The Story Beneath

All of the issues and themes doubtlessly at work in The Tempest--the meditations on nature, colonialism, Utopia, the theatre, cosmology and the meaning of life, etc., and all the vexed questions about the various characters-- seem to me to  be overlays on the basic story, the most compelling and direct through-line of The Tempest: Prospero’s intent to secure his daughter’s future.

 When Prospero and Miranda landed on this island, and while he used his books to master its magic forces, he encountered two beings. Ariel was a spirit imprisoned by the now dead witch Sycorax; Prospero freed Ariel on condition that Ariel would serve him for a time. The other being was Caliban, the animalistic son of that same witch. Prospero at first befriended him. Caliban taught him what he knew about the island, and Prospero schooled Caliban in basic European or “civilized” knowledge, hoping to humanize him. But Caliban attempted to rape Miranda (an act he does not deny—it was, after all, his only opportunity to sire children.) Then everything changed, and the enraged Prospero used his powers to torment and enslave Caliban.

 Beyond his rage, Prospero must have seen what this meant. His daughter was becoming a young woman (15 or 16 at the time of the play), while he was becoming an old man (now 50.) His powers would inevitably wane, until he could no longer protect her from Caliban. Eventually she would be alone on this island. What could he do?

The ship returning to Italy from Tunis in Africa was an opportunity he could seize upon. Evidently he knew exactly who was on board—not only his brother and the King of Naples, but the young Prince of Naples, a suitable husband for Miranda. He could bring the young people together to see if they were really a match. He could also magically confront the others with their offenses against him, and put himself in position to reclaim his dukedom and return to Milan, where he could take whatever further measures he could to secure Miranda’s future.

 This is mainly what he in fact does. He brings Miranda and Ferdinand together, and they seem immediately infatuated with each other. But he has to test Ferdinand’s constancy and his honor. Shakespeare himself (also approaching 50) had a daughter who made a bad match with an unfaithful man.  Shakespeare also knew that King James would be in the audience for the first performance of The Tempest, and James had his own daughter's marriage to worry about.

Prospero had to make sure Miranda would become a princess, and not a fling. That Prospero is conscious of his own impending death is expressed most beautifully in his “we are such stuff as dreams are made of" speech, but he also notes later than when he returns to Italy his every third thought will be of death. Even his final speech, when he begs for indulgence and prayers, it is because without his magic powers he is weak.

 Commentators argue whether Prospero was intent on revenge or not, when he created the storm. Some vengeance, or at least accounting, was probably part of it, and he certainly still harbored anger. But he took care that the shipwreck didn’t kill or injure anyone. He did inflict torments on the ignoble Italian nobles, and was jolted out of his distracted cruelty by Ariel, but he had this goal beyond revenge--he could turn his justifiable revenge into forgiveness that actually doesn't seem all that sincere, but it is politically very smart. Especially if his goal is to secure Miranda's future.

 The King of Naples thought his son was dead, but Prospero returned him alive, and with a wife. The grateful king became Prospero’s ally on the spot. Then Prospero let his brother know that he also knew of his conspiracy against the King of Naples hatched on the island, but would hold that knowledge in reserve. When he then boldly proclaimed he would take back his dukedom, his brother could hardly object.

John Gielgud as Prospero (1951)

 These were deft and very effective political moves, meant to get him back to Italy where he could serve his daughter’s interests. For clearly he wasn’t much interested in returning for himself. Here on the island he had magic power, derived in part from his lifelong study. Now he had to give up his power (the staff) and his knowledge (his book), for a life of decline.

It's true that in plays of this era concerning royals, the health of relationships reflect on the health of the state: a good marriage suggests a goodly kingdom.  There's some expression of this in the content of Prospero's magic show for Miranda and Ferdinand (which would have been done as a masque), when the goddess Ceres blesses the impending marriage, equating a fruitful royal couple with a fruitful land.

Yet I can't convince myself that Prospero cares very much about Milan except for his daughter's sake.  He wants the marriage to be honorable, perhaps so that there's no taint of a child conceived out of wedlock that might affect the royal succession of his grandchildren.  But more urgently it seems to be because he wants Miranda to have a stable, prosperous and fulfilled life.

Mariah Gale and Patrick Stewart (2006-7)

 Granted all the other elements of the play, it is basically about a father—a single parent—seizing the opportunity to secure his daughter’s happiness and her future. One consequence of seeing the play this way is that it establishes Prospero as the protagonist—the one who is most active and propels the action. This may seem obvious, but many productions over the years have tended to emphasize other characters: Caliban (as a victim of colonialism and racism), Ariel (relationship to natural forces) or even Miranda.

 These admittedly can be showier parts.  My memory of a production in Pittsburgh is of Caliban, of Libby Appel's production at OSF of Ariel.   But I’m convinced that’s partly because Prospero has been treated too passively. Yes, he’s supposed to be old and wise, but not inert. He’s the magician, after all. I’d like to see him as a livelier, more dynamic and active presence. He has anxieties and doubts, moments of anger, joy and triumph and satisfaction. Mostly he’s locked into his task, and when he allows himself the distraction of putting on a show for the lovers, he angrily cuts it short so that he can attend to Caliban, for he can’t let anything derail his complex plan and the activities that must be delicately balanced.

Producing the Tempest, and Prospero's Gift

Ralph Fiennes as Prospero (2011)

The expression “if you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all” does not apply to productions of Shakespeare plays, and perhaps least of all to The Tempest.  There's a feast of characters, different sorts of action and themes, with drama, romantic and physical comedy, music and magic. But it's also his shortest play, with these rarities: the classic unities of action in one play on one day, and with the modern approach of starting when events have come to a head. (Playwright Arthur Miller used to call it "when the chickens come home to roost.")  Some experts even call it an experimental play.

(The unity of time and action, it must be said, comes at the price of Prospero's long recounting of the past to Miranda.  During it he chides her several times to pay attention, but he might be even more anxious about the audience's attentiveness.)

 The spectacles present each new production with creative and technical challenges. How do you stage the storm and shipwreck that starts the play? The displays of magic? The non-human characters? Then there are the mysteries of motivations and meaning that require decisions, which themselves ensure that each production will be different.

In creating the play, Shakespeare undoubtedly did what he usually did--he kept in mind the actors his company had for the various parts, and the place where it would be performed.  The Tempest was first done in an indoor theatre, which allowed for candlelight to help create magical effects.  A ceiling meant that Ariel might fly down on a rope or wire (which Libby Appel did so effectively in the outdoor theatre at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in her final production as artistic director.)

At the same time, Shakespeare knew the show would probably move to the outdoor Globe, and so had to be adaptable.  Much of the magic in the play is accomplished through music--there are more songs in it than in most Shakespeare plays--and this is a feature that an outdoor theatre can even enhance.

So every production that follows must keep in mind the capabilities of the specific theatre: space, lighting, rigging, etc.  This all influences the interpretation and its expression.

Helen Mirren as Prospera in the 2010 Julie
Taymor feature film

The North Coast Rep production uses an earthy brown set with a central obelisk, and faux rocks etc. spattered with mathematical/magical symbols (that later play a more conspicuous part.)  This is an early decision for The Tempest--do you go brown or green?  Green suggests an island paradise, but brown suggests something more earthbound and at times bleak.  Or you can do both brown and green and add gray/black, as the 2010 Julie Taymor film does,with scenes shot on the volcanic rocks in the Hawaiian islands (though it is similar to Taymor's minimalist black gravel set for her first theatrical version.)  This permits the debate among the nobles as to whether the island is green or "tawny" to be a draw.

The Tempest more than most plays presents a rich variety of ways to structure a production. For example, there is time. “Tempest” comes from a Latin word that means storm but also time, as in tempus fugit, or musical time and rhythm: tempo. Prospero has a plan, and his magic is likely mathematical and astrological in part, so every act has its proper time, and the day has a definite tempo. Making time and the passage of time an overt and visible theme—with strange looking time pieces, etc.-- is a way of structuring the production. Especially for modern audiences, who are used to the “ticking clock” structure for literary, film and TV thrillers.

Christopher Plummer as Prospero (2012)

Another way (perhaps commensurate with the above) is to emphasize the alchemical connection.  According to interpretations that go back to Christian mystics but are more associated with Jung and post-Jungians like James Hillman and Thomas Moore, alchemists were not so much searching for a way to create gold, but exploring the secrets of the soul.  For these interpreters, the soul is the harmonizing function among body and spirit, mind and emotion.  The Tempest sets up these factors, as Ariel represents spirit and Caliban the body or the physical.  Prospero's magic is in harmonizing them, and his success is: Miranda, the wonder child, and her marriage.  The  word "soul" I believe appears in this play only twice, in the conversation between Miranda and Ferdinand.  In this way, Prospero's gift to Miranda is not only a safe and happy future, but the makings of her soul.

The Tempest and the Time Lord: Shakespeare and Sci-Fi

"Shakespeare, in this, the last play completely from his hand, is inventing science fiction."  So writes the acclaimed Shakespeare scholar A.D. Nuttall in his now classic book, Shakespeare the Thinker.  He starts off his chapter on The Tempest with some dialogue between Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock.

Nuttall was referring specifically to an interchange between Prospero and Ariel, when the spirit goads Prospero into feeling some human pity.  Ariel has described how, at Prospero's instruction, he has driven several of the Italian nobles to near madness.  In lines before the ones that Nuttall quotes, Ariel suggests that "your charm so strongly works them, that if now you beheld them, your affections would become tender."

"Dost thou think so, spirit?" Prospero says. "Mine would, sir," Ariel replies, "were I human."  It is indeed a familiar sort of exchange involving the logical Mr. Spock, or later, the android Data, who has no emotions but aspires to be human.

Nutall also mentions the most obvious science fiction parallel--the movie Forbidden Planet, released by MGM in Cinemascope and color in 1956.  It has direct and intentional parallels to The Tempest: a Prospero figure (scientist who taps into the technology, power and intelligence of a vanished alien civilization) marooned on a planet with his young daughter who falls in love with one of the men who arrives from Earth.  The Ariel figure is Robby the Robot, and Caliban is symbolically the evil force that turns out to be the scientist's own denied negative side, his Id or Shadow, made immensely more powerful by the alien technology.  (There is a sense in The Tempest that Caliban reflects Prospero's dark side.)

The alien race in Forbidden Planet thought it was on the brink of perfecting its society--suggesting the Utopian theme in The Tempest--but its attempt ended in instant self-destruction.  Something similar happens in the Josh Whedon sci-fi film Serenity (2005) in which a solar-system government seeds the atmosphere of an idyllic planet with a chemical to make the population less aggressive, to further its objective of making a "better world."  But the chemical makes 90% of the population so passive that they waste away, while 10% become the fierce cannibals that still savage the system.  The name of this planet is Miranda.

Nutall relates the fantasy world of The Tempest's island to our sense of science fiction.  "Classic science fiction, as written by H.G. Wells, gives us alternative worlds in which things we have never experienced are imagined in circumstantial detail."  And it is true that for the modern temperament, it became easier to imagine an android than a spirit, a Spock than a sprite.  But after Harry Potter and the Hobbit films, and all the other popular fantasy stories of the past decade or so, we don't seem to find spirits and magic too unbelievable.  We can accept alternative worlds without machines.

Wells' first great story was The Time Machine, which made the transition from fantasy to science fiction while retaining mythic power.  It is however a more recent time machine traveler who provides another connection to The Tempest.

When the longest-running science fiction TV series anywhere (1963-1989)--UK's Doctor Who--was revived in 2005, each season featured at least one episode in which the Doctor and his companion visit a historical figure in the past: Charles Dickens, Queen Victoria, Agatha Christie, etc.  In the 2007 season, the Doctor (played by David Tennant) takes his companion, Martha Jones (Freema Agyeman) to 1599 London, where they attend a production of Love's Labours Lost at the Globe Theatre, and meet William Shakespeare.

These tend to be lighter episodes, though there is always a menace, and in this one they banter with Shakespeare quotes--some of which Shakespeare hadn't written yet.  There's a lot of historical accuracy in it all, and part of the plot centers on the actual mystery of whatever happened to Love's Labours Won, a title appearing on a contemporaneous list of Shakespeare's plays, but of which nothing else is known--no text, no accounts by anyone who saw it, if it ever actually existed.

Clearly the episode's writer, Gareth Roberts, relished relating aspects of Shakespeare's plays and life to the story, which involved aliens who manifested as witches, using Shakespeare's words to open a rift into which their evil hordes could invade and destroy the Earth.

But what to call these alien witches?  Shakespeare provides the perfect name in The Tempest: the evil witch who had imprisoned Ariel and had sired Caliban: Sycorax.  The name would then tie the adventure that the Doctor and Shakespeare had to Shakespeare imagining The Tempest:  the tale of a man with the power of a god (a thematic problem in the Tennant years on Doctor Who) who is accompanied by a daughter (a young woman companion), etc.  The battle with the witches would be backstory.  (In the episode, Shakespeare triumphs with the help of a word from J.K. Rowling, to further the magic connection.)

Unfortunately though, Sycorax was already taken.  Russell T Davis had used it the year before for the first aliens that the David Tennant Doctor faced.  Roberts had to settle for inventing his own, the Carrionites--descriptive but not Shakespeare.

However, he didn't lose out completely.  After the climactic scene during the only ever performance of Love's Labours Won, the adventure is over, and Shakespeare is sitting on the Globe stage the next day, chatting up Martha Jones. The Doctor wanders in from backstage where he's found a prop that he says reminds him of a Sycorax.  "And I'll have that off you as well," Shakespeare says, meaning that this word Sycorax is something else he's going to appropriate from what the Doctor and Martha have said and done.

So the connection is made anyway, and when Shakespeare writes The Tempest in 1611, he's apparently allowing himself to recall the fantastic events of 12 years before (notice that Prospero has been on the island for 12 years!), perhaps conflating the magician he knew of called Doctor Dee with the Doctor of Tardis, when a Lord of Time visited the great Globe itself, and left not a rack behind.  

Audition for Actors (and a Horse)

Skyclad Theater (a project of the Ink People) in partnership with the Arcata Recreation Division and NCRT present Plays in the Park, coming this summer.  Auditions for William Shakespeare’s As You Like It and Sarah Ruhl's Late: A Cowboy Song will be held Saturday, April 6th, 2pm-4pm and Sunday, April 7th, 7pm-9pm at the Redwood Lounge in Redwood Park, Arcata, with call backs TBA. The shows open Friday, August 2nd, and run alternating weekends through Sunday, September 1st in Redwood Park. All roles are available. Rehearsals will begin in June.

 Roles available for As You Like It

9 Male
4 Female
11 Male or Female
All age ranges

Roles available for Late: A Cowboy Song

1 Male, age 20-35
1 Female, age 20-35
1 Female, age 20-40, plays guitar and sings.
1Horse: Yes, a real horse. Good natured, calm, good around crowds. Well trained and able to be ridden.

Please bring a headshot and resume if you have them.  Short prepared monologues are welcome, but not required.  Several roles in both shows require singing.  If you are interested in auditioning for a singing role, please be prepared with a short song. If you are interested in offering a horse, a photograph will do.

Please email skycladtheater@gmail.com or call (707) 834-0861 for more information.  You can also visit www.playsinthepark.org.

This North Coast Weekend

The only game in town this week is Shakespeare's The Tempest at North Coast Rep.  It's on stage weekends at 8 p.m. through April 20.  Directed by David Hamilton, it features Scott Malcolm as Prospero, Kate Haley as Miranda, Chyna Leigh as Ariel, Kenneth Wigley as Caliban, Ken Klima as Antonio, and Bob Service as Alonso. Sets are by Calder Johnson, costumes by Patricia Hamilton, lights by Alex Service, sound by Gabriel Groom, with cinematography by Malcolm DeSoto.  There's likely to be plenty more on this play and production in this space, and a review in the NC Journal.

This North Coast Weekend

 Dell’Arte International School MFA students present Finding The Way Home: An Evening of Melodrama, a set of overlapping stories in which good triumphs over evil (eventually), Thursday through Saturday (March 14-16) at 8 p.m. in the Carlo Theatre. 707-668-5663.

 Arcata Playhouse inaugurates this year’s Family Fun Series with The Gruffalo, a play with animal characters and music adapted from an award-winning children’s book, presented by the London-based youth theatre group Tall Stories. Performances are Friday and Saturday at 7 p.m., plus a Saturday matinee at 2. 707 822-1575.

 Community members are presenting several performances of A Thousand Kites, a play based on letters from prisoners, family members and correction officers: Friday (March 15) in Gist Hall at 8 p.m., the Native American Forum at HSU on March 29 during the university’s Criminal Justice Dialogue, and finally at Redwood Curtain on April 7 at 2 p.m. All proceeds benefit the Prison University Project and other programs.

HLOC Anniversary and Hater at HSU

She was a Humboldt State political science major who took a voice class on a dare. She sang in public for the first time in Amahl and the Night Visitors, the first show produced by the Humboldt Light Opera Company. It was December 1973.

 Now voice teacher Carol McWhorter Ryder runs the company, and she was the Artistic Director of This Is Our Story, the show celebrating HLOC’s 40th anniversary in a packed Van Duzer Theatre at HSU last Saturday.

 “A lot of us didn’t have that much music in our lives when we were younger,” she said in an interview as the company rehearsed. “When we explore that as an adult, we find a passion we didn’t know was there. It changes your life tremendously.”

 She credits Jim Stanard, her HSU voice teacher, with inspiration that went beyond music. “He was an amazing mentor, not only vocally but in his feelings about the community and the role of arts organizations in the community.”

 Stanard, along with director Francine Peterson and conductor Phil Kates, founded HLOC as an all-volunteer nonprofit. After more than 100 productions involving well over a thousand performers, it still is. “The goals from the beginning were to provide opportunities for people in the community to perform and explore musical theatre,” Ryder said, “and to provide the community with a company that’s dedicated to performing only musical theatre.”

 The anniversary concert featured songs from HLOC shows of the past five years, from their fifth production of The Pirates of Penzance to the North Coast premiere of Dirty Rotten Scoundrels. The show previewed songs from HLOC’s forthcoming summer production, Shrek The Musical.

“It’s going to be a huge challenge,” Ryder said. “We have to build a 25 foot singing dragon. But because we’ve had a great design and production team for so long, led by Jayson Mohatt, I know we’ll do it.”

 Also performing were representatives of two auxiliary groups—the women’s chorus known as The Babes, begun 20 years ago, and Kidco, the training and performance company for children, formed in 1998.

 With four voice teachers currently in the company, HLOC emphasizes training. But this anniversary was clouded by the news that College of the Redwoods is about to reduce its music and theatre programs to almost nothing, beginning this May. “Probably 80% of our company’s young people have gone to CR,” Ryder said. “Closing these CR programs is going to hurt us and all the local theatres, and the whole community.” To emphasize this, performers who’d gone to CR filled the anniversary show stage just before intermission to ask audience members to petition the administration.

 One example Ryder noted in the interview was James Gadd, a lead in several HLOC shows and a soloist Saturday night, who had never considered singing “until he walked into a voice class at CR. He’s amazing now. He never would have felt he could sing except for CR. And that man needs to sing.”

 Besides Gadd, soloists for the anniversary show included Brad Curtis, Lela Annotto-Pemberton, Tyler Rich, Molly Severdia, Kevin Richards, Fiona Ryder, Katri Pitts, Bill Ryder, Melissa Trauth, Larry Pitts and the singer who will play Shrek, Tristin Roberts.

 There were duos and trios and larger groups, and 50 munchkins from Kidco singing songs from The Wizard of Oz. Led by HLOC’s orchestra conductor Justin Sousa, a final chorus of at least 60 adults and nearly that many children reprised the evening’s theme song from the upcoming Shrek: “This Is Our Story,” with the lines, “you are us/we are you/ this is our story.”

 The first solo number in the show, sung by (former CR student) Essie Canty Bertain, was from Little Women, about how the young writer Jo wants to be “Astonishing.”

 A few hours before this performance I listened to visiting New York director Samuel Buggeln talk to HSU theatre students about working in New York and Los Angeles, where intense competition along with the vagaries of show business mean that few actors get opportunities. But as the HLCO anniversary show should remind us, an audience somewhere in Humboldt on any given weekend may see and hear someone be astonishing.

Hater at HSU

Highlighting the second and final weekend of Hater at HSU is the appearance of Samuel Buggeln, the New York director who translated Moliere's The Misanthrope to create this play.  He will lead the talkback after the performance on Friday at Gist Hall Theatre, and will talk and answer questions in the Studio Theatre on Saturday from 3 to 5 p.m.  He'll then host a potluck for members of the production.

Up there again is Claudia Johani Guerrero, who plays Celine.  A certain newspaper with the initials NCJ has for the second week chosen to pass on the opportunity to publish her photo, or any photo from this production.  And this is the face they ignored in favor of dim and badly focused photos to lead their calendar.  I guess they're worried that people might actually be drawn to look at their newspaper.

As Celine, Johani Guerrero commands the stage, and has complete control of her moments.  The payoff was the utter silence in the audience at the end, when things turned serious.  Charlie Heinberg has never been  more effectively physical--but with Michael Fields directing you expect a physical production.  Mark Teeter is a revelation--he's not only skillful and confident in his outrageous characterization, but he was relaxed enough opening night to improvise with a prop accident.  Andreina Loaiza also performed with very effective skill and style.  The ensemble started out with a shaky entrance onto the fashion show runway set on opening night, but they loosened up quickly.  By now this show should be glittering.

Update: Reports are that Hater had a very successful second weekend, with packed houses of enthusiastic and engaged audiences.

Produced by HSU Theatre, Film & Dance, Hater completes its West Coast premiere with performances on Thursday, Friday and Saturday at 7:30 p.m., and Sunday at 2 p.m. in the Gist Hall Theatre.  More information on Buggeln (including how to pronounce his name) as well as the production at HSU Stage & Screen.

Coming Up:

Dell’Arte International School MFA students present Finding The Way Home: An Evening of Melodrama, a set of overlapping stories in which good triumphs over evil (eventually), Thursday through Saturday (March 14-16) at 8 p.m. in the Carlo Theatre. 707-668-5663.

 Arcata Playhouse inaugurates this year’s Family Fun Series with The Gruffalo, a play with animal characters and music adapted from an award-winning children’s book, presented by the London-based youth theatre group Tall Stories. Performances are Friday and Saturday at 7 p.m., plus a Saturday matinee at 2. 707 822-1575.

 Community members are presenting several performances of A Thousand Kites, a play based on letters from prisoners, family members and correction officers: Friday (March 15) in Gist Hall at 8 p.m., the Native American Forum at HSU on March 29 during the university’s Criminal Justice Dialogue, and finally at Redwood Curtain on April 7 at 2 p.m. All proceeds benefit the Prison University Project and other programs.

This North Coast Weekend:Hater and Others

Dueling Molieres on the HSU campus this weekend.  Although readers of this week's North Coast Journal may be surprised to hear it (though not readers of the Eye or Tri-City Weekly) , the HSU Theatre, Film & Dance production of Hater, a new translation of Moliere's The Misanthrope, opens Thursday.  It's directed by Michael Fields, and plays in Gist Hall Theatre  at 7:30 p.m. Thursday-Saturday, and 2 p.m. on Sunday, as well as next weekend.

Wednesday (Feb. 27, otherwise known as tonight) another version of another Moliere play opens at the HSU Van Duzer Theatre at 8 p.m.  The Northcoast Prep first and second years are doing a 1970s themed production of The Imaginary Invalid, directed by Colin Stevens.  It starts at 8 p.m., Wed.-Saturday, a one weekend run.

I don't have any more information on the Northcoast Prep show, and getting that much wasn't easy.  But there's a lot more about the HSU show at HSU Stage and Screen.  Briefly, though:

 Samuel Buggeln is a New York-based director of such cutting edge downtown shows as Bedbugs!!! and Go-Go Kitty, GO!. He is also fluent in French. He combined these talents in his new translation of Moliere’s comedy, The Misanthrope, called Hater (“misanthrope” loosely translates as “hater,” though not in exactly the same sense as “hater” is used today.) Dell’Arte’s Michael Fields met Buggeln in New York and proposed Hater for production by HSU Theatre, Film & Dance.  This is its West Coast premiere, and may be the first production since its downtown Manhattan premiere.

 The script reads like heightened contemporary conversation (with lots of f bombs) and director Fields promises a slam-glam “bling Baroque” production. The compulsive truth-telling misanthrope is now called Alex (played by Charlie Heinberg.) The beautiful gossip and flirt he’s in love with against his better judgment is Celine (Johani Guerrero, photo above.) Others in the cast are Brodie Storey, Mark Teeter, Galen Poulton, Luke Tooker, Michelle Purnell, Andreina Loaiza, Adrienne Ralsten and Derek Burns.

P.S. Saw opening night.  Charlie Heinberg's never been better, Johani Guerrero is a star, and at least two of the supporting performances--by Mark Teeter and Andreina Loaiza--are astonishing.  This show is going to be legendary.

The Pitmen Painters continues this weekend at Redwood Curtain.

Clarification

An important point may have been lost in the editing of my current Stage Matters NC Journal column, in the "Coming Up" section about a play opening at HSU next weekend: Hater, a new translation of Moliere's The Misanthrope.

The director of this production is Michael Fields, the Producing Artistic Director of Dell'Arte.  But Hater is a production of the HSU Theatre, Film & Dance department, not of Dell'Arte or any other producing organization.  Which means for one thing that it is a largely a student production supervised by TFD faculty, and one of its purposes is education.  

The Pitmen Painters

A synopsis of The Pitmen Painters, now on stage at Redwood Curtain in Eureka, has a familiar sound: based on a true story, it’s about coal miners who take up painting and astound the art world. But this is not The Full Monty (unemployed British steel workers triumph with a male striptease), Calendar Girls (Yorkshire housewives raise money with a nude calendar) or even Billy Elliot (though that film about a coal miner’s son seeking fame as a ballet dancer is by the writer of this play, Lee Hall.)

 For one thing, it’s no rags-to-riches tale with a big triumphant ending. More impressively, it isn’t a movie, and in its present form wouldn’t work as one. The Pitmen Painters is a peculiarly engaging piece of live theatre.

 It’s 1934 in Ashington, a coal mining town in the north of England. Five men gather after work for a class sponsored by the Workers Educational Association, an organization backed by labor unions and universities that still exists in a thousand UK communities.

 Three are lifelong coal miners: George (played by Lincoln Mitchell,) Oliver (Craig Benson,) and Jimmy (Jerry Nusbaum.) Harry (Gary Sommers) is the Marxist dentist, and a character identified only as “Young Lad” (Joseph Hunt) is unemployed. That he says he’s never had a job is just about the only suggestion of the ongoing Great Depression.

 These men have requisitioned a course in art appreciation, but when their teacher, Robert Lyon (JM Wilkerson) shows up from King’s College, they aren’t interested in his slides and references to the Renaissance. They want to be taught how to look at a painting and know what it means. They want to know the secrets “of what’s going on.”

 Lyon decides that looking at paintings is not the best way for them to focus on such questions. He suggests they paint their own pictures, and they do. The dynamic first act centers around the paintings they produce (images of these works projected above the stage are of the real Ashington Group’s paintings.)

Through their sometimes heated, sometimes funny discussions, we learn about each of them, their lives as miners and their community, while they explore perennial questions about art and life. They talk about everything from where meaning resides (the painting, or the viewer?), intention and effect, and inevitably art, identity and class.

 Even if their vocabulary doesn’t always ring true, they deal with weighty questions through the experience of painting as real and practical work. (Jimmy paints something yellow because he had a lot of yellow paint, which according to Gertrude Stein was the secret of Picasso’s Blue Period.)

 All of this is surprisingly mesmerizing, thanks to the writing and the live interaction physically in front of you. It turns out that entertaining ideas can be entertaining. There is some emotional and plot development, particularly when a wealthy art collector (Cassandra Hesseltine) offers Oliver a stipend equal to his miner’s pay just to paint.

 But partly because these are true events, the second act is more diffuse, and aspects of British history are probably obscure for a U.S. audience. Still, the conflicts of individual and community, specifically in a working class context, may well resonate in Humboldt County.

 The cast is uniformly engaging. Craig Benson is especially effective in the most individualized role. Joseph Hunt is impressive in switching from a working class to upper class character (and accent) for a key scene. Lillian Damron steals her scene as a model who scandalizes the puritanical miners by insisting on posing in the nude. The Pitmen Painters is ably directed by Peggy Metzger and James Hitchcock, with scenic design by Jack Shay, lighting by Michael Burkhart, costumes by Catherine L. Brown, sound by Jon Turney and properties by Laura Rhinehart. It continues at Redwood Curtain weekends through March 9.

The Real Pitmen Painters: the Play and the Reality

The play begins in 1934 in Ashington, a coal mining town in the north of England.  The Great Depression, which began with the New York stock market crash in 1929, had spread worldwide.  England had not fully recovered economically from World War I so it was not as hard a fall, but the consequences were still severe, especially in places like Ashington.  Unemployment in the coal mining north reached 70%.

Though the worst of the Depression may have been over by 1934, it's still odd that it doesn't factor more in this play. It was a horrific time.  In his book The Road to Wigan Pier, George Orwell details the conditions: lack of food and fuel, terrible sanitation and housing, and the general drab deadening drag of life.

 The Depression is not even mentioned by name.  (One character refers to "the recession," an odd choice of word, especially since it wasn't a familiar term for some years yet. It was more likely to have been called a "slump" or the Great Slump.) One suggestion of the impact is that the youngest character ("Young Lad") says that he's never had a job in his life, even though he looks for work every day. Yet the conditions of mining plus the Depression were factors that helped make socialism popular among the working class, which is embedded in this play.  The Marx-quoting dentist in the play is something of a joke, but it's not unrealistic.

There are references to the cramped, damp, dark and dangerous mining conditions, and the fact that the older characters started in the mines at the age of 11 or 12.  Boys would not start quite that young by 1934--a law passed in 1917 required children to stay in school until 15.

Beginning in the mid to late 19th century, the British government began consciously expanding educational opportunities. There were new colleges to educate the lower middle class, partly because growing industrialization required more technicians and "scientists" (a word that was born in this period.) Eventually the working class was included.

Also in the mid 19th century, the Cooperative Movement became established in the UK, and particularly in the industrial north of England, where local co-ops formed an association.  Cooperatives functioned in different ways in different places and times, but education for workers was an early priority.

By the turn of the century, universities were offering extension courses.  So it happened in 1907 that university extensions, the Cooperative movement and particularly trade unions combined to form the Workers Education Association.This is the group that sponsors the art appreciation course that is at the center of The Pitmen Painters.  

  The WEA grew quickly to 70 local branches, and by 1945 there were 800 branches. The Workers Education Association continues to this day, with nearly a thousand centers in the UK.  Throughout its history, the WEA campaigned for worker education, and it was instrumental in getting that 1917 law passed extending the compulsory school age, as well as other laws, such as the 1944 Education Act which promoted equal educational opportunities for the working class.

George--one of the characters in the play--is comically officious, and concerned about the WEA regulations.  But the WEA did have careful regulations.  It centered on a system of tutuorials for classes of no more than 40 members who committed themselves to participating for three years.

There was a WEA art appreciation course that began in the Ashington YMCA in 1934, involving at least  the people named in the play (5 of the original 13.) Ashington had a concert hall, a theatre (home to the Ashington Labour Players) but no library and certainly no art gallery or museum.

 They'd just completed a course on evolution, and--as in the play--a college art instructor, Robert Lyon, came to teach them art appreciation.  He started with slides and lecturing.  In the play he gives that up almost immediately, but in reality it took a few classes for him to come up with the idea of the class members doing their own paintings and talking about them.

Though the play uses images of actual Ashington Group paintings, it probably takes some liberties.  In the play, Jimmy paints a picture of whippets, which he may well have.  But the best known painting of that subject produced by this group was by George Blessed ( a later member not in the play. His nephew is the famous British actor Brian Blessed.)  This might partly be because much of the early work didn't survive.  Having paintings around was often wasted space in a working class culture.

They did formally call themselves the Ashington Group in 1936, and they became somewhat famous in the art world through the 1940s, though they were mostly known as "the pitmen painters."  Though their fame slipped, they continued painting.  By the time they were rediscovered in the 1970s, they had accumulated a large collection of work.  It was writer William Feaver whose book led to their resurgence, and it was his book (which Lee Hall found in a secondhand book shop) that eventually led to this play.  A Guardian article recounts Feaver's eureka moment:

  Their rediscovery began in the 1970s when Mr Feaver, then teaching in Newcastle, noticed some Geordie pensioners at an exhibition in the city's Laing art gallery. "They invited me up to their hut in Ashington and I was amazed," he said. "There were all these paintings, cobwebby and in stacks against the wall, which they called their permanent collection. They spat on their fingers - there was a lot of spit involved with the Ashington Group - and rubbed the paint so that I could see what they looked like when they were clean.

"When you're a critic, you often get invited to discoveries which people describe as wonderful. This is the one occasion in my life when that was absolutely the case. The best of the group would certainly have gone to art school today. Their dedication was humbling."

Oliver Kilbourn and original member Jack Harrison in 1982

The play spends most time with Oliver Kilbourn, generally considered the most talented painter among them.  He never left Ashington, and continued to participate in the painting group.  The play makes much of his opportunity to take a stipend to paint, and his decision to remain in the mines instead.  This may raise all sorts of issues for Americans in or from working class cultures.  The relationship of the individual to the community, and the community's attitudes towards individuals with different ambitions, can be very complicated.

 The play refers to this, and is suggestive, though it goes past it pretty quickly.  But it can be a major issue.  It certainly was where I grew up.  At the time this play is set, my father was growing up in a coal company town in western Pennsylvania.  His father and grandfather were coal miners.  Though the coal mines are long gone, and even the steel mills and much of the other industry, the area retains a working class cultural cast, and certainly did when I was growing up there (though not in that town.)  I suspect there are resonances of this for some of those who grew up in Humboldt County as well.

But Kilbourn himself apparently did not stress this issue.  He claimed to like mining, and he believed that the mines gave him his subject.  Others had painting skills and education, but no subject, he insisted.  It was better to have the subject and acquire the skills.

Kilbourn was the last surviving original member when he managed to preserve the collection before his death in 1993. In 2007 their permanent collection was exhibited and housed in the Woodhorn Colliery complex, with a ceremony officiated by Princess Anne.

The play ends with a scene that is probably puzzling to most Americans, especially in the context of what "socialism" has come to represent these days.  But in England, the period just after World War II was a time of promise and hope, especially for the working class.  The postwar Labour government nationalized coal, steel, rail and utilities, in an attempt to consolidate and modernize these industries, and revive the economy. It was not a controversial move. For workers, especially miners, it meant immediate improvement in working conditions and safety.  Miners were given paid vacations and sick leave for the first time.  The National Health Service was about to begin, bringing free medical care to people who could never afford it.

An historically-minded British audience would know this, and also know that this hope--and the ethic of we're all in this together-- didn't last.   In fact, Lee Hall's film Billy Elliot takes place during the 1980s of union-busting and Maggie Thatcher's budget-cutting and aggressive capitalism that was its antithesis.

This North Coast Weekend

Dell'Arte International second years present Contents Under Pressure: A Night of Adaptations Thursday (Feb.14) through Sunday at 8 p.m. in the Carlo. The Dell'Artisans adapt a poem by Shel Silverstein ("The Devil and Billy Markham"), a short story by The Wizard of Oz author L. Frank Baum ("A Box of Robbers") and a story by the inimitable Kurt Vonnegut ("Welcome to the Monkey House.") Themes and treatment include sexually explicit stuff, so no adults, please. It's pay what you will and if all that isn't enough, there's a Valentine's Day Drink Special, a potent brew called "Love Potion #9." Reservations: 707 668-5663 ext. 20, www.dellarte.com. 

 Redwood Curtain opens their new season with The Pittman Painters, a play about a group of British miners who become art world sensations, by Lee Hall. Co-directed by Peggy Metzger and James Hitchcock, it features Craig Benson, Gary Sommers, Lincoln Mitchell, Jerry Nusbaum, Cassandra Hesseltine, JM Wilkerson, Joseph Hunt and Lillian Damron. Previews are Thursday and Friday (Feb. 14 & 15), with official opening night on Saturday at 8 p.m. Performances continue weekends through March 9 boxoffice@redwoodcurtain.com or call 443-7688.

 This is the final weekend for Songs for a New World at Ferndale Rep. Reservations: 1-800-838-3006 or 786-5483.

 Also the final weekend for American Buffalo at North Coast Rep. Reservations: 442-6278. www.ncrt.net.

This North Coast Weekend

For one night only--Saturday (Feb. 9) at 8 p.m.--Dell'Arte hosts the visiting company PerpetuoMobileTeatro of Italy, presenting Hans Christian Anderson's fairy tale, The Ballad of the Little Match Girl.  The performance features storytelling, acrobatics, mask-theatre and music. It's in Italian with English subtitles. Tickets are $10. There's limited seating in the Carlo, so reservations are recommended: Dell'Arte Box Office (707) 668-5663,www.dellarte.com.

  

Continuing this weekend: the musical revue Songs for a New World at Ferndale Repertory Theatre. Described as a song cycle about dealing with the unforeseen in life’s defining moments, it’s the first produced work of composer Robert Jason Brown. His next show, Parade, won the Tony for Best Score. His later musical The Last Five Years has been produced locally in the last three years by both the Humboldt Light Opera Company and Redwood Curtain.

 Directed by Dianne Zuleger, Songs for a New World  features Alex Moore, Brandy Rose, Craig Waldvogel, Elena Tessler, Jessi Shieman, Jo Kuzelka, Luke Sikora and Qaiel Peltier. Jo Kuzelka also designed the costumes, and Liz Uhazy designed the set and lighting. Live music is provided by Justin Ross & Laura Welch, keyboards; Tamaras Abrahms, percussion; Bobby Amirkhan, bass. It runs Fridays and Saturdays at 8 p.m. and Sundays at 2 p.m. through February 17. Reservations: 1-800-838-3006 or 786-5483.

Also continuing: David Mamet's American Buffalo at North Coast Rep, featuring JOSH Kelly, James Read (both pictured) and Joel Agnew.  See review posted below.

To Phrase A Coin: Mamet's American Buffalo

This is a slightly longer version of  my review in the NC Journal of American Buffalo currently at NCRT.  It also includes a correction--it's Josh Kelly, not Mike Kelly in the cast.  I'm sorry for the error.  On the other hand, hearing about it has been the only way I've learned that anybody read the review.  As I've mentioned here, I'm not fond of every column I write, but I'm okay with this one.

 David Mamet’s plays of the 1980s were warily praised as uncomfortably kinetic portraits of mostly white men jostling on the precarious edge of the American dream. His 1984 drama about a cutthroat band of real estate salesmen, Glengarry Glen Ross, won the Pulitzer Prize. But it was his 1977 Broadway debut that first ignited controversy while making his reputation. That play was American Buffalo, which is currently on stage in an entertaining production at North Coast Repertory Theatre in Eureka.

 Set entirely in Donny Dubrow’s urban junk shop, the story involves a plot to steal a possibly valuable buffalo head nickel. At first Donny is set to send Bobby, his young assistant, to do the job. But Walter “Teach” Cole, a regular at Donny’s nighttime poker games, wheedles his way into the action.

 According to New York Times reviewer Frank Rich, the original 1977 staging (with Robert Duvall as Teach) was tense and brutal, but the 1981 New York production (with Al Pacino as Teach) revealed dour humor and spiraling absurdity. The fast pace set by director Michael Thomas at NCRT unlocks even more of the humor and humanity in the play.

 These days, Mamet is polarizing for his political statements--so much so that there are people who wouldn't go see any of his plays because of them-- and his most recognized recent work is for film and television. These early plays were also controversial, though for other reasons.  His characters casually deploy ethnic and sexual slurs, sometimes in absurd combination with what is idiomatically if idiotically called “mature language” (or even just “language.”) Mamet’s language (beyond but including the “language”) is stylized street talk, and it’s the most important element of the play. It’s also basically musical, so everything depends on the rhythms. The NCRT cast ably sings the score.

 There’s a nice mix of vocal pitches in the three strong voices of James Read, Joel Agnew and Josh Kelly. Kelly has a way of disappearing into his roles, but his Bobby in this play is memorable. Agnew has a reputation for talking fast, and he needs that skill for the mouthy, jittery Teach, who reveals his confusion, desperation and self-doubt with every assertion. James Read as Donny has never been better, and his strong performance re-balances the play, which has tended to tilt towards Teach in those first productions.

 Mamet’s dialogue sounds ruefully or ridiculously authentic, but like Hemingway’s or J.D. Salinger’s, there’s artifice involved. Changing the rhythms changes the meaning. Earlier productions were famous for their long pauses, which allowed for more emphasis on non-verbal aspects.  More meaning came from movement and the physicality of the actors, as well as what the pauses themselves might do to the rhythm and pace.

 This production reveals a clownish pathos in these familiar, conflicted men, as they struggle to negotiate friendship and self-interest while doggedly dodging their final failure. There’s playfulness in these rude arrays of common words, denying and then suggesting that some fitful spirit and residual humanity struggles to survive.  All that is there in the words which this production present, but other approaches might well emphasize the darker side in other ways.

 Defining these impressions comes later—when the play is on, it is often mesmerizing and consistently entertaining. Calder Johnson designed the set, David Tyndall the lighting, Rae Robison the costumes. Dianne Zuleger recorded some tasty saxophone licks. American Buffalo continues at NCRT weekends through February 16. Reservations: 442-6278. www.ncrt.net. It’s for adults—that “mature language”, and brief stage violence.

This North Coast Weekend

On Thursday (January 24) at 8 p.m., North Coast Rep opens David Mamet’s American Buffalo, directed by Michael Thomas, and featuring James Read, Joel Agnew and Josh Kelly. Director Thomas describes the play as a "fascinating study of the dynamic, puzzling and perhaps frightening relationships between three men who happen to be crooks." The play is intended for adults and contains strong adult language.  The run continues Fridays and Saturdays through February 16, with Sunday matinees on February 3 and 10 at 2 p.m.

Also beginning Thursdays,  Dell’Arte reprises Three Trees with Joe Krienke, Stephanie Thompson and Lauren Wilson.   Three down and out clowns become involved in a war.  My review of the 2011 performance is here--it was two years ago almost to the day.  "The show contains mature content. Recommended for adults and brave children 12 and older."  One weekend only, Thursday through Sunday at 8 p.m. in the Carlo.  In February, Three Trees travels to Sacramento for the American College Theatre Festival Region 7 conference.


  On Friday (the 25th), Ferndale Rep opens Songs for a New World, a  musical revue about emotions and choices by Jason Robert Brown. Directed by Dianne Zuleger, it features Alex Moore, Brandy Rose, Craig Waldvogel, Elena Tessler, Jessi Shieman, Jo Kuzelka, Luke Sikora and Qaiel Peltier. Live music is provided by Justin Ross & Laura Welch, keyboards; Tamaras Abrahms, percussion; Bobby Amirkhan, bass. It runs Fridays and Saturdays at 8 p.m. and Sundays at 2 p.m. through February 17.

  On Saturday (the 26th), Redwood Curtain presents their annual fundraiser, a dinner buffet and live radio show, Zounds and Gagged, at Blue Lake Casino. Reservations: (707) 443-7688 or redwoodcurtain.com.

Pick Yourself Up

There are columns I mean to write someday.  When an idea becomes more fully formed, and there's an occasion for it, sometimes I actually write them.  And sometimes somebody else does it for me.

David Denby's piece in the New Yorker about the movie version of Les Mis says a lot of what I would have said concerning my feelings about certain musicals.  These days I probably would have said it more delicately but then, not as well.

First Denby trashes the movie, which he'd seen without having seen any stage version or hearing the music beforehand.  Then he trashes the story and the music.

He notes that the story "stripped of its social detail and reduced to its melodramatic elements, no longer makes much sense..." Which goes for some other musicals.  But it's what he writes about the music and the general approach to musicals that I want to copy:

I was so upset by the banality of the music that I felt like hiring a hall and staging a nationalist rally. “My fellow-countrymen, we are the people of Jerome Kern and Irving Berlin! Cole Porter and George Gershwin, Frank Loesser and Burton Lane! We taught the world what popular melody was! What rhythmic inventiveness was! Let us unite to overthrow the banality of these French hacks!” (And the British hacks, too, for that matter.) Alas, the hall is filled with people weeping over “Les Mis.”

And now, the real point: our great musicals were something miraculous. They were a blessed artifice devoted to pleasure, to ease and movement, exultation in the human body, jokes and happy times, the giddiness of high hopes. Even the serious musicals, like “Carousel” and “West Side Story,” had their funny moments...  If you want emotion in a musical, please, if you’ve never seen it, catch the George Cukor version of “A Star is Born,” in which Judy Garland (John Lahr agrees with me on this) produces the single greatest moment in film-musical history. Late at night in a club, when she thinks no one is listening (while James Mason lurks in the shadows), she sings the Harold Arlen torch song “The Man That Got Away.” Overwhelming.

He offers a cure "for those suffering from absorption in “Les Mis.”

 Download the Astaire-Rogers “Top Hat” from Amazon. Throw it on a big screen if you can. Or download “Singin’ in the Rain,” with Gene Kelly and Debbie Reynolds, or “The Band Wagon,” with Fred Astaire and Cyd Charisse, or “An American in Paris,” with Kelly again. I will tell you right now that these movies will not make you cry. But if you’ve never seen them before, they may open an entirely new path to pleasure. See them twice, and you will put aside the maudlin nonsense of “Les Mis” forever.

"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."