Stew on Seeing and Being Seen
I want to offer a perspective on the topic of seeing and being seen other than my own. So I’m turning to Passing Strange, a musical memoir by Stew (nee Mark Stewart) that played at the Belasco Theater in 2008. I wasn’t lucky enough to see it live, but Spike Lee filmed it and we Netflixed it.
This was the Netflick that sat on top of the TV for a week and a half. Not being huge musical theater fans, we just couldn’t get enthused about seeing it. Finally, Josh put it in the DVD player. I’d pass through the room watering plants or picking up toys and be like, “Oh, you’re watching this…” And he’d be like, “Yeah, I’m going to send it back today, but I figured I’d throw it in for a few minutes.” And it looked like what we expected: a coming-of-age tale told, kind of artificially, through song.
It’s basically the story of Stew, a middle-class black kid growing up in Los Angeles, with a churchy mom and a slew of identity issues. But, at 17, he moves to Europe, and that’s when the whole production busts out of any ideas you might have had about musical theater and it becomes something utterly transcendent. It’s a story you’ve never quite heard before and, at the same time, it applies directly to you. It becomes art.
If you decide to check out this film, I beg you, give it 35 minutes — wait until he gets to Amsterdam and then decide if you want to switch it off. Everything changes in Amsterdam. All the baggage he carries from being born a black male in America, all his ambivalence about calling himself an artist, his personal demons around being seen and being loved–it’s all there and more.
We ended up watching Passing Strange four more times before sending it back.
“Come Down Now” is a ballad from Act 2. I think of it as a love song for grown-ups because it’s more complicated than the I love you/I want you/I need you message of typical ballads. It’s about accepting the damaged parts and trying to get behind the mask and attempting to stay the course. And it’s just plain beautiful to listen to, with the overlapping and interwoven voices of Heidi Rodewald and Rebecca Naomi Jones.
About two-thirds of the way through the song, Stew comes thundering in with a question that’s of enduring interest to me:
What does it mean to you, both to be seen and to be seen through?
Today I realized I had an answer: It means absolutely everything.
Give the song a listen by clicking on the link below and see what your answer is:
