the fact that his parents were okay with him doing so, puts the lie to the whole movement. You don’t feel unsafe. You don’t feel threatened. You feel powerful. You know a guy in his mid-30’s with an MFA is going to walk by with his bike and get “triggered” and not do anything. And two weeks from now, or a month from now, when the President of the United States says he is sending the National Guard into New York City because of its elevated crime rate, you’ll talk about how he’s right to do it, how you went there a few weeks ago and didn’t feel safe for a moment.

Sitting on the Brooklyn Bridge at 10:30 at night in your MAGA hat, you looked pretty safe to me.

Ran, or, The Madness of Lady Kaede

The other day, I showed my partner a trailer for Ran, Akira Kurosawa’s 1985 masterpiece. I was about to go see it at Film Forum with a friend, and wanted to give her some context. I was looking for the trailer that’s been playing at FF the past week, which emphasizes its moodiness and its score. Depending on the trailer you find, you’ll come away with widely varying impressions of Ran. The one I found on YouTube pushed it as an action film, which I think is disingenuous. There certainly is action, and scores of extras running around battlefields, but Ran is actively disinterested in action as uncomplicated spectacle. Better to foreground the moodiness.

As soon as Lady Kaede (Mieko Harada) popped up on screen, both at Film Forum and at home, I had the same response: “She’s crazy.” I’ve carried that idea of her around with me for nearly twenty years now, since I first watched Ran in my bedroom during a college break. Conniving, vengeful, screeching demands left and right, she was one of the great Manipulative Woman. She left a strong impression, but not necessarily a distinctive one. Lady Kaede sat comfortably in league with thousands of other Lady Kaedes; Lady Macbeth, Scarlett O’Hara, Miss Piggy. We all know the type. Lady Kaede existed in my mind as the ultimate expression of a particular cliché.

She certainly enters haughtily. We first see her as she and her retinue moves her possessions into the First Castle. Her husband, Tora Ichimonji, has just been handed control over the Ichimonji clan and its lands by his father, the retiring warlord Takatora Ichimonji, and the First Castle is to be their keep. When she learns that the path is blocked by members of Takatora’s retinue going about their daily routine, she scoffs. “Scandalous. I am the Lady of this castle, they must make way.”

It doesn’t take long for her to start needling her husband, cajoling him for allowing his father to maintain even symbolic power, for allowing his father to take the family banner from the room that should be the seat of the clan’s authority. She convinces Taro to banish his father, and to execute anyone who assists him. She fits firmly into the Lady Macbeth model, sewing chaos to gain power.

But then we learn that First Castle used to be the center of her family’s domain, before Takatora took it over and killed her father and brothers. “Right there,” she says while seated next to her husband in the throne room, “I watched my mother take her own life.” In the subtitles, “Right there” is separate from the rest of the sentence, followed by a pause and a curt breath as she relives the experience. In the Japanese, she doesn’t begin the sentence with, “Right there.” She says, “My mother.”

In that moment, we begin to understand the role of women within the world of Ran, and Sengoku period Japan more broadly. They are pawns, married off to secure alliances or curry favor. Lady Kaede watched her family die, and was married to the eldest son of the man who did it. She had no say in the matter. She could only accept. It stands to reason that she would be sensitive to any challenge to her position; her position is all she has, and she has much a sense of how precarious it is as anyone. Even more so when returning to the castle in which she grew up.

The idea of women within Ran as object rather than subject is reinforced a few scenes later when we meet Lady Sué, wife of middle son Jiro. She too is the daughter of an extinguished line, but she serves as a contrast to Lady Kaede. When she greets Takatora with a broad smile and gentle tones, he asks her if she hates him. She says no, again with a beatific smile, and he tells her to stop. “I killed your family. It would be easier for you to hate me.” She doesn’t, or at least she claims not to. Lady Sué is now a dedicated Buddhist, and finds comfort in his teachings.

Lady Kaede has no such comforts. When Taro is killed, she wastes no time getting Jiro into bed. The scene in which she seduces him is one of the best in the film, an electrifying high-wire act of threats and desperation. She twice lightly cuts the man’s throat with a knife, and moments later they’re doing it. She’s canny, you gotta give her that. An unerring instinct for self-preservation. While it would be both appropriate and easy for her to become one of Jiro’s concubines, she has no interest. She insists on becoming his wife, and on the death of Lady Sué.

Jiro first orders his advisor Kurogane to carry out the execution, but he refuses. He believes that Lady Kaede is only interested in advancement, that the death of Lady Sué would ill-serve Jiro, but even his refusal is useful to Kaede. It drives a wedge between Jiro and the only one of his advisors honest enough to contradict him. The second advisor carries out the orders with efficiency, returning with the head in the midst of the climactic battle.

The impact of Lady Kaede’s actions on the movie is a slow accumulation, but it is decisive. She pushes Taro not to settle, to push for more power. That leads directly to the banishment of Takatora, which leads directly to a harrowing conflict between Takatora’s men and his sons’ soldiers. That fight leads to Taro’s death, and the further splintering of the clan. Her whispers push Jiro too to push more aggressively for power than he otherwise would have. Viewed from the air, much of Ran is Kaede’s doing. She is the Littlefinger of this world, though we come to learn that she has no interest in climbing the ladder; she wants to burn it.

When Kurogane realizes the scale of Lady Kaede’s schemes, he confronts her. “Your scheming has destroyed the Ichimonji clan. Such is the vanity of women.”

“Vanity, you say,” she replies. I think it’s important to note that it isn’t a question. “I wanted to avenge my family. I wanted this castle to burn. I have done all I set out to do.” Kurogane kills her, striking her down in what has to be one of cinema’s bloodiest deaths, but it’s too late. She has already won.

Kurosawa didn’t populate Ran with many woman, but he knows exactly what he’s doing with them. Their absence is intentional. The few we do see end up dead to a one. They either commit suicide or are murdered. They live lives without agency. The best most of them can manage is a coping strategy, to pray and carry around illustrations of the Buddha. Their miserable ends are the point. They are flotsam moving with the tide.

But not Lady Kaede. Revisiting Ran all these years later, it became clear that I had short-changed her. She isn’t hungry for power like Lady Macbeth. She isn’t a pure machine of self-preservation like Scarlett O’Hara. She isn’t as possessive and ego-driven as Miss Piggy (and you thought I was just being silly). She has her eyes set on much larger prizes, and is astonishing in her capacity to navigate the strict limits imposed on her. Lady Kaede is as canny and capable as anyone. Come to think of it, she is the only character in Ran who achieves their goal.

With that in mind, I apologize, Lady Kaede. I did not recognize your game. You aren’t crazy in the least, and even if you were, I see now that I could hardly blame you.

The Threepenny Opera at The Brooklyn Academy of Music

When I was in undergrad, my playwriting professor mentioned in passing the unique quality that the Irish can bring to Beckett. Waiting for Godot was never better, he maintained, than when it was performed by Beckett’s own kith and kin. 15 years now, this has stuck with me, despite having no strong opinions about Beckett in any direction. It may be that the idea feels both romantic past the point of all reason and fundamentally true.

Last night, during a riveting production of The Threepenny Opera at BAM, I found myself thinking similar thoughts about the Germans and Brecht. Brecht is notoriously difficult to pull off. The whole point of the Brechtian experiment was—is—to keep the audience at an emotional remove so they think critically about what they’re watching. His work walks a thin and precarious line between absolute irony and uncompromising sincerity. It’s easy for his plays to feel disjointed and uneven, or overly confrontational, as a result.

It was an utter joy to watch for three hours as the members of the Berliner Ensemble weaved their way in and out of the dark corners of Threepenny, effortlessly keeping the audience in the palm of their collective hand by emphasizing the humor and absurdity inherent to the material. I haven’t laughed that much in a theater since James Acaster’s last stand-up tour. Every member of the cast finds humor in what they are doing, and each in their own way. Gabriel Schneider plays Macheath as the naughty five-year old who always gets caught. Kathrin Wehlisch, who plays Chief of Police Tiger Brown, gives a firecracker performance, with unexpected comedy in every line and gesture. This is someone who has seen and studied every Looney Tunes short.

At times broad, at others specific, and never indulgent or unnecessary, the use of comedy in Threepenny provided a stark contrast with another recent and much-lauded production at BAM, the London transfer of A Streetcar Named Desire. I could not stand that production, despite Patsy Ferran’s exceptional work as Blanche DuBois. Rebecca Frecknall’s direction emphasized severity. The show screamed its own importance, not trusting that the audience would notice on their own. Tennessee Williams wrote a serious, heavy play, yes, but god bless him he also made sure it was funny. Not that you could tell.

Barrie Kosky, the director of Threepenny, smartly directs against the grain. He and the cast understand that the show—unambiguously about murder, philandering, corruption, capitalism, and the cruelty of man—will speak up for the seriousness of its themes on its own. The show doesn’t need their help with that. Their job is to pull the audience in, and they do so magnificently.

The finale of Act 2, “What Keeps Mankind Alive?,” was the moment when the production subtly shifted from the very good into the realm of the transcendent. The song, now a hundred years old, decries the comfort of the rich and how their lives depend on the exploitation of the lower classes. There is a staggering urgency, a genuine anger, and a sense of menace. The final line, “Mankind is kept alive by bestial acts,” manages to feel all at once like a warning, a condemnation, and an exhortation. I’m not so sure it’s meant to turn you off the idea, or to convince you that mankind is beneath redemption. It almost feels like encouragement. How else can we protect ourselves? How else can anything change?

Spring, Summer, Asteroid, Bird

I once joked to a friend that every Miyazaki movie follows a similar trajectory: stuff happens, then five minutes before the end, we find out it was about love the whole time. Miyazaki doesn’t build his stories in the way that we’re used to. Spirited Away, Howl’s Moving Castle, and The Wind Rises don’t break down easily into the three-act structure. They feel truly idiosyncratic.

While Miyazaki’s films are remarkable things no matter your cultural background, his story structures are less unusual when considered within the framework of both Japanese storytelling tradition specifically and East Asian narratives as a whole. Henry Lien’s Spring, Summer, Asteroid, Bird is an introduction to those narratives, exploring East Asian storytelling and what distinguishes it from the West. In particular, he juxtaposes the Eastern preference for four-act and circular structures with the Western three-act. 

The West is so steeped in the three-act structure that many people who don’t spend most of their time thinking about the inner workings of stories are familiar with it. A thing happens. The thing intensifies. The thing resolves. That’s the flow of it. Lien uses Star Wars as an illustration, but just about every story we know and love here in the U.S. of A. adheres to the formula.

The four-act structure is similar. Similar enough, in fact, that it is often treated as nothing more than a variation on the three-act. People exist in a given world. We see them go about their lives in that world. There is a crisis. We see how that crisis and the world come to terms with one another. From that description, you can see how they might be considered two different ways of cutting the same sandwich.

Whether Lien is aware of their interchangeable status, I don’t know. He doesn’t mention it. Instead, he provides a wonderful argument for how and why the structures are distinct, tying them to philosophical outlooks reinforced by the cultures that prefer them. The three-act structure emphasizes the individual, requires a tidy resolution, and necessitates that everything obey the terms laid out in its first act. The four-act structure, on the other hand, emphasizes communities, tends to leave the ending a bit more ambiguous, and allows for so massive a change in the third act that a story may hop genres—consider the tonal shift halfway through Parasite. In point of fact, Lien says, four-act stories are entirely about the impact of that sudden third-act change, and how the world adjusts or doesn’t.

Though Lien missteps early on with some poor choices of examples, and leans throughout the book on a risible short story to illustrate some points, his observations are excellent. There’s a lot to chew on here. Spring, Summer, Asteroid, Bird better equipped me to think and talk about many of my favorite stories, which is a wonderful feeling. I always knew Miyazaki’s movies suddenly become about love in the last five minutes. Now I know why.

The Seed of the Sacred Fig

The Seed of the Sacred Fig is peppered with actual footage of Iranians taking to the streets in 2022 and 2023, protesting the regime and the hijab following the death of Mahsa Amini. For that reason, it is a difficult film to watch. We see real people getting abducted by police, real people getting beaten and shot at, and I am sure that at least one clip shows a dead man. It occurs to me now, 24 hours later, that the footage showing him was not blurred to obscure his identity, unlike so much of the other footage. Whether I realized it or not at the time, that might be why I knew he was dead.

During one of those montages, I found myself thinking about power, and what it means to believe in a world that consists of nothing but power, or rather nothing but power and its absence. That is, after all, the worldview of the Iranian regime: either my control is total, or it may as well not exist.

That is very much what The Seed of the Sacred Fig is about, power and absolutism and the ways they undermine our humanity. The title refers to the sacred fig, ficus religiosa, which propagates by landing on other trees and eventually choking them out. In the real world, the sacred fig was a metaphor in Iran for the revolution and the regime. As for the movie, the regime may be the sacred fig, but if it is, it’s smothering the people of Iran rather than the US-backed Pahlavi Dynasty. More likely, director Mohammad Rasoulof sees the sacred fig in this story as the inevitability of cultural change and progress. I keep thinking about a single shot in the film, showing a tattooed young woman wearing a baseball cap and driving car, which suggests that the world has already moved on more than even the people in this film care to acknowledge.

The day before Seed, I saw I’m Still Here, which tells the true story of Rubens Paiva, a former Brazilian congressman who was disappeared by the military dictatorship. During a harrowing sequence set in a military prison, I found myself thinking, “Why do you feel so compelled to hold onto power that you would behave this way?” I’ve had the thought before. I do not find meaning in power, and I never have. The only power that means anything to me, the only power I understand people fighting tooth and nail to retain or reclaim, is autonomy, but autonomy doesn’t extend beyond one’s own immediate borders.

I understand power’s appeal intellectually. Donald Trump and Elon Musk are entirely foreign to me, but I get where they’re coming from. Our own little home-brewed fascists share the same outlook as the Ayatollah, the AfD in Germany, Putin, the Communist Party in China, and Bibi. Each and every one of them exists in a world that consists of those who do and those who are done upon. The idea of a world in which we are all equal and we all have dignity doesn’t exist for them, because they do not believe that is possible. They believe power is a zero-sum resource. If they don’t have it, someone else must.

When you see the world that way, as so many Americans do nowadays, you open yourself up to all manner of horrors. I was reminded of Adam Serwer’s now-immortal line, “the cruelty is the point.” When he wrote that during the first Trump presidency, Serwer was putting the lie to the idea that Trump supporters liked his policies and were willing to ignore his racism. The cruelty of his words was central to why people flocked to him, why they still do. The cruelty isn’t a side affect, it’s the whole point. Poor white people supported the institution of chattel slavery because it meant there was someone beneath them. There are those who do and those who are done upon.

Both The Seed of the Sacred Fig and I’m Still Here were part of a two-day mini-marathon to catch up on new releases. Whether it’s because I started with I’m Still Here or because I’ve been reading Say Nothing, about Ireland during the Troubles, or because of what it’s like to live through this moment in time with even a hint of awareness, all four movies that I saw seemed to be about power, in one way or another. Even Companion, a fun B-movie about a sex robot, can be framed as a story about one man’s inability to accept his own impotence. If he’d managed to find meaning in any other aspects of life, none of [gestures vaguely towards a pile of dead people] would have happened.

The last movie in my two-day marathon was Nickel Boys, which also has quite a bit to say about power, about who has it and who doesn’t, and how those who don’t survive. Nickel Boys is adapted from Colson Whitehead’s novel The Nickel Boys, which was in turn based on a real and highly-abusive reform school in Florida. The administrator of the school, a white man named Spencer, enters the film congenially enough. He talks to the boys about the school, its system, how they can earn early release with good behavior. He then tells them that misbehavior will not be tolerated. “I’ll see to that personally,” he says while patting a ring of keys on his belt loop.

One of the places he takes the boys for punishment is a shed where he belts them. We only see the shed once, though that’s certainly enough. The whole scene plays out like a horror film, enhanced by director RaMell Ross’s decision to shoot the entire movie in POV. Because of that choice, you spend a lot more time observing the details of the world, rather than focusing on the protagonists. When Elwood enters the room, which is dim and splattered with blood, we see Spencer looking haggard, exhausted, spittle or possibly some blood dripping from his lower lip. He looks, in the moment, far weaker than any of the boys. You can gain power if you want. It isn’t necessarily hard. But what you have to give up in the process is almost certainly not worth it, and, if all four of these films are to be believed, it will destroy you.

James

Mark Twain introduces Jim, the slave who accompanies Huckleberry Finn down the Mississippi, at the start of the second chapter of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn:

We went tip-toeing along a path amongst the trees back towards the end of the widow’s garden, stooping down so as the branches wouldn’t scrape our heads. When we was passing by the kitchen I fell over a root and made a noise. We scrouched down and laid still. Miss Watson’s big nigger, named Jim, was setting in the kitchen door; we could see him pretty clear, because there was a light behind him. He got up and stretched his neck out about a minute, listening. Then he says:

‘Who dah?’

James, in which Percival Everett retells The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from Jim’s perspective, announces itself with astonishing clarity. It dropps readers into the opening of that second chapter as Jim saw it:

Those little bastards were hiding out there in the tall grass.

That is such a perfect encapsulation of everything the novel is doing, such a succinct explanation of its tone and its viewpoint, that I cannot help but hope it was the wellspring of the entire project. In my mind, Everett was talking about Huckleberry Finn with friends, joking about how Jim could probably see those little fuckers, only to realize he had something here. I have to believe he wrote that sentence down and the rest of this wondrous novel came spilling out. It’s the romantic in me. 

I was prepared for James to gently subvert the tropes at play in Twain’s novel, to slowly add detail where none had been, but it doesn’t really do that. Instead, James does away with those tropes fully within its first five pages, mostly through Everett’s use of language.

All of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is written in dialect, but Jim’s dialogue is particularly hard to parse: “A harem’s a bo’d’nhouse, I reck’n. Mos’ likely dey had rackety times in de nussery.” A lot of “dey”s, a lot of “warn’t”s, that sort of business. Jim is a comic foil, always an object and never a subject. His dialogue supports that.

Not so the Jim of James. Even if we ignore the timbre of the narration, he says as much in the second paragraph: “[Huck and Tom] were always playing some kind of pretending game where I was either a villain or prey, but certainly their toy.” The narration is so assured, particularly when taken in contrast to the source material, that I was jarred when I turned the page and came to the first line of dialogue: “Who dat dere in da dark lak dat?”

First of all, it is a miracle of book publishing that the first line of dialogue sits at the very top of page 10, and not at the bottom of page 9. Having just finished reading The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in preparation for James—something I don’t think is essential to enjoy it, but which certainly enhanced my experience—I had already noticed Everett’s rejection of dialect, so it was dizzying and exhilarating to turn the page and see it. In that moment, before I knew everything Everett was up to, it suggested a sort of radical egalitarianism, the idea that our thoughts are not bound by the particulars of how we speak.

Second of all, I love that Everett chose not to use the same dialogue as Mark Twain. Both books are explicitly, textually first-person narratives written down after the fact. Huck remembers Jim saying “Who dah?”. Jim remembers it a little different. The choice to deviate from Twain’s/Huckleberry Finn’s account in the particulars while adhering to the broader structures reinforces the conceit behind both books.

Third and lastly, that is the moment in which James announces its love of language to the reader. One of Everett’s primary thematic obsessions here is code-switching, and the ways in which the specifics of the language we use communicate much more than just the words themselves are saying. Three pages later, Jim has a conversation with another slave in which they speak entirely without dialect. A page or two after that, Jim instructs his young daughter on “the correct incorrect grammar” for speaking to white folk. It’s all an act, a façade put in place to make sure the white people feel comfortable and secure.

The rapacity with which Everett acknowledges and discards tropes reminded me of Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave, a movie that burns away all the comforting slave tropes the audience might bring with it. The “kind slaveowner” is kind and good right up until the moment it’s inconvenient for him. The southern belle is just as malicious as her husband. An attempted lynching is slow, aching, and miserable, not a grand and dramatic burst of horrifying cinematic action. For his purposes, McQueen turned cinema against itself, just as Everett uses language here to find what’s at the bottom of one of the Great American Novels.

To say James is a retelling of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a good hook to get you interested—it worked for me!—but the reality is that James is done with Twain by the end of Part One. Everett has his own story, and his own concerns. This is a project of reclamation. It is a strident assertion that black people aren’t, will not be, and never were anything less than just that, people, whole and unto themselves, no matter what the white people write down.

Suffs at the Music Box Theatre

When the cast of Suffs performed “Keep Marching” at the Tonys, I disliked it. It felt smug. Whether or not that was the song’s fault is hard to say. Self-importance has followed Suffs, which tells the story of Suffragist campaigner Alice Paul (Shaina Taub), from the beginning. Most of the marketing for the show didn’t have anything to do with the show itself, instead focusing on how “important” the subject matter is. I don’t have a lot of patience for that.

It wasn’t a false impression, either. The first act of Suffs suffers badly for the creative team’s desire to erect a monument. The story goes by in a flash, with little in the way of stakes or character. This is the leader, this is the friend, this is the wealthy one, this is the loose cannon, this is the quiet fresh recruit. Of course, there are stakes, but they’re abstracted, or buried. Importance and dramatic stakes are not the same thing. Suffs assumes you care rather than making you care.

It was hard not to think about Hamilton the whole time, and that’s not because both shows draw from American history. The score to Suffs is so thoroughly reminiscent of Hamilton that it made me more appreciative of all the things that show does well. At one point during the first act of Suffs, as I was being inundated with plot point after plot point spoken in rhythm over a sparse series of bass notes, I found myself thinking, “Wow, yeah, I guess Hamilton does have a lot of exposition.”

The bones of a great show are in there, I think, but they’re buried. Suffs would need to be less worried about relating facts, and more concerned with character. The central relationship to the structure of the first act is between Alice and the doomed Inez Milholland (Hannah Cruz), but the through line isn’t quite there. When Inez tells Alice that she’s leaving the movement to start a family, Alice convinces her to continue. That moment is crucial to everything that comes after, but it doesn’t hit. Inez doesn’t feel like she needs much convincing. Inez dies while campaigning in the midwest. She had a chronic illness that she’d known about for years. A version of Suffs in which the audience knows that while Alice tries to convince her to stay would probably be great.

As the show stands, it feels manipulative. I say that fully believing that the creative team is deeply sincere. Achingly sincere, even. When I saw David Byrne’s horrendous Joan of Arc at the Public back in 2017, the audience was greeted with a giant, hastily-assembled sheet that said, “Nevertheless, she persisted,” a phrase which had just entered the lexicon. I believed the people involved meant that sincerely. That was the story they were telling with their show. I also believed that they didn’t trust in the work to make its own point. Given how little meat is on the bones of Inez as a character, it’s hard not to roll my eyes at the decision to end Act I with a massive photograph of the real Inez Milholland filling up the stage.

The second act is much improved, with more attention paid to stakes and less of a breakneck pace. The show ends with an older Alice talking to a college intern. Much as Alice threatened the supremacy of the Suffs who came before her, this young woman can’t help but point out all the ways in which Alice’s beliefs about the Equal Rights Amendment are flawed. In that moment, realizing and accepting that she has inevitably fallen behind the times, Alice begins to sing “Keep Marching,” a song about the importance of doing the work for its own sake. Within the context of the show, it’s a great song. I’d even go so far as to say it’s important.