Art provokes. And sparks conversations. The Houston Grand Opera's recent production of John Adams' 'Nixon in China' has done just that, drawing strong responses from two critics — Scott Cantrell in Dallas and Wei-Huan Chen of Houston.
Their perspectives, on matters of race, history and how a viewer should interpret what they're seeing on an opera stage — are here. Chen's Houston Chronicle review is republished below, after Cantrell's column.
Scott Cantrell: Understanding opera's unique issues
Amid current political turmoil, with a controversial president destabilizing international relations—notably with the People's Republic of China—John Adams'
Nixon in China
is eerily resonant. Thirty years after its Houston Grand Opera premiere at the then-new Wortham Theater Center, 45 years after the events portrayed, the opera returned for five HGO performances last month.
With a libretto by Alice Goodman, the opera dramatizes President Richard Nixon's February 1972 visit to China. Ending a 25-year standoff between the two nations, he and his wife Pat met Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai, opening wary communications that persist today. (Although the opera preserves earlier transliterations of the Chinese names, I'm sticking with current conventions here.)
In the Houston Chronicle the new production received not a review as such, but two long and contentious columns from Wei-Huan Chen, the paper's theater critic and classical/opera writer. Chen, whose review is republished below, objected to the casting of non-Asian singers in the opera's Asian roles, quoting people in the theater and Asian communities who shared his objections. (Whether they had actually seen the opera wasn't clear.)
Publicly criticizing another critic gives me pause. But Chen's columns disturbed me enough that I drove down for the Jan. 26 performance to see for myself.
The opera's second and third acts still strike me as too long, but James Robinson's staging was an imaginative and probing realization of the story. Allen Moyer's sets, backed by a great red wall, and smartly lit by Paul Palazzo, made much of rows of circa-1970 console televisions showing newsreels from the Nixon trip. James Schuette supplied period costumes. Choreography of the extensive second-act ballet was by Seán Curran.
Baritone Scott Hendricks incarnated Nixon's awkward swagger and his confusion in a world foreign to him in so many ways. Chad Shelton supplied a powerful, penetrating tenor for the often high-pitched role of Mao, cautiously shuffling as the aging dictator who prefers gossip and philosophy to politics.
Soprano Andriana Chuchman was Pat Nixon, on one hand the still-naive small-town girl lost in a new world but on the other the opera's most poetic character. A late replacement for an indisposed Tracy Dahl in the role of Jiang Qing (Madame Mao), Audrey Luna radiated menace and set off soprano fireworks. Patrick Carfizzi was the stolid Henry Kissinger. Chinese baritone Chen-Ye Yuan, the only Asian in a major role, portrayed the steady, prudent — and lonely — premier Zhou Enlai.
In Adams' highly rhythmic post-modernist music conductor Robert Spano enforced all-important precision onstage and in the pit, with well-drilled contributions from the chorus, prepared by Richard Bado. Unfortunately, the winds-and-brass-heavy orchestration often made it hard to hear the singers.
Acknowledging that it's a personal issue, Chen criticized the casting of non-Asians in the opera's Asian roles. "Yellowface hurts more than one person or group of people," he wrote. "What Nixon in China says about Chinese people is ugly, but it says even more about what the Houston Grand Opera, not to mention Houston, and opera, stands for."
I'm neither Asian nor Asian-American, and I fully recognize, and regret, the reality of white privilege. Friends have certainly opened my eyes to unspeakable racism they have experienced. But the ethnicities of the singers in Nixon struck me as a complete non-issue. At least from my seat, I couldn't even be certain of individual ethnicities. I was impressed, actually, with how effectively Shelton was made up to look like the puffy, elder Mao.
Chen is judging opera by standards of realist theater or Hollywood, which has been criticized in particular of late for "whitewashing" — putting white actors in Asian roles. But opera has a different history, and different issues.
It has always required willing suspensions of disbelief — starting with the artifice of dramatis personae singing their conversations and ruminations. The disconnect between the role and the performer goes far beyond the issue of race: Think of the cliche of the hefty soprano pretending to be a frail tubercular at death's door. To avert inappropriate guffaws, supertitles for Puccini's Madama Butterfly often leave untranslated the middle-aged soprano's announcement that she's 15 years old.
Ironically to us, heroic roles in baroque opera were written for castrati, men who literally had no testicles; they had been castrated in youth to preserve their high voices, but they had the vocal power and technique of adults. When a castrato wasn't available for a given role, it was sung by a woman in male drag. Such roles now are usually done by countertenors, men singing in falsetto.
Standard-rep operas from other ages and conventions do perpetuate ethnic stereotypes that we find offensive, or at least unsettling. In Mozart's Magic Flute the sinister, and hapless Monostatos identifies himself as black. In The Abduction from the Seraglio Muslim Turks are portrayed as products of a more primitive and sexist culture.
The gold-grubbing dwarfs Alberich and Mime in The Ring of the Nibelung may personify Richard Wagner's documented anti-Semitism. Madama Butterfly, one of the most popular of all operas, spares neither Japanese nor American characters from noxious stereotypes, the former naive and backward, the latter crude and selfishly exploitative.
Opera companies have wrestled with these issues in recent decades. On one hand, there's been increasing pressure to make singers actually look like the characters they're portraying. On the other, there's been a rise in deliberately color-blind casting—not to mention updating historic operas to more recent, even current, time periods.
Among the Dallas Opera's many instances of color-blind casting, the African-American sopranos Grace Bumbry and Denyce Graves have appeared as the eponymous gypsy seductress in Bizet's Carmen. The African-American baritones Gordon Hawkins and Donnie Ray Albert have portrayed, respectively, the title role in Verdi's Rigoletto and the American consul Sharpless in Madama Butterfly. The South Korean-American soprano Hei-Kyung Hong has portrayed the young French woman who's the star of Massenet's Manon and the presumably Spanish servant Zerlina in Mozart's Don Giovanni.
If one's to insist on ethnic accuracy in opera casting, are we to demand an all-Egyptian cast for Verdi's Aida, an all-Chinese cast for Puccini's Turandot or exclusively Sri Lankans for Bizet's Pearl Fishers (set in ancient Ceylon)? Should roles in Rossini's Barber of Seville be limited to Spaniards? Must we have a Dutch tenor and a genuine Norwegian chorus for Wagner's Flying Dutchman? May only an Irish soprano portray Isolde?
"Opera is, of course, primarily a vocal art, and HGO casts performers on the basis of talent, not ethnicity," says a statement from Houston Grand Opera. In Nixon, the roles of Mao and Jiang Qing call for specific voice types and experience that may or may not be available among Asian or Asian-American singers at the moment. (Opera companies must book singers two years and more ahead of time.) For what it's worth, no Asians appeared in the original cast or in a subsequent recording conducted by Edo de Waart.
More and more excellent singers are coming out of South Korea, in particular, and Asian and Asian-American singers are appearing more in opera productions these days. But the talent pool is still dwarfed by Europeans and Americans. Asian singers also tend to have more training in continental European languages than in English—the language of Nixon in China. Understandably, they increasingly resist being cast in stereotyped ethnic roles like Butterfly's Cio-Cio-San.
In his indignation over casting in Nixon, the Chronicle's Chen seems to have misunderstood crucial characterizations in the opera. He interprets as vicious Western stereotyping of Asians a second-act scene in which a character in a Fu Manchu mustache attacks a helpless young woman. But that scene recreates an actual Communist ballet, The Red Detachment of Women, that was mounted for the visiting Americans. It was a Communist-Chinese, not Western, stereotyping of a cruel pre-Communist Chinese landlord. Even Pat Nixon finds it horrifying.
Chen also imagines Pat Nixon exhibiting "an air of All-American superiority" as she's given a tour of the countryside and a factory. Quite the contrary: there's more than a little condescension in Adams' and Goodman's—and Robinson's—portrayal of an American naif, clueless in a world apart from what she has known. Even Nixon himself comes off as something of a bumbler, outsmarted by Mao and Zhou—who actually come off as the opera's most sympathetic characters.
Opera remains far too white-dominated an art form. And operatic stereotypes and conventions are valid subjects for ongoing re-evaluations. Opera companies everywhere are wrestling with shifting expectations.
We all have our personal and racial hot buttons and blind spots. But we should be wary of letting them distort our perceptions of historic works of art—and a 30-year-old opera about events 45 years ago is now a product of history.
Scott Cantrell, former classical music critic of The Dallas Morning News, has also written for The New York Times and numerous music magazines.
Wei-Huan Chen: 'Instead of presenting Asians as human beings, we are offered a world of lazy stereotypes'
A version of this commentary by Houston Chronicle theater critic and classical/opera writer Wei-Huan Chen was originally posted at houstonchronicle.com on Jan. 23.
Pat Nixon despises the East.
In John Adams' 1987 opera, Nixon in China, which just had a 30th anniversary production at the Houston Grand Opera, the first lady, played by soprano Andriana Chuchman, struts around the austere Chinese countryside with an air of All-American superiority, her head whipping back like wheat caught in a monsoon when she sees an evil Chinese man — you can tell just how wily he is by the Fu Manchu that wears him — abusing a local peasant girl.
Mrs. Nixon cries out, falling to the ground where the girl lies crumpled. "Just look at this," she says, her eyes trained upward, probably at God. "Poor thing! It's simply barbarous!" Her tears aren't just for all the oppressed women of China. Mrs. Nixon is speaking her mind as a civilized being, her lily-white skin and golden hair a symbol for the decent, Christian Americans that the opera encapsulates early on as a white, heterosexual nuclear family of four.
Her sympathy toward the peasant girl belies an attitude about China that's so condescending it's almost colonialist. But Mrs. Nixon is more than just another annoying white-savior trope whose arc recalls The Last Samurai (the 2003 film starring Tom Cruise as Japan's savior) and The Great Wall (the soon-to-be-released movie starring Matt Damon as the heroic leader of the Chinese army).
No, the way she views the Chinese — as savage, exotic and ripe for salvation — symbolizes the demeaning treatment of Chinese culture throughout Nixon in China, an opera featuring non-Western culture but directed, written and composed by white people.
Instead of presenting Asians as human beings, we are offered a world of lazy stereotypes: tai chi, terra cotta warriors, Fu Manchu facial hair, kung fu, conical rice hats, even white men in fat suits clowning around in Asian-style masks, evoking minstrel shows of the 1800s.
Acts 1 and 3 of Nixon are too dreamily abstract to carry true cultural violence. The second act, however, features a scene in which the Nixons attend the Chinese ballet The Red Detachment of Women, a representation of Asian people so nostalgic, so inaccurate and so out of touch with the way we talk about and view race in modern times that it at first evokes more confusion than disgust.
Patrick Carfizzi plays an abusive landlord in a shameful display of yellowface that recalls Mickey Rooney's role as Mr. Yunioshi in Breakfast at Tiffany's. More than that, it's an example of the way racism can worm its way into stories when it's conflated with other human rights issues.
Carfizzi's role, taken at face value, is backward enough, but here it's also used hypocritically as a plea for feminism. Evil Fu Manchu (that may as well be his character's name) calls a local girl a slut, Mrs. Nixon cries her white tears, and the opera seems to have absolved itself of its sexist themes of female victimization by pawning it off on the "barbarous" Chinese.
After we see a girl repeatedly whipped and spat on by men, we're meant to direct our outrage not at the opera but at the metafictional setup it's laid out before us.
When we see the minstrel show in Act 2, we're meant to discount it as a play-within-a-play. When we raise cultural, social and historic issue with the portrayals of the Chinese, we're meant to dismiss those issues in favor of appreciating its painterly stage, a masterwork of light and shadow that accentuates the elegantly modernist choreography, as well as Adams' score, which rises and falls like an ocean wave with the plaintive circularity of Philip Glass' Einstein on the Beach and the throbbing urgency of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring.
In fact, Nixon in China does a lot of hiding behind art to avoid social responsibility. Its compositions drown out the mind's objections, lulling it into an impressionistic dream by the third act.
Tenor Chad Shelton, as Mao Zedong, has a stellar performance, his voice vivid and nuanced. Chuchman shines in her thankless role as Mrs. Nixon, her winding melodies carried out with purpose and ringing out like bells.
There was a time when we would merely applaud all this. Perhaps we'd question the opera's decision to eschew narrative suspense for modernist portraiture, or wonder if the contemplative third act was more languid than bold. But that would be enough, and it'd be back to praising a well-executed, relatively new opera that included people of color — because, honestly, how many of those even exist?
But that time has passed.
The fact that Shelton is white is not a trivial one. It is at least worth asking questions about its historic symbolism: What does yellowface say about the erasure of history for people of color? What does yellowface say in 2017, considering its origins in a time when, because of racial discrimination, only Caucasians were allowed to play Asians in Hollywood?
Sure, the image of yellowface stings on a personal level. They recall my childhood, when I saw again and again white kids in high school imitating Asian people by saying "ching chong ding dong," by pretending to be Bruce Lee, by bowing and saying "konichiwa" and by using their fingers to slant their eyes.
I've seen white people pretend to be Asians many times in my life, and never once has it made me feel anything other than small, anything other than less than human. The case with Nixon is no different.
But yellowface hurts more than one person or group of people. What Nixon in China says about Chinese people is ugly, but it says even more about what the Houston Grand Opera, not to mention Houston, and opera, stand for.
While HGO looks back on 1987, I ask that the company consider the future, when the majority of Americans will be people of color. HGO has let down not just the Asian community but all people invested in the future of its art form. HGO has let down those who want to live in a society that celebrates different cultures and races rather than caricatures them.
The missteps in Nixon are so pronounced, awkward and nostalgic that its blunders stand out far more than its achievements. I wish only that, if nothing else, it were more aware of the strange contradictions that it embodies as a show performed today.
The most ironic line in Nixon, of which there are many, goes not to Pat Nixon or Evil Fu Manchu but to Mao, who expresses exasperation and talks about the erasure of identity: "I am no one. I am unknown," he says, from the libretto by Alice Goodman. "Give me a cigarette."
And what a line. I'm sure he wasn't the only one that night who yearned for a sense of individuality and, of course, a break. I shook my head and chuckled. Finally, on a night filled with falsehoods, someone gave us a glimmer of the truth.
Wei-Huan Chen is theater critic and classical/opera writer at the Houston Chronicle. Read more of his coverage of Nixon in China at houstonchronicle.com.
