Outmaneuvering the maestro

by David Benjamin

“If they give you ruled paper, write the other way”
—Juan Ramon Jimenez

PARIS—The dilemma of the moment in America and beyond: Confrontation or subversion?

Or both?

I offer a case in point: Many moons ago, the renowned La Scala Opera Company of Milan mounted a lengthy excursion to Japan. It brought to Tokyo its orchestra and principal performers, directors, costumers and costumes, cosmeticians, stage and lighting crews, sets and a truckload of props. To properly populate their productions, the La Scala troupe needed a cast of locally hired “extras”—spearcarriers, slaves, courtiers and courtesans—who all had to be non-Japanese, lest the Japanese audience were to regard the whole show as inauthentic.

The mob of extras La Scala recruited, including me, were a cross-section of Tokyo’s expatriate community, from thirty-year “Japan hands” with corporate titles and regular salaries, to backpack vagabonds who worked part-time in the city’s gray market. Me, I was typical, a writer doing free-lance magazine features and working on a book.

Our first opera, at NHK Hall in Tokyo, was Giuseppe Verdi’s sprawling Babylonian spectacle, Nabucco. Because the opera’s first act was a parade of crowd scenes, our complement of extras included a flock of idle rich women married to the ambassadors, chargés d’affaire and other dignitaries at the U.S. embassy in Tokyo. These “embassy wives,” as we came to know them, avoided contact with the more plebeian extras. They never got to know, for example, Steve, Mrs. Steve, Steve from California, Steve from Australia or Gianluca, “the little Italian kid.” But the highfalutin ladies of Hiro-o more or less behaved until the night of dress rehearsal.

Suddenly, confrontation erupted and landed all over our kind and competent directress, Lorenza. The embassy wives demanded an emergency meeting during which they insisted, volubly, on the right— after finishing their onstage duties in Act I—to occupy seats in NHK Hall and watch the show, The embassy wives, you see, had nothing to do in Acts II and III. They could have gone home or watched from the wings.

But they wanted to sit out front.

The rub was that Ricardo Muti, conductor of the Filarmonica della Scala, Italy’s preeminent maestro, didn’t want anybody out front during his dress rehearsal. He wanted an empty theater. This was not for the sake of his concentration or the integrity of his art. He wouldn’t know if anybody was out there in the hall (spying on him?) because his back was turned for the whole damn opera. He assumed his prerogative to order an empty house during his dress rehearsals because he had the power. In Italian opera, Muti was Ozymandias, the boss of everyone.

Normally, the embassy wives appreciated that sort of arbitrary authority because they belonged to the ruling class. In the company of Ricardo Muti, however, they found out what it felt like to be an “extra.” They raged and sputtered at Muti’s tyranny. One of the non-embassy extras, a Brit named Simon—whose psyche had been affected by growing up in a class-conscious society—joined their cause and argued their case. The rest of us treated the embassy wives’ revolt as entertainment. We felt silent sympathy for Lorenza, who found herself wedged between Vassar and Verdi.

Eventually, Lorenza managed to appease the embassy wives by assigning them seats on the far side of the orchestra, largely out of Muti’s sight, on the condition that they remain absolutely silent and make no movements that might catch the attention—and the wrath—of the maestro.

Meanwhile, without negotiation or permission from Muti, the rest of the extras—Simon among us—got to watch the dress rehearsal from about twenty rows back in the theater. We used a side door, shuffling in and out whenever we weren’t needed onstage. Most of us, raised on city streets or in rural America, had knothole experience, watching baseball or football games, through gaps in the fence, from a tree or atop a nearby roof, without buying a ticket. I was one among dozens of kids who snuck into the Erwin Theater in my hometown by lurking at the Exit door, waiting for someone to leave and slipping inside before the door clicked shut—thus saving a quarter.

Unlike the privileged and self-righteous embassy wive, the Row-Twenty extras understood that keeping cool and sneaking inside is often preferable to, and more effective than, standing one’s ground and shaking a fist at one’s even more privileged antagonist.

In the end, the response to tyranny is not an either/or proposition. Despite Muti’s temperamental executive order, the embassy wives got slightly less than what they wanted by pitching a fit and stomping their feet. But what the embassy wives did not perceive, because they saw life through a veil of entitlement, was that all the other extras also, got what the embassy wives wanted but without restrictions. In fact, through craft, cunning and creeping around behind the maestro’s back, we had gotten more—and had more fun—than what the rich ladies wanted.

Subversion is a tool every bit as effective—and sometime moreso—than marching, chanting, protesting and even filibustering. Subversion, like Steve, Steve and Gianluca taking turns in the twentieth row, is a series of small, discrete disruptions that seem insignificant until the whole row is full of the nameless “extras” without whom the spectacle would shrink and the audience would boo.

In the era of King Donald, the defenders of law and democracy and the guardians of world order need to confront the Orange Jesus and his oligarch brownshirts. Open defiance is civic duty. But this resistance also needs actors without lines, seemingly innocuous—just extras—who know how to sneak in through the Exit door, scatter banana peels on the linoleum, crawl under the big desk and tie the boss’s shoelaces together.