A Gathering of Actors: The People's Light & Theatre Company in Cyprus and Hungary

By Peter Carnahan

Actors have always been travelers. So in 1991, when The Peoples Light & Theatre Company, of Malvern, Pennsylvania, decided to take their original production of Achilles, A Kabuki Play to mountain villages in Cyprus and to state theatres in newly-westernized Hungary, they were following an ancient tradition. Peter Carnahan has written a unique travel and production journal of this most unusual play, a verse adaptation of Homers Iliad, done in the style of the 17th century Japanese Kabuki theatre. 29 photographs by Mark Garvin.


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• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Feb 4, 2002
• ISBN: 9781462802982

Book preview

A GATHERING

OF ACTORS

The People’s Light & Theatre

Company in Cyprus and

Hungary

Peter Carnahan

Photographs by Mark Garvin A

People’s Light Book

Copyright © 2011 by Peter Carnahan.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

This book was printed in the United States of America.

To order additional copies of this book, contact:

Xlibris Corporation

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Contents

INTRODUCTION

MALVERN

CYPRUS

HUNGARY

LATER PERFORMANCES

POSTSCRIPT 2001

To the Company

ALSO BY PETER CARNAHAN

NONFICTION

SCHOONER MASTER, A Portrait of David Stevens

FICTION

A TALE OF SULIMAN AND HECTOR

THE ETHNIC WARS

SECOND MALVERN

PHARNABAZUS SITS ON THE GROUND WITH THE

SPARTAN CAPTAINS

INTRODUCTION

The People’s Light and Theatre Company is a resident professional theatre based in Malvern, Pennsylvania, a suburb seventeen miles west of Philadelphia on the old main line of the Pennsylvania Railroad. The Theatre was founded in 1973 by Danny Fruchter, Meg Fruchter, Ken Marini and Dick Keeler, the way most theatres are founded, with high hopes and no money. Keeler owned a stage lighting firm at the time that he had named, with youthful fervor, The People’s Lighting Company, thus the new theatre’s distinctive name.

By 1991, People’s Light, as it had become known, had grown to comprise a resident company of seventeen actors, nine more actors in a youth company, 40 other staff members, 1600 financial contributors and over 100,000 in attendance each season. The annual budget was two million dollars. The company owned a complex of theatres, offices, rehearsal and shop spaces and living quarters built in and onto an 18 th century farmhouse and barn just off the highway sprawl of U.S. 30 in Malvern. Since 1981, the company had focussed much of its attention on the performance and development of new plays, keeping one or sometimes several playwrights in residence, and for a number of years producing a summer-long festival of new work.

One of the many artists to become involved in this new play activity was Shozo Sato, a Kabuki master who taught the skills and disciplines of this Japanese theatre of the people at the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana. After some years of trying to recreate Kabuki theatre in Illinois, Shozo turned to a new approach, doing Kabuki versions of western stories, starting with Medea and then Macbeth. He staged his Kabuki Othello at People’s Light in 1986.

In 1989, Danny Fruchter, now the Producing Director of the company, began work on something he called the Iliad Project. This was a result of Danny’s growing fascination with Homer’s epic poem, a fascination fueled by his first trip to Greece, Cyprus and other Mediterranean countries in 1987, and his reading of Julian Jaynes’ The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, a book that uses The Iliad as the starting point of a complex theory about the development of modern consciousness. Danny became obsessed with the idea of getting back to the plain of Troy; in theatrical terms this meant getting back to how life looked and felt to someone standing on that plain in that time.

Typically, his approach in the Iliad Project was to throw every kind of creative activity into the mix, gospel singing, Afro-Caribbean drumming, and the Kabuki techniques of Shozo Sato, as well as to involve three writers, two of them resident with the company, the third, Karen Sunde, the author of Shozo’s Kabuki plays. One result of all this activity was Karen’s script Achilles, A Kabuki Play, tracing the story of the principal character of The Iliad.

The Iliad Project continued to explore other aspects of the poem, but Achilles, A Kabuki Play was scheduled for immediate production. Rehearsals would be in Malvern, then in Cyprus in preparation for a tour of Cyprus and Hungary, before returning for performances in Philadelphia at the Festival Mythos and finally at the home theatre in Malvern.

Invitations to Cyprus and Hungary had come about as a result of travels by Danny and his wife, company actress and literary manager Alda Cortese, in Europe between 1987 and 1991. The island of Cyprus, in the eastern Mediterranean, was their first stop, and they made many friends in the theatre there. When the Cyprus Ministry of Education decided to sponsor an international cultural festival in the summer of 1991, People’s Light, which had spent three weeks in the summer of 1990 working on the Iliad Project in a mountain village in Cyprus, was a logical choice.

The Hungarian connection was also established on their first trip. With Hungary’s emergence from the last vestiges of Communist control, its large and vital theatre community was concerned with how to maintain itself and its artistic mission without the high level of government subsidy that it was accustomed to. An American theatre company that raised 35% of its income from ticket sales and 60% of its income from nongovernmental contributions represented an important model to them, and Hungarian theatre people had already made a number of trips to Malvern to begin learning how it was done. An invitation to extend the tour from Cyprus to Hungary was arranged with the participation of the Hungarian Ministry of Culture and the office of the Mayor of Budapest.

So five weeks were to be spent in Cyprus and Hungary, but in some senses, senses that are important in the theatre, the journey was much longer than that.

The arts are one of those fields where the human imagination defines the time frame. In that sense, the journey began with the Achaean’s siege of Troy, around 1200 BC, stretched through the time that Homer composed The Iliad about it, perhaps four centuries later, skipped to the 17th century AD, when the Kabuki Theatre was established in Japan, skipped again to the present day, when this group of artists came together to create this particular play, still fascinated with that original confrontation before the walls of Troy, 3200 years before.

In space, too, it was quite a journey, if you want to trace it from Troy, in northern Turkey, to Japan, back to the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, where the play was first staged with a student cast, back to Japan, where they toured their production, to Malvern, where the play was remounted with People’s Light actors and some from Illinois, and then on to Kalopanayiotis, the mountain village in Cyprus where the company had been the previous year, to other stops in Cyprus, including the ancient Roman theatre at Kourion, to Budapest in a discotheque in what formerly, under the Soviets, had been a tractor exhibition hall, to a jewel-box 18th century theatre in Debrecen, in eastern Hungary, back to the indoor-outdoor setting of the Great Hall of the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, and finally to the large black box of the company’s home theatre in Malvern. Some journey. As much a journey in cultures as in time or geography.

In the spring of 1991, I was in Malvern from Harrisburg one day watching a rehearsal of Sister Carrie, the Theatre’s seven-and- a-half-hour dramatization of the Theodore Dreiser novel. Danny approached me with the idea of coming along on the Achilles tour and writing something about it.

Writing what?

Anything you want.

It was an offer difficult to refuse. I was about to retire as director of the theatre and literature programs of the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts and felt some anxiety at how I would fill up my newfound days. A writing project like this sounded ideal. And Danny understood that you don’t order a piece of writing; you turn a writer loose on a subject and see what happens. To the other journeys, add the journey of this book.

The immediate story began six weeks before departure:

MALVERN

Tuesday, July 16, 1991—Malvern

It is the first day of rehearsal for Achilles, and rather than meeting in the theatre, we find ourselves on Technology Drive in a modern office park in Malvern.

The room is empty office space, without interior walls or partitions, an expanse of brown carpet, exterior walls of tinted glass on two sides. Rectilinear, minimal, filled with light, it is like a Japanese house,

We are told to remove our shoes as we enter and pairs line the walls at the door. It is the first discipline of the director, Shozo Sato.

Shozo goes on to instruct us: the three-foot areas of carpet that have been taped off along the walls are our personal spaces. We are to keep our things there, neatly.

Place them like a work of art.

The day starts with meditation, company members sitting cross-legged in their personal spaces, before their belongings.

My first impressions of Shozo:

—His clothes fit him perfectly.

—He can do grotesque things with his voice or body andmake them seem as ordinary as walking or ordering a tuna on rye.

—Kabuki, the theatre of excess, flows out of this pillar of calm.

—He embodies two qualities in a combination undreamt of by the United States Marines: discipline and gentleness.

Preliminary talking is done with twenty-six people sitting in a circle on the carpet in the bare room. The atmosphere is quiet, friendly; there is some joking but it’s mostly low-key business, like a family meeting. There’s a kitchen table sound to it.

At 12:30 p.m. we go into the small kitchen area, which is windowless, and watch slides of the Illinois production’s tour of Japan. After the first five, the slides are upside down. Someone says, That’s the Australian tour.

First read-through, back in the circle on the carpet, Danny assigns chorus lines, this one to this actor, this one to a group of four. Three of the chorus of soldiers are women: Joyce Lee, a company member, Caroline Clay, a recent graduate of the University of the Arts and Elizabeth Meeker, who was Sister Carrie in the recent marathon production. The others are young men from the University of Illinois, whose names I will absorb piecemeal over the next week. For the moment, they are just the Illinois guys.

The reading is expressive, intimate, in the western style. There is no hint of the sing-song vocal delivery that I was skeptical of in the Kabuki Othello that I saw here a few years ago, nor does Shozo call for it.

The reading takes only an hour and a half. Rich in color and action, Karen Sunde’s script is extraordinarily compact, distilling the enormous Iliad into forty-five pages of dialogue. How did she do such a thing? By language, by the compressive power of poetry. With her terrible eyes ablaze, she yanked his coal-fire hair, says all you need say about the relation between Athena and Achilles, or even goddess and man in this story.

We begin a walk-through, which Shozo describes as an artist’s sketch of the physical action, with the details to be filled in later. There are frequent stops to assign chorus action.

6:00p.m. The chorus and company member Kathryn Petersen, (who plays Briseis, the narrator of the play), discuss with Danny and Shozo the function of the chorus—it is a character in the play, in Greek drama usually the villagers, here the soldiers, but also a group outside the action looking on, an intermediary between the audience and the actors.

The discussion moves on to ritual, what is it? what does it do for us? I’m invited into the conversation and add to the other descriptions that ritual is repeated familiar action. It must ring bells in your own consciousness, your own culture. You can’t adopt ritual from someone else’s culture, because for you there is none of the resonance that comes from deep within, from your ancient memory.

Even as I say this I’m aware that I’m directing my remarks at Shozo. I have no background in Japanese culture. When I see these actors with their strange, stilted movements (I’ve seen a video tape of the Illinois production), their exotic costumes and grotesque make-up, hear their voices speaking English words but running up and down two octaves of the scale in ways that suggest to me only the conversation of loonies, the effect is so foreign that I lose any sense of the story, and just wonder why these people are behaving in such a peculiar way.

I am aware—Danny has put it well—that you can’t do a story as big as The Iliad without some kind of formalism, some convention to make it larger than life. Achilles and Agamemnon cannot slouch on the sofa and send out for pizza. But will this Kabuki formalism work for us? I don’t know. I’ll find out over the next three months.

We talk on for quite a while. As we break up, Shozo says to the group, You better be good after all this talk. One of the things I like about him—these touches of quiet humor.

A theatre exercise to end the evening: Danny has the soldiers stand in a circle, make eye contact with each other and speak the play in their own words, if they are moved to speak. A kind of Quaker meeting exercise. It produces the usual stilted replies, fragments of piety, fragments of the written lines. Until Joyce says simply, I miss my family. I miss my children. I resent being here for a woman who if I passed her on the street wouldn’t acknowledge my presence.

Wednesday, July 17—Malvern

The warm-up this morning is being conducted by Robin McFarquhar, a thirtyish Englishman, who is a professor in the drama department at Illinois and the fight choreographer for Achilles. He also teaches circus skills, juggling, tumbling—which are, in their larger context, confidence and trust skills. Confidence in yourself. Trust in others. To hold your body erect and fall backward off a four-foot-high platform, you have to trust in the people catching you. This is true of the emotional falls of acting as well. This is the bond among actors.

I’ve already noticed that the Illinois guys, when there is a moment’s break in rehearsal, tend to relax with skill games, hand stands, forward rolls, juggling the sticks from the prop table. I was startled the first time I turned and saw lanky Joe Foust standing on solid Nick Offerman’s shoulders. How did he get up there?

Shozo enters, dressed in a gray-green striped kimono. He kneels and they kneel, then all bow, touching heads to the floor and say, O-hi-o gote-sye masu, a greeting offered at the beginning of a work session.

Shozo: You are not bowing to me. To what are you bowing?

Peter DeLaurier: We are bowing out of respect for ourselves, and the work.

Shozo: Most important, when I bow to the floor I am emptying myself of the previous moments, in this case, the warm-up.

When I come up I am empty, purified, ready for the next activity.

When you go to an art museum, the Louvre, after one room it all looks alike. It wears down your aesthetic stamina. After

you’ve seen one painting, eliminate it. Put it away for your future knowledge. That way you can go on.

Shozo demonstrates the semi-formal walk, the walk of the Kabuki soldier, knees slightly bent and turned out, the pelvis thrust forward, the arms curved at the sides, hands holding the cuffs of the kimono. He walks forward, arms swinging first, then the legs. It is a kind of stylized swagger, a formal exaggeration of masculinity.

The group forms in a circle that takes up the whole room and using the semi-formal walk begin what Shozo calls walking meditation.

Get to the point where your nerves, brain, all very calm, tranquil, transparent.

Most of the company, even the Illinois crowd, whom I presume have had this training, seem to be working at it. They walk as if they are, with great effort, keeping something balanced on their heads. It’s obviously more difficult than it looks when Shozo does it.

Shozo (after more coaching): No other culture pays so much attention to a simple thing such as a walk.

As the session concludes, they all kneel, bow to the floor, say, ote-skala sama deshita. Which means, You worked hard so you must be very tired.

The afternoon is given to costumes and makeup for publicity photos, It’s disorienting on the second day of rehearsal to see the whole visual part of the production finished, as if rehearsals were over and we were about to open. It recalls the actor’s nightmare: Wait! I haven’t learned my lines!

other surreal sights:

Michael Dailey, Achilles, with the left half of his face dead

white, the