Chapter Five Yansh and All is a provocative new production by the writer Rollo Tomono, which is certain to change the way we view theater for a long time. Set in modern times, Yansh and All delivers a message that is at once as unoriginal as it is endearing—a true contradiction of the process and the processed. Innocuous as a lamb, yet deadly as a warrior, it is the story of a man caught between his love for a woman, his love for his art, and his love for an abandoned child. Indeed, Yansh and All, some have claimed, has all the trappings of a modern day theatrical fugue. A stretch, to be sure. Yet with the questionable standards of art today, and without recourse to prevarication or the pursuit of invidious neologisms, it is safe to submit that Yansh and All, while sophomoric at best, may just be the best thing out there. Yet this precisely is why it is so scary, if important, a production. Theater seeks to enlighten, to invigorate, to draw upon that eternal well of creativity that makes us identify with those things we cannot express but feel at our core. In a sense, theater is a sublime identification of the humane consciousness that brings us together by the very differences it exposes in us. With theater, we tell our truths in a lie, sing our songs in a poem and drink from the fountain of life. In essence, theater is us. In disguise, of course. Stylistically, what differentiates the several genres of theater we have come to know might be the reinforcement of our values in manners as varied and diverse in currency as the very values themselves; the opposition to opposition that we posit in the undermining of the collective, by the over-indulgence of the singular. This, some would say, is key to the theatrical performance and is, perhaps, the very soul of theater. Over the course of time, as theater has evolved, we have learned to adapt our societal consciousness within a barely audible argument regarding our roles as barbaric beasts to our roles as civilized intellectuals, being yet unobservant of any folly in this regard. Thus, with polemical brigandry, do we often imbue in our infinite mind the eternal possibility that we, too, are in fact really what we are represented as on stage—from the basest to the most uplifting characterizations that come forth from the mind of a playwright. Rollo Tomono’s play is certainly not lacking in substance. It is tasteful in its handling of the essence of its own humanity, overbearing enough in subtle soliloquy, ancillary, true, yet without which the play would suffer an irreparable loss of conscience. It speaks to its own inventiveness when the main Character, Vidun, laments in the third act: “Verily, oh thou Lord of all and none, to what becomes this man inside, when the woman he loves without doth at times envy the parity that is thy will? Shall I then relive the truths of an ancient past, or chart the course of a distant future?” Ah, a marvelous, if even endearing, plea which cannot but allow us acquiesce to the premise that, yes, our destinies might lie without the bounds of our own competencies when intertwined with the nature that makes us who we are. But yet, it is in this very premise that Rollo Tomono fails to capture the beautiful despair that is the magnificence of a soul lost in reverence to the creators. We see, here, and indeed throughout the entire play, the implicit deference to a higher authority which, we are informed, is necessary for the very orbital modulations that create the life which lives within these same orbits. We are not, however, allowed to question what came first, the orbit or the orbited. Who was first in the reference chain? Or was there one orgasmic big bang where all creatures great and small identified with the infiniteness that is the sum total of the gods to whom Vidun speaks? Hear him again in the fifth act, speaking to a high priest about the love he has abandoned in pursuit of the words of the gods and the high art given unto him. “Verily, t’might be but a travesty if I were to endure but a drop less from the chalice of adoration that has been presented before me. But I find that the wine is sour, even as the soul is full. Would I prefer the sweeter grapes from the vine of the one who first loved me, that soft, delicious aroma that envelopes me whenever the rhythm of her spirit addresses the nature of my environment? Like the nectar of the flower that the bee uses for honey, the drops of love torment my soul. For I am what you made me. A simple being. As much, I must, too, love.” As much, I must, too, love! Now we see, in its glory, the arrogance of a playwright who is portentous enough to claim such an inherent perception of the structure of the soul, with his self-righteous promulgation of a singular understanding of whom and why we exist. Because, in Vidun we supposedly see our selves and admit that as much, we must, too, love! But if this love is a product of the nature of our kind, how is it that against this very motion, a higher nature exists to draw Vidun away from what he was made? Or is he different? We are never given cause to question if Vidun himself might not be of our own species, but of a different kind. We are to assume, or perhaps take for granted, that he is exactly as we see him. But what do we see him as, especially when we notice this fundamental difference between his person and that with which we can identify? Rollo Tomono does a grave injustice here for at this point, we are open to possibilities beyond the scope of what we can see on stage, giving way to speculative translation of what lies beyond the words we thenceforth hear and the actions we thenceforth see. A tragedy, for such mutliplistic divergence is where the play begins its reaches into the theater of the absurd. A place where we might only relate had we the, no doubt magnificent, insight of the playwright. Tomono exhibits what might only be described as a rural sensibility in his understanding of the nature of our kind. His premises are based on horizons which the audience is not privy to, set in distant logues that reveal nothing of the common identity we have forged and are proud of as a race of who we are. He captures little about the essence of the questions that those before him have asked, seeking only to reinvent the past in order to accommodate his own simplistic views of the future. His characters, though entertaining, if even at times delightful, live in a world of their own, the conversations between whom yield nothing about the underlying thematics that created the magnet of forces supposedly the circumstances in time that brought said characters together. In its entirety, Yansh and All, by the sheer force of its content, exercises in us an undue pernickety and the concomitant restless energies within, for Yansh and All, is about a world that exists somewhere in the minds of the playwright and his actors. In this vein, it should score low in the eyes of our intellectual community. Tragically, though , there is little doubt that it will elicit its own blindly loyal following as his previous works in similar fashion have generated. But to what end? When do we break the mold? When do we hear new voices, or is our society in need of these rhythms reflected as an indictment of our kind by the likes of Rollo Tomono? I am hopeful that we will indeed progress. That one day we will not hear from the likes of Tomono and his peers. That their wailing would be the sound of distant comets, sweeping the paths of atmospheres far away from those left to the reality that is our kind. Clearly, however, that time is not now. So as a matter of our current state, Rollo Tomono’s work is as important as it is disheartening. That we might see in Yansh and All, all that we hope never to be. Dear Editor: I read with utter dismay, and might I add, a healthy dose of contempt, your treatment of Rollo Tomono’s classic work Yansh and All. I have read your magazine diligently for several years and have found it to be an excellent source of genuine and unbiased intellectual exploration. I have often spent several hours poring the contents of the various pages of articles, critiques, fiction, essays and poems that grace the innards of this worthy publication, barely leaving time for my own pursuits in the world of ivory and academia where most of us who read your magazine exist. Yet, I have never doubted that the content of the character of the magazine can not be marred by the color of its cover. But after reading your handling of Yansh and All, I am afraid that I will have to rethink my point of view. I am saddened and ashamed that a magazine held in as high esteem as yours will so glaringly, (by none other than its editor!), miss the point of such a widely studied work of art as Rollo’s. Let us start at the beginning. You self-indulgently ascribe to Yansh and All a story line which you believe to be representative of what the production is about. Perhaps you are not aware of the obvious metaphor, which is revealed in the FIRST ACT when Vidun says, facing the audience: “Fill me with thy praise, take me to the stars, “Tell me that you love me, let us fly to mars. “What I have here to discuss, on the other side of this veiled curtain, “Is a story that is not my story, but the spirit in all its glory. “These single strands of hair, that make me what you think, “Might verily a charade be, before thy eyes can blink. “So fill me with thy praise, make you loathe me more “For when all is said and done, my spirit you might adore” Conveniently left out of your piece was any erudition on the effect these words might have in coloring the way that the piece is viewed. Or, perhaps, you missed the first act. If you know anything about Rollo Tomono’s works, he is never to be taken at face value, which might be said of any contemporary poet. But, then, how much more so a theatrical production?! Rollo has, long before you joined this world of ours, defined a genre of art that is original in its purveyance of the symbolic ideals that many of us cherish as a definition of whom we believe we are—high minded civilized beings with a responsibility to improve our societies because, well, we are high minded. It is to your credit that you mention that this production “may just be the best thing out there.” However, you fail to intimate us to the fact that among the other things “out there” are works of such great and recognized scholars as Pristina B. Du, Dr. Lorreta Hail, Sensei Kiyoto, and Dr. Scott Williams. How dare you, in the same breath, label these works as belonging to the class of “fallen standards”! How arrogant! You speak of a deference to a “higher authority” throughout the entire play, missing the point that this “higher authority” is often recognized as the playwright himself, as Vidun says, “the author and finisher of our faith”. As such, your argument holds little water in its emphasis of a “multiplistic divergence” because, in fact, this was what was intended by the author and finisher of our faith! Perhaps you might spend some time brushing up on your study of classics such as Images of Dawn by Omoshile Olowogan, or Caution and The Wind by Duke Shanogo. These might help shed some much-needed light on how we should view works by the likes of Rollo Tomono. You claim that Rollo exhibits a “rural sensibility in his understanding of the nature of our kind” but you, clearly, fail to see where a bucolic rationale is the highest form of endearment to our art. You seem an acolyte in this regard, elevating yourself to some imaginary threshold of advancement, which many of us understand, may in fact be regression. You make me now doubt how much of our artistic world you truly understand. Yes, dear Editor, the only futility in Rollo Tomono’s works is exhibited by people like you and their stand-offish attitudes with those who fail to allow themselves to be colonized by your clique of intellectual terrorists. A tragedy, indeed. A tragedy. I hope that your inaccurate depiction of this great and classic work will not influence your more than modest readership, and allow others to make more educated judgements as to the authenticity of Yansh and All. I will continue reading your magazine, but now I will do so with extreme caution. May the spirits of our art dwell upon you and your staff. Igo Alita Dean, School of African Art. Maghresh International University
Posted on: Tue, 20 Jan 2015 03:17:25 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015