08/03/2024
I REMEMBER MARY MARY…
I remember Mary Mary in 1983 standing in the pitch darkness of the little proscenium theatre on East 4th St. on the apron of the stage speaking the first lines of Artaud’s There is No More Firmament”: Darkness. Explosions in the dark. Harmonies cut short. Raw sound. Sounds blurring. …” No one sees her in the perfect darkness. Only her voice is perceived. Her words float into the house. She speaks carefully, articulate, intimate, and clear. Personally to each person in the audience as though whispering in their ears. It was a sublime moment, a trick of performance technique that came naturally to her after 20 years in the theatre. Yet. How did she do that? It was something about her presence, even in the dark, and her relationship to the public, to the audience. The key to performing like that is love. Mary was a lover. A full spectrum lover. The kind of lover as an actress which in another moment, another play (Seven Meditations on Political Sado-Masochism) she could ask random people in the audience, “Am I your slave?” And depending on what they answered, she replied, Yes, I am your slave, or No I am not your slave. And in that simple exchange she could summon true revelation, not merely an answer.
Mary was born in 1939 in Bay Ridge to a Catholic family. Her father and brother were NYC cops. Her mother a strong witted matriarch. She defied their expectations and left home at an early age and made her way to the West Village and sought refuge among the poets, folk singers and like-minded rebels of her generation. She herself played guitar and was a folk singer performing at the Café Wha and Bitter End. While in the West Village she became acquainted with a few people from The Living Theatre.
As fate would have it, she traveled to Europe with some West Village poets and while in Rome happened to meet her Living Theatre friends who were on tour at that time. This encounter was to change Mary’s life. She was invited to join the company and thereby became a member of The Living Theatre Company which was about to do its most profound work. Mary performed in the pieces of that time: Antigone, Frankenstein, Mysteries and Smaller Pieces, and their masterpiece Paradise Now. The LT also experimented with collective creation especially with Mysteries and Paradise Now, and Mary was able to contribute greatly to the creation of those works. In Paradise Now, Mary was there performing for 5,000 people, and at the end of the show opened the doors of the hall with her fellow actors leading the audience into the streets, declaring that “the theatre is in the streets!” and calling for the beginning of “the beautiful non-violent anarchist revolution.” She had travelled a long way from Our Lady of Perpetual Help school in Bay Ridge to performing Paradise in the very sports hall in Berlin, where 30 years before, Hi**er had asked, “Do you want total war?” and his audience enjoined, “Seig Heil!”
After the last Paradise tour, The Living Theatre broke up into three groups. One went to India to pursue spiritual studies, another went to London to work on new play, and the third group including Julian Beck and Judith Malina (The LT’s founders) traveled to Brazil to work in the favellas with the poorest of the poor, determined to use the theatre as a force for direct social change. Mary traveled to Brazil with that group where they performed in the streets plays about the action that people can take to transform violence into concord, and to meet political repression with demands for social justice. They were arrested and sent to jail. Mary managed to convince the cops in that moment that she was just visiting the company (not true), and after a brief stay in prison, they released her. She managed to return to New York where she and Steve Ben Israel rallied the support of famous artists, theatre people and filmmakers to demand the release of her comrades from jail in Brazil. In the end, the Brazilian government was so embarrassed by the negative publicity that they released The Living, dropped the charges, and deported them from Brazil.
Rejoining the company in New York, Mary continued working with The Living Theatre for the next 8 years. She created roles in all the major works from that next period of work called The Legacy of Cain, mostly comprised of large street spectacles like Six Public Acts and The Dismantling of The Money Tower, and myriad smaller street pieces like The Strike Support Oratorium, created in solidarity with Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers union movement. At that time Mary worked with me and others from the company to develop Meyerhold’s Biomechanics to sharpen and amplify our physical techniques of street performance.
I met Mary at this time, as I joined the Living Theatre in 1973. She was my constant companion and partner in theatre work for the next 10 years.
In 1980 Mary and I went on tour with The Direct Action Workshop in which we created and performed a street theatre piece with a group of about 20 actors in one week. The basic idea was to teach collective creation and show that it’s possible to agree upon and create a company to perform together. Over the next few years we did 100 workshops. Meet the group on Monday, explain the process, discuss and agree upon the theme of the piece (asking: “What is the burning question?”). Present physical work to measure their capabilities and extend them. Break into small groups which create a scene. Decide the order with transitions (usually with music). Perform the piece on the street on that Saturday. Mary was amazing in those sessions. She could inspire them, give them confidence, and knew how to bridge any conflicts that would arise.
One workshop in particular stands out. We were invited to do Direct Action Workshop at an Italian Army base: The Caserma Dante Alighieri di Ravenna. Capitano Martino was a nice guy who loved his “boys.” We worked with them for a week and they ended up creating a piece on pacifism titled “Fratelli! Non si spara!” (“Brothers! Don’t shoot!”) . When we met the privates who took the workshop, Mary gave the most eloquent and beautiful speech to them about the opportunity they had to create and perform such a piece to their superior officers. Capitano Martino saw the dress rehearsal, not knowing what we had been working on. He tried to cancel it but it was too late. The show went on, and Mary was awarded a medal!
In 1982 Mary returned to New York City after years of creating, touring, performing, and teaching in Europe since 1975. And in August of that year she gave birth to our son Cyrus. She was 42 and I don’t think she had imagined having a child until it happened and she rose to the occasion with a fierce love and caring that was exemplary. She was very involved in Cyrus’ education working for special extra programming at P.S. 19 and eventually served as PTA president for three years.
At the same time she worked with me to establish a theatre company in The East Village: The Alchemical Theatre. She trained that company, initiating them into collective creation and co-directed the plays of that company including the world premiere of Artaud’s “There Is No More Firmament”, and Pure War/The Madness of the Day, based on the writing of Paul Virilio and Maurice Blanchot among other pieces, and toured Europe again, this time with our company, The Alchemical Theatre.
Thank you, Mary. Thank you for all you have given us. Thank you for your steadfast wisdom, and for your exemplary kindness and grace.
(This is Part One. Part Two will be contributed by our son Cyrus which I will share on my time lines. Memorial date in September will be announced)
