A Different Premise?

To the Editor:

We at the Castillo Theatre very much appreciate TDR's publication of Sean Cook's critique of our work in the Fall 2003 issue ["Walking the Talk: Castillo Theatre of 2002," 47:3, T179].

We could find much in Cook's article to nitpick about and regret the fact that he totally ignored our work between 1992 (when Eva Brenner wrote the first piece on Castillo in TDR ["Theatre of the Unorganized: The Radical Independence of the Castillo Cultural Center," 36:3, T135]) and 2001 (when Cook saw the first of three productions at our theatre). Nonetheless, as Cook points out, theatre and performance studies scholars have, for the most part, neglected our efforts and we are grateful for Cook's honest attempt to grapple with our controversy, accomplishments, and shortcomings.

There is one political/aesthetic assumption of Cook's critique that we, in turn, would like to challenge because, we feel, it has obscured the most important premise of our work. Cook has problems with how Castillo's artistic director and playwright-in-residence, Fred Newman, ends his plays. He writes of a "strange and clumsy ending" (85), of "forced closure" (86), of "sloppy ambivalence" (93), of "poorly constructed play[s]" (87), and sums up that Newman is "an impenetrable playwright" (93).

We simply want to ask Cook to consider for a moment the possibility that "bad" plays may lead to good organizing. As Cook himself points out, Newman's great success has been in organizing a grassroots multiracial/multiclass community and constructing a theatre with broad support in that community. Newman came to theatre and performance as a political organizer, and an organizer he remains. If one is writing plays as part of an ongoing effort to organize community, then by almost all aesthetic standards (including those learned by Cook in NYU's graduate program) you are very likely going to write "bad" plays. (I personally think some of Newman's plays are quite "good" even by abstract aesthetic standards, but that is beside the point.) At Castillo, plays are approached as performance tactics not works of art, although obviously, at times, they can be both.

On a related note, Cook faults Castillo's actors for not using Brechtian alienation techniques onstage to remind the audience of who they really are. Here again, he misses the relationship that the Castillo Theatre has to its audience and community. Our audiences see our actors in Bed-Sty and Mott Haven and Harlem, often 9-to-5 everyday. They really don't need aesthetic tricks to be reminded that the person onstage is acting.

Cook notes with approval that Castillo's actors, in costume, meet and mingle with the audience in the lobby after a play, and calls for more of this type of erosion of "theatre/life boundaries" (92) to happen onstage in order to remove the mystique of stage performance (93). What he misses, we feel, is that what goes on in the lobby is not just an add-on; it is integral part of our concept and practice of theatre. Cook is apparently working from the assumption that the only place the audience will see the actors is onstage. Where we leave our audience is in the community, not in the theatre.

Once again, we appreciate the forum provided by TDR to discuss these issues and thank Cook for his contribution to the dialogue.