• Postcard from Greensboro from November 1998

• Cold War Revisited from April 1998

• One Year After the Fringe Festival from October 1997

• The Wild, Wild West from October 1997

• Bertolt Brecht: The Art of Unmasking Evil from June 1997

• Not Quite Dead Yet: Musings on the Neo-Futurists from June 1997

• The Unbearable Lightness of Milan Kundera from April 1997

• The Letters of Elizabeth Wong from December 1996

• Just a Kiss? from September 1996

Last fall, on a whim (and encouraged by an airline computer glitch that resulted in a free ticket), I decided to spend Thanksgiving munching on crawfish stew outside the gates of Graceland. Following a weekend in which Elvis failed to make a netherworldly appearance, I headed east to see a friend in North Carolina.

I had recently read Emily Mann's play Greensboro, and noticed that the town itself was just a few miles from my destination. The play explores the events of November 3, 1979. A group of anti-Ku Klux Klan protesters gathered for a march through the town, when several pickup trucks screeched around the corner and opened fire on the group. The shooters systematically picked off several of the organizers of the event, killing five people and leaving a community shaken for years to come. Emily Mann's play is composed entirely of recent interviews with the massacre's witnesses and even some of the former Klan members who were in those trucks, as they look back on this event.

As I pulled off the highway into Greensboro, I consulted the play, finding a description of the route taken by the Klan trucks as they approached the rally. I decided to retrace their route. It took me along a main drag, through a wasteland of warehouses, and into an attractive, low-income, predominantly African-American residential area. I turned left, and left again. The fateful intersection came into view. I pulled up next to a playground and got out.

The play mentioned a memorial plaque nearby. On the corner were two women minding a baby in a stroller, and I asked them about its location. They pointed down the block, across the street from a convenience store. It was a small metal plaque bolted into the top of a tree stump, bearing a single sentence: "A caravan of armed American Nazi and Ku Klux Klan members invaded the Morningside-Lincoln Grove neighborhood during a political rally, 100 feet from this spot, and shot to death four men and one woman." I took out my camera and snapped a picture.

I heard laughter across the street and looked up to find a group of teenagers pointing at me and giggling. I heard the words "lost" and "tourist." Putting away the camera, I approached a man on the corner, asking what he knew about the massacre. He assumed that I was a narcotics officer. I assured him that I was not, but he warily explained that it wasn't safe for him to be seen talking to me.

I returned to my car and drove off in search of a local church featured in the play. It was a couple of miles away, back down the road that the Klan trucks had traveled. The church was an unassuming brick building surrounded by warehouses. The door was locked, but a middle-aged white man pulled up in a pickup truck and asked if I needed any assistance. I explained my interest in the massacre. He shook my hand and introduced himself as Tim. He reached into the cab and handed me a copy of the Greensboro Gazette, a newspaper containing an update on the plight of California strawberry pickers, an exposé on tobacco marketing in Greensboro, and a message urging attendance at an upcoming rally against police brutality. Tim knew of Emily Mann's play and offered to take me out to the cemetery where the victims were buried. I gratefully accepted.

It was a simple cemetery of low unassuming stones, dotted with small trees exploding into fall colors. The largest monument announced the presence of the "Communist Workers Party 5," as the massacre victims were known. The headstone read, "Live Like Them. Dare to Struggle. Dare to Win." On the back was a treatise on the impact of the killings: "The CWP 5 lived and died for all workers, minorities and poor; for a world where exploitation and oppression are eliminated, and all mankind freed…"

Tim then escorted me to the nearby Greensboro Poor People's Organization. Their Executive Director was apparently one of the most vocal members of the community during the trials. I was told of her 16-year-old son, Kwame, who was picked up by the police in 1986 for petty, non-violent robbery, and was sentenced to two consecutive life sentences in jail. They kindly showed me a video that they are putting together to bring attention to Kwame's plight. His supporters assume a revenge motive, as repeated protests over the last 11 years have brought no justice. Kwame is now considered a second generation victim of the 1979 massacre.

I returned home galvanized by these experiences, and determined to present Greensboro to San Francisco audiences next summer. In the meantime, I intend to travel to Greensboro again, and learn as much as I can from a group of heroic survivors.

(In this issue, we feature Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, the heroes/villains of Donald Freed's Inquest, which we will be reading on Sunday, May 3rd. The play is created from the actual words of the participants of the trial and surrounding events.)

"With your betrayal you undoubtedly have altered the course of history to the disadvantage of our country," proclaimed Judge Irving R. Kaufman as he sentenced Julius and Ethel Rosenberg to die for the crime of espionage. Today, with nearly 50 years of history separating us from that moment in 1951, most experts believe that this alarming prophecy has gone unfulfilled, and that the Rosenbergs weren't responsible for altering much of anything.

The Rosenberg couple was tried on charges that they were key players in a spy ring responsible for handing the Soviet Union crucial information on how to build an atomic bomb. They supposedly received this information from Ethel's brother, David Greenglass, who was an employee of the Los Alamos atomic project in New Mexico.

Over the years, retired Soviet officials have come forward to talk about their connections to the Rosenbergs, and this has lead to a general consensus among historians concerning the events leading up to the trial. Julius Rosenberg probably was involved in a spy ring, but the secrets he sold for thousands of dollars were of no use to the Soviet Union. Retired KGB colonel Alexander Feklisov told the New York Times last year that "He [Julius] didn't understand anything about the atomic bomb, and he couldn't help us." Testimony such as Feklisov's has all but vindicated Ethel, who reportedly never participated in any spy activity.

With new evidence strongly suggesting that Julius did attempt to sell military secrets to the Soviet Union, the debate over the Rosenberg trial has shifted from a question of guilt or innocence, to whether or not the death penalty was warranted in this instance. The Rosenbergs were the first Americans ever to be sentenced to death for espionage, and certainly there were more than just dry facts to consider in this case. Both Julius and Ethel were Jews and one-time communists, leading many to wonder if they weren't victims of bigotry or red scare hysteria. Also, the most damning evidence against the Rosenbergs presented at trial was testimony from their relatives, the Greenglasses, who were concerned with avoiding the death penalty themselves. Add to this prosecuting attorney Roy Cohn (soon to prove himself an infamous manipulator of the American public's fear of communism as Joseph McCarthy's right-hand man), and there is little wonder that some people have come to view the Rosenberg trial as a scandalous abuse of human rights.

Julius Rosenberg was executed by electric chair at Sing Sing Prison on June 19, 1953 at the age of 35. Ethel, aged 37, died six minutes after her husband, at the same place, and by the same means.

Inquest is part of our Sunday night reading series.

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It's been a year since we premiered Groping for Justice: The Bob Packwood Story at the 1996 San Francisco Fringe Festival. Seeing the 1997 Fringe this past month, it brought back wonderful memories of last year's insanity.

For those of you who aren't familiar with the concept of "fringing," it's a phenomenon that's spread all over Canada and is becoming quite popular in the States. It's a festival of diverse groups from all over the globe, who come together on a non-juried, first-come-first-serve basis to present shows. Here in San Francisco, the festival took over five downtown theatres, where fifty different groups presented their work. All participants were required to carry their sets in on their backs and set up in less than fifteen minutes - proof that simplicity can spur creativity.

What's astounding for a small theatre company is the "power of the pool" that the Fringe provides. Audiences and critics alike come to take their chances and check out several groups that they might not go to see on their own.

When we received press attention and were named "Best of the Fringe" last year, it boosted our visibility and gave us the courage to remount the show for an independent run. To quote the critic Mari Coates in this month's Callboard magazine, the Fringe has "done the most for young companies by offering space, resources and a chance to showcase their work. Unconditional Theatre's deliciously clever Groping for Justice: The Bob Packwood Story made a splash at last season's Fringe and gave that company instant credibility."

Since that time, the show has played a sellout run at Exit Stage Left, traveled to the Seattle Fringe Festival, and performed at City College. Based on the press buzz, a producer in Portland, Oregon, contacted me and secured the rights to the play. The show just closed up there, with Gene Thompson playing the title role he originated down here. Clearly, "fringing" can be a springboard for even greater success.

The San Francisco Fringe Festival is truly one of the cultural gems of this city. I hope that you all get a chance to check it out next year, and maybe even take the risk to participate. Take our word, it's worth it.

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Volume 2, Number 1 (October, 1997)
The Wild, Wild West
by Paul Lancour

Arthur Kopit's Indians begins and ends with the dimly lit static image of three glass cases - one contains a larger-than-life effigy of Buffalo Bill; one an effigy of Sitting Bull; and one a buffalo skull, a bloodstained Indian shirt, and an old rifle. Between these two bookend tableaus, Indians breathes life into icons of our collective conscience. It's a look at westward expansion in the 19th century that's as hilarious as it is disturbing.

Creating what he calls "a hallucinatory mosaic," Kopit exposes many of the myths about the conquest of the West and the familiar characters of the time. The cast includes Sitting Bull, Geronimo, Wild Bill Hickok, Annie Oakley, Jesse James, Billy the Kid, and others. The central character is Buffalo Bill Cody. Cody relives his life in an effort to find where he went wrong. Here he is presented as sincere but bewildered, and in spite of his best intentions, party to the brutal "taming of a savage land."

Much of the action takes place in the play-within-a-play, Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show, with characters reenacting their parts in supposed actual events. It's a circus-like spectacle where things go wrong more often than not. At one point we see Wild Bill Hickok (playing himself) chasing an Indian Maiden (played by a clearly Italian actress) across the stage, to the delight of the president and the first lady. We also travel to U.S. Senate chambers for hearings on Indian grievances, go on a buffalo hunt with Grand Duke Alexis of Russia, and visit the White House as we hurtle toward the inevitable conclusion.

Throughout, the picture that emerges is one of cultural differences so vast, and self-interest so enormous, that the "manifest destiny" of the march to the West and the incumbent dislocation and slaughter of an entire population and way of life seems inevitable. Because Buffalo Bill has first-hand knowledge of the destitution the Indian population faces, he finds himself to be a liaison between the U.S. government and the Native population. Despite his best efforts, and in part because of his complicity (he got his nickname by killing 4,280 buffaloes), Cody is helpless. At the end of the play Buffalo Bill is confronted by the ghost of Sitting Bull, who says to him, "Farewell, Cody. You were my friend. And, indeed, you still are...I never killed you...because I knew it would not matter."

Indians was first performed in 1968 by the Royal Shakespeare Company, and had its American debut the following year. That it was written at the time of a burgeoning civil rights movement in America, and before many key events in the Native American rights struggle here, gives this play an interesting spin. Expect more than a history lesson, though. Indians is a fast-paced, whimsical reshaping of popularly held ideas that makes for great theatre.

Indians is part of our Sunday night reading series.

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Volume 1, Number 4 (June, 1997)
Bertolt Brecht: The Art of Unmasking Evil
by Nicole Malkin

The evil filling the world at the beginning of the twentieth century was an evil of regret -- regret that God, science, and material progress had all failed. Bertolt Brecht was born into a time replete with an art of existential angst. This mainstream view rang hollow to an emerging generation of dramatists. It appeared to them as a vacuum lacking human purpose. Brecht saw the social and political roots of this evil and determined to use his artistic ability to make change for the greater good.

Inspired by the skepticism of empirical biological science -- a system that encourages doubt, experiment, and discovery over the immobility of the status quo -- Brecht felt that Marxism offered the opportunity to apply these methods to the social realm. In his Short Organum for the Theatre, Brecht declared, "Have we not seen how disbelief can move mountains?" This faith in the power of skepticism, of utilizing doubt to provoke change, is the foundation for the instructive goal of Brechtian theatre. To encourage a discomfort with complacency and skeptical analysis of accepted forms of oppressions and destruction, while at the same time being rationally aware of circumstances and consequences, is to offer a gift of hope.

Die Aufhaltsame Aufstieg Des Arturo Ui, or The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, is a comedy which compares and contrasts the rise of Ui, a Capone-like gangster in Chicago, with Hitler's rise in Germany. The episodic scenes take place in various locations around the city, where Ui manipulates anyone he needs to in order to gain control of the Cauliflower Trust. In The Resistible Rise, the characters -- Dullfeet (equivalent to Engelbert Dollfuss, the Austrian Chancellor), Old Dogsborough (equivalent to Hindenburg), Ui's lieutenants Giri, Givola, and Roma (equivalent to Nazi cronies), along with a hysterically funny ensemble cast of greengrocers and citizens of Chicago -- never resist orders, even when warehouses burn. Murder ensues, and Ui makes plans to extend his operation to the suburb of Cicero. The grocers become petrified into asking Ui for protection.

The essence of this evil is recalled in The Resistible Rise by Brecht's paraphrase of Mark Antony's "Friends, Romans, Countrymen" speech from Shakespeare. In scene three, journalist Ted Ragg delivers sarcastic praise to Ui: Alas, the finest scars Get lost with those who wear them. 'Can it be That in a world where good deeds go unnoticed No monument remains to evil ones?' 'Yes, so it is.' 'Oh, lousy world!'

Brecht believed that Hitler's rise to power was not inevitable, that the responsibility lay with the people to stand up and resist evil.

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Volume 1, Number 4 (June 1997)
Not Quite Dead Yet: Musings on the Neo-Futurists
by Josh Marchesi

How many times have you heard the phrase, "theatre is dead?" It's been tossed around so long that it's slipped into the category of punchlines that people get without hearing the joke.

While the theatre may not be dead, it's certainly seen better days. The popularity of Hollywood Blockbusters has forced the uneasy birth of the Broadway-style Event Play: Big Sets! Booming Sound! Famous Stars! Amazing Special Effects!

At the other end of the spectrum, those of us who work in smaller scale have become progressively more outrageous in order to attract attention. Unfortunately, daytime talk shows and Disease-of-the-week movies do it so much better: America's! Steamy! Underbelly! All Real! Based (loosely) on a True Story! How can a struggling company in an over-heated black-box hope to compete with that? We can imitate it, which is fun, but artistically it's just another dead end. Worse, neither of these approaches takes advantage of the things that theatre does well: intimacy, spontaneity, confrontation, honesty, contact, and unpredictability.

About a year and a half ago, a company from Chicago called the Neo-Futurists descended on EXIT Theatre here in S.F. to suggest that there may just be a better way.

Inspired by Italian Futurism, Dadaism, and German Expressionism (along with more modern influences like Samuel Beckett and Howard Barker), the Neo-Futurists feel that the more sincere and genuine the performers and material are onstage, the stronger the bond with the audience. Therefore, they use no sets or costumes, and they write all their own material, which is always, ultimately, autobiographical. As their founder, Greg Allen, says, they "do not aim to suspend the audience's disbelief, but to create a world where the stage is a continuation of daily life." This life can be spun in ways that are satirical or literary or just plain silly, but always alive and immediate.

There is no "fourth wall" in a Neo-Futurist show. The audience is sometimes written into a play, or will write themselves in, feeling drawn into the action by the strength of their reaction to the material. And it is always fresh. They never perform the evening's plays in the same order twice, and they write several new plays a week, throwing out older scripts that may no longer be relevant. This is theatre that leaves much room for growth, for development, and most importantly, for failure.

So, what's it like in practice? Well, here's a typical evening with the Neo- Futurists, a performance of Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind:

You walk up to the box office and ask how much the tickets cost. Instead of a number, you are given a pair of dice. You roll a two and a one. "Three dollars, please!" the woman says. Your friend isn't so lucky, though. He rolls double sixes. Inside the door, a cheerful guy listening to a walkman really loud yells, "What's your name?" You tell him, and he slaps a nametag on your lapel. It reads, "Hi! My name is Bronchial Asthma." A lot of the audience have been named after diseases: a woman named Planters Wort, a teenager named Gout, and one poor guy whose name is Chronic Flatulence. Very cruel parents.

On the stage, high in the air, is a clothesline with pieces of paper pinned to it, numbered from one to thirty. The program is actually a menu, listing thirty plays, numbered, coincidentally, one to thirty.

Suddenly, several people from the audience, as well as the box office woman and the walkman guy, jump up onstage, and one of them says, "I'm Greg, and we're the Neo-Futurists. We're sold out tonight, so what kind of pizza do you want?" You all decide on pepperoni, and one of the guys goes off to order it. While he's gone, Greg explains the way the show works: They set a timer for sixty minutes, audience members call out the numbers of the plays they want to see, Greg jumps up and grabs the sheet with that number on it and reads off the title, they start the clock and yell "Go!", and then they do the play. When they're done, they yell, "Curtain!", someone yells out another number, and off they go again. They stop for only three things: the plays are all done, the sixty minutes are up, or the pizza arrives.

Each play is 30 seconds to 3 minutes long; some of the plays are funny, some are sad, or poetic, or infuriating, or moving. Some are monologues, some are scenes, and some defy all definition, taking place all over the theatre and involving the audience in ways heretofore unimagined.

About halfway through, the pizza arrives and they pause the timer so that everyone can get a piece, then they pick up exactly where they left off. When they call "Curtain!" on the last play with 45 seconds to spare, you feel energized, excited, ready talk, and write, and perform, and run away to Chicago...or maybe not.

But in that moment, you realize that theatre has no limitations.

Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind is part of our Sunday night reading series.

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Volume 1, Number 3 (April, 1997)
The Unbearable Lightness of Milan Kundera
by Wendy Wilcox

In this issue, we feature the Czech writer Milan Kundera. He is best known in the U.S. for his novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being and his play Jacques and His Master (our June 1st reading).

During the 1960's, Milan Kundera and other writers toiled for greater cultural freedom under Czechoslovakia's dictatorial socialist regime. Their labors bore fruit during the brief "Prague Spring" of 1968. The country's leadership changed hands and Milan Kundera, unfettered by censorship, became one of the major literary figures of the day. When Soviet forces took control later that year, however, Kundera lost the right to work and publish in his own country. Finally, in 1975 he was permitted to accept a teaching position in Rennes, France. Four years later, the Czech government revoked his citizenship.

Within the boundaries of his new home in France, Kundera resumed writing, ever more fascinated by man's struggle against power. Through the juxtaposition of humor and seriousness, eroticism and sterility, memory and forgetting, Kundera shed light on different variations of this struggle and the universality of the human condition.

On the necessity of humor in a world dominated by power, he states, "I learned the value of humor during the time of Stalinist terror. I could always recognize a person who was not a Stalinist, a person whom I needn't fear by the way he smiled. A sense of humor was a trustworthy sign of recognition. Ever since, I have been terrified by a world that is losing it's sense of humor."

Kundera, believing in the illuminating potential of eroticism, claimed in a New York Times book review that "The erotic scene is the focus where all the themes of the story converge and where its deepest secrets are located."

Just as he values humor and eroticism as weapons against repression, he also declares, in his novel The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, "The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting." In another interview, Kundera elaborates on this central theme. "Forgetting is the great private problem of man: death as the loss of the self... The self is the sum of everything we remember. Thus, what terrifies us about death is not the loss of the future but the loss of the past. Forgetting is a form of death ever present within life."

Proclaimed "the favored spokesman for the uneasy conscience of the French intellectual," Kundera has won many awards and honors. He understands the laughable nature of fame, quipping, "When I was a little boy in short pants I dreamed about a miraculous ointment that would make me invisible. Then I became an adult and began to write, and wanted to be successful. Now I'm successful and would like to have the ointment..."

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Volume 1, Number 2 (December, 1996)
The Letters of Elizabeth Wong
by Nicole Malkin

In 1979, diplomatic relations with the People's Republic of China were normalized. In 1984, Elizabeth Wong's Chinese-American family took a trip to China to re-establish ties with relatives. At this time she began a correspondence that would extend until the student uprising in Tiananmen Square. Until the massacre of June 1989, the young people of China had a great deal of hope.

Elizabeth Wong uses this period as a backdrop to themes of personal freedom in China, as well as in the U.S. and beyond. In her play, Letters to a Student Revolutionary, a Chinese woman and a Chinese-American woman come up against societies that confine them. Wong is one of an increasing number of American women playwrights who assert a vantage point from a segment of America that traditionally has been viewed as silent. Even today's popular media has confined Asian women to stereotyped roles of "exotic prostitute," quiet overachiever," or simply decorative accessory.

Elizabeth Wong grew up in Los Angeles and was a successful journalist before trying her hand at playwriting. She cites the work of other Asian-American theatre artists, David Henry Hwang and Wakako Yamauchi, as inspiration for writing from her own unique perspective of an Asian-American woman. Other plays by Elizabeth Wong include: Kimchee and Chitlins, about the conflicts between African-Americans and Korean-Americans in New York City, and China Doll, which explores the life of Asian-American film star Anna May Wong.

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During a 24-hour period in July 1995 I received over 50 messages on my answering machine, most from the press and TV, wanting interviews. I lead a busy but quiet life, so this was most unusual. The Senate Ethics Committee had released news of the letter I'd sent them in June, when they announced their decision to hold hearings on Senator Packwood's conduct. Reporters asked, why did I wait 24 years after my encounter with the Senator, on a conservationist river rafting trip, to "go public?" After all, isn't a kiss just a kiss?

In 1971 there was no encouragement to report such things. It was simply not news. The lengthy discussion I'd had with the Senator, earlier on that afternoon by the Snake River, was what I'd hoped was important. It was encouraging, in those post-1960's times, that a newly elected Republican senator wanted to exchange ideas about the Vietnam War, poverty, racism, education and the arts. Later, in the woods, when no one else was around and the man was obviously drunk, he appeared suddenly, grabbed me and kissed me. Yuch. Some men did things like that. You just didn't expect it from a senator.

Over the years, I've occasionally told friends about the incident; when the articles about other women's experiences with the Senator began to appear I made my own bumper sticker and displayed it on my car: Honk If You've Been Kissed By Senator Packwood. When I read in June that the Senate Ethics Committee had agreed to hold hearings on Packwood's behavior, and that 17 women had come forward, I knew it was time for me to join with them. Perhaps it would encourage others to speak out too. You don't need to be a psychotherapist to know that this is a repeating pattern, and I know the Senator's problem goes way back, that it's likely many more women have felt invaded by his conduct. The pattern over the years is significant. Speaking out is important, breaking silence when silence has protected power and masked injustice.

Many men share Senator Packwood's problem behavior. It is often linked with alcohol. It is still, to a large degree, socially sanctioned. Anita Hill validated what women already knew: all women experience this, though not all men do it. Not all men act inappropriately toward women, but I believe I can say that all women experience various forms of unwanted, invasive and disturbing attentions of a sexual nature from males -- harassment -- from the time they reach puberty. Long before puberty, many little girls (and boys, too) are sexually traumatized by males in their own households who assume an ownership of their bodies (and souls) that is the logical extension of behavior like the Senator's. Touch, fear, control, anger, desire, domination, love. The confusions are sown early, and they go deep, warping our social fabric. When is a kiss just a kiss?

Celia Rosebury Lighthill teaches film history at City College of San Francisco and is a psychotherapist.

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