"The Secret Life of Bees" Becomes an Off-Broadway Musical: NPR

Lynn Nottage, Pulitzer Prize winning double playwright, has been approached to write the script for a musical version of The secret life of bees, She said yes. But she knew that it would not be easy to adapt a novel told in the first person – by a white girl.

"We were very aware that we did not want to create a narrative that it was just a young white woman who was coming into this home and was being fed by black women – but that she was not. It was a story about the community, "she says. And so it is two young women, both healed in different ways, who need healing, who find refuge in this hive of women. "

In the musical, as in the book, the two women are a white teenager, abused by her unmarried father, and her black guardian, beaten and imprisoned for attempting to vote. The hive of African American beekeepers who welcome them is composed of three deeply spiritual sisters, but who have their own problems. And although the musical draws some significant deviations from the book, novelist Sue Monk Kidd says the adaptation reflects the spirit of its story.

"I think it was a brilliant decision to make this a whole, "says Kidd. So this concerns all people and it concerns the community. And a great theme that I hoped to bring out in the novel was that this community of women can heal. "

The novel spent more than two years on The New York Times list of bestsellers after its publication in 2002. But Kidd, who is white and native to the southern United States, is in a place and a time of great upheavals: South Carolina, 1964.

Tony Gold award-winning director Sam Gold directed the adaptation at the Atlantic Theater Company, Broadway, New York.

"I think we all felt that this book lent itself to a conversation about race in America at the present time," Gold says. "That you look back in 1964 and think that what has changed tends to change, and that it is not.It is an inevitable part of doing a show on 1964 and on civil rights. "

While Gold and the rest of the creative team were extremely aware of the challenges posed by the book, they were also aware that their team included only one African-American in Lynn Nottage. The composer Duncan Sheik, a native of South Carolina, who collaborated on the score with the lyricist Susan Birkenhead, says that he has questioned his role.

"I thought, "Oh, maybe it's not my story to tell," Sheik said. "I do not come from this community, I saw and lived around that, but I do not come from this community."

Eisa Davis plays one of the sisters. She says that she is happy that he had this concern: "That [Sheik] was just trying to make sure that his writing in a variety of black and genre musical idioms would be something reverent. And I think that's it. I think that rather than cultural appropriation, it is cultural appreciation. "

Davis says his friends have had mixed reactions to the series. And his own response to the matter is complicated.

"I still have problems with the operation of the game, in that I still favor a kind of white fragility and whiteness centering in a way that, in my opinion, was tested in 1964. "said Davis. said. "And, of course, we are trying to dismantle it in 2019."

It was a critique of both the book and its adaptation to the 2008 film. But for playwright Lynn Nottage, it's actually something that has drawn her to the subject.

"There is this conversation around Green paper and L & # 39; s help and books in which you have stories of blacks framed by a white author, or a black journey that is seen through the white gaze, "she says. And … I think that one of the things that really attracted me The secret life of bees, and what makes it very different from these other stories, is that this white girl enters a black space and she has to negotiate a space that is foreign to her, rather than the black body going into space White. "

It's a story, says Notting, that she's never told before.

Tom Cole edited this story for broadcast.