Performing Fact: The Documentary Drama

Out of the success in Germany of Rolf Hochhuth’s The Deputy (1962) and Soldiers (1967), Heinar Kipphardt’s In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer (1964) and Peter Weiss’s The Investigation (1965) grew the modern documentary theater. According to The Encyclopedia of World Theater, this term

describes plays and productions which employ or are based on material such as official documents, press reports and also films, records, photos and tapes. In general, [it is] a theatre which presents fact instead of fiction. . . . The themes have almost always an historical or political character. Often used forms are transcripts of lawsuits, trials or investigations. Usually, political and economic subject-matter is combined with educative, critical and didactic purposes.

Though this definition could apply to other fact-based perfor­mances, there are significant differences. Unlike the so-called historical pageants, for instance--especially the early ones--the documentary play usually has a fully developed script and a unified plot and is presented in a non-specific performance space, such as theater, not in a historical site. Though performing Emily Mann’s Execution of Justice (1983) in the San Francisco City Hall or Hall of Justice might add poignancy, the play doesn’t lose anything by being performed at Washington’s Arena Stage or New York’s Virginia Theatre. Performing Paul Green’s The Lost Colony anywhere but its home on Roanoke Island, South Carolina, on the other hand, would diminish the impact of the pageant.

In addition, though the documentary play usually deals with recent history, such as the aspects of World War II covered in Soldiers, The Deputy, and The Investigation, or current events, such as the trial of Dan White for the murders of San Francisco Mayor George Moscone and City Supervisor Harvey Milk explored in Execution of Justice, this isn’t always the case. James de Jongh’s Do Lord Remember Me, based on oral histories taken in the 1930s, is about slave life in the 1840s-’60s and Arthur Miller’s The Crucible (1955) is drawn from court records of the Salem witch trials of the 1650s.

It’s also a general practice that the central characters be major historical or cultural figures (Pope Pius XII in The Deputy, Churchill in Soldiers; Hal Holbrook’s “Mark Twain Tonight!”), but they needn’t be. Occasionally the protagonists are significant groups such as the slaves of Do Lord or the Auschwitz guards on trial in The Investigation. Even local or family history, however, can be the subject of the non-fiction play, though such productions seldom gain general attention.

It’s also evident that, from The Crucible to Execution of Justice, the most common conceit is a trial or hearing. Even those non-fiction plays that aren’t based on trial records are often presented as a kind of trial or indictment of an injus­tice with the audience as the jury and the playwright, the prosecutor. The polemic tone of most factual plays, frequently liberal to left-wing, is effectively housed in the accusatory atmosphere of the courtroom, legitimate or kangaroo.

With all the lee-way afforded by the genre, diverse forms can be used with equal claim to fact. Peter Stone and Sherman Edwards, for instance, claim that most of the material for their 1969 musical 1776 was taken from historical documents, although no one sang or danced in the Continental Congress. 1776 qualifies, perhaps, as documentary drama at the lower end of a continuum, where the playwrights have heavily manipulated the facts, even though they’ve invented very little. The continuum of documentary theater would stretch from the least-manipulated facts to the classic history play in which only elements of the basic story remain. Off the scale at one end is real life; reality occurring on stage, represented by the happening or the work of performers like Spaulding Gray or Quentin Crisp whose performances were actualities; and reality recreated on stage, a kind of drame vérité, which is probably impossible. Off the scale at the other extreme is the fictional “documentary” play which uses the form but not the content of the non-fiction play.

Despite its kinship to other forms of documentary performance, the non-fiction play takes the documentary film as its model. Just as the modern documentary film is a linear descendant of the illustrated travelogue of the 19th and early 20th centuries, so, too, is the documentary play. The route, however, is less direct. Whereas the illustrated travel lecture began using more and more film until the motion picture enveloped the lecturer who became a voice-over narrator, the live lecturer left the theater for other venues, most notably the Chautauqua tent and the college campus. The earliest attempts at modern documentary theater not only used film in the live performance, returning to the travelogue practice of the turn of the century, but developed an artistic and ethical approach to the genre that paralleled the development of the documentary film over the first 30 years of the 20th century. The appearance in the 1920s of the factual play, again principally in Germany, revived in the live theater the ostensible purpose of teaching and informing over entertaining, This, of course, had been the intent of the lecture and travelogue of a generation before, and is, similarly, the intent of the documentary film. In a sense, the documentary play rejoins two strains of performance that had split with the advent of the feature-length film.

The drive to perform fact--to teach or explain events of import to the community--is as old as performance itself. The first historical performance, the precursor of the documentary drama, must have occurred the first time a Neanderthal hunting party danced around the campfire to replay the day’s success. The prehistory of the non-fiction play is the development of historical drama from the first known true history play, Aeschylus’ The Persians, which is based on actual events rather than myths, to the modern history play exemplified by romanticized spectaculars such as A Man for All Seasons, Becket, Murder in the Cathedral, and Anne of the Thousand Days in the 1950s and early ’60s.

Along the way, the factual veracity of the drama went through many guises. Shakespeare based his histories on what were accepted as facts in the 16th century--but rearranged them to suit his dramatic intentions. In 1800, Friedrich von Schiller’s Maria Stuart considerably bent truth, presenting as apparent history a meeting between Elizabeth I of England and Mary I of Scotland which never took place. In 1801, however, Schiller’s Maid of Orleans was presented at the Königliches Nationaltheater in Berlin with one of the first known historically accurate settings. While the script may not have been documentary, the production was--the first in a series of antiquarian and naturalistic productions culminating in the late-19th-century naturalism of Émile Zola, André Antoine, and David Belasco.

The first documentary play may have been Georg Büchner’s Danton’s Death, his 1835 treatment of the French Revolution and its aftermath composed from 18th-century records. True documentary drama in modern times began to appear in political spec­tacles, primarily in the Soviet Union after the Revolution. One example, Nikolai Evreinov’s Storming of the Winter Palace in Petrograd for the second anniversary of the Revolution in November 1919, required 2,000 participants. Later in Germany, Erwin Piscator pioneered documentary productions with In Spite of Everything (1925). A montage of authentic speeches, essays, newspaper cuttings, appeals, pamphlets, photographs, and film, the production was a revue recounting scenes of World War I and the Russian Revolution. Piscator’s theater was decidedly leftist and his shows were unabashed propaganda. Indeed, the documentary form was adopted by leftists more than rightists--as least until World War II, when its nationalistic propaganda value was recognized by all the belligerents.

From the example of Piscator’s early documentary pro­ductions, it's clear that “documentary drama [adapts] for the stage . . . broad themes from life itself done without losing . . . intimacy of the human element and identifiable characters.” The characters, however,

might be impersonal, representative and even stereotyped at the expense of the individuality of realism. A more purposeful and directed dialogue might be simplified, less colloquial and more abstract. Humour, if any, was likely to be broad, and comic business could lean towards slap­stick. . . . Documentary drama also inhibited the subtlety and imagination of the stage by its need to deal in facts.

The idea of documentary theater came to the U.S. in the 1930s and was adapted by the Federal Theatre Project for its Living Newspapers. Between 1935 and 1939, several Living Newspapers were produced to inform people about ills such as unemployment and the housing shortage. After the FTP, there was little documentary theater for nearly 30 years. The ‘40s saw plays supporting the war as radical sentiments became unpopular and, in the ‘50s, the history play, with social issues fictionalized and romanticized, became popular. An exception, to an extent, was The Crucible, which, though it’s not a pure documentary play, makes an important point about the genre: most documentary plays are actually about the time and locale in which they’re presented, not the ones in which they’re set. Miller’s play recounts the Salem witch trials, and certainly can be accepted as simply an indictment of community hysteria, but it’s really an exposé of McCarthyism and the House Un-American Activities Committee probes. Most documentary drama, in fact, “is relevant only to certain times and places . . . .” Its “lack of historical perspective is proportional to the intensity of its moral perspective.”

In another instance, Peter Weiss asserts that everything in The Investigation, about the Frankfurt War Crimes Trials investigating the death camp at Auschwitz, is taken from the transcripts. Having edited them down, however, and selecting carefully, Weiss also acknowledges that the play’s not really about the trial of some Auschwitz guards, but that “it is capitalism, indeed the whole Western way of life, that is on trial.”

In the 1960s, documentary drama returned to the world’s stages. It had its strongest rebirth in Germany, but there are some home-grown examples, such as Martin Duberman’s In White America (1963) which depicts the status of black Americans in the pre-Civil Rights era, and Donald Freed’s The Inquest (1970) which presents an alternate view of the 1951 espionage trial of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. The non-fiction play was again being used for instructing and opening eyes. Just as in the ‘20s and ‘30s, contemporary documentarists “believe that the dramatist should teach, and they use the stage as a podium from which they express their political views.”

Mostly concerned with World War II--and Germany’s part in it--German documentary theater was the impetus for the revival of the genre. The first modern documentary play, Hochhuth’s The Deputy, is a five-act verse play, exploring the guilt of Pope Pius XII in the extermination of the Jews by the Nazis. Asser­ting that all his material is documented, the playwright invented some characters to act as advocates for the absent Jews. Hochhuth, like his colleagues, doesn’t claim to hold to absolute objective fact. Objectivity is, in fact, a myth even in the most scrupu­lously even-handed script:

subjectivity plays the dominant role in documentary drama. From the initial choice of material to the final production, the selectivity of the playwright is at work. . . . The dramatist . . . create[s] the illusion of reportage, and pursues a thesis with the intention of enlightening the audience. Hence, the documentary drama reports facts, but only certain facts, and it investigates, but only those issues which interest the author.

Kipphardt’s In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer, for example, drawn from published transcripts of the Atomic Energy Commission’s security hearing, includes several composite characters and severely edited testimony. Although Kipphardt claims he didn’t change the context of the hearing or impose his own conclusions, Oppenheimer denounced the play as inaccurate and supported a rival adaptation, The Oppenheimer Dossier (1963) by Frenchman Jean Vilar.

One of the most controversial non-fiction plays from the 1960s, Hochhuth’s Soldiers, illustrates a serious problem of documentary productions. The play posits that Winston Churchill was actively involved in the murder of General Wladyslaw Sikorski, Poland’s president-in-exile, and that he approved the saturation bombing of German cities that killed thousands of civilians. Because the full script would take about ten hours, it’s usually performed in cut versions, making each production a different play. In Berlin, Hochhuth complained, the cuts in one scene removed the serious facts leaving the humorous lines and jokes, giving the scene “a false and unfortunate hilarity.” The audience at that production would assume Churchill was a silly, callous buffoon, planning the bombing of German cities from his bed.

This incident raises a problem inherent in documentary drama. Although it purports to be objective, it can’t be, even under ideal circumstances. The audience is asked to believe the truth of what’s shown, but, by the very nature of the presentation, they know it’s a performance. If the audience suspends disbelief, they’re in danger of being misled; if they don’t, the production can’t work as theater or as instruction. The documentary dramatist stands in the position of both scholar and playwright. This frequently means that “[t]he historian condemns the playwright for misrepresenting the ‘truth,’ and the drama critic complains that the documentary play . . . lacks aesthetic values.”

After the mid-1980s into the middle of the next decade, few documentary plays were produced in the U.S. with any significant success or notice. History plays continued to be written, of course, and documentaries like Execution of Justice received revivals around the country (and a 1999 television rendition on Showtime). New plays based on historical records, however, were infrequent for a decade, possibly because they tend to require large casts, multiple sets, and, often, extensive technical support. Companies around the U.S. did produce several documentary plays, often where the subjects had significance (reminiscent of the historical pageants described earlier), but few gained national attention: Digging In: The Farm Crisis in Kentucky at the Actors Theatre of Louisville; God’s Country (1988) by Steven Dietz, about the 1984 murder of Denver radio personality Alan Berg by a member of The Order, at ACT in Seattle; Barbara Damashek’s Whereabouts Unknown (1988), about Louisville’s homeless, also at ATL; In the Heart of the Woods (1987), Todd Jefferson Moore’s play about the logging and the environmental in the northwest at the New City Theatre in Seattle; Rushing Waters (1993) by Migdalia Cruz, based on 400 years of history in the Latino community in the San Fernando Valley at the Cornerstone Theatre Company in L.A.

In place of the conventional non-fiction play, perhaps, were the documentaries of such performance artists as Anna Deavere Smith, who creates her own documents through interviews and then recreates the personages who’ve been affected by such historical events as the Crown Heights riots in New York (Fires in the Mirror) or those that followed the acquittals in the first Rodney King beating trial in Los Angeles (Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992). Jessica Blank, co-dramatist of The Exonerated (2002), another play based on taped interviews rather than historical documents, named Smith as a long-time inspiration, and the work of Moíses Kaufman and his Tectonic Theatre Project on such undertakings as the 2000 Laramie Project (which has just spawned a sequel/update), their exploration of the atmosphere in Laramie, Wyoming, at the time of the 1998 death of Matthew Shepard, based on interviews with Laramie, is clearly in the vein of Smith’s pioneering efforts.

Perhaps because of profoundly unsettling events, documentary dramas returned here in the early years of the 21st century. The students of New York City’s Stuyvesant High School, a public high school a scant five blocks from the site of the World Trade Center, found a way to confront the tragedy of 11 September 2001 by composing With Their Eyes, a 2002 drama drawn from the experiences of the staff, students, and faculty in a style inspired by Smith. In March 2004, Chicago’s tiny Bailiwick Repertory Company premièred Sin: A Cardinal Deposed, compiled by Michael Murphy from the depositions of Bernard Cardinal Law in the Catholic Church’s sexual-abuse scandal in Boston. In May 2004, the small London Tricycle Theatre premièred Guantánamo: “Honor Bound to Defend Freedom” by Victoria Brittain and Gillian Slovo which examined the plight of British citizens held at Guantánamo Bay Naval Base. The play combined the statements of such figures as U. S. Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld and British Foreign Minister Jack Straw with accounts by the prisoners to create “verbatim theatre.” But although the majority of documentary plays are politically or socially oriented and focused on one historical event or phenomenon, some are occasionally not. A case in point is 1999’s Charlie Victor Romeo, a play created by Bob Berger, Patrick Daniels, and Irving Gregory directly from the transcripts of cockpit recorders of planes that crashed. (“Charlie Victor Romeo” is the military’s phonetic transcription of ‘CVR,’ which stand for “cockpit voice recorder.”)

Except for Sin and Kaufman’s earlier Gross Indecency: Three Trials of Oscar Wilde (1997), which returned to archived documents--trial and hearing transcripts once again--almost all recent documentary plays have been based on interviews with living participants or witnesses. (Mann’s 1996 Greensboro: A Requiem, her evocation of a violent response by Ku Klux Klansmen and Nazis to a 1979 anti-Klan rally, is, of course, a combination of both practices, as is Jessica Blank and Eric Jensen’s Exonerated to a lesser degree. Mann’s Having Our Say, the story of the centenarian Delaney sisters, was adapted from a book rather than taped interviews, but Amy Hill Hearth’s account was oral history.) This trend, if not begun by Anna Deavere Smith (Mann employed the tactic in her 1977 monodrama, Annulla Allen, and her 1980 play about a violent Vietnam veteran, Still Life) then certainly given prominence and cachet by her performances, seems to be linked to the near ubiquitousness of 24-hour news programs, public confessions on television, and the focus of our news media on personalities rather than great events.

The rise of blogs, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and personal websites--all of which promote interest in the thoughts, words, and ideas of ordinary people--appears to parallel the focus of the newest documentary theater, like the plays of Smith and the Tectonic Theatre, on the testimony of people whose words would otherwise not be recorded, much less heeded. There’s been a reaction, too, to the distrust of mainstream media because of errors, fabrication and falsification, bias, and control by the establishment or corporate owners. In general, the public has seen a lack of openness by public figures who are handled, advised, spun, and air-brushed to the extent that their utterances have no more authenticity than do their looks. Plays based on the historical record have been filtered through the perceptions of bureaucrats, historians, and journalists who decided what to record and how to report it, while these new texts appear to be the mostly unmediated thoughts of people brought directly to the audience unfiltered (except, of course, by the playwrights--whose hands are present in both types in any case). Mann has pronounced her fondness for “the poetry of everyday speech” and Smith, declaring “character appears in language,” explains that she looks for the “natural poetry” in her subjects’ words: “The bottom line is to speak to people and try to evoke from them performance and poetry.” While the language of the archival sources and news reports is formal, scholarly, written, edited, and perfect, the language of the oral-history plays is unaffected, spoken, immediate, and living. It’s natural dialogue.

At the same time, the personalities of the archival plays are, as noted before, historical figures or prominent people--Dan White, Pope Pius XII, Churchill, the Auschwitz guards, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Hollywood figures called before HUAC. The voices of the oral-history plays are mostly ordinary folks--the citizens of Laramie, the Delaney sisters, the people of Greensboro, death-row inmates--whose testimony would never have otherwise been noted. Indeed, Emily Mann called the citizens of San Francisco, whom she interviewed for Execution of Justice as counterpoint to the court testimony and police records, the Chorus of Uncalled Witnesses. The archival plays are reexamining recorded history, while the oral-history plays are recording history that often hasn’t been documented, at least not in one place at one time. If it weren’t for the plays, in a way, the events on which they’re based would be lost and forgotten. As one historian observes:

Unlike documents that simply come to us from the past, whether they are film clips or letters or reports, interview materials are unique in themselves being documents about the past--reflections more than simple reminiscences, in which the interpretation of a past reality is not only something the audience brings to the document, but to some degree is implicit in the document itself.

Now, that doesn’t make the new documentary plays important--but it does make them different from the tradition started, if you will, with Büchner’s Danton’s Death. Indeed, there are potential faults in either approach: on one hand, there’s the latent subjectivity of the historical record that’s the basis for the archival plays; the innate biases of the recorders, journalists, editors, minute-takers, and so on, influence the record of the events before any manipulation by the dramatists. On the other hand, interview-based plays are subject to manipulation by interviewees who say what they think the interviewer wants to hear: their words may seem authentic, but where’s the proof of veracity? As one scholar notes, “The written record . . . is permanent and verifiable.” Another trap of the oral-history play is that it may be too subjective and one-sided (whose views are set against those of the former convicts in The Exonerated?), lacking distance, multiple focuses, and the perspectives of outsider explorations. Such texts can become more narrative than drama, focusing as they do on words rather than actions and failing to develop the conflict on which most traditional Western drama depends, such as occurred in the controversial documentary play My Name Is Rachel Corrie by Katherine Viner and Alan Rickman, staged in New York (after some false starts) in 2006, which in production was little more than the oral interpretation of the letters and e-mails of the doomed young protester in the Gaza Strip. Even the warring points of view of, say, Greensboro, with the Klansmen’s and Nazis’ perspectives juxtaposed against the demonstrators’, isn’t inherently dramatic.

One theater historian identifies four “periods” of the documentary play. The first period, corresponding to the Neue Sachlichkeit (“new objectivity”) movement in the Weimar Germany of the 1920s, was defined and dominated by the productions of Piscator. The second period was epitomized by the Living Newspaper of the FTP in 1930s U.S. The third period, again centered in Germany, was exemplified by the plays of Weiss, Hochhuth, and Kipphardt but also included Duberman’s In White America and Freed’s Inquest in this country. The fourth period began here in the 1980s with Execution of Justice and continued through Mann’s other plays and the work of Smith and Kaufman. The prospects for a possible fifth period of documentary theater for the 21st century, beginning with the new interview-based works currently in vogue, are certainly intriguing.

How America Eats: Food and Eating Habits in the Plays of Suzan-Lori Parks

by Kirk Woodward

[From time to time, I may ask friends to contribute a “guest post” to ROT, and this column by a writer and theater artist I’ve known for many years is the first one. Kirk Woodward is a playwright and director, among other accomplishments, and I have mentioned his children’s plays recently. Kirk’s scripts are available through his own website, http://spiceplays.com/index.html. Suzan-Lori Parks, of course, is one of our most interesting and successful playwrights. She is currently the Master Writer Chair at New York’s Public Theater where the world première of her newest play, Snake, directed by James Macdonald, will open on 3 March 2010. ~Rick.]

We can learn a great deal about a playwright by seeing how the writer presents a single kind of activity in the course of a series of plays. For example, I recently had the opportunity to trace the subject of food and eating habits through the plays of Suzan-Lori Parks, and in the process learned a lot both about her plays, and about the possibilities of playwriting itself. Parks is a terrific playwright. If you’re not familiar with her, you should know for starters that her writing isn’t like that of a conventional playwright. Her scripts even look different on the page; words are frequently written out just as they sound, and she uses dramatic techniques that few others use. (She provides a handy glossary of her techniques in each volume of her plays.) If you want to read about her, an excellent book is Suzan-Lori Parks by Deborah Geis (University of Michigan Press, 2008), and McFarlane Press has announced a collection of essays on Parks edited by Philip Kolin for 2010. Meanwhile, read her plays, or, even better, see them. Among the better known are Venus and Topdog/Underdog, the latter of which won the Pulitzer Prize and enjoyed a substantial run on Broadway.

(NOTE: Parks’ two most recent plays are not included in this piece. Father Comes Home From The Wars (Parts 1, 2 and 8) was performed at the Public Theater in June 2009, and Snake is scheduled for the Public’s 2009-2010 season.)

Starting with one of Parks’ earliest plays, there aren’t many instances of food and eating in the short play Betting on the Dust Commander (1987), but they’re telling. “Dust Commander” was a race horse that the character Lucius bet on. He and Mare (in the context of the play, her name is a pun) discuss the horse races and much more about their relationship, using a device, repetition, that Parks is particularly fond of. She reuses similar events or sections of dialogue repeatedly throughout a play, and each time their significance changes a bit. Eating, itself, is a repetitive act, of course. But what strikes me most about the subject of food in Commander is that when Lucius talks about a church lady who used to sell him food and drink, he doesn’t say that she sold something generic – “soda” – or that she distributed one of the big brands like Coca-Cola or Pepsi; he says that she sold RC Cola, a drink strongly associated with the American South. This closely observed and realistic detail helps anchor a superficially spacey play in a concrete reality.

Then, in the monologue play Pickling (1988), Miss Miss, the one character in the play, links her past and present through food. Almost at the start of the play she talks about an ice box – it’s been a long time since people in the United States used ice boxes – but she has replaced hers, not with a refrigerator, but with jars she uses to try to bottle (“pickle”) the past, something she’d love to be able to do. Miss Miss also tells us that she no longer can keep milk cold, that is, life-sustaining; instead she keeps powdered milk in a jar, which she can, she hopes, “rise up from the dead” for visitors, if she has any, which doesn’t seem likely. In these few deft strokes Parks uses the subject of food to link for Miss Miss her past, her present, and a future that, sadly, has minimal hope in it. Parks makes it clear that you can’t “bottle” life, whether past, present, or future.

That’s not all Miss Miss has to say about food. She remembers Charles, a lifeguard, in her memory a gorgeous physical specimen, coming by her house once a day to eat a beet – “he loved you,” she says to herself, “for your beets.” Presumably she could replace the beets he ate with more beets, like the peach cobbler she says she can replace when it gets “rubbery,” but nothing lasts forever and when the “eighteen Thursdays” of eating beets eventually come to an end, all that’s left for her is the collection of jars that represent her memories. So the act of eating, in this poignant play, carries considerable emotional depth.

Parks wrote a longer one-act play, Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom, in 1986-1989, and in it food actually introduces the play. In the first scene, while Molly is talking about being expelled from school, Charlene fixes breakfast, an activity that Chona picks up in a later scene (eggs and, later, peach cobbler, a repetition of the food in Pickling). What’s important here, though, isn’t the food itself but the absent-minded way it’s prepared; eating is background, unnoticed, rather than an important event in itself. We will see Parks return to this idea.

But in Mutabilities Parks also uses two characters to make larger points about the act of eating. One of them, Shark-Seer (notice the extravagant names, another Parks trademark), says that “our flesh is edible tuh them fish”– in other words, we are in danger of being “eaten” or destroyed in a mindless way (by fish that presumably act by instinct) just as we, in this society, mindlessly eat. And the Naturalist, speaking directly to an audience presumably attending a lecture on social behaviors, uses the metaphor of not particularly nourishing food to tell us, “The great cake of society is crumbling.”

Then in a play called The Death of the Last Black Man In the Whole Entire World (1989-1992), Parks brings the theme of food front and center through the frankly stereotypical names of the major characters. The “last black man” of the title, doomed to repeat his death over and over, is named Black Man With Watermelon, and other characters include Black Woman With Fried Drumstick, Lots of Grease And Lots Of Pork, Yes And Greens Black-Eyed Peas Cornbread, Ham, and Prunes and Prisms. The soul food names remind us how long stereotypes last in America. Despite advances in relations between races, despite years of efforts to deepen understanding among peoples, the names of the characters slam the persistence of stereotypes in our faces. It’s safe to say that numerous white Americans would recognize race as a subject of the play just by hearing the names of the characters, and would probably feel shock at having their deep-rooted prejudices so blatantly named.

If we look at the first scene in Last Black Man, following the “Overture” of the play, we see how Parks gives food mythic status. The Black Man is welcomed from his “resurrection” or rescue from death with food – a chicken dinner. On the other hand, when the crowd was watching his execution, from which it is claimed he escaped, “Folks come tuh watch with picnic baskets.” In the third scene, food becomes an image of triumph and survival: “Our crops have prospered” . . . “Our one melon has given untuh 3.” Food perhaps even survives death: Black Woman With Fried Drumstick claims that chickens still grow feathers and give eggs after they’re dead. On the other hand, to make sure we don’t think Parks is indulging in easy optimism, destruction is just as continuous: “Eggs still break.”

Devotees in the Garden of Love (1991) is about rituals of love, so it presents food and eating mostly in the form of table settings. There are ways, the characters say, that things are done and ways that they are not – social rituals. So the character Lily says, “I taught you your basics. How tuh lay uh table. How tuh greet uh guest. Thuh importance of uh centerpiece.” She refers to a meal as “uh mess” in the military sense of the word, that is, as an orderly feeding, but the word also suggests the contradictory meaning of “messy.” In this simple word Parks shows our social rituals as barriers against confusion and chaos. Parks, then, uses incidents of food and eating introduced in a simple and natural way to underline the great complexity of love, particularly its function as a barrier against confusion and chaos.

The America Play (1990-1993) is the first of Parks’ two plays to be produced so far in which a character impersonates Abraham Lincoln at the moment of his assassination. Lincoln’s assassination, of course, represents a huge tearing apart of the continuity of this country’s life. Appropriately, eating in The America Play is presented in the form of an interrupted event, in which the Foundling Father tells how the Lesser Known would “leave his wife and child after the blessing had been said” due to being “summoned between the meat and the vegetables.” The disruption of the national fabric leads to the memorializing of history in fragmented ways. George Washington is remembered primarily by his wooden teeth, and the land now called America was once covered by the sea like “uh dried scrap of whales blubber,” just fragments of historical reality. There aren’t many references to food in The America Play, but even these few directly relate to the upheaval of national life that is the subject of the play.

Then the remarkable play Venus (1995-1998) uses food to highlight the difference between the genuine and the spurious. Venus tells the story of a young African woman in the nineteenth century uprooted from her home and exhibited as a curiosity in Paris, where she dies. The play is full of “performances” of many kinds, some of them identified as such (the carnival-like display of the Venus, and a play-within-the-play), some of them not (the ways people present themselves to each other). When we first see the Venus in England, for example, the Brother brings her food and water with a “show” of real concern. Moments later, he is groping her. His pretense of caring is a “performance” in the sense that it is spurious, not genuine.

In the same way, in the play, real food gives way to substitutes for nourishment in the Venus’s life, like alcohol, which speeds her death. Even more to the point is chocolate. The Venus is chocolate-colored, “Coco candy coloured,” and audiences bring her chocolate. Truthfully, the Venus likes chocolate, and there is no reason she shouldn’t, since chocolate stands for love and for luxury, a fact she expounds on in the “Brief History of Chocolate” she delivers late in the play: “it has become the practice / to present a gift of chocolates when professing Love.” The Venus in fact becomes quite a connoisseur of chocolates, able to list the most exotic treats, and she enjoys them. Her affection for the sweet is paralleled by the young man’s gift of chocolates to his sweetheart in the play-within-the-play “For The Love of The Venus.”

Unfortunately chocolate, regardless of its delicious taste and association with love, is not truly nutritious, though it may provide the illusion of nutrition, and its effects begin to tell on The Venus. The Baron Docteur, who is besotted by her but knows she’s getting sick, sends her chocolates in spite of himself. Ultimately the “civilized” luxury of exotic sweets contributes to the early death of the Venus. While the play-within-the-play that bears her name ends in the triumph of love, she herself ends up literally dissected at the hands of a civilization that has failed to protect and nourish her. The elegance of the formal play is the pretence, but her death is the reality.

“Chocolate is a recognized emotional stimulant,” the Venus lectures, but that is as close as she comes to understanding her situation. However, the actual audience of the play knows better, because Parks uses eating habits to demonstrate that there is no substitute for genuine caring. The Venus essentially dies from indifference to her plight. Pretending to care for our fellow human beings – even by feeding them chocolate – can’t substitute for genuine love. The reality is that we need real food, nourishing food, in order to survive, but we need spiritual as well as physical food. We can say we “love” chocolates but “love” for each other is quite a different thing, not based on pleasure and on self-indulgence but on the ability to see each other as real people. It is the failure of that vision on the part of the “audience,” as well as of the people close to her, that dooms The Venus.

Suzan-Lori Parks’ two “red letter plays” In the Blood (1998-2001) and Fucking A (2000-2001), called “red letter” because they’re inspired by Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, relate food to poverty and hunger. Hester, the central character in both plays, is desperately poor. In the first scene of In the Blood, Hester promises her young children, named Bully, Trouble, and Beauty, that she’ll give them the “soup of the day,” an elegant phrase that ignores the reality that her soup is only water plus whatever she’s able to put in it. “Dinner” is framed by a fight among the children. To divert them, Hester describes the soup as though it’s a fabulous meal. We see that she uses imagination to charm the children, but we also recognize that few if any of the ingredients she names – carrots, meat, oranges, pie, “mash potatoes,” diamonds – are actually in the soup. Her son Jabber notes that Hester doesn’t even eat the soup – she gives it all to her children, as she says later, so “They wont starve.” She’s doing the best she can, even though, as she notes, “I promised the kids cake and ice cream.”

The Reverend D, who got Hester pregnant, tries to steer her toward the welfare department with the promise of a hot meal. Hester demands money from him, but her focus keeps shifting back to food: “Theres so many things we need. Food. New shoes. A regular dinner with meat and salad and bread.” Welfare, a character, promises a hot meal too, but her description shows how far Hester’s world is removed from an organic idea of eating: “You cannot simply – live off the land. If yr hungry you go to the shelter and get a hot meal.” Welfare brags of how well fed she is – “Comes from a balanced diet. Three meals a day. Strict adherence to the food pyramid,” an image of a much better life, and she reminds Hester of the time she had her to her house in the afternoon and used teacups, a detail reminiscent of the rituals of table setting in Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom.

The specifics of these episodes are so organic to the play, and so telling, that Parks doesn’t need to announce to the audience that the family is poor, or that poverty is having a terrible effect on the children and on their mother, or that the departments that administer welfare are far removed from the real needs of people. Those observations are all embedded in the fabric of the play, particularly in the way it presents food and eating.

Fucking A, the other Hester play, shows the influence of Bertolt Brecht in its use of inserted songs. The proposal song “A Meat Man Is A Good Man To Marry” explicitly and hilariously links food and love: “With me yr mate, every day we’ll have steak,” Butcher sings, and he proposes marriage to Hester, who puts him off, because food is not everything, as we have seen earlier when Hester visits her (she thinks) son Jailbait in prison. Hester hopes to warm his heart with food – Jailbait says, “Yr looking at me like you wanna eat me up” – but he devours the food without any sign of affection for her, despite her feeling for him. When Hester writes him, she uses food to try to warm his heart – “Next year we’ll be picnicking. We’ll have meat and cheese and wine and bread and apples.” The lack of food is a dreadful incentive for action. When Monster robs Hester, he demands food as well as money. Worst of all, Jailbait went to jail for stealing food – “He was only hungry! He stole some meat and she seen him . . .”

That eating, under these circumstances, might be a communal, soul-nourishing activity on its own is out of the question. Conditions for the characters in the play are so desperate that every action – even the search for love – is really just another part of a desperate effort to survive.

Topdog/Underdog (1999-2002) is the second play by Suzan-Lori Parks in which a character makes a living as an Abraham Lincoln impersonator, reenacting the moment of Lincoln’s assassination. In the same way that the play features two brothers, named Booth and Lincoln, it also frames its plot with two dinners. Like the two brothers, one dinner is scrappy and thrown together, the other almost elegant. The first consists of Chinese food that Lincoln has brought home. This meal is prepared by others; it’s served casually and eaten offhandedly; its contents (meat and “skrimps” – shrimp) are nourishing enough, but are also the subject of disagreement between the brothers, both of whom wanted the “skrimps.” The meal, in other words, is a dysfunctional event – the food is disconnected from the brothers, and the brothers from each other.

Because the meal is Chinese food, it contains “fortunes,” slips of paper in fortune cookies that claim to point to the future. The futures of both Booth and Lincoln, who both live marginal lives, are uncertain, and their “fortunes” ambiguous. Booth’s tells him to “Waste not want not,” which seems almost insulting for someone scraping out a tenuous living. Unfortunately he will later literally “waste” his brother, and then wish he had not. Lincoln’s fortune says simply, “Your luck will change,” and, sadly, it does.

The second meal, in the next to last scene of the play, is quite different. From the stage direction it almost seems that the meal might be the first in Parks’ plays that functions as a genuinely positive event: “. . . a table with two nice chairs. The table is covered with a lovely tablecloth and there are nice plates, silverware, champagne glasses and candles.” Booth has set up the “romantic” dinner for Grace, who hasn’t yet arrived. Nothing, though, works smoothly. Lincoln arrives home unexpectedly; he correctly assumes that Booth stole the lovely elements of the table setting; Grace never arrives; and when Lincoln begins to show off his superior Three Card Monte skills, Booth knocks everything off the table and it becomes the setting for a slight-of-hand trick that will eventually lead to real tragedy.

Although the second meal is as close to a genuinely nourishing event as any meal in the plays of Parks we have examined to this point, circumstances have already guaranteed that it will not go well. Between the first and second meal, there are several references to food and eating, none of them encouraging. Lincoln uses the expression “bringing home the bacon” when he has money; the expression is a commonplace, but it also implies that food is important only because of its link to money. Booth makes a similar connection between food and sex when he describes how Grace “eats up the food I’d brought like there was no tomorrow and then goes and eats on me.” In both instances food is important because of its connection to another objective (money, sex). On neither occasion is eating either physically or emotionally nutritive. The characters in the play, Parks shows us, always have their minds on something else, whatever that something else may be.

Then in 2002-2003, Suzan-Lori Parks took up the challenge of writing a play every day for a whole year, published as 365 Days /365 Plays. About fifty-seven of these short plays, or about one out of every six, have some sort of reference to food. Of those fifty-seven, food and eating are integral to the stories of about half, including one block of four plays (May 20 and 22-24).

Some of the plays in the collection, though by no means all, recapitulate themes or situations from earlier plays. “Pig Meat Farming Man” brings to mind the Meat Man in Fucking A, but here the association of food with sex is even more explicit (he has no money, but “he puts his bacon up on my plate every night, you know what I’m talking about”). “Everybody’s Got An Aunt Jemimah” makes the same use of racially stereotypical character names (in addition to Aunt Jemimah, Uncle Ben is also invoked) as The Death of the Last Black Man In the Whole Entire World, but with more humor and less anger. Also as in Last Black Man, “Better Than Chitlins” links soul food with the imminent death of a character.

Parks’ familiar theme of food as a means to some other end is repeated in “Fries With That,” where the characters barely notice the fast food of the title, and in “The Legend of Wilgefortis,” where the King gorges himself with not necessarily nutritious food (“Brown Bag Surprise”), like the Venus’s chocolates. As in the “scarlet letter plays,” the primacy of hunger is recognized in “Mason Jar Genie,” in which the most important wish anyone in the play can make is for a ham sandwich, and in “House of Cards,” where a man courts a woman by using a head of cabbage.

Among new themes, “Chicken Wings” makes the act of eating a conscious one: the Dad dissects the process of eating so much that he makes the Son decide he has to leave home. In “Veuve Clicquot,” a condemned man orders his last meal with gusto, “trying to enjoy myself is all.” A chorus of the women he has murdered contrasts his attitude with the hard lives that ended with their deaths, and at the end of the play his guilt begins to overwhelm him. The motif of the condemned criminal continues in “The Executioner’s Daughter,” but here the executioner is the condemned’s mother (Freud would surely identify with this plot), who worries about whether the doomed prisoner had a good last meal. In “Coney Island Joe’s” the long line of food stores is something to pass by on the way somewhere else, but the song of the Pretty Waitress raises the possibility – unresolved in the play – that the Lonesome Man just might not pass by, or be passed by, an opportunity for love.

Among other variations on the food theme, “Father Comes Home From the Wars (Part 5)” is a title that Parks referenced again for her play that opened at the Public Theatre in New York in 2009. Joe, the father who returns from the wars, wants his meat raw, although, being re-socialized, he accepts it well-done. The setting is sitcom elegance from the early 1960s. The title of “The Good Cook of Szechuan” is a clear reference, not to another play by Parks, but to Brecht. However, where Brecht’s central character in The Good Woman of Szechuan struggles to be “good” in an evil society, the “good cook” turns out to be evil – a rapist – leading to the observation that “Goodness in one area / Does not translate into goodness in another.”

The title’s punning reference to Chinese food in “The Good Cook” (the cook may both be from Szechuan, and cook Szechuan food) demonstrates that Parks can be quite funny, and in particular two other pieces from 365 Days illustrate her sense of humor. The title character of “Proust’s Cookie,” an unusual sort of muse – the cookie that once inspired Proust – demonstrates the fickle nature of the artistic process, since a character in the play gets no inspiration from the cookie at all. Finally, “The Worst” contains a pun on “wurst” that presumably couldn’t be stretched to much greater length, but certainly is funny as it is.

If the subject of this piece is “How America Eats,” how does Suzan-Lori Parks answer the question, and what does her answer tell us about ourselves? We’ve seen that she answers the question not in one, but in many ways. The richness of her use of patterns of eating in her plays shows her remarkable ability to fill a single moment of a play with many kinds of associations; she is not limited to just one theme or two. In an overall sense, though, we can say that Parks uses food and eating patterns to illuminate a theme of disassociation or displacement. We in our society, Parks suggests, are disassociated from the food we eat, and in the same way we are disassociated from each other. Our displacement may be geographic, in the same way that the Venus is removed from her native land and dragged to the spurious world of Paris, and as countless people were dragged from Africa into slavery in the western hemisphere. Or we may be disconnected from each other by racial stereotypes, as she so powerfully demonstrates in Last Black Man. Or we may be displaced from normal, useful life by poverty, by pretense, by greed, by crime, or by broken relationships of many kinds.

Parks suggests that although there is truth in the popular saying that “you are what you eat,” it may be more important to say, “You are how you eat,” and the way we eat in America, she suggests, is distractedly, half-heartedly, with our minds somewhere else, our fragmented attention indicating our fragmented lives. A truly communal meal nourishes the individual soul and the collective soul of the community, as well as the physical body. Parks, by contrast, shows us meals that cannot be said in any sense to nourish the soul or the community, and of course as a result the physical body may suffer as well.

But if Parks takes our eating habits with utter seriousness, she doesn’t leave us without hope. After all, she has taken the trouble to hold her mirror up to our lives, and the richness of her imagination, the complexity of her dramatic technique, and the humor that survives the gloom all suggest the possibility of transcending the limitations she so forcefully presents in her varied and penetrating analysis of the ways we eat.

[Kirk Woodward is Artistic Director of Troupe of Vagabonds, a children’s theater company for which he has written several plays. He is also a preacher, a rock musician, an acting teacher, and a technical writer and project manager for the Visiting Nurse Service of New York.]

Pudlo Pudlat, Inuit Artist

Some time back, I wrote a profile of experimental stage director Leonardo Shapiro and his theater troupe, The Shaliko Company, for TDR ("Shapiro and Shaliko: Techniques of Testimony," The Drama Review 37.4 [T140 - Winter 1993]: 65-100). I had spent months following Leo around, plowing through his files and records, interviewing him and his colleagues, and attending rehearsals and classes. I had first met Leo when I covered the Theatre of Nations in Baltimore in 1986 and saw his magnificent production of The Yellow House, a play about Vincent van Gogh he’d composed with his company, and I interviewed him as one of the participating artists. After that, I’d kept up on Shaliko’s work so I knew a little about Leo, most pointedly that he took his inspiration from the theories of Bertolt Brecht and Jerzy Grotowski. Later, when I was preparing the TDR article, I asked Leo who his other influences were. At first, he said he didn’t know; he’d never thought about it. Then, a few days later, he handed me a list of names and works of art which he said were the influences or inspirations of his artistic and philosophical life. It was a varied and fascinating list, covering all the arts and some politics, and including some names and works that I found surprising in Leo’s case. I’d at least heard of most of the names on the list, but there were four or five that were unfamiliar to me, and one or two that I couldn’t find when I first looked them up. One of these was an Inuit artist, Pudlo Pudlat, whom Leo admired because of his “courage and openness.”

Some years later, because I found the subject of Leo and his theater work so interesting, and because I had so much unused material left over after the TDR profile, I decided to expand the essay into a book-length examination of Leo’s art. One of my first notions was to research the names and art works on Leo’s list and see what in them might have inspired Leo’s art and ideas and use that as a sort of reflection of Leo’s own work, a commentary, so to speak. When I came to Pudlo--Inuit commonly use only one name and the artist is internationally known this way--I found an engrossing and revealing subject in its own right. I fancy myself a devotee of art, especially modern art, so I pursued the story of Pudlo a little more extensively than other names on Leo’s list. The artist just interested me. Here’s some of what I learned.

First, a number of years after I did this research, I made a visit to Quebec, which is a center of Inuit art. The galleries all over the city show Inuit artists and there’s an Inuit art museum, the Galerie Art Inuit, a few doors up the street from our hotel. I learned some general facts about the whole niche that is Inuit art, which has an interesting, and I suspect unique, history. Since Pudlo’s part of this continuum, let me précis this chronicle before I go into his own story.

If you are my age or older, you are probably more used to speaking of Eskimos, but especially in Canada the more current, and preferred, expression is Inuit. (That’s the plural; the singular is Inuk, which means person). Eskimo, which is still used in Alaska, refers to several native peoples, including the Inuit. The term Eskimo is a foreign word applied to the Inuit and other peoples by outside tribes. Its most likely etymology is a Montagnais word meaning snowshoe-lacer. (The Montagnais are a group inhabiting the north shore of the Gulf of St. Lawrence in Quebec and Labrador.) In Canada, however, the word is believed to be derived from an Algonquin word that means raw meat-eater, and although linguistically this is less likely, the belief is widely held in Canada and the word Eskimo is considered derogatory and racist. In any case, the Canadian government officially recognizes the people of the far north, including Nunavut, as Inuit; the name Eskimo is seldom heard in the country.

The Inuit were a nomadic culture of hunter-gatherers well into the 20th century, following the fish and game of the far north as the ice receded, living in igloos (which means simply house and may be made of ice and snow, according to the image we have, but is also commonly built from stone, sod, mud, skins, or any other convenient material), and moving from spot to spot as the hunting, weather, or terrain necessitated. Traveling by dogsled across land and in umiaks or the smaller kayaks across water, an Inuit family or clan could not really afford to carry much with them that wasn’t of immediate practical value in their harsh life, so decoration was minimal, and artwork, even on practical items, was uncommon. What little there was was carved ivory or bone. A change occurred in about 1945, however, when the Canadian government encouraged Inuit and other native peoples to settle in towns and villages, learn cultivation and other domestic skills, and give up the nomadic way of life they had known for centuries. I won’t get into the socio-political implications of this change (except to suggest that it wasn’t entirely insensitive and cold-hearted as the world around the Inuit had changed and their subsistence existence was becoming untenable), but the sociological effect was profound.

The Canadian government saw that the move to permanent habitation in towns and villages left many Inuit without traditional livelihoods or even pastimes. This was mostly true of the men, as the women were able to transfer their traditional responsibilities of homemaking and child-rearing from the nomadic existence to the permanent one with little significant change (except, of course, that they now got their material needs from stores instead of the wild). The men, on the other hand, were the ones who lost their customary occupations. Looking around for something with which to replace the lost income and work, the government lit on art and established training programs and outlets for whatever the Inuit produced, even supplying them with the materials they needed. In what may be one of the rare examples among artificial cultural redirection, the plan succeeded wildly. I guess the Inuit had a hidden tribal talent for making terrific art, and they started a co-op to market and determine the prices of their work so that they wouldn’t be ripped off by gallery owners and dealers or, in turn, cheat the buying public. (That Inuit art museum in Quebec is run by the co-op, and all the galleries, from the high-end chi-chi ones to the shops in hotels to the tourist dives, all sold the Inuit art at the same range of prices.) Inuit art took off in popularity and desirability in the south. Over time, some artists became recognized and art museums began organizing exhibitions of Inuit works. Collectors, first in Canada then in the United States, began to buy the art. Whole villages lived off the art turned out in their community studios, some making it, some marketing it, some managing the studios; printmaking became a profitable concern. Over 60 years now, Inuit art has become established and while it started as naïve work, it now has a sophistication and dynamic that compares easily with the works of American Indian artists in, say, the Taos art colony area. In both cases, too, the themes and subjects developed from strict focus on traditional culture to an embrace of the whole universe around them--in the case of the Inuit, the Canada of the Europeans and the technology of the middle- and late-20th-century world. Though many Inuit artists work in a naturalistic style, carving animals or scenes common to the Canadian north, many others work in symbolist and abstract styles that draw on indigenous images and refer to the style of Inuit art that developed in the post-WWII years (there not having been a true indigenous precursor). The media used by Inuit artists has expanded as well, from simple carvings to sophisticated soapstone sculpture, painting, drawing, lithography, and all the forms commonly used by Western artists.

Pudlo was born on Baffin Island, Northwest Territories, Canada (now part of Nunavut Province, the Inuit homeland), on 4 February 1916. He straddled the generation that lived an entirely nomadic life and that born in permanent abodes of towns and villages. In 1957, Pudlo suffered a hunting accident which he dismissed as minor until the injury required medical attention a month later and was flown south for treatment. A few days after he returned north to recuperate, he was diagnosed with tuberculosis and went back south again to recover. The injury and the illness forced Pudlo and his wife, Innukjuakju, who had also been ill, to give up their nomadic life and they settled in the village of Kiaktuuq, Cape Dorset, in the spring of 1958 when Pudlo was 42. Cape Dorset was the epicenter of the emerging Inuit art community, established there only a few years earlier. Pudlo met James Archibald Houston, the Canadian southerner who was the prime force in developing Inuit art, and took up art himself. Though he made sculptures, he found carving difficult because of the hunting injury to his arm and by 1959 or ’60, his preferred media became watercolors, oils, and especially drawing and lithography. (Many of Pudlo’s works exist as both a drawing and a subsequent print.) Pudlo saw ten of his first drawings commercially printed in 1961 and he continued to make art for the last 33 years of his life and left an output of over 4,500 drawings and 190 prints in the end. His work is exhibited in galleries and museums around the continent and abroad, including MoMA, and his drawings and prints are still in demand. A few years after that trip to Quebec I was in Vancouver, on the opposite coast of the country, and I recognized several of his prints in the city’s art galleries. (One gallery owner was astonished that I not only knew Pudlo but that I spotted his work almost instantly. Shocked my mother, too! Thank you, Leo.) Pudlo has been the subject of many articles in art magazines and several books, which include reproductions of his drawings and prints. Among his other accomplishments as an artist, one of his drawings, Umingmuk (1970, the image of a huge, shaggy, but rather friendly-looking muskox), was reproduced as a 1972 UNICEF greeting card and in 1978, Aeroplane (1976) was chosen as the design for a Canadian postage stamp. Pudlo died in Cape Dorset on 28 December 1992 at 76.

The artist had a wonderful sense of humor which only expanded as his art became more elaborate, from the simple pencil drawings of his early work to his colorful later sketches drawn with felt-tipped pens. Pudlo not only worked in many forms but he incorporated in his art images of both indigenous subjects such as caribou, fish, hunters, and dog sleds, and modern, technological ones such as helicopters, snowmobiles, power lines, and satellite dishes. He mixed in Christian iconography with Inuit shamanistic symbols. Pudlo also included imaginary images alongside the old and new reality, all to create a portrait of his times and the world he saw around him, metaphorically and actually. In a way, Pudlo the hunter transferred his sharp eye and analytical mind from finding game with gun and dogsled to depicting life with paper and ink. In a broad sense, he was a documentarist. “Artists draw what they think . . . ,” said Pudlo. “That’s how they are. They draw what they think--and what they have seen also. But sometimes they draw something from their imagination, something that doesn’t exist anywhere in the world.”

Although other native artists had begun to incorporate the modern European world in their art, Pudlo was among the earliest who recognized that modern technology had long ago become part of human, even Native American, culture. He treated this encroachment on traditional life as integral to the world of his people, a permanent and everyday element rather than a temporary or unwelcome intrusion. (In contrast, American Indian artists often see Euro-American technology as a dangerous threat to be expunged.) Pudlo’s work is a visual evocation of the nexus between the traditional life of the Inuit and the modern world of Canada and the south. He saw, more clearly perhaps than other native artists, that there were now more snowmobiles than dog teams; more motor boats than umiaks; that Christianity was quickly displacing traditional shamanism; airplanes were commonplace; and telephones, television, and the Internet were bringing the south into the Inuit’s living rooms and keeping far-flung members of the tribe in regular contact with each other and the tribal center. No longer foreign or alien, the planes, helicopters, angels, and churches in Pudlo’s drawings had become part of northern life. It is this openness to the new experience, which he encountered repeatedly whenever he went south, that is fundamental to Pudlo’s art. Over his career, the artist demonstrated an endless inventiveness and versatility both in his techniques and his subjects. Pudlo not only saw that, along with the indigenous images, the formerly foreign objects had long ago become part of the native culture, he knew that by drawing these once-alien images, capturing them in various juxtapositions with traditional ones, such as a miniature airplane tethered to the horns of a gigantic muskox, he gained a measure of control over them. In Leo Shapiro’s words, Pudlo “adapts art to his incomprehensible life.”

That muskox image is in Pudlo’s Winds of Change (1983/1984 drawing; 1985 lithograph) which shows two Inuit and a dog (the indigenous form of transportation) bound together like mountain-climbers on the undulating, knobby back of a muskox, tied to one of the horns, and an airplane attached to the tips of the animal’s horns as if in a giant slingshot. Another plane is buzzing the ox--perhaps one that’s already been launched. It’s a wonderful example of Pudlo’s tendency of juxtaposing the familiar and the exotic--though what he found “familiar” and “exotic” were, of course, the reverse of what we southerners find so. (The juxtaposition still functions, however.)

Aeroplane, the drawing that was reproduced for the stamp, depicts a large, colorfully-decorated prop plane over an arctic mountainscape while seals lie on floes in the blue sea below. "This is like an iceberg or a big hill of snow,” the artist explained; “that is what I was thinking when I was drawing." Four anorak-clad Inuit stare up at the plane. Two huge icebergs rise up to the plane and two more figures stand on them as if to reach the plane. The airplane became a frequent symbol in Pudlo’s later work of the confluence of the old way of life and the new--but it was an object of interest, not of fear. Pudlo’s two worlds meet here, not in a clash of cultures but in an atmosphere of curiosity and wonder. "Whenever there is a plane,” Pudlo said, “we go up to the hills to get a better look at it." Not only did the artist depict modern technology alongside more traditional images in his art, he found it to be a beneficial addition to society. Having been saved from death or permanent handicap by being airlifted to the south for medical treatment on at least two occasions, he saw planes and helicopters as useful inventions. It is interesting to note that Pudlo explored the meaning of modern technology in other ways as well. In New Parts for an Inuk (1981), for instance, he drew an anthropomorphic figure with a light and antenna on its cap and a clock over its heart in a reflection of the artist’s own pacemaker, installed that same year. Some descriptions assert that the figure bears horns, antlers, and hooves (though what these are is more than open to interpretation, I’d say), all of which would be references to the game that Pudlo used to hunt in his nomadic days. While New Parts remains true to Pudlo’s documentary approach, that is, recording the world he saw around him, it is full of visual puns and fantasy, a self-portrait--the Inuk, or man, is Pudlo himself, of course--that shows himself in a highly symbolic and whimsical manner.

His investigation of the convergence of the European and native worlds in Canada is most vividly portrayed in North and South (1974) which shows the “white Arctic camp scene” of the Inuit north on the right and the “blue lakes and lush, green forests” of the European-dominated south on the left, each in a separate field surrounded by a border, but connected by a bridge-like arc. Pudlo asserted that the bridge demonstrates how cultures that were “split off” from one another “before telephones or radio” (i.e., technology), “even though we were part of one piece, Canada, . . . are touching each other--through CBC radio and telephones.” Having himself been saved from possible death from a hunting accident in 1957 by being airlifted to medical care in Western hospitals, Pudlo deemed the airplane and helicopter useful inventions for aiding stranded and isolated people.

One aspect of Pudlo’s art that is distinctive and makes him such a captivating artist (along with his whimsy), is the way one work carries over to the next. Within one drawing, one idea or image might be echoed in another, but each drawing can also be seen as a preparation for another one, with each succeeding work developing or continuing explorations the artist started earlier. He could take an image or idea, either Western or traditional, and experiment with it, looking for a way to depict it accurately. Images or ideas might be repeated differently or Pudlo might experiment with technique or approach, resulting in a series of drawings that explore and develop that new approach. Pudlo didn’t just document what he saw and experienced around him, he examined it, learned from it. He saw art as a kind of investigation, both for the artist and for the spectator: The muskox, for instance, a frequent image in Pudlo’s work (including Umingmuk, the print that UNICEF made into a greeting card in 1972), is not actually indigenous to his native territory in Nunavut: he first saw some being corralled in northern Quebec in 1957, and then he saw a herd from the air while on a flight from the south in 1969. He became fascinated with this strange, new beast. And like the snowmobile, the airplane, or the helicopter, this unfamiliar creature fascinated Pudlo and he attempted to understand it by drawing it. “If an artist draws a subject over and over again in different ways,” Pudlo said, “then he will learn something. The same with someone who looks at drawings--if that person keeps looking at many drawings, then he will learn something from them too.”

Staging Shakespeare

Having looked at Shakespearean acting not long ago, I’d like to reinforce and clarify some points I made regarding classical directing. Like actors, many directors, it seems, are frightened by the prospect of mounting a classic play. Some are intimidated by the language and poetry, others by the weight and heft of a play that’s come down through the centuries. The great German director Peter Stein has even admitted, “It was not easy for me to approach Shakespeare . . . because I’m simply afraid. For me he’s just a giant . . . .” And Ariane Mnouchkine, whose work I’ve admired immensely, says quite frankly, “Shakespeare’s such a mystery . . . . For me both Aeschylus and Shakespeare are gods.” Other artists apparently feel that plays as old as Shakespeare’s are no longer relevant or accessible to modern audiences. Over the years, I’ve seen productions of Shakespeare that suggest all of these feelings.

Many famous and successful directors have faced Shakespeare and recognize his power and complexity. A number have recorded their thoughts on directing Shakespeare plays. Though some couch their ideas in prescriptive terms, telling directors what they “should” or “must” do, their remarks are still worth noting. (Many quotations and concepts mentioned here are drawn from Toby Cole and Helen Krich Chinoy, eds., “Staging Shakespeare: A Survey of Current Problems and Opinions,” Directors on Directing [Indianapolis and New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1953], 403-440. They’re a tad old, but some things just don’t go out of style. Other sources are also quoted.)

Margaret Webster, author of Shakespeare without Tears, points out first of all that “The principles on which a director must base his approach to a Shakespearean play are, after all, no different from those which govern his approach in any other play.” Peter Brook provides no-holds-barred counsel in this regard: “To communicate any one of Shakespeare’s plays to a present day audience, the producer must be prepared to set every resource of modern theatre at the disposal of his text.” (‘Producer’ used to be the British locution for what we Americans call the director. ‘To produce,’ as you’ll hear below, was to direct a play. The American usage has overtaken the British distinction.) As with any other script, the director must learn “the mood of the play, its material and spiritual atmosphere, its structural pattern, the wholeness of its effect,” adds Webster. Polish director and teacher Kazimierz Braun, a friend for over 20 years, writes for instance, that whether you’re directing Shakespeare or anyone else, the first problem is “to integrate speech with action.” While Braun acknowledges that this is harder for verse plays than those with contemporary dialogue, the key for the former is to infuse the speech with passion. Of an early encounter with directing Shakespeare, Braun says:

I had the feeling that I was faced with an impossibly difficult challenge, and, at the same time, that the author was taking me by the hand, like a little child, and leading me safely through the labyrinth of the play. Trusting him was the best way to go. Unmistakably, he permeates the dialogues with the energy of action.

One aspect of plays that seems too often missing in Shakespearean productions is humanity. Literary scholar Harold Bloom establishes in his book Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human that the Bard was the first dramatist to portray men and women as characters who could grow and change and drew psychologically-based portraits of his characters (even though Shakespeare didn’t know that was what he was accomplishing). Peter Brook points out that all of Shakespeare’s characters are “fully resolved human beings,” even the “shortest character in Shakespeare,” James Gurney (King John, I.1). Plays are written for people about people, and, as director Stuart Vaughn insists, “The real task we have, those of us who try to produce Shakespeare for modern audiences, is to reach those audiences with the essence of Shakespeare’s human meaning. . . . We must try to find what he intended his audience to receive and transmit the same effect and intention to our own.” This does not necessarily mean that the plays must be modernized “because the director lacks faith in Shakespeare’s longevity,” for, as John Gielgud points out, “Great plays do not date except through the occasional obscurity of archaic jokes and unfamiliar wording.” Margaret Webster reminds us that “The truth of the plays is a timeless truth, and similarity of external circumstances no more than a fortuitous, though sometimes poignant, reminder that the returning paths of history have been trodden by many feet.”

“The challenge for the director therefore,” asserts Joseph Papp, “is to achieve . . . modernity without sacrificing the form and poetry of Shakespeare . . . .” For Franco Zeffirelli, this means that “[w]hat matters is modernity of feeling, modernity inside.” This is what the late Jan Kott wrote in his Shakespeare Our Contemporary, in which the critic and teacher points out that Shakespeare anticipated not only the circumstances of our world, but the modern dramas of the likes of Beckett, Ionesco, and Genêt. In Kott’s view, Shakespeare doesn’t need to be modernized because he’s already dealing with modern problems and notions within his own plays. Harold Clurman, commenting on Kott’s analysis, writes that the greatness of Shakespeare and other classical playwrights “transcends the limits of time and many cultural differences.” The director and critic continues:

In the theatre they reveal their contemporaneity only when they are felt and projected in response to our innermost needs. This is not to be construed to mean that they must be made “topical,” e.g., Julius Caesar as Mussolini, Shylock as an East Side peddler or King Lear as an example of latter-day nihilism.

The theatre is not a museum, a treasure house to commemorate ancient wonders; it is a vehicle for the manifestation of the joys and travail of our existence. The greater the scope and profundity of its revelations, the more universal it becomes. But it always begins with the now.

Though Papp’s and Zeffirelli’s exhortations may sound as if they’re calling for psychological Realism, there is a difference between Realism, the imitation of life on stage, and reality, putting truth on stage. “Shakespeare,” as Tyrone Guthrie cautions, “is only intermittently concerned with realism. In the main, he is not writing realistic dialogue or dealing with realistic characters or situations. Most of his characters have great reality but this effect is not, as a rule, achieved by literal imitation of life.” In director Michael Langham’s terms, the director must not be “so preoccupied with this truth in his small domestic terms that he overlooks and belittles his author’s vaster intentions” and have the courage to recognize that “important theater, almost invariably, can only hope to convey its widest implications by eschewing naturalness . . . .”

Ignoring this admonition, Langham thinks, leads to productions in which “[i]nsignificant, domestic themes are . . . made to take the place of the play’s major timeless issues.” Langham faults directors “inhibited by an overabundance of naturalism” who avoid the vastness of Shakespeare’s works “through shapeless underplaying” or “with a loud, empty rhetorical flourish.” Both cheat the audience of the full impact of a classic. Often-controversial director Peter Sellars insists, in fact, that we do Shakespeare specifically because we don’t “want to be so literal about the world, and the reason we apply poetry to these questions is because in the end it’s more interesting than journalism.”

Brook, who has no objection, he says, to “rewriting Shakespeare,” admonishes directors to look for “Shakespeare’s meaning” in the plays by going beyond the words to find “the essential living heart of the play--the poetic inner dream” and translating that into theatrical vocabulary. Now, I don’t go along with Brook’s advocacy of changing Shakespeare’s words unless you’re doing a true adaptation (though I do agree with Brook when he points out that “the texts do not get burned,” so it’s not like you’ve drawn a mustache on the Mona Lisa), but going beyond the words, not cleaving to a slavish literalism, should be part of the director’s prep: not just ‘What did Shakespeare mean?’ but ‘What is Shakespeare saying to us now?’ (This is akin to the dramaturg’s basic inquiry: Why this play, why here, why now?) The director (and, of course, the actors) must figure out what the play is saying to the current audience, then put that into Shakespeare’s words by all the arts of acting and playmaking. That’s what Brook means, I think, by using “every resource” at the contemporary director’s command. Not long ago I saw a brilliant Merchant of Venice that made use of computers, cell phones (and cell phone cams), and PDA’s on a generally high-tech set to make the point the director wanted. Not a word of Shakespeare was altered and it worked like gangbusters for me.

What Brook expects, I think (and since he’s done this himself, I’m probably right), is, if setting Merchant on Wall Street, or Midsummer in a circus, or Richard III or Julius Caesar in a 1930s fascist state makes the point you think Shakespeare’s making, then do it. That’s not the same as putting Hamlet on rollerskates just because you think no one else has done it. But if it says something about the play to your audience to paint a nearly-naked Achilles in black and gold psychedelic swirls--go for it. As a teacher of mine, Aaron Frankel, would say, paraphrasing Harold Clurman: “We don’t have Shakespeare’s phone number.” (He might have added, too, that the Bard doesn’t have ours, either.)

What seems to be operating in so many contemporary productions is a distrust of the audience. Director William Ball deplored that “very little has been done in drama to utilize the willingness of the audience to extend its vision beyond what it is looking at, and to help it to see with a larger vision--that is, to see with its imagination.” “The audience’s imagined spectacle can be counted on as more vital and real,” he insists, “because it arises from the creative participation of each individual.” Psychologists know this to be true from tests with children who overwhelmingly prefer toys that do nothing themselves--dolls that don’t talk, instruments that don’t make their own music--and so force the child to do the playing. Hiding safely in tradition for its own sake or exploiting the current faddish concepts disserve your audience. As a current promo for the Syfy channel says: “Imagine greater.”

This is no argument for producing “museum classics.” Gielgud says, “The classics, it seems to me, have to be rediscovered every ten years or so.” I disagree only with his time lapse; I think they should be rediscovered continuously. Change may occasionally be necessary, but it helps to remember that, as writer and critic Alphonse Karr said, “Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.” But, as the great actor-director remarks, this does require “approaching the play with real spontaneity and joy so that it has an absolutely topical effect.” More lessons from Peter Brook’s work include finding inspiration from any quarter, even the unexpected and unlikely, and eschewing old ideas and traditionalist approaches. He revived the playability of a reviled play, Love’s Labour’s Lost, by finding visual stimulation in the paintings of Jean Antoine Watteau. And when his prepared staging ideas didn’t work, he began to experiment, becoming famous for saying, “I don’t know.” Don’t be afraid, he’d say, to try and fail. “No matter,” says Samuel Beckett, one of the great dramatists of all time. “Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”

Similes, Metaphors—And The Stage

In a New York Times essay about two decades ago, Robert Brustein took on the issue of “the reinterpretation . . . of celebrated classical plays” (“Reworking the Classics: Homage or Ego Trip?,” New York Times 6 Nov. 1988, sec. 2 [“Arts and Leisure”]: 5, 16). Brustein divided this “deconstruction” into two categories: “the prosaic simile and the poetic metaphor.” A simile production, he asserted, simply shifts the time or location to an analogous one nearer our own, while a metaphorical one examines the play from the inside, “generating provocative theatrical images . . . that are suggestive of the play rather than specific, reverberant rather than concrete.”

Brustein cited world-famous examples of both types, like Orson Welles’s totalitarian Julius Caesar, a simile, and Peter Brook’s circus-oriented Midsummer Night’s Dream, a metaphor. I’ve recently seen prominent examples of what Brustein was describing: the Théâtre du Soleil’s 1992 Kathakali revisioning of Greek cycle of plays which recount the story of the House of Atreus, Les Atrides, a metaphor; this year’s resetting by the Katona József Theatre of Chekhov’s Ivanov to mid-20th-century Hungary, a simile; Nora, an up-dated Doll House by Berlin’s Schaubühne am Lehniner Platz (2004), a simile; and John Jesurun's FAUST/How I Rose, a 2004 deconstruction of Goethe’s classic, a metaphor. As you might expect, some were more successful (Les Atrides, Ivanov) than others (Nora, FAUST). Do the more modest and lesser-known productions avail themselves of these tactics, and are the results similar? I think so, and some Off-Off-Broadway productions I saw some time back, when I made a concerted effort to see a broad sampling of Shakespeare productions on New York City stages, indicate that I may be right.

In two of the similes I saw, there were no profound reinterpretations, and, in a third, one given only lip-service. The first two--an Italian-American Romeo and Juliet with Paris as a Mafia godfather and the servants as musical-comedy gunsels, and a yuppie Midsummer Night’s Dream with the lovers romping through the forest in designer shorts and warm-ups--carried their reworking through mostly by costuming. In fact, the company seemed to have fallen into a trap they laid themselves (however unwittingly): by giving the play a soap-opera setting and look, the actors all exhibited soap-opera acting, the superficial, shallow, and hollow performance style necessitated by the fast-moving production process of a daytime drama. The R&J included several “dese and dose” accents among the servants, but for the rest, nothing was reinterpreted to further a new approach or shift my attention from the traditional focus. The director didn’t seem to have relocated the story in order to say something unconventional about or through the play.

A second R&J, which I discussed not long ago, did assert a new interpretation. The director’s program note explained that he saw Friar Laurence as the witting catalyst of the tragedy, and ascribed to him an un-Christian reliance on the occult. The note provided some evidence from the text for this notion, and it might well have worked theatrically, not to say intellectually, if he’d followed through with it in his production. Alas, he went no further than giving the friar the prologue and the epilogue, having him do two parlor-magic tricks, and using a violet light when the Nurse describes the natural phenomena on the night Juliet was weaned. Beyond the program note, the production, tricked up as middle-class American suburbia, showed me nothing new about this play. While Brustein notes that this kind of simile directing is “at best a platform for ideas,” with the Capulet party a backyard barbecue and the Tybalt-Mercutio duel fought with aluminum bats on a baseball diamond, this R&J was nothing more than “an occasion for pranks.”

Though a comparison of the two kinds of reworkings will have to wait until after we take a look at metaphorical directing, on the basis of this small sampling, it’s fair to draw a few simple conclusions. First, simile directors seem to strive for familiarity, all three of these choosing contemporary America for their settings or costuming. (Nora and the Hungarian Ivanov, too, were transferred to locales and times that would have been immediately familiar to their original audiences.) Second, there was a similar approach to acting, with all three casts treating Shakespeare’s language as conversational Realism. Third, either because of this or along with it, all the actors endowed their characters with a minimal emotional life. (This was not true of the two international examples.) Fourth, these directors seemed to believe that modern American playgoers can’t understand productions remote from us in time or place; that the common, human problems the classics treat can’t be communicated unless they are portrayed by people just like us.

The simile production, which Brustein saw as an update, “depends largely on external physical changes.” On the other hand, the metaphorical production “changes our whole notion of the play” by probing “the mystery of a play in order to devise a poetic stage equivalent--a process considerably more radical in its interpretive risks, since the director ‘authors’ the production much as the author writes the text.” While acknowledging that “not all examples of this process have the same integrity of purpose,” Brustein nonetheless “champion[s] a more radical auteurism in directing.” Having examined the simile, let’s look at two metaphors.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream I saw (and discussed recently in another context) promised to explore the violence and animalism in all of us. Attired in tights and tee-shirts or leotards overlain with identifying character accessories--red shorts, a studded wristband--the mortals entered in pairs with martial-arts shouts and struck combat poses. During their opening lines, Duke Theseus and Hippolyta rolled on the ground in rough sex. “Tough guy” Demetrius, who, like Lysander, wore leather costume pieces over his tights, later rapes Helena to punish her for following him into the forest and dissuade her from interfering further. In the face of this, however, the acting was flat and unengaged.

The animal imagery was invoked by the fairy characters, all but one of whom had costume additions of pelts and skins and, for the men, went bare-chested. Except for one fairy, however, none exhibited any animal-like behavior.

Now humans with bestial characteristics and spirits with animal traits make a likely combination, and to explore human brutishness through the medium of a fantasy-comedy could be a very effective tactic. Theatrically, at least, it has promise. The director and actors, however, merely let the visual imagery of their costumes and blocking carry the whole exploration without developing any deeper performative aspects. The director conceived the idea but was either unwilling or unable to carry it over into performance.

Finally, in a metaphorical Macbeth, the cast and director made some decisions and ran with them. Determining, for instance, that Macbeth was in the hold of evil forces, not just swayed by the power of suggestion or caught up in a tide of action--other possible approaches--this company tripled the the witches’ appearances on stage. By acting as servants, messengers, and others and standing silently on stage during all the portentous scenes, the witches, symbols of evil, seemed to control events and guide Macbeth’s and his wife’s fates. There were three levels on which this scheme worked. First, as the messengers, the witches seeded and nurtured the plot. The second level was less directly involved in the events of the play: as the various servants, the witches’ presence suggested their control over Macbeth’s life and fate; they were always there, keeping an eye on things. In the third level, the director put the witches invisibly on stage in momentous scenes. They didn’t enter into the action, though they might echo lines or make sound effects such as the knocking that unnerves Macbeth just as he’s about to murder his king.

Further, the costumes were selected elements of modern dress draped with rough fabric to camouflage their silhouettes and allude to “ancientness” and “Scottishness.” The basic costume for the mortal males--the witches were far more fanciful--was a foundation of modern attire draped with rough, wool- or burlap-like tunics or sashes. The colors were muted, mostly charcoals, browns, or blacks, except for the almost blood-red royal sash worn first by King Duncan, then by Macbeth and finally by Malcolm. The modern under-costume suggested general character: the more soldierly wore combat boots and bloused trousers; the more administrative, including Duncan, wore civvies. Other modern accouterments included contemporary haircuts, military field jackets, bayonets, turtlenecks, eyeglasses, and flashlights. The lack of period specificity asserted that this play is not just about an 11th-century Scottish king; it is relevant to today, not lost in some past era, and to all cultures, not only ancient Scotland or modern America.

As Brustein suggests, directors who have an attraction for similes settle for an updated environment and may load their productions with tricks and gimmicks. Metaphorical directors, however, try to “capture the imaginative life of a classic.” A simile staging can be effective and even thought-provoking (the Hungarian Ivanov, which I have described in another post, was extremely compelling, for instance), but even when it misses, the metaphor production can be more powerful and exciting, particularly when the simile is used merely for “ornamental” purposes.

[Much of my discussion above was based on the Robert Brustein essay cited in the first paragraph. After publishing this article on ROT, I’ve decided to reprint Brustein’s original New York Times column; see “Reworking the Classics: Homage or Ego Trip?,” 10 March 2011.]