Salmon Is Everything: Event and Book

I attended the reading at Northtown Books by members of the Klamath Theatre Project on Friday evening.  Marlon Sherman, Suzanne Burcell and Theresa May talked about how the project came about, and Mary Campbell (member of the original cast) and co-director Jean O'Hara read excerpts from the play.

From Marlon Sherman and Suzanne Burcell (Karuk), I was impressed by how open they were to the idea in the beginning, which was suggested by Theresa May, a new member of the HSU theatre faculty at the time, in response to the massive fish kill on the Klamath in 2002.  They were instrumental in recruiting Native students, conspicuously absent (then and much of the time since) from HSU theatre.  These students went back to their Karuk, Yurok and Hupa families and gathered relevant stories.

In reading excerpts from her chapter in the book, Suzanne Burcell described the rebellious shock of Native students to the idea that the point of view of competitors for Klamath water, the farmers and ranchers upriver, had to be represented.  She also noted with humor how Teresa May reacted to her suggestion that they also had to include the point of view of the fish.

The first part of the book describes the process of developing the script.  I also attended the first reading of the script in progress, and confess I didn't see how a theatre piece was going to emerge from it.  But according to the book, this reading inspired more people to come forward with personal and family stories, and these provided the human and cultural dimensions to the political and scientific that made the moment so alive on stage.

I reproduced my immediate response to that first production in the post below.  Since I've had cause recently to reflect on my nine years of writing about North Coast theatre, I would still place the 2006 HSU production of Salmon Is Everything near the top of my theatre experiences here.  For one thing, it was the most alive, especially in the emotional connection between those on stage and those in the audience.  And it meant something.  Certainly it spoke at the time to several areas of my experience here--working for Seventh Generation Fund, writing the script for the environmental video Voices of Humboldt County: Cumulative Impact which was cited in at least one forest court case, and writing the grant for the Native Performance Fund, still going now as the Native Art Fund. Even beyond the textures represented by these and other experiences, as a live theatre event it was singular in my experience here.

The heart of the book is the script itself.  Jean O'Hara describes touring it to Hupa, Yurok and Karuk communities.  In 2011 it got a full production at the University of Oregon, where Theresa May now teaches.  Her own chapter details what worked and what didn't in the process of creating the play, for she means this book to be a kind of guide to community-developed theatre.  A foreword by Gordon Bettles provides some historical context, and here and elsewhere in the book there are updates on what has happened since.

The book is Salmon Is Everything: Community-Based Theatre in the Klamath Watershed by Theresa May with Suzanne Burcell, Kathleen McCovey and Jean O'Hara, published by Oregon State University Press in their First Peoples series.  It's at Northtown Books and presumably other booksellers.

This North Coast Weekend: A Special Event

Back in 2006, a community-based play was presented at HSU and elsewhere called Salmon Is Everything. At 7 p.m. on Friday October 10, several participants in that process and production will be at Northtown Books, with their book about it all: Salmon Is Everything: Community-Based Theatre in the Klamath Watershed.

Scheduled to be present are Theresa May, Jean O’Hara, Suzanne Burcell (Karuk), & Kathy McCovey (Karuk) and special guest Marlon Sherman.

The invitation reads: "After a devastating fish kill on the Klamath River, tribal members and theatre artists developed a play to give voice to the central spiritual and cultural role of salmon in tribal life. Join the authors for readings from the play and hear their own stories about the creative collaboration and the significance of salmon among the people of the Klamath River."

Here's my Stage Matters commentary from 2006:

Going to theatre is an act of faith in its potential, and an act of hope that this will be one of the times it is realized. Of all that theatre is capable of, the expression and even creation of community around public issues is one of the most complex, and possibly, the most rare. But on a Friday evening early in May in the Studio Theatre at HSU, I saw it happen.

 It was the opening night of three performances by the Klamath Theatre Project, an ad hoc group of Native and non-Native faculty and community members, and some 30 students, most of them from local tribes, who worked for two years to collect interviews, studies and stories, and to create presentations arising from the 2002 Klamath River fish kill, a watershed event in all senses. But I doubt anyone involved could have predicted what would happen on that stage.

 Salmon Is Everything dramatized a series of interweaving encounters of fictional characters---a young Yurok-Karuk fisherman and his wife, a non-Native rancher and his mother, a graduate student in biology and a Hupa fish biologist, several Karuk, Yurok and Klamath elders, plus family members, a farmer, tourists, a reporter and a priest, among others. Their interaction illuminated some of the ways the Klamath water crisis affected them all, though the emphasis was on the Native communities where salmon has been the center of life and culture for untold generations.

 The cast was composed of Natives and non-Natives (as was the audience): elders, youth and children. Not many had acting experience, but there was not an abashed breath of amateurism anywhere--from the first moment everyone was poised, clear, warm and authentic. It was an illuminating ninety minutes, and a powerful night of theatre.

 There were heartfelt declarations presented with such conviction and authority that several actors (Native and non-Native) were moved nearly to tears by their own words. Yet the cast also moved in and out of dramatic scenes with the skill of theatrical veterans.

 There was power also in a simple scene of women beginning to weave baskets as they talked: this clearly is from their lives. And when two Brush Dance skirts were brought out, you could feel the intake of breath in the audience. As Native and non-Native characters talked of their lives and those of their forbearers, such historical terms as “Termination” and “allotments” attached themselves to real consequences and fates.

 The Project’s attempt to bring a community together without any culture losing its integrity, to find common interest and common ground, turned out to be mirrored in the form of this presentation. It brought together key elements of European-based theatre with elements of Native cultures derived in part from storytelling and ceremony.

 Though they are sometimes reluctant to express their concerns to outsiders, I have heard Native people speak their thoughts and from their hearts in primarily Native gatherings. I have also seen several well-meant, polished but inadequate theatre pieces concerning Native history and culture presented by non-Natives. But even as a work-in-progress, I have never seen anything like this. I wish I had space to name everyone who had a hand in creating it. I felt my faith restored, and my hope rewarded.

"Requiem" in Arcata: An Interview with Ursula Osborne

Ursula Osborne (Kowinski photo)

At the Humboldt Unitarian Universalist Fellowship in Bayside (Arcata), beginning on Thursday January 10, an ad hoc group of familiar North Coast actors will present the first English language production anywhere of Requiem, a play by Heinrich Liebrecht about his experiences in Nazi concentration camps and afterwards. In part—and improbably—it is a love story.

Liebretcht’s concentration camp memoir in book form has been called the most vivid of all such accounts in its presentation of everyday life. It was translated into English by Arcata resident Ursula Osborne, who also translated Liebrecht’s play and guided it to this first performance. 

This is the subject of my Stage Matters column to be published in the North Coast Journal on January 10.  What follows is more background  and my interview with Ursula Osborne.

The background is from the Xlibris site, the publisher of Osborne's translation of Liebrecht's memoir,  Not To Hate But To Love That Is What I Am Here For: My Path Through the Hell of the Third Reich.

Heinrich F. Liebrecht, born 1897, participant in WW I, judge in Berlin, removed from office in 1933 for political reasons. Until 1941 co-worker at the law office of the US Embassy, then arrest, torture, concentration camp. Time spent in USA after the liberation. 1949 he returned to the Federal Republic of Germany. He served in diplomatic service as Consul and General Consul, and after retirement lived in Freiburg where he died in 1989.

The translator, Ursula Osborne, née Solmitz, was born in Hamburg Germany in 1927. She left for England with her siblings in 1938 in a Kindertransport. She lived in England until 1944, at a boarding school, called Bunce Court, where her aunt was a teacher. Meanwhile the Solmitz parents remained in Germany until 1941, and during that time Heinrich Liebrecht and Lies became their special friends. Liebrecht remained a lifetime family friend after WWII, through exchange of letters, and postcards, and visits in California and Germany. Ursula, her husband and two sons met him in Freiburg in 1969, and continued the friendship with visits and exchange of letters.

  Ursula earned a BS degree in Chemistry from UCLA in 1948, became a U.S.A. citizen in 1949, worked intermittently in chemical labs and taught in California public schools and in the Peace Corps at a high school in the Highlands of Papua New Guinea. All along she continued to cultivate an interest in her native language, German.

The following is an edited version of my interview with Ursula Osborne at her home in Arcata on December 14, 2012.

Heinrich Liebrecht 1942

"Liebrecht and Lies [Elisabeth Hertz] got married very soon after my parents left Germany in 1941. Lies got pregnant. She was from Hamburg, he was from Berlin. They were in Berlin but they couldn’t find a place to live. They literally pushed a perambulator from house to house trying to find a place to live. It was hard to find nutrition for the child. It was 1942 when they decided they had to emigrate, to get out of the country with the child.

There was a Chilean doctor from the Chilean embassy who told them he could get them a passport, drive them to Italy in a limo, “I’ll take care of you.” But he was a crook, and was in cahoots with the Nazis, too. They kept asking him when are we getting out. It seems almost incredible to me that a man as intelligent as Liebrecht believed Velasco, this man, but he did. It was the only chance he had to get out of the country.

The last time they were supposed to meet him, it was a ruse. Where he had led them to believe he could help them was an office that was a Gestapo office. Liebrecht and Lies went there. Right away they saw what it was. They saw some Jews with their faces to the wall. Liebrecht wondered how can this be that these five Jews aren’t able to overcome the one Gestapo, but they just stood there.

He told his wife to run. She hesitated but she left. She did end up going to the Berlin zoo and committing suicide. But he didn’t know what happened to her. Liebrecht tried to physically overcome the Nazi official, and thought the other Jews would help him but they didn’t. He was taken to a prison and left there for a long time. He describes the prison in detail and how he was tortured.  Finally he was released and put in a facility where Jews were assembled to go to Theresienstadt." (Photo above: Liebrecht in 1940, photo taken by Elisabeth Hertz before their marriage.)

Theresienstadt to Auschwitz

"Theresienstadt was supposed to be a model camp that the Nazis were showing to the Red Cross and the outside world to show that concentration camps aren’t so bad. Actually it also was a transition camp from which people were eventually sent to Auschwitz.

Liebrecht was put on a transport to Theresienstadt. He didn’t know anything about his child or his wife or his mother. But while he was there his mother arrived at Theresienstadt. She thought it was a great thing that she had gotten to join him there. Some weeks later a caretaker brought his child. He could take his child to see his mother on her deathbed. The child was 2 ½ years old and didn’t know him, he had to win her back and become a good father to her.

  He chose Boszi [Weiss] who was head of the infants home to be her foster mother. Boszi said she couldn’t do it because she already had two foster children, but she relented, and the closeness between them evolved. He would go visit her every evening. He would bring her bread for her and the child. His job in the camp was as a potato carrier, and working with others who worked with food he could sometimes get things.

Then his turn came [to be sent to Auschwitz.] Boszi said I’m not going to let you go alone, I’m going with you. He said that can’t be, they won’t let you. She said I figured out a way—if we are married I can go. She went to Leo Baeck and got him to marry them, they had a little wedding, a camp marriage which allowed her to go along. She insisted on it. The child and I are going with you, we aren’t going to let you go alone.

Liebrecht went with the men who were going to the work camp, and Boszi went with the women and children going to the gas chamber. That’s how they did the division at Auschwitz. Liebrecht didn’t know exactly what had happened to them. After the war when he went back to Theresienstadt he found an old woman on her deathbed who told him.

As Boszi and Liebrecht’s daughter were waiting to go to the gas chamber, the Nazis called for a nurse—they needed a nurse. She stepped forward with the child and said I’m a trained nurse. The Nazis said we can use your services but the child can’t go with you. So she said everywhere I go the child goes. So she and the child walked into the gas chamber together. She could have saved herself but that wasn’t what she was about. I believe that story."

  Ursula and Heinrich Liebrecht

"Liebrecht was a friend of my parents in the early 1940s. My parents introduced me to him. Then when my husband and children went to Germany on a sabbatical, they said you have to visit Liebrecht. At that time he was in Freiberg
 as a lay Jesuit. His wife was baking a cake when we got there. He insisted on taking out us to the Cathedral in the bitter cold. He pointed out the gargoyles and so on, he was very amused with everything.  Then we came back and had cake and hot chocolate.  My sons were 14 and 16, and he was so friendly with everybody that my sons really took to him. They became friends and went back to visit him again later.

After our sabbatical trip he wrote to us. He wanted us to come back and lecture there on what people in the United States thought about the world. We didn’t feel up to that, but I corresponded with him from that point on. That was the winter of 1969. In the 70s he wrote to me that he was writing his memoirs, and asked if I would like a copy when they were published. I said of course. I was teaching gifted students then, and I gave some enrichment lessons in German, and corresponding with people in Germany was part of that. I asked him if he would correspond with one of my students, and he agreed. He enjoyed it very much.

When he died I was in the Peace Corps in Papua New Guinea, in the highlands, teaching chemistry. The caretaker for my house in Arcata sent me the his book that had arrived there from Germany. It was his memoir that was published posthumously.

  Some of my colleagues in PNG were De La Salle brothers and Sacred Heart nuns. One of the brothers knew German and he also read the book. When I read it I was very taken by the way that Liebrecht, who had been born a Jew and converted to Catholicism, had at the end of World War II a very significant conversation with Leo Baeck, the chief rabbi in Germany, who was in the camp with him at Theresienstadt. They had met there and had a lot of conversations there.

  When the war ended he went back to Theresienstadt because he was trying to find out what had happened to his daughter, so he met Leo Baeck again, because he was still there. Baeck had not been deported to Auschwitz as Liebrecht was. In this conversation they talked about vengeance and forgiveness. So it was the rabbi who convinced the Catholic that it was a time for forgiveness, not an eye for an eye. That impressed me. So I translated that section of the book right away, right there in the highlands of Papua New Guinea, so I could share it with all my colleagues, not just the German ones.

When I came home I put it aside for a long time. But in 2008 I translated the whole book. I published it with Xlibris as a translation. In the postscript it’s mentioned that he had also written a play. I’m not sure if Liebrecht wrote the postscript or someone else did. But he didn’t think the play was polished enough to publish."

The Play

My son started looking for the play and found that the Leo Baeck Institute had a manuscript, so we sent for a copy. It had a playbill for a performance in Salt Lake City in 1982 in a German theatre. I was intrigued, and when I went to a conference there with the Unitarian Universalists about four years ago, I wanted to know where the German theatre was.

It turned out to be a private home, started by a man and a woman who had been actors in Hamburg. They converted their living room into a theatre for the German speaking people of the city, Mormons mostly.

I discovered this because the playbill had the names of the actors in that premiere performance, so I looked in the Salt Lake City phone book and found the name of the man who had played Liebrecht. It turned out he had died, but his widow was living in the same house with the same phone number. She invited me to the house. It looked like walking distance from where I was staying but it was June and very hot. I walked up and up the hill and had to rest for awhile under a tree. But I finally got there.

  We talked and talked, and she showed me photos of the play and the costumes. We became quite good friends. She said she had lymphoma and would be dead in a year, but as far as I know she’s still alive. I would like to invite her to the play here.

  At the time they did the play, Liebrecht was the German consul in San Francisco. His area included Salt Lake City, so he came there and told them about the play. But when they performed it, he never saw it.

Fairly soon after I got back I translated the play from German to English. But because Liebrecht didn’t think it was performable, I started looking for someone who might be interested in making it performable. I met John Heckel when he was at the HSU theatre department and he pounced on it. But nothing happened for awhile, and then we started meeting regularly to read the manuscript and talk about it. He and Fran Wittman made suggestions for changes, and from that stage it has evolved.

I haven’t met the actors yet. I want to go to rehearsals. My bad hip doesn’t make it easy, but I’ll go."

His relationship with Boszi Weiss

"His relationship with Boszi Weiss is the central relationship in the play. It’s also in the memoir but it didn’t really become as clear to me from the memoir how close the sexual relationship was. I didn’t see that until I learned more about it in the play. At the end, the Gestapo asked her whether the child is her child. She said, I’m the mother of the child and I’m pregnant by the father of the child. She was carrying another child.

There’s a place in the memoir when Liebrecht first noticed her in Theresienstadt, she had a special way of moving her head to move her hair out of her face. She was Czech. She came in the early days of settling when they were allowed to bring all kinds of equipment, like musical instruments.

There’s a scene in the play that happens after the time covered in the memoir. It’s at the consulate in San Francisco, and Liebrecht is talking to his secretary. He talks about women’s rights. The beginning of the play is different, too. Boszi asks him how it was when he was growing up, so he talks about his early life. His memoir doesn’t. He talks about the youth movement in the “teens” and the young people’s idealism. She asks about his first sexual encounters. He talks a lot about the young women he was with when he was still in the military. He was in the German army in World War I—my father was, too. Liebrecht got the Iron Cross on the western front. He encountered these women on leave.

I’m convinced the play is close to how life was for Liebrecht, and the relationships are very real. He had a very sincere and humanistic outlook, an incredible kindness towards other people. I was intrigued by his choosing Catholicism—a man who was born before 1900 choosing to become a Catholic at the end of World War I. I still don’t really know how it happened. But it was a sincere conversion—not just to avoid the troubles that were already happening. I think he liked the ritual rather than the dogma. He liked being with other people observing the ritual together."

How Ursula Got to Arcata

"My husband, Clyde Osborne, taught chemistry at Long Beach State. He retired in 1976, his health was not good. I was still teaching in southern California but he wanted to retire to somewhere with big trees, like those he knew in his childhood in Bremerton. He grew up near the naval base there. We visited our son at Humboldt State and thought the redwoods were big enough. So we retired here."

Women of the Northwest

Women of the Northwest, on stage at the Arcata Playhouse, celebrates 14 or so individual women in local history. But in performance, the lively, inventive, and relatively brief vignettes about them do something more: they shine a different light on that history itself.

 Many of these women are appropriately remembered for individual accomplishments. Elta Cartwright, a track star at Eureka High (which itself made history by becoming the first high school to allow girls to run races in shorts) became the first woman in America to qualify for the 1928 Olympics.

 As Mayor of Eureka from 1926 to 1931, Emily Jones was the first female mayor west of the Mississippi. After Martella Cone Lane moved to Fortuna with her husband in 1899, she revealed the redwoods to the world in her paintings.

 Emma Freeman was a prominent photographer who chronicled Eureka and Humboldt scenes from 1907 to 1920. Known as “The Lady of the Hills,” Margaret Smith Cobb lived in the wilderness near Garberville in those years, and wrote poems and romantic novels that were championed by Jack London.

 Susie Baker Fountain, columnist for the Arcata Union and the Blue Lake Advocate through the 1950s, collected a century of Humboldt County history. Humboldt State claims her as its first graduate in 1915, and houses her historical records in its library.

Stella Patterson, who came north after the San Francisco earthquake, had a full life but found herself alone in 1946 at age 80. She decided to live in an isolated cabin in the mountains on the Klamath River west of Happy Camp, where the two miners who were her nearest neighbors called her simply “Dear Mad’m.” That became the title of her book about the experience, which is still available.
 “I have lived the life I wanted,” she says in this play, “and the life I’ve loved.”

 The core cast of 12 actors presented aspects of these women’s lives, and storyteller Charlene Storr honored her grandmother, Sadie Gorbet (Tolowa), who at the age of 72 was the only Native American in the California delegation to the 1972 Democratic National Convention. She counseled her family to take the good parts of their tradition and of the modern world, and throw the rest away.

 Besides historical figures, the play depicts some legendary ones as well as composite characters and representative figures (a telephone operator, prostitutes, suffragettes.) Historical material was gathered and shaped by Jackie Dandeneau, Edith Butler and Tammy Rae Scott, but the presentation was created by the actors. They came up with an entertaining, very theatrical combination of monologues, dialogues, dramatic and comedic scenes, music and movement, plus bustling and lyrical meditations on themes such as food and motherhood.

 The first act was mostly a mosaic of lives, ending with a memorable moment: members of the Native Women’s Collective sang some of the songs associated with the Flower Dance, a coming of age ceremony for girls that local tribes basically have in common. Reviving this dance has been a priority for at least 15 years, as I recall.  They also spoke of the needs it addresses to restore a sense of self-respect, support and belonging to young women.

 The second act had more thematic threads, culminating in a final evocation of childbirth and motherhood, children and the lineage of women. Though the actors typically play several roles each, there were strong individual moments.

 With that peculiar 1930s diction, Dandeneau conveyed the scary if somewhat comic authority of Mayor Jones. Laura Munoz moved easily from an American Indian woman known only as one of Emma Freeman’s favorite photographic subjects to Antoinette Chartin, a cultured French woman who became one of the first non-Native pioneers in Blue Lake of the 1870s, opening a hotel there with her husband. Ali Freedlund was a spirited Elta Cartwright.

The most amazing feature of Siena Nelson’s performance as a cowboy who was secretly female (a not uncommon subterfuge) wasn’t her perfect gait and vocal cadence: it was the hardness in her eyes. There were vivid performances by Jada Owen and Ciara Cheli Collado in the final thematic sections. Musicians Julie Froblom, Jill Petricca, Dharla Curry and Jan Bramlett joined the action as needed. Other onstage participants were Tammy Rae Scott and Rebecca Zettler.

 These roughly two hours did not offer complete portraits, nor were all ethnic groups and occupations represented. But by including themes from women’s lives that influence common events, this production as a whole evokes in dynamic fashion a dimension of experience often neglected in the usual histories.

From a rhythm of life revealed by cooks for a lumber camp to the “river of blood” of childbirth, the play suggests a perspective it is vital to include. Set design is by Siena Nelson, lighting by David Ferney, costumes by Lydia Foreman. Women of the Northwest continues at the Arcata Playhouse Friday and Saturday (Oct. 19-20) at 8 p.m. and Sunday at 2 p.m. before shows in Petrolia Oct. 27 and Briceland Oct. 28.

Additional Notes: A Preview

Women of the Northwest features a dozen actors portraying at least that many women who figured in local history from 1900 to the 1930s and beyond. Actor/writer Jacqueline Dandeneau, researcher Tammy Rae Scott and historian Edith Butler got the project started this summer, but the cast combined to shape the final show. The Native Women’s Collective is also involved.

 “We tell some of the stories through song and movement,” Dandeneau said, “so it’s not all talking heads, which is the danger with a history piece.”

Women involved in logging, mining, ranching and politics, as well as teachers, artists, athletes, mothers, prostitutes and even a stage coach robber are all represented. “These pieces are about women who figured out—by necessity or from some spirit within them—how to live life on their own terms, given what terms might be available,” Edith Butler said.

For background on the women’s suffrage movement in Humboldt, they brought filmmaker Martha Wheelock up from L.A. Coincidentally, her film on the subject airs on KEET next Monday (Oct. 15) at 7:30 p.m. “She told us that it was the men in rural areas like Humboldt that made the difference in voting for women’s suffrage,” Dandeneau said.

 It was in 1912, exactly 100 years ago, that women voted in their first California election (they didn’t get to vote for federal candidates until 1920.) “So we’re hoping to have the League of Women Voters registering voters in the lobby for our shows,” she said. “There are a lot of women’s issues right at the top of this year’s election—things that have been assumed, and things that have been fought for.” By Humboldt women, among others.