Beautiful Chaos: A Life in the Theater by Carey Perloff

Author:Carey Perloff
Language: ara
Format: epub
Publisher: City Lights Foundation Books
Published: 2015-01-25T23:00:00+00:00

Chapter 11

The International Connection

So many things go into finding one’s own aesthetic; for me it was a background in dance, a passion for archaeology and hidden clues, an obsession with the infinite variety of the English language. Mixed in with all of this was my appetite for foreign work, for ways of creating a theatrical event that had nothing to do with the conventions of American realism. While many theater artists spend their young years in New York second-acting (sneaking into the second acts of Broadway shows without paying), I spent mine as a secretary on the Upper West Side at the International Theatre Institute, a theater-service organization devoted to an exploration of global theater. The U.S. Center of the International Theatre Institute (ITI/U.S.) in the eighties was headed by Martha Coigney, a six-foot-tall American visionary who was married to an urbane Frenchman and was a tireless champion of international theater. She hired me on a whim when I was twenty-two, rescuing me after a series of humiliating interviews at employment agencies that had culminated in a particularly painful appointment on the hottest day of the summer, at which the grim interviewer declared: “Ms. Perloff, you have no skills. And you’ll never get a job in New York if you don’t wear pantyhose.” Martha didn’t care about the pantyhose; she liked it that I was multilingual and had an appetite for global adventure. So she deposited me at the front desk of her office on West 63rd Street, where I sat surrounded by priceless books and magazines from around the world, as the glitterati of the international theater scene paraded through. One day the office would be full of Indonesian puppeteers; the next it was Meredith Monk and her cadre of a capella singers. Peter Brook showed up to take Martha to lunch and talk about the Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord and his African adventures, and the great Russian director Lev Dodin of the Maly Drama Theatre in St. Petersburg would arrive bearing vodka and toasting everyone in the room, including the lowly secretary who would become one of his most devoted fans. On slow days, Martha let me wander through the stacks of the library, beautifully organized by a librarian called Birdie, where I learned about Shakuntala and Persian theater, Khatakali and Indian dance, Mnouchkine’s Théâtre du Soleil and Giorgio Strehler’s Piccolo Teatro di Milano, and the extraordinary flowering of Romanian directors (Andrei Șerban and Liviu Ciulei made frequent appearances at ITI).

It was like a graduate seminar: I kept notes on everything I learned, I went to see the work whenever I was invited, and every day brought a new actor, singer, director, or puppeteer into my consciousness. I met artists for whom the making of theater was an incendiary political act, and artists for whom theater was a spiritual practice. Martha didn’t discriminate; she recognized passion when she saw it, and she made sure her international brood felt welcome in the United States, at least on 63rd Street.

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