Broadway World UK
Treemonisha is educated and smart and is a threat to the conjurers
who sell their good luck charms to the poor black folks scraping a
living off the land in the heat of Arkansas. These ex-slaves have been
freed for a generation, but when the slaveowners quit, they left little
behind them of economic value and life is hard.
There is joy and there is culture too, the songs and dances finding
inspiration both in African roots and in American churches. But
everywhere the weight of generations of oppression and fear hangs in the
air, the stasis imposed by an unseen overlord every bit as present as
it was when imposed at the end of a whip.
Treemonisha, a foundling clandestinely educated by a white woman, is
captured by the conjurers, but swiftly rescued and returns to her
community where she realises that she has a choice to make and a destiny
to follow. She doesn't quite say it in as many words and it's hardly on
the same scale, but we all know that She Has A Dream.
Scott Joplin's opera is over 100 years old now, but it could have been written yesterday - by Lin-Manuel Miranda.
It takes us all the way back to the beginnings of the post-emancipation
Black American experience and demands that this (white, privileged,
smugly liberal) reviewer look again at how the centuries of colonialism
reverberate down the generations, how the price is still being paid now.
Joplin also gives us a clear-sighted heroine whose gender counts for
nothing in the light of her intelligence and decency. One has to look
again to quite believe that the opera was written in 1911.
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