“The Sculptural Drama”: Tennessee Williams’s Plastic Theater

In his production notes to The Glass Menagerie, which appears in every published edition of the play, including the first in 1945, Tennessee Williams introduces a concept that describes the theater for which he was writing:

Being a “memory play,” The Glass Menagerie can be presented with unusual freedom of convention. Because of its considerable delicate or tenuous material, atmospheric touches and subtleties of direction play a particularly important part. Expressionism and all other unconventional techniques in drama have only one valid aim, and that is a closer approach to truth. When a play employs unconventional techniques, it is not, or certainly shouldn’t be, trying to escape its responsibility of dealing with reality, or interpreting experience, but is actually or should be attempting to find a closer approach, a more penetrating and vivid expression of things as they are. The straight realistic play with its genuine Frigidaire and authentic ice-cubes, its characters who speak exactly as its audience speaks, corresponds to the academic landscape and has the same virtue of a photographic likeness. Everyone should know nowadays the unimportance of the photographic in art: that truth, life, or reality is an organic thing which the poetic imagination can represent or suggest, in essence, only through transformation, through changing into other forms than those which were merely present in appearance.

These remarks are not meant as a preface only to this particular play. They have to do with a conception of new, plastic theatre which must take the place of the exhausted theatre of realistic conventions if the theatre is to resume vitality as a part of our culture.

Williams is referring to a drama that was more than just a picture of reality: he insists that his ideal theater make use of all the stage arts to generate a theatrical experience greater than mere Realism. Though Williams only publicly discussed plastic theater once again (he essentially quotes himself in “Williams: People-to-People” in the New York Times on 20 March 1955), from Glass Menagerie on, his plays are very theatrical: his language is lyrical and poetic; his settings, “painterly” and “sculptural”; and his dramaturgy, cinematic. His scenic descriptions draw on metaphors from the world of art and painting and his use of sound and light is symbolic and evocative, not just Realistic effects. In Camino Real and many later plays, for example, Williams consciously exploits non-Realistic styles like Expressionism, Surrealism, and Absurdism, which he explicitly calls upon playwrights to use in their search for truth. Indeed, Williams’s stage directions in the original script of Glass Menagerie called for decidedly plastic elements, including dozens of slide projections, film-like soundtrack music, and lighting dissolves and fades (none of which made it to the stage under Eddie Dowling’s direction).

The scholarship which has focused on Williams’s plastic theater principally examines its practical implications. Roger Boxill simply states, for instance, “The ‘new plastic theatre’ must make full use of all the resources of the contemporary stage—language, action, scenery, music, costume, sound, lighting—and bind them into an artistic unity conceived by the playwright” and describes the cinematic aspects of Williams scripts (with reference to George Brandt’s “Cinematic Structure in the Work of Tennessee Williams”). Esther Merle Jackson is even less detailed: “[T]he plastic theatre of Williams is not confined to visual structures. Its sensuous symbol also embraces sound patterns: words, music, and aural effects.” A more extensive discussion of plastic theater in the critical literature is from Alice Griffin, but even she doesn’t go beyond explaining,

To express his universal truths Williams created what he termed plastic theater, a distinctive new style of drama. He insisted that setting, properties, music, sound, and visual effects—all the elements of staging—must combine to reflect and enhance the action, theme, characters, and language.

Others who mention plastic theater in a similar vein, giving the concept import as the key to the poetic nature of Williams’s drama, are Matthew C. Roudané and Allean Hale, both of whom include it in more general discussions.

The only critical work which specifically uses plastic theater as an analytical tool, Claus-Peter Neumann’s “Tennessee Williams’s Plastic Theatre: Camino Real,” ultimately says no more about the concept than, “The purpose of this ‘plastic theatre,’ of which lighting, music, set, and props are essential elements, is to provide ‘a more penetrating and vivid expression of things as they are’ than mere realism can accomplish”—little more than a restatement of Williams’s own declaration in the Glass Menagerie note. In fact, the most extensive discussion of the concept appears in Robert Bray’s “Introduction” to the 1999 edition of Glass Menagerie which he edited. Bray cites Williams’s own journal, in which the writer had described minimalist balletic movement for the actors. In its simplest terms, then, a plastic theater is a theatrical theater as opposed to a literary (or literal) one.

(In the interest of full disclosure, there is one other study I discovered that employs plastic theater as an analytic device. It’s a 1999 English-language master’s thesis for a German university, Michael Grawe’s “Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire: Contrasting the Play with the 1951 Movie Production.” Grawe devotes chapter two to “Williams’ ‘Plastic Theater’” but he doesn’t add anything to the scholarship concerning the concept or the term itself.)

There’s nothing amiss with any of these descriptions of what Williams meant by plastic theater as he laid it out in his Menagerie note. Boxill, Jackson, Griffin, Roudané, Hale, Neumann, and Bray are all precisely correct—and in absolute agreement, as we can plainly see—in all their interpretations and the illustrations they invoke to show Williams’s application of his own notion. Though the writer never again discussed plastic theater in a public forum, he did reinforce his ideas, and essentially reify the analysts’ understanding, in private communications. In a letter to Eric Bentley, for instance, Williams chastises the critic for

a lack of respect for the extra-verbal or non-literary elements of the theatre, the various plastic elements, the purely visual things such as light and movement and color and design, which play, for example, such a tremendously important part in theatre . . . and which are as much a native part of drama as words and ideas are.
He further admonishes,

I have read criticism in which the use of transparencies and music and subtle lighting effects, which are often as meaningful as pages of dialogue, were dismissed as “cheap tricks and devices.” Actually all of these plastic things are as valid instruments of expression in the theatre as words . . . .

Earlier, as Robert Bray noted, Williams expounds at some length on what he calls the “sculptural drama” in an entry in his journal. Though he never uses the word “plastic” in the entry, he spells out quite explicitly the same basic notion that he expresses in the Glass Menagerie note. (Yale University Press, which later published Notebooks: Tennessee Williams in 2006, wouldn’t grant permission to quote from the journals, even the passages already published by Lyle Leverich, author of Tom: The Unknown Tennessee Williams, and Bray. Ironically, the entry in reference here wasn’t included in the published edition.) The Bentley letter was written in 1948, three years after the publication of Menagerie, and thus can be seen as a kind of restatement of an idea about which Williams has already written. The journal entry, however, dates from between January and April 1942 (which we shall see is just after he was a student in Erwin Piscator’s Dramatic Workshop and while he was assisting Piscator on a production), so we may regard it as a step in Williams’s development of the idea—presumably before he conceived the term “plastic theater.” Even without the name, itself, however, it’s clear that “sculptural drama” invokes the same theatricality that “plastic theater” does in the Menagerie note. Williams speaks in the journal entry of the lack of realism in the innovative form and asserts that it wouldn’t serve the traditional Broadway play. He describes stylized, dance-like movement and stresses simplicity and restraint in acting and design and all the elements of the staging. In fact, though he doesn’t use the word, he describes a theater that is, by definition, Expressionistic—where the emotions of the play are rendered visually or aurally on the stage—an artistic style he specifically names in the Glass Menagerie note.

In all the analyses, however, there’s been little speculation about where Williams got the ideas which coalesced into the concept or how he came to coin the term, itself. There seems, however, to be a connection between the dramatist’s plastic theater and the notion of “plasticity” as defined by painter Hans Hofmann. Williams had a pervasive interest in painting, even turning his hand to it himself, and he knew Hofmann from Provincetown, Massachusetts, in the early 1940s when Hofmann ran a summer art school there and Williams vacationed there with his circle of friends and lovers; they had many acquaintances in common—including artist Fritz Bultman, who helped bring Hofmann to the United States and who may have introduced the writer and the painter; Jackson Pollock, whom Williams met on Cape Cod and who’d attended some of Hofmann’s early lectures at the Art Students’ League in New York; Lee Krasner, Pollock’s wife and a painter herself who was a student at Hofmann’s school in Provincetown; and Williams’s dancer friends Kip Kiernan and Joe Hazan who both worked as models at Hofmann’s Provincetown school—and later Williams even wrote an appreciation of the artist. Hofmann wrote extensively about plasticity, already publishing in English as early as 1930, and defined space in terms identical to what Williams calls “plastic space” in Act 2, scene 2 of Will Mr. Merriwether Return from Memphis?:

LOUISE: Did you set something on the table?
NORA: I just set down the upside-down cake on a vacant spot on the table.
LOUISE: There is no such thing as a vacant spot on the table.
NORA: – Ow, but there was a space with nothing on it, I didn’t move anything, not a thing, not an inch!
LOUISE: The spaces on the table are just as important as the articles on the table. Is that over your head?
NORA: I’ve seen your pitcher of ice tea on the table and glasses for it.
LOUISE: The pitcher of ice tea and the glasses for it are part of the composition.
NORA: – The what of the what did you say?
LOUISE: In painting there’s such a things as plastic space.
. . . .
LOUISE: If you’ve ever looked at a painting in your life you must have observed some spaces in the painting that seem to be vacant.
NORA: I’ve looked at paintings in the museum, dear, and I’ve seen vacant spaces between the objects painted.
LOUISE: The vacant spaces are called plastic space.
NORA: Ow.
LOUISE: The spaces between the objects, as you call them, are important parts of the total composition.
NORA: – OW ?
LOUISE: What would a painting be without spaces between the objects being painted?
. . . . Nothing. And so the spaces are what a painter calls plastic.
NORA: Plastic, y’mean, like a plastic bottle or –
LOUISE: No. Plastic like the spaces between the objects in a painting. They give to the painting its composition like the vacant spaces on my table give to the articles on the table its arrangement. . . . .
. . . .
LOUISE: The articles on the table, including the spaces between them, make up a composition . . . .

In the novella Moise and the World of Reason, Williams specifically credits Hofmann (though Williams misspells the art teacher’s name) with the idea of plastic space, though the painter never actually used the phrase. (The 1969 play In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel, about a painter much like Jackson Pollock, also makes direct reference to Hofmann’s color theory.) Hofmann wrote of plasticity in terms of many aspects of painting and art, however, and what both men said was that space isn’t inert but alive, and that unoccupied space isn’t just empty but as significant to the work as the occupied space: “Space must be vital and active . . . , with a life of its own.” Note how nearly identical their language is. In his early essay “Plastic Creation,” Hofmann writes:

[S]pace is not only a static, inert thing, space is alive; space is dynamic.

In Moise, Williams’s painter character explains:

Space is alive, not empty and dead, not at all just a background.

Hofmann defines plasticity as the communication of a three-dimensional experience in the two-dimensional medium of a painting. His contention is that plasticity derives from the tension between the forces and counter-forces—which he calls “push-pull”—created by the separate elements of the painting. (The juxtaposition of empty space and filled space, for instance, creates this kind of tension.) The tension creates the sensation in the viewer that the painting breathes, even seems to move. Hofmann also believed that an artist mustn’t simply copy nature, but must create an artistically imagined reality which requires the careful and deliberate manipulation and juxtaposition of the elements of the artwork. I posit, then, that Williams married ideas he was already formulating with the language of Hofmann to create the term “plastic theater,” perhaps on the model of the term “plastic stage” of the 1920s.

This may be how Williams conceived the term “plastic theater,” but it’s not an assertion that the playwright took the idea of plastic theater from Hofmann—he surely put the concept together from several sources over his early years, including the University of Iowa, Erwin Piscator’s Dramatic Workshop at the New School for Social Research, and other influences. At Iowa, where Williams studied in 1937-38, the Department of Speech and Dramatic Arts required every student to gain practical experience in all aspects of production from acting to stagecraft. While the 26-year-old playwright was a poor scenic art student—he failed the stagecraft course, delaying his graduation until he made up the F—he dutifully fulfilled the requirements. Piscator had the same policy at the New School, where Williams took the Playwrights’ Seminar in the Spring 1940 term. The Seminar was chaired by Theresa Helburn, a producer at the Theatre Guild, and John Gassner, a teacher, critic, drama anthologist, and writer who was a playreader at the Guild. Gassner was a champion of disquieting, new theater writers and introduced innovative dramaturgical ideas in the Seminar. While Williams took only the Playwrights’ Seminar and therefore wasn’t obligated to take courses in the other stage arts, all students of the Dramatic Workshop, whether enrolled in one course or more, were required to attend the “informal talks” of Barrett H. Clark’s “The American Drama in Our Times,” which included presentations on “various aspects of [. . .] theatre as an art, a profession and a social phenomenon” by artists and professionals in fields as varied as playwriting (Maxwell Anderson, George S. Kaufman, Sidney Kingsley, Lillian Hellman, Howard Lindsay), design (Robert Edmond Jones), directing (Harold Clurman, Eddie Dowling), music (Hanns Eisler, Erich Leinsdorf), producing (Lawrence Langner), dance (Maria Ley), acting (Monty Woolley), and theater education (E. C. Mabie). Another required course was “The March of the Drama,” a survey of world theater history taught by Gassner and Italian scholar Paolo Milano. In this course, the students read plays from not only the standard periods of Western theater, but from the classical Asian cannon, the Soviet drama, and the European avant-garde.

The German director also emphatically promulgated his own innovative theories and his “Epic Theater” philosophy, with which Williams got first-hand experience when he assisted Piscator in the production of War and Peace in 1942. This production contained several aspects which may have foreshadowed some of Williams’s later practices, but most provocatively, it used the character of Pierre Besuchov as a commentator, much the way Williams used Tom Wingfield in Glass Menagerie. Techniques Piscator used in War and Peace, whose script, as adapted by Piscator and Alfred Neumann, was kaleidoscopic and panoramic, included a set designed so that scene changes didn’t interrupt the action, providing the production a cinematic sweep as one scene flowed into the next—not unlike Williams’s triptych setting for Summer and Smoke and The Eccentricities of a Nightingale. Enhanced by Impressionistic lighting effects and the film and projections Piscator employed on stage, the performance unfolded on a two-level Constructivist set with screens and panels, and with action that took place in the wings as well as on the stage. Williams would surely have called this “plastic theater.”

Furthermore, following the 1941 commercial failure of Williams’s Battle of Angels, Piscator considered presenting it at the Dramatic Workshop’s Studio Theatre and in 1942 he had several meetings with Williams to discuss adapting the script for the director’s Epic Theater. The German director didn’t have much regard for playwrights, treating them as just one of the many theater artists who contributed their talents to a production, and Williams rejected Piscator’s way of working, but he admired the director’s staging techniques. Ultimately, Williams’s play didn’t meet Piscator’s requirements, but it’s certain that during the process, the young dramatist got a private course in Epic Theater techniques. There was further contact, too: though Williams had vainly approached Piscator for a job reading plays for the Studio Theatre, he did end up working in close proximity to the director when he took a job for the New School in 1942 doing publicity for the theater.

Piscator’s theatrical approach and Williams’s own experience working at the MGM film studio in 1943 certainly affected his own work, which has often been described as “cinematic” and shaped by film techniques. (Williams loved movies, one of the few pleasures of his childhood when he would lose himself in them. Even before his stint with MGM, one of the novice playwright’s bread-and-butter jobs was an usher in a New York movie theater.) Another source for Williams’s non-Realistic ideas, however, was Eugene O’Neill, with whose writing and techniques the younger playwright was very conversant, having immersed himself in the reading of, attendance at, and study of O’Neill’s plays from as early as 1928. In that year, a touring production of Strange Interlude came to St. Louis and the 16-year-old Williams wrote his grandfather, describing some of the unusual aspects of the play—which, ironically, he hadn’t seen. Later, at both the University of Missouri (1929-32) and Washington University (1936-37), Williams was surrounded by O’Neill. Course readings at Missouri included heavy doses of O’Neill’s one-acts and the student theater, the Missouri Workshop, presented O’Neill’s decidedly Expressionistic play The Hairy Ape in 1930. When Mourning Becomes Electra opened in New York in October 1931, the Columbia, Missouri, campus buzzed with discussion of the startling new work, spurred by unprecedented press attention, including a Time cover on 2 November. During Williams’s time at Washington University, he wrote a term paper, “Some Representative Plays of O’Neill and a Discussion of His Art,” which focused on some of the unconventional elements of the plays. It’s also certain that Williams was among the many in his class who were rapt when O’Neill’s Nobel Prize, the first for an American dramatist, was announced in 1936. Exposed as he was to O’Neill’s works and techniques at this early stage in his theatrical education, it’s unimaginable that Williams wouldn’t absorb many of the older writer’s ideas about non-Realistic theater.

These multifarious experiences, surely enhanced by Williams’s private contacts with artists, performers, and writers of many different disciplines and styles—among his friends in New York and Provincetown were painters, sculptors, composers, dancers, and actors, as well as writers in forms other than drama—impressed on him how integral to theater all the arts were and how effective the non-Realistic forms of theater and art could be. While painters like Hofmann, who was an Abstract Expressionist (as was his Williams’s and friend, Jackson Pollock), were restricted to space, color, form, line, and the other elements of two-dimensional art, dramatists and theater artists had, in addition to the painters’ techniques, a broader palette from which to draw: sound, light, language, movement, and so on. The New Stagecraft’s “plastic stage,” as described in Kenneth Macgowan’s The Theatre of Tomorrow and practiced by designers Adolphe Appia, Gordon Craig, Lee Simonson, and Robert Edmond Jones, among others, focused on a self-consciously three-dimensional stage: constructed scenery instead of painted flats. This movement, of course, added the elements of sculpture and architecture to those of painting as techniques available to stage artists—and we’ve already noted that Williams had explored the notion of “sculptural drama” before, perhaps, he lighted on the term “plastic theater.” On this analogy, Williams, already working with a three-dimensional stage, wanted a truly multi-dimensional theater, integrating all the arts of the stage to create its effects. He didn’t want language to be the principal medium of his theater, merely supported by a picture-frame set and enhanced by music and lighting effects. While there seems to be a connection here with Richard Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk [total work of art] concept, Wagner was talking about the director and production, but Williams pushes the idea back to the playwright and the creation of the text. Williams wanted all the so-called production elements traditionally added by the director and designers to be co-equal aspects of the play and part of the playwright’s creative process. Instead of merely composing the text of a play and then turning it over to a director and his team of theater artists who will add the non-verbal elements that turn a play into a theatrical experience, Williams envisioned a theater which begins with the playwrights who create the theatrical experience in the script because they aren’t just composing words, but theatrical images.

(I did find an essay in Art and the Stage in the 20th Century called “Gilberto Clavel: Depero’s Plastic Theater” that speaks of plastic theater in the same sense that Williams uses the term. Clavel, a Swiss poet and art critic writing about a series of dances, Balli Plastici [plastic dances], designed in 1918 by Fortunato Depero, a Futurist painter, sculptor, and designer, states: “The Plastic Theater offers us the right to project onto one plane a multiplicity of means of artistic expression and to enclose them in a unity. It enlarges the visual horizon of the real world and leads things and objects of different species and origin towards a single center of irradiation.” The original essay, “Il ‘Teatro plastico’ di Depero,” however, was from Il Mondo, a Milan monthly, in April 1919 and wasn’t published in English until 1968. It’s unlikely, therefore, that Williams ever saw this parallel use of his term before he formulated his notion.)

In a sense, Williams was harking back to the original etymological meaning of playwright. The word, we note, isn’t playwrite—it’s more than a mere writer of plays. The Oxford English Dictionary provides one definition of wright as “a constructive workman” and we still have the obsolete noun in words like wheelwright, shipwright, millwright, and cartwright—craftsmen who construct wheels, ships, mills, or carts. The obsolete verb wright, in fact, means “to build” or “to construct” as we can deduce from the past participle, the only form of the verb that we still use. Wrought, according to the OED, means “that is made or constructed by means of labour or art; fashioned, formed”; before that, it meant simply “created; shaped, moulded.” (Interestingly, the word dramaturg—or dramaturge, if you’re a Francophile—which was another word for playwright before it designated a separate theatrical professional, has a similar etymology from a Greek, as opposed to Old English, origin.) In other words, Williams was envisioning dramatists who, rather than just writing scripts, wrought them from all the materials that were available in the theatrical lumberyard. Then the tension—the “push-pull”—among these disparate arts would create the plasticity of the theatrical experience and, just as the viewer of a plastic painting has a three-dimensional experience from a two-dimensional work of art, the audience of a plastic theater work has a theatrical experience beyond the mere image of actual life.

Today, plastic theater isn’t a particularly rare application. It’s what Meyerhold, Eisenstein, and Brecht were after, and directors like Robert Wilson, Richard Foreman, Peter Brook, and Yuri Lyubimov, and groups such as Théâtre du Soleil, Théâtre de Complicité, Ex Machina, Wooster Group, Mabou Mines, and Théâtre de la Jeune Lune do it all the time. Now, these artists aren’t strictly playwrights, though they function as auteurs, and the companies work as collaborative ensembles in creating their works, but that may be closer to what Williams had in mind than a conventional dramatist-director symbiosis. Certainly the plastic playwright would have to have more control over the production than Williams managed to get in 1944 with Dowling. Even on the Broadway of recent decades, however, there couldn’t have been M Butterfly, say, or The Invention of Love, or The Grapes of Wrath, or Angels in America without plastic theater. What makes Williams’s 1945 expression remarkable is that, first, he’s not often regarded in such terms even though he wanted to be and, second, he was writing at a time when straightforward Realism was the dominant style on American stages, and the Actors Studio—the creation, in part, of Elia Kazan and the nurturer of Marlon Brando, both part of Williams’s early, defining success—was the paradigm for American acting and production. (Ironically, there have been some recent productions of Williams’s first plastic play, Glass Menagerie, with an eye to his original staging directions. Two such productions were in California: one at the Pasadena Playhouse, directed by Andrew J. Robinson in 2000, and the other in 2002 by the American Conservatory Theater at the Geary Theater in San Francisco, directed by Laird Williamson.)

[This article is based on research I conducted for the “Plastic Theater” entry in Philip C. Kolin’s Tennessee Williams Encyclopedia (Greenwood Press, 2004). A version of this piece was published in Issue 5 (2002) of The Tennessee Williams Annual Review, on line at The Tennessee Williams Annual Review | 2002 Journal (tennesseewilliamsstudies.org). A bowdlerized version of the original essay was published, without my participation or acquiescence, as “Richard E. K***** on Sculptural Drama and Plastic Theatre” in Harold Bloom’s textbook Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie (Bloom's Guides, 2007). (I wrote about this “theft” in “The Case of the Purloined Paper,” ROT, 5 February 2010.)]

Frank Waters

There are many American writers who have chronicled the West, both in fiction and in non-fiction and sometimes both, but one whom I found especially interesting and compelling is Frank Waters, a novelist, amateur anthropologist, and literary critic who wrote about the Indians of the American Southwest in both non-fiction books and articles and in wonderful novels that put the reader into the mind and spirit of Native Americans. He spent his entire career, which spanned over 60 years and more than 25 books, plus articles, essays, and other writings, studying the American West—the actual region and its culture, not the mythical place and stereotyped inhabitants of the movies—and the American Indian and capturing them on the printed page. The Indians about whom Waters wrote mostly lived in the high desert of northern New Mexico and neighboring Arizona: the Taos Pueblos and their neighbors in Picurís Pueblo, the Zuni, the Hopi, the Navajo, and the Apache. In addition to the accuracy of his accounts, even in his novels, what makes his writing so compelling for me is the love he clearly had for the people and the cultures he depicted. He portrayed his subjects without prejudice, preconception, or sentiment and viewed them from all sides, juxtaposing one with another. Without rejecting the Euro-American contributions, he had immense respect for the native beliefs and codes of conduct and saw the benefits of all of them. As Thomas J. Lyon, a biographer of the author, emphasized, Waters was “a personal writer”: his “mind and force are clearly in evidence” in all his work. Whereas the writing of professional anthropologists and ethnographers is based on knowledge gained from predecessors and observations at arm’s length, Waters, a self-taught anthropologist, wrote only from his own experience, what he saw, did, or felt himself; he acknowledged that his writing, both the fiction and the non-fiction, reflected the people he knew and loved, the places he lived, and what he’d done there.

Part of the reason for this perspective is probably the fact that while Waters’s mother, May Ione (“Onie”) Dozier Waters (1869-1941), was a white Southerner from St. Joseph, Missouri, his father, Frank Jonathan Waters (1862-1914), was part Cheyenne (born in Long Creek, Iowa). This heritage was an immense influence on Waters’s interest in Native American culture. The writer’s father, who died of double pneumonia in 1914 when Waters was only 12, had taken his son to the Hon-Not-Klee (Shallow Water) Navajo reservation in New Mexico in 1911, an experience that was profound enough for Waters to write about it in The Colorado, a non-fiction book first published in 1946 which posits that the American West can’t be properly understood through habitual Euro-American rationalism but demands an intuitive approach that allows a personal and emotional outlook. This method was Waters’s signature and in the foreword to the author’s 1950 study, Masked Gods, Clyde Kluckhohn, an American anthropologist known for his field work among the Navajo, observed:

Although I am personally more comfortable with conclusions that can be reached independently by different observers using the same explicit methods, I recognize the profound usefulness of the warmth and imagination of Mr. Waters’ approach. His picture may—I believe it does—require correction in details of color, size, shading, and perspective but it is at least a painting with depth and color. The lay reader will get a wealth of acceptable fact and an intuitive understanding of peoples and cultures that he is not likely to obtain from our rather cold ethnographies.

Frank Joseph Waters was born on 25 July 1902 in Colorado Springs, Colorado, and died on 3 June 1995 in Arroyo Seco, New Mexico, near Taos where he had lived much of the last part of his life. He began writing about Indian Country in the 1930s, centering on the Four Corners where New Mexico, Utah, Colorado, and Arizona meet. In both his fiction and non-fiction, Waters’s common thread seems to be a quest to unite his own dichotomous heritage, Cheyenne and Anglo-American. (‘Anglo,’ by the way, is simply the regional term in the Southwest for anyone who’s neither Indian nor Hispanic; someone of German, or even African-American, ancestry is an Anglo in the region.) Waters’s fictional characters are often divided figures who find peace in reconciling conflicting drives. According to Lyon, “When Waters began writing, he found both an artistic resolution for conflict and a means to travel beyond compromise to coalition and eventually synthesis.” He didn’t dismiss the merits of Western society out of hand, nor promote a Romantic image of Native American life; he pointed out the beneficial attributes of each. “For only by understanding the Indian as representing one phase of our development,” wrote Waters, “and the Anglo as another, can we reconcile the tenets of both in a still higher stage as true citizens of our common universe.” This belief didn’t mean that Waters didn’t see the weaknesses and deficiencies of anyone’s belief system, and both his fictional and non-fiction writing is full of pronouncements about one culture or the other needing to learn something fundamental from the other.

The death of Frank Jonathan Waters at 52 when his son was so young left the writer to ponder his father’s native heritage. His mother and father had come from disparate cultures and Waters was left to figure out how to reconcile them. This seems to have led him on a quest not only within himself but also outwardly, as a member of American society with a divided background—one part of which was alien. According to Waters himself, his mother’s family, the Southern Methodist Doziers, didn’t accept his father’s Indian heritage. “My father,” wrote Waters, “with his dark skin and straight black hair, was of a different breed than the Dozier clan.” I think the effort to know both his heritages and how they fit together and how they didn’t was what gave Waters, first, his love and respect for the two cultures and, second, his clear-eyed view of them as well. Whether in fiction writing or non-fiction, which often covered the same issues with only the slightest variation in approach, this perspective endowed Waters’s works with an authority I haven’t always found in the work of Western academics who studied the Indian as a kind of “other” they were observing with clinical detachment. Waters, though raised in the Anglo society, was part of the world about which he wrote. He had become familiar with his father’s Native American religious beliefs and his Indian friends. We shouldn’t overlook, though, that Waters’s native heritage was Cheyenne, who are Plains Indians not Pueblo or Navajo from the desert Southwest. Though many Indian cultures share some common beliefs and practices, there are great differences even among the closest native relatives such as, say, the various Pueblo tribes. What Waters found, I think, was an emotional connection that rendered him receptive to a way of seeing and thinking that allowed him to mediate between the Indian view of the world and the Anglo way. He saw Anglos as emphasizing the factual and the concrete, while stifling the abstract and the intuitive, which the Indians accentuated.

Waters grew up in Colorado, attending Colorado College as an engineering student from 1921 to 1924, though he didn’t graduate because the classes didn’t stimulate him. He traveled around the West and to Mexico—and wrote. He settled in Los Angeles to work for the Southern California Telephone Company, during which period his first novels were published (Fever Pitch, 1930, and the first of a series autobiographical novels, The Wild Earth's Nobility, 1935). In 1936, Waters left L.A. and moved back and forth between Colorado and New Mexico, where he became friends with a prominent Taoseño couple, Mable Dodge Luhan and her Taos Pueblo husband, Tony Luhan. (Mable Dodge Luhan was a wealthy Buffalo heiress who was intimately associated with the Taos artists’ colony. After a colorful and much-married life in the East and in Europe, Mabel and her third husband, a painter, moved to Taos in 1919 and she started a literary colony on a large property she bought on the advice of Tony Luhan, whom she married in 1923. The couple entertained prominent writers and artists including Georgia O’Keefe, Alfred Stieglitz, D. H. Lawrence, Thornton Wilder, and Waters until Mabel Dodge Luhan’s death in 1962.) After serving in Washington during World War II, Waters moved to Taos in 1947. While in Washington, the writer published several more of his works including The Man Who Killed the Deer (1942), the novel considered Waters’s masterpiece, about a Pueblo Indian boy learning to become a man in a conflicted world of the Anglo culture and the native Indian. (Although Waters never specifically identifies the pueblo about which he’s writing, I’m pretty sure he based the setting on Taos Pueblo, perhaps the oldest and most traditional of the 19 New Mexico pueblos, with references to neighboring Picurís, the smallest pueblo in the state.) He published Masked Gods: Navajo and Pueblo Ceremonialism, an important non-fiction study, in 1950. The writer remained in Taos or its environs—Arroyo Seco is a tiny community nine miles north of Taos—for the rest of his life except for winters spent in Arizona.

One reason given for Waters’s settlement in Taos, aside from the magical attraction the land is believed to have for those who stop there—Taos Mountain is said to draw back anyone who leaves—and the natural beauty that kept artists like Georgia O’Keefe enthralled—was the comfort he felt with the tolerance of the residents (which eventually also attracted the commune-dwellers of the hippie era of the ’60s and ’70s) where three cultures—the Spanish/Mexican, Indian, and Anglo—lived together and blended their customs. (To be honest, there were tensions, even violent ones, among the different ethnicities, as well as conflicts with the hippies when they settled near Taos. In fact, the Taos Pueblo was at the center of several violent episodes over the centuries of European settlement.) There are actually a cluster of three habitations called Taos: in addition to Taos Pueblo (formally, San Gerónimo de Taos), the Indian village, and the town of Taos (whose colonial name was Don Fernando de Taos), the predominantly Anglo town, there’s also Ranchos de Taos, the old Spanish/Mexican village. I imagine Waters found a sort of symbolism in that for his own divided ancestry and in such local events as the town’s Fall Fiesta that paralleled the pueblo’s San Gerónimo Festival. The Anglo celebration was dubbed “tri-cultural” and included the crowning of three “Queens”: Native American, Spanish, and Anglo. (I don’t know if this fiesta still occurs, or how far back it goes in Taos history, but it was an annual event in the ’60s and ’70s when Waters was living in Taos County.) Despite some bumpy relations, however, Taos’s artistic and literary society was a cultural meeting place for Native American traditions and Euro-American art and thought.

Waters’s conviction that all human life is a single force is far more inclusive than the mere tolerance for different ethnicities and beliefs to which Americans ordinarily aspire. “Everybody belongs to the Brotherhood” of humanity, declared the writer. “Despite their financial standing, political party, church membership, complexion, or hair-do, there is no real difference between men—neither in bone structure nor blood analysis.” Not only are we all related beneath the skin, according to Waters’s epistemology, but, however hard it would be to sell that worldview to the Sunnis and the Shi’a, the Serbs and the Bosnians, or the Indians and the Pakistanis, he insisted we’re the same at the elemental level: “It is a well-known fact that every person, regardless of race, is physically reducible to the same amount of water, carbon, and chemical salts.” “We are concerned with the subjective record of the evolutionary development of man through successive, well-defined stages. Through these stages each individual, each race and civilization, evolves alike,” Waters believed. “For,” as he also wrote, “we know . . . that to refuse to perceive the unique face of man under the masks that cover it, is no longer a sign of force but rather of senility.”

Though he evinced great sympathy for the Indian approach to life and the universe, Waters didn’t portray Native Americans as “noble savages.” His writings reveal a compassion for all cultures, seeing benefits for humankind in all of them—if only we could overcome the deep divisions of our conflicting psychologies. The writer saw white Americans as destructively aggressive and declared that what we’ve done has been harmful. But what we might do holds promise, Waters foresaw, if we were only enlightened by the Indian way. The author, though, didn’t expect us all to imitate the Indian; in fact, he illustrated the weaknesses of both cultures: how through the “resistless tide of conquest” of the Anglos, “the very earth has vanished under the axe and plow, steel and concrete,” as has practically the entire Indian race; on the other hand, the Indians “were not adaptive enough to keep abreast of industrial developments” and so fell behind the newcomers, lacked “economic enterprise” and so couldn’t attain the “material wealth and power necessary for protection,” maintained “a smug insularity which prevented expansion and adaptation,” and because of their hyper-religiousness were absorbed “with the abstract rather than the practical.” Waters believed it’s possible, however, to fuse our contradictory perspectives into a single force in both individuals and humanity. We Anglos, the author taught, must learn from Indian belief to grow psychically, to strive less to exploit and change rather than accommodate and embrace.

The land itself was important to Waters, just as it was to the Indians about whom he wrote. (Aside from the general reverence all Indians have for the land, the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, where Waters lived, are sacred to the Taos Pueblos.) “[T]he first time I saw it on a walk up into the mountains,” the writer said, explaining his decision to live in Taos, “something about it claimed me.” He wrote that he felt “in touch again with the natural world.” Devastated by the despoiling of Pikes Peak in his native Colorado, he reveled in the nearly pristine state of Taos Mountain: “Anyone who spends any time around Taos can't help but feel the mountain's beneficial effects.” In Mountain Dialogues (1981), the author depicted the land:

Deep below the surface one can hear its slow pulse, feel its vibrant rhythm. The great breathing mountains expand and contract. The vast sage desert undulates with almost imperceptible tides like the oceans. From the very beginning, throughout all its cataclysmic up thrusts and submergences, the planet Earth seems to have maintained an ordered rhythm.

Waters, in Lyon’s words, had “the mystic land-sensitivity” mixed, as it was, with a Euro-American’s analytical rationalism.

Next to his advocacy of the notion that all people were variant parts of a human brotherhood, Waters’s most significant focus was the relationship of humanity with its environment. Rudolfo Anaya, a Chicano writer who was a close friend of Waters, wrote in a tribute to his older colleague after Waters died: “Frank taught us to see the mountain, the deer, the birds, water, trees as living.” This was a direct reflection of the writer’s sympathy with the Native American sense that the Earth is the Mother of all humans, that we were born of the Earth, nurtured and sustained by her, and return to her when we die. (Unlike Judeo-Christians, Indians believe that the spirit resides beneath the Earth and comes up through the sipapu, the place of emergence, at birth and returns below after death. The Taos Pueblos’ sipapu is the sacred Blue Lake in the Sangre de Cristos; Waters’s The Man Who Killed the Deer is seen as an account of the Taos Indians’ decades-long struggle to regain control of the lake, their “cathedral.”) “Man was not created apart from nature, as he thought,” Waters explained in Pumpkin Seed Point, his 1969 study of the Hopi, “but out of nature whose unconscious forces and instinctual drives still swayed him.” Of the Navajos and Pueblos of the Four Corners, Waters wrote in Masked Gods:

The Indian-American has never been separated from his land. Unlike us immigrant Euro-Americans, his traditions stem back to its prehistoric past. And he has doggedly clung to them, preferring to die out as an ever-dwindling racial minority rather than to adapt himself and assimilate others. Whatever he is, whatever he believes, stems from the very soil of his ancient homeland. He is inseparable from the earth itself.

This sense of belonging to the environment in which we live came to Waters long before he set foot in Taos. In 1926, back when he settled in Southern California, he took a trip to Baja California and, “having lived all of my early years in the high Rockies of Colorado, I was unprepared for the vast sweep of sunstruck desert with its flat wastes, clumps of cacti, and barren parched-rock ranges.” The experience of the contrast aroused his sense of place so profoundly that he was compelled to write about it, and “land-sensitivity” became the major theme of his first novel, Fever Pitch. In the novel, a young Anglo engineer, Lee Marston, ventures into Lower California and the emotional, physical, and spiritual effect of the journey on him is soul-shaking. What Waters—and Marston—had seen was that human beings have to be one with their surroundings, with nature. As Lyon described the book’s theme, Marston “had overcome, or been granted relief from, his baggage of white-engineer sophistication and rationalism and had been permitted to link directly to the world in unmediated experience.” This feeling of belonging to the land, being part of it rather than its occupier—Pueblos and many other Native Americans understand that “land was not tangible property to be owned, divided, and alienated at will”—remained with Waters for the rest of his life and appears significantly in all his writing.

Waters described the way Euro-Americans set about to “subdue the continent,” and contrasted that with the Indians’ sense that they “are not separate and alone” from the environment, but “all one, indivisible.” In the native shamanistic culture, in which “Nothing that any of us does but affects us all,” an Indian even asks permission of the deer he’s about to kill for food, the tree he must fell, the stones he must take for his cooking fire or his pueblo’s kiva. In his novel The Man Who Killed the Deer, Waters recounted a scene depicting this approach:

In the old days we all remember, we did not go out on a hunt lightly. We said to the deer we were going to kill, “We know your life is as precious as ours. We know that we are both children of the same Great True Ones. We know that we are all one life on the same Mother Earth, beneath the same plains of the sky. But we also know that one life must sometimes give way to another so that the one great life of all may continue unbroken. So we ask your permission, we obtain your consent to the killing.”

In Pumpkin Seed Point, Waters spelled out the creed:

The earth-mother had many children other than man: the stem of long wild grass that developed into a stalk of maize, the lofty spruce, all the birds of the air, the beasts of plain and forest, the insect and the ant. They too had equal rights to life. They supplied the needs of man, but they were not sacrificed ruthlessly and wantonly.

This sense of connectedness extended to inanimate matter, too, because in Indian belief, everything possesses a spirit of life that unites all of nature, including, as Waters put it, the “breathing mountains, the living stones, each blade of grass, the clouds, the rain, each star, the beasts, the birds and the invisible spirits of the air.” The writer expressed the Indian’s world-view:

The world simply is. Without a compulsion to change it, [the Indian] simply fits into his place in the whole as an individual whose sole aim appears to be a resolute self-effacement. His religion is communal. He has no conception of personal prayer for personal gain to a personalized, all-powerful deity envisaged in his own image. Ever in touch with the mystery, he acknowledges the spiritual essence in all things—the forests and the fields, the clouds and mountains, the young corn, the eagle, and the deer. Like him they exist to play their parts in the cosmic whole. Free of terror, the Pueblo does not battle with them nor abjectly make obeisance. Respectfully but unafraid, he secures their assistance by esoteric ceremonials that acknowledge his kinship with them.

As Waters explained it, the Native American considered himself part of an indivisible continuum of the physical world, not separate from it. It was all “one living whole.”

Another aspect of Native American belief to which Waters subscribed was the non-competitiveness of the Pueblos. This starts at the very base of Pueblo life: as Waters put it, “No Indian is an individual. He is a piece of the pueblo, the tribe.” The Pueblo Indian mindset doesn’t see an individual; they’re “collectively minded” people. “The Indians were communal,” wrote Waters, “obdurate to change, non-individualistic, and hence not competitive . . . .” Renown or fame, “‘rugged’ individualism,” aren’t virtues in Pueblo epistemology and several observers of, say, the ceremonial footrace of the Taos San Gerónimo Festival describe how the runners aren’t trying to beat one another but to give their best for the village. “It is the race of the individual against the limits of his own flesh,” observed Waters, “and it is the unending race of all humanity with the wonder of creation. No man wins. No man loses.” Competition and self-aggrandizement isn’t an element in Indian life, according to Waters. The Pueblo Indian’s “social life is likewise communal. There are no incentives to wealth, social prestige, and personal power—to keep up with the Joneses.” The writer explained:

The Pueblo sees no need for horizontal contact with the alien world without. The Anglo compulsion for lateral expansion—for more land, more wealth, influence, and power over his neighbors—is incomprehensible to him. He is rooted to a pin-prick of earth in immeasurable space. But that pin-prick is the whole universe in miniature. Nothing outside can add to what he has here; expansion can only detract from its meaning.

Hence his contact with life is purely vertical. That is to say, his strength to live, his power to enjoy and understand life, derives from constant contact with its invisible forces.

Thus the Pueblos built a society based on accommodation and inoffensiveness, not aggressiveness and competition, for as anthropologist Ruth Bunzel observed of another Pueblo culture, “[T]he thing that a Zuñi will avoid above anything else is giving offense.” Indeed, Indian religion and medicine is based on harmony: the body must be in balance within itself or it will become ill; the human being must be in harmony with nature and the universe or the society will sicken. The healing rites of the Navajo, the sings and the sand paintings, are entirely directed at maintaining or restoring the balance of humans with the forces of the universe.

(This abhorrence of aggressiveness and offensiveness shouldn’t be seen as an embrace of pacifism or non-violence. The Pueblos and Navajos, like other Indian tribes, engaged in warfare, used torture and corporal punishment on transgressors, and included physical mortification in initiation rites. Three times in the history of Euro-American settlement of the Southwest, the Pueblo Indians were at the center of violent uprisings against their colonizers—the Spanish in 1680, the Mexicans in 1837, and the Americans in 1847—that resulted in dozens of scalpings and hundreds of deaths.)

The non-competitiveness of the Pueblos and the natural environmentalism of most Indian peoples, which we can easily see are philosophically connected, are fundamental to what Waters saw as the principal contrast between the Native American way of life and the European society. As Lyon phrased it: “The conflict between the emotional and the rational, or between the passively celebrating and the aggressively dominating was the source of tension and energy in young Waters.” In his analysis of Waters’s novels, Alexander Blackburn, returning to the theme of the writer’s split heritage, explained:

A theme of major importance in all of Waters’s work, the resolution of conflicting dualities, possibly originated in the need the growing young boy felt to resolve the two sides of his own nature: his grandfather’s manifestation of the rational, materialistic, aggressive aspects of the white culture and his father’s embodiment of the intuitive, spiritual, patient aspects of that of the Indian.

Going back to Waters’s notion that the European and the Indian are two phases of humanity’s development, the author saw, “At each stage, tremendous conflicts take place. In the individual it is the inner conflict between instinct and ego. Between the Indians and the Anglos, as races and cultures, it has been the same basic psychological conflict objectified and extroverted on the field of war, economics, and politics.” The conflict in the Americas between the native Indians and the invading Europeans was the inevitable result of this dichotomy, alive not just across the land as the two cultures met and clashed, but within Waters himself—as it is in all humans. He knew that “the Anglos, with their lusty individualism, Yankee wit, and mechanical genius” had given the world great gifts: “the power to fly in the air, travel under the sea, talk across the world, preserve food indefinitely, undergo operations without pain, lengthen the life span.” But in our drive to conquer the natural world, to turn it to our service, haven’t we, Waters wondered, overlooked something equally beneficial and important? The author explained:

Man . . . finds himself in a devil of a fix. There are two parts of him. One binding him to his concrete, factual little world with a nagging wife, a scrubby corn patch that doesn’t get enough rain, no money in the tomato can, and a lot of nuisances as well as a lot of pleasure and enjoyable fiestas. The other attesting a greater world in which everything he sees has an invisible counterpart, an inner form, all ordered by laws which he feels somehow constrained to obey.

What Waters thought we’ve lost on our road to technological, rational domination is, simply, spirituality:

The monstrous paradox is that while we have created untold benefits for all mankind, we have impoverished ourselves spiritually in the process. In achieving what seems to be a complete triumph over nature, we have established a machine-made society so utterly devitalized that it is anticipating the synthetic creation of life within a laboratory test tube. What could be more reasonable, then, than to enthrone the machine as its deity?

As far back as 1950, Waters saw that this dichotomy is, in fact, perilous. The duality exists deep in our psyches and Waters suggested that stressing either proclivity is destructive. While the emphasis of the white culture on conquest and subjugation—of peoples, nature, the elements—can lead to rapaciousness, the dependence on passivity and appeasement that characterizes the Indian way of life leaves them unprepared for the inevitable technological progress and the encroachments that must bring. It was inevitable, Waters believed, that the “conscious ego of the Anglo” would ultimately dominate the “instinct of the Indian.” In his view, we’ve reached a crossroads in our social development: “Not knowing that we must depend on an equal interplay of both forces, we have become the modern machine-made Euro-American whose spirituality has been dominated by a cold mentality.” Waters warned:

Our own human rights menace the very concept of property rights on which our civilization is founded. Our racial psychosis self-isolates us as a minority from the predominate dark population of the world as a whole. Neurotically ill, obsessed by nameless fear of a kingdom of the spirit forever beyond our technological and economic mystery, we feel, for the first time, a lack of momentum, a loss of a sense of direction, the absence of a guiding faith.

I think Waters would be aghast today at the constant and overt religiosity our society relishes, even demands, especially in our political and social leaders, but he’d deny that that’s the same as true spirituality. In that respect, he concluded: “Man must transcend his own dominating conscious ego lest he impoverish his life to sterility.” If he saw that 60 years ago, where must we stand by now? Back then, Waters predicted a possible future:

Yes . . . Individual man achieves his dominating rationality at great peril. For the more powerful and independent his consciousness becomes, the more the unconscious is forced into the background. Till finally it breaks free from the dark, feminine principle with its emotions and instincts reaching back into the depths of time and rooting him to his past. Man breaks free—into a neurosis of anxiety and discontent, into a paralysis of frustration. And once more he must be led back to health and sanity, to his roots, to a harmonic relationship with all the living universe.

All the way back to his childhood in Colorado Springs, Waters had been drawn to the Indian religion of his father’s people. He’d fled (literally) the Anglo churches of his mother’s clan, never belonging to “any church or religious cult.” He began to sense “an invisible Otherworld we simultaneously inhabit,” a universal spiritual plane “where everybody and everything were somehow connected.” In Fever Pitch, his first novel, Waters conjured a symbol for the imaginary desert world the engineer discovered: a giant lizard with the face of a woman swallowing its own tail. (The book was retitled Lizard Woman, Waters’s original title, when it was reissued in 1983.) The writer later learned that this was the uroboros, one of humanity’s oldest symbols, representing the endlessness of time and universal oneness. This was Waters’s representation of the “invisible Otherworld,” his most fervent hope for the synthesis of Indian and European America, of which he declared:

One of the greatest lessons I finally learned is that this source in which everything is interconnected in one harmonious whole—the nebulous Otherworld I had imagined so long ago—does not exist somewhere among the splendor of the midnight stars, but within ourselves. Nor does it lie far in the future. Realization of it may come slowly or suddenly with our conscious awareness of ourselves, others, and the world about us. Any event, a chance remark, even a handful of sand, anything that leads to a better way of seeing, doing, or being, may provide an opening to it.

'Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished.

[As a sidebar to the prediction that Frank Waters made that an overemphasis on one or the other characteristic of the human duality will ultimately lead to a self-destructive society, I can’t help but consider three somewhat disparate examples of one aspect of this division. They seem illustrative of Waters’s dream of a synthesis of the cultural focuses of the two cultures, the Indian and the European. First, take the Taos Pueblo itself. One of the oldest of the New Mexico pueblos, it’s also the most conservative. The Taos Indians have resisted assimilation for centuries and don’t permit the encroachment of modern technology and practices in the village despite the desires of younger members of the tribe. Though Taos Indians who live in town or on the reservation that surrounds the pueblo itself may have phones, TV’s, computers, radios, dishwashers, stereos, and so on, any Indian who lives in the ancient village, which has no electricity, gas lines, water lines, or sewerage system, may not have any form of modern technology, including a cell phone or an iPod. As a result, the village today is almost bereft of actual residents. The adobe houses are mostly used as shops for the artisans who sell their crafts and art in the pueblo, though they mostly live elsewhere. (One artist I met there, who sold his prints from his mother’s house—pueblo houses are owned by the women—lived in Florida when it’s not tourist season in Taos.) Other family-owned houses are maintained for ceremonial use—the owners move in when there’s a pueblo festival or religious rite, but keep their principal residence in town or on the reservation. Taos Pueblo, for all its history and its status as a World Heritage Site and a National Historic Landmark, one of the oldest continuously-inhabited places in North America, is in danger of becoming little more than a Potemkin village and a tourist site.

[In Canada, I learned when I was in Quebec a few years ago, many First Nation cultures were near extinction because few members had remained in their traditional homelands. Young Indians had moved to cities far away, following jobs and education and the older members of the original communities were simply dying off. With no one to pass along the culture's traditions, lore, and language, many were in danger of disappearing as the members scattered to the winds. What saved some of these disappearing cultures was the computer and the Internet. Where actual communities had dwindled, virtual ones began to form as tribal members, in search for their heritage, made contact on the Web. Several tribes established official websites for the purpose of reaching out to their members in the diaspora and the notion of using the ‘Net to reestablish the connections at great distances began to spread throughout the First Nations.

[Finally, I’m put in mind of Inuit artist Pudlo Pudlat of Canada (about whom I wrote for ROT on 28 September 2009). In that profile, I wrote:

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. . . . 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. . . . 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 his own small universe, Pudlo was a living example of the kind of palimpsest or synthesis that Waters envisioned.

[As I’ve noted, Waters lived in Taos, New Mexico, from 1947 until his death in 1995. He was instrumental in establishing the literary scene there under the inspiration of Mable Dodge Luhan. Of all the Indians about whom Waters wrote, the Taos Pueblos were his most frequent, and I believe his most admired, subjects. He lived among the Hopi for three years, but he became friends with many Taos Indians and was protective of the ancient Taos Pueblo near which he lived for almost half a century. Taos Pueblo and the town of Taos undeniably played a significant role in Waters’s life and work. It’s no wonder: in addition to the natural beauty of the region, with colors that challenged every artists who tried to capture the landscape, it’s a fascinating place historically, culturally, and socially. I’ve now written an article about the Taos Pueblo and its surroundings for ROT (to be published on 24 and 27 May). I visited the area, including the Pueblo, a few years ago, and a friend lived there in the late ’60s and early ’70s. I read extensively about the town, the Pueblo, and the Taos Indians and I have plenty of notes. I’d also like to post an article on the Navajo healing rites to which I’ve made reference here (though I expect there would be a fair amount of time between the two pieces). Frank Waters will surely make return appearances in both articles, along with some of the experts I cited in “‘May You Be Blessed With Light’: The Zuni Shalako Rite” (22 October 2010). Interested readers should keep their eyes out for a posting on Taos in what I hope will be the near future. Let this serve as a BOLO.]

'Three Sisters'

Maly Drama Theatre of St. Petersburg brought its highly-praised production of Anton Chekhov’s Three Sisters to the Brooklyn Academy of Music beginning 18 April and Diana, with whom I’m sharing this season’s BAM subscription, and I caught the second performance on Thursday, 19 April, at the Harvey Theater. (Three Sisters ran at BAM through 28 April. MDT last appeared at BAM with Chekhov's Uncle Vanya in 2010, a production I didn’t see.) The production, which was performed in Russian with English supertitles, premiered in St. Petersburg in October 2010.

Chekhov completed Three Sisters in 1900, when he was suffering from tuberculosis and living at a house he’d built in Yalta, a fashionable resort city on the Black Sea. The play premièred on 31 January 1901 at the Moscow Art Theater, for whom the dramatist had written it, under the direction of Konstantin Stanislavsky. Chekhov wrote the role of Masha for MAT actress Olga Knipper, whom the playwright married on 25 May. (Tuzenbach was played by Vsevolod Meyerhold and Natasha by Stanislavsky’s wife, Maria Lilina. A week before the opening, the director himself decided to appear as Vershinin.) The MAT’s co-founder and dramaturg, Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko, said the play was “the best production of the Art Theatre.” The MAT’s Three Sisters débuted in New York in 1923 as part of a six-play repertory that also included Tsar Fyodor Ivanovitch, The Lower Depths, The Cherry Orchard, The Lady from the Provinces, and The Brothers Karamazoff, helping to introduce stage Realism and the Stanislavsky acting style to the U.S.

This Chekhovian tale, under the direction of MDT artistic director Lev Dodin (who’s made a few small adjustments to the text apparently), follows the Prozorov sisters Olga, Masha, and Irina, and their brother, Andrey, who were forced to leave Moscow for life in a provincial town, following the death of their father a year earlier. The family confronts the gulch between yearnings and reality as the play examines the emotional effects of the family’s loss of status and wealth while they come to terms with the changes in turn-of-the-century society. (One irrelevant thought skittered across my mind at one point: the play is set around 1901 and what neither the characters nor Chekhov could know is that in a little more than a dozen years, World War I will completely disrupt this life, followed by the Bolshevist revolution which will end it altogether.) A saga about the vital importance of staying true to yourself while struggling with the burden of everyday life unfolds as Chekhov eloquently provides insight into resignation, longing, and love.

Maly Drama Theatre began in 1944 in wartime Leningrad (now renamed St. Petersburg), performing in relative obscurity until the mid-1970s, when current artistic director Dodin and other well-known artists joined the company. (Maly in Russian simply means ‘small,’ usually in contrast to some other local theater named bolshoi, or ‘big.’) MDT grew to become an internationally acclaimed, multi-award-winning theater famous for challenging theatrical boundaries with imaginative productions by an accomplished ensemble of actors. One of the world's most respected theaters today, MDT was invited to join the Union of European Theatres and is one of only three current troupes to be granted the status of "Theatre of Europe." The company’s comprised of a 56-member ensemble, most of whom were students of Dodin’s at the St. Petersburg Academy of Theatrical Arts. Dodin believes that acting must be a "way of life" and his training methods have made MDT a leader in the development of theater; he often rehearses his actors well into the run of a production. MDT tours extensively throughout Europe, Australia, the Americas, and Southeast Asia with a number of productions, including a 20-year run of Brothers and Sisters by Fyodor Abramov, which won the USSR State Prize and Italy’s Ubu Prize; Alexander Galin’s Stars in the Morning Sky, which garnered Britain's Laurence Olivier Award; and Gaudeamus, inspired by Sergei Kaledin's story "Construction Battalion," which received the French Theatre and Music Critics' Award.

The Maly Drama Theatre's production of Uncle Vanya received two of Russia's prestigious Golden Mask awards for Best Director (Dodin) and Best Actor (Sergey Kuryshev, who plays Baron Tuzenbach in Three Sisters) and the Italian Critics’ Prize for Best Foreign Production. Hailed by Peter Brook as "the finest ensemble in Europe," MDT has found worldwide critical acclaim for this production of Three Sisters, which was nominated for a Golden Mask, Russia’s premier performing arts award, as best drama and Dodin was nominated as best director. (Two MDT actors, Elizaveta Boyarskaya—who didn’t appear at BAM—and Alexander Zavyalov were also nominated for their portrayals of Irina and Chebutikin. The production didn’t win the awards, handed out in Moscow on 16 April.)

Dodin began at the Maly in 1975 after an early career in which he started as a child actor and continued in the 1960s as a freelance director in the Soviet Union and Europe. While still doing guest directing around the continent, Dodin became MDT’s artistic director in 1982. Among his many individual awards and honors are the Olivier Award, the Triumph Russian National Independent Award, St. Petersburg’s Golden Spotlight for Best Director, the Stanislavski Foundation Prize for Excellent Teaching, and a Russian Presidential Award for Excellent Service.

Dodin’s Three Sisters isn’t perfect by any means, but it’s ultimately an astonishing accomplishment. MDT has achieved the reputation as one of the best ensembles in Europe and it’s well-earned. In this production, the rewards were not always easy to wait for, however. Starting at the top, though, let me say that the acting was an absolutely magnificent example of Stanislavskian Realism. (I can’t single out individual performances in this Three Sisters as it was one of the truest ensemble productions I’ve seen in a long time. They all get equal praise and equal responsibility for the show.) Many of the cast were Dodin’s former students at the St. Petersburg Academy and they clearly learned the lessons on building characters and establishing circumstances and relationships well. What seemed clear to me was that the actors really understood the play and the characters and were truly immersed in that world. As Alexis Soloski wrote in the Village Voice, “[T]he characterizations feel remarkably full.” If they were doing that technically somehow, rather than viscerally, then it fooled me. Of course, they've been living with this life and these people for two years now, and since Dodin continues to rehearse his shows even after they open, the company may still be actively exploring. But the final word really has to be that this cast is just a group of superb actors. (As former students of Dodin, they’re not unlike the original MAT company, who were also students of their director.)

I’ll get to the pacing in more detail in a bit, but one of the most salient aspects of this ensemble’s acting style was that it was unrushed. They weren’t slow and they didn’t add in arbitrary pauses; there was no studio-inspired “line-beat-reaction-line” performing. But the actors took the kind of time that would have been natural for a group of people at a country house where they’ve gotten used to having nothing to do. As a spectator used to more animated stage fare (or, worse, TV fare), I had to get accustomed to this more stately and subdued pace, and while it skirted enervating at times, especially early when Dodin was establishing this atmosphere, it became an inherent element of the Prozorov world. (The performance ran three hours and ten minutes with one intermission, and this pace was surely in large part the cause of the extended running time.)

As realistic as the acting was, the directing wasn’t wholly of that style. In fact, there were strong aspects of Expressionism in Dodin’s staging, as he isolated actors or groups of actors and made them remain in place, often with little movement, for minutes at a time, even whole scenes. Even when there were several characters together, they looked out front as if searching the horizon for some sign of life coming to them. This heightened the times when two actors actually connected to one another, making the brief connection seem all that much more significant and momentarily stronger. It wasn’t a casual occurrence, the way other people might just glance at their companions without registering much contact or conveying much meaning in their look. The same was true of touches in Dodin’s staging—and the two passionate kisses he added to Chekhov’s performance text were almost blistering when they occurred in act two. This expressionistic atmosphere was enhanced by the subdued palette employed by Alexander Borovsky in his sets and costumes and the crepuscular lighting designed by Damir Ismagilov.

The sense of isolation was extended to the whole production. There’s no evidence that the village is anywhere near the house or that there are other dwellings in sight. The actors sometimes entered or exited though the auditorium, a long distance for a cross, enhancing the sense that there’s a great distance between the Prozorov house and the rest of the world. When the fire comes in act two, we see nothing, not even a glow in the distance. It’s as if the Prozorov house is on an island cut off from even the sliver of society the backwater town might offer. It’s a kind of anti-Brigadoon.

There was also considerable comedy in Dodin’s untraditional interpretation of Chekhov’s study of desperation and loneliness. (Indeed, the playwright didn’t call his plays “dramas”; he labeled them “comedies,” though they are seldom staged that way.) The director added a pillow fight, a gag beard, a huge shlyapa (fur hat), tuneless and annoying whistling, and a chorus or two of “Ta-Ra-Ra-Boom-Dee-Ay.” The humor just seemed to heighten the bleakness of this Chekhovian world, in the same way as the yellow light from inside the house made the grayness outside seem more oppressive.

The set design may have been the most expressionistic element in the production, or at least the most visibly manifested. Borovsky conceived a bleak façade of the Prozorov house as the dominant component of the setting, with a flat, undecorated, and unplanted terrace before it, with a four-foot-high flight of steps leading down to the ground level. (Many of the scenes are staged on those steps, boxing in the actors for an even greater sense of separation.) The façade reached from the stage floor to the proscenium arch, completely blocking the stage opening upstage of it, but there were windows cut out on two stories and a cut-out doorway under a peaked, wooden canopy. (The doorway seemed narrow and low, as if it were intentionally hard to get in or out of the house.) In the New York Times, Charles Isherwood described the openings as suggestive of “hollowed-out eyes,” but another image came to me: a painting by Edward Hopper, with the mystery and vague ominousness they convey when he depicts someone through a window, often lonely and isolated even when in the company of someone else. Hopper has more color in his paintings than Borovsky used in the Three Sisters set, but the feeling of glimpsing through the windows and not really knowing what’s going on in there was the same for me. Borovsky even also used bright indoor lighting, seen behind the dun-colored façade through the open window holes, to contrast with the dimmer outdoors the way Hopper does in his canvases. (I thought specifically of Nighthawks, Hopper’s 1942 portrayal of three patrons and a waiter in a cafeteria at what seems to be early evening from the shadows outside, assembled near one another but all still alone and separate. Back in 2007, I saw a Hopper exhibit in Washington on which I wrote a brief report and prophetically, I observed that “there's a strange kind of theatricality in Hopper's paintings—not action or drama, but his interiors especially look like stage sets, a kind of set designer's rendering.” Maybe Borovsky thinks so, too.)

The house façade was remarkable for another attribute: it moved. Like one of those shrinking rooms in some horror movies, the flat front of the house moved downstage a few feet on several occasions, notably at the start of the second act, not only increasing its ominous presence, this large, hollow (there’s no interior) prison for the Prozorovs and their circle, but decreasing the small plot of free space down front. If the environment of Dodin and Borovsky’s Three Sisters was claustrophobic when it began, it got even more so until the house receded again near the end of the play. It wasn’t as if the scene was welcoming to start with—the house was drab and dark with those hollow windows, almost like a derelict, and the front terrace is barren and characterless as if there wasn’t even plant life here—but the looming mud-brown façade and the shrinking open space increased the feeling of desolation. It’s no wonder that the Prozorov women yearn so obsessively for life in Moscow, even if it’s a chimerical vision. (We know that, even if they manage to get there, Moscow isn’t such a glittering place when we meet Colonel Vershinin. He’s a Muscovite—and as dull as dishwater.)

It took me several days of thinking about the set design to devise any kind of explanation. I didn’t find it immediately comprehensible while I was watching Three Sisters and, because it was such a prominent part of the production (David Sheward in Back Stage said, “Alexander Borovsky's suggestive set becomes a character itself”), I kept wondering what Dodin and Borovsky’s point was. My attempt here may not be complete or even accurate, but this is what I came up with. Another difficulty (which is not to say either ‘mistake’ or ‘problem,’ as I hope to explain) was the long first scene of the play during which the characters all talk incessantly about not having anything to occupy them, neither work nor social and cultural pursuits. (As if to echo our presidential campaign, one character states, “I have never worked a day in my life!”) As Chekhov’s dialogue keeps reminding us, these people are idle (even the army officers, which struck me as especially noteworthy), and Dodin gave the actors nothing to do, either. (It occurs to me that no one in the play even smoked, an activity actors used to love because there’s so much a character can do with a cigarette, cigar, or pipe. A Russian papirosa is especially loaded with potential business.) Except for going into or coming out of the house, they practically didn’t move about the blasted heath of a front yard.

Diana said she found this boring, though the performance was redeemed later for her, and suggested that Dodin should have had the characters play cards. It’s an unproductive activity, she pointed out, and we know that later Andrey gets into debt from gambling. Playing cards would have given the actors something to do on stage even though it didn’t actually accomplish anything. I agreed that the director’s choice not to have any stage business for the cast during the scene was a chancy decision because it was boring and could alienate the audience irretrievably. It seemed to me, however, that providing any activity like card-playing would subvert the theatrical and dramatic point of enforced inactivity—that the people in this play, as bored as they were, couldn’t even invent something to do. Dodin elected to brave the possibility of losing the audience—this is what I meant by the rewards of the production being sometimes hard to wait for—by choosing not to let the characters do anything at all. If that was a mistake—and I’m not sure, given the evidence of the rest of the production, that it was (a friend to whom I described this dilemma said Dodin “has courage”)—I don’t know what a good solution would be. I’m sure, however, that having the characters play cards is not correct, even though I couldn’t get Diana to understand that in the context of staging, unproductive activity is not equivalent to inactivity. In acting, doing something, even if it accomplishes nothing in the end, isn’t the same as doing nothing.

(By the way, I must note here that the problem wasn’t with the actors. Possibly the hardest thing an actor has to do on stage is to do nothing—actors love business, hence the attraction to smoking—but this company did idleness excellently. They were consistently and thoroughly in the moment, as Stanislavskians say, even if they were just sitting leaning against the walls of the staircase. If there was a problem, it was Dodin’s to solve, not the actors’.)

Now, I said I’d touch on the pacing of the production, so let me get to that. I tried to explain earlier that the actors took their time the way actual people might in the play’s circumstances—an unrelieved lassitude. The three hours of the play was filled with life (even if it was inactive); there were no Pinteresque pauses or long reactions, no attenuated scenes but, in contrast, say, to the Cheek by Jowl performances I’ve seen, no actors speeded up their work to move things along for theatrical reasons (see my report on ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore, published on ROT on 4 April). I wouldn’t call it slow as much as deliberate or measured. It wasn’t a manifestation of thoughtfulness or reflection, but simply a slow life, oppressive perhaps but also just unhurried. It’s the country, after all, not fast-paced Moscow. I said also that it took a few minutes to get accustomed to this performance pace, exacerbated as it was by that inactive first scene, but once my rhythm synched up with the actors’, it was intriguing both theatrically (I got to see what the actors were doing because I had time to watch them) and dramatically. It was also stunning to see these actors hold onto their characters, business, inner lives, and all even if they had to maintain them through the longer scenes. If an actor gets to move on from one moment to the next quickly, without dwelling on one for long, there’s less chance of making a mistake, losing sight of something, and if she slips, it’s over fast and she’s on to the next moment. Theater usually moves faster than real life; Three Sisters didn’t—or didn’t seem to. An actor has to be more grounded, more anchored, I think, to move at the speed of life—especially turn-of-the-century provincial life. Like that opening scene, this decision was a risk, too. I think it paid off, and from the audience’s reaction—considerable laughter, especially in act one; a standing ovation; and several extra curtain calls—I wasn’t alone. (The performances were nearly sold out before BAM sent out the announcement—our seats were considered obstructed, though they were really just far away at the rear of the mezzanine—and no one left at intermission as far as I could see. I even checked a bit because I’d hoped we could move down a few rows.)

The press seems to have been just as impressed as I was. Isherwood in the Times called the production “compassionate” and “richly acted” and characterized Dodin’s staging as “a surprisingly fluid mixture of delicacy and bold, almost stylized expressionism.” He described the performances as “emotionally vibrant” and “precisely detailed.” Sheward called Dodin’s “searing production” of Chekhov’s classic “a dreamlike version” in Back Stage. This Three Sisters, said Voice reviewer Soloski, is “a mischievous and lively production,” and in New York magazine, Scott Brown explained, “The company restores an urgent, gut-level anguish to Chekhov’s terrarium of provincial discontent, delusion, and paralysis . . . .” In contrast, Elisabeth Vincentelli called the MDT Three Sisters “stark, slow and grim,” and warned, “It’s a respectable approach, but it requires patience.”

Vincentelli concluded her notice by saying, “This opaque, demanding production isn’t for beginners,” and I’d agree to a certain extent. She means this a pretty stiff warning, but I’d suggest only that MDT’s Three Sisters is a sophisticated enough theater experience that it takes not only open-mindedness and patience, but a palate sufficiently practiced to look beyond flash and, these days, stage effects, and see something we seldom get to see much now: the love and glory of the art of theater itself. This cast isn’t in the entertainment business—they’re in the art business. I don’t mean that as a snobbish panegyric for high theater art, I mean it as a reminder that we sometimes lose sight of where this all started. There’s not a thing wrong with good entertainment. I like The Boyfriend and Once Upon a Mattress. But we get so used to that kind of fare (not to mention the influence on our understanding of theater that comes from television’s 23- or 46-minute attention spans doled out in ten-minute chunks. Dodin and MDT don’t work in that medium. According to Barbara Chai in a Wall Street Journal interview with the director, “[O]ften in theater, you see a mutual tranquility going on” and, Chai says, Dodin believes that “the essence of theater is an inborn ‘intranquility.’” Audiences at Three Sisters need to be prepared to feel insecure—and to relish it for much of the three hours. For that reason, it’s not for beginners. On the other hand, it may be that a true beginner, someone who hasn’t become inured to the 21st-century theater world yet, would experience this Three Sisters differently from one of us old-timers—like Ilya in Never on Sunday, whose ingrained naïveté informed her experience of Greek tragedy. Maybe we need to get back to that, at least a little.

[I don’t normally do this, but because I didn’t single out actors to appraise on my report of MDT’s Three Sisters, I’m going append the cast list here, just to acknowledge this excellent company.

Alexander Bykovsky (Andrey Prozorov), Ekaterina Kleopina (Natasha), Irina Tychinina (Olga), Elena Kalinina (Masha), Ekaterina Tarasova (Irina), Sergey Vlasov (Feodor Kulygin), Igor Chernevich (Alexander Vershinin), Sergey Kuryshev (Nicolai Tuzenbach), Alexander Koshkarev (Vassili Soleny), Alexander Zavyalov (Ivan Chebutikin), Danila Shevchenko (Alexey Fedotik), Stanislav Nikolsky (Vladimir Rode), Sergey Kozyrev (Ferapont), Natalia Akimova (Anfisa), Elena Solomonova (Maid) and Anatoly Kolibyanov (Soldier).]

World Theatre Day 2012

[The statement below is from the website of ITI, the International Theatre Institute. ITI, an NGO in formal associate relations with the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, was officially inaugurated during the meeting of its first World Congress in Prague in 1948, organized on the initiative of UNESCO and a group of international theater experts. ITI’s charter objectives are: To promote international exchange of knowledge and practice in the domain of the performing arts; to stimulate creation and increase cooperation among theater people; to increase public awareness of the need to take artistic creation into consideration in the domain of Development; to deepen mutual understanding and contribute to the consolidation of peace and friendship between peoples; to join in the defence of the ideals and aims of UNESCO; and to combat all forms of racism or social and political discrimination. To further its goals and especially to spread the idea of theater as a bridge-builder for peace and mutual understanding, in 1961 the ITI created World Theatre Day, celebrated annually on 27 March. Each year the Executive Council of the ITI selects a message author and circulates the international address all over the world. The message is translated into more than 20 languages.]

World Theatre Day was created in 1961 by the International Theatre Institute (ITI). It is celebrated annually on the 27th March by ITI Centers and the international theatre community. Various national and international theatre events are organized to mark this occasion. One of the most important of these is the circulation of the World Theatre Day International Message through which at the invitation of ITI, a figure of world stature shares his or her reflections on the theme of Theatre and a Culture of Peace. The first World Theatre Day International Message was written by Jean Cocteau (France) in 1962.

It was first in Helsinki, and then in Vienna at the 9th World Congress of the ITI in June 1961 that President Arvi Kivimaa proposed on behalf of the Finnish Centre of the International Theatre Institute that a World Theatre Day be instituted. The proposal, backed by the Scandinavian centers, was carried with acclamation. Ever since, each year on the 27th March (date of the opening of the 1962 "Theatre of Nations" season in Paris), World Theatre Day has been celebrated in many and varied ways by ITI National Centers of which there are now almost 100 throughout the world.

Each year a figure outstanding in theatre or a person outstanding in heart and spirit from another field, is invited to share his or her reflections on theatre and international harmony. What is known as the International Message is translated into more than 20 languages, read for tens of thousands of spectators before performances in theatres throughout the world and printed in hundreds of daily newspapers. Colleagues in the audio-visual field lend a fraternal hand, more than a hundred radio and television stations transmitting the Message to listeners in all corners of the five continents.

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2012 WORLD THEATRE DAY MESSAGE

World Theatre Day is an opportunity to celebrate Theatre in all its myriad forms. Theatre is a source of entertainment and inspiration and has the ability to unify the many diverse cultures and peoples that exist throughout the world. But theatre is more than that and also provides opportunities to educate and inform.

Theatre is performed throughout the world and not always in a traditional theatre setting. Performances can occur in a small village in Africa, next to a mountain in Armenia, on a tiny island in the Pacific. All it needs is a space and an audience. Theatre has the ability to make us smile, to make us cry, but should also make us think and reflect.

Theatre comes about through team work. Actors are the people who are seen, but there is an amazing set of people who are not seen. They are equally as important as the actors and their differing and specialist skills make it possible for a production to take place. They too must share in any triumphs and successes that may hopefully occur.

March 27 is always the official World Theatre Day. In many ways every day should be considered a theatre day, as we have a responsibility to continue the tradition to entertain, to educate and to enlighten our audiences, without whom we couldn’t exist.

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INTERNATIONAL MESSAGE BY JOHN MALKOVICH

[On March 22, 2012, John Malkovich delivered his international message at UNESCO in Paris at a gala event that included readings of play excerpts with Malkovich and other theatre artists.]

I'm honored to have been asked by the International Theatre Institute ITI at UNESCO to give this greeting commemorating the 50th anniversary of World Theatre Day. I will address my brief remarks to my fellow theatre workers, peers and comrades.

May your work be compelling and original. May it be profound, touching, contemplative, and unique. May it help us to reflect on the question of what it means to be human, and may that reflection be blessed with heart, sincerity, candor, and grace. May you overcome adversity, censorship, poverty and nihilism, as many of you will most certainly be obliged to do. May you be blessed with the talent and rigor to teach us about the beating of the human heart in all its complexity, and the humility and curiosity to make it your life's work. And may the best of you – for it will only be the best of you, and even then only in the rarest and briefest moments – succeed in framing that most basic of questions, "how do we live?" Godspeed.

—John Malkovich

[John Malkovich is a founding member of Steppenwolf Theatre Company in Chicago and has worked on 33 productions with the company since 1976. In 1983 he won an Obie for his performance in Sam Shepard’s True West. The following year, he appeared with Dustin Hoffman in the Broadway revival of Death of a Salesman, which earned him an Emmy in 1985 when it was made into a television film. He rose to fame in cinema with his interpretation of Valmont in Dangerous Liaisons directed by Stephen Frears from Christopher Hampton’s stage script, alongside Michelle Pfeiffer and Glenn Close. After this role he acted in more than 70 movies internationally, receiving Academy Award nominations for Places in the Heart and In the Line of Fire and playing a version of himself in the films Adaptation and Being John Malkovich. He has periodically returned to Chicago to act and direct, and was recently seen in the international tour of The Infernal Comedy: Confessions of a Serial Killer. This production traveled to nearly 20 countries and received its New York premiere at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in November 2011. He also directed his third theater production in Paris, Les Liaisons Dangereuses, at the Théâtre de l'Atelier following the success of Hysteria (2002) and The Good Canary (2007) for which he was awarded the Molière Award for best staging.]