Playwright's Notes on ...
WIDOWS
Acknowledgements in the Guise of an Afterward by Ariel
Dorfman.
The origins of this play go back twenty years.
I had been forced to leave Chile in 1973 after General
Augusto Pinochet had seized power and had, since then, wandered through
several countries until finally settling down in 1976 in Holland. It was
there, in Amsterdam, that the story which remains at the core of Widows first
came to me.
I was working on a painful series of poems about the
missing, men and women, who, snatched from their homes by the secret police in
the silence of the night, are never heard of again, their bodies denied to
their relatives as if they had never existed. As I wrote, I could feel
myself being turned into a bridge through which the living and the dead were
trying to communicate, a burial mound where they could meet and mourn and
touch. By allowing the voices of the disappeared and the families
waiting for their return to speak to each other using my faraway words I was
also finding a way of going back to myself to the faraway country where my own
body and, of course, these very words I was writing, were forbidden, placing
myself imaginatively in that place I had escaped, that story I could not share
except as a witness, except as a channel for those voices which seemed to be
taking possession of my throat.
One night – it was early, just after dinner – I was
visited by an image, almost a hallucination: an old woman by a river, holding
the hand of a body that had just washed up on its shores. And the
certainty that this scene had happened before, that this was not the first
time that river had yielded a dead man to the arms of that old and twisted
woman.
I wrote all night, the same poem over and over again,
trying to hear that woman I had invented and who nevertheless seemed to have a
life of her own, I spent those long dark European hours trying to drag that
woman out of the darkness inside me, the darkness on the other side of the
world where she lay trapped in oblivion and indifference, I sat there and
tried to understand word for word what she was saying and that so few in the
alien world I unwillingly lived in seemed to care about. And by dawn, a
new poem, almost like a new born child, was there on the table where we ate
our meals and where I also wrote my work back then in exile, that poem which
gave origin to Widows was waiting for my wife Angelica, always my first
reader, to give her opinion.
This was the poem:
What did you say – the found another one?
- I can’t hear you – this morning
another one floating
in the river?
talk louder – so you didn’t even dare
no one can identify him?
the police said not even his mother
not even the mother who bore him
not even she could
they said that?
the other women had already tried – I can’t understand
what
you’re saying,
they turned him over and looked at his face, his hands
they looked at,
right,
they’re all waiting together;
silent, in morning,
on the riverbank,
they took him out of the water
he’s naked
as the day he was born,
there’s a police captain
and they won’t leave until I get there?
He doesn’t belong to anybody,
You say he doesn’t belong to anybody?
tell them I’m getting dressed,
I’m leaving now
if the captain’s the same one as
last time
he knows
what will happen.
that body will have my name
my son’s my husband’s
my father’s
name
I’ll sign the papers tell them
tell them I’m on my way,
wait
for me
and don’t let that captain touch him
don’t let that captain take one step closer
to him.
Tell them not to worry:
I can bury my own dead.
So. It was done. The old
woman had a presence, she had been given a voice, she was free to roam the
earth in that poem and speak her lines. I had done my job. Now it
was up to her to do hers.
Except that the old woman was
not content with this. In the fictitious universe of poetry she had
defied that captain and now she would not leave me alone in my own
unfortunately quite existent historical universe of exile.
As the years went by, I could
not rid myself of the certainty that there was more, much more, to her story
than what I had written, that in the poem I had merely grazed the outer skin
of that pain, that fierce determination of hers not to let the captain bury
her dead, and that she wanted me to go deeper, she wanted the world to know
what happened before, what happened afterwards, she wanted – in brief – to
be narrated, told in time, filled with a world and filling it. That old
woman wanted a destiny and she would not rest until I had given it to her.
Perhaps she would never have
been successful – after all, I cannot dispense that sort of service to every
one of the crazed literary creatures who mill around inside me and clamour for
the light of day and paper – if she had not formed an alliance with another
obsession of mine that was just as difficult to get rid of: the need to be
published in my country, to reach the audience that the dictatorship was
denying me. I was particularly worried about the young people back in
Chile – and in other countries of Latin America, Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil,
so many of them suffering the same tyranny, the same armies imposing death and
defeat. And I began to wonder oh so slowly if I could not write a novel
dealing with the disappeared, telling the story of that old woman and that
river and those bodies and that captain, but using a pseudonym, disguising my
name and perhaps even, yes, disguising the country where this was happening.
A great deal of the horror of Chile was, after all, enhanced by the fact that
this sort of tragedy and this sort of resistance had occurred before in
history, that we seemed to be repeating, forty years after the Nazi
experiments, some of the same endless sorrows and iniquities. What if I
were to make up a Danish author who, living under the German occupation of his
country, had written this story, a fictitious author who would himself be, I
decided, a missing person? What if that story about an old woman by a
river in a place like, say, Greece, had been lost all these years and only
recently located and now as being published for the first time? What if
that novel, supposedly written by that Danish author, happened to be
translated into Spanish and sold in Chile? Could the authorities of my country
object? How would they know that I was the real author?
Sometime in the summer of
1978, I began to write that novel which I called, from the very beginning,
Widows. I could not have written of such loss if I had not, at that
time, been accompanied by my wife who was pregnant with the boy who was to be
our son Joaquin, if I had not lifted my eyes from the page that was taking me
into the hell of those women on a riverbank and been unable to see our eldest
son Rodrigo playing cheerfully nearby. The joy that I was experiencing
was precisely what was being stolen from my protagonists.
And as, in the months that
followed, I answered the call of that old woman and gave her a world in which
to live, I embarked as well on a different sort of operation, of a less
literary kind: I appealed to those who, in the real world of real frontiers
and real censors, could help me fool the dictatorship in Chile. My
primary partners in this wild scam turned out to be two fellow writers both of
whom are no longer living – and whose affection and loyalty I can now
acknowledge. My friend Heinrich Boll, the German Nobel Prize winner, who
had already helped Solzhenitzen smuggle his manuscripts out of the repressive
Soviet Union, was delightful with the opportunity of assisting a Chilean
writer do the reverse and smuggle his manuscript into a country where he could
not be published. He would preface the book, Boll said with a twinkle,
as we sat drinking tea in his house near Cologne: he would explain to the
readers that the son of an unknown Danish author had come to him with his
father’s long lost novel that the world should now read forty years after
its creator’s death at the hands of the Nazi secret police. And a
month later in Paris the Argentine writer Julio Cortazar who had been like a
brother to me in those years of exile, told me that he would gladly and
mischievously appear as the “translator” of the book into Spanish
from the French – though of course the text that would be seeing the light
of day would be my own original Spanish language version.
All I needed now was for a
publisher who brought out books in Chile, Argentina and Spain and had
originally shown some enthusiasm for the project when I had mentioned it to
him, to give me the green light. But when the man read the manuscript,
he demurred. He wasn’t ready, he told me, to risk his whole enterprise
on this sort of adventure: the military would quickly see through the ruse and
then I would be safely out of harm’s way, still banished, but he and his
employees and his investors would have to suffer Pinochet’s displeasure.
There is nothing an Army hates more than being made fun of.
So I was left stranded with
my old woman on this side of the barrier of fear that still surrounded Chile.
She had not managed to surreptitiously infiltrate me back into my country.
But, she suggested, the world was still there, as much in need of this story
as my country. We should circulate it abroad, wherever we could until
that remote day when Chile would be free to receive my words and hers.
I proceeded to publish the
novel under my own name. It was no longer necessary to bother Boll and
Cortazar. Several foreign editors suggested that I should now make the
story more overtly Latin American and militant and denunciatory.
Instead, I decided to preserve the framing device of the Danish author and to
keep the Greek setting for the story. I did not want readers to feel
that this was merely some exotic abuse in lands that they had barely heard of.
I wanted them to ask themselves about the connections between my country and
theirs, my present and their past, our present and their future. And
besides, I had discovered that the distancing of my urgent reality back home,
my ability to pretend someone else had written that narrative, had had a
liberating effect on it. This allegorical approach helped to solve an
artistic dilemma that besieges many authors who deal with contemporary
political issues: how to write about matters that have extraordinary
documentary weight without being subjected to the grinding jaws of a
“realism” that is often unwilling to depict the complexity of what is
truly happening? To give just one example: when I wrote that novel, no
bodies of the missing had yet been unearthed, neither in Chile nor elsewhere.
If I had written only about what was effectively transpiring in my land, I
would have been limited to tracing and copying what history had already
materialized. Instead, I imagined a different scenario, one that history
was hiding at the moment which would, in the years to come, reveal itself: I
prophesied that the bodies would begin to appear, that nobody could stop the
dead from coming home, that the women were bringing them back against silence
and oppression, and effect, as time went by, they began to emerge from the
rivers and the mine shafts and the fields and the sands of Chile and Latin
America, they came as if from the depths of the imagination of the world.
I didn’t want to be trapped into reproducing what existed out there. I
wanted my literature to explore an alternative future that my imagination
could see and that perhaps could someday emerge from reality itself. I
also saw my story going beyond mere denunciations of the terrors of a
dictatorship, asking questions about memory and gender and betrayal and
community and writing itself which should not be subsumed in what seemed to be
the political questions the text posed.
This dilemma of how to tell a
story that was historical inasmuch as it derived from the suffering of real
human beings but that simultaneously had to obey aesthetic and literary laws
of representation that demanded freedom from that immediate history, would
come back to haunt me in the story’s next embodiment, when many years later,
one day in 1985, I got a call from Judy James, then with Mark Taper Forum in
Los Angeles, who had been given the novel by my friend Deena Metzger and who
thought it cried out to be a play and, eventually she thought, a film.
The old woman inside me
agreed. She wanted more people to see her life, to witness how she had
not allowed death to dictate that life. She wanted to live again, this
time on stage.
Thus began one of the,
longest and most arduous creative odysseys of my existence. The poem had
taken a night to compose and the novel, a year. The play was to bedevil
me for almost a decade.
Widows the play had many
incarnations. Under the diligent guiding light of my director at the
Taper, Bob Egan, and supported with verve by Gordon Davidson, the artistic
director of the company, my play went through many rewrites and two major
workshops where the actors gave everything of themselves and, in return,
showed me no mercy with their questions. I felt that I knew the women of
this play, knew who they were, from what despair and loss and ambiguity they
acted: it was the men, the military, who ended up being a real enigma, and in
those workshops Richard Jordan and Rene Auberjenois who incarnated the
Captain, and Tony Plana, who played the Lieutenant, were particularly helpful.
But advice was not enough: I needed to see it fully staged to try and
figure out what was wrong. In 1988, Diane and Johnny Simons of the Hip
Pocket Theatre in Fort Worth, Texas, premiered a version that had just won a
New American Plays Award at the Kennedy Center; and that same summer I went on
to get another production starring Tony Musante and directed Kay Matschullat
at the Williamstown Theatre Festival. Reviews and audiences were
enthusiastic, but I knew as I watched the staging, that the play had not yet
freed itself from the magic of the novel.
After yet another rewrite and
another disappointing reading at the always faithful Taper, Bob Egan and
Gordon Davidson proposed in 1989 a different solution: perhaps I needed
someone else to come in and collaborate with me. I was skeptical, with
the old woman inside me kept nagging, the dead and the missing inside us would
not leave either of us alone. So I reluctantly agreed to read some of
the plays of the man my friends at the Taper thought could help me bring my
vision to fruition. He was a relatively unknown playwright but was
bound, they were sure, for great things.
His name was Tony Kushner.
When I read his plays, A
Bright Room Called Day, and the first draft of an absolutely compelling
drama entitled Angels in America, I agreed that he was indeed the right
person to work with me. Tony’s vision might be different from mine,
but he was struggling with my same demons of expression, confronting way in
which politics and imagination intersect, how to depict suffering and
repression without sinking into how to depict suffering and repression without
sinking into hopelessness, how to be colloquial and simultaneously mythical,
how to show human resistance and resilience without being a propagandistic or
doctrinaire, how to recognize that we have the enemy inside and the best
people are capable of the most terrible things.
If I deluded myself into
believing that I was the bridge the missing had been looking for to enter the
world and speak to it, Tony became in effect the bridge I had been looking for
to enter the world of theatre and reach the U.S. audience which I had found
trouble in connecting to this particular story so removed politically and
aesthetically from the typical American tradition. For the next two
years, interrupted by several trips of my own back to Chile where I could now
go and where we were in the process of ousting Pinochet from power, Tony
patiently helped me craft Widows into the play it had always promised to be,
provided dialogue and characters and rhythm, day after day after day. He
is the co-author of this text, its midwife, the hands that helped the play,
like a child, to grow. I cannot thank him enough for what he taught me,
for his loyalty to the old woman and her family, for his friendship to me and
my own family.
And yet, the play which
finally opened on the mainstage of the Mark Taper Forum directed by Bob Egan
in 1991 – ten days after another play of mine, Death and the Maiden had its
premier at the Royal Court in London – was still not exactly what I wanted.
As I watched the performance in Los Angeles, there was something still
missing, something the novel had possessed and that this play, for all its
power, had not yet managed to achieve. I had no idea what that missing
something could possibly be – only that I might now have strayed too far
from the original vision and that I had to find a way to get back to it.
The text still beckoned me to journey with it for one last time.
My next few years were filled
with Death and the Maiden – and Tony’s own stunning success with Angels
in America; so neither he nor I found the time or the tranquility to
return to Widows again. And yet, for me, in the back of my mind,
it was always there, demanding to find its voice and be complete. This
secret dialogue with myself might well have gone on forever if the Andrew
Wylie Agency had not one day received a call from Ian Brown at the Traverse
Theatre: he wanted to do our play up in Edinburgh. My answer to him
– as it had been to others who had recently inquired about possible
new productions – was that the play needed one more rewrite before it would
be ready. But my agent, Deborah Karl, would not let me off the hook that
easily. She insisted that I should say yes to the Traverse’s offer and
force myself once and for all to finish the play. And she was right:
when I concentrated on the character’s and structure again, I discovered the
changes I thought the play required. However, when I met my co-author
for lunch in New York and told him about my plans, Tony stated, with his usual
generosity, that I should go ahead without him, that I had to run this last
lap on my own.
And that was how I found
myself again writing alone, wrestling with my solitude and that old woman’s
affliction, offering Widows one last ritual elaboration, one more labour of
love. Besides a couple of minor alterations, shifts in emphasis, a
heightening of the lyrical and mythical qualities of the drama, the major
modification – one which, in fact, I only could have accomplished by myself,
by going into my own pain one last time – framed the play with a narrator
who is himself, as I had been, an exile who watches, witnesses, suffers the
actions from afar.
Once the new version of the
play toured England in 1996, I discovered, however, that my decision to
introduce this enigmatic male figure into the action as an intermediary
between the real audience and the mythical characters, turned out to be
completely misunderstood and, in fact, counterproductive. Exile might
have been at the origin of my relationship with that old woman and her missing
loved ones, but spectators almost unanimously felt that such an infiltration
distanced them from that tragedy without bringing them any closer to our
impure contemporary world.
And so, for this definitive,
final version of Widows the play, I have decided to eliminate that narrator
and trust that the story itself will be strong enough to reach the right
audience. Perhaps in its next incarnation – in Widows the film, which
currently shows signs of soon finding its way into a world in dire need of its
message – that narrator will be able to make a reappearance, watch the story
as I did from another country, will be swallowed up by what he is watching,
maybe he will suffer the same fate as his characters.
It should be clear by now
that this play has arrived at its final published version only because it was
supported through two decades by countless men and women who believed in it.
Some of those names have been alluded to in these pages. Space does not
allow so many deserving others to receive my gratitude here, but they do know
who they are. Thanks to you, one and all, for having helped to bring to
life a play that needed so many actors and that dealt with issues that are so
dark and unyielding and apparently remote.
I have left for the end the
most important acknowledgement and recognition of all.
I made up that old woman.
I invented her and her family
and that river and that captain who does not know how to deal with her.
If she could come from my
imagination, however, it was because she had been placed there, sparked into
being, inspired into existence by real women who searched for real bodies in a
real world more cruel and inhuman than anything I finally described in my
fiction.
Democracy has returned now to
Chile and to so many other countries where those widows resisted the military
and demand their men back. Democracy has returned, but many of those
women are still waiting for the return, but many of those women are still
waiting for the return of their fathers, their husbands, their brothers, their
sons, many of them are still waiting for a river or a god to bring those
bodies back from the dead. And the bodies are also waiting, somewhere,
are still accusing the men who murdered them, are still waiting for justice to
be done, are still demanding to be remembered by a society that is all too
willing to forget.
It is to those waiting women,
the women who are the hidden and silent storytellers of this tale that came to
me as if in a dream twenty years ago, it is to them that Widows is finally
dedicated.
Ariel
Dorfman, October 1997.
THIS TEXT WAS
DILIGENTLY TRANSCRIBED FOR OUR WEBSITE BY RACHEL ZELLER*
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