Sorry, Saartjie
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The fascination with Baartman stemmed from her ethnicity and her anatomy, both of which seemed exotic to 19th-century Europeans, according to historian Stephen Jay Gould, who included an essay on Baartman in his 1985 collection, The Flamingo’s Smile. Khoisan women were known for impressively proportioned rear ends, Gould wrote, and Baartman was apparently well-endowed in that department. They were also said to sport a genital flap of perplexing origin. Baartman, who was exhibited nearly nude in a cage, allowed her rear, but not her “apron,” to be shown. But after she fell ill and suffered an early death (in France, where she was also exhibited, in 1815), anatomist Georges Cuvier dissected her private parts and identified the “apron” as an enlargement of the inner lips of the vulva. A jar containing Baartman’s preserved genitalia remained in the collection of the Musee de l’Homme in Paris, along with her skeleton, until 2002, when South Africa won a protracted diplomatic and legal battle with France. Her remains were returned to her homeland, where she was, at last, given a proper burial.
Chicago’s hot right now for Diamond, who moved to Boston a year and a half ago, where she’s also a resident playwright with the Huntington Theater. The second idea she mentioned to Steppenwolf–a family drama about the search for a father–has come to fruition as Stick Fly, which will open in a Congo Square production directed by Chuck Smith at the Duncan YMCA just one week after Voyeurs de Venus opens. On top of that Steppenwolf recently announced that they’ll remount her adaptation of Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye in the fall. The Northwestern University graduate, 36, says she thought of herself as an actor through college and in her first years in the business, and “didn’t quite get” that she could be a playwright until she hooked up with people like former Northwestern adjunct faculty member Charles Smith and found Chicago Dramatists.
Those were the good times. A recent New Yorker article by James B. Stewart chronicles Vilar’s operatic downfall. It turns out the supposed upper-class refugee was born in New Jersey, and his fabled wealth has gone the way of his Cuban childhood. Arrested last May for fraud and embezzlement (a $5 million investment by a longtime client that failed to yield interest payments was the trigger), he was unable to come up with $10 million for bail. Calls to his friends on the boards of the opera companies that had feted him went unanswered–only Valery Gergiev, of the Kirov Opera, responded–and Vilar spent four weeks in jail before the bail was reduced enough to spring him. He’ll stand trial next month, along with his business partner, Gary Tanaka. The New Yorker reports that Vilar’s name was erased from the Grand Tier and restaurant at the Met in 2003 after he failed to meet some of his commitments. Stewart’s story doesn’t mention Lyric Opera, but it’s been reported previously that Vilar also failed to fulfill his Chicago pledges. I wondered how much they’d been stiffed and called the Lyric to find out. I might as well have been dialing from jail.
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