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Community Performance Inc.

June 03, 2008

Saturday culminated with an amazing runthrough, the energy for which seemed more than human. When we finished a group of ordinary townsfolk, children to the very old, had been there twelve hours straight. And at the end we were dancing in jubilation.

Towards dinner time, before the runthrough, Iega came to tell me that he wasn't getting an emotional connection with the piano/man figure I'd envisioned in March in the Rain, the scene, not the song. We talked and while I believe the conflation of the two images is right and strong in a literary sense, I saw Iega's point, and I saw that the community didn't "get it." Sometimes a visual metaphor fails in community performance. I might be able to get away with it for a theater crowd that enjoys prying open a tasty metaphor to get at the flesh, but not here. Too abstract.

The piano was THE WAY of speaking the truth in code. The truth is that both man and piano were shot up that night. Man could not be resurrected, but the piano could be replaced. The piano tracked the restitution of the normal, even the return of harmony and fellow feeling between the races. Dwelling on the man's death, the justice/injustice of it, remains a significant point of disagreement for blacks and whites.

When we took out the piano/man, our decision, we were left with narration that told the story of displacing a community and shooting up the community center and its heart, the piano. The image of the man was nowhere, anymore, in code or not. That still didn't solve the problem, a leader, we heard third hand, was upset by the screaming and the words about shots fired. I know this person, who is not upset because of the truth, I think, but because telling the story "wrong" will keep white folks from coming, and the entire project will be destroyed before it is really begun. There will be no next season.

Iega spoke clearly, blacks emancipate themselves when they speak their truth. It need not be a withering truth, but it must be the entire truth. As a black person, he felt that the entire truth could not be told without mention of the man's death.

We approach the unspeakable and the unshowable, where theater moves past enlightening to incandescence. Beyond it is the open flame and a pile of ashes where the theater stood. Perhaps not an exaggeration. Fall short, and the light isn't bright enough to see by, to see the truth by.

We go to the leaders this morning with a compromise. The cries and the words "gunshot" will be removed. The people, when disposed of their house will be swept all the way off the stage. They will stay off stage and in their place will be two, perhaps three narrators. And the narrators will tell the the story and mention the man. "If it can happen to him, it can happen to us." Words, right out of the transcript. It is the truth. Iega was satisfied. Will it be cleansed enough--gunshots and cries--to also satisfy the white leadership. If it does, we'll stage it tonight and then ask the cast to comment.

Eighty people for twelve hours, wow.

   

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