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Twin Town High (vol. 8) |
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We've all been Bushwacked!
Wednesday 04 December @ 11:31:37 |
 Maxine Klein produces “Ambush,” an ironic comedy
by Ed Felien
“Hello.”
“Hello, this is Ed Felien. Is this Maxine Klein?”
“Yes. Can you hold a moment . . . [Goddam it! Stop it!] . . . You know, I’ve been saving pit bulls for a number of years.”
“Oh. What’s your new play like?”
“Ambush? It’s an irony, a kind of comedy. The first scene is high comedy.”
[From the first scene:]
THE STAGE AND AUDITORIUM ARE DARK, THE VOICE OF THE U. S. STATE DEPARTMENT IS HEARD:
RECORDED VOICE: Do you personally know a terrorist? A 25 million dollar reward is being offered for any reliable information about terrorist activity. Always be on the alert, and if you suspect terrorist activity, call this toll-free number: 1-800-U. S. REWARD. All information will be strictly confidential. In case of apprehension or conviction, the accused will never know who turned him in.
SUDDENLY ALL LIGHTS COME ON AND LOUD SOUNDS OF “HAIL TO THE CHIEF” FILL THE AIR. AT THE MICROPHONE IS A WOMAN RECOUNTING THE GLORIES OF THE CURRENT PRESIDENCY.
SPEAKER: Tonight you’ll see a nuts and bolts president with a power not seen in the Oval Office since the days of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. (Cheers) A daring man who has broken more international treaties than any other president in our nation’s history, and is still as popular as a posse in Texas. And now the man historians have already named “The War President,” Mr. First Strike himself, Quinsy Adams Shrubel.
Shrubel comes on stage, acts like the ignorant fool that today inhabits the White House, picks up a guitar and sings. His song ends: “Say what you want in the land of the free. But I can lock you up and throw away the key.”
The lights come up all the way and we realize now we are in a tribunal where Shrubel is actually a professor who has been satirizing the President in his class. He is being tried for aiding terrorism.
[From the Director’s Notes in the program:]
“When Bush-appointee Attorney General John Ashcroft was called to the U. S. Congress to answer questions about democratic liberties that would be restricted in his USA Patriot Bill, he arrogantly waved a copy of the Al Qaeda terrorism handbook at that elected body, admonishing them thusly: ‘To those who scare peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberty, my message is this: Your tactics only aid terrorists—for they erode our national unity and diminish our resolve.’ With these words Ashcroft not only effectively silenced most of his opponents, but began a frightening, if not entirely new, era in this country—one in which the most basic of all rights in a democracy, the right to dissent, is on trial for its life. And, unfortunately, the Patriot Act was but a dark prelude to the Pentagon’s proposed Office of Total Information Awareness which for once and all would make readily accessible each and every detail of the private life of our nation’s citizens.
“In a similar period of our nation’s history when Joe McCarthy put fear on trial in his futile search for Communists, Edward R. Murrow stated that ‘No one can terrorize a whole nation unless we are all his accomplices.’ ‘Ambush’ chooses not to be an accomplice to the tyranny of silence that this nation’s leadership would once again impose on its citizens. Admittedly, the play is fictional. Yet were one to investigate the events and characters of this evening’s entertainment, one would find, I think, that most have their basis in the spirit, if not always the letter, of what is happening today in this country. And, as Arthur Miller said in Death of a Salesman, ‘Attention must be paid.’”
Before I had ever met Maxine Klein I saw a touring production of her play, “Mother Jones” in the early 1970s when I was teaching at Wayne State University in Detroit. I was struck by the upfront politics and intensity, as well as by the writing and intelligence.
Maxine told me some miners happened to see the play one evening, and they insisted the company bring the play down to the Diamond Coal Mines in Kentucky. The tour detoured and went to perform for the miners. One of them came up after the performance and said, “My life is now complete. I’ve met Mother Jones.”
Maxine considers that her greatest compliment.
“Ambush” is “about what’s happening in today’s world. Democracy is on trial. But this is a funny play. It’s a musical.”
Bush is a supremely arrogant man: “No more presidents by election, now we get them by selection,” she sings, quoting her play. “Ordinary voices are not heard. We have the empire made manifest, more far-reaching than Rome. We don’t hide horrors like the School of the Americas. We don’t hear the cry of the dispossessed. The media and dominant culture don’t show us what is happening. They provide escapes that prevent us from understanding our real condition.”
“Tim Pawlenty has a marvelous plan for dealing with impoverishment. He’s going to turn the food shelves over to charities. The 501c3’s are already depleted. The Federal and State governments don’t know or care about these problems. There isn’t even a pretense anymore that government should be trying to help. There’s a war of attrition against poor people. Eventually, the machines will just take over.”
Maxine experienced something like the conflict of her new play in her personal and professional life earlier this fall. She was scheduled to teach at St. Catherine’s College in St. Paul along with her job teaching at Minneapolis Community and Technical College. There was a meeting of faculty at St. Cate’s before classes began to talk about how the classes should be taught. One man said, “One of our teachers has obvious bias and baggage. Teaching shouldn’t be about putting forward your own ideas, it should be about opening minds and getting students to express themselves.” One of the nuns said, “One of my best students said all you had to do was agree with her left-wing politics to get an A.” Rather than try to teach under that kind of pressure, Maxine Klein quit.
After September 11 there is greater and greater pressure on academics to be conformist and convergent, she said.
“Producing theater is always a struggle for a culture of meaning. Most theater teaches the values of the ruling class. Political theater should be held to the same standards of entertainment as other theater, but we should dramatize the struggles of ordinary people. We should deal with the passions and problems of most of this country—workers, women, student activists—rather than the elite few.”
[“Hold on a minute. They want out,” obviously her attention had gone back to the pit bull terriers.]
“That’s O.K. Maxine, I think I’ve got enough,” I said.
“Ambush,” written and directed by Obie-Award-winning Maxine Klein, is produced by Candid Theatre at Bedlam Studio, 514 ½ Cedar Ave. S. It opens Dec. 6 and runs through Dec. 22. Call 612-341-1038 for ticket information.
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