Figures That Inspire:
Malcolm Tulip
Malcolm Tulip embodied a sense of fight, had a nose for daring, and had no interest whatsoever in the service of culture, mysticism or respectability. He seemed to have leapt from a turnip cart in Southern France in 1517, timeless, tireless, elegant, grotesque. His stage was a weapon that thwacked power at the ankles, and it was beer for the broken. He invited the trampled to laugh at their own wounds, to laugh at the edifices of tyranny, to laugh at death, to laugh at fear, and at the last to shed that fear. In 1986 Tulip toured with an Anglo-Gaelic company through Soviet Ukraine. In April, they performed in the North of that country a satire of Stalinist despotism, thinly veiled as a parody of Hitler’s Germany to placate the censors. During performances, the nearby Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant exploded and burned. The government granted immediate dispensation for Westerners to evacuate. Tulip’s company chose unanimously to remain and continue performances until orders for a general evacuation went through. Malcolm was my director when I was sixteen and he told me that story then. I decided to be a stage-director at that time.
I spent long stretches with my 90-year-old grandmother in her nursing home at the close of her life. At the time I was reading Caryl Churchill’s Cloud 9. My grandmother was in a perpetually good mood, mostly alone, in a place that to me seemed dismal. She reminded me at times of Betty near the close of the play, and in my imagination, she had lived in cheer and torment through all the psycho-sexual conflagrations of the Victorian epoch. I’ve always felt that the genius and the paradox of Churchill’s play is that her 2nd Act, set in hip, modern, sexually-liberated London feels infinitely more repressed and painful than the objectively oppressive, racist, male-supremacist world of the empire. Beneath her wicked hilarity Churchill continues to demonstrate that forging bonds of egalitarian love requires more than smashing the taboos and hang-ups of our ancestors. Empire is a bad narcotic that we must wake up from (It is intoxicating precisely because it binds us together for a great ideal). But our struggle does not end there, it must be renewed every day in the imperative to truly see and listen to one another, to understand each other as women and men, gay or straight or queer. Grappling with this present reality, our cast arrived again and again at the conclusion that true freedom can be more challenging than subjugation, and that a deep loneliness may lie at the heart of liberation.
Working for the city of Buffalo this past Summer, I directed and devised with my partner, Luisa Muhr and Stonehorse Lone Goeman a new musical, The Wedding of the Waters, which tells the story of the completion of the Erie Canal. Stonehorse, a warrior and a storyteller, acted as a spokesman for his people, The Seneca, of the past and the present, playing his ancestor, Red Jacket, a staunch opponent of white Christian conquest and “progress.” Together we shaped a narrative that moves towards reconciliation and hope in Buffalo today while recognizing the immensity of the theft and violence inflicted against the tribes of Western New York. Stonehorse is one of the most remarkable men I have met in my lifetime, and he has taught me how the telling of a real story is an action, a negotiation and a responsibility with a weight one must not shirk.
Malcolm at 16, My Grandmother at 20, Stonehorse at 30. These are three spirits, three key figures who have inspired and driven me to work for and in the theatre.