kier’s secret german audience
by Douglas Messerli
Kier Peters The
Confirmation, performed by the English Drama Group (EDG) der
Universität Passau, January 25-27, 2007
About twice a year, I check the
computer to discover what my playwright pseudonym, Kier Peters, is up to. Over
the years I’ve found he’s a fairly busy person, with plays being performed by
experimental theatre companies and even at dinner theatres—all of which came as
a surprise to me! But in 2007 I came across an even more interesting piece of
information regarding his/my plays. The entry that popped up on Goggle sounded
very promising, the first sentence reading: “The main topic of conversation,
even after seven days, is still The
Confirmation, the American play by Kier Peters we came to Bavaria to see.”
“The lights darken,” he continues. “The play begins. But it doesn’t. A
four-piece band plays Klezmer music. Foot tapping and stomping.”
“The curtain rises and an American family takes the stage. Then begins
the peeling of the onion, layers of revelations. Much of it beyond me.”
Walsh goes on to discuss some of his favorite lines—one in particular
uttered by the play’s shikker
(Yiddish for a drunk) sister Blanche (speaking only Yiddish throughout the
play, which the family believes to be Norwegian), who upon hearing one of her
sister’s open a bottle of wine, shouts out: “Did I hear a cork?” With Josh and
Jutta, evidently, this American couple “constructed tables with diagrams and
arrows delineating relationships to better understand the play,” which had
three sold-out performances! “Modern American theater is still alive,” declares
Walsh, “—alive and well in Bavaria, Germany.”
The very idea of my crazy American family of women survivors—Grandma,
Mother, Sister, Blanche and the family intruder, Sister’s lesbian lover
Carmelita—being brought to life in that small Bavarian city nestled between
three rivers (the Danube, the Inn, and Ilz) at the border of the Czech
Republic, amazed me! As Paul Vangelisti merrily chuckled over the phone the
other day—he being one of the few individuals who love such accidental
collisions of discovery and event (insidious gaps in life) as I do—“Surely this
can’t really have happened, this seemingly lost American couple coming across
your play in Bavaria without a clue of what it was about! And you knowing
nothing of it whatsoever. You made it up. You wrote this,” he proclaimed. “No
one will believe you didn’t. It’s like all the stories in your memoir!”
“I know,” I concurred. “But you and I both realize that I didn’t
fabricate a single moment of my adventure in New York with you. And I haven’t
knowingly made up anything in any of these volumes to date. Things just happen
to me that way. It’s my life.”
“I think they do happen that way to many people,” Paul concluded, “only
they block it out, rationalize it away or perceive no significance in the
facts.”
Yesterday, as I was about to write about this newest manifestation of my
wondrously eventful life, I received an e-mail from Joshua Amrhein, outlining
the details of his directorial choice and the performances of my play.
Apparently, he’d first discovered my short plays, A Dog Tries to Kiss the Sky: Seven Short Plays, in City Lights
bookstore in San Francisco, and had thought about performing “Past Present
Future Tense” or “A Dog Tries to Kiss the Sky.” “The plays…had an American kind
of humor I thought, just ‘dada’ enough for my taste and approachable enough for
any audience.” “Well, I wanted to see what else you’d written, and found The Confirmation. Besides really liking
the story, and all things to do with grandmothers in general, I felt it was a
perfect piece to do with a group mainly made up of women….” “My actors loved
it,” he reports, and it beat out David Mamet’s Water Engine. Hearing his response, I could only recall the
reaction of my German friend Hans-Jürgen Schadt upon reading the comedy: “I
found it very sad, very sad, while my wife kept laughing out loud the whole
time.” Perhaps some Germans do share the American sense of humor.
Amrhein apologized for not trying harder to reach me—he had evidently
sent an e-mail which I did not receive. I reported that my only regret for not
having been told about the production—although an amateur performing fee would
be appropriate (he is sending a small payment)—was that I might have flown to
Passau to witness it! I was delighted by the production.
We turned Blanche from a Yiddish speaking character, to a Polish figure,
he explained, in part because we had a Polish actor playing the part.
Coincidence, again, I responded: I originally wrote the part for a Polish actor
I had seen in one of Mac Wellman’s plays; she was out of the country, however,
during the July 1994 production of that play in New York at the Vineyard
Theatre near Union Square.
And who was that visiting American man and his wife from St. Petersburg?
His grandfather, who was overjoyed that I had stumbled upon his blog and that
he’d been able to be the conduit between author and director!
Los Angeles, November 15, 2007
Reprinted from Green Integer Blog (February 2008).
