Invisible Man Project
By Brian Dau
When Ralph Ellison published his debut novel, Invisible Man,in 1952, he quickly went from unknown author to creator of one of the most important works of American literature. Yet despite the novel’s popularity (it spent sixteen weeks on the bestseller list and won a National Book Award for fiction), as well as its cultural importance, Ellison resisted any attempt to translate the work to a medium other than print.
Now, sixty years after the first printing and with full approval from The Ralph Ellison Estate, adaptor Oren Jacoby and producer/director Christopher McElroen plan to present the novel in a new way for the first time ever by bringing Invisible Man to the stage. The theater production will have its world premiere at the Court Theatre in Chicago in an initial run from January 21 through February 19, 2012. To help get the production ready, the project has received support, both financially and in terms of content, from Hancher and other areas of the University of Iowa.
“Oren’s adaptation is extremely faithful to the novel,” McElroen said. “There isn’t a word in the script that doesn’t belong to Ellison. The [Ralph Ellison] Estate felt our intentions were pure in regard to the novel.”
McElroen and Jacoby will be in Iowa City and Cedar Rapids November 28 through December 3 for a weeklong residency at the University of Iowa titled “Iowa and Invisible Man: Making Blackness Visible.” The residency has two goals: to give current students and the community at large an idea of what it meant to be African American at the University of Iowa during the middle of the 20th century and to give McElroen and Jacoby the opportunity to develop the staging of the play by working with University of Iowa Assistant Professor of English Lena Hill, whose research deals directly with the visual elements of Invisible Man.
The residency culminates Saturday, December 3, with a public reading of the staged adaptation of Invisible Man at Shambaugh Auditorium in the UI Main Library.
“Right now all of our work has been sitting around a table reading scenes,” McElroen said. “We’d like to actually get on our feet and see how the script holds up and what changes we need to make.”
So how did the New York-based McElroen and Jacoby match up with Hill and Hancher halfway across the country? The answer begins with a series of “serendipitous events,” according to Hancher Executive Director Chuck Swanson. First, the University of Iowa has a historical connection with Ellison, as his wife Fanny graduated from Iowa in 1936 with a theater degree, though she was not allowed to perform onstage.
The modern connection to Ellison and the Invisible Man adaptation begins with a three-day event last May at Iowa called the “Creative Campus Institute.” The event, co-sponsored by Hancher and the UI Center for Teaching, was designed to “integrate Hancher into the classroom to enrich the educational experience of students,” according to Swanson. Lena Hill was among the twelve “fellows” invited to participate, a group which included professors from departments across campus, such as Law, Sociology, Epidemiology, History, and others.
The program was funded with a sustaining grant from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, which was awarded based on the previous success of Hancher’s partnership with the UI Department of Theatre Arts and the University of Iowa’s Center for Macular Degeneration that resulted in a play by Rinde Eckert based on issues of blindness.
“This institute was an opportunity for Hancher to connect with faculty from across the campus,” Swanson said, “beyond the traditional ways a presenter might work with the performing arts units.”
Jean Florman, director of the UI Center for Teaching, added that “everybody loves Hancher and they see it as a performing arts venue, which it is, but it’s also part of a university, so it also is—and should be—an academic resource.”
The Creative Campus Institute was fresh in Hill’s mind when she received an email just a few weeks later from McElroen.
“I saw Lena’s writing about the visual aspects that exist throughout Invisible Man and I knew Fanny Ellison had gone to school at the University of Iowa,” McElroen said. “So she seemed in my mind a good potential partner to help develop the script further and have a discussion about the novel and Fanny’s time at Iowa.”
McElroen expressed interest in coming to Iowa for a residency, but Hill didn’t have much experience bringing artists to campus. So she got in touch with Swanson and they immediately began “brainstorming about how to connect the residency to a broad range of university and community entities.”
“Within three weeks we had departments across the entire university on board,” Swanson said. “We wanted to expand the residency beyond Invisible Man to the African-American experience from the thirties to the fifties at the University of Iowa.”
In addition to the public reading of the play on December 3, related events include McElroen and Hill working with undergraduate classes in the Gerber Lounge of the English Philosophy Building, a panel discussion in Shambaugh Auditorium called “Black Hawkeyes: Midcentury Memories of the University of Iowa,” and a visit to the African American Museum of Iowa in Cedar Rapids to discuss issues raised by the book. The UI Chief Diversity Office will also host an event in Shambaugh Auditorium titled “Now You See It, Now You Don’t: A Civic Reflection Dialogue.” The facilitated discussion will use a shared text as a starting point for a conversation about issues of perception and difference.
Additionally, as a result of another of those “serendipitous events” and connections, University of Iowa Museum of Art Chief Curator Kathy Edwards will give a presentation on African-American artist Elizabeth Catlett, the first black recipient of an MFA in sculpture at Iowa, whose work is currently featured in the IMU and who happens to have a sculpture of Ralph Ellison on display in a New York City park.
“Too often our research fails to reach past a scholarly audience,” Hill said. “This residency will allow us to burst beyond the walls of academia to impact the larger Iowa City and Cedar Rapids communities.”
Hill’s work with McElroen and Jacoby over the course of the residency will deal chiefly with the play’s visual elements, including the iconic “basement hole” filled with “exactly 1,369 light bulbs” where the novel’s unnamed narrator spends the majority of his time. Jacoby describes the play’s staging as a “very pared down idea of theater, covering a huge range of scenes and time but done in a sort of minimalist but very expressive way using the bare minimum.” His plan, developed with the help of McElroen and Hill, is to use the light bulb room as the “central image from which a memory play emanates, visiting other places in a kind of picaresque fashion.”
Fellow University of Iowa English Professor Michael Hill, who is also Lena’s husband, sees McElroen’s residency as an opportunity to reach out to African-American alumni who attended Iowa in the middle of the 20th century, but who may not feel a strong connection to the university or who might feel that their voices and stories remain unheard. Michael is also president of the African American Council on campus and is responsible for organizing the “Black Hawkeyes” panel discussion November 29. The event will include several alumni speaking about their experiences in Iowa City while attending school, as well as their sometimes “anomalous” relationship with the University of Iowa.
“The big issue is full disclosure,” Michael said. “The University of Iowa has a tremendous history that is attractive and progressive, yet at crucial moments certain silences creep into the narrative. These moments of silence have consequences, and this [discussion] is a chance for progress.”
Teresa Mangum, Director of the Obermann Center for Advanced Studies, agrees that the residency is a “wonderful example of the way art can help a community reflect on its own past and cultural history and the values we’ve operated with and aspire to for the future.” The Obermann center is organizing a panel of scholars, along with Jacoby and McElroen, to introduce the novel in an event at the Iowa City Public Library titled “Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man—A Roundtable on the Literary Past and Theatrical Future of a Great American Novel.”
“The artist visit and reflecting on the novel and play is a fascinating and important opportunity to look back at African-American history at the University of Iowa and Iowa City, as well as in the context that historicizes the novel,” Mangum said. “So the arts can be so significant in creating space and an occasion for really challenging public conversations and reflections, and I think this [residency] is going to be a great example of that.”
Jacoby, who began work adapting the novel to the stage more than five years ago, was drawn to an adaptation of Invisible Man based on his previous success with an adaptation of Robert Penn Warren’s novel All the King’s Men, and because Invisible Man “always spoke to me very personally for reasons that I couldn’t always explain.” Once he began work on the adaptation he found that, despite Ellison’s hesitation during his lifetime, the novel made a “very natural” transition to theater.
“[Ellison] really understands dramatic structure,” Jacoby said. “He kept two books on his desk: one was the Bible and the other was the complete works of Shakespeare. I don’t just toss the word ‘Shakespearean’ around lightly, but I think there are a lot of aspects of the drama and the way scenes are constructed that are Shakespearean.”
Ultimately what Jacoby hopes people will take away from this residency is a “renewed interest in Ralph Ellison and what a unique voice he is in the American cultural fabric,” as well as an opportunity to examine more deeply the overarching themes of the novel.
“[The story] is specific to one man, Ralph Ellison, who went from Oklahoma City to the Tuskegee Institute to Chicago to Harlem, but it’s also part of a much bigger movement that he was a part of which transformed the whole country,” Jacoby said. “This [story] speaks to a specific historical movement but there are a lot of universal themes and relationships to American myths and taboos that are a part of our culture everywhere. The play in some ways makes the novel accessible in a different fashion to people through the experience of participating as an audience in a shared environment.”
That sentiment seems like something Ellison himself would have no trouble supporting, in spite of any misgivings he may have had about translating the novel to a different medium during his lifetime. Those “universal themes” and the struggle of African Americans in modern society are as real as they were when Ellison first began to put Invisible Man to paper. In fact Ellison, surprised to still be writing about Invisible Man in a 1981 foreword thirty years after the novel was first published, described a cultural climate that remains relevant even after another thirty years.
“So if the ideal of achieving a true political equality eludes us in reality—as it continues to do—there is still available that fictional vision of an ideal democracy in which the actual combines with the ideal and gives us representations of a state of things in which the highly placed and the lowly, the black and the white, the northerner and the southerner, the native-born and the immigrant are combined to tell us of transcendent truths and possibilities such as those discovered when Mark Twain set Huck and Jim afloat on the raft.
“Which suggested to me that a novel could be fashioned as a raft of hope, perception and entertainment that might help keep us afloat as we tried to negotiate the snags and whirlpools that mark our nation’s vacillating course toward and away from the democratic ideal.”