Photograph by Mark Kitaoka
Opera Theatre St. Louis’ 25th world premiere, Shalimar the Clown, is about a tightrope walker and his quest for revenge. The character was created by British Indian novelist Salman Rushdie, who’s walked his own tightrope for 27 years, since the Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa against him for his novel The Satanic Verses. The bounty for Rushdie’s death now exceeds $3.3 million.
In this later novel, Shalimar the Clown, a young Muslim acrobat falls in love with a Hindu dancer. Village elders grant their blessing, pronouncing a shared Kashmiri identity more important than differences of creed. But the American ambassador seduces the dancer, Boonyi, who is eager to escape the confines of tradition. Shalimar loses his footing, and his quest for revenge turns him into a terrorist.
The operatic tightrope stretches from Kashmir to Los Angeles, where Shalimar finagles a job as the ambassador’s driver, and the tension mounts. His personal tragedy is also the tragedy of Kashmir in the 1960s, caught in a power struggle between India and Pakistan and invaded by the west.
Composer Jack Perla blends western classical music with sitar and tabla drums. And librettist Rajiv Joseph (whose play Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo starred Robin Williams and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize) brings his own blended sensibility to the project: His father is from Kerala, India, and his mother is from Cleveland, where he grew up.
Have tensions between East and West shaped your work?
I was raised in a multicultural, multiethnic, biracial way, and that’s informed every part of me. It’s given me the confidence to inhabit characters that are not of my race or of my background, because I felt comfortable—or I guess you could say I felt equally uncomfortable—in both worlds growing up. It’s given me an imaginative toehold.
You’ve also said it was volunteering for the Peace Corps in Senegal that made you a real writer. How, exactly?
I’d been a creative writing major in college, and all my teachers would tell me, “You need to write every day. You need to find your voice.” I wasn’t doing that. I was a pretty undisciplined student. And I had no experience of the world—the majority of my life had been in Cleveland. And there I was living in a mud hut with no electricity or water, in a village where no one spoke English. Writing became a survival technique, a way of communicating to myself. As it became a habit, my writing became better, and my mind opened up.
You’ve written plays, essays, and screenplays, but this is your first opera. How’s it different?
It’s a whole different art form, and even more different than the form, it was an adaptation. The real challenge with Shalimar was how to take this 600-page novel that is quite ambitious and gorgeous and make a two-hour presentation. The work was figuring out the story, breaking it down into what was essential. It’s a selection more than a creation. It’s about finding those wonderful moments in the book that make sense for an opera.
For example?
This young man and this young girl are part of this performing troupe in Kashmir. It was a built-in vaudeville performance—we’ve gotta have that, it’s an extraordinarily theatrical moment. But there was a wonderful character in the book who has this insane inner world because he’s cursed with a memory that never forgets anything, even the most quotidian details. He’s hilarious, but we had to cut him entirely. He was one of the casualties.
I know you sang in a glee club, but are you an opera lover, or did you come to this fresh?
Very fresh! I’m no stranger to music, even classical music. But I think I’ve seen one opera in my life—it was La Bohème, in college.
Wasn’t it scary to do a libretto, then?
Oh yeah, absolutely. Very scary. That’s why it was so great to work with Jack and also the director, James Robinson. They were my tutors. They taught me some of the basic tricks of the trade. The sung word takes a lot longer than the spoken word. You have to take a complicated thought and boil it down to a phrase that can be sung and not take forever. And opera’s an incredible emotional spectacle. It goes well beyond the words; it articulates what can’t be articulated through speaking. The Beatles aren’t known for being poets.
Whose idea was it to adapt Shalimar the Clown for opera?
It was the composer, Jack Perla—he’d read the book, and there are so many moments in it that are operatic. There’s a political angle to it that’s quite compelling, and at the end of the day, it’s a tragic love story. Rushdie’s storytelling is often referred to as magical realism, and it suits opera because it’s very theatrical. Magical realism is when you take a basic fact and make it larger than life so as to illustrate the poetry beneath it. You heighten the emotions.
How does the visual nature of opera change your approach?
It’s a big part of why I like writing for theater. I’m very interested in theatricality, in taking a notion and making it stage-worthy. There’s a moment in Shalimar where he’s heartbroken and writing Boonyi letters, constantly begging her to come back. She’s in bed and the ambassador is sleeping, and she’s reading the letters and tearing them into little bits. And Shalimar is in another part of the stage and the bits of paper are falling like snow.
Salman Rushdie is your favorite writer, and an idol. Have you ever wondered how you’d react if there were a fatwa against you?
Yeah, I’ve thought about it a lot. I hope I would react with the same grace and industry. He was enormously prolific during his time in hiding. These are major works from a man who did not have access to a personal life. I cannot fathom how he did that.
How involved has Mr. Rushdie been in your collaboration?
Not much, but he’s been there for us when we needed him. He answered some of our tougher questions, and then he said, “But this is a very different project, and you guys need to do whatever you need to do.”
What was one of your tough questions?
Why does the ambassador allow Shalimar to become his driver when he knows who Shalimar is? I asked Rushdie and he said, “I don’t know. He just did it.”
Why is the experience of betrayal powerful enough to turn an acrobat into an assassin?
It’s love. When you love someone and they spurn you, you don’t know what to do with yourself. Especially as a young man. Young people are ill-equipped for some things, and when young people experience deeply passionate love and then it’s ripped from them, bad things can happen. Add to that a volatile political landscape and intertribal dispute...
And you have a terrorist?
Part of what Shalimar is about is a curious way in which a young man becomes a terrorist, and it’s not based in religious or political fanaticism. It’s based in a fanaticism of lost love. The point is that it’s different for every person. There is no easy fix to these problems.
Rushdie interwove the destruction of Kashmir with the downfall of Shalimar. What sort of plot would you invent to talk about the U.S. today?!
If I could answer that question insightfully, I would have my next work. [A pause.] I think it would, like this, have a clown at its center.
Shalimar the Clown runs June 11–25. For more information on Opera Theatre's 2016 season, go to opera-stl.org.
