WHERE SHE STOPS NOBODY KNOWS

Aug 31, 2007

Margo Lee Sherman, an old friend, an extraordinary actress, and one of the original puppeteers, came up this summer to do a one-woman show at the Bread & Puppet farm. Here is a promo piece I wrote for her coming:

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WHERE SHE STOPS, NOBODY KNOWS

Christmas season, 1966. The war is heating up. At St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York, Cardinal Spellman calls for victory, Victory! 

On Fifth Avenue, among the shopping crowds, a young woman in white -- white robe, white hood, white oriental mask -- walks slowly up and down in front of the great Cathedral steps. She carries a bloody doll in her arms. And she carries a sign: I AM MARY MY BABY WAS NAPALMED IN VIETNAM.

The police arrive: “No masks allowed, no concealed faces.” So the young woman takes off the mask; her face is no longer concealed. And later, with full face, she mounts the steps of the Cathedral to leave the bloody Christ-child on the steps, a gift and reminder for the war-exultant cardinal.

“You can’t leave that there!”

The men in blue.

“Why not?”

“It’s littering.”

I AM MARY MY BABY WAS NAPALMED IN VIETNAM. The young woman was Margo Lee Sherman, and the event was one of the earliest creations of Peter Schumann’s Bread & Puppet Theater -- and in my opinion, one of the greatest pieces of political street theater in history.

Now, 40 plus years afterwards, Margo Lee Sherman is bringing her latest creation back to Bread & Puppet for the last Friday night offering of the season. On August 31st, at 8 PM, in the New Building behind the Museum, Margo will present What Do I Know About War?, an hour-long medley of stories told by twenty American soldiers, about their service in Iraq. Round and round she goes. Iraq -- our latest Vietnam, waiting for its Laos and Cambodia in Iran. I AM MARY.

Margo Lee Sherman is an extraordinary actress because she is an extraordinary person. Her way is slow, her voice deep, her timing devastating. If you asked her for the time, and she said simply “8:15”, you might break out crying. She has that kind of an affect, that kind of tone, that kind of diction. The smallest of her gestures is enormous.

And here she is, forty years and thirty one-woman shows later, still noting the same tears flooding the world, speaking them, sharing them, and calling them forth, still horrified.

Her choice of material is varied and subtle. For example, What Do I Know About War? was born from a story about Capt. Terrance Wright, who returned from Iraq and couldn't ‘t stop hiccuping. Hiccuping, that’s funny. what a riot. Well, apparently not for Capt. Wright, who was later found in a Fayetteville motel room -- dead -- from what the Army called “an unknown illness.”

OK then, hiccuping. Odd, maybe even grotesque. But what is

 hiccuping? Spasm of the diaphragm followed involuntarily by spasm of the glottis. Spasm. Spasms. Like Iraq? Involuntary, out of control, impossible to stop by willing. Chronic hiccuping? One’s humanity is left behind. Drinks in the hand are spilled and cups are broken. People make fun, and then avoid you, a victim of forces beyond your control.

The tiny actress makes big noises: explosions, gunfire, IEDs. Where have I heard these sounds before? Ah -- those little boys with their Tonka tanks and Mattel space guns, making sounds that defy orthography, usually followed with “...you’re dead!” Little boys -- like those 18-year olds with automatic weapons, making -- in their great wisdom -- life and death decisions for whole families, whole towns of “dirty ragheads” and “sand-niggers.” That’s where I’ve heard those sounds before. Little boys.

Such subtleties, conscious and unconscious, reverberate throughout the piece because, as a current Bread & Puppet sideshow sings, “Everything, everything, everything is everything.” Margo knows this, intensely, and the planet knows it, and humans need desperately to learn it.

An hour-long show, and for many of us a long trip to see it. But in its many contexts -- the silences it must provoke, the discussions driving home, the expanded understanding, beyond casualty figures, of the human costs of war, the new wariness with which to hear claims of its “success” -- the show is a long one, and huge. Like Margo Lee Sherman herself, tiny, tenacious, and deep.

 For a photo of Margo, see the printed article here.