In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

2 “oh the hilt, the hilt Again Please” A Glimpse Inside the Making of Operas with Fred Ho ruTh mArGrAff I used to think jazz sounded expensive, until the day I met Fred Ho in 1997. He put on a recording of Journey beyond the West, and I remember the force of his music trembled a stained-glass fish lamp against the Park Slope sunshine in Brooklyn, streaked in darkness. Fred had asked my beloved mentor Aishah Rahman to recommend a radical writer who could “kick his ass.” I had studied playwriting with Aishah at Brown University, and Fred played music for her Lady Day Billie Holiday musical back in 1972. Fred says that at first Aishah told him there was no one, and then she thought of me. So Fred grilled my politics that day, as we dreamed up a vampire that would become the central character in our first collaboration, Night Vision: A Third to First World Vampyre Opera.1 Fred said “the first shall be last” and I said, quietly, “that won’t change anything.” I believed form was more radical than content because any message can fit into the capitalist system but we came to agree that artists should be radical in form and content both. Fred would ask me who my enemies were and I would say I didn’t want any enemies —not knowing there were at least three standing closer than a brother, undermining my every move. When we returned to these debates later, maybe because I bought him dinner, Fred once made me so mad I told him I’d eat out of a dumpster if we could get along. We were changing in proximity by then—both of us warriors. I was forever trying to write the swords I heard in Fred’s music. In writing “Red Sheath for the Modern Revolutionary Peking Opera” that ends my play 55 A Glimpse Inside the Making of Operas with Fred Ho Red Frogs, I described the ornaments of a sword with “rage uncircumcised in jaded dragons that would melt against your fist.” I wrote about a warrior’s name that was “gilt in a thrust of waists, ungirded to the underside of our suspended mounts, so binded to the double edg’ed edge” . . . I tried sometimes , as yin to Fred’s yang, to “weep the porcelain to silk, gunpowder into tea.”2 For Night Vision, I laid out photocopies of blood magnified 300× all over my basement apartment—some of which looked like negatives of suburban trees or telephone wires coming out of the back of a house, some like the painted chaos of Jackson Pollock. I became obsessed with stealth bombers, crusader art, Iraqi Bedouin songs, and Disney Davids. For my “Heartsong Aria” of Night Vision, I wrote the electricity of a vampire’s heart transfusing blood with darkness: Claiming to preserve us as the sacrifice goes limp You knew a thousand years ago my pulse would stir your fetus To the thrall sealed shut against the wide-eyed glottis (dragging me down like an arrow) . . . when I open up my heart When I open up my heart Made like slaughter in the dark I seem to you? My lamb shorn to the breast? Stripped to the murmur? Thus you lust the savage by mistake. (Night Vision, 2000) I always heard the swords there, striking and flashing in Fred’s music—not for the martial-arts choreography on stage, but drawn of the much deeper scarlet of revolution. I came to Fred almost cavalier in the privacy of my own innate rebellions on form that he called “white downtown.” He challenged me to think more politically, which I had evaded, because I was a pacifist and the son of a Baptist preacherman, having once converted scores of people to what I no longer believed. I remember one of Fred’s syllogisms as “If you are white in a white supremacist society, you are a white supremacist.” This stopped me in my tracks and made me read a lot of Marxist theory, including Butch Lee and Red Rover’s Night-Vision: Illuminating War and Class on the Neo-Colonial Terrain (1993), which Fred loaned to me. Because of Fred, because of traveling to war-torn Bosnia in 1999, because of teaching remedial English in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, to adults who would miss class because they were in jail, pumping drugs in the broom closet, or getting a restraining order—the proscenium of my...

Share