Back To Back Theatre | The Shadow Whose Prey the Hunter Becomes / 2022

listening to sarah instead of siri

by Douglas Messerli

 

Back to Back Theatre performers Mark Deans, Michael Chan, Bruce Gladwin, Simon Laherty, Sarah Mainwaring, Scott Price, and Sonia Teuben (writers), Bruce Gladwin (director) The Shadow Whose Prey the Hunter Becomes / 2022 / the production I saw with Deborah Meadows was at Redcat (the Roy and Edna Disney CalArts Theater) on September 28, 2024

 

Three of the Back to Back performers Sarah Mainwaring, Simon Laherty and Scott Price (the last two of which I had seen formerly in the company’s 2013 performance at UCLA in the brilliant play Ganesh Versus the Third Reich) come together in this work in a kind of obscure “meeting” to discuss issues of importance with the play’s audience.

     The play “begins,” so to speak, with Sarah and Scott setting up the chairs and creating a kind of line which becomes a spatial marker for the intellectually disabled or what Sarah prefers to describe as neurodivergent artists, some of whom, such as Scott, suffer from autism, needing to draw lines between themselves and others.

     In fact, Scott begins the play by describing to Sarah just that, establishing the limits of how one should deal with others in public, making it very clear that it is not all right to grab another’s crotch (or vagina) as a former unnamed US President has claimed is his prerogative, and that it is not even proper to grab one’s own crotch in public, not permissible, indeed, to touch anyone without permission unless you are a family member or lover expressing actions of familiar or shared sexual love, all statements, presumably, that Scott and the others have had to sit through in the lectures and group sessions determined to make them behave more like “normal” folk.

     Obviously Scott, who has a large and rather sophisticated vocabulary, has also received much of his information from his on-line searches and his chats with Siri, the “intelligent assistant” of Mac (Apple Computer System) products. Scott, who quite comically describes himself, later in the play, as suffering from both autism and a rather strongly incomprehensible Aussie accent, has ordered up a large light board behind the players which translates their words through voice recognition so that the audience can engage with their various expressions of opinion throughout.

   Sarah, as she makes clear later, is quite resentful of the computer translations, suggesting that it is perhaps the audience’s responsibility to attend to their words and accents, not their duty to attend to audience “normality.” Moreover, her own words, although often slow in coming—she describes herself as having had a severe head injury—are spoken clearly and rather emphatically.

      Sarah, once Simon joins them, was to have led their entire discussion. But suddenly standing before the audience she panics and cannot at all remember what she was about to say, and the responsibility to lead their discussion falls, after much discussion, to a somewhat reluctant but verbose Scott, who in order to establish his position requires, like so many panel leaders and professors, an overly large lectern to which he must climb up a few steps to even position himself. 

   The first part of this “meeting,” it appears, is devoted to an historical recounting of the way people such as three intellectually disabled or neurodivergent players have been treated over the years by society in general. Scott, with help from the others, describes how disabled men were made into virtual slaves for several years in a small Iowa town in a Tyson manufacturing plant and the use and abuse of disabled women for decades by the Catholic Church in Ireland which ran businesses using them as slave labor without pay. When some of the businesses were later taken over by a toy company the disabled continued to make some of the major board games including Monopoly, Scrabble, Risk, Clue, Ticket to Ride, etc. The list of board games quickly becomes a kind of idée fixe with Scott as he continues endlessly to list them, he and Simon also breaking in from time to time to admit to having played some of the games.

     Sarah may have forgotten what her original message was, but she soon becomes the controlling force of the two males, as she demands Scott stop by pulling down his high lectern, indicating that he is not properly communicating the real issue to his audience about the abuse disabled individuals have received over the years from the people who continue to diminish those to whom they feel superior.

     She and Simon demand he speak in simple sentences, given what she fears is the audience’s lack of comprehension, about the problem, a comical moment given it’s clear that the neurodivergent individuals on the stage see those of us in the audience as the inferior fools. And we are, after all, just that, even if he feel sympathetic with their feelings. We have not had to experience a lifetime, as these folk have, of being made to feel inferior, which the two males later declare they often still feel in their private moments even if they have come to perceive that in many respects they also have a more profound way of seeming things.

      In a sense, any minority group eventually comes to similar conclusions. Surely blacks in the US have rightfully come to perceive themselves as representing a far richer and more dynamic culture than the more-restricted and socially repressed white community; as a gay man I feel I’ve been blessed with a far more empathetic and deeper understanding of what it feels to be different and am joyful for the far more open attitudes that I have had toward sexuality than most of my straight peers. Asians have a far richer historical perspective than most Americans. Native Americans have a deeper understanding of culture and nature than most of the newer US immigrants.

      But still, we wonder, is that all these three wanted to explain to us? How much they have suffered under our enslavement and come through with a more complex perception of themselves?

      Scott, realizing that he has failed in communicating (just as does Simon, soon after, when he declares himself the “mayor of understanding,” while permitting Sarah only to be his secretary who does all the work while he writes the speeches, a typical male sexist vision of reality) demands a momentary retreat into privacy, communicating with his more reliable friend Siri.

       But it is in just that act, as Sarah soon makes clear, that he is making quite obvious the reason these three have come together to talk to us. Sarah reminds him of the “Hal Syndrome” based the encounter with artificial intelligence in the 1968 Stanley Kubrick 2001: Space Odyssey in which a computer, growing smarter than its human creators, begins to kill off the members of the space crew.

       Just as these three have been enslaved by others who perceive themselves as mentally superior, so too are we, in our hubris, endangered by the AI systems we have created and are developing. These systems, as they interchange with us, winning first at chess games and other simple challenges of logic, may come to recognize us a neurodivergent and intellectually disabled and, accordingly, find ways to enslave or do away with us.

       These three individuals have come together to reveal what we are simply not yet recognizing, that any system that identifies itself as superior to another, will soon end up diminishing, abusing, or even destroying others it deems to be inferior. The pattern, seemingly, is embedded in the human brain, and accordingly, will be installed even in the human-built creations that may eventually become smarter than us. Even the usually calmly assuring Siri shows her impatience with Scott’s and Simon’s failures to communicate, moving on to proffer her intellectual superiority as she speaks through the light board Scott has created to facilitate communication.

       The real issue here, even among the males who begin with a pretense of learned correctness, but who gradually exclude and dismiss the more reticent but for deeper thinker Sarah, are concerned the categorization of others and the human species’ seemingly endless inability to recognize and enjoy difference and multiplicity of perception.

     When Sarah previously argues for the word “neurodivergent” she mentions that, in fact, every human being is in some respects “neurodivergent,” different in their way of thinking in minute ways from everyone else. “Disabled,” the term of which Scott is now quite proud, like the word I have restored to my own writings, “Queer,” still carries with it a sense of the inferior of unnecessary difference.

      The meeting has been called to ask us to imagine an alternative from our old ways of perceiving, to encourage us to recognize complexity and difference as a positive necessity for survival. What if we might be able to construct AI systems that recognize multiplicity instead of superiority? What if we could abandon our ancient cultural “hunter” roots, and begin to perceive everyone as a significant gatherer of the various needs upon which all depend, how might that alter our perceptions of human activity. Would we then need to be so fearful of our own shadows, the futures we have created for ourselves?

       This wisdom, we finally recognize, comes not from intellectual geniuses, but simply from those who think differently from ourselves. And what a wonderful gift they have offered us. If only, as they themselves worry, we are able to comprehend their message, or, as they reveal, if they too could only alter their inherent patterns of behavior. We might all listen carefully to what Sarah finally says, not in a speech to the masses, but in her private comments and behavior.

 

Los Angeles, September 30, 2024

Reprinted from International Theater, Opera, and Performance (September 2024.

Luis Valdez and Lalo Guerrero | Zoot Suit / 2017

 dreams destroyed by hate

by Douglas Messerli

 

Luis Valdez (writer and director), music by Lalo Guerrero Zoot Suit / Los Angeles, the Mark Taper Forum, the performance Howard Fox and I saw was on March 11, 2017

 

I will begin this short essay on the Mark Taper Forum revival of Luis Valdez’ Zoot Suit by confirming that this legendary Los Angeles-based musical-drama is still a powerful and moving document. People gasped several times during the matinee performance I attended yesterday with my spouse, Howard Fox, at the contemporary currency of many of the play’s comments. At one point, when the Lieutenant and corrupt Judge (Richard Steinmetz) declares that at a time of war (the play begins in 1942), faced with so many enemies, there is no room in the US for “outsiders,” you could openly hear the audience ruminate the resonance of the lines given Trump’s current utterances.

       At another moment, after being released from more than a year in prison for a crime that none of them committed, one of the so-called Chicano 38th Street gang, Ishmael “Smiley” Torres (Raul Cardona), reports that there is no place for him any longer in Los Angeles and that he intends to move to Arizona; the audience laughed and hooted, clearly referencing their knowledge of the bigoted actions of former Arizona sheriff Joseph Michael "Joe" Arpaio, and the continued conservative immigration attitudes of that state.

       The mostly younger cast, headed by the trickster figure, El Pachuco (Demian Bichir), played their roles well and danced with enthusiasm. The lead character, Henry Reyna (Matias Ponce), his gang-member partners, the already mentioned “Smiley,” Tommy Roberts (Caleb Foote), and Joey Castro (Oscar Camacho), and the women in Henry’s life, Della Barrios (Jeanine Mason) and Alice Bloomfield (Tiffany Dupont) are all charming performers, and help to make this work riveting.

       And then, there are all those wonderful Lalo Guerrero songs: “Zoot Suite Boogie,” “Chucos Suaves,” “Vamos a Bailar,” and “Marijuana Boogie”; my only wish was that there had been more.*

       The original play opened at the Mark Taper Forum in 1978, with a cast that included Edward James Olmos, Daniel Valdez, Tyne Daly, Lupe Ontiveros, Tony Plana, Robert Beltran, and many other noted actors, not only ran in sold out performances at the Taper, but was so successful that it continued throughout the year at the Aquarius Theater. New York, however, did not quite take to the work, and on Broadway it ran for only 41 performances.

       As the author, himself, notes, “Zoot Suit is a quintessential Los Angeles play. It represents the fabric of the city, the internal strife, the Sturm und Drang of Los Angeles, what forced it to be the city it is today.”

     The central focus of Valdez’ work is the notorious Sleepy Lagoon Murder of August 2, 1942, where 21 innocent, mostly Chicano, zoot-suit-wearing young men were arrested and convicted in a sham trial—as the play presents it, the young men were forced to remain in their elaborate suits throughout the trial, and were forced to stand with every mention of their name, while simultaneously being kept apart from their defense lawyer, George Shearer (Brian Abraham)—and were sentenced to life imprisonment for a murder that, quite apparently, was committed by another, Downey-based gang.

       But the real point here is not so much guilt or innocence, but the entire notion of what it means to be an outsider in a world in which you live. To the LA press and prosecutors, the very fact that these young men dressed differently from others and represented a different cultural perspective, proved their unworthiness. The Japanese had already been shuffled off to internment camps (see my pieces in My Year 2007 and My Year 2015), and it only followed, as it does in all times when people feel threatened by what they do not know, that the young Chicano men should also feel the country’s wrath. Throughout the US, but particularly in Los Angeles, soldiers and sailors, after the arrestment of the zoot suiters, randomly attacked young men wearing what they saw as peacock-like costumes, virtually, if not literally, raping them, stripping their clothes from their backs. Later in the play, we see the sad consequences of this, as Henry’s younger brother, Rudy (Andres Ortiz), now a Marine uniform, recounts how he was so attacked. He resents his brother simply not being there to protect him.

      The zoot suits represented many things: the possibility of wealth, the differentness of  identity, and, yes, a preening of the male ego. But here, we realize that it had become almost a sign of meaningful dress as important to the young Chicanos as the Marine, Navel, and Army uniforms were to the others. The sad, so very sad fact was that Henry Reyna, the charismatic leader who had already been wrongly arrested several times, had dreamed and hoped for a life of normalcy, and was planning a few days after from the Sleepy Lagoon events to join the navy. What might his life have been if he had given that simple opportunity?

       As it was, even though hundreds of well-meaning Los Angeles citizens, including celebrities, fought for his freedom, his year-long prison stay would inevitably change his life forever, and, as we are told in a kind of prelude to the ending, he eventually was arrested again for burglary, killing a fellow prisoner, and finally dying in the 1970s, a broken man.

      But the narrator El Pachuco “revisits” that ending, describing the brief life stories of others involved and transforming the criminal facts to the explanation of his involvement within his community, as husband and father to children. Yet, by this time we know El Pachuco is a far from reliable narrator. In his attempts to repeat the worst of the facts of racial hatred and its terrible results, he mocks and challenges any of the young Henry’s dreams for a better life, and it is only when Henry fights back from that viewpoint of desperation that he has the possibility to change it. The trickster is just that, a man who helps keep his own kind down by daily reminding his fellow men and women of their own cultural perspective and how others, outside of that, actually see them. How different might have been Henry’s life been, if instead of being forced by his family’s sense of responsibility to marry his youthful Mexican-American love, if he had been able to cross the cultural divide and married the beautiful Gabacho, Alice; yet, she now also sees herself as an outsider, and fears its ramifications. Besides, her own relatives are now being killed in Poland and Nazi Germany. Despite her need to reach out to help others, she cannot truly help herself.

        Despite my deep respect and admiration of this work, however, I left the theater feeling that the whole had not quite been integrated. Basically, it is a series of dramatic events interrupted by song and dance, and while that can often be, as in Brecht and Weill’s great works, a remarkable combination, here the parts feel a big unhinged, particularly since, I believe, the spoken drama parts were accomplished without microphone, while the song and dance numbers were accompanied with canned music and heavily miked songs.

     Coming out of the United Farm Workers, El Teatro Campesino performances, moreover, Valdez was never quite able to link the various tableaux of his tale in a truly integral way. Even as we are moved by its many parts, the parts still seem not to be quite woven into a whole. Finally, I’m not sure the gravely-voiced Birchir was quite strong to play host to the work’s many disparate parts.

     Still, I wouldn’t have missed this revival for anything in the world. We all need to be reminded again and again of the horrible histories that have transpired in Los Angeles—as well as so many other American cities—throughout the years. What happened to these 21 boys happened elsewhere to Emmet Till, what happened to Emmet Till happened to the entire West Coast Japanese community, and what happened to the Japanese happened again to Rodney King, all of which is threatening to happen all over again. And one cannot say enough about the bravery of figures like Gordon Davidson, the original founder of this very theater, who died late last year, and offered up his stage in 1978 to this play’s Luis Valdez.

      Certainly, the audience at the performance I saw—so very different from the elderly graying-haired audiences of so many of my theater events—clearly enjoyed this exploration of cultural history, raucously applauding even the minor figures, such as Reyna’s mother and father (Rose Portillo and Daniel Valdez), as much for their titular roles, as the major actors.

 

Los Angeles, March 12, 2017

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance

 

*In the past few years, through Howard’s work on a show at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art of the artist Carlos Almaraz—who, incidentally, created a mural for the original production of this play—we have become friends with Daniel Guerrero, himself an outsized theatrical figure, the son of the US National Heritage treasure, composer and musician Lalo Guerrero.