Up-ending the Tea Table:

Race and Culture in Mary Zimmermans 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 production of The Jungle Book. He soon learns that his costume will be a loin-cloth and brown makeup, so that I resembled a turd in a bikini-bottom, and that he will be required to shed his Orpington 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 cobrapits that await any theatricalization of Rudyard Kiplings 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 Kiplings 1894 collection of stories). While the production was in tech week at Chicagos Goodman Theatre, an interview with her appeared in Chicago Magazine; which in turn provoked charges of Orientalism and racism from Silk Road Rising artistic director Jamil Khoury; which created a social-media frenzy of alternating approbation and indignation; which led to Zimmerman gamely arranging a meeting with Khoury and agreeing to answer a series of his barbed questions; which led to Khoury declaring peace and saying he would have no further comment on the matter. The general mood in the theater-world became one of self-congratulation. Congratulations to 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 had actually been resolved. Indeed, the production at the center of the controversy had not yet raised 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 only one fuller analysis3 of the play in light of Khourys original charges.
1

Penguin Books, 1990.

In 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 Bostons Huntington Theater. I have found no reviews from Boston that brought up any controversial aspects of the material.
3

Dani Snyder-Youngs generally well-reasoned Race Representation in The Jungle Book, in HowlRound.

2 Why take on a more extended examination here? Why, given that Khoury has now buried his hatchet, do I find further axes to grind? Why risk (to continue the sharp-implement metaphor) re-opening the old wounds inflicted by the appearance of the Chicago Magazine interview and Khourys blog? (And though spoiler alert I take issue with the blogs charges against Zimmerman,4 I very much understand the general frustration of those in the theatrical community who expressed solidarity with Khoury. This frustration has been fueled in Chicago by issues more tangible than aesthetics and stage-craft. There can be little argument that in a city thats 60% African-American and Latino, whites maintain an inordinate control over mechanisms of representation both in terms of controlling resources 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 film about Indian farmers.7 So here we go... with digressive footnotes aplenty, because these are issues that resist containment in simple paragraphs. The more casual, time-strapped reader should feel free to stick with the main text. For those as obsessed as I, the asides might well provide some curious pleasures.

While I am interested in exploring his wider concerns, I find Khourys rhetorical excess unhelpful: why, for instance, associate Zimmerman with how our judicial system has historically protected rapists?
5

These 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 AfricanAmerican neighborhoods are just the most dramatic manifestation of the inequities throughout the civic system.
6

I 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 migrs 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-world debates from the 1980s regarding Peter Brooks production of The Mahabharata. To recap that argument: Indian theater director and scholar Rustom Bharucha asked Can a story be separated from the ways in which it is told to its own people? He wrote that Brooks play suggests the bad old days of the British Raj, not in its direct 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 dramatise the 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 Khourys and Bharuchas critiques continue to parallel each other. Khoury: On Zimmermans 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 youd have lunch with, but gilded objects that were amusing and titillating, to be enjoyed vicariously and from ample
8

Bharucha, Rustom. Peter Brooks Mahabharata: A View from India. Economic and Political Weekly, August 6, 1988.
9

Bharuchas protectionism is problematic, as Maria Shevtsova has pointed out (in her remarkable article Interculturalism, Aestheticism, Orientalism: Starting from Peter Brooks 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.
10

Interestingly 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.

4 distance.11 The never quite people complaint echoes what Bharucha said a quarter-century ago: Almost all of the characters in Brooks Mahabharata are presented in outline, with their inner energies and fire missing. 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
11

This 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 Zimmermans work, but there are certainly times when the intrusion of thirdperson narrative and the stateliness of her mise en scne 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 Zimmermans 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 Zimmermans 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. Webers language regarding Zimmerman in general is much like Khourys when critiquing Zimmerman vis vis Asian, Arab, and Persian texts.
12

I am only familiar with Brooks 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. Im guessing, however, that the full nine-hour stage production might have a very different effect on me.

5 The colorful textiles complaint also echoes Bharuchas belief that in Brooks glorious trivialisation 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 is exotic 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. Brooks response to Bharucha, not surprisingly, sounds like Zimmermans response to Khoury. 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 that which 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 exact instances of Zimmermans sins largely to the readers imagination.14 He does indict one work in particular; though, unfortunately, I believe he does so with more provocation 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.

14

Khoury has made clear that, following his conversation (conversion?) with Zimmerman, he will be providing no further commentary on his original charges.
15

Actually, 2007.

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 did not have the reaction that Khoury mentions, 16 though (as I shall examine further below) I am 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, a Russian 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 I have not been able to find any complete, considered critique from the perspective that Khoury talks about.17 Any such critique would have to go into the kind of detail that
16

I am not alone in this. Kerry Reids 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 Reids 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, figuratively 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 Chertoffs staff would like you to see.
17

The only relevant report I can find of the conference is at Silk Road Risings 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.

7 Bharucha employs vis--vis Brook. If there were stereotypes, were they Zimmerman's invention? 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 from her collaborators? Did the stereotypes demean darker-skinned characters, to the advantage of lighter-skinned characters? How could those characters be represented in a better, deeper way? Without a more detailed reckoning, Khourys charges leveled all these years later come off as somewhat reckless. In addition to Mirror, Ive seen all of Zimmermans 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 by talented, multi-ethnic casts.19 I was never offended by the depictions, which seemed to me an 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, Khourys 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 Bariccos 1996 novel. It is a work that both embraces and examines Western erotic attitudes toward the East.
19

Zimmermans 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 fairly nuanced piece in Theatre Bay Area Magazine: When I saw The White Snake at Berkeley Rep, the racial aspects of the shows casting made me feel icky. In Mary Zimmermans 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 Reps resources, I know that finding the best Chinese actors in the country, or the world, wouldnt be a problem if that were what Zimmerman wanted, so I assumed that wasnt what she wanted, that she sought to cast Asian roles with racially diverse actors to make the point that The White Snake isnt just a Chinese story; its everyones story. It should be noted that issues of casting are not part of Khourys critique of Zimmerman, and that Khourys 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 Risings casting make me feel icky at all).
20

One 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 Jacksons 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.

8 Of course, my perspective is that of a white, middle-class theater-goer.21 I am quite willing to accept that I am viewing the works from a particular and perhaps privileged vantage, and that my own under-examined biases might obscure the biases being played out on the stage.22 Zimmermans The Jungle Book opened at The Goodman Theater on July 1, 2013. Shortly, I will discuss whether it contains evidence of the Orientalism on Parade that Khoury decries, but first I shall address another charge from Khourys blog: that Zimmerman failed to adequately address the implied racism of the plays biggest, swinging-est song and dance number: 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 snatched up by the orangutan King Louie and his band of apes. Louie wants Mowgli to impart the secret of fire, because (as the song says)

21

Perhaps 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 was essentially 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) Jaffes portrayal of the titular character in the 1939 film version of Rudyard Kiplings poem Gunga Din.
22

The 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.

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 part or did not, depending on what account one reads. 23 In either case, we are left with an ape singing, in a recognizably African-American style, about wanting to be more human. Any contemporary rendition of the song contends, therefore, with the horrific history of racist imagery depicting African-Americans as primitive, sub-human, and/or anthropoidal.24

23

In 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 hes 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 thats 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? Theyd say were making fun of him. Shermans shifting memories may reveal a retrospective discomfort he feels with the song and its origins.
24

These 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 feelgood 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

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 Bndchen. 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

Zimmermans views led to what became the most notorious of the quotes in her Chicago Magazine interview: regarding I Wanna Be Like You, Its something I think where the racism is in the eye of the beholder, you know? This got boiled down, in Khourys 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 Andr De Shields in the orangutan 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 talked about 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 poorlywritten 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 songs historical and cultural context, Shaw argues that to accuse the songs critics of racism themselves was an overly aggressive move by Zimmerman. I certainly see the point, and yet sympathize with Zimmermans 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 Disneys 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 isnt 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.

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: Ive always said that part of my mission as a performing artist is a ministry to detonate stereotypes, to blow them up, so that were 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 showstopping 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, gravelvoiced, sweat-mopping, big-grinning imitation of Satchmo. 27 But De Shields and Zimmermans strategy is more complex than this. Yes, King Louie introduces himself to Mowgli with a growling burst of scat. But he delivers his entire scene with a sense of suave and sly remove. His air of aloof knowingness opens the possibility that Louie doesnt really wanna be like you at all; he might just be buttering up Mowgli in order to get what he wants the power bequeathed by Kiplings red flower.28 By the third reprise of the chorus, King Louie is openly mocking his own social pretensions by taking on the persona of a British twit at tea. When De Shields up-ends his mock tea table at the end of the chorus, he is up-ending our pre-conceived ideas about Louie; but more than that: hes up-ending the colonialist supposition that the primitives of India aspire to be like their British occupiers.29
26

Ive certainly witnessed De Shields ability to blow up stereotypes: he was the director of a fine production of George C. Wolfes satirical The Colored Museum at Victory Gardens in 1987.
27

De Shields confirms that he is imitating Satchmo in a Jet Magazine interview: We gotta skat because Im 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, thats exactly what he was, the culture ambassador to the rest of the world for us.

28

While 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 Disneys animated King Louie creates more drama; he definitely desires something from Mowgli, and it is unclear how far hell go to get it.
29

Dani 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

13

black origins of tap when I identify the hoofer style of tap as historically black, and I admit I went into the production looking for issues of race and representation, but this number, that codes the multi-racial ensemble black, made me squirm a little. Snyder-Youngs analysis here is intriguing, but I find it somewhat flawed. The Baloo lines she cites are actually themselves sung in a historically black manner: its from Baloos 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 Mowglis 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 Mowglis capture by King Louie and his monkeys. So the words becom e: 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 productions drummer, Sarah Allen, for helping me recall the lyrics, and for her thoughts on King Louie.] I dont 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. Kiplings 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. Disneys monkeys arent frizzy either, though the hair that halos Zimmermans monkeys (in Mara Blumenfelds 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 Louies 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 Zimmermans re-imagining of Disneys re-imagining of Kipling serve a similar detonating function? Does its representational strategies up-end the Orientalist 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, but her source materials. There are, of course, many different definitions of Orientalism. In Khourys blog, he references a specific perspective with the following quip: For years I've been tempted to send Zimmerman a copy of Edward Said's ORIENTALISM with a note describing it as literary criticism, not a director's manual. Let us then, in concert with Khoury, take Said as a jumping-off point. Saids ground-breaking 1978 book lists the following principle dogmas of Orientalism: ...one is the absolute and systemic difference between the West, 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 an artist of enormous gifts and no imperialist minstrel. At the same time, Kipling reflected and ascribed to the colonialist ideology of his time, in which (as Said describes it in his introduction to Kiplings 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 away like 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 Kiplings 1894 work The Jungle Book is caught between (and eventually rejected by both) the world of the jungle and the world of the human village. Kiplings 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 irrational and, 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 his incessant referencing of The Law of the Jungle, he seems intent on turning that jungle into 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 that Bagheera the panther and Baloo the bear impart to their student Mowgli. Baloo himself is not the comic, nurturing figure we encounter in the Disney or Zimmerman versions of the tales: he is a strict disciplinarian, and staunch defender of corporal punishment.32 Kipling is peddling the Rational vs. Aberrant dogma that Said describes above. He contrasts his surprisingly rational Jungle with the Indian villages tales of ghosts and gods and goblins, its cobwebs and moontalk. When Mowgli seeks refuge in the human village (after hes 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 identification with 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 Saids Yellow Peril dogma).33
31

From Wilsons 1941 collection of essays, The Wound and the Bow.

32

When Bagheera sees the bruises on Mowglis face, he and Baloo argue over the latters 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 Majestys 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.

16 Mowgli is admitted to the village thanks to the intervention of the clever village priest, who sees a political advantage in endorsing the wolf-child; as in Kim, Kipling readily depicts the huckster instinct of the East. After Mowgli proves his worth by killing the tiger Shere Khan, the villagers turn on him. Instead of appreciating Mowglis bravery and ingenuity, they assume he must be employing some sort of black magic; they exile him, calling him a Sorcerer and Jungle-demon. This manifestation of their mystical, superstitious belief structure again evokes the first of Saids Orientalist dogmas, as their aberrant and undeveloped nature is contrasted with the assumed rational and humane attitude of Kiplings Western readers. Walt Disney, in his 1967 movie adaptation, does not retain Kiplings quirky take on the jungle.34 He re-instates a more conventional Western outlook, where the jungle is both a free, nuts-and-berries, almost hippy-ish paradise and, concurrently, a treacherous realm of carnivorous beasts. The village, on the other hand, is safe and welcoming; it is the Disney/Indian/primitive version of bourgeois conventionality, as described by the village girl in her song: Father's hunting in the forest Mother's cooking in the home I must go to fetch the water 'Til the day that I'm grown... Then I will have a handsome husband And a daughter of my own And I'll send her to fetch the water I'll be cooking in the home In Disneys re-working, the village has become the place of rules and order, and the jungle has become a land of roguery both the roguery of Baloos aw-shucks libertarian philosophy and of the predatory zeal of Shere Kahn the tiger and Kaa the boa constrictor. It is difficult to apply any of Saids Orientalism to the Disney version, because the film so completely divorces itself from Kiplings conception. At least Kipling presents a recognizable, if distorted, India. You wont for instance, find an orangutan in Kiplings work (as they actually live in Borneo and Sumatra). In Disneys adaptation, India is not presented as aberrant or undeveloped because it is really not presented at all. 35 If Kipling has
34

In fact, he instructed his screenwriters to avoid reading Kipling.

35

This does not mean, of course, that audience members even Asian audience members did not experience Disneys India as if it were a real India, as evidenced by an interview with Goodman Theater cast-member Nehal Joshi. Of the Disney film version, he says: They say that every kid has a Disney movie that speaks to them and this one was mine. It is about a young, South Asian kid and thats exactly what I was when I saw it. I wanted t o be Mowgli so bad.

17 turned the Indian jungle into England, Walt Disney turns it into Disneyland: the magic kingdom 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 nearimpossible task: Not only does she have a scholars impulse to re-insert Kipling into the text,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 Mans Burden, that requires her to try and save both Kipling and Disney from themselves? She journeyed with her design crew to India (as Peter Brook did); included elements of classical South Asian dance (in the form primarily of Alka Nayyar as a doe); used costumes that exuded the 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; there can be for Zimmerman no escape from an Orientalist perspective. For in writing about the Orient 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 has come of age and is ready to embrace the conventions of adulthood.
37

Re-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 Pecks 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.

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 spirit has their human engagements... first dissolved, then usurped by Orientalist generalizations.40 In the face of an ever-reifying Orientalism, should the European/American simply give up and 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 Khourys questions, clearly rejects this surrender, saying that the works she adapts are masterpieces of world literature and the more versions there are of them, the more people get to hear them and
39

The effects of this history drew another of Khourys 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 dont 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 Saids view expressed in the main text above on the long duration of the Wests colonial interests in the East, and with Khourys view that colonialisms 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 Marxs 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 passion, poetry better.

for the compendiums of wisdom, humor, and superb story-telling they are, the

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 old ideological straitjacket and can discover an ethical approach towards oriental subjects. 41 Is Zimmermans work consistent with Saids call for scholars to engage in a continual selfexamination of their methodology and practice, a constant attempt to keep their work responsive to the material and not to a doctrinal preconception?42 It is clearly a question that she has asked herself, as evidenced here, in response to one of Khourys 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. Heres how Zimmermans 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. Thats 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.

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. Zimmermans optimism in this regard is commendable, but it does not make the task she has set herself any easier. She wants to embrace the joyful power of Disney,43 re-introduce India into Disneys ahistorical romp, and avoiding fetishizing her Indian sources. As I hope has become clear, she is far too much the humanist to engage in the kind of gross colonialist perspective that would depict Indians and Indian culture as inferior;44 but those audience members put on red-alert by Khourys provocation surely came to the theater on guard for subtler fetishistic manifestations of Orientalism: those that depict Eastern cultures as timeless, eternal, mystical, naive, innocent and yet, contradictorily, corrupt, sensual,
43

Zimmerman 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 Louies lackeys or Kaas 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 Disneys vision does seem particularly well-suited for animation.
44

Zimmerman, indeed, directly confronts the colonialist perspective in her re-imagining of Colonel Hathi and his elephant patrol. In Kiplings The Jungle Book, Hathi the Wild Elephant receives only a passing mention. Disneys 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 books non -Mowgli stories. In the Disney film, Colonel Hathi is a wannabe Brit, rhapsodizing about when I earned my commission in the Maharajahs 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, thats an entirely different matter. Different. Entirely. Zimmerman elaborates upon this exchange in her version. Hathis 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 humanitys) perspective. [Again, I am indebted to Sarah Allen, drummer for the Chicago production, for her perspective, and for reminding me of Hathis lines.]

21 erotic.45 And yet there are hazards for the artist who becomes doggedly exacting about avoiding these Orientalist errors, and pitfalls for the audience member whose vigilance for political transgressions 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 artists 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 playwrights 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 East and 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 as naive or innocent to some degree? And do we want our theater directors to police the sensuality of their stagecraft? Do we not want 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 descent shows 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 usually going for a forthright sensuality: rich colors, alluring music, pretty people. After all, she is the 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 brochures conception of India, and puts one on aesthetic alert for a touris tic reproduction of that countrys culture, for the unsophisticated, exoticized renderings that Khoury warns of. Marketing copy often tends towards clichs when it comes to India. Ads for the Joffrey Ballets 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 19 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.

th

22 These questions lurk in the wings of our cross-cultural theatrical enterprises, never to be fully answered by one single production, or one single essay. In the end, it is Zimmermans boldest and most original narrative gesture that brings her closest to the edge of an Orientalist Jungle Book. In Zimmermans staging of Mowglis final confrontation with the nemesis who orphaned him the tiger Shere Khan it is the Hindu god Vishnu who supplies Mowgli with the fire to kill him, and then intervenes to allow Shere Khans re-birth into a post-predatorial after-life. It is this moment that to the generally sympathetic Kamal Hans Managing Director of Chicagos South Asian theatre company, Rasaka, writing in The India Tribune feels like cultural appropriation or even tokenism.47 The deitys 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 the works most purely ornamental moment. And given that it is a specifically Indian ornament, manufactured by an American artist, Zimmermans gambit does at last seem to lend some credence to Khourys otherwise half-baked brief. And yet... Zimmermans 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 so it is her quirkier digressions that are simply the most engaging things about the show: the Victorian framing device; the character of Lieutenant George (who has no precedent in the Disney 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-again apotheosis of the plays #1 villain the bengal tigers transformation from scarlet-draped serial killer to white-robed avatar of peaceful wisdom. Again we are faced with the contradictions inherent in Zimmermans enterprise, where potentially objectionable elements 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 didnt 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 doesnt 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 wasnt even offended and did not have any real issues with the racial depiction I didnt care enough.

48

Even 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 Zimmermans decree regarding King Louie: that we must search for and examine the locus of racism (as expounded fully in footnote #25), looking beyond the viewed 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 so deeply woven into the fabric of societal conception of East-West that the locus is scattered among all the theatrical collaborators, the audiences, and even the Saids and Bharuchas and Khourys (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 appropriations and puzzle over what constitutes an appropriate depiction. Appropriate itself remains a fairly 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. Those who over-worry about whether their art is appropriate will be hard-pressed to create something great. And for the audience? We must be willing to sit down to tea, and yet willing also at a moments notice to up-end the tea table. We must find that middle-ground, that psychic duplex, where we are attuned to manifestations of a colonialist perspective, but at the same time do not allow that attunement to attenuate any chance for true delight in the theater. It is a middle-ground that clearly Edward Said found vis vis Rudyard Kipling: in his introduction to Kiplings Kim, he was able to deliver a no-holds-barred critique, while still conveying his pleasure in reading Kiplings 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 Pecks Jungle Book score; as we watch the always-adamant artistry of a hoofing and wailing Andr De Shields.