Hip Hop playwright flips the record By Grace Lee Boggs Michigan Citizen, July 23-29 2006 Will Power, born William Wylie, is an award-winning Hip Hop artist, actor and playwright whose irreverent adaptation of the ancient Greek tragedy “Seven Against Thebes” at the New York Theater Workshop evoked not only laughter but profound questions about human possibilities. From his interview with Bill Moyers’ on the Faith and Reason pbs series I got a sense of the revolutionary potential of Hip Hop culture. Hip Hop Culture, Power told Moyers, includes taking something old and flipping it to turn it into something relevant and powerful for today. It’s a form of “paying homage to elders.” “Seven Against Thebes,” the old sampled by Power, is the story by Aeschylus of the two sons of Oedipus, King of Thebes. After learning that he has unknowingly murdered his father and married his mother, Oedipus gives up his throne and goes into exile. Whereupon his sons, instead of accepting responsibility for sharing power, become rivals and end up killing each other. In “The Seven,” Will Power’s adaptation, Oedipus is not a king but an abusive father and pimp/hustler from the 1970s who used to be hip but has now lost stature. Instead of chants, the music is hip hop, doo wop, calypso, funk and blues. But 2500 years later we face the same questions. Do we, as individuals, communities, nation, have the power to control our own destiny? Can we remake, re-imagine ourselves? Or are we ruled by Fate, destined to fulfill the curses of our forebears? Must we make the same mistakes as our mothers and fathers? Oedipus tries to do right? Did he fail because the gods were against him or because of his own weaknesses? Can we do better? Will Power said that these are the questions he and his contemporaries are wrestling with. “What do we leave behind and what beautiful things do we take with us?” Hopefully every generation will make fewer mistakes. In 500 B.C. Greece the plays of Aeschylus were as much a part of the popular culture as Hip Hop is today. Tribal society was being replaced by urban society, the old gods had lost their moral authority, and people were wondering how much power they now had to determine their own destiny. In the Greek tragedy the chorus representing the common people questions the king. This was very revolutionary in that time. In Will Power’s Hip Hop version a female dj asks the chorus for advice. Leaders come and go but the chorus lives on. The Moment of Truth in his play, Will said, was when the brothers lose faith in each other. It is a metaphor for the bigger problems of our time. What is destroying us is our lack of faith in one another, in our local communities, in society and between nations But this doesn’t have to always be the case. In our time the Bush administration’s disastrous war in Iraq is making it clear that violence and war proliferate rather than eliminate terrorism. How do we build trust in one another so that we can go beyond violence and war to resolve important questions? Will Power said that his sources of inspiration are his creative spirit, God, the magic in life, his wife and family, and his community, especially the Fillmore community in the Bay area where the Black Panthers began and which now has an amazingly strong Asian and Latino presence. The choreographer for “The Seven” was Bill T. Jones, the 57-year old African American HIV-infected artist who, with Arnie Zane, his Jewish-Italian partner, created dances that celebrate all kinds of differences, including sexual difference. During casting Jones suggested that “The Seven” might have more resonance if Right Hand, a slick slippery character, was played by a white guy, and was surprised by the response from his younger colleagues. ‘The notion that race is not an issue in hip hop culture gave me great pause. That’s one of the things that’s generational. I have an old-fashioned habit of ‘racial looking’ and hope that the younger generation is freer than that. I’m learning at breakneck speed something about the nature of culture. Their references have happened in the last three years, things I know nothing about. It behooves me to pay attention.” (The Village Voice, Jan. 4-10, 2006) Email Grace Boggs Center, |