[Back in 1985, when I was a grad student at New York University, I did an internship with one of my teachers, Cynthia (C. Lee) Jenner, who was planning to start a writers’ theater. The internship ran from 4 February to 17 May, and my main jobs, in addition to reading scripts (which everyone working on the theater project did), was to attend and report on workshops and reading series around the city and play readings and showcases at other theaters. Jenner, who was a dramaturg (American Place Theatre, Women’s InterArt Center), was scouting out playwrights for her prospective production house, which she named Theatre Junction.
[I’ve posted a few of the longer reports I made for Cynthia on Rick On Theater, mostly of Off-Broadway productions I saw on her behalf (Salonika by Louise Page and Faulkner’s Bicycle by Heather McDonald, both in “Women Playwrights of the ’80s,” posted on Rick On Theater on 21 December 2018). Here are some shorter reports I sent her for performances Off-Off-Broadway.]
ZOE ANGLESEY & VICTOR MONTEJO
Word/Play
Medicine Show Theatre
6 March 1985
Poetry and translations of Zoe Anglesey and fables, myths, poetry, and fiction of Victor Montejo, part of Word/Play at the Medicine Show Theatre (6 W. 18th Street [since moved to Clinton]), the theater’s writers’ reading series, is a month-long series of readings and “performances” of material that would otherwise not be produced. The evening of Tuesday, 5 March, was devoted to readings by two poet-writers concerned with Central America in general and Guatemala in particular. There was no “performance” in any sense, so the space had no effect on the presentation.
Anglesey’s material, both her own poetry and translations (both hers and others’) of works by Central American poets, was all of one note. She seems (on the basis of this one hearing) to be obsessed with the subject of the violence and war in Central America. Her attitude is decidedly anti-right, pro-peasant, and a little anti-U.S. All the material was adamantly political, and I saw no real artistic value in it. I may sympathize with her political anger, but her poetry leaves me less than cold. She’s a bore.
Montejo, on the other hand, is very interesting, both as an individual and as a writer. He is a Guatemalan Mayan from a small village, Jacaltenango in Huehuetenango Department (pop. ca. 15,000 in 1985), and, despite his very heavy accent, he’s very articulate and sophisticated. His interests are threefold: preserving the oral traditions of his people, recording their contemporary history and writing “personal” poetry.
[Montejo is a Jakaltek Maya and an internationally recognized author, scholar, and intellectual. In 1982, he was forced to flee his home to escape being murdered by the Guatemalan Army during that country’s civil war. He managed to make his way to the United States, where he received a Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Connecticut in 1993. He later taught at the University of California-Davis in the Department of Native American Studies, eventually becoming its chair. He was a Fullbright Scholar in 2003. In 2004 he returned to Guatemala to serve first as Ministro de Paz (Minister of Peace) in the cabinet of Guatemalan president Roberto Berger, and then as a member of Guatemala’s National Congress from 2004 to 2008. He formally retired from UC-Davis in 2011, and currently lives in his hometown of Jacaltenango, where he continues to write.]
Montejo has a published book (bilingual in Spanish and English) relating in verse the myth of “El Kanil, The Man of Lightning,” the great hero/god of his people. He also has material recording some of the fables (much like Aesop’s) used by his parents and grandparents to teach the village children proper values in the days before there were schools for the Indians.
[The book cited in the paragraph above is El Kanil, Man of Lightning: A Legend of Jacaltenango (Carrboro, N.C.: Signal Books, 1984). It was an earlier edition of the current Q’anil, el hombre rayo: una leyenda de Jacaltenango (Rancho Palos Verdes, CA: Fundación Yax Te', 1999). (The English edition is El Q’anil: Man of Lightning, translated by Wallace Kaufman and Susan G. Rascón (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2001).
[A book of Mayan legends by Montejo is The Bird Who Cleans the World and Other Mayan Fables (Willimantic, CT: Curbstone Press; East Haven, CT: Distributed by InBook, 1991).]
The chronicling of the contemporary lives of his people is not much different from what you might expect, but it is related with an innate charm and a combination of irony, humor, and concern that is quite illuminating. What Montejo read were several anecdotes and vignettes that were very telling about the relationship between the Indians and the government.
Montejo’s “personal” poetry (my term, not his) apparently deals with his own experiences. He read two quite amusing and astute pieces concerning his current visit to New York City, as seen by a very observant and sensitive visitor from a small Guatemalan village. The sophisticated language juxtaposed with the naïveté of the wonderment was very touching and revealing.
Despite the interest I had in Montejo’s writing, I’m not sure what could be done with it as potential performance material. To me, the oral tradition material is the most intriguing, but these myths, legends, and fables, as enjoyable as they are, aren’t terribly different from the equivalent material in many other cultures from the Greeks to the Norsemen, African tribes to North American Indians. I doubt their charm would transfer to the stage as direct adaptations of the stories. (It would probably end up as the Mayan version of that TV adaptation of Hanta Yo, called The Mystic Warrior [ABC, 1984].)
However, if some device could be found to use the material in a new way, perhaps, but not necessarily, in conjunction with some of Montejo’s other stuff (say his contemporary vignettes), it might prove interesting, different, and provocative. I confess that I can’t think of such a device that would be different from other such attempts.
The big question that I see is, even if it can be adapted, would it be really anything new except for the fact that it’s Guatemalan and Mayan? I mean, is it only it’s exotic locale that makes it a curiosity? I can’t shake the feeling that that’s the case.
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THE PRIVATE RICH
by Peter Rand
and
THE GERMAN
FRIEND
by Serge Gavronsky
Word/Play
Medicine Show Theatre
8 March 1985
I think I can take care of The Private Rich by Peter Rand and The German Friend by Serge Gavronsky (WORD/PLAY at the Medicine Show; Friday, 8 March) very briefly. Neither have anything I consider worth going after. I begin to see that the taste of TMS people is pretty awful, and I’m not much inclined to go to any more of their stuff.
Rand’s Private Rich is a clichéd, sniggering satire about the wealthy. It has nothing to say that’s either new or clever, and the performances were uniformly amateurish and mugging. The audience’s laughter was incomprehensible to me—I saw nothing funny, or even amusing. This guy is billed as a teacher of creative writing at Columbia. If I were Columbia, I’d be ashamed.
Thinking the second reading couldn’t be worse, I made the mistake of staying instead of coming back home to watch television. The Rand pieces at least weren’t painful; Gavronsky’s pretentious, obtuse, self-indulgent mush was excruciating. I’m sure everyone around me saw me looking at my watch every fifteen minutes.
I couldn’t wait for the thing to be over, and when it finally was, I bolted as fast as I could. If I ever see this man’s name on a program again, you couldn’t drag me to the theater. I couldn’t even begin to tell you what this thing was about. The flyer calls it “his poetic, funny, and disturbing novel about terrorism and the fractured world of the bourgeoisie.” I found it neither poetic nor funny, and the only thing that was disturbed was my tush—from sitting through it. For the rest—who cares! Yecch!
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SOME RAIN
by James Luczak
Staret . . . The
Director’s Company
13 March 1985
I went to the staged reading of James Luczak’s Some Rain at Staret . . . The Director’s Company (311 W. 43d Street) on my own on 10 March because I read the script last summer when I was reading for StageArts Theater Company, an Off-Off-Broadway showcase house where I did some rudimentary literary advising, and liked it very much. I won’t recap the whole report at length—just give you my new impressions from the reading.
Very briefly, the plot is about Sarah, a middle-aged waitress, who encounters Wally, a young drifter. He reawakens her to love and life, which she had abandoned, and when he leaves, she finds herself able to accept the proposal of her long-time friend and boss, Eddy.
There’s a subdued and engaging charm to this play. Wally is extremely likeable—more Eros than Cupid—and the relationship he establishes with Sarah is entirely acceptable and understandable. Even though he leaves her, I don’t feel he’s abandoned her. We’ve been subtlety prepared for her feelings for Eddie, and his arrival is aptly conceived. The play’s simplicity is deceptive, and the roles of Sarah and Wally have depths and corners that challenge the creative imaginations and talents of the actors.
I still like the play as an idea. The slightly otherworldliness of Wally, though not brought out in this reading, and the engaging relationship of Wally and Sarah, make this a touching and interesting statement. Though it’s presented as realism, I think there’s something more under its surface this reading didn’t tap. Even here, I still saw what I saw when I read the play.
What I found out at the reading that I didn’t see when I read the script is that the play’s almost all dialogue. There’s very little physical action, and not much possibility for adding any as the play stands. The setting is the almost barren yard of Sarah’s trailer home. Though there’s junk littered about, it provides little opportunity for activity, since it must be cleaned up by Wally—but this happens between scenes. The bleakness of the surroundings is emblematic of Sarah’s life, so it can’t really be changed. There are some directorial possibilities, I think, but they’re vague in my mind right now. If this very serious problem can’t be overcome dramaturgically, the play will not stage well at all.
There was one review from a Theatre Row production about four years ago—in the New York Post, I think—which wasn’t very good. I suspected at the time I was looking into the play that the production was done, as this reading was, strictly realistically and straightforwardly and therefore wasn’t as theatrically interesting in production as I envisioned it. I now suppose the talkiness of the script was also part of the problem. The former can be solved easily by directing; the latter will need rewriting and dramaturgical efforts.
In the reading at Staret there was a scene I hadn’t read before the main action of the play. After the reading, there was a brief discussion with the director, and he said that this was part of a scene added after the script was published. It had been a longer scene than the reading used, and had been performed in some subsequent production of the play after the New York première. The scene introduced Eddy, walking Sarah home from the diner, before she meets Wally.
In the published version, Eddy is talked about throughout the first three scenes, but we never meet him until the very last scene, after Wally’s left. I liked the old version, without this scene. Though this makes Eddy a much smaller part quantitatively, I didn’t feel he was in any way insignificant. I like the fact that Sarah talked about him, even defended him to Wally, without our ever seeing him until she was ready to accept his love. It seemed important that he wasn’t “really” there while Wally was breaking down her resistance to life.
The addition of the new opening scene, though it provided a structural frame for the play (Eddy at the beginning and the end), made the play too “real” for me. The old way, besides not meeting Eddy in the flesh until the end, started off with Wally just appearing on Sarah’s doorstep. This parallels his disappearance between scenes—we never see him leave; he’s just gone, no questions asked.
This contributed to the “otherworldliness” I felt in his character—as if he were sent to awaken Sarah’s hibernating soul, and, having done his job, passed on to another assignment somewhere else. Opening in medias res as the original version does helps this. Having a logical beginning dissipates this feeling.
The reading also used a young, attractive actress for Sarah. Not only does this change all the relationships, it also changes the play’s central message concerning life, love, and age. An aging, no-longer-attractive woman awakened to love and affection is different than a young, pretty one. The former seems less self-pitying than resigned; the latter prematurely jaded and needlessly enervated.
I could understand why an older woman couldn’t pick up and move on, but a younger one made me wonder why she doesn’t just quit complaining and go someplace else. I don’t have the same sympathy for the younger Sarah that I do for the older. The rest of the audience seemed to concur with this reaction.
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“SUNSHINE”
by Dallas Murphy
Word/Play
Medicine Show Theatre
2 April 1985
I really don’t have much to say about the staged reading of prose works by Thulani Davis, Dallas Murphy, and Frederick Feirstein, part of Word/Play at the Medicine Show (31 March 1985). I really only went to meet and introduce myself to Murphy; I didn’t stay for the second half of the reading, the works by Feirstein, particularly after Murphy, who had seen it, told me it didn’t work.
The Thulani Davis material was of little interest—a number of very brief monologues acted out with a silent ensemble while one actress delivered the piece. The material was obtuse, and the performances were strange and self-indulgent.
Murphy’s piece, “Sunshine,” was more whole: a brief story of two migrants to New York City from Miami (the evening was centered on views of New York from various perspectives), one wanting to return to Florida, the other resisting the boredom and lifelessness she left there. The characters were alive, despite the amateurish performances, and quite telling.
Of all the material I’ve seen at TMS, this was the first that had some real life and universality (see report of 8 March 1985, above). Everything else sounded like literary masturbation in public. It might well be worth looking at the whole piece from which this was drawn, something called Uptown Tales.
I took the opportunity before the show to introduce myself to Murphy and we talked briefly. He is, indeed, a very nice man. We both agree that TMS is a mediocre place at best. He was not pleased with their direction of “Sunshine” and said he had nothing to do with their production of the work. He was relieved they didn’t do worse by it than they had. (It wasn’t as mugged and camped as their other performances.)
I think that puts the period to my visits there. Except for Murphy, their choices of material show a vast lack of taste, and their performances do not do anything for the material they select. (I wonder how Murphy’s worked slipped in here. Murphy’s Law—pardon the pun—in reverse.
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