In ‘Juan Darien’, by the Uru-guayan short-story writer Horacio Quiroga, a woman's compassion transforms an orphaned tiger cub into a child.
Then the fear and cruelty of her neighbors change the boy back into a savage jungle beast. Elliot Goldenthal, the co-author and composer of a new production inspired by this 70-year-old story, says that the tale has haunted him since he first encountered it 12 years ago. “It has fragments of mystical resonances. It's not exactly a Passion Play. It's not exactly Joan of Arc, not exactly the Inquisition. But it has a heartbeat in that area.”
In 1980, when he met Julie Taymor, the director, puppeteer and designer, he suggested that they stage the piece together. “A story about transformation is so perfect for the use of puppetry and masks,” Ms. Taymor explains. The two New York-based artists began to work together, but on other projects – a version of Thomas Mann's Transposed Heads, and, most recently, Liberty's Taken and The Taming of the Shrew. Now, eight years and six collaborations after Mr. Goldenthal first proposed it, their Juan Darien is coming to life, opening at St. Clement's Church on West 46th Street on Tuesday.
At an early rehearsal in the church, the work's disturbing themes lurk in the background as everyone concentrates on logistics. “To make things move magically,” Ms. Taymor says, “there are a lot of quirks to work out on the technical end of things.” In one scene, a skeleton in a derby is hoofing a little jig – but the actor handling the life-size puppet can't get its head to cock quite right. In another, a canopy of jungle foliage that must descend from the ceiling requires three people to control it, but all except two are busy at the moment with giant lizards and tigers. The actors running the butterflies are being forced to operate at half-speed, because the musicians haven't gotten the wildly complex ‘Gloria’ – on keyboards, marimba, Indonesian drum, trumpet and tuba – up to tempo yet.
But even with the quirks and creaks not yet ironed out, with the all-important lighting not yet plotted, a magical and dangerous world is crystallizing. Just after a miniature funeral procession mounts the paths of a hillside village, past tiny terra-cotta-roofed stucco houses, giant close-ups of mourners appear around the stage. Oversized masks and bas-relief puppets present sharp-planed copper faces distorted with grief; sculptured hands hold heads or reach out in supplication. Meanwhile, the sound of a dirge swells in from behind the village. Ancient Mayan clay pipes wail and flutter dissonances above church harmonies; a tuba bellows from below. In the tiny village, a foot-high house-wall lights up as a shadow screen. In silhouette, a mother cradles her child. Then the entire village rotates, and the scene changes to the inside of the hut. The mother is cradling a coffin.
In visual imagery as well as music, Ms. Taymor and Mr. Goldenthal tried to capture the Quiroga story's sense of living at the border between the jungle, with its natural beauty and savagery, and civilization, with its refinement and cruelty. They describe their play as a “carnival Mass.” Ms. Taymor says, “It's showing the conflict between religion – specifically in South America the Catholic church – and the jungle, the natural state of man. You have the theme of the beast, the jaguar, against the human. From the human point of view, the jaguar is constantly devouring the human. And the human fights back against the primitiveness and the baseness with religion.”
To create a sense of earthiness, Ms. Taymor used natural materials in her staging. “Even though I have in the past used different kinds of mirror-plexiglass and electric light for shadow puppets, I'm going back to using leather and fire here. It's much more tactile and sensual and really supports the story. We use real torches, candles and a Bengal light structure, our own version of fireworks.”
Ms. Taymor, who is 35 years old, has studied masks and puppetry in Eastern Europe, Japan and Indonesia. (She went to Indonesia for three months on a grant and stayed for four years.) Juan Darien incorporates and adapts ideas from all over. Its techniques include a Punch-and-Judy style schoolhouse with little glove-puppet urchins; a life-size Bunraku-type doll, manipulated by three handlers; masks that recall the Bread and Puppet Theater; a version of Indonesian shadow puppets, and ‘black theater’ effects, in which handlers, shrouded in black, disappear behind walls of light.
The use of masks and puppets in Juan Darien, she says, intensifies the action. “All those gestures are even more touching because it's an inanimate object, and you know that. You see gesture anew; you don't take it for granted. Every single thing is like being under a microscope.”
Only three actors in the 11-member Juan Darien company – Barbara Pollitt, Stephen Kaplin and Willie C. Barnes – had done puppetry before. The others brought a range of talent and experience. The South-African-born singer Thuli Dumakude played Lady Macbeth in the Zulu Macbeth and the title role in Poppie Nongena. Nicholas Gunn was a principal dancer with the Paul Taylor Dance Company for 10 years. Ariel Ashwell performed movement-theater in Mexico for eight years. Andrea Kane has studied Beijing Opera technique.
This diverse ensemble has risen to the exceptional demands of the work, Ms. Taymor says. “It's not a normal art form. To puppeteer means you have to survive hundreds of pounds on your back, be hidden under black cloth, be in painful positions. And your own person isn't there. You're putting all your talent into manipulating another creature.”
In an uncanny way, these ‘other creatures’ have become part of the company. During one break, an actress rescued the infant-Juan doll from the dancing skeleton and casually held him, like a baby, while she consulted Ms. Taymor. Later, the stage manager called out a direction, “Juan, look at your mother”; she was addressing a puppet.
While the plot of this new Juan Darien mostly follows the Quiroga tale, its text comes from the Catholic Requiem Mass – plus the ‘Gloria’, a bit of Quiroga's original story, and a poem written in Spanish by Mr. Goldenthal. The play is entirely sung, in Latin and Spanish. Ms. Taymor explains: “We felt that if you didn't understand the words, the musicality of the language would be much more apparent. Latin and Spanish have so much beauty. And in the Requiem Mass you don't need to understand what each of the words means to get incredible feeling from the language.”
In the few places where the audience needs to understand the text literally, staging devices fill the gap. In one case, little Juan recites his school lessons in Spanish while writing them in English; in another, an old-fashioned ‘cranky’, a hand-rolled scroll, gives the translation. It would fracture the feeling too much, Mr. Goldenthal says, “if someone came in and said in English, ‘Oh, my God! The boy's a tiger!’”
The Mass, in Mr. Goldenthal's hands, is an eclectic mix of refinement and rawness. While he uses only one excerpt of the traditional ‘Dies Irae’ music, “played by a tuba in a carnival manner, over and over again, maniacally,” he weaves plain-chant melodies and church harmonies all through the work. “It's very common in Spanish songs, even in Caribbean music,” he says, “to hear ‘Ave Maria’ in the middle of a very sexy song.”
Mr. Goldenthal's aim has been to “try to create a multilayered work that has a tremendously developed rhythmic and contrapuntal structure and still brings us back to the terra-cotta world that the set and the masks evoke.” The musical fabric of Juan Darien includes Japanese taiko drums, African shakers and slit drums, Indian temple gongs, Mayan clay flutes and death whistles and an Australian aborigine didjeridu. The non-tempered scales and pitches of these instruments mix in with sounds of a marimba, tubas, trumpets, a violin, an upright piano “that's slightly out of tune, the way I like it” and four “hopelessly in-tune synthesizers that we're kicking around enough to make them blend.”
The global bent in his music, the 33-year-old Mr. Goldenthal says, developed from his love of American jazz. Through his older brother, who had connections with some jazz artists, he met such legendary performers as Charles Mingus and Miles Davis. He started out, he says, “appreciating the underbelly of musical culture and then fell in love with the European masters, Mahler and blah, blah, blah.”
Although he has explored other traditions a little (“I like the boniness and edginess of two-part harmony that I've heard in some Hispanic and also Bulgarian culture”), the non-Western sound in his music, he says, is home grown. “It is in the air – somewhere in Brooklyn, at Smith and Ninth Street, possibly – but it's there.”
Despite his affinity for jazz, Mr. Goldenthal leaves no room for improvisation in Juan Darien. Every note has been written, reconsidered and set: “My main instrument,” he says, “is the eraser.” It is a difficult, virtuoso score for eight musicians: “It can't be read in a four-day rehearsal. It must be worked up, almost in mountain-climber fashion, day by day, until the gig.”
For all its technical complication and exoticism, Juan Darien is personal and immediate for its creators. “It's about compassion,” Mr. Goldenthal says, “and it's about bigotry. My mother was Catholic, and my father's Jewish. When that's going on, it heightens your awareness of bigotry. Maybe you're the outsider on Wednesday and then on Thursday you're not. So why shouldn't you identify with a boy who's perceived as the enemy?”
Ms. Taymor adds: “Juan doesn't know he's a jaguar. He's a little boy. It's the people's fear and hatred that make him become the jungle beast they accuse him of being. He's turned into a jaguar forever.”