“The genius of a lot of Octavia’s work,” said Toshi Reagon about visionary science fiction author Octavia E. Butler, is that the circumstances she describes in her books are “applicable to anyone at any time.” Reading Butler’s work, she said, the reader may think, “that could happen to me.” Or: “I hope that never happens.” Or: “I can imagine myself there.”
Reagon has immersed herself as thoroughly in Butler’s novel Parable of the Sower as much as anyone. With her mother Bernice Johnson Reagon, she co-created an opera based on the work that is running at the Shubert Theatre on June 21 and 22, as part of the International Festival of Arts and Ideas and the culmination of its One City, One Read program.
Parable of the Sower and its sequel Parable of the Talents peer into a near future of catastrophic climate change, economic disaster, and national splintering to tell the story of Lauren Oya Olamina, who is forced to flee her home in Southern California along with other refugees in a trek up the West Coast that becomes a fight for survival. Olamina, however, is deeply empathic and, along the way, is developing the core ideas for a new religion called Earthseed, which takes as its central tenet that God is change. Or, as Butler phrases it, “all that you touch, you change. All that you change, changes you. The only lasting truth is change. God is change.” In the two books — intended to be a trilogy, but Butler died in 2006 before she could write the third installment — Butler tells a story of wrenching despair and enduring hope, steeped in an abiding knowledge of the terrible things that people are capable of, and the ability of others to rise above it.
Reagon.
The idea of adapting Parable fell first to Bernice, a musician, composer, and social activist who is a founder of both the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee’s Freedom Singers and Sweet Honey in the Rock, but “she was too busy,” as Toshi put it. Toshi’s own career as a musician and composer has taken her to Carnegie Hall, the Paris Opera House and Madison Square Garden, and her collaborators have included Lenny Kravitz, Lizz Wright, Ani DiFranco, Carl Hancock Rux, Nona Hendryx, Pete Seeger, and Chocolate Genius. Her “favorite collaborator,” however, according to her bio, is Bernice.
The Reagons first approached adapting Parable together several years ago, in a Princeton seminar led by Toni Morrison. “I think we were lucky because we weren’t thinking about theater or operas,” Reagon said. They were hoping to put together a collection of songs that would allow them to tell the story and reflect the themes of the novel. They went chapter by chapter through the book, and ended up with a piece that would take five hours to perform — clearly too long. They began to winnow it down.
“We had to make some hard decisions,” Reagon said. Then Bernice retired in 2014, “and she really retired,” Reagon said. So Reagon finished the work herself.
Following the story, the opera is divided in two halves. The first half deals with what Reagon called “the circle of community,” meaning “community that you know and are familiar with.” She added that “we followed the book in that, in the first act of the piece, the songs are narrative-driven.” Those familiar with the book will recognize what they’re seeing, but it’s not necessary to have read it in order to follow the piece. “if you’ve never read the book, you’ll think, ‘here’s a family and a community in trouble,’” Reagon said. “These people arrive out of an experience of being very upper-middle class — electricity, lights in the city — and then they end up where they are.”
The second half focuses on “territory you’ve never been to before, and making a community out of people you meet.” In addition, “we pull some things from Parable of the Talents” in order to get at one of the overriding messages of the book and its frightening circumstances. “Why does this happen? Because people let it happen.”
The opera is entirely sung through. “There’s multiple genres of music in the show. It really does span across time,” Reagon said, even as it is “rooted in Black American song and culture … I consider it a real collaboration between who we are musically, and then we both stretched out from there.… All the music we use in the show we already had within us.”
The opera also deploys characters called Talents that act as “sort of a Greek chorus”; they are the vehicle for the messages from Olumina’s nascent religion, which, as the story develops, seems to hold the key to surviving and perhaps overcoming the situation the characters find themselves in. “We wanted to make sure to get some of the text of the parables inside of the story,” Reagon said.
The opera premiered in Abu Dhabi in 2017 and has had numerous performances since then. “It has evolved so much. We change it every time we go out,” Reagon said. “We’ve gotten to be strong storytellers.” But another reason it changes is because Reagon and cast react to the community they’re visiting. “I think the coolest thing about this has been collaborating with the people who chose to present us. There are people who are wanting to have a specific conversation with the citizens of their communities. So we don’t just show up and do two or three shows and leave. In every community, I’ve been in conversation with a circle of people for at least a year.”
Butler’s Parable books have received a lot of attention in the past few years for the way they have accurately forecasted the perfect storm of climate calamity, political division, and the rise of authoritarian tendencies in the government as a result. But Butler is less prophet than acute observer, and for Reagon, some of the sharpness of that observation comes from Butler was, as a queer Black woman all too aware of the intransigence of the obstacles that needed to be overcome to create a society able to withstand so much outside pressure.
Reagon also recognized in Butler’s outlook a generational attitude that she sees in her mother as well. “My mother was born in the ’40s, and she lived through segregation and the Civil Rights Movement. Her brothers fought in the Korean War. She lived through the terror of being in the South during that time.” The message she imparted was to “do something with your life. They might kill you, but do something with your life.”
For activists at the time, there was a way they tapped into a horrific vein of American identity, the way society was built on people it made disposable, whether it was slaves, or soldiers, or today, kids in schools suffering from gun violence. “We lived in a country that was stealing people and making them do something for free,” Reagon said, and for Butler, the echoes of that resounded all too loudly. “She wrote out of that in such a profound way.”
“I don’t think she saw that we would change that much,” Reagon continued. “I don’t know if we were changing enough for her.” In 2005, when Katrina decimated New Orleans and the government was powerless against it, “people were asking her about Katrina and she was like, ‘of course this happened. We knew this was going to happen.’” Butler said. That so many in the United States were aware of the problems they faced and were unable or unwilling to start the work of changing and adapting, Reagon thought, was “a disappointment for her.”
Even the all-out war in Butler’s book finds echoes in the conflicts that tear across our current headlines. Channeling Butler, Reagon said “war is one of the most outdated modes of doing anything. It’s so expensive. It obliterates people. It tears down infrastructure. And for what? In 10 years, they’ll be sitting at a negotiating table, negotiating over whatever’s left. And people act like it didn’t happen.”
“Because Octavia’s calendar has been so accurate, I think ‘why won’t we choose the path that we want to be on now?’” To Reagon, the frightening aspects of Parable are meant to spur people to action, not paralyze them with fear. Why settle for “the idea of living behind a wall as your only way of existing?” Why not instead “make it impossible for that to be?”
And as Reagon pointed out, for Butler part of the solution lay in building community wherever one might find it. Her characters survive by learning to rely on one another. The forces that threaten them, meanwhile, are powered by people who don’t do that.“Take care of each other,” Reagon said. “Everyday people who don’t have access to anything become destructive. They lose their compass and do horrible things.” But “people in communities know the medicine that their communities need.”
Reagon sees that medicine in the communities she visits. She witnesses some people doing small things to help “that no one will ever see” while others “create large circles” of energized people. Some discover innovations; some people just choose not to harm others. However people find their way of helping, Reagon said, Butler’s message was to “do it now and do it every day as a way of life.”
Reagon sees parallels in the way the generation coming up seems to view the world. “I think young people now, they are entering into a zone that is catastrophic,” she said. But “they have more language to talk about what’s happening to them, and they have more language to think about what would be real transformation. The best thing all of us can do is to support these young people. To not let go.” U.S. society, for Butler, made too many people disposable. “It’s time for us to say no more.”
Parable of the Sower runs at the Shubert Theatre, 247 College St., on June 21 and 22. Visit the website for the International Festival of Arts and Ideas for tickets and more information.
