FROM PAGE TO THE STAGE

FROM PAGE TO THE STAGE

Interview with Nobel laureate Derek Walcott whose collaboration with Paul Simon 'The Capeman' will be shown in Broadway

by Brendan Lemon

Variety, December 1997

As his cocreation. The Capeman heads for Broadway, Nobel laureate Derek Walcott describes the joy of collaborating with Paul Simon, and defends the singer against his politically correct detractors

Derek Walcott and Paul Simon met several years ago In a recording studio, and soon after began work on The Capeman, a musical about 1950s Puerto Rican-gang member Salvador Agron, which begins previews on Broadway this month. The collaboration between the 1992 Nobel laureate in literature and the popular songwriter is not as unusual as It may seem. Each is a poet who has long admired the other's work, and each has an instinctive interest in the typos of music - Latin, doo-wop, rock - that make up their project. For Walcott, the music calls to mind the calypso beat that pulses through Trinidad, the south Caribbean island where he has lived for the past twenty years and which has been the base for his work in the theater. He has written many plays and the lyrics for many musicals, yet all his stage work, he insists, is a kind of poetry, which Walcott defines generally as "that extra little bit of ignition" that fires the mind of the literary artist.

BRENDAN LEMON: A lot of people have been wondering whether the story of a Puerto Rican-gang member in the late 1950s will interest a Broadway audience.

DEREK WALCOTT: It's not an obvious subject for a Broadway play.

BL: On the other bend, one of the most popular musicals of all time - West Side Story - concerned a Puerto Rican gang.

DW: The Capeman isn't West Side Story, although West Side Story was playing on Broadway in 1959 when the Agron crime happened in the neighborhood nearby. That's a little irony.

BL: Some of your lyrics for Agron incorporate his own words. How much did you strive to be accurate to his speech and to the facts of his life?

DW: When Paul and I began to get together, we didn't have a plot. I mean, the plot was the life of the man, but what happens in Act II is almost totally fictive.

BL: Unlike most of your follow poets in America, you don't look down on musical theater, or theater in general, as an inferior art form for the writer.

DW: In the American theater, the most original and powerful and creative form is the musical. Because then you've got something that's got a beat, that's driving the show along. That beat is really African in source. I think the American musical is in serious danger of losing all foot tapping. I come from the Caribbean. My meter is percussive.

BL: In that respect, was it easier for you to write lyrics to Paul's rhythms than it would have been for an American lyricist?

DW: No, no, no. You're being very rude to me. You're saying that I can't do free verse or syllabic verse. Of course I can. I demand an apology. [laughs]

BL: NO, you've misunderstood me.

DW: It's true that I don't think I'd be particularly interested if somebody said to me, "I want to do a jazz piece." It's not my beat. That's what you're saying, and I agree.

BL: Do you feel that your career as a poet and your career as a playwright have fed each other?

DW: Well, you have to remember a very simple thing: When I come here, any work I do is categorized as minority theater. Immediately. When I'm back in the Caribbean, I don't want to be called a black writer any more than I want my friend to be called a white actor or a Chinese painter. Because I come from a really mixed society. And I don't feel any difference when I move from the page to the stage, since I write my plays in verse.

BL: When you come to the United States, it must be strange to have these racial filters put on you.

DW: They used to be irritating. But how I'm not bothered anymore.

BL: Paul Simon is not from that region, yet In Capeman he is appropriating its rhythms.

DW: And people are again starting to criticize him for being a little magpie going around picking up somebody else's music and taking it back home. That's so insulting. And so self-demeaning.

BL: I don't understand that whole school of criticism. By the same token, anytime an artist painted a wheat field, he would have to ask himself, Am I stealing from Van Gogh?

DW: But it's even more acute with Paul's work. One very strong theme in it is South African music. But Ladysmith Black Mambazo, for one, is very happy to work with him. They don't feel ripped off.

BL: Hasn't Paul Simon shown himself to be too genuine to still be subject to this criticism?

DW: But he's going to be. People are already saying, "What right has he got to write Puerto Rican music?" The presumption is that you are so weak that you can let some little guy called Paul Simon come in there and take your music - you sad person. That's what's great about the Caribbean as opposed to here. If the music works, who cares? Don't tell me whose music I'm allowed to dance to. I'm not that dumb.

BL: Your own poetry is so steeped in classic literature that you've been called Eurocentric, a kind of reverse criticism from Simon's.

DW: I don't know if that goes on much anymore. But it always recurs. Like there's a big quarrel now between rap poetry and poetry on the page. Well, you just get to my age and you say, "Look, most of rap poetry is just bullshit." If you think there's a choice between rap poetry and the other, that's pathetic. You cannot improvise as well as you can write.

BL: Do you have any interest in popular music?

DW: I hardly listen to music, I think a lot of artists in some way have one kind of block, one kind of dead area. I won't say mine is dead. But I never play music, and I certainly don't listen to much. It'll probably be put down to some kind of arrogance. But I can't have that. I can't be responsible for "almost poetry." It can fool a lot of people. But I don't think that's my case. Certainly not with Capeman. I'm not an academic poet who thinks, I'll slum around a little bit with Paul Simon. Because I have much more respect for him than that. I'm talking about the joy, the delight of doing what I'm doing.

BL: Do you have other theater projects lined up?

DW: I'm dying to get back to work on another musical, which I would like to cast with American actors and do down in Trinidad. That event will be as important to me as Capeman.