BCN Diary

The transforming power of art

A friend of mine Alice Smith worked for years as a stage manager and acting coach at the American Conservatory Theatre in San Francisco. In 1989 she volunteered to manage a production in San Quentin prison of Waiting for Godot, “the ultimate existential tragedy”. The cast and crew were all inmates, African American lifers, who brought startling authenticity to the piece. Samuel Beckett said, “I saw the roots of my play!”

Of course the cruel context intensified the significance of waiting. And the actors’ background transformed the cadence and silence of the play. The production has been described as intensely vital, with Beckett’s wordplay separating the actor inmates from the void. 

In a chapter of Directing Beckett, Lois Oppenheimer interviews the Swedish director of that production, Jan Jönson, who describes some of the process of creating the show. For set pieces he used a stone from the prison wall and a dead tree from the prison garden that looked like a Giacometti figure.

At one point he describes opening night in the prison gym, the audience composed of prison officials, family and friends, surrounded by armed guards:

“I remember opening night at San Quentin when, at the end of the play Twin and Happy [the actors playing Vladimir and Estragon] were standing before that tree. Happy asks Twin, ‘Why don’t we hang ourselves?’ And Twin replies, ‘With what?’ Happy says, ‘You haven’t got a piece of rope?’ He is standing there asking his best friend if they should hang themselves. I told them to talk to each other as though they were standing on the street in Watts. Then Happy says to his best friend, ‘And if he comes? ’What he is saying is, ‘What shall we do if the Department of Corrections opens the gates and we’re saved?’ So he faces the director of the Department of Corrections, and he smiles and says, ‘Then we are saved.’ That was my present to Sam Beckett. I gave him that. The production was for him and for us and the audience. And then I walked up onstage and gave each of the actors one red rose.

"After the performance, I was cleaning up, and the guards came and put the men up against the wall and made them strip. I saw these guys standing there totally naked, and it was a shock. I started to scream, ‘What are you doing?’

"I saw this squad come with plastic gloves and start looking all over their bodies for drugs. And on top of each of the men’s clothes was the red rose. Spoon was standing there, and when the guy came up behind him he said, ‘You have my body, but not my soul.’"

Now, my friend Alice writes that because California has been filling its prisons with African American and Latino youth at an alarming rate, some of the longtime lifers with good behavioral records got downgraded. All the men she worked with have been released in the last few years. And they reunited with Jan Jönson to stage Waiting in freedom. Last year they did a presentation of the work in LA: two performances at the Actors Studio and one at a gym in Watts (the community two of the men come from).

Alice reports: “I cannot tell you how amazing and inspiring the weekend was. First Jan talked about the work we all did, then he introduced the guys and they talked about their lives - what put them inside and how they began to transform their lives through the power of Beckett’s play. They recognized themselves in the text. Amazing - one of the guys from Watts had only third grade reading skills. He learned to read by doing the play and became interested in educating himself after that experience - he became fascinated with the power of language. All were changed by the power and humanity of Beckett! Never underestimate the transformative power of art.”

Read more in Spoon Jackson’s book By Heart: Poetry, Prison, and Two Lives

And Directing Beckett by Lois Oppenheimer 

Choose your attitude

I visited a group of prisoners in Barcelona’s Modelo prison. An ex-student, is a social worker there and invited me to a session with his weekly group of 15 inmates, crammed into a small space, 100-degree heat, with greasy old fans clanging… Later he gave me a tour around the prison: the print shop where they produce official documents for the Catalan government, a machine shop where they make bags for happy shoppers, and the sweaty kitchen. The sour smells, intense heat, and constant tension, brought back lots of prison visit memories.

I told the group I wasn’t a psychologist, therapist, or social worker, but that I helped train trainers, or take care of people who take care of people. “From SF, you know Alcatraz, San Quentin…” Told them I’d visited members of my own family in prisons all over California with Spanish sounding names: Soledad, Chino, Vacaville. I told them stories about Jarvis Masters finding freedom on death row and Viktor Frankl choosing his attitude in concentration camps... and took them through a couple relevant exercises. I coached them to breathe deeply, with their hands placed on their diaphragms, to loosen their jaws and blow all the air out of their lungs, counting the in-breath then exhaling twice as long- a good way to activate the parasympathetic nervous system, to calm down. I invited them to close their eyes and find any sign of wellbeing, and then connect to a positive memory and relive it as fully as possible…

The biggest toughest-looking con, boasting tattoos, was the first to show tears, of sadness then of joy. And the young guy with innocent eyes turned out to be the man in the news a few months ago who killed his sister and brother-in-law and left their dismembered bodies in the freezer…. A weird mix of young Peruvian gangbangers and white collar criminals in their 60’s.

One of the young inmates claimed he couldn’t remember even one positive experience from his past. So I asked him to act as if he could and what that experience would be like. He began to open up. Then I reminded him of the time he might have enjoyed a cold shower or a tasty sandwich or laughed at a friend’s antics…. His face relaxed...

Under Construction

This weekend half our town (Lavern pop. 420) crammed into the local community hall, where the amateur theatre group “En Obras” (Under Construction) adeptly represented recently uncovered scenes from local history. The actors, dressed in the uniforms of Republican Spanish Civil War soldiers and the plain clothes of 30’s campesinos, on a small proscenium stage framed by familiar red velvet curtains, and with minimum props and scenery: a canon, sandbags, old rifles... created a tableau of living postcards in ochre and sepia of the tragedy of one village family- reviving personal, local, and historical memory.

It all started when a teenage boy named Pol found a packet of old letters written between his grandfather Josep (our deceased neighbor) and Josep’s older brother Pere, a soldier who is retreating through the Pyrenees in 1938-39… The letters come from different towns as he moves toward the French border. The dramatized reading unfolds with Pere depicting the horrors and boredom of the war, and Josep describing the dire life on the farm and the angst of waiting to be called up for “la Quinta del Biberón”, the drafting of 16 year olds, the Republic’s desperate attempt to stave off the fascist onslaught by sacrificing its youth. Toward the end of the war the letters from Pere stop coming; he just vanishes. His body was never found. Does it lie in some mass grave high in the mountains or did he cross to France to end up in a concentration camp? Pol has created an authentic drama from a firsthand account, with the encouragement of his parents and teachers and the help of talented townsfolk.

The piece is pure Brecht- he’d like the staging and the narrator upstage right, making comments to the audience in her husky voice. He'd have felt right at home among the eager crowd: families with kids of all ages; a few docile dogs; people chatting as the play is in progress or doting over babies – after the event he’d have gone to the bar to smoke his cigar. He’d extol the show: “So many untold stories!”

I remember another event in the same space, another example of community, memory, synergy… March 2008, Int’l Woman’s Day kicked off in Lavern with a presentation by a woman’s group called Las Adrianas from el Barrio de la Mina, formerly a Barcelona shanty-town founded in the 50s by gypsies and immigrants from Southern Spain. One of their projects involved recovering the history of their neighborhood by setting up workshops to create a large model of the original streets, houses, shacks, gardens, stores- using cardboard, papier-mâché and clay. Dozens of neighbors got involved in the design and construction of a huge replica, which now serves as a symbol and anchor for cooperation.

The group started in 2001 with 3 women going door-to-door and now boasts 70 members. Many of the women knew little of women’s herstory, so a sewing circle was set up to make dolls of famous women, while learning of their achievements. Each little effigy wears the typical dress of her epoch and serves as a puppet spokeswoman to explain her personal and political narrative.

Las Adrianas intervene in all aspects of community life, from problems with drug abuse, water quality, domestic violence, education, traffic control, tree planting, and multi-cultural conflicts. In one of the mediations, a clash between gypsy and “payo” communities was solved when each group was asked to write a story to explain its sense of identity to the other one. When the two groups were brought together and listened to each other’s stories, a new kind of understanding and acceptance ensued…

Their achievements bring to mind something I read recently about the difference between patriarchal and matriarchal societies. What stands out in matriarchal societies is not so much that women rule. Rather, what distinguishes societies where women have real power and parity is that the social order functions, the relationships are fully human: family bonds are strong, the community is more harmonious, and attention is placed on well-being.

Grape harvest

A pickup just passed below loaded with African farm workers huddled under hoods of standard issued army green windbreakers looking like medieval monks in the rain. The grape harvest is in full swing with tractors going to and fro on all the country roads. A few years ago someone sabotaged a vineyard near here sawing into the vines to form giant letters when seen from above. The aerial photograph of the graffiti appeared in a local newspaper; it read: CAÇIC, literally “political boss or mobster”- referring to the exploitation and low prices paid by world famous family owned Catalan wineries. Their vineyards are fat with grape juice to be fermented, distilled and bubbled up on supermarket shelves from Shanghai to Saskatoon. This morning in a local café I overheard local growers worried that none of their kids want to continue the tradition, and pissed-off about ruinous prices paid by monopolies. When their complaining turned to the “Banksters” and financial despotism in general, someone mentioned a Catalan nun and MD, Teresa Forcades, who’s cloistered at Montserrat but has taken no vows of silence. She’s calling for a refusal to pay the illegitimate toxic debt, proposes an indefinite general strike to return democracy to its roots, and denounces Goldman and Sachs as murderers for speculating with world food supplies.

Portrait of the Artist as an Old Man:

Just before moving to Lavern, I remember finding my 80 yr old father-in law Pere about to climb up onto the 3 storey high roof of his house, using an old wooden ladder he'd crafted with specially fitted slots that hooked over the metal railing of an upstairs balcony and that he’d propped up against the wall. “Hurry before my wife Carmen sees me. She’d have a fit.” I held the bottom of the ladder and he scooted up in his Chinese slippers whereby I handed him a tripod and his classic Leica with rare lens to capture a section of the valley panorama of green and yellow grapevines and the foothills of Montserrat beyond- for a section of an elongated montage he was creating. He crafted a huge panoramic picture of Lavern by sticking together dozens of shots taken from above the town. His son Betu then smoothed out the color and contrast in Photoshop. It was their last collaboration- between the artisan and the artist. They’d carefully faked the photo to look real, and so that each and every home is visible in the foreground, and the whole town is crowned by jagged Montserrat in the background; the enormous portrait hangs in the Lavern café.