Clay

In Genesis, in the beginning, before God creates the earth, or the sun, He creates light. It's a little odd. Before there's a sun to create light, before there's fire, and before there are even photons or eyes against which those photons could bounce, God creates light.

Actually, God doesn't create any physical, tangible light whatsoever. His first act in presiding over creation? Calling light into being: “Let there be light.” Before there can be anything physical, before there can be a concept of light as a distinguisher from the primordial void, God must speak. God must use language. Words come first. To make sense out of the idea of light from the swirl of unformed chaos that comes before, God must call it forth.

I thought of this last night, when I saw Clay at the Lookingglass (in a coproduction with About Face). Well, this and one other thing. A few months ago some friends of mine and I were carrying on a really highfalutin argument about which was the first art. It's the sort of question that ties you into impossible knots and which says more about your philosophical and personal understanding of art and its definitions than anything else. Being a devoted pretentious so and so (Aristotelian), I said rhythm, as the Aristotelian idea is that art begins in imitation, and I imagine that without rhythm there is nothing to imitate.

Okay. Enough first principles. Clay got me thinking about these ideas because, for a one man hip-hop musical, it is at heart a philosophical and kinesthetic meditation on the soup of experience and how we make sense of it in order to create lives for ourselves. Further, it uses these meditations to illustrate contemporary realities about hip-hop, the American experience, and larger narrative ideas that come from Shakespeare.

It opens on a stage draped in red velvet curtain with a man on stage who calls himself Sir John, hyping up a crowd for the much ballyhooed arrival of the star of the show, Clay. But this is not just Clay's announcer for the night introducing us to the star of our show. Sir John is the master of ceremonies for a fictitious concert at which Clay is to perform his hit single. Clay is the newest hip-hop sensation.

But that fiction and the reality we witness on stage are constantly confused. And this is the first of the many hip-hop conventions Clay introduces his mostly white and affluent audience to. He articulates the confusion of fictitious and real identities and the irrelevance of those distinctions according to the hip-hop form. Whether we see Clay, Matt Sax (Clay's real-life persona and the writer and performer of the show), or Clifford, the boy out of whom we see Clay emerge, what we see is from a “true place” as Sir John might put it.

A note on conventions: when artists misuse them, they're called cliches. When used appropriately, they are homage or narrative convention. And Matt Sax uses many conventions. Beyond hip-hop, he operates in the popular contemporary convention of the one-man show, which is becoming a popular vehicle for talented young actors and others who want to control the way they present themselves artistically. Actually, the popularity of the one-man show is an interesting prism through which to examine the experience of the contemporary American actor, but I digress.

As the play unfolds we see a boy in an idyllic childhood experience the downfall of that childhood (convention!). We witness the boy reinvent himself as an MC (microphone controller) and become renamed as an MC (convention!). We see plenty of what would seem conventional sex and violence, too.

What makes Clay special is that he aspires to illustrate to his white, affluent audience that hip-hop is not simply the conventional sex and violence to which they are accustomed to seeing on Cable. He aspires to unite the hip-hop universe with narrative ideas emblazoned on our culture by Shakespeare.

Harold Bloom, in “Shakespeare—The Invention of the Human” posits that certain emotions that we experience were first introduced to us, culturally, by Shakespeare's ideas. That may be true of certain emotional sentiments, but Shakespeare uses the vessel of certain mythological conventions to carry those emotional ideas to our culture. Amongst these are the Mentorship, the Coming Of Age, the Renaming, and the Return of the Prodigal. We get many of these most profoundly through Henry the IV. Furthermore, from Shakespeare we have received very strong ideas about filial duty, vengeance, parental replacement, and parental-sexual associations through Hamlet.

These conventions are woven into the part hip-hop, part monologue narrative of Clay. Obviously, Sir John is an open homage to Sir John Falstaff, Prince Hal's gargantuan mentor. And Clay is part Hal-part Hamlet. His father is part Claudius. His mother is part King Hamlet. And his stepmother is part Gertrude.

Following the introduction by Sir John (in which he uses a beautiful meditation on the inadequacy of language in communicating), Clay appears to us, and we are introduced to Clifford, Clay as a boy, and his crass, obnoxious father (the father as a failure; a hip-hop convention). We are introduced to his sedate mother, smoking cigarettes, and presented in a vaguely saintly light. Of course the ghostly pale of Clay's mother is a meditation on Hamlet's relationship with his father as a ghost. Subsequent events and the telling of stories determine the nature of our ghosts. It is clear that we are seeing a representation of the past through an evolved context. That is to say: Clay might not have told this story this way when he was a boy, but part of the story is the story itself. Clay's understanding of the context of life has come to him through the telling of stories and through a prism defined by his later experience.

We are then confronted with Clay's parents' divorce and the court proceedings at which he is asked to choose between them. We see Clay bribed by his father and implicitly corrupted by the choice of his father over his mother. We later learn that Clay's father was a traveling businessman, compounding the travesty of Clay's choice of this absentee father for custody. The moment of childhood lost and first implication in evil is of course a biblical idea, but it is strongly echoed throughout hip-hop, and a major theme in Clay.

Directly thereafter we are taken backstage as Sir John begs Clay to appear on stage. We see Clay's face is covered with blood. We are then transported to Clay's memory of his mother's over-the-phone suicide (including a reference to Notorious B.I.G.'s “Suicidal Thoughts”), his subsequent misunderstanding smile, his grief, his guilt, and his journey several years later from the curtained theater of Manhattan to the exposed brick (he actually pulls the curtains back to expose the brick) of the hip-hop Eden, Brooklyn.

Clay's father is the Claudius murdering his mother. His mother's ghost is the narratized memory that Clay has come to after discovering hip-hop. Clay can only see his guilt and responsibility to his mother through memories accessed and articulated by hip-hop. And here is where we see him introduced to hip-hop.

He wanders into Sir John's bookshop, with Sir John in full control of the mic—and telling his story. He asks for help to learn hip-hop. Sir John quizzes him, humorously, on music from Wu-Tang to Michael Jackson—neither of which Clay has any idea of. Sir John teaches him rhythm before anything else—by asking Clay to repeat his rhythms. In a thrilling sequence, we see Clay go from total novice to rhythmic expert.

Hip-hop starts simply—through rhythmic call and repeat. It is primal, and it applies basic meaning to the swirl of experience living in our memories. Subsequently Clay starts rapping, but at first, all he does is recite what Sir John (and Sax, I imagine) considers crass, commercialized hip-hop conventions: money, bitches, blunts, and hos. When Sir John asks about whether Clay has ever met a prostitute, he makes the point clear—hip-hop, for John, is about the definition of our experiences through rhythm, and not the gangsta rap that has found its home in the hearts of suburban white kids for a generation now. Instead, real hip-hop has to come from a “true place.”

Clay finds that “true place” in love...a love affair with his stepmother, who we learn then, married Clay's father “hard upon” (to quote the Bard) Clay's mother's suicide. We are taken to Clay's house following a soccer practice in which Clay's stepmother walks in and ogles his naked body. His father is on the road. The affair ensues as the stepmother performs oral sex on Clay. And following that, she orders him to the bathroom to shave.

As Clay shaves, he contemplates how he got to the point where choosing to shave, that symbol of becoming a man, became the choice to betray his father by sleeping with his wife. We feel the vulgarity and the exploitation of his stepmother's actions, and we also understand the underpinning emotions of hate and revenge that compose Clay's choice. Again, it is clear that this understanding comes to Clay through the retelling of the story.

Following the seduction, we're transported to Brooklyn again (though the sliding curtains), to hear Sir John's story. Hip-hop replaced his parents, who were killed tragically when he was young. The narrative parallels between Clay and John are made clear. Hip-hop is therapy. John begs Clay to allow him to train him to be a famous MC. Confused, Clay storms out, back to Manhattan, where his father soon returns to discover the affair. This section features a fantastic sequence in which Clay and his stepmother make love as Clay's father leaves a message on the machine. Upon his father's discovery of the affair, Clay is thrust into a whirlwind, without a father. For a moment, I thought that Clay might emerge from Clifford in this moment—in an act of self-renaming and self-fatherhood. Rather, Clifford returns to John's bookshop and is renamed by John, his only true father. As we see him perform, the lighting of Clay goes from directly overhead, special lighting, to followspot “entertainer” lighting.

Thus, a hip-hop convention, the rebirth/renaming through hip-hop, meets Falstaff, Hal, and Hamlet. We are then transported back to the backstage of the present time, and Clay's face covered in blood. Clay takes us into the scene a few moments earlier, as his father comes to him, humiliated, begging for money (a hip-hop convention—the betraying old friends seeking a handout). As Clay rejects him, a fight ensues in which Clay stabs his father in the neck, achieving his mother's revenge, and destroying (and purifying) himself at the same time.

The blood purifies him of the stain of the betrayal of his mother—and the stage is washed in a shockingly bright light. Of course as, the show closes to the sounds of Outkast's Chonkyfire, we are left to wonder at Clay's destruction—but it is a destruction that is nothing short of tragic. Clay's heroic quality, the ability to create meaning from the flux of experience, through rhythm and rhyme, leads him to the inescapable conclusion that he must murder his father and destroy himself to attain purification.

Matt Sax is an electric performer, who assumes, convincingly, several characters in the show. His narrative technique, which constantly shifts the audience's attention from one compelling scene to another time and place manages a frenetic pace, which allows him to create meaningful events from small alterations in rhythm. Of course, having an expertly produced and contagiously energetic sound design doesn't hurt, either.

For Matt Sax and Eric Rosen (who co-developed and directed the project with Sax) to undertake a project like this is admirable. The questions “why?” and “why now?” are shockingly clear from the moment we leave the theater. Hip-hop as an art form is so deeply misunderstood, especially by the white elite in our country, yet it is the essential sound of the zeitgeist of the moment. If you want to hear and feel what's in the air, in the cities, tune into a streaming broadcast of any college radio station playing non-commercial hip-hop.

But, as this art form of the moment is misunderstood, so are the stories of those who practice it. Clay, in a theater, accomplishes one of the things that Eminem has: he has drawn the parallels between the hip-hop experience and the universal experience. While Eminem focuses his energy on poverty and middle-class hypocrisy, Clay strives to draw parallels between the experience of a neglected, middle-class white kid, the hip-hop experience, and ultimately the grand narrative themes that we have inherited from Shakespeare. He elevates both his experience and hip-hop's, and in so doing, elevates his audience's cultural understanding.