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.
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.
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.
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.
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 4th Street in Manhattan’s East Village. Over the years it expanded from the two
theatres at 74A, to the Annex at 66 East 4th Street, to 9 floors of
rehearsal halls on 3rd St., and an Art Gallery on 2nd. 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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© 2024 Susan L. Chast
