Is so much subtext obtrusive? No, for three reasons. Ántonia and her family endure hardships, struggle for acceptance, assert their independence, pursue work-and the ethnic diversity onstage keeps you constantly aware of the variegated experiences of other immigrants throughout America’s history up to today’s front page. Ahmed as Ántonia-Book-It amassed a cast that resembles the melting pot America has long prided itself on being-though not so often achieved-building another level of innovation atop Cather’s and extending her novel into a complementary and enriching dimension.
(Why did it take decades for all this to be recognized as groundbreaking? Because, as Acocella points out, progressiveness in art was seen strictly in terms of economics, certainly not of gender.)īy including several actors of color-most prominently Bangladeshi-Muslim Nabilah S. Though Cather links the two in her two-word title, she defiantly keeps them on independent paths where any other author would have ended the book with their marriage. (At the same time, Cather throws you off the scent by writing herself, “Willa Cather,” into the novel’s framing device.) Right away Jim meets a Czech family of newcomers, the Shimerdas, and begins an enduring but nonsexual friendship with the forceful oldest daughter Ántonia. As the novel opens, the young Jim is relocating from Virginia to Nebraska, as Cather did herself as a child, cementing the identification. (Regardless of whether or not Cather would have wanted to be.) Now, with the current administration’s racial fearmongering as a goad, Book-It’s exploring yet another aspect of Cather’s 1915 novel My Á ntonia, as adapted and directed by Annie Lareau, mixing racially traditional and nontraditional casting in ways that encourage the audience to view its tale of the immigrant experience in broader terms.Ĭather set her novel in the first person, but in the voice of a male narrator, Jim Burden-a provocative choice considering that during her own teenage years, she signed her name “William Cather” and aspired to being a doctor. Short version: It slowly sank until the writer’s work was re-examined through a feminist lens and she was welcomed into the lesbian canon. In her 1995 New Yorker essay “Cather and the Academy,” critic Joan Acocella outlined, entertainingly, the vagaries of Willa Cather’s literary reputation.
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