Women who move me in the field of theatre, 2024 version

    One of the spunky women I like to perform is Helen of Troy, Helene of Sparta, the Helene who Euripides wrote about, the one who when cornered by circumstance and by men who wanted to use her, literally rose above them.  She didn't bow down, and never let her supposed beauty be an excuse for war. In performance, I may exaggerate her defiance, but I see it in her.  She never went to Troy with Paris.  The gods lifted her up to a place in the clouds where she lived out the war.  From up above, Helene watched an image of herself interacting in Troy.  While her husband tried to return home to Sparta after 10 years of war, she went to Egypt to make new friends and a new life.  The public image of Helen had nothing to do with the real Helene.  If her face launched a thousand ships, it was because she was the figurehead on their bows.

Helen

    Contemporary drama is populated with women who defy stereotypes and depart from the paths expected of them.  In a sense, Lady Macbeth is one of them.  She's deliciously wicked, duplicitous, strong, and then piteous to play.  But all of Shakespeare's women are complicated by being written for men in drag.  Whether they are obedient or independent, they are male fantasies. 

Lady Macbeth

    One of the fun parts of the feminist theatre of the 1970s and 1980s was that women played these characters.  While some feminist troupes deconstructed the narrative by changing male parts into female ones, I enjoyed watching women inhabiting the male parts from their ideas of males.  I would love to play Prospero in The Tempest both ways: trying to understand the maleness of the character AND transforming the character into a woman.  I'd like to see the royal Prospero as containing the beast Caliban and vice versa, as if they are two halves of the same character.  I'd like to play Hamlet with the same double analysis.  Even the great Sara Bernhardt played Hamlet.  Jean Arthur and Mary Martin both played Peter Pan on Broadway.

Sara Bernhardt as Hamlet

    Truth be told, however much I might wish to play these parts, I have incredible stage fright when I’m not holding a script in front of me.   The only way I can perform is by multiple-choice acting, a technique introduced to me by the feminist troupe Split Britches.  I’m mainly a stage director, one greatly influenced by theatre artist Ellen Stewart. 

Ellen Stewart

    I was the stage director for the feminist theatre company This River of Women when I met Ellen Stewart, the woman who taught me how to use the stage and the place of performance in a whole new way.  She was both a producer and a theatre artist.  I saw the tall, elegant, African-American Ellen Stewart speak at 2 separate conferences on Women in Theatre before I dared to ask her if I could write her biography as my doctoral dissertation.  She had spoken about the importance of expanding space, about “filling the need of artists to grow within their craft.”  A larger space, she said, “was an increase of the imagination for the musician, for the actor, for the designer, in what each can give, and writers, in what they can write.”  She said, “You have to make a space, see?  Like the venders’ carts on Delancy Street.  You move the pushcart along and invite persons in—and they all take you to where you want to go.”  Her ideas of and uses of space fascinated me.  They seemed an application of Peter Brooks’ The Empty Space.

She said no to a biography, said that she only talks about her theatre, without which she would be a zero.  She invited me to capture what La MaMa is and does, but warned that I’d never be able to explain La MaMa, because as soon as you say it is one thing, it changes.  But she opened the doors of La MaMa to me, and I moved in for parts of 1988 and 1989, including accompanying a production to Italy. 

In short, Ellen Stewart was the creator of LaMaMa Experimental Theatre Club at 74A East 4^th Street in Manhattan’s East Village.  Over the years it expanded from the two theatres at 74A, to the Annex at 66 East 4^th Street, to 9 floors of rehearsal halls on 3^rd St., and an Art Gallery on 2^nd.  As producer at La MaMa, Stewart is the mother of Off Off-Broadway experimental theatre just as Joseph Papp of the Publik Theatre is the father of OOB. Whereas Papp straddled a commercial and OO Broadway world, Stewart worked in poor theatre and international theatre.  Living space, for example, was part of the pay for theatre makers.

She was the first producer to create a space for international theatre in the USA.  Historians who label such things should note that the contributions of the Black Arts Movement included Ellen Stewart’s international theatre.  They don’t, partly because the Black Arts Movement didn’t accept that Ellen Stewart’s stages were not reserved for Black folks only.  According to Amiri Baraka, for example, Ellen Stewart was, quote, crazy.  She did the impossible, both in NY City and as a guest and UNESCO diplomat theatre maker that traveled the world.

In NY City, the first thing I noticed was the fore staging of the arts and the back staging of business.  In the lobby of 74 A, the walls were a collage of color from past productions.  The few captions were in more than one language and alphabet.  English was in the minority, which reflected what you were likely to see on the stages and in the rehearsal halls.  The theatre at La MaMa was small and intimate, a second theatre above it worked as a café, and the third, the annex stage two buildings away was a vast open space, a place to set up like a forest, a journey of many resting places, or a house with many rooms. Here sets were taken down completely between shows, and few set pieces remained, in keeping with Mama Ellen’s idea that once an item existed it tended to limit the imagination of the artist using the space. 

I had expected to see a great amount of cross-fertilization of the productions here, but LaMaMa was not a melting pot.  Each production team retained its own style and story, though curiosity compelled artists to visit each other’s work and come to know the artists involved.  La MaMa was a bee-hive of intensive activity.  Influences definitely occurred as did future collaborations, but like a United Nations of theatre, or vast quantum theatre, the shows over the years showed evidence of expanded artistry rather than a narrowing into zones of fashion.

Ellen Stewart’s own productions within the Great Jones Theatre Company were environmental, with the audience moving along with the actors.  In this company, artists such as Tom O’Horgan who worked with Hair, and Andre Serban and Elizabeth Swados who worked with ancient Greek texts established the environmental style and kinetic audience experience of each production.   Ellen Stewart took this further as a director.  In the Italian production of The Monk and the Hangman’s Daughter which I documented, the action extended throughout an entire village and included a hanging and a suicide, both in full view of the traveling audience.  This staging invited the audience to move along with the emotions of the actors, a kinetic experience which differed greatly from seated audiences.  It was up to each audience member how close to the action they wanted to be.   In an earlier environmental production of Romeo and Juliet, at the Salzburg Seminar in American Studies on Reinhard's estate in Austria she cast the play with actors and musicians form 16 different nations.  With the assumption that everyone on stage and in the audience was familiar with the story, she had them keep their original languages, and cast without regard to race or gender.  Again, the audience moved with the actors and experienced what they experienced

I would love to bring this exceptional Woman to the stage herself in a visceral performance revealing how she expanded expectations and acted as if boundaries did not exist.  I would love to show what the United Nations saw in her work—the bringing together of diverse peoples in projects where true cooperation could begin.  I would love to show her ability to have multiple productions share space and resources without feeling the need to alter their individual arts.  I would make it clear that curiosity is a driving force of love which has the power to bring people together.  As Mama Ellen knew, this doesn’t happen through war or détente, but when people build a work of art together.

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Aside: I used the unseated audience techniques as often as I could in my classroom as a HS English teacher, and noted the same benefits.

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Please respect my copyright.

© 2024 Susan L. Chast

Black History Month

 

(Memories of and Research on Black History Month)

*

FROM WIKIPEDIA:  "The precursor to Black History Month was created in 1926 in the United States, when historian Carter G. Woodson and the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History (ASNLH) announced the second week of February to be "Negro History Week".^[8] This week was chosen because it coincided with the birthday of Abraham Lincoln on February 12 and that of Frederick Douglass on February 14, both of which Black communities had celebrated since the late 19th century.^[8] For example, in January 1897, school teacher Mary Church Terrell persuaded the Washington, D.C. school board to set aside the afternoon of Douglass's birthday as Douglass Day to teach about his life and work in the city's segregated public schools."

*

I grew up in a little white upstate NY town, and graduated HS in 1969, the same year that Kent State University proposed the week commemoration of Black History be expanded into a full month.  I had not heard of it. According to Wikipedia, Kent State first observed African American History month in February 1970. 

What I knew in 1970 was that President Nixon had just expanded the Vietnam war actions into Cambodia, and we were protesting at campuses across the USA. On May 5^th the Ohio National Guard shot 70 bullets into an anti-war protest at Kent State.  This massacre, and others like it, led to the major anti-war protests in DC later that year. 

Now I know that "on May 14, ten days after the Kent State shootings, two students were killed (and 12 wounded) by police at Jackson State University, a historically black university, in Jackson, Mississippi, under similar circumstances – the Jackson State killings – but that event did not arouse the same nationwide attention as the Kent State shootings" (Wikipedia).

It got the attention of Black students where I was, though I didn't know why.  I was fortunate to be at Clark University in Worcester, MA, where the strong presence of the Black Student Union after sit-ins in 1968 and 1970, made me want to know more of Black literature and arts, made me want to know more of the experience that students of color brought to campus.

*

Hey Susan, you are going back too far!  The theme of the 2024 Black History month is African American peoples and the Arts! 

Write about the storyteller and anthropologist Zora Neal Hurston and Ruby Dee, the famous actress who played her in the play “My Name is Zora.”

Write about the amazing performances of students in ACTSO—the Afro-Academic, Cultural, Technological and Scientific Olympics (ACT-SO), informally named the "Olympics of the Mind," a youth program of the NAACP "designed to recruit, stimulate, improve and encourage high academic and cultural achievement among African American high school students."  Write about how much you learned about the excellence parents expected of their children fully on display here.

*

Write about what got you into the study and practice of theatre, the 1976 production of Ntozake Shange’s For Color Girls at the Booth Theatre on Broadway.  Oh, that was a revelation!  “an amazingly beautiful insistent loving spirit.  The play was a choreo-poem about the troubled lives of Black women, but in performance the actresses' powerful presence contrasted so radically with the poverty and pain portrayed, that it showed what could and should be true”—and was true.   Black lives were powerful.  Black woman are powerful.  Let Ntozake Shange and Audre Lorde and Sweet Honey in the Rock portray that, but you live with it.

*

Stop name dropping, Susan.  This is supposed to be a creative writing about Black History Month.

But I never celebrated Black History month! 

By the time school authorities demanded that I provide the band width in my HS English classroom, the works of people of color were so thoroughly integrated into my curriculum, there was little more that I could do but acknowledge the month and encourage projects for students to focus on during the month.  I asked students to write about what African American history and cultural material they were aware of, and what they liked, and why.  I made both informal and formal writing so they could share their feelings as well as focus on something they learned—or wish they learned as part of the celebration.  We moved from writing into oral reports so the students could teach the class.  Group projects included opportunities for music, film, sports, photography, and other research, as well as alternative writings like interviews, poetry, plays, debates, and performances.

Was this successful?

More or less, for most, for some.  There were few protests by white students.  Many students felt that there was too much focus on writing in my classroom, and that other English teachers would be easier.  I also noticed that a few students held themselves back so that they wouldn’t look too interested in learning—at least that’s how I interpreted it.  And there were a few who came after school to work with me privately.

But the student work made me love the possibilities of Black History Month.  What better to learn in a HS English Class than myriad ways to approach what you want to say?

 *

And then, the school itself was not satisfied.  Before I retired, I was told that I needed to use available on-line curricula, that my students weren’t on pace with other students in the city.  This, of course, was the purpose of the core curriculum.  In my defense, I must say that when I taught 11^th grade English, we always made AYP.  My students could think, and they mastered communication skills. 

*

Susan, you’re off topic again.  That used to bother your students a lot!    OK.  But I don’t want to talk about that.

*

Let’s talk about this community at Simpson House, and how even after only 2 months, you are impressed with the great variety of offerings.  And, really, there are few offerings, but within them is a wonderful opportunity each to share with each.  It makes me happy.

AND maybe I can end with a poem:

Black History Month
 
This year in Philadelphia,
Black History Month feels like Spring
bursting forth all at once.  (Maybe
because writing focuses it,
maybe because Imbolc, the
Cross Quarter Day between Winter
Solstice and Spring Equinox
grounds it.)  Light pours in as we turn
toward the sun, hear our hearts drum, and
breathe in our love for each other. 
There is so much to learn.  Learning
is a joy, is the joy, as colon-
ialism fades ‘round the world.
Death and destruction mars the skin
of earth, but deep down seeds open,
and green shoots insist on being born.
We may yet overcome.  Our hearts
are too full to die.  We stand up
to see better what we have missed
and yearned for—full representation
here and now.  We are the green shoots
ripening near to the surface
of our world, and soon the reversal
will be complete.  What was silent
speaks.  What was invisible appears.
Now real progress can begin.

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So, I rewrote this.  Too much of what I had written required more story.  Now, reading this rewrite, I wish it was less about me and more about the shows or the children.  I've got to wok on that even in my poetry!

The Rewrite:

Thinking about Black History month makes me want to focus this writing on education—mine as well as others.  I worry about African American History Month because of new laws in states like Florida that reject the curriculum proposed in the 1619 Project launched in August 2019.   The curriculum adds the legacy of slavery to other approaches to African American History.  To me, it seems right to acknowledge and include ongoing struggles for survival to the celebration of accomplishments and achievements of African American people.

I grew up in a little white upstate NY rural town, and graduated HS in 1969, the same year that Kent State University proposed the week-long commemoration of Black History be expanded into a full month.  Since the 19^th century, African American communities had celebrated African American history especially during the February week containing both Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass’s birthdays.  But I had not heard of it.  I didn’t know about Frederick Douglass.  Nor did I know that Ohio’s Kent State held the first month long celebration in 1970, and that other states adopted it by 1976 when President Gerald Ford recognized it’s observance. 

What occupied my mind in 1970 was that President Nixon had just expanded the Vietnam war actions into Cambodia, and we were protesting at campuses across the USA.  On May 5^th the Ohio National Guard shot 70 bullets into an anti-war protest at Kent State University.  This massacre, and others like it, led to the major anti-war protests in DC later that year.   One of the others was “on May 14, ten days after the Kent State shootings, when two students were killed (and 12 wounded) by police at Jackson State University, a historically black university, in Jackson, Mississippi, under similar circumstances – the Jackson State killings.  But that event did not arouse the same nationwide attention as the Kent State shootings" (Wikipedia).

It got the attention of Black students where I was, however, though they had to tell me why it was important.  I was fortunate to be at Clark University in Worcester, MA, where the strong presence of the Black Student Union after sit-ins in 1968 and 1969, made students like me want to know more of Black literature and arts, made me want to know more of the experience that students of color brought to campus.

*

That was the beginning of mmy life-long education in issues that engaged my Black peers.  My college majors were English, theatre and education, and in each of those areas, I tried to break the white exclusivity and exceptionalism I had absorbed as a child. 

During the next 25 years, I was aware of Black History month but made no attempt to participate.

Fast forward to the year 2001, when I accepted a job teaching HS English in the Philadelphia Public schools.  By the time school authorities told me to provide a focus on Black literature for Black History Month, the works of people of color were so thoroughly integrated into my curriculum, there was little more that I could do.  Instead of adding more literature, I acknowledged the month and assigned students to work in group and solo projects.  Students wrote about what African American history and cultural material they were aware of, and what they liked, and why.  Informal as well as formal writing allowed students to share their feelings as well as to focus on something they learned—or wish they learned.  We moved from writing into oral reports so the students could teach the class.  Group projects included opportunities for music, film, sports, photography, and other research, as well as alternative writings like interviews, poetry, plays, debates, and performances.

Was this a successful approach to African History Month?

More or less, for most.  There were few protests by white students, though some of their parents complained to the principal that I was teaching social studies instead of English.   Many students felt that there was too much focus on writing in my classroom, and that other English teachers would be easier.  A few students held themselves back so that they wouldn’t look too interested in learning.  And there were a few who came after school to work with me privately.  But the student work—both process and product—made me love the possibilities of Black History Month.  What better to learn in a HS English Class than myriad ways to approach and communicate what you want to say?

 *

But the school itself was not satisfied with this approach.  I did not control the material not student voices.  I was told that I needed to use available on-line curricula, that my students weren’t on pace with other students in the city.  This, of course, was the purpose of the core curriculum.  In my defense, I must say that when I taught 11^th grade English, we always made AYP.  My students could think, and they mastered communication skills. 

I’d like to end with a poem that grew from my delight at the Black History offerings here at Simpson House:

 

Black History Month
 
This year in Philadelphia,
Black History Month feels like Spring
bursting forth all at once.  (Maybe
because writing focuses it,
maybe because Imbolc, the
Cross Quarter Day between Winter
Solstice and Spring Equinox
grounds it.)  Light pours in as we turn
toward the sun, hear our hearts drum, and
breathe in our love for each other. 
There is so much to learn.  Learning
is a joy, is the joy, as colon-
ialism fades ‘round the world.
Death and destruction mars the skin
of earth, but deep down seeds open,
and green shoots insist on being born.
We may yet overcome.  Our hearts
are too full to die.  We stand up
to see better what we have missed
and yearned for—full representation
here and now.  We are the green shoots
ripening near to the surface
of our world, and soon the reversal
will be complete.  What was silent
speaks.  What was invisible appears.
Now real progress can begin.

Please respect my copyright.

© 2024 Susan L. Chast

Resolution

 

You don’t need a New Year resolution to change your life, I say.  

Prayer might work, but resolution rarely does.  

Yet:

The idea of the new year resolution always visits me this time of year.  I have sometimes ignored the habitual target setting.  This year, however, I wrote a poem about what I would like to change: my perfected procrastination.  My poem compares trying to change this habit to trying to fill a bucket with droplets of water.  Both are difficult to impossible.  But writing about it, I reasoned, might have some impact.  Later, I realized I didn’t like the poem except for one word, “ingrained.”  Here are the lines:

 

“Imagine changing
your dominant hand!
Habit is ingrained.”

Ingrained!  As if a person was a wooden board treated with an immoveable dye lot, a color like beet juice that just won’t let go.  My ingrained procrastination mostly pertains to writing.  With a paragraph now and then I treat the board, hoping to dilute the beet juice coloring.  I see no progress, but try again and again, a paragraph here, a page there, sometimes liking the page so much I imagine I see a lighter shade of beet in the wood.  Then I say to someone—anyone—I’m writing again! With two exclamation points.  I more than say it, I brag it, I delight in it, I imagine a whole book written, and me on a reading tour at bookshop after bookshop.  Of course, the next day I must needs go to the Post office and shopping, and when I sit down at the computer, I must do the wordle and crossword puzzle and words with friends, and before I know it, it’s time for The News Hour and Jeopardy, and then at 8pm it’s too late to start anything.  Tomorrow, I think.  I had such a good start yesterday.  But tomorrow comes and I am still ice skating on the frozen lake of achievement and self-admiration.  Procrastination plays tricks with my head, and I’m still ingrained with it, my wooden self is beet red.

 

 Tears in a Bucket

 

Catching my tears in 
a bucket, I laugh 
at imagining I could fill it

and then half smile at thinking
one day can ring change
with new year wonders.
 
As if we could wish 
away habit with 
impulse, as if we
could use magical 
words to invent new
and good beginnings.
 
Procrastination's
my pitiable
habit.  Though it is
not as tragic as
use of weapons, it
diminishes me.

Because habit is
easy, we think it's
simple to alter.
Imagine changing
your dominant hand!
Habit is ingrained.
 
Yet today is New
Year’s Day, another
day with another
chance to end habits—
the hard ones that play
over and over.
 
Would you rather fill
a bucket with tears?
I ask, then laugh and
grit my teeth with great
determination.
This time I may win.

Please respect my copyright.

© 2024 Susan L. Chast

Landback

"The movement goes beyond the transfer of deeds to include respecting Indigenous rights, preserving languages and traditions, and ensuring food sovereignty, housing, and clean air and water. Above all, it is a rallying cry for dismantling white supremacy and the harms of capitalism."

From FIX, November 2020:                                                    

"Returning the Land: Four Indigenous leaders share insights 

about the growing landback movement 

and what it means for the planet."

Last year I read Braiding Sweetgrass: INDIGENOUS WISDOM, SCIENTIFIC KNOWLEDGE AND THE TEACHINGS OF PLANTS  by Robin Wall Kimmerer, and since have been learning about the multiple contemporary realities of Indigenous people in North America, especially reading social histories of those who lived in places I have lived: Massachusetts, California, New York, Virginia, and Pennsylvania.   As Euro-Americans (we) requisitioned land and cut off indigenous use of it, we changed most of the names of cities, land formations and waterways.  We made no attempt to preserve the livelihood, customs, and culture of the displaced and disinherited people.  Indigenous stories reveal not only what we destroyed but what we might have learned from being better neighbors (I know that is an understatement).  Thank God and Earth alike that people from many tribes still exist to tell their stories and to salvage something from re-educated colonialists.  I'm grateful that I know a little more now than I would have known then.  Grateful that I am learning how to listen.

In the article quoted above, the idea and practices of "Landback" are held up to view.  In each case, note that action is underway but there is more to do.  I am impressed by how much of it would help solve the climate crisis we share.  I am not surprised that much of this work involves support for Black Lives Matter and others among BIPOC peoples, how much naturally accepts the many identities a person might have (intersectionality).

In Quaker meeting today, Pamela read aloud a page from A Lenape among the Quakers: The Life of Hannah Freeman by Dawn G. Marsh.  The author revealed Quaker complicity in Indigenous displacement--even sanctioning taking children from their parents for re-education.  As of yet, I cannot put words to how horrible this is/was.  Is it possible that we saved these people from a worst fate?  If only I could believe that.  Meanwhile, I begin to see why learning this and giving back seems so right to me.  

Also in Quaker Meeting today, Anschel pointed out that no secular word exists for the action of doing good, no name for the person except "do-gooder" which has negative connotations.*  "Benefactor" seems a patronizing word.  Altruist?  Humanitarian?  Volunteer?  Bleeding Heart?  Good Samaritan?  Helper?  When enough of us show up, we'll learn the word.  Maybe then we'll be neighbors engaged in "neighboring."

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* His source is "On Doing Good: The Quaker Experiment" by Gerald Jones.

Reparations, and other ways of working toward Justice, Peace, and Salvation

 

My Quaker Friends and I are beginning to think reparations, and finding ways to give back.  This does not have to do with guilt, but the fact of owning and earning things because they were taken from Native Americans and African Americans who did not have the same access to owner-ship and earning-ship that I have had.  In other words, quite literally, this is not mine, and if nothing more, it should be at least shared. 

For me it's a spiritual quest just to understand.  For example, I've been thinking of giving my house and its land back to the Lenni Lenape who live in this area, but I realize that I invested my money here so I could sell the house and use the money to move in to an "old folks' home."  I've actually been looking at them.  A residence costs the full value of my house up front, and I will have it to pay if I sell my house.  But should I have this option from stolen land?  Are there other ways of growing old and being cared for when a person (me) doesn't have children?  My Mom is still in her house at age 97, but my brother lives nearby.

You get the train of thought.  It's eye-opening to think of how I might/could live differently.  I've been actively contributing to African-American people in need, as well,  because  I can.  I don't have much, but what I have to spare will be better used by others.  I do not think of the money once it is out of my hands.  And few know about this activity of mine.  (Well, any readers here now know, but I think I only have three readers.)

What I discovered today is that everything I learn has a foundation in things I once knew and had forgotten.  Let me use "land-back" as an example.  I enjoyed 40 acres of woodland between the ages of 7 and 15, right outside my Grandmother's house.  I keep returning to trees as friends, and trees populate my poems.  Before I went to Graduate School in California, I was part of the Women's Encampment for a Future of Peace and Justice in Romulus, NY, near Lake Seneca, where we said no to the military industrial complex and nuclear bombs.  After Grad School, I was right back in the same area.  The Cayuga Nation land-claim lawsuit was heating up while I was teaching right there at Wells College in Aurora, NY.  I heard some people I worked with and created theatre with saying that if they were asked to leave their homes, they would sit on their porches with rifles.  I've heard since that the lawsuit was won, then lost.  I don't know where it is now.  Have any of these people asked the Cayuga Nation what it wants?

I am donating money to support Water Watchers trying to stop petroleum pipelines from destroying the crops and water of Indigenous land.  Donating to those who help elders survive through long winters by providing food and healing herbs and protein.  Showing up for Black Lives Matter whenever I can, and continuing to support Black efforts for justice and for healing in the face of prison systems and white body supremacy.  Thinking about how to live, now that I am retired on both pension and social security.  Examining how to help pass legislation that would help all people have homes, food, water, and healthcare.

Thinking about what's next. The life of our planet may be waning, but we'll all have more chance of survival if Indigenous and Black and Brown and women's and children's intelligences are finally in the mix.

There are friends, family, cultures we each know, and then there are those strange to each other.  But as Valerie Kaur says from her source in Sikh wisdom, there is no stranger, only those who do not yet know each other.  The work now is to get close enough to know and unite and move on to Just and Peaceful Days (Beloved community) in the many projects of healing, repairing, reparation-ing--you know--all of it.

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