APR 9–MAY 16 WORLD PREMIERE THE WASTE LAND by T.S. Eliot adapted by John Wilkins directed by Michael Socrates Moran
CAST the poet / the prophet / the people Lisa Ramirez* CREATIVE TEAM
Adapted by John Wilkins Director Michael Socrates Moran Stage Manager Kimi Harvey-Scott Set & Props Designer Karla Hargrave Lighting Designer Dr. Stephanie Anne Johnson Sound Designer Elton Bradman Costume Designer Regina Y. Evans Projections Designer Erin Gilley Technical Director Kevin E. Myrick Lighting Technician Ashley Munday Choreographer Katie Faulkner Image Design Natalie Khuen Photography Carson French OAKLAND THEATER PROJECT STAFF
Executive & Co-Artistic Director Michael Socrates Moran Managing Director Colin Mandlin Co-Artistic Director William Hodgson Associate Artistic Director Lisa Ramirez Co-Director of Education Dawn L. Troupe Literary Manager John Wilkins Community Manager J Jha Co-Director of Education Rosalie Faye Barnes Box Office Manager Lucianne Colón Administrative Director Kimberly Ridgeway Communications Director Simone Finney Marketing & Development Associate Marco Sheng Dr. Stephanie Anne Johnson Resident Lighting Designer Actors and Stage Managers Association, the union of Professional Equity Actors’ *Appearing courtesy the Resident Costume Designer Regina Y. Evans Resident Set Designer Karla Hargrave PRODUCERS Craig and Kathy Moody THANK YOU Alkimi Stage Management • Stephen Graham • Sam Rudy • Angelina Fiordellisi DIRECTOR’S NOTE Dear Friends, Soon after the shelter-in-place came down and theaters across the country shuttered, Lisa Ramirez, our Associate Artistic Director, called me from New York and said we should do a drive-in theater production of The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot. John Wilkins, our Literary Manager, said, “This is a terrific idea, but the poem by itself isn’t a script.” I asked John if he would make it into a script. And, after two delays, a year of pandemic and many tumultuous world events later, here we are. Often considered the most famous poem of the 20th century, The Waste Land is also famously inaccessible. For a company with a core value of radical inclusivity this may seem a strange choice, yet, these remain strange times. Far from the decisive structure of a play, we offer the open-ended quality of a poem with the hope that T.S. Eliot is correct and “genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.” The Waste Land evokes many questions about the crises of our day: How do we re-think progress? How do we confront our capacity for self-destruction? How do we make meaning in a world that seems increasingly meaningless? How do we re-make a new world from the ruins of an old one? In some ways, The Waste Land was a poet’s attempt to create art when all previous forms of art no longer seemed relevant to a post-pandemic, post WWI-world. His world was ruptured, so his poem is ruptured as well. We could imagine The Waste Land as a work of art about the impossibility of art after the self- destruction of the Western world. And, yet, a work of art it is. If The Waste Land is a poet’s attempt to create art when art may no longer be possible, this production has been our humble attempt to create theater when theater has not been possible. Theater has the distinction of being made of the materials of life: human beings bearing witness to human beings coming to terms with the human condition in the time we live in. If our places of worship are where we reconnect with the Divine, I have always believed the theater might be where we reconnect with our humanity. Theater is life and, therefore, cannot exist in a time of mass death. But, just as The Waste Land as a poem stands as a testament to renewal for the individual; perhaps The Waste Land as a piece of theater can offer a beginning of renewal for the community. Eliot may have been writing a poem about the impossibility of art in a decaying world, but he made a work of art about the decaying world. And, in doing so, renewal becomes possible once again. The world would make art impossible again and again in the 20th century, and yet art continued to be made about its impossibility. Perhaps we are at such a moment once again. And so we present a theatrical realization of The Waste Land, a poem that seeks to stitch back together a ruptured world from “the heap of broken images” we are left with, in order to make a new one. “These fragments I have shored against my ruins.” Art persists, as does life. Thank you for joining us tonight in this unique way—words don’t adequately express how grateful we are to have you back at the theater.
Michael Socrates Moran Executive & Co-Artistic Director Oakland Theater Project LITERARY MANAGER’S NOTE We should always pay special attention to art that destroys the talent that creates it, though we should also mention that talent is an overrated virtue. Anyone who’s watched America’s Got Talent knows that. T.S. Eliot had talent aplenty, as well as a fine and wide-ranging critical mind. But there’s no doubt that his masterwork, The Waste Land, finished him off as a poet, effectively shutting down what had been up to that point a wild and daring artistic spirit.
When we read this almost 100-year-old poem, we have to take into account that one of its victims, among the many mutilated corpses, lost lovers, and traumatized souls, is Eliot himself. What he became — a dandified purveyor of so-called high culture, a writer of deadening seriousness, and a political conservative of questionable ethics — is a stunning rebuke of what we see and feel in The Waste Land.
The question of why the Oakland Theater Project would take on this poem as a piece of theater in the midst of a world-wide pandemic can be found in this split between what the poem offers and what its author never wanted to confront again: a world gleefully spinning its way into meaninglessness.
Where we can all too easily see Eliot’s limitations in hindsight (as others will certainly see ours), his poem offers other challenges—and especially theatrical challenges—that cut to heart of what we might call the “Waste Land” project.
Despite the many tragedies of COVID (the shocking number of needless deaths, the financial devastation, the ever-expanding inequality between the poor and the upper-middle class), the disease has made the theatrical world think. By summarily halting the endless cycle of production (play after play, season after season), every practice and ritual of the theater is primed and begging to be reimagined.
Maybe a poem can be a play; maybe congregating in cars is a distinctly American display of community; maybe a soundscape swirling around a performer can take on the vibrancy of a pop concert; maybe a projection screen is as good, and even more realistic a depiction of the world than a set.
Maybe the many fragmented voices of Eliot’s epic are just one voice, a character in the spirit of Beckett’s tramps, or Buster Keaton, or Patti Smith, or any of the desperate and committed activists who struggle to fight against and give voice to injustice.
I don’t think any of us would wish this last year to happen again, or if we suddenly had God-like powers, to let it happen in the first place. But since it did, there does seem something important about not only creating this new Waste Land from the symbolic ruins of Eliot’s Waste Land, but also keeping in mind that relentlessly questioning how we create new theatrical worlds is more than just a trick for a difficult situation; it’s an aesthetic, philosophical, and political demand that we must stay alive to the limitations and chaos of the world.
Eliot understood that once, took on a world ravaged by war and the Spanish Flu, gave it stunning artistic shape, and it destroyed his talent. But even getting that far was something else, a challenge from the past that is still haunting our future.
John Wilkins Literary Manager Oakland Theater Project ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Lisa Ramirez (the poet / the prophet / the people) is an award-winning actor and playwright, who has performed off-Broadway in New York and regionally, including Vineyard Theatre, Rattlestick Playwrights Theater, Rising Phoenix Repertory, Atlantic Theater Company, Cherry Lane Theatre, New York Theatre Workshop, Playmakers Repertory Company, Berkeley Repertory Theatre, Magic Theatre, and Oakland Theater Project. Lisa Ramirez was last seen with the Oakland Theater Project in the role of Olga in the 2017 West Coast Premiere of TO THE BONE by Lisa Ramirez, and Blanche in A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams in 2018. Writing credits include EXIT CUCKOO (nanny in motherland) (Writer/Performer), world-premiere produced by the Working Theater in NYC (Colman Domingo - director); ART OF MEMORY, a dance theatre piece, commissioned by Company SoGoNo, presented at the 3-Legged Dog in NYC (Tanya Calamoneri - director); Pas de Deux (lost my shoe), Cherry Lane Theatre - Mentor Project (Bryan Davidson Blue - director); TO THE BONE, a Working Theater commission, world-premiere produced by the Cherry Lane Theatre (Lisa Peterson - director); DOWN HERE BELOW, an adaptation of Maxim Gorky’s THE LOWER DEPTHS, commission and world premiere by Oakland Theater Project (Michael French - director); IN THE MOUNTAINS, a commission by The Workshop Theater (Thomas Cote - director); MORE THAN GRAPES, a commission and collaboration with Jeffrey Lo and Carlos Aguirre, world-premiere by TheatreFIRST (Sean San José - director). Lisa is currently working on a commission of sAiNt jOaN (burn/burn/burn), an adaptation for Oakland Theater Project (Michael Moran - director), where she serves as Associate Artistic Director.
John Wilkins (Adaptation) is Oakland Theater Project’s Literary Manager. He was the founder and artistic director of Last Planet Theatre for 10 years. He directed critically-acclaimed productions of Rainer Fassbinder’s The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant, Howard Barker’s Ursula, Fear of the Estuary, Howard Brenton’s Sore Throats, Franz Xaver Kroetz’s Farmyard, Ronald Ribman’s Sweet Table at the Richelieu, and Wallace Shawn’s The Designated Mourner. He also was the theater critic for KQED Arts and covered the Bay Area performance scene at his own site, The Free Audience and presently teaches in the Writing and Literature department at CCA.
Michael Socrates Moran (Director) is a Co-Founder and Co-Artistic Director of Oakland Theater Project. Michael has led the organization to critical acclaim and produced and directed a number of award-winning productions since its founding in 2012. Michael holds a BFA in Theatre Arts from Boston University and an MFA in Directing from the University of California, San Diego. Directing credits with the Oakland Theater Project include the West Coast premiere of Dance of the Holy Ghosts by Marcus Gardley, the world premieres of Rashomon and Pool of Unknown Wonders by Philip Kan Gotanda, the West Coast premiere of Lisa Ramirez’s TO THE BONE, as well as classics such as Death of a Salesman, The Grapes of Wrath, Othello, Hamlet and Macbeth. He is also an award-winning actor and a faculty member in the theatre department at the University of California, Berkeley.
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