Sections
Neighborhoods
Features
Follow Us
NHI Newsletter
Legal Notices
Some Favorite Sites
- 5 Snacks After 10
- Abram Katz
- African independent
- At Risk for HD
- Back To Basics
- barista
- Branford Eagle
- Business NH
- Conn Art Scene
- Cornwall-On-Hudson
- Crosscut
- CT Business Litig
- CT Capitol Report
- CT Energy Blog
- CT Enviro Headlines
- CT Green Scene
- CT Law Tribune
- CT Local Politics
- CT Mirror
- CT News Junkie
- CT Watchdog
- CTV
- Design New Haven
- Gotham Gazette
- Hartford Guardian
- Josiah Brown
- Karman Turn
- La Voz Hispana
- Laurel Club
- Len's Lens
- Magrisso Forte
- Media Attache
- Media Nation
- Medical Intelligence
- Middletown Eye
- MinnPost
- My Left Nutmeg
- NBC Connecticut
- NH Advocate
- NH Register
- NH Review of Books
- NH Youth Map
- Northampton Media
- OneWorld
- Only In Bridgeport
- Oral History Project
- Reddit NH
- Road To Greenness
- Saved By Design
- See Click Fix
- Smartpill Design
- Specials In NH
- St. Louis Beacon
- Taste Of NH
- Tom Ficklin
- Valley Independent Sentinel
- Voice of SD
- VT Digger
- WFSB-TV
- WPKN Today
- WTNH
- Yale Daily News
- YourCT
Government/ Community Links
- Advocate Calendar
- Agency on Aging
- Animal Shelter Volunteers
- Arte Inc.
- Arts Council
- Beth El Keser Israel
- Bike New Haven
- Chamber of Commerce
- Children's Museum
- City of New Haven
- CitySeed
- Citywide Youth
- Community Loan Fund
- Community Mediation
- ConnCAN
- Creative Arts Workshop
- CT BAEO
- CT Tech Council
- Dariba Referrals
- Data Haven
- Elm City Cycling
- Elmseed
- Empower NH
- Friends Of Wooster Sq.
- GAVA
- Habitat For Humanity
- Info New Haven
- IRIS
- Jazz Haven
- Jewish Federation
- Job Finder
- Junta
- Labor History
- LEAP
- Legal Aid Network
- Literacy Coalition
- Magrisso Forte
- Mary Wade
- Music Haven
- New Haven 828
- New Haven Chorale
- New Haven Reads
- New Life Corp.
- NH Bulletin
- NH Land Trust
- NH Symphony
- NH/Leon Sister City
- NHS
- Orchestra NE
- PAR
- Parents Available to Help
- Pat Dillon
- Peace News
- PechaKucha
- Planned Parenthood
- Police
- Promoting Enduring Peace
- Public Allies CT
- Public Library
- Public Schools
- Public Works
- Rainbow Girls
- Register Calendar
- REX
- ROOF
- SAMA
- SCSU Events
- Share Our Voices
- Shubert
- Solar Youth
- Soul-O-Ettes
- Squash Haven
- United Way
- Urban Design League
- Urban Resources Initiative
- Ward 25 Blog
- Ward 26 Blog
- Westville Chabad
- Westville Renaissance
- Westville Synagogue
- Workforce Alliance
- Yale Events
- Yeshiva NH Shul
- Yeshiva Of NH
- Youth Continuum
It’s A Hip-“Hopera”
by Paul Bass | May 30, 2008 7:51 am
(1) Comment | Commenting has been closed | E-mail the Author
Don’t call Aaron Jafferis’s collaboration with ECA students a “hip-hop musical.” It has strings.
Jafferis (pictured) is a homegrown playwright known for gritty, musical works about life in New Haven — gang life, drugs, violence, and hope.
He incorporates music into his plays, such as last year’s Kingdom with Fair Haven’s Bregamos community theater troupe. He called that one a “musical.”
Friday and Saturday, his arts high school alma mater — Educational Center for the Arts — is staging his latest work, Weird Sisters. This play, too, deals with drugs and gangs and other harsh realities of life in New Haven for young people. This, too, has music.
But this one isn’t a hip-hop “musical.” It’s a hip-hop “opera.”
The show opened Thursday night at the Little Theater on Lincoln Street. It continues Friday and Saturday night. Both shows start at 7; tickets cost $12.
Jafferis, who’s 32, admits he made a subjective “semantic” decision with his “opera.”
No one sings “operatically” in Italian in Weird Sisters. The balance between spoken word and song is about the same as in Kingdom. To Jafferis, his newest play an “opera” because of the strings and orchestral arrangements (“Hip hop has been sampling in classical and operatic music forever”) as well as the grand, melodramatic sweep of the story.
“The story is a very big story,” he said outside the Little Theater oduring the final rehearsal Thursday afternoon., “in which the little dramas of people’s lives are exploded and magnified.” Like in an opera.
The dramas include teen pregnancy, heroin-abusing parents, homelessness, and HIV. Jafferis drew the stories from the life experiences of female friends in New Haven; he used Macbeth as a touching-off point, with an updated set of witches. Click here to read the scene-by-scene outline.
“‘Hip-hop opera’ sounds a little more serious,” Jafferis said. “‘Musical’ sounds more froopy, like comedy.”
There’s some, though not much, precedent for Jafferis’s semantic leap. MTV staged a hip-hop adaptation of Carmen. “It is absolutely awful,” Jafferis opined. “It’s soap opera. It doesn’t feel real at all.”
Jafferis aims for the real above all else in his plays, including Weird Sisters, which again finds him working through, in fiction, the “crazy, traumatic experiences of my friends” he knew from growing up in the city.
In the program notes, Jafferis describes how he developed the play along with the students in ECA’s theater department.
“We started with a read-through of draft #5 of the script, followed by a week of hip hop improv workshops, in which we rapped and beatboxed and dared each of us to look and sound more ridiculous than the last. Then the students learned an ever-changing mix of 25 songs and raps by eight different composers and myself, all in various stages of completion.
“With the input of students and teachers, everything from individual songs to the ending of the show were cut and added and combined. The students wrote volumes about the personalities and wants and histories of their characters, all of which were helpful to me — since I am still trying to figure out who these weird people are.”
Weird or not, “opera” or “musical,” Weird Sisters has a story to tell. To a beat. Click on the play arrow for a sample.
