Up-ending the Tea Table: Race and Culture in Mary Zimmerman’s The Jungle Book

7/22/2019 Up-ending the Tea Table: Race and Culture in Mary Zimmerman’s The Jungle Book

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/up-ending-the-tea-table-race-and-culture-in-mary-zimmermans-the-jungle 1/23

Up-ending the Tea Table:Race and Culture in Mary Zimmerman’s The Jungle Book

by David Isaacson

In Hanif Kureishi's Buddha of Suburbia,1 the main character, Karim ("an Englishman born

and bred," with an Indian father and British mother), is cast as Mowgli in a stage productionof The Jungle Book . He soon learns that his costume will be “a loin-cloth and brown make-

up, so that I resembled a turd in a bikini-bottom,” and that he will be required to shed hisOrpington vernacular for an “authentic” Indian accent.

“Karim you have been cast for authenticity,” he is told by the “snooty bastard” director Jeremy Shadwell, “and not for experience.”

And so, Kureishi – through the ridiculous figure of Shadwell – reveals the potential cobra-pits that await any theatricalization of Rudyard Kipling’s tales.

Indeed, director Mary Zimmerman might have thought herself in such a pit recently, after signing on to adapt for the stage and direct the 1967 Disney film The Jungle Book (itself

loosely based on Kipling’s 1894 collection of stories). While the production was in tech

week at Chicago’s Goodman Theatre, an interview with her appeared in Chicago Magazine ;

which in turn provoked charges of Orientalism and racism from Silk Road Rising artisticdirector Jamil Khoury; which created a social-media frenzy of alternating approbation andindignation; which led to Zimmerman gamely arranging a meeting with Khoury andagreeing to answer a series of his barbed questions; which led to Khoury declaring peaceand saying he would have no further comment on the matter.

The general mood in the theater-world became one of self-congratulation. Congratulationsto Jamil Khoury for bringing such issues to light; congratulations to Mary Zimmerman for engaging in a dialogue; congratulations to the theater community in toto for being the kind

of community that resolves its thorniest issues through open discourse.

And while a certain amount of pride was certainly warranted, little at that point hadactually been resolved. Indeed, the production at the center of the controversy had not yetraised the opening night curtain. Even after the show opened, the matter was left hanging:

some reviews referenced the controversy, some pointedly ignored it,2 but I have seen onlyone fuller analysis3 of the play in light of Khoury’s original charges.

1Penguin Books, 1990.

2In the former category, we find Tony Adler in The Chicago Reader and Kris Vire in TimeOut Chicago. The latter

includes The Chicago Tribune , The Chicago Sun-Times, and The New York Times. As of this writing, the production is

completing a record-breaking run at Boston’s Huntington Theater. I have found no reviews from Boston that

brought up any controversial aspects of the material.

3Dani Snyder-Young’s generally well-reasoned “Race Representation in ‘The Jungle Book,’” in HowlRound.

http://www.chicagomag.com/Chicago-Magazine/C-Notes/May-2013/Mary-Zimmerman-Race-Gender-Jungle-Book/


http://www.silkroadrising.org/news/the-trouble-with-mary



http://www.silkroadrising.org/news/mary-responds-my-interview-with-mary-zimmerman



http://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/mary-zimmerman-jungle-book-goodman-theatre/Content?oid=10213978



http://www.timeoutchicago.com/arts-culture/theater/16327931/the-jungle-book-at-goodman-theatre-theater-review



http://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/theater/theaterloop/ct-ent-0702-jungle-book-review-20130701,0,5132024.column?track=rss



http://www.suntimes.com/entertainment/stage/21002764-421/its-a-jungle-in-there.html



http://theater.nytimes.com/2013/08/07/theater/reviews/the-jungle-book-opens-at-the-goodman-theater.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0



http://www.howlround.com/race-representation-in-the-jungle-book














2

Why take on a more extended examination here? Why, given that Khoury has now buriedhis hatchet, do I find further axes to grind? Why risk (to continue the sharp-implementmetaphor) re-opening the old wounds inflicted by the appearance of the Chicago Magazine interview and Khoury’s blog? (And though – spoiler alert – I take issue with the blog’scharges against Zimmerman,4 I very much understand the general frustration of those in the

theatrical community who expressed solidarity with Khoury. This frustration has beenfueled in Chicago by issues more tangible than aesthetics and stage-craft. There can be littleargument that in a city that’s 60% African-American and Latino, whites maintain aninordinate control over mechanisms of representation – both in terms of controllingresources and holding positions of power.5)

And so: why this essay now? Well, one of the general underlying questions – should, or how

should, an individual represent cultures other than his or her own? – is an essential one for all

playwrights; and the specific question -- what are appropriate and meaningful ways for a white

artist to represent Asian cultures? – is of particular interest to me, as a) I am in the process of

writing a play about Chinese immigrants to America in the 19th century,6 and b) I recently

got back from India, where I was visiting a couple friends who are making a feature filmabout Indian farmers.7

So here we go... with digressive footnotes aplenty, because these are issues that resistcontainment in simple paragraphs. The more casual, time-strapped reader should feel free tostick with the main text. For those as obsessed as I, the asides might well provide somecurious pleasures.

§

4While I am interested in exploring his wider concerns, I find Khoury’s rhetorical excess unhelpful: why, for

instance, associate Zimmerman with “how our judicial system has historically protected rapists?”

5These power dynamics are mirrored by in myriad ways throughout Chicago. The recent actions of a white mayor

and white-led un-elected school board, who have closed 50 neighborhood schools – overwhelmingly in African-

American neighborhoods – are just the most dramatic manifestation of the inequities throughout the civic system.

6I intend to do a great job with my Chinese immigrant play. But I certainly have experience with what I would now

term inappropriate misappropriations. Many, many years ago, I wrote a play entitled Somalia Etcetera. My

intention was to use certain historical events in Somalia as jumping-off points for theatrical investigations of

feminism and social change. Imagine my surprise (and the surprise of my almost-all-white cast) when a couple

Somali émigrés showed up at the theater one night, anticipating some true engagement with their country and

culture. They were quite polite after the show, but I realized that I had gone off-course in this case, projecting my

concept of “Somalia” onto a real-world country and culture.

7 My friends’ movie is entitled Basmati Blues, and features an international cast. I think that it will be great. It

directly engages issues of post-colonial control and appropriation; the cultural heritage that is being appropriated

by the West, in this case, is the rice seed of the Keralan farmers. It should be noted that my friends are both white

Jews like me; it should also be noted that even though they are white Jews from America telling an Indian story,

they have never had anyone give them guff about this. In fact, when I was there, it seemed clear to me how

excited people in the small towns of Kerala were that their story was being told.



3

The current debate over The Jungle Book is in large part a re-hash of the theater-worlddebates from the 1980s regarding Peter Brook ’s production of The Mahabharata. To recap

that argument: Indian theater director and scholar Rustom Bharucha asked “Can a story beseparated from the ways in which it is told to its own people?” He wrote that Brook’s play

“suggests the bad old days of the British Raj, not in itsdirect allusions to colonial history, but in its

appropriation of non-western material within an orientalist

framework of thought and action, which has been

specifically designed for the international market... He

has taken one of our most significant texts and

decontextualised it from its history in order to sell it to

audiences in the west.”8

Bharucha makes it clear that “I am not for a moment suggesting that westerners should be banned from touching our sacred texts.” However, if Brook is incapable of fully dealing

with this epic in its own specifically Indian context, “then the director should not dramatisethe epic. Rather he should focus his attention on his own cultural artefacts, the epics of western civilisation like the Iliad or the Odyssey , which he is more likely to understand.”9 This argument is echoed by Khoury, when he asks that Zimmerman “adapt stories about her

native plains states and leave the Silk Road alone!” 10

Khoury’s and Bharucha’s critiques continue to parallel each other. Khoury:

On Zimmerman’s stage, Asian and Middle Eastern people were

never quite people, we were colorful textiles and

choreographed movements and sensualized fables. We were

exotic and playful and mysterious. Not quite someone you’d

have lunch with, but gilded objects that were amusing and

titillating, to be enjoyed vicariously and from ample

8Bharucha, Rustom. Peter Brook’s Mahabharata: A View from India . Economic and Political Weekly , August 6,

1988.

9 Bharucha’s protectionism is problematic, as Maria Shevtsova has pointed out (in her remarkable article

“Interculturalism, Aestheticism, Orientalism: Starting from Peter Brook’s Mahabharata,” Theatre Research

International , Volume 22, No. 2):

Interpretation can only be a matter of misinterpretation, and even of misrepresentation, in the eyes of

someone... [T]he performance work created “belongs”, temporarily, fleetingly, to those who have made it

and those who are watching and sharing it. Like the performers, those watching are interpreting and

misinterpreting it according to their sociocultural and emotional stock of references and resonances. If

this were not the case, if theatre art was not appropriated by different groups, and for different goals,

then it would be embalmed in its holiness, untouched and untouchable, and unloved.

10Interestingly enough, Zimmerman has often turned to the Greek myths that Bharucha would recommend as her

source material, in her productions of The Odyssey , Metamorphoses, and Argonautika.

http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/theatre_s/postgraduate/maipr/currentstudents/teaching_1112/warwick/st1_reading/sarkar_m_rustom_bharucha__peter_brooks_mahabharata.pdf



http://www.yavanika.org/classes/reader/shevstova.pdf







4

distance.11

The “never quite people” complaint echoes what Bharucha said a quarter -century ago:

Almost all of the characters in Brook’s Mahabharata are

presented in outline, with their inner energies and firemissing. Brook seems to use the characters to tell his

story, so that they rarely ignite and acquire lives of

their own. Most of the characters are so undifferentiated

that they almost blend into one another.12

11This charge echoes a common critique of Zimmerman: that her characters (not just her Arab, Persian, and Asian

ones) lack flesh and blood, emotional depth; that they seem like pawns she moves about the stage. (I myself have

felt emotionally involved watching Zimmerman’s work, but there are certainly times when the intrusion of third-

person narrative and the stateliness of her mise en scène have pulled me out of any march towards catharsis I

might have been on. Whether a “march towards catharsis” is a desirable state for an audience-member is another

question entirely.)

Chris Jones complains in The Chicago Tribune that the stagecraft and parade of props in Zimmerman’s Candide

fails to touch the heart. Jack Helbig noted in The Chicago Reader that

the spectacle in [Journey to the West] gives the show an air of diffidence and emotional distance, an

effect not unlike that produced by the super cool aesthetics of fashion photography. Some have argued

that Zimmerman's work is cold and heartless – a kind of clockwork theater, brilliantly structured but

mechanistic and manipulative.

(Helbig then counters this view, saying she is “hiding her heart in the forest of her words, dances, and props to see

if we're too lazy, distracted, or inattentive to see her.”)

And finally, the New York Times’ Bruce Weber is writing about Zimmerman’s Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci – not

one of the “Silk Road” plays – when he says (with my italics added)

As virtuosic as she can be as a painter of stage pictures, she has always been something of a showoff, and

all her work gives out the sense that it is less about the material she has appropriated than it is about the

flashing of directorial imagination. In other words, she's not so much interested in enhancing literary

classics; she's only making selfish use of them. There's a ''look at me, I'm directing'' quality to a Mary

Zimmerman production, and that's an unseemly attitude to take when the likes of Ovid and Homer are in

the theater.

[The actors] seem to have been cast for physical traits and skills – there is at least one trained acrobat,

and several are obviously strong – rather than their distinct personalities as actors, so you don't really

connect with them. They're pieces of a puzzle.

I bring up these reviews not to provide a litany of belly-aches about Zimmerman, but to point out that perhaps

what Khoury experienced negatively is an inherent part of her aesthetic, and not an aesthetic aimed at trivializing

the East. Weber’s language regarding Zimmerman in general is much like Khoury’s when critiquing Zimmerman vis

à vis Asian, Arab, and Persian texts.

12 I am only familiar with Brook’s The Mahabharata from the greatly abridged 1989 video version. In this format, it

comes off to me as a rather leaden affair, and the characters do seem to lack the inner energy and fire that

Bharucha seeks. I’m guessing, however, that the full nine-hour stage production might have a very different effect

on me.

http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2010-09-28/entertainment/ct-live-0928-candide-review-20100928_1_cunegonde-pangloss-voltaire



http://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/eye-candy/Content?oid=887502



http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/30/theater/theater-review-if-leonardo-had-had-access-to-powerpoint.html








5

The “colorful textiles” complaint also echoes Bharucha’s belief that in Brook’s “glorioustrivialisation of our epic,” India

exists as a construct, a cluster of oriental images

suggesting timelessness, mystery, and eternal wisdom. Brook

may oppose cultural exoticism in theory but his own work isexotic in its own right. From a press release of the

Mahabharata, the selling of the Orient is apparent: “It

unfolds in a swirl of colour – saris, gowns, and garments

of saffron, crimson, and gold, umbrellas of rippling blue

silk, red banners and snow-white robes.”

Brook’s response to Bharucha, not surprisingly, sounds like Zimmerman’s response toKhoury. Brook is interested in those features of humans and their texts that are, for him,universal . And Zimmerman says (regarding her choice of source material)

I feel that the texts I have engaged – The Odyssey , The

Book of One Thousand Nights and One Night [The Arabian

Nights]13, Nizami's Haft Paykar [The Mirror of the Invisible

World], The Journey to the West, Metamorphoses, In Search

of Lost Time, Argonautika, etc... for all their epic

adventure and surface sparkle, speak to the fundamental

facts of what it is like to be a person: to experience

unwanted and unlooked for change, to love and to die; to

try to behave well and to fail at that. To forgive.

Bharucha argues that the emphasis on universality and “fundamental facts” obscures thatwhich is culturally and regionally specific. The problem for Khoury is that while Bharucha

backs up his critique with detailed and extensive examples, Khoury leaves the exactinstances of Zimmerman’s sins largely to the reader’s imagination.14

He does indict one work in particular; though, unfortunately, I believe he does so with moreprovocation than analysis :

In 200615, then Silk Road Theater Project (now Silk Road

Rising, the company of which I am Founding Artistic

Director) hosted the first ever South Asian American

Theatre Conference. Over 25 South Asian American theatre

professionals from around the country were in attendance.

13 In discussing The Arabian Nights in this video, Zimmerman makes clear her humanistic approach to these works.

14Khoury has made clear that, following his conversation (conversion?) with Zimmerman, he will be providing no

further commentary on his original charges.

15Actually, 2007.

http://lookingglasstheatre.org/content/node/1627






6

One of the nights we took the participants to see Mary

Zimmerman's MIRROR OF THE INVISIBLE WORLD at the Goodman

Theatre. Minutes into the play, my heart sank. Before our

eyes was “Orientalism Live on Stage and With a Vengeance!”

Or “How To Take Every Stereotype of Asian and Middle

Eastern People And Cram Them Into One Play.” At the

intermission, we conference organizers faced a near mutiny.

Many of the attendees were angry that we would bring them

to such a racist play and some were even contemplating a

walk out. We pleaded with everyone to stay for the second

act. The second act was worse.

I saw this play in its original, 1997 production; my memory of it is hazy. I enjoyed it,though it was not among my favorite Zimmerman adapted/directed pieces. I certainly didnot have the reaction that Khoury mentions, 16 though (as I shall examine further below) Iam coming from a different background and perspective than the conference attendees.

The play, based on the 12th century Persian epic Haft Paykar, includes tales told by an Indian

princess, a Moorish princess, a Chinese princess, a Turkish princess, a Persian princess, aRussian princess, and a Greek princess: a whole parade of princesses from a wide variety of cultures – Eastern and Western. Were there stereotypical representations? Probably. But Ihave not been able to find any complete, considered critique from the perspective thatKhoury talks about.17 Any such critique would have to go into the kind of detail that

16I am not alone in this. Kerry Reid’s review of the 2007 production in the Chicago Reader describes (to her view)

“a thoughtful look at cultural unity and a subtle take on gender roles.” Indeed, it is difficult to square Reid’s

perspective with the one Khoury alludes to. To cherry-pick some additional quotes from her review:

“The tales told by these variations on Scheherazade have multiple layers of narrative and meaning,particularly the first one, delivered by the Indian princess.”

“Each of the princesses tells a tale from a region other than her own, and since King Bahram's connection

with each wife increases, f iguratively their different kingdoms are united.”

“This narrative cross-pollination suggests the intermingling of Eastern and Middle Eastern cultures –

whose complexities are often ignored by Westerners. Though Zimmerman runs the risk of making exotica

out of these unfamiliar stories about love, she refuses to dumb them down with cute pop-cultural

anachronisms, honoring the poetry and mystery behind the legends.”

Reid, it must be said in this context, is a white reviewer, as is Christopher Piatt of TimeOut Chicago who found the

play to be a “nonfanatical take on the Middle East that no one on Michael Chertoff’s staff would like you to see.”

17The only relevant report I can find of the conference is at Silk Road Rising’s website, from journalist and critic

Jonathan Abarbanel in Performink .

Indeed, another point of discussion was the acceptability of plays telling South Asian American stories but

not written by South Asians. The Jefferson Citation winning play The Masrayana was cited as an example;

a play written by Euro-American William Kovacsik telling a contemporary Indian story, produced in 2005

by Prop Thtr and Rasaka Theatre Company. The general consensus was that the ethnicity of the writer is

secondary to authenticity and universality.

http://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/dance-of-the-seven-tales/Content?oid=925400



http://www.timeoutchicago.com/arts-culture/theater/50709/mirror-of-the-invisible-world




http://www.silkroadrising.org/news/silk-road-hosts-south-asian-american-theatre-conference









7

Bharucha employs vis-à-vis Brook. If there were stereotypes, were they Zimmerman'sinvention? Did they exist in the original Persian text? Given that Zimmerman develops her scripts with the actors in rehearsal, did these stereotypes originate from Zimmerman or fromher collaborators? Did the stereotypes demean darker-skinned characters, to the advantageof lighter-skinned characters? How could those characters be represented in a better, deeper

way? Without a more detailed reckoning, Khoury’s charges – leveled all these years later – come off as somewhat reckless.

In addition to Mirror , I’ve seen all of Zimmerman’s plays based on "Silk Road" texts: Arabian Nights , Journey to the West , Silk , and most recently, The White Snake . I am a fan of

the work. I considered them to be masterful re-tellings of classic tales,18 performed bytalented, multi-ethnic casts.19 I was never offended by the depictions, which seemed to mean antidote to the racist depictions of Asians, Persians, and Arabs that one is all too familiar with from mainstream American entertainment sources.20

It is striking that in this case the group (according to Abarbanel) embraced universality , a concept Bharucha would

reject as creating an Orientalist perspective.

Indeed, by devoting itself to the extremely wide range of cultural perspectives that make up the “Silk Road,”

Khoury’s theater company takes a decidedly universalist approach (much, I would argue, to their credit).

18 Silk , of course, is not a ancient text, but rather based on Alessandro Baricco’s 1996 novel. It is a work that both

embraces and examines Western erotic attitudes toward the East.

19Zimmerman’s casts have increased their diversity over time. The original 1992 production of The Arabian Nights

(the one I saw) was comprised of (and developed by) ensemble members of Lookingglass Theater Company, which

at the time was largely made up of recent, white graduates of Northwestern University. The 2009 Lookingglass

cast, on the other hand, was decidedly multi-ethnic. Still, there have been quibbles about Zimmerman casting any

white actors – even her life-long collaborators – in her “Silk Road”-derived work. Lily Janiak writes in a fairlynuanced piece in Theatre Bay Area Magazine:

When I saw “The White Snake” at Berkeley Rep, the racial aspects of the show’s casting made me feel

icky. In Mary Zimmerman’s production about a Chinese myth, actors of a variety of races, including a few

Asians, play Chinese characters. Zimmerman mostly conveyed Chinese-ness through clothing and fake

facial hair, but she also drew from poses found in ancient Chinese artwork. There was no mimicry in the

actors’ performances, no hackneyed stereotyping (that, I like to think, would never happen at Berkeley

Rep), only solemn, stately movements that seemed motivated by deep respect.

Given Berkeley Rep’s resources, I know that finding the best Chinese actors in the country, or the world,

wouldn’t be a problem if that were what Zimmerman wanted, so I assumed that wasn’t what she wanted,

that she sought to cast Asian roles with racially diverse actors to make the point that “The White Snake”

isn’t just a Chinese story; it’s everyone’s story.

It should be noted that issues of casting are not part of Khoury’s critique of Zimmerman, and that Khoury’s

company – which, for instance, casts Puerto Ricans as Asians – might, given her criteria, make Janiak feel “icky,” as

well (though neither Berkeley Rep nor Silk Road Rising’s casting make me feel “icky” at all).

20One never knows where subtle and not-so-subtle racism will show up in Hollywood fare. I was reminded of this

recently re-watching The Two Towers (the second in Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy), in which the evil

Haradrim are dressed like Arabs and the hook-nosed Orcs resemble Nazi-era depictions of Jews.

http://theatrebayarea.org/editorial/Making-Up-for-Mistakes-Race-in-Theatre-Reviews.cfm






8

Of course, my perspective is that of a white, middle-class theater-goer.21 I am quite willing toaccept that I am viewing the works from a particular and perhaps privileged vantage, andthat my own under-examined biases might obscure the biases being played out on thestage.22

§

Zimmerman’s The Jungle Book opened at The Goodman Theater on July 1, 2013. Shortly, Iwill discuss whether it contains evidence of the “Orientalism on Parade” that Khourydecries, but first I shall address another charge from Khoury’s blog: that Zimmerman failedto adequately address the implied racism of the play’s biggest, swinging-est song and dancenumber: “I Wanna Be Like You (The Monkey Song).”

In both the play and the Disney film on which it is based, the orphaned Mowgli is snatchedup by the orangutan King Louie and his band of apes. Louie wants Mowgli to impart thesecret of fire, because (as the song says)

21Perhaps it should be noted in this context that I am a white, middle-class Jewish theater-goer. And the late

Edward Said (the principle author of our modern conception of “Orientalism”) makes it clear that Western,

Orientalist representations of Arabs share much with prejudicial representations of Jews. Regarding caricatures of

Arab sheiks that began appearing in the 1970s, he writes

These Arabs, however, were clearly “Semitic”: their sharply hooked noses, the evil mustachioed leer on

their faces, were obvious reminders (to a largely non-Semitic population) that “Semites” were at the

bottom of all “our” troubles, which in this case was principally a gasoline shortage. The transferences of a

popular anti-Semitic animus from a Jewish to an Arab target was made smoothly, since the figure wasessentially the same. [Edward W. Said, Orientalism.]

Given this covalence, one might expect (and I do claim) a heightened sensitivity to appropriation and

misrepresentation of Arab culture. Though, on the other hand, as a Jew one must contend with some notable

appropriationist history, such as Sam (born Shalom) Jaffe’s portrayal of the titular character in the 1939 film

version of Rudyard Kipling’s poem “Gunga Din.”

22The somewhat Sisyphean project of seeing beyond these biases is summed up by my friend Matt Wray and his

co-author Annalee Newitz in the introduction to their book White Trash: Race and Class in America:

Minority intellectuals like Toni Morrison, and bell hooks, among others, have called for whites to

reevaluate themselves and their identities self-consciously, eschewing a vision of whiteness as the “norm”

for a more realistic and fair-minded understanding of whiteness as a specific, racially marked group

existing in relation to many other such groups.

The book goes on to also make clear that “white” is itself no simple classification. This is a point that Jamil Khoury

himself makes in his excellent, short documentary film Not Quite White: Arabs, Slavs and the Contours of

Whiteness and its companion video essay On Whiteness, in which he examines his own identity as a “WASP –

White Arab Slovak Pole” and defines whiteness as “a constructed social and political category.”

http://www.temple.edu/sociology/wray/



http://www.silkroadrising.org/video-plays/not-quite-white-arabs-slavs-and-the-contours-of-contested-whiteness



http://www.silkroadrising.org/video-plays/not-quite-white-arabs-slavs-and-the-contours-of-contested-whiteness/video-essay-on-whiteness








9

I want to be a man, man-cub,

and stroll right into town

And be just like those other men

I'm tired of monkeying around...

Ooh-bi-doo, I wanna be like you

I want to walk like you, talk like you, too

You see it's true, an ape like me

Can learn to be human, too.

This rollicking, clever piece of song-writing is problematic in both conception and rendition.Songwriters Richard and Robert Sherman either had Louis Armstrong in mind for the partor did not, depending on what account one reads. 23 In either case, we are left with an apesinging, in a recognizably African-American style, about wanting to be more human. Anycontemporary rendition of the song contends, therefore, with the horrific history of racistimagery depicting African-Americans as primitive, sub-human, and/or anthropoidal.24

23In a 2010 interview, Richard M. Sherman recalls “And we finally we wrote the song and it was fun, and we played

it for the guys, and for Walt, and Walt said ‘Who do you think we could have do this thing?’ And we said we gotta

get a great swinger, a jazz man, not just an actor - we have to get a real legitimate jazz band. And someone in the

room suggested ‘How about Louis Prima?’ and we said ‘My God he’s perfect – we had King Louis as the name of

the guy!’ Made in heaven, right?”

And yet in 2013, he told the New York Times: “We were thinking about Louis Armstrong when we wrote it, and

that’s where we got the name, King Louie,” said Mr. Sherman. “Then in a meeting one day, they said, ‘Do you

realize what the N.A.A.C.P. would do to us if we had a black man as an ape? They’d say we’re making fun of him.’”

Sherman’s shifting memories may reveal a retrospective discomfort he feels with the song and its origins.

24These associations are amplified by the fact that the song comes from Disney, the company behind Song of the

South – a 1946 movie that peddled more obviously in racial stereotypes -- and behind such recent cultural

appropriations as Pocahantas, Aladdin, and The Lion King.

The Disney Corporation has clearly become uncomfortable, however, with King Louie and his song. In their 2003

sequel Jungle Book 2, Louie is the only major character who does not make a return appearance. The song is only

heard over the closing credits, in a version by Smash Mouth (a rock band made up of white members). New feel-

good lyrics at the end of the song pointedly divorce it from many of its earlier implications:

You'll see it's true

Someone like me

Can learn to be

Someone like me

I can learn to be

Someone like you

I can learn to be

Someone like me!

Controversies regarding “primitive” or “ape-like” depictions of African-Americans go beyond Disney, of course, and

pop up in other cultural contexts. My friend John Hartigan, an anthropologist at the University of Texas, points me

http://www.avhub.com.au/index.php/Features/Sound+Image/richard-m-sherman-an-interview.html



http://theater.nytimes.com/2013/06/23/theater/the-jungle-book-comes-to-the-stage.html



http://www.amazon.com/John-Hartigan/e/B001HPSE5A/ref=ntt_athr_dp_pel_1








10

While Zimmerman herself does not find the song to be inherently racist,25 she still was quite

to the response to the April, 2008 Vogue Magazine cover, featuring Lebron James and Gisele Bündchen. Numerous

commentators labeled the photo racist, saying it conjured up images of King Kong and Fay Wray. Lebron James

responded by essentially saying that in this case, racism was in the eye of the beholder.

25 Zimmerman’s views led to what became the most notorious of the quotes in her Chicago Magazine interview:

regarding “I Wanna Be Like You,” “It’s something I think where the racism is in the eye of the beholder, you

know?”

This got boiled down, in Khoury’s blog, to the blanket statement “racism is in the eye of the beholder, you know?”

In his follow-up e-interview with Zimmerman, she clarified her point of view.

Jamil: In the Chicago Magazine interview you did with Catey Sullivan, you described racism as being "in

the eye of the beholder." Can you explain what you meant by this?

Mary: First, let me say that the phrase "Racism is in the eye of the beholder" is completely preposterous

and I disavow it. Here is what happened: We were talking about the Disney film and King Louie, an

orangutan. She asked me about this character and how he has been sometimes named as a "racist

character" which many people believe was voiced by Louis Armstrong, but was in fact conceived for and

voiced by Louis Prima, a white Italian American. I challenged the assumption that King Louie is a

derogatory depiction of a black man given that what is on the screen is only an ape, drawn in a style

consistent with all Disney animation of the period, voiced by a white musician, singing to a little Indian

boy. I suggested that it may be the well-meaning observer making the supposedly enlightened remark

that King Louie is a racist depiction who was, in fact inserting a black person into that particular equation;

and further, that a person doing that might be acting out of his or her own unconscious racist mental

formations.

I made a quip that I realize was very ill-chosen in saying that in this specific case, "racism is in the eye of

the beholder." It is more accurate to say that the "race" of the animated King Louis is in the eye of the

beholder; or perhaps, that conclusively assigning race to an animated image of an animal was a racist

move in and of itself, steeped in the same grotesque historical discourse around race and evolution that it

is purportedly trying to refute. In no way did I ever mean, nor could I believe -- because I'm not insane --

that racism does not exist, or that it is subjective as in the phrase "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder." I

was attempting to locate the act of racism, in this single specific example, in the observer and not the

observed object -- not to deny the fact of it. My understanding is that in the final version of the interview

virtually all of this idea was excised except the ludicrous phrase "Racism is in the eye of the beholder."



11

aware of the baggage that comes with it. This led directly to casting André De Shields in theorangutan role. As she told Deanna Isaacs in the Chicago Reader :

I asked him to come and actually audition for me — a thing

he rarely does — and to come prepared to audition for the

role he most would like to play of the three we talkedabout — and that turned out to be King Louie. He gave the

single greatest audition I've seen in 25 years. Still, I

debated with myself for eight days before offering him the

role. But in the end, if I hadn't cast him, it would have

been because he is African-American. That would have been

the only reason — the fear of the past, of the historical

discourse, of the stereotypes of the past. I would have

just been going along with the wounds of the past. That

felt wrong: to reject this legendary talent and what he

could do with this song for that. To say, "You can't work

Here, Zimmerman is almost certainly mistaken about the role being “conceived for” Prima. In any case, he is

“sporting a familiar black-coded voice,” as pointed out by Susan Miller and Greg Rode (in an unfortunately poorly-

written 2008 essay included in the collection From Mouse to Mermaid: The Politics of Film, Gender, and Culture). In

an on-line discussion, music historian John Shaw (a friend and author of the forthcoming This Land That I Love)

elaborates:

the character of a jazz-singing ape might be inherently racist, due to the history of white supremacist

depictions of non-white people as sub-human (apes), the historical association of jazz with African

American culture, and the African American style of Louis Prima's singing.

Given the song’s historical and cultural context, Shaw argues that to accuse the song’s cr itics of racism themselves

was an overly aggressive move by Zimmerman. I certainly see the point, and yet sympathize with Zimmerman’s attempt to locate a true nexus of racism in the King Louie number. I would posit that it is limiting to place it in

either the observed or observer. The racism is tied up in a whole history of imagery and ideology that consumes

both observed and observer, an entire spectrum of racist tropes that we share as a culture. Whether or not King

Louie was voiced by a white man or a black man, the style conjures up for the listener (and probably for the

composer/lyricists, and perhaps for the performers as well) all sorts of conscious or unconscious racist associations

of "primitive" versus "civilized." (There is of course an additional – and perhaps mitigating – question here:

whether those racist associations exist for the young child – Disney’s target audience – experiencing the musical

for the first time. )

Khoury himself has been a practitioner of this type of analysis which goes beyond denunciations marking certain

individuals, groups, or cultural artifacts as racist. In the aforementioned documentary Not Quite White, his

interviewee Ann Hetzel Gunkel (Director of Cultural Studies at Columbia College) explains how labeling certain

white ethnic groups as bigoted

“shifts the attention from the larger racial politics of the culture, and says the racism in this culture isn’t

really found in the structure of the culture that reproduces and maintains white supremacy and

inequality...”

Despite this, I believe that it is sometimes reasonable, even necessary, to clearly denounce certain activities or

individuals as racist. But one must always do so with an eye towards the greater systemic, cultural forces of racism

that scar us all.

http://www.chicagoreader.com/Bleader/archives/2013/07/08/that-felt-wrong-mary-zimmerman-on-the-jungle-book



http://www.iupress.indiana.edu/product_info.php?isbn=0253209781



http://www.publicaffairsbooks.com/publicaffairsbooks-cgi-bin/display?book=9781610392235&cover=hc








12

with me on this because some people still carry these

moronic ideas of the past and we must never go near them

until the end of time."

De Shields put it this way, in the New York Times :

“I’ve always said that part of my mission as a performing

artist is a ministry to detonate stereotypes, to blow them

up, so that we’re no longer haunted by them.”26

Did Zimmerman and De Shields succeed in this detonation? Kris Vire wrote in TimeOut

Chicago: “While De Shields makes hay of ‘I Wanna Be Like You,’ turning it into a show-

stopping Act I closer, those who see racial overtones in a be-bopping orangutan who wishes he

could walk and talk like men won't be made any more comfortable.” Tony Adler, in The

Chicago Reader , said “De Shields sings a verse of ‘I Want to Be Like You’ in full-out, gravel-

voiced, sweat-mopping, big-grinning imitation of Satchmo.”27

But De Shields and Zimmerman’s strategy is more complex than this. Yes, King Louieintroduces himself to Mowgli with a growling burst of scat. But he delivers his entire scenewith a sense of suave and sly remove. His air of aloof knowingness opens the possibility thatLouie doesn’t really “wanna be like you” at all; he might just be buttering up Mowgli inorder to get what he wants – the power bequeathed by Kipling’s “red flower.”28 By the thirdreprise of the chorus, King Louie is openly mocking his own social pretensions by taking onthe persona of a British twit at tea. When De Shields up-ends his mock tea table at the endof the chorus, he is up-ending our pre-conceived ideas about Louie; but more than that: he’sup-ending the colonialist supposition that the “primitives” of India aspire to be like their British occupiers.29

26 I’ve certainly witnessed De Shields’ ability to blow up stereotypes: he was the director of a fine production of

George C. Wolfe’s satirical The Colored Museum at Victory Gardens in 1987.

27De Shields confirms that he is imitating Satchmo in a Jet Magazine interview:

We gotta skat because I’m standing on the shoulders of the father of jazz and the innovator of skat, Louis

Armstrong. One of the shows that I do is called Ambassador of Satch, which is based on the life and times

of Louis Armstrong because in the 50s, that’s exactly what he was, the culture ambassador to the rest of

the world for us.

28While I endorse the politics of the De Shields/Zimmerman approach, it does take away from the potential drama

of the scene. If King Louie is completely self-assured, hip, dignified, and confident in his own nobility, then it is hard

to believe that he really wants or needs anything from this little kid. The unhinged neediness of Disney’s animated

King Louie creates more drama; he definitely desires something from Mowgli, and it is unclear how far he’ll go to

get it.

29Dani Snyder-Young, in her aforementioned HowlRound critique, shifts focus from “I Wanna Be Like You,” saying

A more racially charged moment comes in a later scene. The bear Baloo, played by Kevin Carolan,

bemoans that the monkeys will "monkey-fy my man cub" and "frizz his hair.” When we next see Mowgli,

played by Akash Chopra, with the monkey ensemble, they “monkey-fy” him by giving him a tail and

teaching him to tap dance in a highly stylized simian tap number. I may be reading too much into the










http://jetmag.com/entertainment/andre-de-shields-stars-in-the-jungle-book/













13

black origins of tap when I identify the “hoofer” style of tap as historically black, and I admit I went intothe production looking for issues of race and representation, but this number, that codes the multi-racial

ensemble black, made me squirm a little.

Snyder-Young’s analysis here is intriguing, but I find it somewhat flawed. The Baloo lines she cites are actually

themselves sung in a “historically black” manner: it’s from “Baloo’s Blues,” a song that formerly appeared on a

special 1968 Disneyland Records album called "More Jungle Book." In that version, written by the Sherman

Brothers, Baloo is worried about what the denizens of the man-village have done to his adopted son (following

Mowgli’s defection there at the end of the movie):

They've civilized my man-cub,

Washed his face and combed his hair

(Sticky, gooey stuff, yeah).

They civilized my man-cub,

Gave him way-out clothes to wear

(Nowhere).

They're messin' with my Mowgli,

And he would've made one swell bear!

Zimmerman and Peck have saved this song from obscurity, so that Baloo can have a second number to sing. But in

repurposing it to open Act Two, Richard Sherman had to tweak the lyrics. Now it is about Baloo worrying about

Mowgli’s capture by King Louie and his monkeys. So the words become:

They're gonna monkey-fy my man-cub,

Change his style and frizz his hair

(Yech, monkey grease).They'll monkey-fy my man-cub,

Man, he doesn't have a prayer

(Not a prayer).

They're messin' with my Mowgli,

And he would've made one swell bear!

[I am indebted to the production’s drummer, Sarah Allen, for helping me recall the lyrics, and for her thoughts on

King Louie.]

I don’t find anything troubling with “monkey-fy” here. Baloo wants Mowgli to be bear-like, not monkey-like. “Frizz

his hair,” on the other hand, is an odd and problematic choice. Kipling’s bandar-log (which he also refers to as

“Monkey-people” or “gray apes”) are presumably gray langur monkeys, a species that does not have particularly

frizzy fur. Disney’s monkeys aren’t frizzy either, though the hair that halos Zimmerman’s monkeys (in Mara

Blumenfeld’s costumes for the Goodman production) could be considered so.

On the other hand, African-American hair is frizzy. Perhaps Sherman, in substituting “frizz” for the original lyric

“comb,” is tapping into the same subconscious associations that caused him to create a swinging orangutan named

Louie in the first place. Still, it is perhaps over-stating things to identify this section as “racially charged” and

further coding the monkeys as blacks. Given that the bear (who is presented in opposition to Louie’s gang) sings his

anti-monkey song in an African-American idiom, it hardly seems fair to fret about the African-American dance style

of the monkeys.



14

§

Beyond King Louie, does Zimmerman’s re-imagining of Disney’s re-imagining of Kiplingserve a similar detonating function? Does its representational strategies up-end theOrientalist perspective that Kipling has – for many – come to represent? To examine this,

we must first define our terms, and then examine not only the Zimmerman stage play, buther source materials.

There are, of course, many different definitions of “Orientalism.” In Khoury’s blog, hereferences a specific perspective with the following quip: “For years I've been tempted to sendZimmerman a copy of Edward Said's ORIENTALISM with a note describing it as literarycriticism, not a director's manual.”

Let us then, in concert with Khoury, take Said as a jumping-off point. Said’s ground-breaking

1978 book lists the following “principle dogmas of Orientalism:”

...one is the absolute and systemic difference between theWest, which is rational, developed, humane, superior, and

the Orient, which is aberrant, undeveloped, inferior.

Another dogma is that abstractions about the Orient,

particularly those based on texts representing a

“classical” Oriental civilization, are always preferable to

direct evidence drawn from modern Oriental realities. A

third dogma is that the Orient is eternal, uniform, and

incapable of defining itself; therefore it is assumed that

a highly generalized and systematic vocabulary for

describing the Orient from a Western standpoint is

inevitable and even scientifically “objective.” A fourth

dogma is that the Orient is at bottom something either to

be feared (the Yellow Peril, the Mongol hordes, the brown

dominions) or to be controlled (by pacification, research

and development, outright occupation whenever possible).

Said acknowledges that Rudyard Kipling – born and bred an Englishman in India – was “anartist of enormous gifts” and no “imperialist minstrel.” At the same time, Kipling reflectedand ascribed to the colonialist ideology of his time, in which (as Said describes it in hisintroduction to Kipling’s novel Kim30 )

“the inferiority of the non-white races, the necessity for

them to be ruled by a superior civilization, and the

absolute unchanging essence of Orientals, black,

primitives, women were more or less undebatable,

unquestioned axioms of modern life.”

30 Kim was written in 1901. Said wrote the introduction to the 1987 Penguin Books edition. All my subsequent Said

quotes come from that essay or from his Orientalism.



15

As the critic Edmund Wilson puts it, Kipling establishes in Kim

the contrast between the East, with its mysticism and

sensuality, its extremes of saintliness and roguery, and

the English, with their superior organisation, their

confidence in modern method, their instinct to brush awaylike cobwebs the native myths and beliefs.31

Wilson says that Kim, the title character, is torn between these worlds. In the same manner,Mowgli – whose story makes up the first three chapters of Kipling’s 1894 work The Jungle

Book – is caught between (and eventually rejected by both) the world of the jungle and theworld of the human village. Kipling’s twist is to make the jungle (with the pointed exception

of the gray apes, or bandar-log ) the rational, organized world, and the Indian village irrationaland, in the end, inferior.

I expected, in reading these tales, that Kipling would romanticize the Indian jungle – that is

what the White Man, with his “burden,” tends to do, no? Kipling does not. With hisincessant referencing of “The Law of the Jungle,” he seems intent on turning that jungleinto England , bound by and highly inscribed with creaky customs, codes of conduct, and

parliamentarian practices. Said says Kipling believes “boys ultimately should conceive of life and Empire as governed by unbreakable Laws,” and this is also the message thatBagheera the panther and Baloo the bear impart to their student Mowgli. Baloo himself isnot the comic, nurturing figure we encounter in the Disney or Zimmerman versions of thetales: he is a strict disciplinarian, and staunch defender of corporal punishment.32

Kipling is peddling the “Rational vs. Aberrant” dogma that Said describes above. Hecontrasts his surprisingly rational Jungle with the Indian village’s “tales of ghosts and gods

and goblins,” its “cobwebs and moontalk.” When Mowgli seeks refuge in the human village(after he’s been kicked out of the wolfpack), he quickly determines that

“They have no manners, these Men-folk... Only the gray ape

would behave as they do.”

Kipling has wasted no time in making his views clear. Despite his love of and identificationwith the people of India, he still considers them to be – like his bandar-log – lacking that most

British of possessions: manners. They are, essentially, apes : a lower order of human being,

and therefore eminently in need of the control of and occupation by a superior order (echoing Said’s “Yellow Peril” dogma).33

31 From Wilson’s 1941 collection of essays, The Wound and the Bow.

32 When Bagheera sees the bruises on Mowgli’s face, he and Baloo argue over the latter’s educational methods. It

is likely that Kipling, a survivor of British boarding schools, sides with Bagheera in this dispute.

33 In the final story of The Jungle Book , entitled “Her Majesty’s Servants,” Kipling goes all out in promoting the

hierarchical, rules-based, order- based Raj in contrast to the individualistic, “very wild country” of Afghanistan,

where “we obey only our own wills.”





17

turned the Indian jungle into England, Walt Disney turns it into Disneyland: the magickingdom of childhood, where one might encounter Ariel under the sea, Pan in Neverland,or Mowgli romping with Baloo.36

§

Mary Zimmerman, in adapting the Disney material to the stage, is faced with a near-impossible task: Not only does she have a scholar’s impulse to re-insert Kipling into thetext,37 she has an artists’ aesthetic urge to re-introduce India itself to the proceedings.

Her strategy to do so is perfectly reasonable, though by carrying it out she creates a kind of Catch-22 for herself. Has Zimmerman fallen prey to a new kind of “White Man’s Burden,”that requires her to try and save both Kipling and Disney from themselves? She journeyedwith her design crew to India (as Peter Brook did); included elements of classical SouthAsian dance (in the form – primarily – of Alka Nayyar as a doe); used costumes that exudedthe bright colors of saris; and most importantly had her collaborator Doug Peck re-imagine

the original Sherman Brothers score, incorporating sitar, tablas, and a half dozen other Indian instruments into his arrangements. To not effect such a strategy would be to present a

kind of cultural lobotomy on stage; but to do so opens Zimmerman to charges of an

ornamental, tokenistic theatricalization.38

From a Saidian standpoint, this Catch-22 is an inherent feature of this particular job; therecan be for Zimmerman no escape from an Orientalist perspective. For in writing about “theOrient” as a European or American, it

36 Mowgli in the village is Cinderella in the castle, or Pinocchio reincarnated as a “real boy”: the child who hascome of age and is ready to embrace the conventions of adulthood.

37Re-inserting Kipling into The Jungle Book proved a difficult task. From Chris Jones in the Chicago Tribune:

"The difference between Kipling and Disney was ten times wider than the difference between Voltaire

and Leonard Bernstein," said Zimmerman... referring to "Candide," her last project at the Goodman

Theatre.

And as Zimmerman said to the New York Times:

Once you commit to using the songs from the movie, they act like a dragnet: they pull in plot and

character and, most importantly, tone. I originally thought I was going to be using Kipling much more, but

his tone is so radically divergent from the film that it would have no integrity to do that dark and bloody

and vengeful version of things, and then do those songs.

And so, Zimmerman employed a different tactic to insinuate Kipling back into her stage narrative. Along with the

Indian village, she adds a further human realm: a Victorian bedroom in which a boy sits reading. This realm serves

as the framing device for the play; it is where the story and the reading of the story meet, the nexus of organized

civilization and the aberrant world of fantasy. This nexus is, in fact, Kipling himself.

38 Doug Peck’s arrangements, I would argue, display far more than a merely ornamental or gratuitous use of Indian

music. You can get some sense of his engagement with the art form by reading his blog post here.

http://www.goodmantheatre.org/Goodman-Blog/Dates/2013/6/Conductors-Reports-Part-2/






18

“means being aware, however dimly, that one belongs to a

power with definite interests in the Orient, and more

important, that one belongs to a part of the earth with a

definite history of involvement in the Orient almost since

the time of Homer.”39

Even the observer with a genuine egalitarian spir it has their “human engagements... firstdissolved, then usurped by Orientalist generalizations.”40

In the face of an ever-reifying Orientalism, should the European/American simply give upand depart the field of play? Should Zimmerman, as Khoury puts it, “adapt stories about her native plains states and leave the Silk Road alone”?

Zimmerman, in her responses to Khoury’s questions, clearly rejects this surrender, sayingthat the works she adapts

are masterpieces of world literature and the more versionsthere are of them, the more people get to hear them and

39The effects of this history drew another of Khoury’s blog charges. In excerpted form:

Zimmerman in Chicago Magazine:

But you go over there [India] and you see that the British occupation was so short in the history of the

country. No one is sitting around moping about the raj. You have to remember the past, but you don’t have

to live in it.

Khoury in his blog:

Zimmerman's flippant, aloof dismissal of the brutality and cruelty of the British Raj is as astonishing as it is

infuriating. Human injustice of such epic magnitude simply shrugged off, shooed away like some sort of

pest.

Zimmerman in the e-interview:

I was trying to displace what I think of as the typical self-centered western notion that other countries are

all about our relation to them; that the only important history of other countries is that which directly relates

to us. I did not mean to trivialize the scar of that period and I really do apologize if I gave that impression.

I would only add this: I agree with Said’s view expressed in the main text above on the long duration of the West’s

colonial interests in the East, and with Khoury’s view that colonialism’s effects are cruel and lasting. But I am

sympathetic to the case that Indians are not “moping about the raj.” Case in point: during my recent trip to Kerala,

elections were coming up. The dominant images on signs were portraits of Che and Hugo Chavez – not of Gandhi

or of any of the other rebels against British rule. In this case, political groups in Kerala were not emphasizing the

legacy of the Raj; their main concern was with current American hegemony (with Che and Chavez being two

prominent critics of the U.S.). It is American multi-nationals and the American-dominated IMF apparently

represent a more immediate danger; Gandhi's march to the sea may be evoked by cotton-belt farmers in their bid

to control their own seeds and preserve their livelihood, but it is Monsanto they are now fighting, not Rudyard

Kipling and King George V.

40 Here Said is talking about someone he greatly admires, Karl Marx, of whom he writes: “...even though Marx’s

humanity, his sympathy for the misery of people, are clearly engaged... Yet in the end it is the Romantic Orientalist

vision that wins out.”















19

experience them for the compendiums of wisdom, humor,

passion, poetry and superb story-telling they are, the

better.

Said himself rejects the notion that Westerners should “leave the Silk Road alone.” He believes

self-aware and self-critical scholars are “perfectly capable of freeing themselves from the oldideological straitjacket” and can discover an ethical approach towards “oriental” subjects.41

Is

Zimmerman’s work consistent with Said’s call for scholars to engage in “a continual self -

examination of their methodology and practice, a constant attempt to keep their work responsiveto the material and not to a doctrinal preconception”?

42It is clearly a question that she has asked

herself, as evidenced here, in response to one of Khoury’s emailed questions:

41 He singles out the American anthropologist Clifford Geertz in this regard, “whose interest in Islam is discrete and

concrete enough to be animated by the specific societies and problems he studies and not by the rituals,

preconceptions, and doctrines of Orientalism.”

42 Zimmerman has an additional concern. Not only does she wish to remain open to the text/responsive to the

material, she wishes to remain open and responsive to the specific and immediate cultural situation she finds

herself in: that of the theater artist, in a theater, working collaboratively with other theater artists to create a

“product.” Here’s how Zimmerman’s process was described in a “Broadway World” article:

Anjali Bhimai, who plays the mother wolf as well as other roles in The Jungle Book , says from personal

experience that Zimmerman always likes to experiment and throw around ideas rather than to

meticulously plan. "Mary's style provides a tremendous amount of freedom in the rehearsal room... When

Mary casts a show, she doesn't really have a set script, and she doesn't know who she's casting as what."

Zimmerman shows are primarily written around the performers themselves to take advantage of every

talent they possess. She casts actors whom she knows are capable of bringing to life not just a play, but a

theatrical experience. The characters then slowly emerge throughout this process.

Bhimani thus describes a rehearsal with Zimmerman as, "a collaboration all-around, from start to finish...

The more [Mary Zimmerman] finds that you can do, ... the more stuff she can use." Her actors are cast

because of who they are, not necessarily for who she wants them to become.

"Mary's willing to say, 'I don't know,' because she's discovering everything just as much as we are. And

there's so much freedom when you're working with a director who says, 'I don't know yet. Let's find out.

Let's figure that out together.'"

Zimmerman, then, is the anti-Shadwell (the theater director from The Buddha of Suburbia). Where Shadwell claims

to cast “for authenticity” and not “experience,” Zimmerman finds authenticity in the specific experiences of her

cast. Her collaborative, democratizing work style puts attacks on her productions in a new light. Claims of her

“racist” and/or “Orientalist” stagings are inevitably also attacks on the collaborators that co-created those

stagings. It is instructive, in this regard, to read what cast-member Nehal Joshi had to say about why he was in The

Jungle Book :

I wanted to work with Mary, but more than that, as a South Asian actor there are not a lot of shows for

us. I appreciate the opportunity to show the culture that I grew up with. That’s something first generation

people rarely get to do on stage. Often, my goal as an artist [is] to share the immigrant experience

because it is so pervasive in my life.

http://www.broadwayworld.com/chicago/article/BWW-InterviewMary-Zimmerman-Creates-Theatre-Nirvana-Through-THE-JUNGLE-BOOK-20130807;?%3E



http://www.goodmantheatre.org/Goodman-Blog/Dates/2013/6/In-the-Jungle-Nehal-Joshi/







20

My understanding of the term "orientalism" is as a kind of

fetishized and objectifying drive towards a culture

different from one's own. While it is certainly possible to

have such fetishes, I also believe that one can love a text

from another culture as one can love a person from another

culture, with genuine love for the inner self, the true

self, and not through perverse and condescending

objectification.

Zimmerman’s optimism in this regard is commendable, but it does not make the task shehas set herself any easier. She wants to embrace the joyful power of Disney,43 re-introduceIndia into Disney’s ahistorical romp, and avoiding fetishizing her Indian sources. As I hopehas become clear, she is far too much the humanist to engage in the kind of gross colonialistperspective that would depict Indians and Indian culture as inferior;44 but those audiencemembers put on red-alert by Khoury’s provocation surely came to the theater on guard for subtler fetishistic manifestations of Orientalism: those that depict Eastern cultures astimeless, eternal, mystical, naive, innocent – and yet, contradictorily, corrupt, sensual,

43Zimmerman does retain some of the bouncy appeal of Disney songs, imagery, and tropes. But as a Zimmerman

fan, I must concede that in this instance, she fails to harness the full potency of Disney. 1) Disney almost always

manages to create a real sense of fear and danger for the main, innocent character. The Goodman stage

production does not succeed in this. One never gets the sense that this Mowgli is ever in serious danger. Even

when he is in the clutches of Louie’s lackeys or Kaa’s coils, he walks away without much effort or consternation. 2)

The movie has only two genuinely show-stopping numbers, and these are not enough to carry a stage enterprise of

this length and size (plus, they both come in Act One). 3) Without getting into specific comparisons between Snow

White and The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes, I would argue that Disney’s vision does seem particularly well-suited

for animation.

44

Zimmerman, indeed, directly confronts the colonialist perspective in her re-imagining of Colonel Hathi and hiselephant patrol. In Kipling’s The Jungle Book , “Hathi the Wild Elephant” receives only a passing mention. Disney’s

cartoon Colonel Hathi has much more in common with Kala Nag, “the best-loved and best-looked-after elephant in

the service of the Government of India,” who appears in one of the book’s non-Mowgli stories. In the Disney film,

Colonel Hathi is a wannabe Brit, rhapsodizing about when “I earned my commission in the Maharajah’s Fifth

Pachyderm Brigade.” Zimmerman more clearly delineates her elephant herd as stand-ins for the colonialists –

supplying them with English accents and military attire.

In the movie, Bagheera attempts to enlist Hathi in a search for the runaway Mowgli. The Colonel demurs, causing

his wife to remonstrate: “How would you like to have our boy lost and alone in the jungle?”

“Our son, alone?” Hathi responds. “But Winifred, old girl, that’s an entirely different matter. Different. Entirely.”

Zimmerman elaborates upon this exchange in her version. Hathi’s wife accuses him (and by extension, the British

occupiers of India) of being "brutal, selfish and everything that's wrong with the world." Hathi pleads in response:

"One's own children are more important than the children of others! Everyone knows that! The world runs on

that!"

In this instance, Zimmerman has provided an incisive and revealing encapsulation of the colonialist (and, to some

extent, modern humanity’s) perspective. [Again, I am indebted to Sarah Allen, drummer for the Chicago

production, for her perspective, and for reminding me of Hathi’s lines.]



21

erotic.45

And yet there are hazards for the artist who becomes doggedly exacting about avoidingthese Orientalist errors, and pitfalls for the audience member whose vigilance for politicaltransgressions undermine any prospect for experiencing pleasure in the theater. Even Said

warns that, in the realm of academia,

openly polemical and right-minded “progressive” scholarship

can very easily degenerate into dogmatic slumber.

These ongoing manifestations of the artist’s Catch-22 provoke a slew of relevant questions:Though it may look good on paper to avoid fetishization, what are our dramatis personae but

walking, talking fetishes of a playwright’s fevered imagination? And does not the play,presented as ritual in a darkened theater, seem to be always slightly removed from the

natural course of time and space? Are not depictions of classical culture (of both the Eastand West) bound to seem ancient, even eternal , to resident participants in the immature

culture of such a young country as ours? Are not children in literature usually depicted asnaive or innocent to some degree?

And do we want our theater directors to police the sensuality of their stagecraft? Do we notwant all the actors, costumes, sets, and props to be in some regard sensual , no matter the

culture being depicted? Can we say that whenever a white person of European descentshows Indian life or individuals as sexual or sensual that they are to be admonished?46 Zimmerman has been criticized for being a little cold at times, but in her work she is usuallygoing for a forthright sensuality: rich colors, alluring music, pretty people. After all, she isthe author of a play entitled S/M (based on de Sade and Masoch, the fathers of Sadism and

Masochism, respectively). So when depicting Oriental cultures, is she supposed to check her

sensual impulses at the stage door?

45 Indeed, Goodman Artistic Director Robert Falls does her no favors in this regard with his essay “Why The Jungle

Book ?,” included in the program for the show, where he writes of “the beauty of India itself, a land of grace and

enchantment...” This is a travel brochure’s conception of India, and puts one on aesthetic alert for a touristic

reproduction of that country’s culture, for the “unsophisticated,” “exoticized renderings” that Khoury warns of.

Marketing copy often tends towards clichés when it comes to India. Ads for the Joffrey Ballet’s current (as of this

writing) Chicago production of La Bayadere announce “Ballet meets Bollywood in this tale of mystery, vengeance

and eternal love.” (The Joffrey, it should be noted in this context, has not cast Asian dancers as the principals in

this India-based ballet.)

46 Said certainly admonishes Gustave Flaubert in this regard, in a passage that has relevance to 19th century author

Kipling:

In all of his novels Flaubert associates the Orient with the escapism of sexual fantasy... the association is

clearly made between the Orient and the freedom of licentious sex. We may as well recognize that for

nineteenth-century Europe, with its increasing embourgeoisement , sex had been institutionalized to a

very considerable degree. On the one hand, there was no such thing as “free” sex, and on the other, sex in

society entailed a web of legal, moral, even political and economic obligations of a detailed and certainly

encumbering sort... the Orient was a place where one could look for sexual experience unobtainable in

Europe.



22

These questions lurk in the wings of our cross-cultural theatrical enterprises, never to befully answered by one single production, or one single essay.

§

In the end, it is Zimmerman’s boldest and most original narrative gesture that brings her closest to the edge of an Orientalist Jungle Book . In Zimmerman’s staging of Mowgli’s final

confrontation with the nemesis who orphaned him – the tiger Shere Khan – it is the Hindugod Vishnu who supplies Mowgli with the fire to kill him, and then intervenes to allowShere Khan’s re-birth into a post-predatorial after-life. It is this moment that to the generallysympathetic Kamal Hans – Managing Director of Chicago’s South Asian theatre company,Rasaka, writing in The India Tribune – “feels like cultural appropriation or even tokenism.”47

The deity’s slow descent from the heavens is vintage Zimmerman: the scene is pretty,stately, redemptive, and echoes ancient texts. But it certainly finds no precedent in Kipling(whose Jungle Book is a stern refutation of Indian “superstition”) or in Disney (who – with

the notable exception of Fantasia – tends not to explicitly call upon the gods). This deus ex machina is not integrated organically within the world of the play, and therefore becomes thework’s most purely ornamental moment. And given that it is a specifically Indian ornament,

manufactured by an American artist, Zimmerman’s gambit does at last seem to lend somecredence to Khoury’s otherwise half -baked brief.

And yet... Zimmerman’s The Jungle Book hardly stands with her best work. Both Kipling and

Disney, in their own way, resist easy transfer to the Broadway-style musical format. And soit is her quirkier digressions that are simply the most engaging things about the show: theVictorian framing device; the character of Lieutenant George (who has no precedent in theDisney movie), the second-in-command elephant whose idealism serves as a corrective to

the British-style regimentation of the rest of his herd; and, yes, the weird born-againapotheosis of the play’s #1 villain – the bengal tiger’s transformation from scarlet-drapedserial killer to white-robed avatar of peaceful wisdom. Again we are faced with thecontradictions inherent in Zimmerman’s enterprise, where potentially objectionableelements of her staging are at the same time her most intriguing, even beguiling.48

47 The link to Hans’ India Tribune review now appears broken. Here is the full paragraph in question:

Despite many wonderful moments, there are significant issues with the production. The Jungle Book

comes with a history of racial overtones and controversies and the production didn’t do too much to

address these issues, including a strange twist towards the end of the play where Hindu gods become

involved with no real tie-in before or after this intervention. This scene encapsulates the issues with the

play as it is beautiful, but doesn’t do anything to forward what should have been a coming of age story

about Mowgli and the amazing animals he lives, learns and loves. Instead it feels like cultural

appropriation or even tokenism. Still, by the end of the show, I wasn’t even offended and did not have

any real issues with the racial depiction – I didn’t care enough.

48Even with this word, we are faced with the contradiction at the heart of this and similar theatrical enterprises. It

may be in fact the legitimate aim of a director to “beguile” the audience, and the desire of the audience to be

beguiled. And yet it is the job of any critic of the Orientalist perspective to resist and bring attention to any

beguilements.



23

§

We return to Zimmerman’s decree regarding King Louie: that we must search for andexamine the locus of racism (as expounded fully in footnote #25), looking beyond theviewed individual or act. The same is true for Orientalism: it is too simple to point to and

locate “Orientalism” in any one theater artist (Brook or Zimmerman). It is a perspective sodeeply woven into the fabric of societal conception of East-West that the locus is scatteredamong all the theatrical collaborators, the audiences, and even the Saids and Bharuchas andKhourys (and Isaacsons) who oppose themselves to it.

At the same time, we must make sure that such a search does not become an end unto itself;that it does not overwhelm both artist and audience, as we search for cultural appropriationsand puzzle over what constitutes an appropriate depiction. “Appropriate” itself remains afairly charged word, one that deserves scrutiny. As a verb, appropriate represents the

hijacking or commandeering impulse that might arise from a complete lack of artistic

circumspection (that basic level of circumspection that remains the “bare necessity” for an

ethical artistry). In its adjectival form, however, it can be a deathly word for artists. Thosewho over-worry about whether their art is “appropriate” will be hard-pressed to createsomething great.

And for the audience? We must be willing to sit down to tea, and yet willing also – at amoment’s notice – to up-end the tea table. We must find that middle-ground, that psychicduplex, where we are attuned to manifestations of a colonialist perspective, but at the sametime do not allow that attunement to attenuate any chance for true delight in the theater. Itis a middle-ground that clearly Edward Said found vis à vis Rudyard Kipling: in his

introduction to Kipling’s Kim, he was able to deliver a no-holds-barred critique, while still

conveying his pleasure in reading Kipling’s text. And it is certainly a middle-ground we can

occupy as we attend and attend to the work of a self-searching artist like Mary Zimmerman;as we listen to the seemingly-seamless matching of Eastern oud and Western sax in Doug

Peck’s Jungle Book score; as we watch the always-adamant artistry of a hoofing and wailing

André De Shields.

§ § §

Documents

Up-ending the Tea Table: Race and Culture in Mary Zimmerman’s The Jungle Book