Theatre
Ruth Maleczech
Doyen of Downtown and all she touches
By Wickham Boyle
I have seen Ruth Maleczech for decades. You can’t miss the flaming hair and the intense gaze penetrating anyone she surveys and all the characters she fiercely inhabits from the avant-garde gender-reversed King Lear or James Joyce’s demented daughter Lucia or a dodgy malcontent in mainstream television’s ER. She has received awards for acting, directing, and design; her creative mind knows few limits.
When I first encountered Ruth Maleczech we were both working at the famed crucible of experimentalism, La MaMa, in the 1970s soon after she, partner-husband Lee Breuer, composer Philip Glass, director Joanne Akalaitis. And actor David Warrilow formed the Mabou Mines. (Here an aside from Joe Stackwell the GM in the MM office) They were all up in Nova Scotia, working on the Red Horse Animation, very near a town called Mabou Mines. They had all met in France, and decided to return to North America to make work not as expatriates but in a culture where English was the first language, since they were very interested in language at the time (and remain so).
Back in those days, I was a techie grunt and Ruth was, to my mind, a star. She floated, she possessed an energy that must have been what drove her to color her hair the Titian tint of raging fire. And although now one may spy white roots on Maleczech’s nearing 70-year-old crown, the fire is anything but diminished; in fact age may have fanned the flames.
As we sit dripping with the first heat of summer, Maleczech coolly bustles about the Mabou Mines offices here in New York City in the ex-schoolhouse cum theater center called PS 122. It is the Mines’ 16th year at PS 122 and their 37th season producing mind-blowing farsighted works that often spill over into the mainstream to become successes fou. Their production of Peter and Wendy is enjoying a rebirth at the Arena Stage in Washington, D.C., and their grab and spin on Ibsen’s Doll House is still raising hackles.
As we talk about her new work I am consumed by her calm. Her hands have occasional tremors, which stitch me to her even more firmly as it makes me see my mother’s hands. But Ruth’s mind is a steel trap. How, I wonder, does she have total recall of every play, all the thousands of elements, the names, the dates, the colors and feelings of new work, old, children, loves, artists? One could feel diminished in the face of such wondrous mental agility, but instead I attempt to channel her focus and calm resolve.
Her new piece — the five Mabou Mines artistic directors alternate producing the work of their choice, and this is Maleczech’s turn — is called What Women Do While Men Sit Knitting. It is an environmental extravaganza and a valentine to New York City, inspired by September 2001, when the West Village, where Maleczech lives, was filled with weeping people brandishing photographs of loved ones lost. “I wanted to make something as soon as I could after 9/11,” she says, “and this was as soon as I could. I held that image and I held on to it as I pondered what to do as a piece after 9/11. I picked two young women who perished on September 11, and I say their names every morning and I think about them and their lives lost. After that thought process I read Walt Whitman and his poems about New York City, but that was 175 years ago and I began to wonder what women poets would make of all of this.”
How is experimental work formed, created. and realized? I think many of us sit gob-smacked as non-traditional theater works on our subconscious, moving us in ways unimaginable, and then we wonder where it all begins. Maleczech says that for this piece it begin with five women poets, each chosen to celebrate their own borough:
Patricia Spears Jones (Brooklyn), Imelda O’Reilly (Staten Island), Migdalia Cruz (Bronx), Karen Kandel (Queens), Maggie Dubris (Manhattan).
After that it was finding Grammy-winning composer Lisa Gutkin, and inserting the idea of yarns – tall tales — told by men as intersticial moments. Maleczech and Gutkin actually utilize the chorus of men to play percussion with knitting needles on the metal scaffolding that is attached to a barge that floats off various piers, gracing all five boroughs.
Is your creative mind exhausted yet? Well, Ruth Maelczech’s isn’t. She adds a costume designer, Irina Kruzhilina, who designed clothes that transform and grow during the performance as their origami panels unfold, mirroring the kinetic constancy of this metropolis. Maleczech’s adoration for NYC is evident – the city that has provided a cultural succor for her for nearly 40 years.
The new work, according to Ruth, is “sort of more like a folk-opera, with the yarns providing a more historical input and the songs being personal in a gently general way.”
This is quintessential Maleczech — a mélange of words, poetry, music — and it floats into neighborhoods, leaving them refreshed. Even what is left over becomes art. At each site there will be an opportunity for the audience to leave, relics, if you will, and have their photographs taken in a special booth that mirrors the set pieces. At some point the photos and the relics will be combined into a gallery show.
Although awards are most probably not how Maleczech tallies her value (not as much, certainly, as the impending birth of her first grandchild), she has garnered multiple accolades: a Distinguished Artist award from the National Endowment for the Arts, Obie awards, fellowships, residencies across the world, even recognition from the government of Egypt for her pioneering role in experimental theater. Why I myself worship at the shrine of Ruth, however, is because of the way she has managed to continue to work, to create, to bust down theatrical walls, and still remain with her original theatrical partners, one of whom she was married to, and never lose the ability to see the good, the worth, and the theatrical magic in all around her.
Schedule for What Women Do While Men Sit Knitting:
8/31/07, 8 P.M., Governor’s Island Ferry parking lot
9/2/07, 8 P.M., South Beach Ocean Breeze Fishing Pier, Staten Island.
9/5/07, 8 P.M., On steps outside Community Center, Roberto Clement State Park, Bronx
9/7/07, 8 P.M., Gantry Plaza State Park Piers, Queens
9/9/07, 8 P.M., 69th Street Veterans’ Memorial Pier, Brooklyn.
