[I’ve
just posted a two-art “History of Dramaturgy” (31 December 2022 and 3 January
2023). At the end of the second part, I
made a comment about the beginning of a dramaturgical project almost 33 years
ago for avant-garde director Leonardo Shapiro.
[The performance piece Shapiro wanted me to work on with him was Strangers, which I wrote about on Rick On Theater on 3 and 6 March 2014. When I went to look for something I wanted to include in my comment on the dramaturgy post, I found that I had a stash of notes I’d filed away on the start of that project.
[The notes amount the earliest stages of a dramaturg’s work-up—well, this dramaturg’s, anyway. It’s only the beginning of the project because we had to abandon the work before we really got started. Shapiro wasn’t able to put together the financing for the production, which was planned for June 1991 at the La MaMa Annex (now called the Ellen Stewart Theatre) in Manhattan’s East Village.
[I’ve decided to post the notes and other work documents, with a little commentary, as a follow up to the “History of Dramaturgy” and “Dramaturgy: The Conscience of the Theater,” posted on 30 December 2009. I’m going to publish the posts in chronological order, so I’ll start with the notes I took when I spoke to Shapiro about what he wanted and what he was aiming at.]
End of June 1990. Leo Shapiro called me in answer to a card I sent him informing him that I was back in NYC and available for work on a project if he was interested. He said he needed a dramaturg for the same project we had discussed before I left for Oneonta last fall. I said I was interested in principle, and we made an appointment to meet on 3 July to talk about the project.
[I had taken a one-year, leave-replacement teaching job in the speech and theater department of the State University of New York, College at Oneonta, upstate about five hours from New York City. I was in Oneonta from September 1989 to June 1990.],
Actually, I couldn’t remember what we had talked about back then; I’m not sure we ever got into any details about what the project was about specifically. All I really remember is that I had seen a notice at NYU and answered it.
I told him, I think, that I was simply interested in his work, which I first saw at the Theatre of Nations in Baltimore in 1986 [see “Theatre of Nations: Baltimore, 1986,” posted on Rick On Theater on 10 November 2014, and “The Yellow House,” 9 February 2018]. I think Leo’s work with Shaliko is fascinating theatrically and very provocative in the old-line avant-garde approach of the ’60s (though his subject matter is current and topical).
5 July. I met with Leo at his place (he had postponed our earlier appointment) to go over the project, its current status, and exactly what he wants me to do for him. He explained that Strangers has been in progress for about two years already, that a script already exists, and that it has been performed with the same ensemble twice. [August 1989 at the Yellow Springs Inst., Pennsylvania; March 1990 at the Washington Square Church, New York City.]
Leo wants to revise the existing work for a performance, probably the last go-round, at La MaMa [Experimental Theatre Club in Manhattan’s East Village] in June 1991. He wants to have a new script ready when he goes into rehearsal in February; he would like some progress by September 1990 when he expects to go soliciting grants. (He has just lost an NEA grant he hoped for; he feels it was due to the current political pressure on the Endowment over controversial works.)
[The “NEA Four” controversy over the withdrawal of grants to four performance artists that had already been approved was in June 1990. Before that, Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ and Robert Mapplethorpe’s The Perfect Moment exhibit drew controversy in 1989. As a result, in June 1989, conservative members of the U.S. Senate co-signed a letter to the NEA requesting reforms to its grant-making policies. Shapiro always felt that he lost grants after that because of this kind of political interference.]
Strangers, as Leo described it to me, is a performance piece drawn from reports—all the dialogue is quoited material—of several unrelated incidents. [See “Shaliko’s Strangers” on ROT.] These are: 1) a case of radiation contamination in a provincial Brazilian city resulting from the discovery of a discarded radiotherapy machine by a couple of junk-metal scavengers who opened the container of Cesium-137 powder and passed it around their family and friends because they thought it had magical powers because it glowed in the dark; at least four people died from radiation poisoning by the time the accident was discovered; 2) the Atlanta child murders; 3) Hedda Nussbaum; 4) the Jonestown massacre; 5) the Central Park wilding incident; 6) people who report they have been kidnapped by UFO’s. The last five events constitute the dialogue portions of the piece; the Brazilian radiation incident forms the basis of the performance element and is the core of the piece.
[For the story of this radiation incident, see “Goiânia, Brazil, 1987” on this blog, 9 August 2020. The murders of 24 African-American children in the Atlanta area, in Fulton and DeKalb Counties, took place in 1979-81. Nussbaum (b. 1942) was a witness in the trial of her live-in partner, Joel Steinberg (b. 1941), for the murder of his illegally adopted, 6-year-old daughter, Lisa Steinberg, in 1987. Steinberg was convicted of manslaughter, imprisoned, and was paroled in 2004. Nussbaum was declared a victim of Steinberg’s abuse and not charged in Lisa’s death. On 18 November 1978, 909 people died at the People’s Temple, known as Jonestown, of cult leader, Jim Jones; at a nearby airstrip; and at a Temple-run building in Georgetown, Guyana. Most of the deaths were from poison administered by Jones; several others were shot at the airport as they attempted to leave Guyana. The incident known as the Central Park jogger case, in which a woman was assaulted and raped, took place on 19 April 1989. Eventually, five black and Latino youths, dubbed the Central Park Five, were arrested and convicted. In 2002, a convict serving a life sentence for an unrelated crime, confessed to committing the rape of the jogger and the so-called Central Park Five were exonerated—after having served 6 to 13 years in prison.]
Leo explained the connection among all these apparently disparate events, but it seemed very tenuous to me from his oral description. He acknowledged that he wasn’t really sure what the connection was, either. He explained that he felt that the kids in the Central Park wolf pack were the souls of the dead Atlanta children, which is an interesting idea dramatically, but I didn’t really understand it as thematic connection yet.
Leo also asserted that he thought that there was an aspect of these incidents that demonstrated the way the white European culture was dominating a more traditional non-European culture (Native American, African) and that the aliens in the UFO’s represented our “white men” who would come down and be our masters so we wouldn’t have to do it anymore. I found this an intriguing idea, too, but still don’t really see a unifying idea for the piece.
Leo showed me photos of the previous performances which helped me see the theatricality of the script, which he gave me to read later. He also gave me all the research—photocopies of articles and clippings on the Brazil incident and the Atlanta murders. He has in mind two tasks [for me]: additional research to find more material on the Atlanta murders and strengthening the structure of the script to make the thematic connection clearer to the audience.
The dialogue in Strangers is all either directly quoted or careful paraphrases of reported words that can be adjusted as dialogue. Leo wants more direct quotations from the Atlanta children and their parents. He also said he would like to find out what happened in the radiation contamination since he did his initial research in 1987. He didn’t expect to use this information in the script, but he wanted to know how many members of the original family had died in the ensuing three years. [See below, “27, 28 & 30 July.”]
I took the material (after glancing quickly at the Brazil stuff, since I had never heard of that incident) and the script to look over during the weekend. We scheduled a meeting for Monday, 9 July, to talk about what I learned and, in essence, reach an agreement on whether I would do this job and on what basis.
I was anxious to read the script, even though Leo warned me that it wouldn’t really be very clear without the performance elements that have no dialogue and are the center of the piece. I assured him that I was pretty good at imagining the visual part of a performance when I read a script, and that the photos of the production had been very helpful in giving me an image of the piece in performance. I hoped that the script would give me a better idea what Leo was trying to say with these six dissimilar events.
10 July. Leo rescheduled the meeting again, so we met this afternoon. I had read the clippings and the script; I found the script fascinating and the Brazil radiation case astonishing. I still wasn’t certain what the connections really were, but the suggestion that there was something underlying these different cases of violence and alienation that connected them was strong, if not clear.
Still, I think there is unquestionably something to explore here, and I trust Leo’s instincts in these matters far more than my own. He’s always been successful before, and this is his kind of work after all. Unsurprisingly, I decided that I would work with Leo on this as long as I could help.
Certainly I can do the research part. Leo had never gone to the Atlanta Constitution in his original search, so that seems like the best place to get started. The NYPL [New York Public Library] must get it, though Bobst [Elmer Holmes Bobst Library, the main library of New York University] doesn’t. The restructuring of the script will come later, and I expect I’ll have a better understanding of the internal connections in the piece by the time we get to that work.
I told Leo I wanted to work on Strangers with him, and that I thought I could handle the task with my other work on the schedule he wanted. I explained what I planned to do first, an issue-by-issue search of the Atlanta Constitution, then move on to other sources as I uncovered them.
We talked about the possible existence of a black paper in Atlanta that might have covered the story earlier and in more detail as it unfolded, but neither of us knew such a paper. I’ll see if one is listed in the periodicals indexes and then see if anyone has it on microfilm that I can get either through NYPL or Bobst. Failing that, a trip to DC and the Library of Congress would be in order.
I also suggested an attempt to get the investigation files through the Freedom of Information Act, and perhaps an attempt to find out what the sources of the TV film [The Atlanta Child Murders, a miniseries that aired on 10 and 12 February 1985 on CBS] were. (I didn’t think the screenplay itself would be very useful, since it’s probably not very authentic in terms of its dialogue. [Shapiro was looking for quotations or near-quotations, not invented speech.]
As far as the Goiania incident, I agreed that I could do a cursory search while I was doing the Atlanta thing. I imagine, however, that finding the final disposition of that case will require a contact with the Brazilian Consulate, unless I just luck out and stumble on a follow-up report. I expect to concentrate, however, on the Atlanta murders first, since that’s what Leo wants most for the rewrite. It also should be the most accessible.
While we were talking about the research, Leo cited a metaphor he had read in a book by Shiva Naipaul (he didn’t remember the title, but it’s his book on Jonestown [see “20 & 21 July” and “27, 28 & 30 July,” below]). It’s apparently an extensive passage, but it sounded like the basis for making the interconnection in the script.
As I understand it, Naipaul [1945-85], says that the dominant white European culture (probably really any dominant culture with a minority culture in its society) treats its subordinate cultures the way the developed countries treat their nuclear waste. We use them to do our work for us—building our highways, railroads, and factories, farm our crops, clean our cities, etc.—then discard them to decay in toxic dumps (i.e., ghettos and barrios) instead of making a real commitment to them by finding a really safe way to dispose of them or turning them into something useful to society. Leo didn’t actually agree that the metaphor was the solution, though he didn’t dismiss it either. He did insist that he didn’t want to use the passage as dialogue, but that wasn’t what I had in mind anyway.
I think there must be a way to make this clear dramatically without just quoting it and thus communicating to the audience that this is the main idea unifying all the events Leo has put into Strangers. Of course, I have no idea how to do this yet, but I’m sure there is a way, and Naipaul’s metaphor is the key to strengthening the structure of Strangers. I want to get Naipaul’s book and read it; maybe that’ll help make the problem—and the solution—clear to me.
I took the Atlanta materials and the script since I needed them to work with, but left the Goiania stuff with Leo. We didn’t make any further appointments—Leo’s going out of town fairly often in search of grant money—but agreed that I should check in as I needed.
13 & 14 July. I made my first trips to the NYPL newspaper annex [521 W 43rd St., between 10th and 11th Aves.; now demolished and replaced by 41-story rental apartment building] to start searching the Atlanta Constitution. Going through a big-city daily issue by issue on microfilm is a tedious job, particularly on a hand-cranked reader. I can get through about two to four months of papers each session.
This weekend, I started at June 1979 and went up through the end of the year. Even though the first bodies were discovered in June 1979, no one seemed to have noticed anything at all in that year. There were only a few mentions of the deaths or disappearances, and only one column that seemed even remotely useful.
I had expected that as each death was discovered, there would be an article with a remark or two by a parent or friend; I didn’t expect the pattern to be determined, but I did think the death or disappearance of a child would attract some press. Perhaps because Atlanta was in the midst of a crime wave and a police job-and-pay dispute, the paper paid little attention to these deaths. This was also the start of the local, state, and national political campaigns of 1980 [Jimmy Carter (D – incumbent) v. Ronald Reagan (R) for president], and, at the end of the year, the Iran hostage crisis erupted [4 November 1979: 52 United States diplomats and citizens held hostage in Tehran, Iran; lasted 444 days].
Additionally, the Bert Lance affair and Herman Talmadge corruption scandal were being played out, and they are Georgians, as is Carter.
[Lance was a businessman who served as director of the Office of Management and Budget under President Carter in 1977. He resigned because of a scandal during his first year in office; however, he was later cleared of all charges. Talmadge, a conservative Democrat, became embroiled in a financial scandal after a U.S. Senate investigation. On 11 October 1979, the Senate “denounced” him for “improper financial conduct” between 1973 and 1978. A former Georgia governor (1948-55) and incumbent senator (1957-81), he lost his seat to a Republican in 1980.] All this apparently took press space away from the unrecognized murder mystery.
I took some time to check on Brazilian papers, and I was correct that the only ones in the annex were in Portuguese. I used the catalogue computer to search for any books that might cover the accident, but nothing covering the right period seems to have been published on the subject of Goiania, nuclear accidents in Brazil or any other related topic.
I will ask Jamie Thomas [an actor friend of mine who worked at AGS] to see if the American Geographic Society’s quarterly [Geographical Review] did any coverage; the National Geographic mentioned it in passing, so I thought the AGS journal might also. Probably science and medical journals will have covered this story best. I still think a letter to the Brazilian Consulate would resolve it easiest; I think I’ll send one off soon and see.
20 & 21 July. More hours in the newspaper annex looking at the AC on microfilm. Finally, along about July 1980, the story of the mass deaths began to show up. Some of the parents had formed a group, the Committee to Stop the Children’s Murders, and they held a conference in August.
Slowly there are appearing small articles linking several dead and missing children, though I think some are not on the list yet and the police haven’t narrowed the group to just boys yet either; they are only considering children under 15 so far. This is still two years away from the arrest of Wayne Williams, but it’s also more than a year since the first death occurred. I expect the rest of the search to yield some useful quotes for the script.
[Wayne Williams (b. 1958) was the main suspect in the deaths from May 1981 and was eventually tried for two murders, though not any of the 24 children, in which he’s suspected. He was convicted on 27 February 1982 and is serving a life sentence. There have been many questions raised about his guilt, but various reinvestigations, including DNA tests of evidence, have confirmed Williams’s conviction (or failed to contradict it). Nonetheless, doubts persist even today.]
I’ve also tentatively identified the Naipaul book as Journey to Nowhere: A New World Tragedy (formerly published as Black and White). I’m waiting for Leo to confirm that this is the book from which he got the metaphor he described to me [he does in “27, 28 & 30 July,” below]. I assume it is (it’s his only book on the People’s Temple listed in the NYPL catalogue); if so, I’ll get a copy to read.
I also did a computer search of stuff on the Atlanta murders and came across several video tapes at the Schomburg Center in Harlem [Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, a research library of NYPL].
There were also a few other books aside from the James Baldwin one [The Evidence of Things Not Seen (book-length essay; 1985)] that might prove useful. I’ll check Bobst to see if they have them first—it’s easier for me to get them from there [Bobst is on Washington Square, ca. 9 blocks south of my apartment]—then try to get them from the NYPL, though several are also up at the Schomburg.
I’ve passed all this on to Leo via his assistant [Marilyn Zalkin (b. 1967)]. When I’ve found all the useful material in the AC, I’ll make copies for Leo and go on to the next search, most likely the videos. Since I have to go to the Main Branch [Humanities and Social Science Library of NYPL, 41st St. & 5th Ave., Manhattan; now named the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building] to request they be sent on loan from Schomburg, I’ll also try to identify the black papers in Atlanta. I might also see if the NY black press covered this story more carefully than the mainstream papers.
27, 28 & 30 July. I went to Bobst and the New School [for Social Research] libraries [the NSSR has been renamed The New School and its main building and library was located on 5th Ave. at 14th St., two blocks south of my apartment] this time to use the indexes. I wanted to identify the black papers in Atlanta, find out what material Bobst had (it’s closer and more convenient to me than the NYPL) and get the Naipaul book.
The New School librarian suggested that I contact two organizations which might have tracked the Goiania accident: Physicians for Social Responsibility, which has an office in NYC (its HQ is in DC), and the Union of Concerned Scientists in Cambridge, Mass. I called PSR, but they didn’t monitor the accident; their principal concern is domestic rather than international. I have written to the UCS asking if they followed the Goiania incident and if they could furnish me with a final report on the extent of contamination and fatalities.
Though I identified two books that might have covered the Atlanta murders (both were off the shelves), I concentrated on the Goiania accident this time. Of all the possible listings in books and periodicals, I found two books (Multiple Exposures: Chronicles of the Radiation Age by Catherine Caulfield, 1989, and Medical Management of Radiation Accidents edited by Fred A. Mettler, et al., 1990) and one journal report (International Journal of Radiation Biology, June 1990) written in December 1989 that mentioned the accident.
All recorded only 4 deaths; it seems the only people who died of radiation poisoning were the 4 family members who died within weeks of the exposure. Any additional deaths from cancer or related diseases have not been included in the reports yet. The number of people exposed and contaminated varied in the reports, but stayed around the 200-250 people range.
I reported this to Leo in case he wanted more detailed information on this, but I still have a few sources I can check out if I can locate them, including a 1988 report on the accident by the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna which held a conference on the accident.
[My ROT 2020 report “Goiânia, Brazil, 1987” includes statistics on the final death toll of the accident, those sickened, and several who died from delayed responses to the radiation incident. The economic toll is also discussed and the effect on the population because of mere association with the accident is examined as well.]
The newspaper index identified several Atlanta black community papers, but only one, The Atlanta Daily World, seems to be kept on microfilm extensively. It turns out that one of the places that has it is the NYPL, but up at Schomburg. If I can’t get the Main Branch to get it for me, I’ll have to make a trek up to Harlem to check it, and the other things I found there, out. I also discovered that the NYPL gets Atlanta magazine which may have done some coverage of the story; I’ll check that out when I go to the Main Branch after looking through the AC’s at the annex.
Leo confirmed that the Naipaul book with the metaphor he described was, indeed, Journey to Nowhere (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1981). Bobst had it, so I took it out and began to look through it. I haven’t started to read it through, but I found the passage Leo referred to (p. 291):
. . . . Joblessness is a euphemism. It would be more accurate to say that a technologically sophisticated society has no use for these people [i.e., the black masses]. They are redundant. They are good for nothing. They do not even evoke fellow feeling. One can think of them as the human equivalent of the radioactive waste produced by nuclear power plants: sterile and potentially lethal. What, the ecologists ask, is one to do with this waste? Bury it miles underground? Shoot it into outer space? Discover some way of breaking it down and rendering it harmless? The junk people, the human waste left behind by American history, are no less negative, no less dangerous a quantity. One sees them on the streets of midtown Manhattan, carrying glittering noisemaking machines, dressed to kill, the ugliness and the hatred of the discarded slave glowing in their eyes. You see them in Harlem, standing drunk or drugged on street corners. What is to be done with them?
Above this passage, Naipaul makes another allusion, attributed to journalist I. F. Stone [(1907-89); politically progressive investigative journalist, writer, and author]:
the American Negro, he said, was condemned to live in Egypt, but it was an Egypt that had already built its pyramids and no longer needed slaves. “Mechanization on the farm and automation in industry have at last set him free, but now freedom turns out to be joblessness.”
Additionally, Naipaul earlier (pp. 213-214) invoked H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine [1895]
in which the hero of the tale transports himself to the year 802,700. He finds himself in a land of gardenlike beauty where the sun always shines, the trees are laden with delicious fruit and flowers are resplendent. He meets a beautiful race—the Eloi: graceful, delicately formed creatures clad in robes. They seem very open, very laid-back, very up-front. Their life is an endless round of innocuous pleasure. The Eloi spend their days playing childish games, fashioning garlands for one another, splashing in warm, sparkling streams and making gentle love. Bountiful nature appears to have showered on them every blessing.
But slowly the Time Traveler begins to realize that this Eden conceals a nightmare. The Eloi, he discovers, have no capacity for concentration or for any other kind of strenuous mental activity. Human intelligence in the year 802,700 has all but atrophied. These gorgeous, charming creatures have even forgotten what fire is. When night falls they crowd into the ruined palaces of a long-vanished civilization and huddle together for mutual protection and comfort, showing great fear. For in the tunnels deep underground live their counterparts, the mutant Morlocks, lemurlike descendants of a once-oppressed proletariat who, transformed by darkness and confinement, can no longer bear the brightness of day. At night, ravenous with hunger, they emerge from their caverns to feed at will on the defenseless, fruit-eating children of light. Paradise turns to horror.
Eloi and Morlocks: the New Age is replete with both.
Naipaul frequently thereafter refers to the underclass as Morlocks. Following his nuclear-waste metaphor, for instance, he cites a 1980 prison riot in New Mexico in which the prisoners had killed and mutilated one another. He remarks that “The society did not react. . . . Nobody cares what the Morlocks do to one another. They are beyond the pale even of humane curiosity. Junk is junk” (p. 292).
While the nuclear-waste metaphor may be the core of Strangers as Leo sees it, Wells’s allegory also seems to be a fruitful image as well. There may even be a useful tie-in with Leo’s theory that the UFO-spotters think of the aliens as their “white men.” What they want to build, on that assertion, would resemble a society in which they would be the listless, pampered Eloi with a strong, capable Morlock society to do the work—before the mutation that made them predators.
The implied danger is obvious, especially when linked with the nuclear-waste image. The question still remains, how to make all this clear to an audience, allowing them to make the necessary connections in the performance, without spelling it out? I don’t know yet; but the key certainly seems in the centrality of these two images.
One thought that occurs to me—not well thought-out, but possibly useful—is to assist the image with costuming. If the victims of the social waste-system are identified the same way as radioactive waste, the image would be communicated. This would be particularly so if the symbol is used after the Brazilian family is contaminated. They actually are radioactive, but the others—the Atlanta children, Hedda, the Central Park wolf-pack—are only contaminated symbolically. It may be too obvious for Leo’s taste, but it’s a place to start thinking.
3 & 4 August. Back to the NYPL newspaper annex. I’m now into the end of 1980, and the case has finally reached the proportions that keep it on the front pages fairly regularly. The authorities have finally recognized that there is an epidemic of murders among black children and they’re using every resource they can put together, including a New Jersey psychic, Dorothy Allison [1924-99] (who proved entirely unsuccessful), and, eventually, the Center for Disease Control, whose HQ is in Atlanta.
The CDC is trying to use its expertise in tracking down the sources of disease epidemics to find the common denominator of the murdered and missing kids. The FBI has also been asked to lend assistance, though they have no jurisdiction unless an interstate element to the crimes is discovered.
(I thought that a local or state agency could request the intervention of the FBI, but that it took a federal or interstate crime for the FBI to come in without a local request. If that’s correct, then why are the feds ducking this case? Apparently, the FBI investigated the similar case of several black men killed in Buffalo just before the Atlanta murders on the basis that civil rights had been violated. Why isn’t this the same thing?)
So many agencies and individuals have gotten into the act that the investigation is beginning to look like a Keystone Kops effort. Five out-of-state super-detectives—including one from NYC—have been brought into Atlanta to assist; at the same time, a local county detective has been conspicuously cut out, apparently for political reasons.
In disgust with the process of the investigation by the Atlanta police authorities, the county DA has mounted his own effort. Meanwhile, citizen’s groups have begun frequent sweep searches for the missing kids, eventually finding several bodies, not all of which are part of the child case. A reward, now reaching about $100,000, has been offered, but no one has apparently come forward with any information. It’s all very queer.
I’ve come up with a short list of possibly useful articles with some direct quotes in them. As soon as I get a good number, I’ll interrupt my issue-by-issue search and copy some of them to give to Leo. Since the scope of the case has been recognized, each new disappearance is covered with an article that often includes quotations from parents, siblings, and friends.
Mothers like Camille Bell and Willie Mae Mathis constantly appear as spokespeople for the parents, but each new disappearance or death is accompanied by remarks by others, too. Additionally, other children and their parents, affected by the fear generated by the deaths, are included in features about the repercussions, often with useful quotes about their feelings and behavior.
Aside from the Buffalo murders, there was also a parallel case in Detroit involving several white children. The similarity—no one thinks it’s the same killer—has been the subject of a few pieces, including one with quotes from Detroit parents and kids. I noted it because the language, though not directly relating to the Atlanta cases Leo is using in Strangers, might be useful if he’s not strict about accuracy of source.
12 & 13 August. I wasn’t well Thursday, so I stayed home Friday. Saturday I spent most of the time making copies of the stuff I’ve found up till now, having reached the end of 1980. Leo’s still out of town, so I’ll just mail him the copies, which I highlighted so he can scan the quotations I thought most interesting. I’ve gotten about 20 or so articles so far, though some have only one or two possibly useful statements. I think I’ll go up to the arrest of Wayne Williams or just a little beyond, on the assumption that the focus after that will be on him instead of the kids.
That will be a good point to move on to the Atlanta Daily World, the Black Atlanta paper Schomburg has. It’ll probably take me a few more visits to the newspaper annex to get through 1981 and into 1982 when Williams was tried; it takes several hours to scan one month of issues now because there are so many references to the case.
Unfortunately, most of the articles are about the investigation, not about the kids or their parents. I have to read through each one quickly, however, to be sure that there’s nothing good hiding in the article. I also have to skim the editorials, columns, and letters in each issue since now and then, they focus on the case as well. The same is true of the various magazine supplements to the paper published during the week.
In one supplement article I ran across a reference to a Donahue show [The Phil Donahue Show, syndicated daytime talk show, 1970-96] taped in Atlanta featuring Mrs. Bell and Mrs. Mathis on the panel and several other mothers in the audience. It was scheduled for airing on 29 Jan. 1981, and I have asked Marilyn (Leo’s assistant) to check with him about getting a transcript. It should be fairly easy to get one (Donahue does make transcripts available for a fee, if they have one that old) if Leo wants to check it out.
There was also part one of a series on Atlanta’s street kids that made passing reference to the murders. What might be useful to Leo, however, are the comments by the kids about their lives and fears on the streets; they use language more redolent of these kids than many of the quotes in the articles directly dealing with the murders.
Either the parents quoted are more articulate that I expect (the murdered and missing kids are nearly all from the poorest sections of the city and many are drop-outs and truants), or the reporters are cleaning up the grammar and diction. Also, the street kids in the article are the throw-aways that Strangers is about in part. I’ve asked Marilyn to find out if Leo wants this piece and the follow-up (which I haven’t run across yet) copied along with the pieces about the murders.
I was going to write up a report of my search so far to send along with the copies, but since Leo won’t be back in NYC until 28 Aug., I decided to put it off for a while and get it to him when he gets back so I can include anything that I uncover next week. I’ve been phoning in to Marilyn every week or so, anyway, so a wrap up can wait. I just hope that what I’ve been collecting is a) what Leo had in mind and b) is at least somewhat useful for the script.
I got an answer to my note to the UCS in Cambridge about Goiania, but they weren’t any help. They sent me a couple of clippings on the initial discovery of the accident, but nothing on the final disposition of the case. They suggested I contact the NYT reporter who covered the story, but that seems a waste of effort, particularly if all Leo wants is the final death toll, which I already found to be no more than the original four family members. I’ll wait for Leo to tell me if he wants more before I go beyond the searching I’ve already done on that subject.
23 & 25 August. More searching for material from the AC; I’m up to March 1981. Wayne Williams was arrested in June, so I suspect shortly, all the coverage of the murder case will focus on the suspect and swing away from the victims. [This was more likely since Williams was arrested for the murders of two adult men, not any of the 24 children. He was suspected of the child murders, but not tried or convicted for them.]
On Saturday, I photocopied what I had collected since the last batch and got them ready to send off to Leo. He hasn’t given me any real feedback, but Marilyn has indicated that he’s satisfied so far. This time, I sent him a report on my progress along with the clippings, and I asked him to let me know if he was getting what he wanted or if he wanted me to go in a different direction.
I also updated Leo on the circus surrounding the investigation. I don’t know if he’s interested in that, but I thought he’d be curious about the atmosphere in which the case was being pursued.
[These were mostly preliminary
notes and a record of the very earliest work I did for Shapiro. On Wednesday, 11 January, I’ll be posting the
reports I sent Shapiro based on this research.
I hope you’ll come back to Rick On Theater to see where this goes.
[Not all dramaturgs work the
same way—and not all plays require this much documentary research—but this is a
fairly good introduction to the work of a dramaturg on a production (as
distinguished from literary management).
Coming up is the transcript of an conversation I had with Shapiro early
in the effort and it deals more with more theatrical matters.]
No comments:
Post a Comment