Talking About Two Things You Don’t Talk About At Dinner
by Sylvie Drake for Applause magazine
The highlight of her film acting career, says Lisa Loomer, was getting to say, “Wanna go out?” on screen to Paul Newman. “I was frustrated by the kinds of roles I got, not so much in the theatre, but certainly on TV and film.
“I played a lot of Latin hookers.”
It’s one of the reasons she became a playwright.
Loomer, who was born and grew up in New York until her family moved to Mexico when she was in her teens, has shuttled a lot between both countries. While under the acting tutelage of Wynn Handman, Artistic Director of The American Place Theatre in New York, Loomer was encouraged by Handman to turn some of the monologues she had developed at his theatre into a one-woman show. From there she moved on to character comedy and some standup and eventually worked at INTAR with Maria Irene Fornes, another important mentor who encouraged her to write. Her first full-length play, Birds, was staged at South Coast Repertory in 1986 and she was off and running.
“I was no longer an actress,” she said, “I started to eat. I stopped waiting tables and began a writing career.”
Many plays and awards later, Loomer’s Two Things You Don’t Talk About At Dinner is about a highly diverse group of friends and family with widely divergent opinions and convictions attending a Passover Seder hosted by Myriam and Jack. As the dinner conversation careens into politics and religion, it goes terribly wrong—or right, depending on the point of view. The play is receiving its world premiere production after being read at last year’s Colorado New Play Summit.
Applause asked the playwright, who now lives in Oregon, a few questions.
Applause: Is Two Things based on an actual event?
Lisa Loomer: It is inspired by an actual event, which I have fictionalized of course… I find that sometimes the parts of plays that are hardest to believe are the “true” ones…. So I will tell you that I have a dear friend who has a yearly Seder and one of her oldest and closest friends who always attends is Arab American. They do not agree about politics. They love each other. That was the inspiration for this play. I should add that I have other friends whose political beliefs differ from mine and it’s gotten me into trouble. So I wanted to write a play that deals with family and friendship being tested by political and religious differences.
My computer is a war zone. I get all the emails from my Jewish friends who are pro-Israel and, often, anti-Arab. I get all the emails from my Arab American friends who are pro-Palestine and, often, anti-Israel. I watched documentaries for months, I read books, I talked to experts, I talked to folks. The situation is mind-boggling, cruel, frustrating, heartbreaking. I’m not a politician. I’m just a writer. Usually a play takes one side or the other. I wanted to give voice to both sides in one play. Because my only hope is for us to hear each other.
A: I see from your bio that you are of Spanish and Romanian descent. Any Jewish antecedents anywhere?
LL: Part of the mix that I am is Jewish—although I was raised without religion—and I do believe in the concept of tikkun olam [repairing the world]. That said… I feel that people will come to the theatre full of passions, preconceptions and prejudices and I’d hate to add to that by giving them the chance to have preconceptions about its author. Especially since everything about me is in this play. More and more, I like to let go of labels…and just want to be described as a “writer.”
A: What is this play’s genesis?
LL: The idea came after attending my friend’s Seder. When I had a first draft, I showed it to several people, including Jews, Christians, Arab Americans, and a Palestinian friend who had shared his story with me. My passionately pro-Israel friend is extremely supportive of this play and grateful I wrote it. But. She’d like for the character, Myriam, to have even more dialogue in response to things that Sam [the Arab American] says that she doesn’t agree with. And, of course, my Palestinian friend feels the same [vice-versa]!
A: How long did it take to write it, start to finish?
LL: Always impossible for me to say, because I do other work in between. But I wrote a chunk of it in a week at the O’Neill [Eugene O’Neill Theater Center in Waterford, CT, that fosters playwrights and new plays] and, coincidentally, it was Wendy Goldberg who invited me. [Goldberg, Artistic Director of the O’Neill, is the director of this Denver Center production.] I had been researching and living with the play for quite a while. And then, of course, I made a million changes last year…and will continue to do so in rehearsal.
A: You mention the Sephardim, who originally were Jews from Spain and remain mostly Jews of the Mediterranean basin. How did they cross your path?
LL: I’m interested in people who have two things going on in their blood and in their culture.
A: You said about something else and I quote: “Clever wasn’t what I was after. It wasn’t that I simply intended to be funny, but that comedy was a way to get at something else.” Is this also what you hoped to achieve with Two Things?
LL: I was surprised that the play played so funny in the workshop production. If my work is funny, it’s just in my cereal. It’s my skewed way of seeing things. That said, I am grateful when something turns out to be funny because I’m usually trying to get at something pretty serious and laughter opens us up and makes it easier for us to consider different points of view.
A: Not to put too fine a point on it, but what would you call this play? A comedy? A tragedy? A tragicomedy? Neo-realism? Something else?
LL: An often funny play about some serious things.
A: What do you hope an audience will take away from this play?
LL: How important it is to hear the other side… if we are to be friends, family, co-workers… or co-existers on this planet we all claim as “home.” Home-land.
I do expect that this play will be controversial. It seems that, to present characters that are pro-Palestinian and pro-Israel in the same play is, in itself, controversial. Some people do not even like the idea of hearing the other point of view in a play! I have friends who are quite radical in their allegiances… on both sides. But what else is an evening of theatre for if not to promote discussion, even heated discussion?
My main characters are bound together by a shared history, they come from the same town in Massachusetts, they’ve known each other all their lives, their parents knew each other. They all want peace. But, as one says, “one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom-fighter.”
Then again, in terms of controversy, most of my plays have been controversial. I’m used to it now. I argue with myself, all the time. I once read in a psychology book that 97% of what we see, in a play or in life, is what we already believe… and the rest we just filter out. So we come to the theatre pretty loaded.
It’s rare that someone leaves the theatre thinking, “Hey, that really opened my mind.” Still, I like having a bunch of characters that see a situation from different sides. And maybe that’s where the comedy comes from, in part. If you can put yourself in someone else’s shoes for a couple of hours—and laugh in the process, maybe cry—that to me, is a good night out.
A: What are you working on now?
LL: I’ve just written a play about homeless teens in Oregon, some of whom consider themselves “homeless,” others who see themselves as “homefree.” *
I’m also writing a play for the Cornerstone Theatre’s upcoming cycle of plays on hunger. Mine takes place at Homegirl Café, a restaurant that trains, and is run by, female ex-gang members in L.A.
* Homefree was commissioned by the Denver Center Theatre Company and is being read as part of this year’s Colorado New Play Summit, Feb. 10-12.
Julie Taymor: Still Queen of THE LION KING
by Sylvie Drake for APPLAUSE magazine
Almost from the moment she was born—in 1952, into a comfortable upper middle class Boston family—Julie Taymor was destined for a wild ride in the theatre she could never have foreseen. This director, choreographer, writer and designer has managed what no one else has in the West (with the possible exception of France’s Ariane Mnouchkine and our own Robert Wilson): She has successfully blended Eastern and Western theatrical traditions, creating new forms exclusively her own. With the 1997 emergence of the musical of The Lion King, which she directed and whose costumes, masks and puppets she designed, she is the first artist to have brought her unique talents to a huge commercial hit.
Who would have predicted that?
Taymor’s interest in theatre had manifested itself in the usual ways—backyard productions, theatre classes. But before she was 21, she had studied with an assortment of world masters, including Jacques Lecoq of the Lecoq School of Mime in Paris and Peter Schumann of the Bread and Puppet Theatre in Vermont. At Oberlin College she flourished under the tutelage of Hebert Blau. Aside from Europe, her travels had taken her to Bombay, Madras and Sri Lanka (Ceylon at the time).
Seeds were planted. When she graduated in 1974, Taymor received a Watson Traveling Fellowship. “My specific course was to go to Eastern Europe, Indonesia and Japan and study visual theatre and experimental puppet theatre. I planned to spend a year at the Awaji folk-Bunraku theatre in Japan [an ancient puppet theatre form]. But I went to Indonesia first.”
Theatre in Indonesia so inspired her that a planned three-month stay became four years. Because there was virtually no film or television, “theatre operated in its original manifestation,” she said, “not just as entertainment, but as educator, mediator between the gods, for religious purposes, socializing purposes. I immersed myself in it with Indonesian artists—Javanese, Balinese, Sundanese, Sumatran. W.S. Rendra was one of the most famous contemporary poets and playwrights of Java. I worked and choreographed for him, until he encouraged me to do my own work.”
Overcoming a daunting variety of obstacles (practical, financial, lingual and cultural) and using mostly Javanese artists, Taymor created her first piece, Way of Snow, an elaborate three-part affair about shamanism and spiritual and physical starvation. Encouraged by its reception, she organized her own international company.
The company lived communally in Bali on a Ford Foundation grant in a house with dirt floors, no running water, no electricity. “We toured, performed. I tried to bring my company to the States. Could never get the money,” she said. “Everyone was China-oriented. Where’s Indonesia? It’s only the fifth largest population in the world! So I came home.”
That was 1980. Where was an iconoclast with such exotic talents to find work in the US? Mostly at experimental not-for-profit venues such as the New York Public Theater (where she did The Haggadah with Elizabeth Swados) and LaMaMa (where in 1981 she did a second version of Tirai, created in Bali). In 1984 Robert Brustein invited her to design puppets and masks for Carlo Gozzi’s The King Stag at the American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge, MA. When the costume designer backed out, Brustein suggested Taymor do everything. “So I designed the costumes, did the choreography, worked with the company, helped them perform.”
As with so much of her work, The King Stag drew broad admiration from theatre insiders, but a contemplated joint production with several theatres fell apart because of high costs (much as the staggering costs and complexities of Spider Man: Turn Off the Dark on Broadway this year caused her to be fired as director from the show).
Money has always been an issue with Taymor productions. She continued to develop her idiosyncratic style, eliciting raves, but not finding many US companies able or willing to afford such demanding work. She decided she also wanted to direct and branched out into opera and film. The world began to notice, especially Europe, which found real kinship with her sensibilities—and, at that time, the subsidies needed to finance them.
The phone call from Tom Schumacher, head of Disney Theatricals, came as a total surprise. Taymor remembered him as a line producer for the Olympic Arts Festival in Los Angeles who, in 1984, had wanted to bring a piece of hers, Liberty’s Taken, to the Festival. It never happened, but after joining Disney some years later, and the success of Beauty and the Beast as a stage musical, Michael Eisner, head of Disney at the time, urged Schumacher to find someone who could do the same for The Lion King. The only name that came to mind for what Schumacher thought was an unfeasible project was Taymor’s.
She hadn’t even seen the movie.
“I wasn’t very interested,” she said. After going off to direct Salome for the Kirov in Germany and Russia, and The Flying Dutchman in Los Angeles, she decided to take a second look. She liked the set-up. Both parties could leave at any time if things didn’t work out. She had the talent, Disney had the money—a marriage made in heaven.
“I got tremendous support from Disney,” she said, “and when I say Disney I mean individuals—Tom in particular—and they kept saying, ‘Do what you do; that’s why we hired you.’ ”
She was working with her long-time associate Michael Curry, as much a wiz in the engineering of the puppets and masks as she was in the sculpting of them. For years they had jointly created a panoply of invented creatures. Together they came up with the movement of the masks as headgear—up/down, backwards/forwards—operating on an intricate technology.
“I could never afford to do that in any other playground,” Taymor said flatly. “I thought, ‘Disney is game to support these experiments. We should take advantage.’”
The next thing she did was develop a book with the writers. There were five songs in the film; she needed 15. Some were by Elton John and Tim Rice, but most of the new work came from South African composer Lebo M.
“I was adamant about that,” she said, “and, thank God, they supported it. He’s a great artist. This is a specific composer who draws on the choral traditions of his culture as the Beatles drew on a pop tradition, wonderful songs like ‘Shadowland,’ ‘He Lives in You,’ ‘Endless Night’… I love ‘Circle of Life,’ don’t get me wrong, but without Lebo’s contribution…?”
How, with so many ethnically different composers, did she maintain a unity of tone?
“Lebo provides the unity. Everything has his choral touch. They had put out this album called Leader of the Pridelands after the Lion King movie opened. It was all this choral music Lebo had done with Hans Zimmer. It had been background. My plan was to bring [it] to the foreground and make the chorus as principal as the principals. I told Tom, ‘You can’t hide the actors. This piece is about humanity. It’s human, not animal.’
“I wanted Pride Rock to be like the Circle of Life. The circle is a strong symbol throughout. Mufasa’s head is circular. The wheels of the gazelles, the sun that rises in the beginning, the pool of water in act two—many, many things came off of this dynamic. Even if it’s subliminal, it’s much more than you know.
“We did workshops. Things had to be proved. Fine by me. A lot of money was being invested.” The first workshop disappointed. “The heads were too big, the masks oversized, cumbersome. We hadn’t gotten the scale right.” Taymor talked the powers-that-be into letting her refine four of the characters and present three versions of each (as make-up, as half-masks, as full masks), fully costumed, under proper lighting, giving the actors time to practice the movement.
“All three worked,” she said. “Michael Eisner came. Top of the food chain. He said, ‘They all work, but the one that you first conceived is by far the riskiest. The pay-off will be bigger.’ ”
Taymor’s willingness to accommodate to whatever suited Disney was the mark of a mature and confident artist, but also smart. It removed tension. The choice grew easier. The Disney brass knew it could trust the outcome.
What excited her were the virtually limitless possibilities, “the idea of the old-fashioned theatrical techniques, the forced perspective, the mechanical doll theatres. I love that stuff. I knew I would use a lot of traditions from Asia and Africa as well as our own that have so much charm but are not hi-tech. It was exciting.
We had done our work.”
Sylvie Drake is the editor of Applause magazine, the program magazine for The Denver Center for the Performing Arts.
Sylvie Drake: Can you briefly tell me how you went from the movie, which was Jane Fonda’s idea, to the musical, which was Robert Greenblatt’s idea? And what drew you to the project?
Dolly Parton: Well, when I first did the movie I was intrigued with the fact that someone as big as Jane Fonda would actually want me to be in the movie. I wasn’t tryin’ to get in the movies at that time, but it worked out really well, and then when Robert Greenblatt came to me to see if I would write the music, I was just schoked. I’d never thought of it as a musical; I’d never done a musical. I wondered why they waited all those years to decide to do it and I said ‘I don’t know if I can do it but I’ll certainly give it a try.’ And he said, ‘I know you can do it because you did the theme song [for the movie] and I know your stuff and I know your songs and I think it would be a wonderful thing to do.’ So I said, ‘Well, let me try’ and I did and here we are.
SD: How long did it take you to create the score?
