Today's column is an interview with Mary Fengar Gail, author of the play "Jambulu". Moreover, Metanexus will be providing a panel for InterAct's performance of "Jambulu" on 2/5/2002 in Philadelphia. Read on to find out more about this event.

Metanexus is delighted to announce the next collaborative evening with InterAct Theatre in Philadelphia with a performance and discussion of "Jambulu" on Tuesday, February 5, 2002. The play begins at 7:00 PM followed by refreshments and a panel discussion. Actors, director, and audience will all join in the conversation.

"Jambulu" is by Mary Fengar Gail, whose critically acclaimed World Premiere production of "Drink Me" was also produced by InterAct. Opening January 18 and running through February 17, the play takes us to the Mojave desert and into the Research Institute for the Discovery of Extraterrestrial Life Forms. When a group of misfit scientists finally comes into contact with an alien life form, all are changed in unimaginable ways. Is this the beginning of a new race, or the end of humanity, as we know it? In their interview with author Mary Fengar Gail, Larry Loebell and Susannah Engstrom commented ". . .the play raises questions about race and identity, and to what extent our social and political values and even our behaviors arise from our backgrounds."

Panelists for the post-performance discussion on Tuesday, February 5 will be Stacey Ake, Associate Editor of Metanexus: The Online Forum on Religion and Science; Douglas Vakoch, psychologist at the SETI Institute, University of California, Davis; and Andrew Petto, Associate Professor of Science in the Division of Liberal Arts at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia and editor for the National Center for Science Education.

"Missing Link" by Producing Artistic Director Seth Rozin running March 29 through April 28 will conclude the season. Developed at InterAct's 2000 Showcase of New Plays. "Missing Link" is a deeply human drama centering around a couple who lose their only child in a tragic plane crash and are catapulted into conflicting crises of faith. The play explores the nature of faith and grief in our volatile contemporary world.

Rev. Ralph Ciampa, Chaplain and Director of the Department of Pastoral Care at the University of Pennsylvania Health System; Dr. Dan Gottlieb, psychologist and host of Voices in the Family; and Rabbi Barry Schwartz of Congregation M'koor Shalom, Cherry Hill, N.J. will be the panelists.

InterAct was founded by current Producing Artistic Director Seth Rozin in 1988. The company produces new and contemporary plays that explore the social, political, and cultural issues of our time. Seeking to educate as well as entertain, InterAct produces plays that explore issues of social, cultural and political relevance and uses theatre to influence positive social change in the community. The company's aim is educate, as well as to entertain, its audiences by producing world-class, thought-provoking productions, and by using theatre as a tool to foster positive social change in the school, the workplace, and the community. Through its artistic and educational programs, InterAct seeks to make a significant contribution to the cultural life of Philadelphia and to the American theatre. InterAct uses the unique power and magic of the theatre to ask difficult questions about the world we live in, examining the forces that influence what we believe and why. InterAct dares to dramatize complex and controversial issues with artistic integrity and fairness.

The InterAct Theatre is located at 2030 Sansom Street in Philadelphia. For information and tickets, call the InterAct Theatre at 215.568.8077 or visit their website <http://www.InterActTheatre.org>. For information about Metanexus programs, please contact Julia Loving at 610.486.1176 or<loving@metanexus.net>.

--Stacey E. Ake

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=--=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

Subject: Interview with Mary Fengar Gail, author of "Jambulu" From: InterAct Theatre Email: <http://www.InterActTheatre.org>

MARY FENGAR GAIL JAMBULU INTERVIEW

Interview conducted by Larry Loebell, Literary Manager and Dramaturg and Susannah Engstrom, Literary Intern

INTERACT: Like many InterAct plays in the past, Jambulu has become instantly relevant because of current events. The play raises questions about race and identity, and to what extent our social and political values and even our behaviors arise from our backgrounds. There is the suggestion in the play that humans cannot exist without conflict, and the only way to stop belligerence is to evolve beyond our humanity. Is that your personal view?

MARY FENGAR GAIL: Being the wickedest person I know, I don't dare define, much less judge the whole of humanity and its capacity to evolve; however, my characters do both and often aspire to leading ethical lives, though they rarely succeed since they're usually plagued with weak natures and bad habits. The characters that most intrigue me -- artists, scientists, adventurers, criminals, clerics, spies, children, misfits, and the mad --
tend to believe that the great purpose of life is to transcend their creaturely identities, to live in a world where the intellect and imagination are primary. So to define themselves in terms of race, age, gender, or ethnicity is to be limited, [b]alkanized, stranded on a smaller planet. And for playwrights, imagining other cultures, other races, can be liberating, allowing them to live outside themselves, to learn to tolerate and even embrace identities they once thought insufferable.

The whole question of identity is being confronted day after day in Fortress America, but can a person truly be identified? Beyond the fragility of the body is the mystery of personality, character and temperament, the profound influences of family, peers, politics, literature and art, and what of the sacred mystery of the soul? And what of the one thing that most expresses our existence to others -- our names? Once upon a time in America we could board an airplane without even showing an ID card. We were the only country in the world that allowed for the glorious freedom to invent and reinvent ourselves, to write any name we wished on our ticket to Tahiti. Now laws are being passed that will sanction our being scanned, tracked, detained, frisked and ID'ed so often so that we're starting to think in terms security at the risk of losing the freedoms that made our country so unique. Philadelphia's beloved Ben Franklin must be spinning in his grave. It was Ben who said, "Anyone who sacrifices essential liberties for a temporary sense of personal security deserves neither freedom nor security."

Your question also asks if the only way to stop belligerence is to evolve beyond our humanity, but it isn't belligerence we should be trying to stop. Belligerence can be a positive quality, leading to intellectual and creative acts. After all, to the true questioner, nothing is sacred, and the search for the truth requires relentless determination, even contentiousness. Members of the Taliban are not belligerent; they're obedient -- following the dogma of a cult that demands conformity and adherence to rigid rules that keep them infantilized, intolerant, and unimaginative. The obedient abdicate the responsibility of true adulthood, giving up their moral decision making process to leaders like Osama Bin Laden. Belligerence requires a sense of autonomy, of courage, of being allowed to make ethical and moral choices, the very freedoms cultists and theocrats discourage and despise. That women were enshrouded, that music was forbidden to be heard or books read, that the ancient Buddhas that belonged to the history of all humanity were destroyed -- these were not acts of belligerence but of blind obedience, moral cowardice, and a contempt for beauty, creativity, and soul soaring freedom.

INTERACT: The women in Jambulu are all very accomplished, yet there is a pervasive feeling that many of our sincerest objectives in the struggle to create parity between men and women remain unreached. Aurora says that she is working to keep from internalizing feelings of low self-esteem. You clearly believe that world wide this is still an essential struggle.

MFG: You have only to read our newspapers, watch television, or live and work in the world to see that in nearly every country in, in every government, in every place of power and authority, there are the faces of men, almost always and exclusively men, men, men. In light of recent geopolitical horrors, I feel that JAMBULU is relevant because it's apocalyptic, features strong women, and reflects in the worldview of its characters a suspicion of male power structures. It appears that patriarchal religions and theocracies with their authoritarian male gods continually inspire oppression at some level. They also tend to exclude and deny the heroism and sacredness of women. (The maxim "to exclude is to revile" is painfully true for many women.) In fact, every professional woman I know has felt at some time undervalued, underutilized and assumed to be less competent than her male colleagues. There is even a theory that because the arts are considered to be vaguely "feminine" they continue to be undervalued in our culture. Sadly, the world seems to belong much more to men than to women, and the fact that women continue to be excluded from its power structures may be why it remains so tragically imbalanced.

InterAct: We know you have done a lot of research on a whole range of subjects in writing this play, orchids, UFO research, American and African history, and much else. There are a lot of disparate elements in this play that are brought together in a quite imaginative way. What led you to this scenario?

MFG: It is usually the choice of locality that becomes the stage setting that leads to every other element in my plays. With Jambulu, I began with a vivid picture of the Mojave Desert which I've crossed several times. Then I built RIDELF, a large edifice complete with a research laboratory, a greenhouse, and a conference room. Then the characters materialized, and I christened them, fathomed their natures, and set them loose. The fact that their varied professions and hobbies coincided with my own interests is not a coincidence, and a great excuse to read about subjects that intrigue me. James Joyce said that for a literary work to be artful, it must have wholeness, harmony and radiance, and I believe that the radiance comes from the juxtaposition of opposites: in personalities, professions, religious and political beliefs, and in the syntax of their speech. My plays all begin as collages and then comes the arduous work of making the disparate elements into a coherent whole. Aristotle wrote that "the essence of drama is story" by which he meant plot, and even in these "postmodern" times, there remains this childlike longing to have a tale told. I still see that as part of the dramatists' obligation, so I rely on my characters to assemble themselves into some sort of story while I follow them around and take notes.

InterAct: What is your writing process like?

MFG: With Jambulu, after I gathered my notes into a large three ring binder, I went to bed. I wrote my first draft in long hand while propped on a bedsitter. This is because I once suffered a long bout of bronchitis and was forced to write in bed. Miraculously, the pen danced across the page and since that day, I haven't been inspired to write anywhere else. For me, the bedroom is a sequestered chamber, the place where dreams are still wafting about and the rest of the house can't beckon for attention, not to mention the phone, fax, and Email. After working in bed all morning, I retreat downstairs to the computer and type and print my scriblings. Then I take the pages upstairs for revisions and on it goes: upstairs, downstairs, upstairs, downstairs, writing and rewriting until a coherent draft emerges. Then actors are summoned to the house where they're wined and dined, and read their roles in a state of uninhibited inebriation. A reading never fails to inspire more revisions and more readings until the script is finally ready to be copied, bound and peddled to gullible theatres like InterAct where a workshop with professional actors leads to even more re-visioning.

InterAct: What is your greatest challenge or obstacle as a playwright?

MFG: The biggest challenge facing me as a playwright is the American Theatre's relentless preference for naturalistic carpet-slipper plays that tread softly, offend no one, and simply mirror or affirm our quotidian lives (which television and movies do very well). As a fantasist, I dream of a theatre of heightened passions that takes me to unfamiliar worlds, a theatre that's imaginative, subversive, and features brave protagonists of mythic stature in plays that require a fusion of all the arts. I long to see and create plays that communicate compelling ideas and images by employing slanted speech that risks being heretical, scenery of unfamiliar, even alien landscapes, and acting styles that reach beyond the confines of verisimilitude towards song and dance. I truly believe that the theatre, with its roots in myth, poetry, and spectacle, is starving for visionary creators to continue its honored purpose as a vital, confrontation art form. But it also needs courageous producers like Seth Rozin, dramaturgs like Larry Loebell, directors like Bob Hedley and Whit MacLaughlin, and audiences everywhere willing to participate intellectually and emotionally so that going to the theatre becomes a creative act unto itself.

InterAct: As in the first play of yours InterAct produced, Drink Me, this play has at its center a child who is both estranged from and deeply tied to her parents. In both plays there were almost two sets of parents in the mind of the child - the real and the shadow parents, the real being somehow inferior to the (better) shadow versions. But we, the audience, see that the parents are a mixture of things, not as good or bad as the doppelgangers in the mind of the child, but deeply human, conflicted, and striving. Can you talk about this idea as an ongoing theme of yours?

MFG: After writing my first few plays, I realized I had two major themes: fragmentation and what I call "the shining child". My characters tend to be divided and tormented souls, and there's usually some heroic adolescent who is either an agent of salvation or chaos. I've never sought psychiatric analysis or attempted to fathom the reason behind these themes, but having survived an oppressive childhood of constant moving, it's possible I may be re-visioning those years through playwriting. Of course life is better in my plays because the adolescent characters are usually empowered, respected, and beloved -- if only by me.

InterAct: When we began having design meetings for Jambulu, one of the things we talked about was the desire for utopia which appears in most world literature going back to Plato and beyond. A perfected life, a life of perfect egalitarianism, a life free of conflict etc. After the September 11th attacks, we all admitted rethinking our ideas about utopia. Nella's quandary at the end of the play seems immediately significant: how do we feel about the imposition of a utopian possibility by any one individual on others. Certainly the Taliban feel their philosophy, if universally applied, to be utopian. Wiping out the infidels is a utopian urge. Any comment on this?

MFG: Any hope for a utopian world seems to have been utterly quashed by current geopolitical hostilities. Maybe we should consider creating a dystopia instead, cordoning off a large parcel of barren desert where every man and woman who aspires to be a warrior can sign up to fight people who don't believe in their gods, their governments, their codes of ethics, civility, and morality. I'm being facetious, of course, but what's the world to do with an over population of angry idle young men simmering with hatred and eager to kill and be killed? Is it too late for the warmth and affection that might make them capable of empathy for others? Is it too late for respect for tolerance? An end to indolence and poverty? Is it too late even for prayers? Certainly it's too late for language. Whenever a bomb is dropped language has failed. Perhaps this dystopia can be a giant theatre for acting out these wars instead of having to actually live and die in them. I suppose in a true utopia, feelings of hatred and revenge and the madness that comes with being human are molded into art, composed into music, written into poems or plays or planted into gardens. There don't seem to be any gardens in Afghanistan.

InterAct: Another on-going theme of yours is the despoliation of the earth through human overpopulation. As a resident of the most populace state in the nation, you clearly have strong feelings about the impact of too many people existing on scarce resources.

MFG: After writing DRINK ME, the population problems of the planet became an ongoing interest. In fact, the United Nations Populations Fund recently held a news briefing, and their report stated that if women all over the world don't receive adequate reproductive health care, equal status with men, and the right to plan the size of their families, then our poor planet will grow 50% to 9.3 billion over the next half century. We are already reaching the last of many resources -- degrading soil, polluting air, destroy natural habitats and most of the hideous wars in the world are population wars -- too many people fighting over too few resources. The power of our own fundamentalist religions has kept the United States from doing its fair share, and this is a crisis of global proportions that affects us all every day.

InterAct: Jambulu, for all of its serious themes, is a fun play, funny and sexy. This is part of what makes your writing so attractive to us, the ability of your plays to evoke such seemingly separate response in the same space. Is this your personal view as well, that we keep going by finding love and sex and humor as palliative to fear and conflict?

MFG: All my plays are comic dramas, yet their themes tend to be dark and apocalyptic. The characters are often wicked, misguided, unfortunate, and their demise inevitable -- so how can I convey all this in a tolerable way if not with humor? Humor let's us escape all the horrors of life, to gleefully mock the gruesome inevitability of our own deaths and all those we cherish. Without laughter there would be no joy, without joy no hope, and to abdicate hope is to give up on the world which to me is a crime against the future and all the children destine to dwell there. Emerson spoke of optimism as a moral imperative to living in America, and I believe he's right. The most grim and savage tale can still find redemption with a line of humor, irony, or wit. Laughter obliterates despair, even manic laughter. Ha, ha! Ho, ho!!!

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
This publication is hosted by Metanexus Online http://www.metanexus.net. The views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of Metanexus or its sponsors.

Metanexus welcomes submissions between 1000 to 3000 words of essays and book reviews that seek to explore and interpret science and religion in original and insightful ways for a general educated audience. Previous columns give a good indication of the topical range and tone for acceptable essays. Please send all inquiries and submissions to . Metanexus consists of a number of topically focused forums (Anthropos, Bios, Cogito, Cosmos, Salus, Sophia, and Techne) and periodic HTML enriched composite digests from each of the lists.

Copyright notice: Except when otherwise noted, articles may be forwarded, quoted, or republished in full with attribution to the author of the column and "Metanexus: The Online Forum on Religion and Science ". Republication for commercial purposes in print or electronic format requires the permission of the author. Copyright 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004 by Metanexus Institute.

Published   2002.02.02