"Running Man" a new "jazz-opera"
by Seth Rogovoy

(LENOX, Aug. 24, 2000) -- Opera and jazz might seem like unlikely bedfellows. One is the tradition of staged performance of composed vocal music originating in southern Europe; the other the mostly instrumental, improvised music of African-American culture.

Yet when avant-garde jazz composer Diedre Murray set out to tell the story of her family in words and music, it came out very much as a cross between the two.

Thus, and in the typically genre-busting tradition of the Music-Theatre Group -- which presents Murray’s show running Aug. 24-27 in the Duffin Theater at Lenox Memorial High School – is Murray’s “Running Man” called a “jazz-opera.”

“It’s called an opera because essentially it’s sung through,” said Murray in a recent phone interview from her New York City apartment. “It has recitatives, and some of them are arias, but they’re done through a different genre.”

That genre is an amorphous blend of chamber music and folk-based, avant-garde jazz, with a bit of blues, spirituals, tango, Broadway and pop music occasionally surfacing.

“I’m essentially an avant-gardist,” said Murray, “so although there are touches of it, you won’t hear bebop. The music is through-composed, but I allow the musicians to improvise on it…. It depends on what you know as jazz. If you think jazz is 1940s or 1964 bebop, then you’re not going to hear a lot of that, but you’ll hear all the other forms.” Murray said the music was a natural outgrowth of the story, since it is in part her story, and thus it was only natural that the music would speak in her voice: the voice of a contemporary avant-gardist. But the theater piece also includes the voices of a mother, a father, and a brother, who like Murray’s own brother, apparently fell victim to drug addiction and death.

The work, said Murray, is “really a fictionalized account of my family’s life, and more specifically the life of my brother.” Through song and music played by a sextet modeled on a tango band featuring accordion, violin, cello, guitar, bass and drums, the characters explore the lost promise of the title character. They wrestle with their individual responsibility and their failed efforts to save him from his ultimate fate.

Along the way, the theater piece, directed by Diane Paulus, explores historical and sociological issues of African-American concern, including the legacy of slavery and racism and their effect on black masculinity. Murray said the piece, a collaboration with poet Cornelius Eady which was a finalist for the 1999 Pulitzer Prize, was inspired by an earlier piece she did with Eady called “You Don’t Miss Your Water.”

“I did a piece with Cornelius Eady about the death of his father and his coming of age, and while we were working on that it gave me pause to think about my family story,” said Murray, a graduate of Hunter College who was born and raised in New York.

“All of us have had family tragedies, and the death of my brother might not be specifically that interesting, but I think my general family and the things that produced it were kind of interesting. They’re from the eastern shore of Virginia, which is a place that a lot of people don’t particularly know about. So it sort of seemed like a good thing to do.”

The play itself takes place in a slave cemetery in a small town on the eastern Virginia shore, where the family members are gathered, along with a mysterious truth-telling woman named Seven, to review their history through a series of flashbacks in song.

The 75-minute opera that follows, which was commissioned by the Music-Theatre Group, has garnered rave reviews in previous productions. The New York Times said, it “taps a well of feeling so deep at times it seems spiritual.” American Theatre said that Murray’s jazz-opera fusion “sounds utterly natural – if nobody has written anything like it before … it’s only because that blend of genres hadn’t been imagined. And Murray seems in a position to imagine the previously unimaginable.”

Murray’s diverse background fed into the fusion. “By training I’m a cellist and a jazz musician,” she said. “When I was a kid living in New York I heard the blues and Albert Ayler and Duke Ellington, and my uncle was a classical guitarist. So I have many influences. Not coming through musical theater and Kurt Weill and all that stuff, I tell the story the way I know how, through the genres of music I’m familiar with.”

Murray said that even though the style of the piece might be new and unfamiliar to audiences, the building blocks are accessible. “Even though the forms, the recipe, might be new with the ingredients put in, most of the things in the show are things that people have seen,” she said. “It’s not really that way out. It’s just the combination of it, I think. If Robert starts singing something that’s a blues, you’ve heard it. You’ve just not heard it as an aria, or taken seriously from that point of view. Or the a capella parts, people have heard that, but not in that context. I think people will be moved, but they will also enjoy it as well.”

Murray suggests that the play is also informed by a “panoramic backdrop or back-story” which lends it its operatic quality. This has to do with the transition of African-American life from a southern rural to a northern urban experience, one which in general took several generations, but in Murray’s case, as reflected in the play, one which was telescoped over the course of one family’s life.

“The ‘Running Man’ character is really a combination of my father, grandfather, brother, and the family mythology surrounding them,” she said. “My father had me when he was 50 and my mother was 40. I was born in 1951. So my take on the South is much older than my actual generation. The South they were talking about is a place with no paved roads, people walking around with rifles, little red schoolhouses in the forest. That’s what I was brought up on, even though I was living in New York City. So I romanticized that journey that a lot of black people took.”

Another theme that “Running Man” explores is that of black genius and society’s inability to deal with it. “What happens when you’re really smart and you have no place to go with it?” asks Murray. “If you have a dream deferred it might turn into a poison and it might kill your soul.” The play suggests that the “Running Man” character, played by Darius deHaas in an OBIE-award winning performance, was a genius and therefore an oddity in his milieu. Murray says that this, too, has autobiographical connections.

“My mother in real life, when she was young she was a dancer,” she said. “There are parts in the play where the mother talks to her son in French. She actually talked to me in French. And so the whole idea of being in the household with a father who was a farmer, and then you have a mother who’s in a whole other sociological place, and what that does inside the family. Who do you go with? Do you think it’s appropriate if you’re living in the ghetto that you’re raising a kid playing the cello and speaking French? Or do you think that maybe they need to know something more practical? There was a lot of tension in my household about that.”

Murray says that “Running Man” is the second of a trilogy of works she and Eady are collaborating on in which the lyricist and composer are trying to tell “very American, Black American stories that maybe people have never heard before.”

Murray is also collaborating with popular hip-hop musical group The Roots on a musical theater piece about “the death of hip-hop.” “It’s from their perspective,” said Murray. “You can’t get more authentic than what they think about the music.”

Murray credits the Music-Theatre Group, founded 30 years ago in the Berkshires by Lyn Austin, for its visionary approach and willingness to support unusual projects such as “Running Man.”

“It’s very hard to get work of this type produced,” she said. “Any time you do anything slightly different, it’s a lot of trouble to get it produced.” Among those who have worked with Music-Theatre Group in the past are such well-known theatrical and musical visionaries as Julie Taymor, Martha Clarke, Andre Gregory, Even Ensler, Geri Allen, Bill Irwin and Richard Foreman.

Performances of “Running Man” will take place in the Duffin Theater at Lenox Memorial High School, 197 East Street in Lenox, on Aug. 24 at 8 pm, Aug. 25 at 7pm, and Aug. 26-27 at 5pm. For tickets and information call 298-5504.

[This article originally appeared in the Berkshire Eagle on Aug. 24, 2000. Copyright Seth Rogovoy 2000. All rights reserved.]

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