A Slap Echoing Beyond the Stage

<First published online in the New York Times on May 12, 2007>

At each performance of New York City Ballet’s new “Romeo and Juliet,” numerous members of the audience gasp aloud in shock at the moment when Lord Capulet knocks his daughter to the ground with a highly audible slap. The slap occurs onstage; then, like an echo, the gasp occurs in the auditorium.

Juliet’s parents, unaware that she has already married Romeo, have come to tell her to marry Paris, and she refuses. In Shakespeare Lord Capulet calls his daughter “young baggage! Disobedient wretch!” and adds, “My fingers itch.” But, itch notwithstanding, he doesn’t hit her in the text or in any other “Romeo” I’ve seen in theater, ballet, opera or film.

For many viewers this moment blights the choreographer Peter Martins’s City Ballet production. For some, moreover, it connects to other recent presentations of violence against women onstage, especially the huge furor surrounding the graphic video of the R&B artist Akon forcefully and sexually thrusting himself against a young female dance partner (who later proved to be underage and a minister’s daughter) in front of an audience.

Actually, the forms of violence employed toward women by Akon and by this Lord Capulet fall into quite separate aesthetic-moral categories. But there are reasons why Mr. Martins’s “Romeo” seems to overlap the categories, and why this slap leaves a disproportionately awkward aftertaste.

Akon’s act, both spontaneous and a piece of performance, and widely seen in the last week on YouTube, was primarily sexual. I don’t condone it, but really it’s an extreme example of the kind of showy, aggressive dance presentation of male-female sex that has been around for a few decades. Pop music videos are full of it. Balletgoers saw it in the (brilliant) let’s-make-love-before-we-kill-ourselves erotic duets of Kenneth MacMillan’s three-act “Mayerling,” new for the Royal Ballet in London in 1978 and seen on at least three tours of America; and in the heterosexual masochism dramatized by William Forsythe’s “Love Songs” widely danced in America in the mid-1980s by the Joffrey Ballet.

Modern-dance-goers saw it in the more intense duets of Twyla Tharp’s “Nine Sinatra Songs” (1982), an enduringly popular work, but controversial enough in its early days for Mark Morris to shout from the audience, “No more rape!” Moviegoers saw a lyrical version of it in “Dirty Dancing” (1987), in those steamy contact duets in excelsis between a once-innocent young girl and her mature dance instructor. I can’t help suspecting that Akon’s teenage partner felt that she was starring in what you might call “Son of Dirty Dancing.”

Any critic of the performing arts must report on such acts when they occur onstage. I think of Janacek’s invariably moving opera “Jenufa” (performed at the Met this season), in which the heroine is physically abused by Laca, leaving a permanent scar on her face, while she is emotionally abused by his half-brother Steva, who will make no public acknowledgment of his paternity of her child; I suspect that if “Jenufa” were performed as a spoken play, the way in which Jenufa settles for Laca, claiming that his violence against her is only part of his greater love, would be unacceptable. Such, though, is Janacek’s music in his finale that we more than go along with her: we find them both enthrallingly large-spirited.

Then there is the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical “Carousel” (1945), still astonishing in the emotional delicacy with which it treats a story of physical abuse in marriage.

Lord Capulet in the City Ballet “Romeo” is a relatively simple character. At City Ballet, however, the feeling for many in the audience is not simple. In the many ballets made for it by its founder-choreographer, George Balanchine, women are glorified, shown as extraordinarily free and decisive, seldom content to be dependent on a man even in a loving relationship.

Robert Gottlieb, in his 2004 biography of Balanchine, recalls a remark in which Balanchine, late in his life, said that Peter Martins “had to be” his successor, because he had the right understanding of what a ballerina needed. But in 1988 Mr. Martins dramatized a Jack-the-Ripper situation in his ballet “Tanzspiel” (based, it was widely said, on the Central Park murder by Robert Chambers), in which the hero kills the heroine.

For the next aspect of the gasp factor at City Ballet, you must speak of offstage matters, notably the 1992 incident in which Mr. Martins was arrested on charges of assaulting his wife, the ballerina Darci Kistler. The charges against him were dropped, and I would hesitate to raise this ghost had it not recently been resurrected by Martin Duberman’s new biography of Lincoln Kirstein, which reveals how Mr. Martins nearly lost his job, and how Kirstein, City Ballet’s co-founder, telephoned Mr. Martins “to say that if there was ever again such an incident, he’d never again speak to him.” And I don’t doubt that some people in the City Ballet audience assume that history is repeating itself when Lord Capulet hits his daughter center-stage.

Just look at what happens onstage here, however. While the father strikes the child, the mother turns away in dismay and shields her eyes. After a moment of stillness in which his violence registers, she walks around him, looking ruefully into his face (as if to say, “Can’t you control yourself?”), and goes to console her daughter. This mother, Lady Capulet, who has to put up with the violence and temper of the Capulet men throughout, is played by none other than Ms. Kistler; and this “Romeo” is presented in a season dedicated to none other than Kirstein.

I assume that Mr. Martins is an artist aware enough of his reputation to know what associations Lord Capulet’s gesture will provoke in the New York State Theater: not just gasps but memories. And I assume too that he means Lady Capulet’s behavior to come as some kind of reproof to male violence; that, in staging this “Romeo” in a Kirstein season, he is publicly assuring those who remember Kirstein that, though violence to women happens, it is regrettable and, in this case, a crucial part of a tragedy.

But Jock Soto as Lord Capulet isn’t convincing or even lucid, so that the slap is a startling break in a performance generally marked by vague bluster. Conversely, Ms. Kistler’s reaction as Lady Capulet lacks force. Instead, my mind goes back to the end of this same scene in Frederick Ashton’s version of “Romeo” as seen in 1989, in London and New York, with the great actress-ballerina Lynn Seymour playing Juliet’s mother. As her husband swept out of the room after his furious threats at his daughter, she simply followed, helpless, in his wake, but stopped for a moment to look at both Juliet and the Nurse. Just a look, but powerfully loaded with regret and acutely timed, as if to say: “These men! — and we women — and alas!”

@New York Times, 2007