At the start of Parable of the Sower — playing against Wednesday evening at the Shubert Theatre as part of the International Festival of Arts and Ideas — Toshi Reagon asks the audience two questions: whether they have been taking care of those around them, and whether they have been taking care of themselves. She pulls the theater move of being disappointed by a first, lackluster response, and then makes people respond again, more affirmingly, more enthusiastically. But what sounds like a self-help session takes a sharp turn when she adds that both are maybe “the only way we’re going to survive” — the next five, 10, 15, 20 years.
It’s a great way to jump into one of the ideas of the opera of Parable — created by Reagon with her mother, Bernice Johnson Reagon — that follows the arc of the story of Octavia Butler’s celebrated science-fiction novel but, very wisely, is more of an exploration of its themes than a retelling of its plot. As such, it’s a meditation on human survival and adaptation in the face of great calamity that yields more than a few insights.
The novel tells the story of Lauren Oya Olamina, a highly empathic teenager who, at the beginning of the tale, is living in a walled-off community in southern California while the world, beset by catastrophic climate change and political upheaval, crumbles around her. The people in her community enjoy a fragile stability that its leaders insist can be maintained, but Olamina intuits cannot; sure enough, it comes to pass that the community is attacked and razed, and Olamina and a few survivors are cast adrift to make their way up the West Coast in search of new community. Throughout all of it, Olamina forms the central tenets of what will become a new faith known as Earthseed, which holds as its core idea that “all that you touch, you change; all that you change, changes you; the only lasting truth is change; God is change.”
The novel is episodic, as Olamina encounters kindnesses and dangers, enjoying now and again moments of tranquility before new mortal threats emerge, usually from other people whom circumstances have driven to brutality. The book and its sequel, Parable of the Talents, can be described as harrowing; they are frightening cautionary tales with kernels of rough hope and dazzling insights at the centers. But retelling the story to capture that would take hours upon hours. The Reagons instead focus on the major shift near the book’s beginning, from stasis to movement, from security to vulnerability, and from fear to resolve.
This encapsulation works mostly thanks to the minute-by-minute strength of the music — drawing from the expanse of Black American culture with a slight tilt toward folk and gospel — and the verve with which the cast performs it, backed up by a nimble onstage band led by Reagon. Marie Tatti Aqeel shines as Olamina, first as a defiant teenager who knows she understands the truth of the matter, and later as a reluctant leader. She embodies Olamina’s strengths and vulnerabilities. Jared Wayne Gladly also stands out as Olamina’s father, a pastor who, early in the opera, preaches the kind of gospels with which Christians are familiar; it promises that a steady God will see them through, if they just believe strongly enough.
The opera doesn’t — and couldn’t possibly — capture the rush of ideas that make Butler’s novels the works of genius that they are. But In the conflict between Lauren and her father, a powerful insight emerges, which Reagon explicitly spells out. The core idea of Earthseed, that God is change, stands in near-direct contradiction of some of the messages of the Christian faith, laid out in exquisitely performed and exquisitely well-chosen songs from the American canon, like “God Don’t Never Change” or “I Shall Not Be Moved.” Reagon, a daughter of the civil rights movement, is able to see clearly what Butler’s Earthseed, as articulated by Olamina, may be getting at with this contradiction in a way that others may not.
In short, Parable suggests — knowing full well the quasi-heresy being articulated — that the particular form of Christian faith that has been such a source of strength, helping sustain Black Americans through so much, from slavery to Jim Crow to the civil rights movement to the injustices of the present day, may not be enough to face the challenges that are coming. Perhaps something else is needed, one that emphasizes fluidity over constancy, that offers fewer promises for the afterlife and more strategies for getting through this one. One that invites humans to change and be changed by the world around them, and in the process, change God. Or as Butler herself puts it, “All successful life is Adaptable, Opportunistic, Tenacious, Interconnected, and Fecund. Understand this. Use it. Shape God.”
From that idea, the opera pulls hope from the catastrophic scenario it depicts. At its end, the future is as uncertain as ever, but Olamina and her followers are ready to face it. In doing so, they help is face it, too, ready or not.
Parable of the Sower plays tonight, June 22, at the Shubert Theatre, 247 College St. Visit A&I’s website for tickets and more information.
Whether you see this performance or not; read the novel! And also read KINDRED!!