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 as commonly as any other life skill that one might teach a child.
In my play, “Camino” there are talking birds. Really, 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 camera “sees.” The intention here again is empathy – to have the audience literally “see” what it’s like to “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 the war and brutally hangs 12 of his female slaves 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 my current home, and fired 52 shots from 2 semi-automatic pistols before committing suicide. George’s status as an incel was often cited as a rationalization for his mass femicide. His hatred and 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 an 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” based on the legend of steel driver 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, as self righteous as it sounds, 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 know if stories or songs 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. These first-hand accounts were gathered from migrants and friends of mine who had experienced horrific trauma within the then still evolving for-profit, private system of U.S. immigrant detention centers. “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 to FaceTime, the rest, especially the cruelty portrayed within our immigrant detention centers, was tragically very relevant. “Helen at the Gym (Again)” has a message about misogyny and the repeating violence against women that has been normalized within our society for thousands of years. (The word AGAIN is even in the title.)
The failure within Mennonite churches across the United States today to stand unquestionably 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 the actions of Jesus. (Although, systems of patriarchal oppression are 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 attend a Mennonite church ?” My Mennonite-ness was something that I certainly did not advertise for most of my artistic career. Perhaps you could say I even hid from my Mennonite past, especially in my early artist days as a first-generation college student at the (chokingly) competitive Carnegie Mellon School of Drama.
It has really only been in my 40’s, after my play “The President’s Pants,” about a Mennonite woman being haunted by the ghost of President Buchanan was an O’Neil Semi-Finalist, that I came to embrace my Mennonite heritage as having undeniable resonance in my artistic voice. (Maybe even the melody for 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 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 about my conservative Mennonite relatives not thinking I am “Mennonite enough,” to be included in this work, because of my life choices and the political messaging in my plays. (And lots of fuck 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. For me it’s an ongoing “camino,” (or journey in English) 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, and I suppose I will just keep plodding along as an artist, one with a distinctively rural Mennonite worth ethic, an inherited connection to the earth and an unrelenting eye for symbolism in stories.
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 my courage to “push play” (again.)
Anthology: ACTING UP volumes 1-6 published by Gelassenheit publishers.
