Archive for the Theater Category

Lear in Paris

Posted in Art and Culture, Family History, Life and What about It, Theater, Travel with tags , , , , , , on December 24, 2012 by Louise Steinman

“Better thou hadst not been born than not to have pleased me better.”
(King Lear to his daughter)

I performed naked for my father once (you see, that got your attention! ) I’ve written about it on this very blog. I’ve used his voice in a soundtrack and I’ve mined his wartime letters in my book The Souvenir. But it never occurred to me to perform with my father… what would Norman Steinman have thought of the invitation? (I used to tape my family seders for use in my plays, and the one year I didn’t set up the tape recorder, my father asked, “Aren’t we interesting to you any more, Louise?”) Would this very private man have agreed to perform with me, simply out of love and a sense of solidarity? That’s what three stolid German fathers agreed to do with their daughters who form the radical theater collective She She Pop, for “Testament,” an astonishing take on King Lear which I saw at Theatre des Abesses earlier this month in Paris (in German with French supertitles.)

There’s a saying in French: tenir tete a quelqu’un… standing up to someone. How do we stand up to someone who has power over us? What if Norman and I had aired our disagreements, our differing perspectives of life– on stage? What if I’d argued to the audience as witness– that my older brother, the math genius and doctor-to-be, received preferential treatment during my childhood? What if my father had bemoaned on stage my choice of going into the theater and said, as he often did, “You’d have made a very good lawyer.” This is raw, uncomfortable powerful theater.

It was deeply moving to see these flaccid older men stripping to their underwear in the “tempest” scene (while being doused with water from a plastic bottle by one of the daughters), revealed in all their frailty and wounded pride. An annotated paperback of Lear—a template for this deep conversation about parent/child issues, is displayed on the wall with an overhead projector. Key words set off the scenes—what is the equivalent of your father arriving at your house with his courtiers? Lisa Lucassen diagrammed how much space would be left in her tiny flat if her father moved in with his entire library, concluding, of course, absolutely none. One daughter/actor recites all the benefits her father will receive under the German health care system, while on a video screen (the camera is live on her father on-stage), he intones repeatedly in a quavery voice, “but I will always love you. But I will always love you.”

She She Pop/Testament

She She Pop/Testament

Perhaps my father, like one of the German fathers in the play, would have graphed a complicated mathematical equation (he was once a math teacher) to chart the dynamics of our love and obligation for and to one another. My pharmacist father may not have understood why his daughter spent hours in a dance studio, crawling on the floor or playing with Howdy Doody puppets. But he never withheld his support, emotional or material. And he was there in the audience for my performance at Project Artaud, accepting a piece of matzoh from his naked daughter on the stage. Ah what one does for love.

Louise and Norman

Leave a comment »

Book of Dreams

Posted in Art and Culture, FRIENDS, Life and What about It, Performance, So&So&So&So, Theater with tags , , , , , , , , , , on October 10, 2011 by Louise Steinman

“A dream which is not interpreted is like a letter which is not read,” says the Talmud. In the little shtetlach of Eastern Europe—in towns like Zhitomir and Radomsk where my father and mother’s families came from—travelling booksellers once plied their routes. Among the most popular items they offered for sale were dream books. In the pages of those books you could learn the meaning of any dream: the baby born with the head of a carp; the midwife dancing in the beet field; the miller’s daughter with the extra eye, your long-lost brother with shoes aflame.
In my performance “Sinai/Sinai” (created with poet John Marron) in the early 80’s, I made my own appearance as a Dreampeddlar. To the melancholy chords of a harmonium score, my peddlar entered the stage dressed in a long overcoat weighted down with his over-sized book of dreams.

An artist friend, Richard Posner, made that marvelous Dream Book, a three-ring binder with a white stork embroidered on the front and a camel from a flour sack on the back cover. Richard was a bricoleur; he used whatever was at hand to make luminous works of art. Glass was his primary medium, and his stained glass windows were in the collection of the Exploratorium in San Francisco; the Metropolitan Museum and the Victoria and Albert. An installation he created in Berlin, “Der Wider-Haken-Krauter-Garten” (The Live Not on Evil Garden) used broken glass and healing plants to create what Richard called “a work of transformation” from “waste material into living things.”

Richard died this past spring, victim of a homicide in Tucson, Arizona. When his body was first discovered by the Tucson police, it was reported as “the body of an anonymous 62 year-old man.” Later, Richard’s name was restored and his many accomplishments—numerous public art commissions, four-time Fulbright scholar– were mentioned in the press.

A few weeks ago, several of his friends gathered for a memorial in the Malibu home to commemorate his life. Richard was a difficult man with many problems, including mental health issues all exacerbated by poverty and lack of health care. He could be exasperating. He was neurotic and needy. “Sometimes Richard drove me nuts or maybe it was him reminding me that I was nuts,” wrote one friend. He was also loyal and brilliant.

My dear teacher Rabbi Singer—also Richard’s friend and teacher — wrote to me after he heard the news: “I have his nine wine bottles Menorah on the deck outside. It is just a row of nine wine bottles fused together by some plastic compound. I could never throw it away. It works. It expresses the desperate, makeshift genius of the impoverished to turn on the lights.”

This gathering of friends took a tour of Richard’s artwork from our various collections. Petra Korink, Richard’s wife from Berlin, brought several of his GWOTBOTS (Global War on Terror Robots), constructed from toys gleaned from Berlin flea markets. Richard, an intrepid wordspinner, gave them names like “Blind Leading Blind in Mad Cow Circles.” Our host, Dr. Ralph Potkin pointed out one of Richard’s glass Kitschina, what RP called “a May-December marriage of German ‘kitsch’ with Hopi Indian Kachina dolls.”) Susan Rubin talked about Rich’s Coping Saws, cast and found glass tools which Richard constructed from the detritus of a decade of stained glass and windows broken in the 1994 Northridge, Ca. earthquake. We posed for portraits in his “Bird-Brained Bicycle Helmets”

and we contemplated ethereal glass marbles with fragments of Richard’s ashes. Rabbi Don read the Kaddish and Petra read Wyslawa Szymborska’s poem, “The Heavens,” which begins:

I should have begun with this: the heavens.
A window without a frame, without curtains, without glass.
An opening with nothing beyond
but a vast opening.

I’d rooted through my basement for the occasion, and unearthed that Dream Book that Richard made me decades ago. I sat on a leather chair in Ralph’s house, my back to the Pacific and facing Richard’s friends. I reached into the transparent pockets the artist created in the book, where the storyteller could stash whistles and a mirror, a clothespin, a Jew’s harp or a pocket watch on a gold chain.

[still from my film, “The Strange Tale of Shabbatai Sevi”]

I opened the pages to reveal the dream images within: an erupting volcano; an astronaut tumbling through space; a city under siege; a white horse rearing up under his rider; a veiled woman with a birdcage balanced on her head; a shining green Star of David.

8 Comments »

Why Is This Night Different?

Posted in Crooked Mirror, Family History, Los Angeles, Theater with tags , , , on April 17, 2011 by Louise Steinman

I was on a bus to Jerusalem in 1975 when I opened and read a letter from a friend in Los Angeles informing me that Herschel Lymon, my childhood rabbi, had committed suicide. What could be more shocking? I loved Herschel. He bar mitzvahed my brother Larry, visited my Sunday School classes at Temple Akiba in Culver City. I have an inscribed copy of Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning he gave to my parents, his good friends, and an inscribed copy of Martin Buber’s The Way of Man he gave me for my high school graduation.

Rabbi Lymon with Temple Akiba students, Culver City 1958

Herschel’s death haunted me for years. It still does. He was such a gentle, wise man. He was a searcher, a deep thinker. After he left the rabbinate, he had a show for years on Pacifica Radio called, “The Wounded Healer.”

I began creating a solo theater piece, “Lents Passage,” in the fall of 1978. My starting place was my anguish over Herschel’s death. I interviewed people who knew him, trying to understand why he would have taken his life. I learned that Herschel suffered from manic depression. He tried all kinds of therapy– rolfing, Reichian, LSD. He filled his prescriptions for anti-depressants at my father’s pharmacy in Culver City.

While I was working on the piece, news broke about the Jim Jones mass suicide. Another shock wave. How could this be? Why did all these people drink cyanide-laced koolaid on command? Why did they follow this madman from the Bay Area to the jungles of Guyana? These unfathomable stories still roiled my psyche as fall became winter became spring and it was time for Passover, when we tell the story of the exodus from Egypt, plagues of frogs and hail, the Israelites following a magician who transformed sticks into serpents across the Red Sea into the desolate Sinai desert.

I structured the play on the form of a Passover seder, which itself means “order.” My sound score was edited from years of recording Steinman family seders. The voice of the patriarch (my father) proclaimed: “This is the bread of affliction which our forefathers ate in the land of Egypt.” My niece Jennifer, then eight, read the Four Questions in a high-pitched voice: “Why is this night different from all other nights?”

“Lents Passage” had its San Francisco premiere at Project Artaud, in San Francisco. My mother was planning to come see it. A few weeks before opening night she called with a surprising announcement: “I bought you a body stocking.” Why? Yes, it was true there was a naked scene in the piece. But so what! This was art! There was a pause. Then my mother repeated, “I bought you a body stocking.” Another pause, then, “…your father’s coming.” Of course, my stubborn younger self did not take wise counsel, would not compromise.

Passover is a brilliant holiday– telling a story through the ritual consumption of food. We eat unleavened matzoh at the Passover seder to remind us of the haste with which our ancestors left Egypt. During the meal, the leader of the Seder hides a piece of matzoh… the children scramble around to find it, demanding a reward for its return. It’s a great device for keeping the children attentive through the long meal, ensuring that they hear the whole story. At the (untraditional) seder I attended this year, the Hagadah explained the symbolism of the afikomen thus: “When the afikomen is found it will remind us that what is broken off is not really lost to our people, as long as every generation remembers and searches.”

I hid the afikomen as part of my performance of “Lents Passage.” I taped a piece of matzoh under a random seat and informed the audience the performance could not continue until someone found it. At first no one believed me. No one budged. Then there was a general shuffling around and then a gasp… from my father. He stood up and we faced each other. It was a moment of recognition like you might have in a bad dream– I was standing naked in front of my father in public– and he was offering me a piece of matzoh.

“You weren’t kidding,” he repeated. “No,” I said slowly, “I wasn’t kidding.” I accepted the matzoh from my father’s outstretched hand. And then I continued the play.

The seder with Howdy Doody

9 Comments »

%d bloggers like this: