Yankee, Stay Home?!

backtalk YANKEE, STAY HOME?! Martha W. Coigney Thirty-four years ago Rosamond Gilder and other certifiable mad persons like J.B. Priestley, Jean Louis Barrault, Lillian Hellman (who swore it wouldn't work) and Clarence Derwent heeded the suggestion of the first Director General of UNESCO, Julian Huxley, and formed a non-governmental organization to deal with theatre. Huxley's feeling was that the arts would do better to legislate and negotiate for themselves, rather than being a division or an office in an enormous bureaucracy like UNESCO. Boy, was he right! International Theatre Institute (ITI) was formed to promote the exchange of knowledge and practice in the theatre arts. What was begun in 1948, and has been achieved, is a network of theatre people who know that the world is a viable stage for their work, who know that imagination freezes in isolation, and who have already insisted that national, political and language barriers are there to be breached. The early "certifiable " founders carried IT[ around in their heads and their consciences -they travelled a lot. Those who know Rosamond Gilder will know where Henry Kissinger learned shuttle diplomacy. Internationally, ITI started with eight countries. It now has sixty, more or less, depending on the weekly political climate in various parts of the world. Political?? Remember, I said that ITI is a non-governmental organization. Well, that is the reason that we survive as a community of theatre people, but it doesn't mean that we can avoid the real world. We are subject to the same political pressures as any other international forum-even the big 111 kids like UN, UNESCO, ILO, etc. What we have is a small slingshot of precedent against the Goliath of inter-governmental nonsense. We have no power except the habit of including our members in any ITI meetings. For example, in 1967 when the ITI biennial Congress was in New York, I was "told" not to invite Cuba and the German Democratic Republic. I said we had to, they were members. While all of this interchange of knowledge and experience is a valuable thing, it has led to a greater and greater sense of frustration on the part of theatre people in the U.S. As more people learn the value of exchange, more people realize that there is one enormous problem that has yet to be addressed in any serious way. Immobility. The immobility of American theatre, both nationally and internationally, is tragic. When foreign theatre or cultural leaders come to the U.S., they are often delighted with the quality of the work here. At the same time they are perplexed or appalled that they haven't seen a balanced sampling of our work abroad. They wonder why it isn't shared. Their questions are unanswerable and embarrassing. For the last eighteen years, this problem of immobility has been confronted by one, then two, then a number of America's experimental theatres. The first to go abroad was Ellen Stewart's LaMama Experimental Theatre Club (she took six plays, two actors, $50, and the promise of a minibus). Starting with La Mama, our smaller theatres took crash courses in transatlantic swimming, charter flight survival, airport Spanish, Polish, Dutch, and "trial, error and starve" tour management. Group after group got, somehow, to Europe and occasionally beyond. Group after group changed the dynamics and the vision of theatre in many parts of the world. This wonderful exodus has been one of the most effective embassies our country could ever have devised. But, our country didn't devise it. In fact, it was accomplished at great cost to some and no cost to others. The great cost has been borne by the artists themselves, by foreign governments and by foreign theatres. American theatre has moved when at all by the grace of foreign aid, and that foreign aid is getting tired-not tired of participating, but certainly tired of picking up the whole tab. That's right, our government has not made any significant contribution to moving American theatre work out of the country. Not ever in any way that reflects the richness and variety of American theatre life. It isn't that...