In my play, “Camino” there are talking birds. But first, do you remember Aesop’s Fables? Like the Tortoise and the Hare? The Ant and the Grasshopper? As I child I was captivated by a book I had of these stories credited to Aesop, an ancient Greek storyteller who lived around the 6th century BC. Growing up in a very religious rural Mennonite home, we read and quoted the Bible together regularly, and so the search for moral meaning within ancient stories interpreted through metaphor and theme became second nature to me. It was a tool that was sharpened, utilized and normalized in my home.
So the talking birds, they are just migrants traveling to survive a world and environment changing faster than their ability to adapt. I have witnessed that people are more able to empathize with animals and even inanimate objects, like puppets, more readily than with each other – especially if political parties have tried to block our ability to empathize toward certain groups of people. I utilize these personifications as metaphoric devices for empathy in “Camino,” as the character of Big Daddy sacrifices himself to save his family, and Paul Bird must then lead the flock home. (Hello there, Biblical references in the names and the plot…)
In fact the main character in the play is a small bird named Camino, who we never actually see. He is represented as a kind of “puppet” with a live feed camera view that is projected onstage, so that the audience only “sees” what the Camino “sees.” The intention here again is empathy – to have the audience literally “see” through the eyes of a frightened migrant trapped away from family within a detention center jail.
The ancient and everyday coexisted commonly in my mind as a child. I’d go to a school friend’s home and be astounded by MTV music videos, and then go to Wednesday evening church services where the 2000 year old parables of Christ would be told through music and story. Much of my artistic work still layers the ancient and modern almost like a collage artist to layer on double images of metaphor and meaning.
This is evident in my play “Helen at the Gym (Again)” where the script is inspired from events in books 4 and 22 of the Odyssey when Odysseus returns home from war and orders 12 of his 50 female slaves to be hanged for sleeping with men that were not him. “Helen at the Gym (Again)” is also composed of direct excerpts from the online blog of George Sodini, a mass murderer who on August 4, 2009 walked into an LA Fitness gym less than a mile from current home, and fired fifty-two shots from two semi-automatic pistols before committing suicide. George’s status as an incel was often cited as a rationalization for his mass femicide.
His loathing for women who slept with men other than him was documented with a visceral hatred that is still worshiped in the world of online incel groups. I wanted the audience to hear how the language from George’s blog translated so closely to those of an epic romantic hero, and how the justification for misogyny and violence continues in our society’s ethos. My purpose here, clearly, is not to give audience to a horrific mass murderer, but rather to this line of thinking, which has traveled thousands of years and pervades our societal rationale even now.
Throughout the entire 10 minute play of “Helen at the Gym (Again)” there is music and movement (those MTV music videos at the friend’s house were so stunning) as the female chorus moves through a synchronized aerobics dance class, and the main character, Helen must run on the a treadmill the entire performance. It is a very physically demanding piece for actors.
Many of my plays utilize the very Mennonite quality of “hard work” and physical labor as a means to give the actors and characters meaning and sometimes even higher morality. Songs like the hymn, “Work, for the Night Is Coming” and the children’s Sunday School song of “When We All Work Together (How Happy We We’ll Be)” were favorites in my home and community. (You can vividly see the attributes of “hard work” and collaged texts in my play “JH: Mechanics of a Legend,” inspired by the legend of John Henry, and primary texts from the reconstruction era.)
The reverence for “hard work” in Mennonite culture is also often connected to the land. There is a deep admiration within Mennonite understandings for how the earth’s environment shapes daily life in a very practical way. (Hello generational farming.) This inherent awareness of the significance of the earth’s geography and environment is a core element to “Camino,” as the migratory birds must navigate an unrecognizable landscape full of cell towers, bulldozed mountains, and polluted waters. (The complicated theme of generational connections to the earth is also at the heart of my developing play “Early Girl” set in a Mennonite vegetable garden.)
Finally, it must be said that both “Camino” and “Helen at the Gym (Again)” have indisputable messages about social justice and human morality. Girls could not be pastors or leaders within my Mennonite church, but as a child I had a recurring dream about being a missionary. The dream was often harrowing, and ended with me holding up a tape player and playing a song or a story that might somehow stop a violent mob from attacking. As terrifying as this recurring dream was, I knew in the dream that I must “push play” on the tape player. It was my calling, and I had to do something. Today I believe these plays aim to do that – push play even when I’m scared to death that the mob will attack me next. I don’t really know if stories or plays change people’s minds. (They certainly do not stop violent mobs, sadly.)
“Camino” was written over the course of 4 years, and was inspired from over 12 hours of interview footage. I gathered these first-hand accounts from migrants and friends of mine who had experienced horrific trauma within the then still evolving privatization of U.S. immigrant detention centers. The making of “Camino” was written about in several news agencies in Pittsburgh, one of which, written by Justin Hopper for the Pittsburgh City Paper, won a first-place Golden Quill Award from the Press Club of Western Pennsylvania in 2009.
After years of development, “Camino” had its professional world premiere in 2011. Today, I wish this play was not so pertinent. When I wrote “Camino” 15 years ago, it was set in “an imagined dystopian near future,” and today that future is gut wrenchingly right now. Shockingly the only update I made to this play, since its premiere, was to change Skype calls to FaceTime calls, the rest, especially the cruelty portrayed within our immigration jails, was tragically very relevant.
“Helen at the Gym (Again)” has a message about the repeating violence and misogyny within our society for thousands of years. (The word AGAIN is even in the title.) This has also been one of my most “successful plays” in some ways. And earlier version of this play entitled, “Helen at the Gym” was a winner in the 2018 Red Bull 8th Annual Short New Play Festival, and was read at the Lucille Lortel Theatre, New York, NY with an all star cast. This early version is also published with Steele Spring Stage Rights along side works by Tina Howe, Arthur Kopit, Dael Orlandersmith, and Doug Wright.
The revised version with “(Again) in the title included in this publication, was also a winner of the New Play Development Workshop with the Association of Theatre in Higher Education and presented in a staged reading at the national ATHE conference in Austin. Despite my satisfaction with this play’s success, as a woman artist, it’s difficult and painful to return to this work – again and again. Questions around the trauma that women artists (or any artists depending on the subject matter) must confront is probed in my play “Run Wild,” a meta-theatrical adventure modeled after the Ancient Greek trilogies. In “Run Wild” we witness a cast of local actresses backstage, as they move through the grueling emotional and physical demands required of them to perform 3 short plays inspired by feminist perspectives on current events, “Helen at the Gym (Again)” being one of the plays.
The failure within Mennonite churches across the United States today to stand undeniably for the humane treatment and rights of immigrants in this country is so deeply hypocritical to the teachings of Christ. The church’s entrenchment with patriarchal dominant systems and norms is so very injurious, and I believe does not align with Christ’s message for humanity. (Although, systems of patriarchal oppression are also undeniably Biblical. Thanks, Old Testament and Apostle Paul.)
This all leads to the question of, “How Mennonite am I today? Am I even Mennonite enough for my work to be included in this Anthology as I no longer even attend a Mennonite church ?” My Mennonite-ness was something that I certainly did not advertise for most of my artistic career. You could even argue that I hid from my Mennonite past, especially in my early artist days as a first-generation college student at the (almost suffocatingly) competitive Carnegie Mellon School of Drama.
It has really only been in my 40’s, after my play “The President’s Pants (and Buchanan’s Peace)” about a Mennonite woman being haunted by the ghost of President Buchanan was an O’Neill Semi-Finalist, that I came to embrace my Mennonite heritage as having undeniable resonance in my artistic voice. (Maybe even the melody of the 4 part harmony. Mennonite hymn sing power!) People who know my history are always asking me, “How did you turn out so different from the rest of your family?”
Recently, I took an Ancestry.com DNA test, and I was excited to discover what secrets might be unlocked as to who I “really” was. Was someone naughty? (Was I really part Cherokee as every white American secretly dreams? Oh, please oh please!) And then the DNA came back nearly 100% German and Pennsylvania Dutch, with names and gravestones in Lancaster from the 1700’s suddenly populating my inbox, along with ship names full of religious refugees from the late 1600’s headed to the “New Land” in hopes of escaping the violent horrors of the Catholic Church as detailed in the classic 1500 page Mennonite book, Martyrs Mirror.
It was all there in “plain view,” (Get it plain? Mennonite jokes even!) how the beating heart of my work is intrinsically connected to the bloodline of my Mennonite heritage. And yet even as I type this I worry that my conservative Mennonite relatives will think I am “Mennonite enough,” to be included in this anthology, because of my life choices and the political messaging in my plays. (And lots of “bad” words!) I also worry that I’m not Mennonite enough for the liberal Mennonites who went to Mennonite colleges, and can recite Mennonite history and pacifist doctrines.
So here I am continuing to reckon with my Mennonite-ness in relation to my artist-ness – it’s an ongoing “camino” (or journey in English) for me that like Helen in my play, I return to grapple with again and again in my work. However, as Aesop teaches us, it’s better to be the tortoise than the hare. (In fact “The Tortoise and the Hare” was the first play I can remember experiencing as a child. At an outdoor performance on a local college campus, I left the audience area to run up to the Tortoise saying, “Run, run! The Hare is right behind you!” I suppose I have always felt an urgency to use my voice, and to be a participant in the action, and so I will just keep plowing ahead with with the work ethic of a Mennonite farmer, even if my grandfather said that theatre was “the devil’s playhouse.”
And dare I say, that I am very proud (a very UN-Mennonite thing! To be prideful!) to have my work appear in this first ever collection of North American Mennonite plays – even as my DNA is crowded with folks who were likely instrumental in banning theatre in Pennsylvania in 1750, my heart remains undoubtedly full of their stories, as I muster the courage to “push play” (again.)
Anthology: ACTING UP volumes 1-6 published by Gelassenheit publishers.
