Interview with Jim, audience member

By Mark McKenna

Mark McKenna: Tell me about the school and the students. How does Blue Lake function with now 30 or 40 students?

Jim: Landlords love it, the market loves it, the Logger Bar loves it. Now they are even renting space from the major developer in our industrial park. The presence of 30 or 40 students is a major impact. The students are instructed by the principle members of Dell’Arte that they are becoming members of a small community and with that comes a responsibility, that their actions reflect on them. Judgments will be made and behavior will be moderated based on those judgments not only for the individuals but for the institution.

I think what the students find here, particularly with the old-timers at the Grange, is an older, more traditional American sense of community than exists off of Main Street America. We are seven miles off of Hwy. 101, we are the only district in Humboldt county off of 101. That makes an enormous difference. We don’t have malls spreading out. We have avoided mainstream economic development until very recently. So those older, more traditional habits of saying hello on the street, of smiling, of being able to walk down the main street of town and cars slow down for you – part of it is that we don’t have sidewalks, we have kids on horseback riding through town, dogs sleeping in intersections. You are stepping out of mainstream culture when you enter Blue Lake.

Only some students don’t like it, find it small townish and boring. Other students really enjoy it and want to reside here. We often have students that have a very hard time of breaking the bond, of returning elsewhere. I think that is partly because of Blue Lake’s geographics. It is slightly isolated but still well-located to all the amenities. An old guard has been anchored in town for 100 years and they respect the honor with which Dell’Arte has handled their end of economic transactions. Dell’Arte is one of the pillars of the community now, not only because they are good artists. I think that is secondary. They have become that because they are good people. The plays are built on local issues, they treated all sides. In theater you need conflict. In community, if you are going to represent conflict, you have to treat all sides of the conflict with honor, dignity, and careful thought, which is rare these days. That is another thing I want to say. The principals have really tried to be fair in their presentation. I think they are harder on their own than on anybody else. That is the way you have to be. The community really respects that. In 20 years, it has turned around 180 degrees. No doubt.

MM: How does Dell’Arte have an impact on the thinking of the community, the thinking of these students? Do you get to see how they are changed?

J: I cannot judge the artistic involvement at all. We are getting more and more of the younger students who come directly out of college, and they seem to be the ones who have the hardest time adapting to the Dell’Arte influence. They want to be a little more dogmatic and self-righteous, and it is because they are the sons and daughters of privilege. Understand that if you have gone through a four-year college and you can come to Dell’Arte, you aren’t paying on a student loan. So, there is a certain class outline here

I do a class here with the students, for the last seven or eight years. Quite honestly I am appalled by about 80percent of the students. If they are not ignorant of basic historical facts and processes in Western culture, they take a supercilious attitude towards, like it "doesn’t effect me." They have been sons and daughters of privilege their whole lives. They have never been tested. If I had a critique of the school it would be that they leave the students untested. They are too easy, too nice and they leave that supercilious self-absorption too much intact. I would like to see it shattered in the first week.

I’ll tell you a funny story about the community. Students come into town around the last week in September, which happens to be the opening of hunting season. Now, we get deer walking up the main street in town. We’ve got bear walking up and down the creek through town. So, here are all the young, white males in town, of which there are many. They wear Metallica jackets, they are not as pierced as the students, but there is definitely a rougher edge to them. Some of these kids are 20 years old and have been working in the woods for four years, dropped out of high school. All these kids are walking around town with rifles. It is the opening of hunting season! We had a girl leave town the first week of school, she \ was afraid she would be harmed by these young men walking through town. Every year I see five or six of these incidents. Personally, I feel safer with guns in the hands of these young guys that I know than in the hands of state police. They are not going to harm you, because they live here. I think that element of personal safety and doesn’t exist in the outside world. Some of the students never get used to it. Just the geographics of Blue Lake present something unique in contemporary America. I think it is one of the reasons why students have a hard time breaking the bond. To miss that is to miss one of the wonders of Dell’Arte.

It is something that has influenced Donald and Michael and Joan’s work. Since Dell’Arte has taken to parodies of local personalities, people now want to be the next personality. You are really rooted in a community when your parodies are desirable. Dell’Arte has been a major influence. Blue Lake wouldn’t be Blue Lake today without Dell’Arte. It has had as big an influence as the industrial park. The industrial park has secured Blue Lake’s economic health for the foreseeable future. Dell’Arte is as elemental to its psychological and financial health.

MM: As a citizen of Blue Lake what would your dream for Dell’Arte be for say 10 or 20 years from now?

J: In 1789 there was a theater group in Paris that earned its living by going out to Marie Antoinette’s little outside of Paris palace and doing classics. Then they would come back into Paris and do the court for the Parisians. Many of the rigorous academics hated actors, saw them as a threat to all things pure. That dissembling, that ability to manipulate emotions is one of the most dangerous things to a well-ordered state. This acting troupe ridiculing Antoinette’s court in streets of Paris really created the psychological climate that changed all of that, enabled the Bastille to fall and the insurrection of women and the rights of men. I would really like Dell’Arte to be harbingers of equivalent liberation for Blue Lake, Humboldt County, California and so on. That is what I would like to see.

Mark McKenna is artistic director and an ensemble member of Touchstone Theatre, in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. He is a graduate of the Lecoq International School of Theatre in Paris. He has taught theater classes at Lehigh University and the University of Pennsylvania, and the MFA Theatre Program at Towson State University. McKenna is active in the growth of the Network of Ensemble Theatres. He is a board member of Alliance for Building Communities, a regional community-development corporation.

PERFORMING COMMUNITIES
Carpetbag | Cornerstone | Dell'Arte | Jump-Start
LAPD | Pregones | Roadside | WagonBurner
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