My Plays

For some of my plays I have almost no script at all. In my adaptation of Pierre we did not change a word of the book but I do not have any of the staging. Asi es la Vida was written in Spanish and I have no script for it. I used language books and repeated common phrases in both English and Spanish. I was influenced by Eugene Ionesco. Also, I used other language books. This play has the kind of surreal sprit embodied by language books. I found a book that taught Russians how to speak English. These language books have sentences for you to practice saying, things like, “Where is the bathroom?” “What time is it, please?” One of the sentences they had Russian speakers learn to say in English, “My grandmother ran away with a cowboy.” This line was in the play, in Russian. Asi and Pierrie were one act children’s plays which the early Palace Theater toured around the twin cities area. Asi was paired with a one act play by Cervantes and the schools booked us because of that. We were going to produce just the Cervantes play and only added Asi because the day before rehearsals on the Cervantes play began the director checked himself into rehab. I put Asi together on the fly. I had a wonderful time and I like the play. I just wish I had a script. We created Asi rehearsing in the basement of what is now The Mixed Blood Theater.  

When I began writing plays, I did not own a computer or a typewriter. I’m not even sure what computer technology was like in those days. So, for my scripts and especially my early plays there are no organized typed out scripts. I would write by hand, usually pen, usually in notebooks but I also used scraps of paper, single sheets of paper, just whatever was handy. I would read the scene to the actors and they would write it down.  Just as I had a wide variation of notebooks and pieces of paper for my script the actors all had their own version of how they kept their script. Some wrote only their cue line and their lines; some wrote the whole scene but if they had no lines in the scene, they did not write it down. A couple wrote down everything. The actors probably had more complete versions of the scrip than I did because we would change the lines in rehearsals and some of the actors would, of course, write the changes into whatever they had for a script and, for any number of reasons, I wouldn’t bother making the change in my script. In many cases the lines I have for scenes are not the way the lines were spoken onstage.

I remember seeing this a movie; a writer goes to a reunion with all the different characters he has created. At least, that’s how I remember the movie. I love the idea of all of the characters from my plays in one room. I should say right from the start there would be a number of dead people in a room full of the characters in my plays. I can’t possibly name every character in every one of my plays but there are characters I know would be at my reunion party. My family. My mother and father and my two older brothers. My grandmother and grandfather on both sides of the family. My wife, Jessica. A long-distance truck driver fighting to stay awake and The Devil from an all-night filling station in the Idaho panhandle. Two men from a bar in Mexico, Orlando and Blackie, who call themselves, “The Tigers of Fantasy. The Magicians of the Illusions of Time!” A traveling tattoo artist named, Sailor, who can take you on “Celestial Navigations.” I would be happy to see Bob. Bob is in five of my plays. Eddie is in two of my plays with Bob. Eddie is Bob’s best friend growing up in south Texas. Eddie grew up to be a major league pot smuggler and died of a cocaine overdose, dying in the street in front of the house where he grew up. Doctor Jack Charles, the man with two first names will be there with his wife who he kills over and over but she always comes smilingly back to life. Doctor Blank who may or may not have been a doctor in a German concentration camp.

The family Jessica and I lived with in Leon, Nicaragua, Luis, his wife and three daughters. The two young soldiers in Nicaragua who had recently brought a body back from the front in the war against the CONTRAS. Abe the 76-year old American who, when he was a young man, was a member of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade and who liked me because I knew what the Abraham Lincoln Brigade was. The three young men from a theater group in Nicaragua who we traveled with to pick up some “…theater equipment.” It was a bag of grenades and a bag of banana clips for their AK-47.

All the actors in the theater group in Honduras Jessica and I lived and traveled with. Theatro La Fragua. One guy told a great story: When he first started working for the theater, about four years ago, his entire extended family rode him very hard about working in a theater. His family said the theater was full of homosexuals and in Honduras that was very bad. Other relatives suggested he worked in the theater because he was homosexual. They ridiculed him and treated him with no respect. Everyone in the family thought working in the theater was a disgrace to their family. But, he said, over the last few years all the guys that were putting him down have all lost their jobs. In fact, he said, he had become the main money man for the entire family. Now, he said everyone in his family tells him it is great he works in the theater and how smart he was to have gone into theater. Now they all treat him respect. But. The actors told stories of being stopped on the street by the police and Army and beaten up because they worked in the theater. These guys stories fundamentally changed my feeling about how artist, and in my case, someone who works in the theater, are treated in North America. I decided I would rather have the kind of ruthless apathy of the USA than the actuality of being stopped at random on the street and given a through beating. On our first time to Brazil, Miguel was our guide and friend on Jessica and my trip up the Rio Negro. Miguel who swore he learned how to speak English by watching Beatles movies. And, Hymundo, the pilot of our little boat, his younger brother Ed who ran the boat engine and their 14-year old cousin, Junior who looks like a model for a travel poster. From our second trip to Brazil, Fillipi and his brother Goldenzio of the Kachinaua people who live in the Amazon rainforest of Brazil. Every member of the tribe, all 27 of them, who live in the village of Xachabina. Even the young couple who refused to look at us. They ate with their backs to us.

Fidel Castro would only be at the party for a few minutes but he is there standing with his arm around my father’s shoulder and they are having a good laugh. There is Zach. He’s about 70 years old but in great shape. He is an Mdewaketan elder from Prairie Island who lives just a few miles up the river from where I live in Red Wing, MN. The family I lived with in Belfast, Northern Ireland. J.J. and his brother who spent five years in prison without ever being charged with a crime. Another brother’s wife, Maggie, who also spent five years in prison but she had been caught smuggling a bomb to the Belfast airport. Tim O’Brien and all the members of the 3rd platoon will be there. Atina Diffley and her husband, Martin. KOCH Industries Inc. was planning on putting a pipeline across their organic farm and Atina led the court fight to stop them. It was, “Soil vs Oil.” An interesting and diverse group of people. It makes me smile to think of them all in the same room speaking English, Spanish, Portuguese, Kachinaua, Medwaketan, Belfast Northern Irish and a south Texas drawl.