At the moment, she was wearing a dress of purple wool, the color that dominates her wardrobe: “Robert’s mad for purple.” She and Breen met at the University of Minnesota, where both were graduate students in the drama department. They have been married eighteen years. Though Mrs. Breen has played professionally on the stage, once as Shakespeare’s Juliet, her real devotions, in the words of one of their associates, are to “Robert and Robert’s career.” If she could find enough paper, she’d wrap up the world and hand it to him.
On the surface of it, a shortage of paper would not appear to be one of Mrs. Breen’s problems, for she lives with a traveling mountain of letters and clippings and files. The international correspondence for Everyman Opera is among her principal responsibilities; that, and seeing that the company is “kept happy.” In the latter role, she’d brought back from Brussels a parcel of toys to be distributed among the children of the cast at Christmastime in Leningrad.
“If I can get them away from Robert long enough to pack them again,” she said, pointing to a bathroom where an armada of mechanical boats floated in a filled tub. “Robert’s mad for toys. Really,” she sighed, “it’s dreadful to think of getting all this into suitcases.” Several of the objects on view, in the bedroom and in the living room which doubled as an office, presented obvious packing difficulties, especially a large seesawlike apparatus known as a Relaxer Board. “I don’t see why I can’t take it to Russia. I’ve taken it everywhere else. It does me a world of good.”
Mrs. Breen asked if I were looking forward to boarding The Blue Express, and was exaggeratedly pleased to hear that I was. “Oh, Robert and I wouldn’t miss this train ride for the world! Everybody in the cast is so darling. I know it’s going to be the kind of fun you’ll never stop talking about. But,” she said, with a sudden sorrow in her voice that sounded not altogether sincere, “Robert and I have decided to go by plane. Of course we’ll see you off at the station here—and be right there on the platform when you pull into Leningrad.
At least I hope we will. Only I can’t believe it. That it’s really going to happen.” She paused; for an instant a frown marred her immaculate enthusiasm. “Someday I’ll tell you the real story behind it all. The people who didn’t want this to happen! Oh, we’ve had such blows.” She struck her breast. “Real body blows. And they’re still coming. Right up to the last minute,” she said, glancing at a sheaf of cables on a desk.
A few of the Breens’ tribulations were already common knowledge. For instance, it seemed an accepted fact, in the rumor and publicity surrounding the Soviet venture, that the Russians had, on their own initiative, and out of a Geneva-spirit impulse, invited Porgy and Bess to tour their country. The truth of the matter is, Everyman Opera had invited itself.
Breen, having long considered a trip to Russia the logical extension of his company’s “good will” travels, sat down and wrote a letter to the Soviet Premier, Marshal Bulganin, saying, in effect, that Porgy and Bess would be pleased to undertake the journey if the U.S.S.R. was willing to have them. The appeal must have impressed Bulganin favorably, for he forwarded the letter to the Ministry of Culture, the government monopoly which, under the direction of Nikolai Mikhailov, controls every facet of artistic life inside the Soviet Union.
Theater, music, films, publishing, painting, each of these activities comes under the specific, not always lenient, supervision of the Ministry of Culture, whose headquarters are in Moscow. Therefore, with the implied blessings of Bulganin, the Ministry began negotiations with Everyman Opera, though to do so could not have been a casual decision.
Casual, say, as the decisions might have been in the case of the Comédie Française, whose company had appeared in Moscow a year earlier, or a British production of Hamlet, which had been given a Moscow première in the autumn of 1955. Both of these troupes had enjoyed wholehearted success. But from any point of view, whether that of the visiting artists or their hosts, the risks involved were merely aesthetic. Molière and Shakespeare do not lend themselves to the intentions of modern political propaganda.
The same cannot be said of Porgy and Bess. Here, either side of the curtain, American or Soviet, had much to concern them, for the Gershwin opera, when slipped under the dialectical microscope, proves a test tube brimming with the kind of bacteria to which the present Russian regime is most allergic. It is extremely erotic, a serious cause for dismay in a nation with laws so prim, persons can be arrested for kissing in public.
It is God-fearing; over and again it stresses the necessity of faith in a world above the stars rather than below, demonstrates in song and dialogue the comforts to be derived from religious belief (“the opium of the people”). Furthermore, it discourses, in an uncritical vein, on the subject of superstition, i.e., “The Buzzard Song.” As if this weren’t anathema enough, it also sings out loud that people can be happy with plenty of nothin’, an unwelcome message indeed.
Certainly the Ministry of Culture must have taken these drawbacks into account, and then reflected that, though the pill was definitely there, at least it was sugar-coated. After all, and despite its accent on folkish fun, the situation of the American Negro as depicted in Porgy and Bess, an exploited race at the mercy of ruthless Southern whites, poverty-pinched and segregated in the ghetto of Catfish Row, could not be more agreeably imagined if the Ministry of Culture had assigned one of their own writers to the job. And so, midsummer of 1955, the Ministry informed Everyman Opera they were prepared to roll out the red carpet.
Assured of a welcome in Russia, Breen then faced the problem of getting there, and that required money, an estimated $150,000. The first newspaper announcements of the Russian “invitation” to Porgy and Bess more or less suggested that the American State Department would not only be the spiritual heart of this “unprecedented project,” as Breen occasionally called it, but would also provide its financial backbone.
Breen believed so, and with good reason. Over the last several years the State Department had received universal praise for its moral and financial sponsoring of Porgy and Bess, which The New York Times, among others, frequently summarized as the “best ambassador” the State Department had ever sent abroad. But Breen soon discovered, after a series of pleading trips to Washington, that he could no longer rely on the patronage of his Potomac friends. Apparently they thought his project too unprecedented, or, in their own phrase, “politically premature.” In other words, not one cent.
In New York, theatrical circles theorized that the State Department had withdrawn its support because they feared the opera too vulnerable to the purposes of Soviet propaganda. Defenders of the enterprise considered this attitude nonsensical. In their opinion, the fact that such social-critical aspects as the opera contained could be freely presented in the American theater counteracted the possibilities of effective propaganda on that score.
A further argument was that in Russia the very presence of the Negro cast, their affluent appearance, their so obviously unoppressed outspokenness, their educated, even worldly manner (“Why,” said Mrs. Breen, “some of our cast speak three and four languages. Perfectly”) would impress on the Russian people a different image of the American Negro from the stereotype that continues to make Harriet Beecher Stowe one of the Soviet’s best-selling authors.
Variety, the theatrical trade paper, reported as rumor a more straightforward explanation for the State Department’s reversal. According to them, the International Exchange Program, a branch of the American National Theater and Academy (ANTA), whose advice on theatrical matters carries great weight in Washington, had registered opposition on the grounds that the State Department had already spent enough money on Porgy and Bess, and that the funds at their disposal should be more evenly spread to allow a larger catalogue of events in cultural exchange.
Nonetheless, ANTA and the State Department wished Everyman Opera the best of luck. They were not disowning, simply disinheriting.
But well-wishers added little to Breen’s bank account, and as he pondered the possibilities of raising the needed amount of private subscription, there was an unexpected development. The Russians stepped forward and offered to pick up the tab themselves. While the feeblest linguist could translate the meaning of this gesture, designed, as it was, to embarrass the State Department, American partisans of Breen’s venture welcomed it for the very reason it was offered. They felt it would shame Washington into taking a less miserly position. They were mistaken.
Consequently, with time growing short, Breen had the choice of abandoning his plan or permitting the Soviet to capitalize it. A contract, dated December 3, 1955, was drawn up in Moscow between the Ministry of Culture of the U.S.S.R. (“designated hereinafter under the name of the ‘Ministry’ ”) and Everyman Opera, Inc. (“hereinafter under the name of the ‘Company’ ”). The contract consists of three and a half closely typed pages, and contains several quaint items—the Ministry agrees to supply a Russian member of the cast, namely, “one domesticated she-goat.”
But the burden of it is set forth in Article 5. When the writhings of language in this long clause are disentangled, it emerges
