Author’s Note
Like all futurist literature, Other Than We is a metaphor – to be experienced literally, of course, as a high stakes adventure (will they, won’t they, what will be the cost), but to lodge in the mind’s heart as a fable from which some personal truth may be extracted which has meaning to each self, alone. We needn’t agree on meaning. The writer is the last to suggest what something means. She has meant to create a world that sucks one in, a web of event that like any web is also a labyrinth and somewhat dangerous. She has, of course, intended – but, again, it hardly matters what she has intended – and in any case, the theater is a collective effort. Each character is a collaboration between a unique actor and the words on the page. The world lives, too, in the designers’ eyes. By now, the playwright is mainly out of the picture. The director (in this case, me) is trying to expedite and clarify the roads taken, driving the action deeper. (And this play has drive, expedience; the stakes could hardly be higher.) Nevertheless, the author had an intention she stands by – even if she won’t say, cannot say, exactly what it was – because the intention, too, is taken up by forces inside her, outside her control. After the initial impulse and effortful investigation, once the words start speaking in her head, she attends; she does not lead.
Still and all, I wanted to go beyond my previous play, Extreme Whether, a family drama of climate scientists under attack by corporate deniers, whose epilogue poses the choice before us, a fragile green world (a Green New Deal, I can say), or a catastrophic climate in which all life is precarious at best. The new play is set in a future where humans continued on as we do now, going about our business, using things up, seldom conscious – even the most conscious among us – of the consequences of our actions because we have always lived like this. (I am speaking of the privileged, the “developed” nations, the culprits.) The result has been climate collapse, and our toxic waste products, the nuclear radiation in our bombs, the poisons in our fuel have polluted the world. It is not just temperature rise, but all climate systems run amuck, that destroys lives. Of course, the privileged have taken shelter in The Dome, a hermetically sealed place. Those who disobey, or are no longer of use, are exiled. The Dome, of course, is highly surveilled and its shadowy rulers are trying ultimately to monitor and control every thought. Food is scarce and the solution ghoulish. “Women are wearing out,” the play’s opening line, gives insight into the condition of the birthers.
There is resistance, of course, a shadowy, barely trustworthy underground. And there are rebels, those who in every tragic situation risk their lives for a vision they cherish in which human life, and all life, will at last be valued. The play is the story of four of them embarked on a foolhardy mission that may spell their doom but which might yet yield a new, fragile start to the project of conscious life.
Many people’s words and thoughts influenced this work. Dalia Basiouny, Naomi Wallace, and Kathleen Chalfant were early readers. Christen Clifford, Caitlin Cassidy, Clea Straus Rivera, and Paul Pryce are actors who helped develop the script. Among the writers I do not know but whose books I devoured, I acknowledge the anthropologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, fiction writers Ursula LeGuin, Octavia Butler, and James Baldwin (for his humanism), plus the many scientists, climate activists, and nature writers whose works document often in elegant, heartwrenching prose our climate crisis.
Every play feels like the last child I will ever have, and like each child is troublesome and remarkable in its own way. Other Than We was five years from conception to birth (a long time to carry a vision) and during that time, the climate crisis continued to worsen while policy remained nonexistent. Homo sapiens need a change of consciousness. Should we destroy ourselves, the world will, of course, rebound. The earth has time. But we, with our feckless cruelty, will have annihilated all that is precious we have made: idea and poetry, art and imagination, our ability to sing of and interpret world. The sorrow of this looming loss beyond comprehension underlies and drives Other Than We. Yet, this is a drama of renewal, the story of the struggle to rebirth ourselves as wiser and more compassionate.
The play had just eight performances at La MaMa, not enough time for a new, edgy, multi-layered work to be fully understood much less welcomed to the world, not enough for actors to settle into their complex roles. Yet, both happened. The performances started strong, and, for the most part, deepened night by night. Many in the audience “got” a whole lot. You can tell when you sit at the back as I do if the audience is leaning forward, straining, attentive; you can sense them being struck by lines and moments and hear in their applause if they really cared. The hipper the audience the better the performance. Theater is an exchange of energies and a profound coming together. For me, the greatest pleasure, as always, was working with the Theater Three Collaborative team as our shared visions were realized in what, to me, is the very friendly theater space of La MaMa’s Downstairs. It’s a bare brick- walled room in a basement with a light grid, but the space creates a direct audience-actor relationship that works beautifully for poetic plays.
I wrote this play knowing the many special talents of the TTC team – the designers and the lead actor with whom I have worked for decades. We looked long and hard to cast the other actors, with the help of casting director Stuart Howard. We took and gave advice to one another; we admired and critiqued. Everyone cared. We worked with great financial and time restraints; at the end, I joked that we brought in a $300,000 production for $30,000. No one got paid what they deserved. Donald Eastman’s set used found materials; his ideas about simplicity and his suggestion to use scaffolding were crucial to my understanding of how to stage this play. Tony Giovannetti and’s lights as always were more stunning than I could imagine, and Arthur Rosen’s music, again, as always, was funk-beautiful. Beth Graczyk choreographed a birth full of the agony, terror, effort, and beauty of a real birth. As always, Sally Ann Parsons’ costume shop, Parsons-Meares, donated labor and goods, while she and Carisa Kelly created pregnant bellies, fantastical newbies to be nursed and born on stage, and the owl to wow.
How do you act the metamorphosis of wise man into bird of wisdom? Perhaps, you have to be George Bartenieff to do so, with his unique blend of physical and emotional dexterity, so that watching him act is akin to seeing the innermost self made manifest. He was a man trembling on the brink of supernatural vision – then, all of a sudden, with spread wings, an owl hooting. Lisa Birnbaum, Emily Fury Daly, Tommie J. Moore, and, of course, George, worked together with the most generosity, caring, commitment, and bravery of any cast I’ve ever had. In the end, I was humbled and grateful. For the past thirty-three years, Beatriz Schiller’s extraordinary photographs have remained the only record of the live performance. As always, she caught the moment within each moment when actors peak. It takes a village to create a play. And an audience to receive one.
I was raised in a theater world where the word “transformation” was taken literally and intended to be given form. Joseph Chaikin’s Open Theater and Judith Malina and Julian Beck’s Living Theatre were my training grounds. Also, as a young woman, I met Noam Chomsky when I interviewed him for a CBS Camera Three arts program on the lawn at M.I.T. His work continues to influence me, and we have remained in touch over the years. I spent many hours with two of his recent books on linguistics, Why Only Us and What Kind of Creatures Are We. The title of this last book becomes an anxious question in the final transformative scene of this play. I was very lucky, too, in my friendship with the cognitive psychologist and ecofeminist Dorothy Dinnerstein, author of the groundbreaking The Mermaid and the Minotaur, with whom I shared hours of intense conversation, often while side stroking together in Long Island’s sound, about her favorite question, “why we cannot see what we must see in order to survive.” Dorothy posited the need for a thinking-heart, a mind that could feel-think, and if there is one dominant idea in this play, that is it.