It was a dripping hot New York day, the kind of day that washes over sense and sensibility and leaves the body inert, bedraggled, without resources.
But inside the Westbeth Studios in Greenwich Village, up three long flights of stairs, there was no time for blessed stillness, no time for coolness, no time, in fact, at all.
Within two cavernous, black-walled rooms, air stirred by a single fan, director and designer Julie Taymor, composer Elliot Goldenthal, choreographer Margo Sappington and a host of actors, musicians and puppeteers were attempting to fuse East and West, speech and song, acting and dance, worldly and fantastic, the animate and the inanimate – all within a matter of weeks.
On Friday evening, their highly unusual musical production, The Transposed Heads: A Tale of Passion, begins previews in Philadelphia at Drexel University's Mandell Theater, 32nd and Chestnut Streets, for a run through Sept. 21. Its official premiere on Sept. 11 will mark the opening of the third annual American Music Theater Festival. And after it closes in Philadelphia, the production is moving to the Mitzi Newhouse Theater at Lincoln Center for an engagement from Oct. 14 to Nov. 2.
On the steamy August rehearsal day in question, however, previews and opening seemed both a long way off and intimidatingly close.
“This is a very complicated piece,” Taymor groused to a visitor. “And we have five weeks. Five weeks!”
The rehearsal rooms, bristling with activity, exuded the aura of Oriental bazaars, teeming with lustrous and exotic theatrical wares.
In front of two 8-foot Mylar mirrors, two men and a woman were clustered together, hunching their shoulders, tapping their heels, flipping their arms in syncopation. They repeated the same sequence over and over, watching themselves, altering their gestures slightly, moving together, finally, with perfect timing.
Behind them, two men and a woman manipulated a life-size, bearded, pale blue puppet through the room. From a tape machine about 25 feet away, the voice of Kamadamana – most holy ascetic, vanquisher of desire – echoed through the room as his blue wooden body traipsed across the floor.
Over in a far corner, a young man was being wrapped from head to foot in black winding cloth – formal wear, so to speak, that would enable the puppeteer to vanish in the blackness of a shadowed stage.
Various voice and diction coaches, choreographers, directors and designers moved from group to group, watching, dropping bits of advice, altering speeches and movements.
Across a small hall, in a second black-walled room littered with blue puppets and wooden body parts and masks and tools and cans of paint, composer Goldenthal and a handful of musicians filled the air with eerie, idiosyncratic sounds from a host of unusual instruments – Nigerian clay pots, Balinese angklung rattles, Indian flutes, gongs, strings and an electronic synthesizer.
The music bounced from the room and rolled and bumped through the third- floor studios, until the whole – music, actors, dancers, rooms, narrators, directors – became a great cacophony, a swirling, kinetic mosaic of sound and movement.
“There's a certain feeling of chaos and precision,” said Goldenthal as he hurried by.
The Transposed Heads is as eclectic in origin as execution. The production is ultimately drawn from a 1941 novella by Nobel Prize-winner Thomas Mann, who, in turn, had based his tale on an ancient Indian legend.
The story of Shridaman, the sublime merchant with the soft, unworked body, his friend Nanda, the lithe, well-muscled goatherd, and their mutual love, the beautiful Sita, culminates in a cave sacred to Kali, mother of darkness, goddess of lust, life and death.
In fits of sorrow and passion brought on by their love for Sita, the two young men behead themselves. Kali grants the bereaved Sita the power to restore them to life. She does so, but mistakenly switches the heads.
Who, then, is whom? Who is Nanda? Who Shridaman?
“It's extraordinary,” director-designer Taymor said during a break in rehearsals. “First of all, the Thomas Mann novel is a legend, so it's a fantasy of sorts. But it's also a very passionate, dramatic story. So you have two extremes. It's not just goddesses and giants – this is extremely human. This is why I love it and why the West-East thing is so powerful.
“You have a real love story, a love triangle, but it is propelled into these extraordinary proportions with people cutting their heads off.”
The current production had its origins in a staging mounted two years ago at the Ark Theater here. Taymor and poet Sidney Goldfarb adapted the novella and Goldfarb wrote the script. But the early version had minimal singing and dancing.
“When we worked on it before,” Goldfarb said, “we kept saying to one another, ‘This would be a great place for a song.’ Or, ‘This seems to be going in the direction of an operetta or musical.’ We could see that the fullest form of the thing would be something that had more music and definitely more singing in it. But I didn't know if I'd ever work on it again.”
That earlier production kept nagging at Taymor. She wanted to do more with Transposed Heads. “I decided I wanted to go further in every way this time,” she said.
Her close friend Goldenthal came in to write music. Goldfarb was brought back to work on lyrics. Alexander Okun, a Russian emigre who had been art director at the Moscow Art Theater, was signed to design the set.
Taymor, 33, who spent four years in Indonesia studying and working in theater and who is fascinated with the reality and nonreality of puppetry, designed a whole array of puppets and masks.
“The way that a puppet interacts with a human, when a puppet hand goes like this” – she placed a hand on an actor's shoulder – “or jumps up onto the human, you know why people die? They realize that it's just a bunch of Celastic, but it's so lifelike.
“That's theater at its best, because you accept the convention that it's not real, yet it moves you, it touches you. It brings you back to seeing things in a whole new light.”
In other words, inanimate puppets intensify reality, clarify it by blurring the edges between real and unreal. Music and dance work the same way, in Taymor's view.
“I felt that by pushing the language into song, or heightening it by creating song, would keep the entire level of the drama,” Taymor said. “You know, when you sing things, you can say all kinds of emotional things, simple things, and make them much more emotional.
“It's like what dance does to straight movement. So it seems much more cohesive as a concept.”
“There are about 20 numbers that are sung,” said Goldenthal. “Many of them are very unusual in terms of the spirit of musicals that we're accustomed to. They're more like recitatives or, actually, back to what was technically called arioso style.”
Goldenthal, 32, took whole pages of Goldfarb's verse text and set them to music so that songs would flow from incident and narration almost seamlessly, as the Ganges flows and overflows its banks, gathering strength as it moves through the ancient Indian landscape.
“I'm not a classical Indian musician by any means, and the Indians, they do the story in their own wonderful, exciting way,” said Goldenthal. “So what I wanted to bring to it was a feeling, a tribute to Asia.”
He was also very conscious of what he calls the “Germanic mind of Thomas Mann,” so his score makes use of the “technique that goes into Bach and the kind of emotional impact that Mahler or Wagner might bring.”
“Then, of course, the third aspect of this is that I live in 1986,” he said. “I feel very comfortable with my time, meaning jazz music and rock music and salsa music and rap music. I feel very comfortable in that world. I can't shut myself off and compose in a vacuum.”
It would appear that designing a set for a production with so many strong and singular elements would present a serious problem. But Okun, Moscow Art Theater veteran and circus buff, seems to have solved the problem in a startling way.
“Basic idea was no set,” he said in his slow, heavily accented speech. “This set is practically nothing. It is only reflection, different reflections, nothing else.”
What Okun has done is create a mirrored pyramid with walls that fold up and down – like a lotus flower. Characters moving within it become fragmented, reflected into infinite mirror distance as they move about the stage.
“Stylistically, I think this is correct for production,” he said. “Set is totally without color. It is all reflections. Very interesting visually and emotionally, too. It is a very unreal space.”
Unreality fits Taymor's theatrical vision. She is not interested in naturalism or realism. She strives for a hyper-reality, a reality that creates tension between the natural and the unnatural, the internal and the phenomenal world, the mundane and the magical.
To achieve that, she employs whatever seems appropriate from the world stage.
Isn't there a danger, then, she was asked, that The Transposed Heads might collapse under the weight of its own staging?
“The visuals are there only to enhance the story, and God help us if they overpower it,” she said, shocked at the question. “The choreography or the stylization or the use of masks – that is the style of presenting the story. It's not naturalistic, although we definitely don't want it to become so spectacular and presentational that the audience doesn't relate very intimately with what's happening…
“The story is a very cohesive, strong, dramatic story. That is why people are attracted to it.”