All Over the Map
(Photo: T. Charles Erickson)
POLITICAL CONFLICT
“Everyone in my family is somewhat of a political animal,” says playwright Eliam Kraiem, whose Sixteen Wounded centers around the unlikely friendship between an aging Jewish baker and the young Palestinian he takes on as his apprentice.
As might be expected, political differences revolving around the Israel-Palestine situation are a crucial component of the play. Although it seems particularly timely now, the topic was a natural one for the author. “I grew up with it,” he says. “My dad’s an Israeli and I spent quite a bit of time there. When I was a playwriting student at Cal Arts, I remember one discussion where someone was saying that a great conflict for a dramatist is one in which both parties are correct, and this was probably the greatest example of that that I could come up with.”
Academy Award and Golden Globe-winner Martin Landau stars in the world premiere production of Kraiem’s play at the Long Wharf Theatre in New Haven. “He’s a very intelligent actor,” says the playwright. “We spent a lot of time at the beginning of rehearsal talking about what happens offstage, filling in the back-story. Some part of me thought, ‘Hmm, is all of this really necessary?’ But I guess it is, because it definitely shows up in his performance. He seems like the man I wanted him to be, and however he gets there, that’s his voodoo.”
Sixteen Wounded had a workshop production in New York last year as part of the Cherry Lane mentor project. Veteran playwright Michael Weller served as Kraiem’s advisor during that period. “He had a huge influence on the play and on me,” says Kraiem. “He never told me what to write; he pretty much only dealt with what I had written, and I appreciated that. The Cherry Lane’s mentor project is one of the most important and well thought-out services to emerging playwrights.”
Members of the Long Wharf’s artistic staff saw the play in New York and recommended it to the theater’s artistic director, Gordon Edelstein; an unexpected open slot in Long Wharf’s season fast-tracked a production of Sixteen Wounded. Kraiem has continued to work on the play as it has progressed, but he says that current events haven’t caused him to make drastic rewrites. “Although terrorism has only recently come into our lives [in the U.S.], it’s been in the lives of people I know for a long time,” he states. “People may receive the play in a different way than they would have prior to September 11. Terror is on people’s minds, and this play does deal with that subject in some way.”
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(Photo: Katherine Owens)
FRIENDLY WORDS
The Undermain Theatre in Dallas presents the world premiere of playwright Jeffrey M. Jones’ A Man’s Best Friend, a play described as a black comedy of modern manners about a man, his dog, his wife, and a giant squid.
“It’s really a Punch and Judy story,” says Jones. “The man is, in fact, a bad clown and he has a dog much like Punch’s Toby that bites him and attacks him.” Interwoven with this storyline are elements of a monster tale. “One of the ideas from the beginning was to try and write something that would be scary,” says the playwright. “I read a lot of H.P. Lovecraft and found myself thinking about his world.” The squid referred to earlier is a Lovecraftian homage and is connected to what Jones describes as “someone who is very sick with a kind of strange, parasitic organism.”
Jones has often been called an avant-gardist, and while he accepts the label, he also qualifies it: “I don’t fit the definition of the contemporary American avant-garde only because most of those people aren’t particularly interested in writing plays, which has always been my focus. But I am interested — and have been throughout my career — in trying to find ways to take the play, as it’s understood, apart and put it together in very different ways.”
He feels that his particular view of theater puts him at odds with many regional theaters and major non-profits. “Most theater that is done in most places is extremely predictable,” he states. “It follows conventions and rules that were established quite some time ago and, to that extent, it’s really disappointing and boring.” But he is happy that some companies do produce work outside of the mainstream. “I’ve known the folks at Undermain for probably 15 years, and I think they’re one of the most valuable theaters in the country,” he says. “If you look at the kinds of people whose work they’ve produced, and produced on a recurring basis, they represent the leading experimental writers in theater today.”
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(Photo: Randy Rovang, yourpix.com)
CALIFORNIA DREAMING
The year is 2020. A massive earthquake has literally wiped Los Angeles off of the map. The first Mexican-American Pope in history leads a joint effort by the U.S. and Mexico to reconceive the San Diego/Tijuana region as Nuevo California, which is also the title of a bi-national mystery with music that is receiving its world premiere by the San Diego Repertory Theatre in collaboration with Centro Cultural Tijuana. The production is the culmination of a three-year creative process led by director Sam Woodhouse, and it features a script by Bernardo Solano and Allan Havis.
As part of the process, Solano conducted numerous interviews on both sides of the border. But this is not documentary theater. According to Solano, the futuristic setting was decided upon “because one of the questions we asked in our interviews, ‘Could the border fence come down?,’ almost always was answered with ‘Not today or tomorrow, but maybe in the lifetime of our children.'”
Solano and Havis wove the interviews into a fictional scenario. “They’re all over this play,” says Solano, “from verbatim phrases and thematic threads to composite characters based on people we met. I want to acknowledge and thank the 200-plus people who have shared their stories, their frustrations, their fears, their predictions, and their hopes and dreams.” According to Solano, music is the “common denominator” within the production. “It works on our hearts and enters our souls,” he says, “even if you don’t understand every word.”
Although 95% of the play is performed in English, it also includes smatterings of Spanglish, Spanish, Somalian, Chinese, Korean, and Russian. “Language is one of the fastest, most powerful conveyers of what our society ‘sounds’ like,” Solano says. “So, in combining different languages, the play is saying: ‘Welcome to the future, welcome to Nuevo California.'”
