Montpellier, France
October 31, 2003
By Jerome Lipani
Montpellier, France
October 31, 2003
By Jerome Lipani
Edited by Andrew Periale, this article first appeared in Puppetry
International #15, Spring /Summer 2004
In Dragon Dance Theatre's Seven Angry Men, three generations of
Rockefellers-- incarnate in one Frenchman-- strut the stage in pajamas,
slippers and a cane. We follow this Rockefeller as he gleefully despoils
the environment while decimating his enemies until-- quite literally-- all hell breaks loose. The work was created and first performed as part of a community theatre festival near Queretaro, Mexico in April, 2003, and then further developed in the Dragon Dance summer season in Middlesex, Vermont. Now reworked for its third production in Montpellier, France, it is being played in an arboretum under the natural canopy of ancient trees.
The production has changed significantly since its premier. It is sharper, clearer, and more poignant now. At this moment in the play's rather unusual process of development, Dragon Dance Theatre has seized
opportunities for alchemy of time, place, human personalities--- even
the weather-- while sustaining a unifying theme. Dramatic elements
encounter one another like distant stars colliding, and the official versions of historic events are blown to smithereens.
Seven Angry Men begins with a thumbnail history of the exploitation of
oil in America. Rockefeller's monologue (played by Michel Faucherre, also the show's producer) begins with a description of how, initially, he drove the small-time businessmen who discovered oil in 19th century Pennsylvania out of business. He goes on to say that his biggest problem
as a businessman was to convince the consumer to pay for this natural
resource, because it was like water or air; “it's everywhere? it bubbles up out of the ground. Oil is a natural resource? A national resource? but we used the law and the government. I had those senators in my pocket. We forced the public to buy their own oil! Brilliant, isn't It!?”;
In the historical rivalry between capitalism and communism, the anti-communist propaganda used by Rockefeller and his cronies, as depicted in Seven Angry Men, goes something like this:
“These communists were proposing to socialize the natural wealth. They
said the natural resources of a country belonged to its people. Ridiculous! My idea was to socialize the risk and privatize the profit: that is, put the profit in MY pocket”;-- an irony still very much alive in the world. Subsequent scenes detail the purposeful ruination of public transportation, the cozy relationship between American business and the Nazis, and the
relationship of Rockefeller and the Military (depicted as a rollicking sado-masochistic spank-fest). Certainly, documentation exists which would support all these depictions (for the spirit of the latter, try Hannah Arendt on the Nuremberg Trials or the work of Jean Genet). It is amazing how little time it takes Dragon Dance to recreate in miniature the essential elements which have so much influence over our lives. If only it were as simple to liberate ourselves from the muck in which we are mired!
Finally, the scene shifts to Rockefeller's imagined death-- a version of the classic St. Peter scene, in which the soul of Rockefeller is interrogated at Heaven's Gate: “Are you the Rockefeller who financed the eugenics studies? Who made personal profit on the God-given natural resources of the American public? Who destroyed the Diego Rivera mural because it contained a portrait of Lenin”;? St. Peter sends him to Hell, and the public must follow him on his voyage! The significance of this is left up to audience members to decide. Does it indicate a certain complicity? After all, we passively and without protest consume endless amounts of fossil fuel. By candlelight, the audience and actors walk together through the Gate of Hell. In the French production, the gates of Heaven and Hell have been made out of locally-found bamboo. Masks (the images of the seven angry men of the play's title) made from natural items gathered on expeditions by the actors-- bark from trees, wild grasses-- are hung on the wall of the two gates. Devils enter to toy with Rockefeller while he is being interrogated. Eventually, they escort him through the Gate to the Underworld.
In the dark, the audience is led to the base of a great tree, where they
hear a poem called “;Homage to Babylon”; written by Katah, a Dragon Dance principal. This poem is an elegy for the loss of the artifacts and
knowledge of an important and ancient civilization as a result of the recent American invasion of Iraq. In Montpellier, it was performed in English and French by Sam Kerson and Didier Jean, and at its conclusion they embraced one another.
The next scene features a Lucifer played by two actors-- one plays the head, the other the body. The premise of this scene-- which embodies the
tragic message of Seven Angry Men-- is that the devil will show the public; “the president's trick, a fantastic magic trick, straight from Baghdad, in which seven angry men will kill each other in mid-air without having any ill effects on the citizens below”; Lucifer calls them from their nether worlds one by one, like contestants in a daytime TV game show, asking each if he is armed and ready to go to his battle station. The other actors-- representing the Voices of Industry, the Military, the American Media Monopoly-- perform various texts in the background simultaneously. The din is composed of little understood but vitally important pieces of information from actual military texts—the specs for such weapons as tomahawk missiles, the American bombing of the central market in Baghdad and, later, a collage of George Bush's State of the Union speech and Israeli televised coverage of the bombing of Saddam Hussein's compound-- all to a Tango accompaniment (music: Daniel Roth and others) and devil dances (choreography: Kirsten Eckstein).
Finally, an innocent person is sought, and an Iraqi mother and her child
are found. She is initially enticed with the promise of an American refrigerator. The matter-of-factness of this blatant colonialist insult is underscored when it becomes understood that this ordinary woman is
actually an incarnation of the ancient Sumerian goddess Inanna, the mother of the world. In the apocalyptic moment that follows, in which
fireworks represent a major battle, the masks of the seven angry men
ignite, in turn setting the goddess ablaze. The event is a distillation of the horrors of war. In this European setting, the wall of fire which enveloped the innocent woman-- her child in her arms-- reminded one of Dresden, of Guernica.
By way of postscript, the devil reappears and apologizes to the audience, assuring them that the woman and her child were merely collateral damage, and that he will try the president's trick again in another country, like Syria or Iran, or “even a little country near you”; One more round of fireworks goes off in the distance-- a bad omen, certainly. Once again it is the powerful imagery created by Dragon Dance Theatre which has given us a fresh look at some of the ethical and moral dilemmas which flow through our history like oil, like blood.