Loss, Healing, and Interspecies Communication
I wrote Blue Valiant for older actors, friends and frequent collaborators, Kathleen Chalfant and George Bartenieff. There is a dearth of meaningful roles for older women (less so for men, of course) and this play is meant, in part, to give a mature woman every acting challenge she might want. In another way, the play is meant to show that older people are just like the rest of humanity, brave, hardheaded, foolish, compassionate, except, perhaps, age has endowed them with greater powers of reflection.
I also wrote this play for a horse. But how does a horse become a character on stage. I never wanted a puppet, not like War Horse, not like Equus; I was clear on that from the start. A puppet-horse would dull the audience imagination; a puppet-horse becomes about the mechanics of the puppet, not the character of the horse, and my horse has a complex story he struggles to tell against the obstacle of not speaking a human language. We mulled this for a year or more while doing other work, then Arthur Rosen, who was resident composer at Theater Three Collaborative, realized he could play our horse on piano. I had already found Ellen Lynch and her emotional horse photographs. Together, the piano, Arthur’s chords galloping in the field, and out-sized, myth-like projections, plus what the characters say about him, create the complex character of Blue.
Hannah Doyle, idly driving around Long Island of a summer weekend, is struck by the sight of a magnificent blue roan running free in a pasture outside a barn. She stops her car and gets out. Whereupon the horse charges the fence. She gets back into her car to find the owner. “No one owns that horse, Mrs.,” says the wily stable owner, Sam Brown. She buys the horse from him.
Hannah’s struggle to tame Blue brings her to confront her own losses and to come to terms with her own guilt. Sam acts as has her human confidante and guide. An old, wizened horseman he is intuitively wise in the ways of animals and people, and, also, recently widowed. Two bereaved and lonely old people, from different classes and backgrounds, then, a young girl who is an illegal immigrant, brutally separated from her father at the border, bond over their attraction to a wounded horse.
This is how a play heals, by embedding a healing structure inside. First, sight of an other: “a beautiful horse, running free in that pasture over there.” Speaking of the horse, Sam tells Hannah: “Grief. I says to myself like I says to myself when I look at you.” It shocks, unsettles, yet opens her that someone sees. The horse and Hannah were suffering alone. No more, once she sees the horse and Sam sees her. High on painkillers in the hospital, she relives her daughter’s opioid addiction and death. Then, she researches the story of the horse and discovers his sorrow and dignity. Like Hannah, Blue has blamed himself. Now, she can talk to him. “Listening,” she says as the horse calms, “is just the beginning.” Finally, the arrival of the immigrant girl, who takes up residence overnight in the horse’s stall. Maya Zelaya revives in Hannah her wounded maternal self. In the play’s last moment, they are all together, an odd new family from different places and species, alive – again – to chance and feeling.