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The Making of The Seven [This conversation
between playwrights Will Power and Charles L. Mee took place at a
WILL POWER: It’s a retelling of another story, and what we’re trying to do with this version is flip it for today. Hip-hop is all about flipping it. When I say flipping it, I mean you take something, keep the essence, the quality, and the feel of it, but you make it something different. Flipping might be taking a problem and turning it into an opportunity. For example, in hip-hop culture—and the first character who comes out is the DJ. DJs have been around for a while, but the way we use DJs in hip-hop culture is really as musicians. And that came from the fact that a lot of black folk in the ’70s in New York either didn’t have access to or couldn’t afford musical equipment, so they took their turntables and their record players and they flipped it. They turned it into a musical instrument, a percussion instrument. That’s really what brought me to the piece. How can I take this story and make it mine? Jim [Nicola, NYTW’s Artistic Director] told me that from what we know, these Greek plays were performed in songs, they were chanted. The way that a lot of these Greek plays are performed today is not the way they were written. Jim said, “What you’re doing, hip-hop, is not far from this.” Stylized movement and music, in some ways, aesthetically, is closer to the way Greek performances were, though we don’t know how they did it. And then I thought about, who are these characters in my world? There’s a loud boaster in the original play. Who would that be? There’s a character who’s one of the conquerors, who’s always on a horse. Since I am from California, that’s a cop. Hippomedon is just this terrifying, gigantic figure. That’s a cat out of the joint, the guy who just got out of prison with a bald head and a goatee. MEE: Will, will you say just what the story is? POWER: Basically, Seven Against Thebes concerns itself with the sons of Oedipus. Oedipus got it on with his Mom. Seven Against Thebes deals with their sons. After this whole tragedy with Oedipus and his big fall, his sons were embarrassed and they shunned him. They kicked Oedipus out and got rid of him, he was removed from power. As a result, Oedipus cursed them. He said, “All of you will fight over the kingdom, the royal family, and eventually you’re going to kill each other.” And the two sons are like, “Aw, we’re not gonna do that. Let’s make a deal: I’ll rule for one year and then you rule for one year and we’ll switch back and forth.” But eventually lack of confidence and lack of faith in themselves symbolized by lack of faith in each other bring them down. They succumb to the belief that there’s no way out. Fate is fate. We’re destined to repeat the mistakes of our forefathers. So this is what this play is about. The reason that the play is called Seven Against Thebes is that once the two brothers start to fight—the brother who was going to rule for the first year, he’s in the kingdom. The other brother is outside. Then these problems start happening and the brother who doesn’t rule the kingdom draws seven armies. In that time, there were all these city-states. And so they march on to the city. The Seven represent that moment of truth: Is this something that you can escape? And it’s fascinating for me. Some of my contemporaries might not agree, but I don’t feel like there are any new stories. What’s often presented as a new story is usually about how the story is told. I mean that there are new characters, but it’s really the same issue that we have been struggling with as human beings. Things change in how we do certain things; technology changes. But I feel like there are really no changes in how we tell a story. I was just fascinated by this family. Oedipus was cursed, his father was cursed, and then his sons, after they kill each other—and we don’t really get to this in the play, but the sons of the sons, they come back and fight each other. So, in Seven Against Thebes, Thebes wins. But ten years later, the sons come back, not just the two sons, Oedipus’s sons, but all the Seven’s sons. So the loud boaster’s son comes back and actually his son and Tydeus’s son, Diomedes, they come back before the war of Troy. It’s kind of symbolic of how you win a war, but you won’t win because the next generation is coming up. That is the basic story. MEE: What’s the curse? POWER: We’re trying to clarify that a little more in the script now, so it’s funny you should ask. But I think that in this instance—as we’re trying also to draw parallels to hip-hop and African-American culture—the curse is the belief in inevitable fate. Once you believe in that it’s a constant pull: I am a man, I am a woman. I am a human being, and you ain’t shit. I think that’s what the curse really is. Oedipus, he tried to rule all this stuff. When you go back to the story of Oedipus, it’s not like he was saying, “Oh, that’s my mom, I want to get with her.” No, he tried to do the best he could. He came to the city and he got rid of the Sphinx. But he still fell to the curse. The question is: Do you have choice? Or are we destined to make the same mistakes? I think that’s what the curse is. And the same mistakes to me are in believing that you’re not a man, that no matter what you do, it’s the way things happen. MEE: Tell us a little more about how you flipped the story. POWER: I could
really relate to the characters’ issues and their vibes, but not
to who they were. I’ve never been to Greece—I need to get
there—but I had no idea about who these people were. So I gave
you some examples about the Seven and who they are in this world. The
way we bring this together in the production is in the opening monologue
with the DJ. If you go to the clubs or listen to the radio or hear about
it from your friends, a DJ can play a James Brown record from 1970,
and then can mix it with a Jay-Z record that has that same James Brown
sound. Do you know what a sample is? A sample is when you record a section
of a song and you loop it and then you create an original song. So,
let’s say James Brown is “doop-da-doop-ba-da,” you
might take that and you might add your own part, “doop-da-doop-ba-da-bit-ba-ba.”
You create an original song, but the foundation or the elements are
from this older song. In some ways, what hip-hop is doing is a nod to
your elders and your ancestors. It is incorporating something old and
adding something like a DJ. So the DJ has a mix of 1970s records, James
Brown, and samples that with Jay-Z and makes his own stuff. These two
have a dialogue with each other. Even someone who’s not alive—Jimi
Hendrix with Jay-Z—they can talk. They have a dialogue. In this
play, I’m trying to take those same principles of hip-hop. It kind of reminds me of The Wiz. That was the first play I ever saw when I was a kid. This reminds me of that, taking this old play and flipping it for the time. That time was soul and funk. So The Wizard of Oz became The Wiz. It pisses some people off. Some people are saying, “Don’t touch the classics.” But I feel like with the people I’m trying to reach, and why we are doing it now, it’s to see how this story will have relevance to today. If you’re doing an older play, you don’t have to do it the way I’m doing it, obviously. But if you can’t make the connection as to why it’s important now, then it’s not interesting. MEE: What you’re doing and what hip-hop does is what Aeschylus and Sophocles and Euripides did. They took legends and stories and each other’s plays and remade them. POWER: Yeah. What’s exciting to me is that as I’ve been working on the play, I’ve been getting into the mythology. What is a myth? It is part fiction, part fact. It’s embellishing, but it’s for a deeper purpose which is to keep people’s history alive, to keep people’s culture alive, and it has a message. In addition, it’s really great entertainment. I’ve been studying these classics, studying Homer and others and I think of my life as a mythology of what I’ve grown up with: West Coast, California, the characters in my neighborhood who are larger than life. We had a guy who was the bully of the neighborhood. So there were stories about him, how he took advantage of this guy or fought with that guy. Most of it was true, but some of it was made up. “He beat up five guys! No, he beat up six guys!” So as I studied Greek mythology, it’s kind of like that too. Was there a king called Oedipus? There might have been. He might have had a fall. Was there a Sphinx outside the gate like that? Maybe not like that. Maybe there was some kind of disease or something. We know that the war of Troy was based in truth. MEE: What drew you to it? POWER: I think it’s the love of myth, flipping the story, and it’s also this idea which I’m contemplating myself: Do you have a choice? Or are you destined to repeat the mistakes of the forefathers and mothers? And that’s personal to me because of my family. What does it
mean to fall from grace in my family and in my community? I grew up
in the Bay Area in the late ’80s and ’90s and it was crazy.
It was crazy on a local level. Now I go back home and the young people
are still killing each other. I don’t know if it’s at the
same level, but I go home and the guy’s on the corner and I kind
of know him, I kind of remember him as a kid, but not anymore. They’re
like men on the corner. So are we destined to repeat that? We have this
president, George W. Bush. Ten years ago, his father was president;
now I hear that they’re trying to get Jeb Bush revved up. It’s
scary. There’s a good possibility that we could have a third Bush
as president. Not in 2008, but in 2012. So, are we destined to repeat?
It’s scary, right? Or do we have choice? MEE: Where did you settle on this play, Seven Against Thebes? Where did you decide that this is the piece you would remake? POWER: We had a reading of a one-act in California. It was the idea of a guy who had a small theatre there. He said, “Check out this play, see if you want to do anything with it.” And I checked it out. Then once I got into it, I couldn’t get it out of my head. Then Jim got hold of it and said, “Would you expand this and do a lot of work on it?” And I was like, “Yeah, I love doing that kind of stuff.” MEE: So what happened? How did you go about doing that? POWER: I studied the older story and I just sat down and let my stuff come out. The king consults a psychic. Okay, what’s that? The songs just kind of came. Then, obviously, we went through the process of tightening it up. But the initial impulse came really quickly. MEE: What’s happening now in rehearsal? POWER: You know this has been a really exciting and interesting thing. First of all, even before getting to rehearsal, there have been some challenges. I’m in hip-hop theatre, I’m doing my thing. Jo Bonney is an excellent choice of director because she understands that world, she’s worked with Danny Hoch and Universes. She understands really well what we do as someone who’s not—no, no, no (Laughter). She is not from that culture, but she still has that level of understanding of how to tell the story, the dramaturgy. But we had some major challenges getting this play up. First, hip-hop theatre is a relatively new kind of art form, a new kind of theatre. The first generation of hip-hop theatre artists who came up were people who wrote their own material. We were writers and performers: Danny Hoch, Sarah Jones, Universes, and Rennie Harris in the dance theatre world. These were people who wrote their material, performed it, and directed it. Now, we write a play and then pass it on. But that’s incredibly difficult because the pool of performers who can do this kind of material is still forming. If you want to do West Side Story, thousands of people can do “When You’re a Jet.” That’s already an established musical theatre form. But hip-hop theatre is different. A few people, but as far as a pool of people it’s really challenging. So we did so many auditions. Jo kept saying, “For Soldier’s Play we had so many incredible actors who came in,” and I’d say, “Yeah, that’s cool, but that’s a traditional form of theatre. There’s a bigger pool of actors, black and white actors, who can do that.” This is challenging because you have to really be able to rhyme—not write the rhyme, but rhyme in character. Furthermore, the actors have to be able to handle the original text because we sampled some of the original text. On top of that, they have to be able to move with Bill T. Jones’s choreography, and sing. We had people auditioning with lots of experience on Broadway and off Broadway who just could not do it. We had rappers who came in and they could rhyme, but it was like, “Okay, remember. You’re a 70-year-old psychic. You’ve got to rhyme like a 70-year-old psychic. You can’t rhyme like yo-yo-yo.” So the people we ended up getting are just an amazing bunch of folks. Young people who, in some ways, have their pulse more on this kind of thing. The other two challenges: first, my friend Will Hammond and I composed the music. We got it to a certain level. But when I would hear it against something like Jay-Z or Erykah Badu, the composition was good, but the production just was not, so all my friends were like, “The music, man….” And I was like, “I know, I know, I know.” So we needed to find our own hip-hop producer, someone who does some composition, but really it’s about production, taking the song and upping it. We needed someone who also had theatre sensibilities, and that was really difficult to find. I started by grabbing the CDs of people I like. For example, I like Erykah Badu, I like the production on her recordings. We started contacting people and they were quoting $20,000 a track. And we were like, no. Or they’d say, “Theatre…I don’t understand. What is it? I don’t get it.” And the people who understood theatre didn’t have the hip-hop sensibilities. So we were trying to find someone who could do that. We searched long and hard and we finally found one guy in Atlanta. We couldn’t find him in New York. You’d think you could. Luckily, New York Theatre Workshop was nice enough to bring him in from Atlanta. This guy is Justin Ellington. He worked with a youth ensemble in Atlanta as a kid, so he grew up in the theatre, composing for theatre, but he’s also a hip-hop producer. He’s got a song on Ciara’s album, it’s pop music, but he also works at the Alliance Theatre, he’s done composition there. He does children’s theatre and he’s amazing. So now we can talk about production on the level of Jay-Z, but we can also talk about, what’s the feeling of this character. That was just so difficult to find and we were lucky to find him. The last challenge was the DJ. Because the DJ is the one who comes out initially, she opens up the whole thing. She’s like, “Yo. If you don’t know B.I.G. is cool, you don’t know Sophocles is cool. I mix all of those. Shakespeare with James Brown.” She has to be able to act because she opens the whole play. What I really wanted was someone who could take our music and press it to vinyl like what we had in Flow with DJ Reborn. We actually needed a turntablist. It was really difficult to find that person because the DJ couldn’t handle the acting and actors couldn’t handle the DJing. I was pulling for a DJ and Jo was pulling for an actor. We had to take it beyond and say, let’s get an actor who we can teach to be a DJ, to do some basic cutting, someone who can spin around and kind of cut in the air. She’s telling a story, she can cut on this level. That gives her more flexibility as opposed to pretending she’s a real DJ. Ideally, I really wanted to find someone who was a DJ, but we couldn’t find her. I wanted a female for that role—I’m not saying that they don’t exist, but we couldn’t find them. Those were some of the challenges even before we got to the first day of rehearsal. It’s been incredible. Some of the actors have been here for a couple of years doing workshops for this production. Some are new. We’ve got Bill T. Jones who will choreograph, but then he’ll pull from the actors. He’ll choreograph the movement, but then the actors will pull the specific vocabulary for that character. So we’ve got this stuff from modern dance, but it’s specific to the character and it’s specific to hip-hop. For instance, we’ve got this one character, the loud boaster. Do you guys know what hydraulics are? In Latino culture, they’re so big in California. Drop it, you gotta drop it. So when this character comes out, he’s got to drop it. It’s modern dance, but it’s also how his character would do it. MEE: What to you is exciting about theatre that you couldn’t do in some other form, or in some other way? POWER: It’s hard to say, but for me it comes down to storytelling and a particular kind of storytelling that theatre involves. It’s really about people in a room, performer-artist engaging live. Cell phone might go off. It’s right here. There was always something about that that excited me. Maybe it’s more accessible. I came up in the community theatre-activist-science fiction-type world. So the theatre that I knew as a kid was always about stretching the imagination and saying something that may not be accessible. Do you guys know Sun Ra? One of his dancers was my first drama teacher when I was ten years old. She came into my community and she started creating this Afrocentric, science fiction children’s presentational theatre. And you can still see that in my work today. We had shows called The Big Blacks Who Left Planet Earth, which were all based on Sun Ra’s mythology. Sun Ra is about the living myth. Black folks were like, “We’re tired of racism, we’re tired of Earth,” so they went to Saturn, but there were other black people on Saturn who were like, “Ya’ll can’t come here because ya’ll ain’t got ya’ll’s stuff together. You’re still drinking alcohol, you’re still lying to each other. You need to go back to Earth to get yourself together, so then you can come here.” So I was doing this at 10 years old. Crazy. All that stuff is still in my work, like in Flow, tweaking your imagination. That’s how I got into it, from that Afro-centered community. MEE: What happened between then and now? POWER: It was just a continuation. I did children’s theatre. When I was 14, I started to rhyme. I always tell people that hip-hop hit the West Coast a little later. The first thing that got popular in my neighborhood was breakdancing. Everybody was breakdancing and I tried to breakdance, but I was wack, other people would just blow me away. This was before the gang activity hit big time. This was about working things out through breaking. It was not for everybody; remember, that this was before the crackheads, right before it hit. So if you had beef with someone, you would break with them, you would do it in a more peaceful way. But you had to have a trade. If you were walking down the street and someone would look at you, you’d have to break against him. But I was getting taken out, I couldn’t hang. I was like, “I need to change my trade in the neighborhood.” So me and my friends, we switched to rhyming. At that point, the theatre or performance was about expressing yourself, more like a hobby, something to do, something fun. At that time, we didn’t think hip-hop was something you could make a living from. All the rappers who were big at that time—early ’80s—were East Coast, or Dr. Dre. So we just did it as a way to express ourselves. A little later
on, at school in my early twenties, the whole hip-hop theatre thing
also came out of a need to express yourself. In the neighborhoods there
was some mad drama going on. In the early ’90s, people were dying,
getting shot all the time. I always tell people, you might be talking
to your friend, and then pow-pow-pow-pow-pow. Then you’d be like,
“Anyway, man...” We were totally desensitized. Today, I’d
be scared to death, but back then it was always around. For us, hip-hop
theatre was about, how can we get a space? We don’t have money
for it. How do we bring it back to telling stories? It wasn’t
that consciously thought out. It was just, “Let’s go to
this space, let’s go to that space.” I guess looking back
now that I’m older, hip-hop theatre was really a response to a
lot of the chaos that was going on around us. A lot of the hip-hop theatre
pioneers were going through that similar experience at the same time.
We created these artist collectives at the same time in London and New
York. We didn’t know each other, it was just these local collectives.
It wasn’t just theatre, it was also poetry and music. A way to
express myself, reflect what’s going on, an outlet. Theatre is
my outlet. I’ve seen what happens when people don’t have
an outlet. I’ve seen the effects of that. POWER: No, not really. This is the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life. I don’t think I could handle performing it and writing it. My hands are full with composition. I don’t see how I could be in rehearsal, be at that level of acting, song and rhyme. You come to rehearsal, Jo’s over here, Bill’s over there, I’m either teaching the actors a part or usually I’m rewriting a part that isn’t working. Last night we were at the Workshop until 10:30. So I don’t think I could handle performing. I’m excited to be hanging out with ya’ll instead of getting ready. Also, I’m 35 and for the first time in my life I’m looking forward to being on the road a little less. That’s really how I’ve made my living, which I love, but I’m married now and I have a dog. Even beyond that, I have ideas for things that I need time to get out. I do want to stay a performer, but this is a blessing to have this time to step back. MEE: Are you talking about any other ideas? POWER: I got a couple of ideas floating around. I think I just want to make things hard for myself, I don’t know why. I have this idea about a teenage punk band in the early ’70s. They’re in high school. They practice in the garage. The Vietnam War is going on, people are getting drafted, people are coming back all jacked up. I was born in ’70, so I don’t remember the Vietnam War, but I remember some cats—this guy in my neighborhood—at five in the morning he would always go out on his terrace and stand watch. I remember seeing that and he was cool. He would talk but he had to do watch to feel comfortable. He was protecting his house. So, anyway, it’s about a teenage punk band and they’re about to graduate from high school. The question is, do they break up the band, or does the band stay together? I think I’m going to develop it for the Children’s Theatre Company in Minneapolis. They have a theatre for teenagers, so I’m trying to get a piece for them. The challenge is, it’s only five people and it’s a band. They don’t have to rap because they didn’t rap back then. They have to sing, act, and play instruments. The idea is that the bass player might be playing something and the drummer might jump from behind the drums and do a monologue about his father while the bass player is backing him or something like that. I want to see that Sweeney Todd because I hear they do stuff like that. I have a couple of ideas. MEE: What kind
of language do you use for that? MEE: No more Greeks? POWER: I’m going to be a Greek scholar after this. I’ve been reading so much Greek poetry, which is beautiful. It’s like you get into that world. When I was doing Flow, I was into that world. I want to move to another world, the world of the early ’70s. So I think I’m probably done with this. Disney’s like, “You want to do the Iliad?” I’m like, “No…I don’t think so.” “No, it’ll be great. Sing a song, ‘Achilles’.” “No, I’m good.” AUDIENCE: Did you think about incorporating Antigone into your story? POWER: I did think about that for a minute, but that was getting into the next chapter of the story of their family. In the original Seven Against Thebes, Antigone and her sister come in at the end, but many feel that this wasn’t the original ending. The theory is that the play ends and after Aeschylus wrote it, they tacked on the ending where Antigone comes out and argues. They’re not one hundred percent sure, but they’re pretty sure Aeschylus wanted to end it where the two brothers die. I thought about Antigone, but I think it would open up a whole new chapter, which could be exciting, but I don’t think this piece is about that. I had to be careful about that. Creon is not really in the piece. There’s some reference, a character refers to Creon the peon, but I had to be selective about which characters are stepping forward to be prominent in this world. There’s just so much we’re dealing with, with the original text, and if I bring her up Jo’s going to ask me more questions. Oh man. Whew. AUDIENCE: Have you scripted all the lines for the actors? POWER: I’m pretty much doing that. Sometimes the actors will offer suggestions for a couple lines, but I’m pretty much writing all of it. The way the verse works is funny because it’s not so much rhyming to a beat like a rapper. It’s like the verse never stops, but sometimes it goes into conventional dialogue, but it still rhymes. So the rhyme changes rhythm. Sometimes it’s like, “Hey, how you doin’?” “Ah, nothing…” Sometimes it goes into song. There are a lot of parts with specific rhythm and a lot of parts for the actor to interpret. It moves, but the rhyme never stops, it changes. Folks who are artists know, when you’ve got really good people in the room, you have a number like at New York Theatre Workshop—that’s why they call it New York Theatre Workshop. It’s so great, especially for a piece like this, because you can hear what’s working and not working. A lot of the actors are very unique characters themselves. Flaco—he’s in Universes—Flaco is a character. As a person, he’s a character. It’s not something he makes up. It’s not even like something he’s trained to do. Edwin, the actor who is playing Oedipus, he’s just so great. I’ve learned so much about the character from him. He’s just crazy. It’s a Greek tragedy, so these are seven heroes, and Oedipus, he’s a Greek hero. And Edwin—he’s strange but in a beautiful way. Which is the perfect person for who I am and the way I write. It’s interesting because Edwin is a great actor, but I don’t think he’s had a lot of success in New York. He’s done some stuff, but he’s got his own thing. You have to have material that works for that personality. He’s got his own thing and for me that works. Having personalities like that around helps me a lot. Oedipus is a personality and Edwin is a personality. You put them together and now I’m starting to hear their voices. I hear all their voices. AUDIENCE: I was wondering about the choice to have a female DJ. POWER: A couple of reasons. The DJ finds the record. She digs the record, it’s an old-school throwback, I love this voice. As the record goes on, the DJ starts questioning it: Why does it have to be like this? I guess there’s something to me about feminine energy. I don’t want to generalize, but there’s the masculine energy of the old, the conqueror. Men can have feminine energy too, but symbolically. Also in hip-hop, there aren’t a lot of female DJs, but there’s quite a number in New York. With DJ Reborn on tour for Flow it’s been like a revelation. In Iowa, Minneapolis, I see young women’s eyes just open right there. And DJ Reborn is bad, but also feminine and powerful in her femininity. She’s doing her thing. That’s something that can be a revelation and show people new ways into hip-hop culture. New York has a lot of great female DJs. When I was in Vermont, I don’t think they’d ever seen a female DJ. I don’t think there’s one in the whole state. And that’s important. Especially with the technical equipment—it’s a social thing. “Let me handle this equipment. Step back.” I think it’s important, breaking down walls, breaking down some stereotypes. AUDIENCE: Are you living in Vermont? POWER: No. I’m on the way, though. I’m in Beacon, New York. AUDIENCE: Are you going to start writing plays about Beacon, New York? POWER: I don’t know. I still have a few things that are older material that I have to get out. So it’s kind of like Flow and The Seven deal with things from a few years ago. I’m just getting to maturity now to be able to deal with those stories. I make it contemporary, but it took a number of years to move from it and understand the story and be able to tell it. Where I’m living now with my wife, maybe that will be something I’ll write about in five, seven years when I have the perspective on it. In the meantime, I still have a few stories I have to get out first. The other crazy thing is the gentrification of cities. It’s really hard to live in cities now if you don’t have a lot of money. A lot of poor people are moving out of the cities and some of the suburbs are getting rough. Up where I live, I’m in Beacon, but Poughkeepsie—ya’ll don’t even know. Vassar’s got its own thing, but you get outside of Vassar in Poughkeepsie, or Peekskill—whoa. And that’s starting to be a trend. Beacon’s like a mix—there are still some rough areas. I don’t know if that’s going to affect me and where I live. It’s interesting. I remember the cities of the 1970s, it was a whole different world. I’m from San Francisco where you could rent half a Victorian as a single mother, and if you had a little more money, you could buy one. Not anymore. I’m not even talking about the brownstones in Harlem or Bed Stuy. So it’s an interesting dynamic, but we’re in the middle of it right now. As a storyteller, you want to be contemporary, but you need a little time to reflect. It’s interesting how our society changes. My father’s a cab driver. I was saying to him, “Yeah, man, a lot of the neighborhoods have changed in San Francisco. Seems like a lot of the suburbs are rough.” And he said, “I wouldn’t call them suburbs, boy. They’re the end of civilization.” I said, “What is that, man?” You grow up in the city, but in some ways, if you grow up poor in a city you still have more access to culture. There’s a little more flavor: “I’m from Brooklyn.” “I’m from Harlem.” There’s culture wherever people are, but if you live out in nowhere country and there’s still violence—it is just a strip mall. It’s going to be interesting to see how that’s reflected, how that changes the story. The cities are a whole different vibe. AUDIENCE: Playwrights have been rewriting this stuff. Voltaire, O’Neill. Did you read other writers’ adaptations of Greek tragedies? POWER: I didn’t read too much of that. Maybe I should. I read more original Greek mythology and just thought about what that is in my world. It’s going to be interesting—I did this talk at the New School a few weeks ago. Sometimes people are very possessive of the classics. I have total respect for that. On what we are doing some people are asking, “Is this a bastardization?” I don’t know if people in Voltaire’s time felt the same way. Someone asked me at the New School, “Are you going to stunt the language? The language of the Greeks is so high.” I was like, hip-hop theatre is kind of new, but there are some storytellers who have some magnificently high language. He said, “Are you saying that it’s at the level of the Greeks?” It’s hard to say that because it was such a long time ago, and people are harking back to the good old days. I would say, yeah, in some ways, because of the way they taught language. Hip-hop pays a lot of attention to language, the rhythm. The language is so rich. It’s different. It’s like jazz. Jazz has its scat. In hip-hop we have freestyling. Freestyling is when you’re rapping, but it’s improvisational rap. They’re scatting, but with words. They’re telling stories. It’s like another level of scat. It’s like scatting, but the scatter says, “I’m at New York Theatre Workshop/I’m doing this hip-hop/I’m here with Chuck/What the fuck.” Hip-hop is thick with language. Some people might see that, someone else might not see it. TOM NELIS: It is amazing how close hip-hop is to free verse. The main thing for me is that it’s so exciting to read. And it has something to do with the excitement you think the Greeks must have felt about their writing on stage. It was in verse. This verse jumps off the page. POWER: He’s one of the members of the cast. Thanks, man. NELIS: It’s a wild thing. And it does have something to do with how hip-hop is an oral tradition. POWER: The main thing to me is how I was taught the classics. They were always written. But it all comes out of Homer. In Homer’s time, they’re pretty sure, there were oral bards. You had Oedipus and the Myceneans, they were before Aeschylus and all that. They were back in the day. They had their own culture, then they had three hundred, four hundred years of dark ages, and that’s when Homer was. The dark ages! We don’t know much about the language. They weren’t even as sophisticated as Oedipus and the Trojans’ time. It was the dark ages, and that’s when these storytellers were spinning these tales, keeping their history alive. With Homer, we don’t know if he had a collection of stories, but here were these stories and he had moments to improvise, he had this structure. That reminds me of hip-hop and the oral tradition of rhyming. I’m looking for those connections. We think of the stories of Homer as high art, and they are for our society. But they came from these dark ages when no one knew what was going on. Who knows about these dark periods, we don’t have any artifacts. We just know the Myceneans, the Trojan War, then three hundred, four hundred years, then the classics, Aeschylus, Sophocles. For me, it wasn’t high art. It wasn’t the classics. It was like everyday folks telling stories. I can relate to that. That’s the way my culture is, telling stories. Richard Pryor just passed away. I think about storytelling, this mythology. I’m not saying Richard Pryor is the Iliad or anything like that, but it’s the oral tradition. So I appreciate you saying that. I’m really excited about this piece. I hope you come and spread the word. We’re more than halfway there.
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