SUSAN SMITH NASH

Speaking to Rochelle Owens is always a pleasure because she sheds insight on her work and philosophical underpinnings. She also explores the ideas that inform her poetry as well as her plays.

Welcome to an interview with Owens, where she reads from her new long poem, “Patterns of Animus,” and chats with Susan Nash about her work and interests now and in the past.

“Patterns of Animus” appears in her collection of the same name, which also contains a series of essays written about her earlier work.

Audio Recording of interview with Rochelle Owens over Patterns of Animus available here.

View source here.

GREGORY BOSSLER

Rochelle Owens has been a playwright, poet, translator, and video artist in the international avant-garde for over 35 years. She is author of four play collections and 16 books of poetry. A pioneer in the experimental Off-Off-Broadway movement, her play Futz was produced in 1967 by Ellen Stewart at La MaMa, directed by Tom O’Horgan, and filmed in 1969. Her plays have been presented and translated worldwide. Owens herself has translated Lilian Atlan’s novel Les passants (The Passersby). A recipient of five Obies and honors from the New York Drama Critics Circle, she has taught at Univ. of Calif San Diego and Univ. of Oklahoma and held residencies at Brown Univ. and Univ. of Southwestern Louisiana State. The editor moderated a conversation with Owens in May at La MaMa for its Coffeehouse Chronicles, an ongoing oral-history project, capturing for posterity the recollections of surviving pioneers of New York’s Off-Off Broadway theaters. The project was conceived and is directed by Chris Kapp under the guidance of Ellen Stewart and is videotaped for the La MaMa Archives. www.lamama.org.

Rochelle Owens: First, I’d like to thank Chris Kapp, for organizing this unique and important series and for drawing attention as well as providing a forum for many old and new friends of La MaMa. I’m grateful to Ralph Lewis for his inspired and wonderful staged reading of The Queen of Greece. I’m pleased that Gregory Bossler of the Dramatists Guild of America, the editor of The Dramatist, is here this afternoon at the Coffeehouse Chronicles.

I would also like to say something about Ellen Stewart and the La MaMa Experimental Theater. Ellen has been and continues to be an inspiration. Two generations of theater artists have succeeded in redefining real and invented borders of gender, identity, and human experience, much of this because of Ellen. Her concept of theater as an oasis to sustain, nurture, and promote a rich diversity of playwrights and directors on a global scale continues to be a viable alternative to the deadening priorities of the commercial theater. Ellen’s intelligence, creative power, generosity, and dedication are forces that flow as normally through her being as the sun, moon, and stars turn across our skies. All of us who know her have, in some way, been transformed by her. Thank you, Ellen.

What you just said about Ellen is also true about you and your work. From Futz, your first play at La Mama, you’ve addressed the boundaries of gender, sexuality, and power. First, though, I wonder how a refugee from Brooklyn like you found her way to La MaMa?

Your memory is great! That is a line from my play Chucky’s Hunch, in which the title character addresses his ex-wife as “a refugee from Brooklyn.” The play premiered at the Theater for the New City and was produced by Crystal Field and George Bartenieff, who had performed in a couple of my earlier plays, Beclch and Istanboul. Chucky’s Hunch had a highly successful Off-Broadway run at the Harold Clurman Theater and starred Kevin O’Connor, who won an Obie Award for his amazing performance.

When I was nineteen I left Brooklyn and lived and worked in Manhattan. I had been writing poetry since my teens and took a course at the New School, but I dropped it because the instructor demanded we memorize “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” I thought he was cynical and indifferent to his students’ interests. At the age of twenty I married a sculptor whose friends were mainly visual artists in the dominant abstract expressionist style. Their discussions about art were cerebral and focused on sophisticated techniques and painting as process, as in the work of Kline, Pollock and others. I was impressed by their commitment and began to believe that true creativity was supposed to offer surprise, discovery, and possibly even fulfillment.

In 1958, before the Vietnam War and during the trial of a killer named Caryl Chessman, I began writing my first play, Futz. I was working as a clerk in the accounting department of Sotheby-Parke Bernet, among whose customers were Greta Garbo, Ali Khan, and Katherine Hepburn. The first drafts of the play were typed on lot statements and sheets torn from the daily calendar. Between sales, during the slow periods, I worked secretly on my play. In 1965, Futz was given a workshop production at the Tyrone Guthrie Theater in Minnesota, which turned out to be very controversial. During that same year, the Judson Poets Theater in New York produced The String Game, directed by Larry Kornfeld and with music by the wonderful composer Al Carmines. When I think of that period, I see a stage set showing several doors with me rushing out of one marked “The Poetry Society,” where I had worked and been a member briefly but had left because of its stifling literary club atmosphere, and then finding myself mysteriously in front of other doors marked in bleeding red paint, LaMaMa E.T.C., Café Cino, St. Marks Poetry Project, The American Place Theater and Theater Genesis. The poetry scene was intensely active, a time of impressive nightly readings and dynamic little magazines. I had met Allen Ginsberg, who introduced me to LeRoi Jones, who later changed his name to Amiri Baraka. LeRoi and his wife Hettie were incredibly generous and welcomed poets, painters, activists, and wannabees to their apartment on a round-the-clock basis. It was a crazy but sweet time, and Jones published poems of mine in his important poetry magazine Yugen, which thrilled me because it was a significant alternative venue for innovative poetics of various kinds. At that time, in 1960, I met a young poet and scholar, George Economou, who became my husband two years later. He was one of the editors of the groundbreaking Trobar poetry magazine and press, which published my first book of poems in 1961.

Soon after that period, Julian Beck and Judith Malina of the Living Theater were planning a production of Futz. Judith, whose hostile phobia towards those who didn’t conform to her bohemian notion of appropriate life-style, ridiculed me—I was working in an office as a clerk—for dressing like a “suburban housewife” and once shouted at me, with more irony than ire, I hope, “Rochelle, why don’t you read your plays and find out what life is all about!” But the Living Theater ran into tax difficulties, and the Becks left the USA for Europe, leaving Futz in limbo. Then in 1966, my first full-length play Beclch premiered under the direction of Andre Gregory at The Theater of the Living Arts in Philadelphia, where it inspired divided critical reviews and church sermons. Ellen Stewart and Tom O’Horgan came to see the play and later she convinced me that LaMaMa should premiere Futz with Tom as its director. At our first meeting in the Village, we discussed the play, which had recently been published by Jerome Rothenberg in a limited edition, and I was terrifically impressed with how intently Tom listened to me. After the play’s success in New York, its European tour, and film production, I began to write other plays, nineteen over the years.

It struck me, after just watching The Queen of Greece, which was originally produced here at La MaMa in 1969, just how little has changed in the Middle East. Your plays have been called proto-feminist, but they almost seem proto-humanist, digging to the root of human experience, and the further you travel to that traditional ritualistic place, the more timeless the work seems. I think that’s why Queen of Greece can play today and not seem dated. Is that a purposeful exploration?

If that comes across, it’s because of my own concerns and the realization that conflict and cultural differences are all problematic and often without solution for those who want change. The fate of the individual, as well as that of the group, clan, tribe, or state, to which we belong is subject to the will of others. Crime becomes a convention, evil mundane, and our mythologies and symbols are transformed according to the collective delusion of the time—crisis and mayhem. Think of Darfur and the destruction of Tibetan Identity by China. I feel there is a dark, twisted inevitability in our destiny and we have to watch out.

You’ve said that you assumed your life would be a battle of sorts. I assume you were talking about personal battles – or were you talking about a battle between yourself about society?

As a young woman defining herself as a poet–my identity as a poet seemed almost sacred. The fifties were rigidly sexist, and I developed an androgynous notion of self, the ideal model being Joan of Arc, I suppose. From that notion sprung the idea of my life as a battle against cultural norms for a “correct self.” Presently, an old warhorse seems more appropriate as a metaphor for myself. An old warhorse has survived battles and still retains a bearing of some dignity. It’s a bit comical also, I suppose.

You’ve also said you have found the theater as a life-sustaining force.

I feel the theater and the other arts can be an education-in-progress for the soul. The arts are oceanic forces where the Imagination plays.

You’ve switched between poems and plays, which have a poetic element but they’re not poetic in the sense of Tennessee Williams. They’re more about images than language.

That’s a good point, but I’ve also written plays that employ rhythmic and sound properties of language as a means to reveal the psychology and emotions of the characters. After the success of The Karl Marx Play, which also toured Europe, I tried to write what I considered a commercial play with music. Galt McDermott, who had set the lyrics I had written for The Karl Marx Play to music, wanted to work with me again, so I wrote a musical play, OK Certaldo. It is a charming and delightful love story that I thought should have been produced. I thought it was a hundred times better than much of the stuff that is staged, commercially or otherwise, but nothing came of my sole attempt to please the general public. So be it. I don’t regret having written it, but then I’m not especially proud of it either.

What are you most proud of then?

I think I’m proud, if that’s the right word, of having a significant body of work, consisting of plays, poetry, translations, as well as some videos. A play that I wrote in 1989, Three Front, was produced by Radio-France and was given a workshop production at the Omaha magic Theater. My, but that play has had a curious history: Joe Papp was considering it for production, and Rip Torn had wanted to direct it, and Jane Fonda’s company was very interested in the script. Then Joe Papp died. I moved to Oklahoma, and I remember when Rip Torn phoned the very day the movers came to our New York apartment and said to me, “Rochelle, I come from Texas.” As I look back, I remember that in 1958 I wrote a play about, among other things, a man in love with a pig. Forty years later, Edward Albee writes a play about a man in love with a goat.

You’ve not only got a strike against you by being American, but also being a woman.

That’s the way it is: cultural imperialism, hierarchies, privileging the male most of the time, and a fawning respect for the British playwright by theater critics. On the other hand, the American visual artist is highly esteemed. It goes back to “language” I suppose. Who truly has the authority and the mastery of language in the theater? During the seventies in New York, a group of experimental women playwrights that included Julie Bovasso, Maria Irene Fornes, Megan Terry, Roslyn Drexler, Adrienne Kennedy, and myself formed a theater collective. Our meetings were angry, hilarious, and even optimistic. Today it’s difficult for everybody, but many young women have the sense of entitlement that guys have always had, which has radically changed the cultural interaction between the sexes in the arts.

Back in the 1960s, as you said in the Eisenhower years, I’m surprised you even found a place to be heard and that Futz received the acclaim it did.

The acclaim happened because several critics wrote very positive reviews, The Times and The Village Voice being the most influential.

It’s clear being from and in New York for many years played a definitive role in your becoming a poet and playwright.

Yes, the Village and the East Village of the sixties were points of origin for my life as a writer. No matter how far circumstances eventually took me from those days, they remain for me, as for so many others, the golden age of beginnings. Yes, those were the days, Gregory. And I also remember a remarkable allegorical play titled The Slave with Two Faces that had been produced by the Provincetown Theater in 1910. That play by Mary Carolyn Davies was published in an anthology that I found in our home in Brooklyn when I was ten years old. I was deeply impressed and moved by the play when I first read it, and I enjoyed rereading it. And I’ll never forget how glad I was that its author was a woman.

C.B. COLEMAN
This interview with Rochelle Owens was conducted by C.B. Coleman in January, 1989.

Many plays and performance works in the eighties, ranging from David Hwang’s M. Butterfly to Karen Finley’s monologues to Mabou Mines’ cross-gender cast Lear, address cultural perceptions of sexual identity. Rochelle Owens anticipated many of these works and their search for sexual and cultural re-definition. Her ground-breaking play, Futz, written in 1958 and first produced in 1965, relates in expressionistic fashion the barnyard love of farmer Cyrus Futz for his sow, Amanda, and the destructive effects their amour has on the local villagers. He Wants Shih, written in 1967 and produced in 1975, tells of the mythical Chinese Emperor Lan, who sheds his own cultural definitions of masculinity and patriarchy to discover the “shih”—the everything—in himself.

Owens is also the author of Beclch, Homo, Istanboul, The Karl Marx Play, Kontraption, Emma Instigated Me, Chucky’s Hunch, and Who Do You Want Piere Vidal?. Her latest play, Three Front, was recently given a workshop production at The Omaha Magic Theater.

Although best known as a playwright, Owens is an equally prolific poet, having written nine collections of poetry, including The Joe Chronicles (Black Sparrow Press, 1979), and Shemuel (New Rivers Press, 1979). Recently Owens has also worked in video. She directed an autobiographical work which merges video art with paintings, sculpture, and photographs in a fractured narrative based on her most recent collection of poetry, How Much Paint Does the Painting Need (The Kulchur Foundation, 1988).

Critic Len Berkman notes that Owens’ poetry informs her dramatic aesthetic, albeit not in the hackneyed sense of the naturalistically “poetic” language enshrined by writers like Tennessee Williams. Owens’ dramatic poetry is predicated on a visceral and semiotic transformation rather than an emotional lyricism.

Speaking of Owens’ The Karl Marx Play (1974), which juxtaposes the historical Marx, literally entangled with his intestinal bourgeois aspirations, with a messianic Marxist Leadbelly of Blues fame, Berkman remarks that:

She achieves here a depth-by-juxtaposition (as opposed to depth-through-exploration); she carefully arranges and repeats in varied patterns the primary influences and absorptions of Marx’s career. (This method is also a trait of her poetry)

Chucky’s Hunch (1981) is one of Owens’ more accessible works; it ostensibly addresses more mundane and contemporary feminist concerns such as empowerment and victimization. Written in the form of an epistolary monologue, the alcoholic Charles “Chucky” Craydon composes unanswered letters to his ex-wife who has just won the New York State Lottery. Woven into this narrative is a grotesque parody of an Oedipal nightmare, as Chucky witnesses the sexual ascent of his eighty-five-year-old mother.

Whether it be Cyrus Futz, Emperor Lan or Chucky Craydon, Owens’ characters challenge our cultural perceptions of gender and sexual identity. If we usually understand the term “gender” as a purely cultural definition of sexuality (as Owens suggests in the following interview), it can be said that many of her plays explore gender and cultural perceptions of sexuality in ways that allow for an expanded consciousness and re-definition of these terms.

Your play-writing has been described as “proto-feminist” by both yourself and critics. Could you elaborate on that term?

I use the term “proto-feminist” because I belong to the generation of experimental artists that gave rise to the present feminist movement. And I also want to suggest that one must go beyond static notions of consciousness and come to terms with the fact that there are writers who always need to seek a re-definition of aesthetic possibilities. For me, the process of writing is a continuing effort to expand my resources, to participate in the act of finding new reverberations in a visual/verbal language. My writing is feminist because it has much to do with my personal and social identity as a woman in a patriarchal culture, and because it resists in both form and idea the absolute power of organized doctrine, principles, and procedures. One ought to question the assumptions of the culture which created the social role of women.

How do you think the proto-feminist element of your play writing compares with contemporary feminist play writing?

I have noticed when we speak of the mainstream theater that feminists’ concerns are expressed in culturally approved and conservative modes and have little to do with re-definitions and experimentation. However, there are some writers who are avant-garde. I am talking about women who manage to continue in the alternative theater. I am making a big distinction between the avant-garde theater (or the avant-garde in general) and middle-class or mainstream theater. But there are some women writers who have stressed an avant-garde intention, and I would include Megan Terry,Adrienne Kennedy and Irene Fornes.

Are there more women playwrights who you would also define in these terms?

They tend to work in a more collaborative theatrical group and their intention is very limited, very sociologically narrow. That’s my impression. The women I have mentioned have written plays and are writing plays. Even though Megan [Terry] might have worked in a collaborative group, she was still able to write a lot of interesting scripts that showed stylistic features that go beyond her conservative modes.

Do you think there is a specifically feminist aesthetic In play-writing and, if you do, why is a feminist aesthetic worth investigating?

I must say that I am attempting to understand my own work critically. Much has been said about the “proto-feminist” features of my writing. I can speak only for myself. About Chucky’s Hunch: often every female audience member who witnessed the play became outraged and even thrilled. This also applies to some of the men in the audience. I would say that my own work, the poetry as well as the plays, definitely challenges traditional notions about the universality of expressive modes and has created new definitions about how I, as a woman poet, use language, create language, and subvert It. Many of these dynamics have much in common with the avant-garde. Fortunately feminist criticism adds a new dimension to the complexities of dramatic literature, poetry, and art and enriches their multifaceted interpretation.

Could you speak a bit about your latest work?

My new work is a long series poem entitled “Discourse on Life and Death.” It creates the dynamism of process and is the continual assembly, deconstruction, and re-assembly of subject matter. It has a lot of voices, multiple voices, and I feel that it is a definite evolution from my dramatic work. The fact that the work is called “Discourse on Life and Death”, creates the dynamics of description. The poem is a loose personal narrative around the themes of Mona Lisa and DaVinci. Pattern, contrast, and juxtaposition is an important aesthetic concept. Pattern finds expression in the repetitions and the integration of images into a kaleidoscopic form which deals with all elements of culture—from primitive society to modern technology, as well as personal and universally experienced reflections on history, mythology, and art. The various voices of the narrator and the characters create psychological polarities of experience.

One of the issues being explored today, in mainstream plays such as David Hwang’s M. Butterfly and avant-garde works such as Mabou Mines’ cross-gender Lear, is the role of gender and our cultural perceptions of sexuality. What are your thoughts on this issue? Do you believe gender and sexual identity are really being dealt with, or are they being entertained in a merely fashionable way?

I would like to lead into these considerations and these questions in a slightly circuitous way. I think it would best be answered by going along that winding path. In terms of gender I want to discuss He Wants Shih. The word ‘shih’ is Chinese and means, depending on the tonal pitch, ‘law’, ‘command’ ‘order’. The play is about Lan, the young Emperor of China who abdicates worldly responsibility and rules to reach out of himself toward the supernatural. He makes a journey toward his ultimate transformation: a means of entering the Unseen by force, of driving his way into power over the world. By the end Lan has become a woman. Leading up to the last scene is an intense dialogue that Lan has with the ‘Other.’ The pro-nouns “she and “he” shift, collide, play and displace each other moving constantly; and then finally Lan is transformed into a woman.

The curious thing to me in terms of the relation between my new work, “Discourse on Life and Death”, and much of my early work, especially He Wants Shih, is my use of the pro-noun of variable reference or, to put it another way, the unlimited pronoun, the pronoun with ten thousand faces. In He Wants Shih the character says he is ten-thousand things. In “Discourse on Life and Death” the pronouns “you”, “I”, “she”, “he” move around like quicksilver. The work is an energy field; meaning is non-linear, transmitted, placed and displaced, scattered, textured and re-textured in an endless, complex system of designed irregularity.

I am speaking mainly about the long series poem that I am currently working on. However, earlier collections share that trait also. The form of this series poem truly excites me viscerally. I think the constant shifting of gender, as well as singular personal pronoun reference, represent an advance in the knowledge of woman being part of culture rather than alien to it. The fact that I have always drastically re-imagined and re-defined the relationships of female/male is why I am an avant-garde poet and playwright He Wants Shih, written over twenty years ago, is part of the terrain of the body of work that is evolving further in my new long series poem.

Your early work, especially Futz, anticipates much recent thinking about gender and sexual identity. Could you talk about some of those early works with regard to these issues?

When I wrote Chucky’s Hunch in 1981, most critics understood it in a feminist perspective. At last the critics had matured sufficiently because of the feminist movement. But we do not know what the female sensibility is, nor do we know what a male sensibility is, except as it is defined by culture. Think of certain cultures where the men will act like females until they reach a certain age, and then they go back to male activities. It is all designed by the norm of the culture, and the norm of the culture can be terribly variable between different groups of human beings. So when I say, yes, I am a woman; I wrote these plays; I write this poetry; I write these plays; and so on, then of course it’s a female sensibility. But what exactly is it? I really don’t believe a female aesthetic can be defined, because if it could, where would current knowledge be in terms of knowledge of the future? I mean. I really do believe we live in an expanding universe, and definitions of art and consciousness are not boxed and frozen and rigid. That is why I consider myself an innovative artist, an avant-garde writer, and I insist on that word (“avant-garde”).

But do you think that our conceptions of gender in drama are being expanded?

There’s a kind of campy, fixated glee, in a superficial aspect, in terms of cross-dressing. But in theater I really don’t see any high-level curiosity.

How do you think feminist plays have affected criticism?

In the sixties, when Futz and my other plays were first produced, there was absolutely no feminist perspective on the part of the critics and intellectuals who had either read or seen my work. Thus, these plays were often seen as a cry for freedom for males. You see, the women were invisible. There were women in plays, obviously. The women’s story was there. But the critics didn’t see it. They all had blinders on. That’s why feminism is so important. That’s why any new interpretative way of looking at the world is incredibly, elementally important. It removes the barrier by which we can see something in a new way. That’s what art is about.

Women playwrights in the sixties and seventies pioneered experimental theater. What do you think brought them out? Why are so few of them writing to-day? Or is it simply a matter of exposure?

First of all, I would say that the women who were around in the sixties were part of a curious and alive phenomenon that was happening in the off-off-Broadway theater, which probably started in the late fifties and which is automatically connected with a lot of experimental art and all the art forms. Of course the Vietnam war was an impulse. I would call it the first wave of the continuing experimentation that began probably in film. This whole part of the avant-garde was stimulating other social concerns and other areas of the culture. In terms of the women, this was the second wave, because the first wave of feminism started back in the twenties. When it started again in the early sixties, the women who were connected with theaters were joined with males. And they were able to work and able to be inventive. But they were invisible. Occasionally they were given opportunities to work and sometimes got the appropriate attention. But compare any of them to the quintessential fair-haired boy. the blessed product of Zeus/Ganymede culture—another term for the patriarchal culture. We all know what Zeus did with little Ganymede. But that’s alright. It’s just Daddy doing his shenanigans.

Your latest play, Three Front, a work-in-progress, has been performed at Omaha Magic Theater, where Megan Terry is playwright-in-residence. Could you talk about your experience there?

The event-reading blended elegant performance techniques rooted in the avant-garde with a range of psychological direction and characterization. Jo Anne Schmidman was the director. I think it’s a very powerful, wonderful play. The Omaha Magic workshop production was very exciting. It’s amazing what they do. It reminded me of the vigorous off-off-Broadway days. It was terribly exciting to see that and also to experience the joy of innovative theater without any of the hangups of the middle-class conservative tone.

In the introduction to the latest edition of Futz you quote the last monologue of Chucky’s Hunch:

Elly, I have an image of you in my mind, poking like a finger under my eyelids. You’re standing next to a vase filled with wildflowers. My ego is growing claws that are ready to tear off a piece of whatever I can get them into. There is no pattern to my life that you can understand, Elly. I have a hunch, you’ll find yourself basking in the sun with me one of these days—but the odds are against it. You’ll most likely die in a mental institute at a ripe old age. What do you think when you look at the old photographs of us together? Do you feel as though you walked away from a head-on collision? I talk to you—you refuse to understand. I loved the way you moved your body—and not once have I pitched woo with anyone but you, dear.)

You remark that “the above quote is one of my official manifestos, a theory of my approach to writing. It is my savage muse talking to me.” Given the fact that male artists have traditionally conceived of their ‘muse’ as a sort of feminine goddess, could you elaborate on your own conception of your ‘savage muse’? Is he a man?

A book was written many years ago on the life of Gaudier Brzeska. He was a French artist that Pound was very interested in in the twenties. And the book was called The Savage Muse. But I don’t think that title is stuck with that book. It’s just a lovely, romantic lust combination—muse and savage. Its archaic and classic.

There’s an ancient Celtic goddess that can still be found on churches in England and Ireland, the Sheila-Na-Gig. She is the Earth Mother, a symbol of life and death. The depiction is of a life-force-energizing principle. The whole idea of a principle of energy of the feminine—or perhaps the masculine or even the androgynous; that to me is the savage muse.

I would like to say that the process of writing itself is unpredictable, immediate, and extremely energized. It is inherently experimental, creating a form and meaning that is part of the seen and hidden interconnectedness of language and consciousness. That exploration becomes an encounter with the “savage muse.” Romantic perhaps. but partially true.