kier’s
secret german audience
by Douglas Messerli
Kier Peters The Confirmation, performed by the English Drama Group (EDG) der Universität Passau, January
25-27, 2007
About twice a year, I
check the computer to discover what my playwright pseudonym, Kier Peters, is up
to. Over the years I’ve found he’s a fairly busy person, with plays being
performed by experimental theatre companies and even at dinner theatres—all of
which came as a surprise to me! But in 2007 I came across an even more
interesting piece of information regarding his/my plays. The entry that popped
up on Goggle sounded very promising, the first sentence reading: “The main
topic of conversation, even after seven days, is still The Confirmation, the American play by Kier Peters we came to
Bavaria to see.”
The blog of Frank W. Walsh went on to
describe how he and his wife, after taking a long taxi ride, quickly found the
train from Münich to Passau, arriving two hours later to be greeted by Josh and
Jutta. Josh, a teacher at the University of Passau and the director of the
English Drama Group, whisked the American couple away for lunch before taking
them to Passau’s oldest movie theater, where The Confirmation was being performed. “The place reminds me of the
theaters I went to throughout my childhood,” wrote Walsh. “Its concession stand
serves popcorn, candy, beer if you like. You came through the doors under where
the screen would have been, as in the Pheil Theater in St. Petersburg (Florida)
many years ago when Central Avenue was hopping. Then you go up, past rows and
rows of chairs to a wide aisle under the projection booth where you can see
everything and still have plenty of room.”
“The lights darken,” he continues. “The
play begins. But it doesn’t. A four-piece band plays Klezmer music. Foot
tapping and stomping.”
“The curtain rises and an American family
takes the stage. Then begins the peeling of the onion, layers of revelations.
Much of it beyond me.”
Walsh goes on to discuss some of his
favorite lines—one in particular uttered by the play’s shikker (Yiddish for a drunk) sister Blanche (speaking only Yiddish
throughout the play, which the family believes to be Norwegian), who upon
hearing one of her sister’s open a bottle of wine, shouts out: “Did I hear a
cork?” With Josh and Jutta, evidently, this American couple “constructed tables
with diagrams and arrows delineating relationships to better understand the
play,” which had three sold-out performances! “Modern American theater is still
alive,” declares Walsh, “—alive and well in Bavaria, Germany.”
The very idea of my crazy American family
of women survivors—Grandma, Mother, Sister, Blanche and the family intruder,
Sister’s lesbian lover Carmelita—being brought to life in that small Bavarian
city nestled between three rivers (the Danube, the Inn, and Ilz) at the border
of the Czech Republic, amazed me! As Paul Vangelisti merrily chuckled over the
phone the other day—he being one of the few individuals who love such
accidental collisions of discovery and event (insidious gaps in life) as I do—“Surely
this can’t really have happened, this seemingly lost American couple coming
across your play in Bavaria without a clue of what it was about! And you knowing
nothing of it whatsoever. You made it up. You wrote this,” he proclaimed. “No
one will believe you didn’t. It’s like all the stories in your memoir!”
“I know,” I concurred. “But you and I both
realize that I didn’t fabricate a single moment of my adventure in New York
with you. And I haven’t knowingly made up anything in any of these volumes to
date. Things just happen to me that way. It’s my life.”
“I
think they do happen that way to many people,” Paul concluded, “only they block
it out, rationalize it away or perceive no significance in the facts.”
Yesterday, as I was about to write about
this newest manifestation of my wondrously
eventful life, I received an e-mail from Joshua Amrhein,
outlining the details of his directorial choice and the performances of my
play. Apparently, he’d first dis-covered my short plays, A Dog Tries to Kiss the Sky: Seven Short Plays, in City Lights
bookstore in San Francisco, and had thought about performing “Past Present
Future Tense” or “A Dog Tries to Kiss the Sky.” “The plays…had an American kind
of humor I thought, just ‘dada’ enough for my taste and approachable enough for
any audience.” “Well, I wanted to see what else you’d written, and found The Confirmation. Besides really liking
the story, and all things to do with grandmothers in general, I felt it was a
perfect piece to do with a group mainly made up of women….” “My actors loved it,”
he reports, and it beat out David Mamet’s Water
Engine. Hearing his response, I could only recall the reaction of my German
friend Hans-Jürgen Schadt upon reading the comedy: “I found it very sad, very
sad, while my wife kept laughing out loud the whole time.” Perhaps some Germans
do share the American sense of humor.
Amrhein apologized for not trying harder
to reach me—he had evidently sent an e-mail which I did not receive. I reported
that my only regret for not having been told about the production—although an
amateur performing fee would be appropriate (he is sending a small payment)—was
that I might have flown to Passau to witness it! I was delighted by the
production.
We turned Blanche from a Yiddish speaking
character, to a Polish figure, he explained, in part because we had a Polish
actor playing the part. Coincidence, again, I responded: I originally wrote the
part for a Polish actor I had seen in one of Mac Wellman’s plays; she was out
of the country, however, during the July 1994 production of that play in New
York at the Vineyard Theatre near Union Square.
And who was that visiting American man and
his wife from St. Petersburg? His grandfather, who was overjoyed that I had
stumbled upon his blog and that he’d been able to be the conduit between author
and director!
Los Angeles, November 15, 2007
Reprinted from Green Integer Blog (February 2008).
Soon
after writing the piece above, I received an e-mail from US playwright Jeffrey
M. Jones (whose plays Love Trouble and J.
P. Morgan Saves the Nation I published on
my Sun & Moon Press label). He reported that his 16-year-old daughter (“who
is absolutely smashing in every way, except when she is cross with her
parents), now in her junior year at La Guardia High School of Art, Music &
Performing Arts in New York, had been involved with a public showing of her
class’s scenework. Students chose their own works, some of which—excerpts from
Paula Vogel, Tennessee Willliams, Martin McDonagh, and Adam Rapp—were “what one
might expect.” “But the second selection was a very odd piece about a
grandmother who had apparently taught one child to speak only Norwegian.”
“I thought there was something awfully
familiar about the author’s name, but the context was so astonishing,” wrote Jones,
“I had to make sure that Keir Peters was indeed who I thought he was.”
American theater, evidently, is alive and
well at La Guardia High School as well as in Passau, Germany!
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