Edgar Arceneaux on his new play “Boney Manilli”
The artist Edgar Arceneaux likes to take moments from our past and see how we got them wrong.
His current project, Boney Manilli, is a play set in Los Angeles over the course of a single night. A troubled playwright, Sunny, is struggling to write the story of ‘90s pop duo Milli Vanilli, while also trying to nurse his mother, Momma, who has dementia.
Sunny’s family is convinced that Momma’s father, Sunny Sr., wrote the script for Disney’s 1946 movie Song of the South but was never credited for it. They hope to find the original script and sue Disney Studios, but Momma hid it and can’t remember where.
"Each person in the family is on their own journey, trying to find something, because they all know that sometime soon they're going to lose the most important person in their lives, which is their mom,” Arceneaux said.
In a surreal touch, the ghost of their sister-in-law appears fully embodied and visible, but no one in the family seems to know why she’s there.
The play is also set amidst an actual barbecue.
"It's a theater in the round. People will literally still be standing in line and getting their food when the play begins. So folks will be chewing on rib bones and chicken and macaroni & cheese and beans during the run of the performance," Arceneaux said.
Arceneaux dug into the story of Milli Vanilli to create this production. Two singers, Fab Morvan and Rob Pilatus, met at a nightclub in Munich, Germany and were signed by record producer Frank Farian. The singers' contracts allowed Farian to record other vocalists and have the duo lip sync along to it. The duo had a massive multi-platinum album Girl You Know It’s True, scoring #1 hits with "Baby Don't Forget My Number," "Blame it on the Rain," and "Girl I'm Gonna Miss You."
The singers begged Farian to let them sing on their next album themselves, but Farian went to the press and admitted that the two didn’t sing the original songs. Their 1989 Grammy for best new artist was revoked, and Arista Records dropped them from their roster.
Farian had, a decade earlier, created the disco group Boney M. and was its primary songwriter. Their hits included “Rasputin” and “Daddy Cool.”
"Boney M. is one of the most important pop groups in the world that most Americans have never heard about," Arceneaux said.
Like he did with Milli Vanilli, Farian hired Black performers to mainly lip-sync to others’ vocals.
“I'm always interested in the story behind the story. And when it comes to artists and musicians, we’re all trying to put something out there, and one of our greatest fears is to be misunderstood," Arceneaux said. "I tend to be drawn to stories and try to tell stories where people have a goal, they have an aspiration, and they can't quite get there.”
The tragic story of Milli Vanilli ended when Pilatus died of an accidental overdose in 1998 on the eve of their planned reunion tour.
“It’s not the kind of redemption that we're used to in the West and our kind of Hollywood stories. Those aren't the kinds of stories that I'm interested in telling. I'm looking for something deeper than that. A kind of wisdom that comes out of circumstances where things just don't quite work out the way in which you hope that they would,” he said.
Arceneaux’s work often investigates and interrogates historical patterns. His work comes in the form of drawings, paintings, theater, film, installations, and multimedia events.
He mined similar territory in his first piece for the stage, 2015’s Until, Until, Until... It’s based on Ben Vereen’s infamous blackface performance at Ronald Reagan’s 1981 Inaugural Ball, which was televised across the country.
Vereen was there to pay tribute to Bert Williams, a Broadway star of the 1920s who had to put on blackface makeup in minstrel-show style in order to perform. Vereen began the number as a caricature, shuffling on stage in a top hat and tails, his face painted black with white lips in a big grin, and sang “Waiting For The Robert E. Lee.” The cameras showed Reagan and his supporters laughing at Vereen’s antics.
The second half of the performance was more pointed. Vereen, still in character, tried to buy a round of drinks at a bar, but was denied entry because he was Black. Vereen ended the show singing Williams’ signature song "Nobody" while wiping off his blackface makeup.
Vereen found out two days later that only the first half of the performance was aired on TV. The public saw a minstrel show, but not the critique of minstrelsy.
"He got death threats. People spit in his face. He had very prominent figures like Jesse Jackson and Ruby Dee come out against him publicly,” Arceneaux said. “Ben Vereen’s career and his reputation was totally smeared, and he never really had the chance to tell his side of the story.”
Like Milli Vanilli, Vereen received public scorn, but was himself a victim. Arceneaux says he has sympathy for artists and entertainers, who are the public face of their work and get blamed when their work fails.
“Some of the artists that we love the most, the ones who are legends, fell on their face all the time. There are just certain kinds of falls that we as a society deem to be worthy of redemption, and there are other kinds of falls that we as a society decide are not," he said.
Boney Manilli was also inspired by Arceneaux’s mother’s death a year ago, after she was diagnosed with dementia. Capturing the joy, sorrow, and frustration of living with someone with dementia became central to the play. Humor, songs, and dancing lighten what could otherwise be a very heavy play.
"The humor gives us access to the grief in a way that's not like a cliche," Arceneaux said.
Arceneaux is one of several artists-in-residence at UCLA’s Center for the Art of Performance (CAP UCLA). Emerging and established artists are given space to rehearse and modest production resources. In some cases, the work that is developed ends up being part of an upcoming season of CAP UCLA’s performances. Boney Manilli is slated to be presented in the spring of 2023 as part of the opening season of the UCLA Nimoy Theater, which is currently being renovated in downtown Westwood.
The Nimoy, named in honor of actor and philanthropist Leonard Nimoy, is a contemporary performing art space that’ll seat close to 300 people, which CAP UCLA will operate and manage. It’ll provide a smaller, more intimate venue than Royce Hall or The Theatre at the Ace Hotel, CAP UCLA’s two main venues.
Arceneaux also has work on view at the Vielmetter Los Angeles gallery in downtown LA through March 12, 2022. The show is called Skinning the Mirror and is made up of mirrors with the silver nitrate scraped off the back, mounted on canvases, and covered in acrylic paint. Like Boney Manilli, the project came about while Arceneaux cared for his mother as she struggled with dementia.
“As my mom got sicker and her mind started going, I realized that in some ways, the breaking of the mirror was analogous to what I saw sort of the breaking in my mother's mind,” he said.
“I try to be very thoughtful about the subjects that I choose to make artwork about. Because it needs that level of unsettledness. It needs to feel like an object that doesn't quite sit square on the table. It needs to have a potential to fall over and upset the order. Those are the stories that I want to tell,” he said.
Boney Manilli is set to be performed at the Nimoy Theater in the spring of 2023. Skinning the Mirror is at Vielmetter Los Angeles through March 12, 2022.
Story by Avishay Artsy
