THE BLACK CLOWN
Creator and opera revolutionary Davóne Tines brings Langston Hughes’ poem “The Black Clown” to musical life in a vaudevillian rendering of this masterpiece. Fusing gospel, opera, jazz, and spirituals into a searing night of theatrical brilliance, The Black Clown embodies the evolving, divided soul of Black America and animates a Black man’s resilience against a legacy of oppression. The Black Clown has been hailed as “pure poetry” by The Boston Globe, and The New York Times lauds “this rich, seamless production melds the past and present of African-American history into an electrifyingly ambivalent whole.” Tines makes his Opera Philadelphia debut alongside an ensemble of 12 performers in this genre-bending, visually arresting piece, juxtaposing dazzling cathartic performances with Hughes’ enduring work.
shows
THE BLACK CLOWN
An adaptation of the Langston Hughes poem by the same name
Co-created by Davóne Tines, Michael Schachter, and Zack Winokur
Produced in Partnership with ArKtype
Original music by Michael Schachter
Directed by Zack Winokur
Choreographed by Chanel DaSilva
THE BLACK CLOWN is a music theater experience that fuses vaudeville, gospel, opera, jazz, and spirituals to bring Langston Hughes’ verse to life onstage and animate a Black man’s resilience against a legacy of oppression. The production features Davóne Tines in the title role, an ensemble of twelve, and a new score by Michael Schachter. Hughes, one of the most prominent voices of the Harlem Renaissance, best known for works such as “I, Too,” and “Let America Be America Again,” wrote “The Black Clown” in 1931. A deep cut in his catalogue, the poem was published in “The Negro Mother and Other Dramatic Recitations,” a trim collection of longer poems written as dramatic monologues. These poems are sometimes dismissed as uplifting to the point of being overly sentimental. Hughes’s aim, however, in writing the poems was to provide an accesible, “unpretentious” answer to “the modern Negro Art Movement,” which he said was “largely over the heads, and out of reach, of the masses of the Negro people.” Contemporary black poetry, he said, had “a distinct lack of rhymed poems dramatizing current racial interests in simple, understandable verse, pleasing to the ear, and suitable for reading aloud, or for recitation in school, churches, lodges, etc.” “The Negro Mother” was the result, and Hughes toured black churches and schools in the South reciting its poems. The book went into seven printings; Hughes joked that it “sold like reefers on 131st Street.” Hughes provided stage directions—called “the mood”—for “The Black Clown,” which he suggested should be spoken “to the music of a piano, or an orchestra.” In the current staging of the work, Tines, playing the role of the clown, opens with Hughes’s instructions before speaking the first three lines of the poem. He then launches into an operatic blues rendering of the lines, with the first word a low rumble of a note, like a drumroll, before his sonorous, gravid bass baritone rises and squares off with the song. By the end of the number, Tines is joined onstage by other singers and dancers—a community of black characters that Schachter calls a “fluid ensemble,” which enriches, and reaches beyond, the single voice of the clown.
Stage: Proscenium
Capacity: 150-500
Traveling Personnel: 40
Running time: 80 minutes