Speaking from the Heart

Speakingfrom the Heart Jean-Claudevan Itallie I MET JOE CHAIKIN in September 1963. Joe, an actor and theatre director, had then just founded the Open Theatre, a group of unpaid actors meeting a few times a week in a loft with peeling dark blue paint on Twenty-fourth Street in Manhattan in order to explore new ways of communicating in the theatre. I am a playwright. I listened with fascination as Joe tossed out a few provocative "pebbles" to the actors: philosophical questions, political and poetical questions. What are the emotions that we are forbidden in our society to show? How can we express grieving? How can we express on stage the disparity between what we feel on the inside and what we are permitted to demonstrate on the outside? And I watched as Joe set up acting exercises in which the "pebbles" began to be explored theatrically. In one exercise the acting area was divided geographically into one place for lament, one for ecstasy, one for hatred, and one for conventional conversation. The actors wandered at will over the emotional topography, expressing the emotion appropriate to where they stood. If you didn't know what was happening you might think the actors were chaotically shouting and acting crazy, but if you knew what they were doing ... My question to Joe after my first extraordinary workshop was: "How to turn this wonderfully theatrical stuff into plays?" His answer: "I've been waiting for someone to ask that question." That was the beginning of our professional dialogue which has lasted now twenty-nine years. I became the principal playwright of the Open Theatre, the wordsmith. The emotional area exercise, for instance, became grounded in a picnic. 110 Characters behaved and spoke as expected at a country picnic, but also wandered off shouting into forests of fear and fields of ecstasy. Being playwright at the Open Theatre was difficult in the early sixties. We were becoming suspicious of words. We were just beginning to discover they are vehicles of public lies: political, commercial, and religious. And Joe was personally suspicious of words because he felt entrapped by them. Scripted words and theatrical form limited his sense of exploratory freedom. Joe was happier rehearsing the actors rather than having them perform because performance needs to be in a more or less fixed form. I argued and Joe agreed that in the theatre some structure and some words are needed to clearly communicate and denotate emotion to the audience. Our creative struggle bore fruit in the creation of plays with new forms, and in rediscovering economical, poetical, and theatrical ways to use words. In a sense we had to reinvent theatrical language in order to communicate clearly what we wanted people to know and feel. Our Open Theatre collaboration culminated in 1968 with The Serpent, hailed as "the powerful and moving ensemble play of the sixties." The words in The Serpent are few and poetical. In 1984 Joe underwent open heart surgery for the third time in as many decades. He had an improperly functioning aortic valve due to rheumatic fever as a child. I have been his support person (best friend, loving witness) in these fearful surgical dives into the underworld. Immediately after the shock and pain of his first two open heart surgeries Joe was more vulnerable and open, more childlike than he had been before them. Then, each time as fie regained strength I felt him regain a more manipulative hardened way of handling everyday reality. When waking from the third (otherwise successful) open heart surgery, however, there was a difference. Joe apparently had a stroke during the operation. He awoke aphasic: greatly impaired in his ability to use or understand words. His only intelligible word at first was "yes," and it had to serve for all meanings, including "no." Once again, as in the days of the Open Theatre, we conspired together to reinvent language. Joe, who had been scheduled to play King Lear at New York's Public Theatre, could now speak only nonsense syllables instead of verse. He needed to re-find the routes for language. He had to learn, as I put it in my play The...