The Bowery Wars - Part 1

"I am a thorough New Yorker and have no narrow prejudices." - Timothy D. Sullivan, congressman and leader of Tammany Hall

We're getting ready to open a new music-theater piece - THE BOWERY WARS - Part 1 of a two part epic about the Lower East Side circa 1903. We will be performing it outdoors in the streets. For more info, check our website: www.downtownart.org

THE BOWERY WARS is set in the fall of 1903, when Tammany Hall's disgraced Democrats battled to retake City Hall, and the violence between The Eastmans and the Five Pointers over control of the Bowery exploded into the worst gun battle New York had ever seen. It raged over six hours and involved over 100 gangsters, but not a single arrest was made, not a single witness would come forward.

Featured historical characters include Big Tim Sullivan and Charlie Murphy of Tammany Hall; Big Bill Devery, former Chief of Police; Monk Eastman and his wife Margaret; and Paul Kelly, leader of the Five Points gang.

In the coming weeks, I will post excerpts and quotes that either appear in our piece or have been a source of inspiration.

Excerpt from 'The Waistmakers' Opera'

Triangle Factory Fire remembrance

Today we are remembering how one hundred years ago a fire broke out in a factory a few blocks to our west. How 146 workers died in that fire.

We are not a people who spend much time thinking about the past. We are a busy people, a forward looking people. So why does this tragedy still haunt us?

Across the street, at 77 East 4th Street, Rosie Friedman lived. She came from Bialystock in Poland when she was 14, part of a flood of Eastern European Jews hoping to leave violence and discrimination behind, hoping for something better in America. She came alone to live with her aunt and uncle here, to find a job and send money home to her family. In her uncle’s tiny apartment, there were also two boarders, five people in a one bedroom apartment, and like many immigrant teens, its likely she would have slept on the kitchen table or on a mat on the kitchen floor. There were some compensations to her life here – the Manhattan Lyceum, next door, offered concerts and lectures, as did Cooper Union and the Educational Alliance. There were dance halls, picture shows, there were young people everywhere. But most of her waking hours, she was a worker. Six days a week she was a worker at the Triangle Factory. Until, at the age of 18, she died in the fire.

Why does her death hurt us still? What is it about the Triangle Factory fire that makes it more than a horror story?

I think that the fire woke us up to to see that a great injustice was taking place. We had been lulled somehow into thinking that the conditions of factory workers were ‘normal.’ That the way the factories were managed by their owners was ‘normal.’ That things were hard for immigrants, but that this was ‘normal.’ It took the photos of Jacob Riis, it took the work of the Settlement Houses, of the newborn unions, and, finally, it took the Triangle Fire to show us that things were not ‘normal’, that in fact, things were not right and they must be, had to be changed. To show us that we as a people had a responsibility to our younger, poorer, less Americanized brothers and sisters - a responsibility which couldn’t be ignored, couldn’t be walked away from.

So much was wrong. For Rosie, as a woman, an immigrant, a Jew, a worker, a young person... so much was wrong. Could we really be asking people to put their lives at risk for a job in a factory? What happened on the road to success that had hardened the Triangle bosses, men who had once been sweatshop workers themselves, hardened them so that they fought bitterly against the workers at every step – so that they routinely locked the fire escape doors because they feared their young employees would steal scraps of fabric from their business.

We remember the Triangle Factory Fire. We remember the trapped girls that chose to leap nine stories to their deaths rather than burn. We remember them because we know, that day, we failed them. We have responsibilities to each other, to justice, to fairness, and those responsibilities include that we look at our world closely, and that we question all that seems ‘normal’, because what history teaches us over and over again is that what seems ‘normal’ may in fact, be very, very wrong.

learning and doing

Five years ago we began a writing project at DTA. The past two years, the project has been a close circle and the emphasis has shifted away from time spent producing work, to time spent writing and editing. Week after week, for the past five months, we’ve gotten together. Writers will share what they’ve written and then we go around the circle, letting them know what we respond to, where we’re confused, asking them questions, enjoying the camraderie and support of this small group.

The Writers Project is not an academic exercise. No one learns how to write a play; they write plays anyway. In any case, I wouldn’t be able to teach them how to write a play because I’ve never learned. To teach them, I would have to go back and familiarize myself with all the terms used in a playwriting class, take some lessons on structure, conflict, building character, begin to articulate my own thinking in those terms..... and I might do that someday, but in the meantime, these writers are here and they’re ready to write.

I backed into playwriting – rather similarly to how I backed into directing, designing, choreographing, writing lyrics – all intimidated me but necessity arrived. Fifteen years ago, either I wrote a play or I would have to turn away a fantastic group of 16 girls and find a lot more boys instead. That rubbed me the wrong way, so my first play was born, painfully, created for an all-female cast. Afterwards, it would often seem that each year I would think of the kind of material I wanted to work on with the company ... then be unable to find it.. and, reluctantly, would haul myself back to my computer to write it. I don’t think it was until I had a dozen plays under my belt that I could manage to refer to myself as a playwright. I still have the feeling of being a fraud when I say it now. And I would also say that it’s taken me fifteen years to actually want to sit down and write. Nothing would have happened before if it hadn’t been all those deadlines, the weekly dread of going into a rehearsal where the cast was waiting for the next scene and letting them down. Deadlines and necessity shaped me as a writer.

Learning by doing is a nice phrase. It hardly suggests the terror that can be involved. The chutzpah needed. To start doing something when you don’t know how – to try to figure out how to get better at it while you’re in the middle of doing it – to know that your efforts are going to be publicly scrutinized and evaluated at the end – people have nightmares about this stuff. Yet it’s the practice of being creative. And somehow your infatuation with the idea of writing a whole play, creating a piece of music, of seeing an idea all the way through to its completion... that infatuation or love or ambition or foolishness has to be strong enough to override your natural self-protective instincts. You don’t know how to do something and you do it anyway.

Downtown Art is basically founded on that principle. I direct, write, design and I’ve never had any training in doing those things. Mike composes and plays gorgeous music; he’s never had a class in either. Our company does things they’ve never done before, and we coach them to the best of our ability out of everything we’ve learned from walking down the same path. Our hope is that their own individual voice – their inner GPS – will hang in there and get stronger, smarter, through the process of doing. Then, one day, when they actually are taught how to write a play they will have the sense to pick and choose from the teaching on offer – to select anything that helps them move forward as original creators, and reject anything that muffles or mutes their own unique sensibility.

something more

I have been reading the writings of Jane Addams, a founder of the Settlement House movement. She wrote a hundred years ago at a time when she felt our modern cities were dominated by the factories, run by the engines of the economy, when people’s primary value was their utility – how as laborers and consumers they kept the machine going, and how blind she felt the city’s leaders were to any other aspect, need or hunger of its citizens.

And she wrote of how young people, naturally – generation after generation, persist in dreaming of a larger future for themselves, how they revolt against the idea that what is dished up to them as reality is all there is.

Because of this, she says, all of us – the entire society – rely upon its youth to reassure us as to life’s charm and joy. This is what the spirit of youth is, this is what it delivers. And if a society dismantles, oppresses and overcomes the insistence of its young people that life be more than the daily round, then society succeeds in killing off the source of its own hopefulness.

Jane finds the spirit of youth in young people, and happily for us, she finds it in artists, whom she calls perpetually youthful, and, finally, thank goodness, she relents and admits that the spirit of youth can, with luck and the right circumstances, survive in a few of us older ones.

This weekend I saw the utube video of Susan Boyle, the 48 year old Scotswoman who courageously put herself through the ordeal of appearing on ‘Britain’s Got Talent’, a kind of American Idol competition complete with Simon as one of the judges. Without a smidge of fashion, heavy-browed, square and dowdy, she went on that stage where she was sneered at by both judges and audience. Though she stood tall and smiled, in a lion’s den like that she looked wildly vulnerable and completely out of context. They booed the simple fact of her age, were ready to crush her pretensions in asking for their listening ear --- and then she sang. Jaws dropped. People rose to their feet. In the past week, 20 million people have viewed that utube video – a seven minute story that has made me weep three times. And I’m not alone.

It is rare that the spirit of youth survives in the kind of life Susan Boyle has led, yet some stubborn hope of finding more than she had been offered still held on after a lifetime of shyness, of caring for her mother, of the quiet paths of her own daily round.

I thank every young person that has ever performed at Downtown Art over the past twelve years, including, of course, every actor and musician on this stage tonight. In them I have found beauty, hope, and joy at times when I couldn’t find it anywhere else. Who they are and what they set themselves to do – how they come out nightly to show something about what is in all of us - moves me in ways I can’t articulate….but I can feel.

why the Illyrians can't see clearly

Shakespeare enjoyed theatricality. I’m quite sure of that. One of the ways he shows his love for the colorful is in his choice of places – places quite foreign to the playgoers of his time – much more foreign than any part of the world is now to a culture that has film, photography, and airplanes. And he was interested in mythology and fable – in raising images, free associations in the minds of his listeners through the evocation of what was far away, long ago, dimly remembered.

Twelfth Night takes place in Illyria – which was indeed a real place in the ancient world. The coast of the Adriatic Sea – the Balkan peninsula – the Dalmation coast. An Eastern world, a seascape with a history of warfare and pirates, a part of the world that 200 years before Shakespeare wrote Twelfth Night had been adopted by the Romani people, that travelling culture we call gypsies. (On a side note, gypsies and artists have a long association, share a common history of itinerant wandering, of being outside the bounds of established society – the French even dubbed the artist world Bohemia because of its gypsy affinities.)

And into this Illyrian world, a pair of twins are dropped, borne there upon a terrible storm against their will. Viola and Sebastian are from Messaline, which I cannot find anywhere in the world or even in mythology. They are well born, well educated, and orphaned since they were thirteen years old. They are not Illyrian – they are strangers in a strange land.

One of the ongoing puzzles of Twelfth Night is this: why can’t anyone tell Viola and Sebastian apart? Being brother and sister, they are fraternal twins, so not identical. Not identical. Yet no Illyrian can tell them apart. What prevents the Illyrians from seeing clearly?

Twelfth Night is filled with a kind of blindness. People project images of what they want to see on to others, longing makes them see what they want to see rather than what is true. Orsino is mistaken in Olivia, Olivia mistaken in Viola, Malvolio unable to see the truth, Andrew relies on the unreliable Toby to tell him what lies beyond the surface. And no one can tell those twins apart.

Blindness takes hold for different reasons, I think. Love and infatuation deliver it, longing and ambition give it a handhold for sure, but there is another cause as well. Difference. Culture, our own culture, can make it hard for us to see and understand people from another. We can be so struck by their difference, their external difference, that we cannot see clearly into the true nature of their minds and hearts. It’s my feeling that Shakespeare wanted to create a deep clash of cultures when he landed Viola and Sebastian into Illyria. Wanted them to be very different, apparently different… attractive to the Illyrians in their exotic difference, so attractive in their newness that they rouse passionate devotion from several Illyrians, but… also so different that the Illyrians cannot read them clearly, cannot see far beyond their clothing and manner, cannot distinguish them from each other.

Viola and Sebastian are not identical twins. They are however new. They are different. They dress in their own way, speak with their own language. And in order to see them, distinguish them, in order perceive the individual in each, we have to build our capacity to see beyond the assumptions of our own world, beyond the blindnesses of culture and habit, we have to look carefully, thoughtfully, with all the capacities of our mind and heart.

surprising ourselves

Great plays do more than tell a great story – they illuminate something about human nature. In the midst of entertaining and surprising us, they give us the chance to reflect on what it is to be human. What we are made of, what we are capable of…

In Twelfth Night, people do surprising things… make surprising choices. Why does Orsino, powerful and in his prime, not woo Olivia himself.. but send messenger after messenger instead? Why does Viola, after surviving a devastating shipwreck, not seek help to get back to home and safety.. but rather stay in a strange country and disguise herself as her lost brother? Why does Olivia turn instantaneously from an extreme form of mourning for her brother to almost giddy infatuation? And what prompts Malvolio, whose dignity is everything to him, to willingly put on those awful yellow stockings?

You can decide that .. well, that’s just the way the playwright is trying to be funny, to tell a story. It’s not real. In other words, you can dismiss the entire play as improbable fiction. But, if instead, you are convinced that Shakespeare had more to him and that it’s worth digging deeper in hopes of understanding something that he seemed to understand about the human heart .. then you have to keep looking for the answers to these questions.

This is the joy of directing, of course. Digging into these questions and many, many more besides and attempting to answer them through how you work with the actors to shape the play.

There is a longing that pervades Twelfth Night. Its people long for transformation – they don’t want to stay in their grief if new love can deliver them from it, they have powerful desires for their lives to be changed entirely. Ruling Illyria is suddenly no longer enough for Orsino – he wants to know love and the powerlessness of love, being alive is not enough for Viola – she wants to keep her brother alive, too, and she wants a new love to give a reason for life, a noble grief turns out to not near enough for Olivia who reveals that we might be most susceptible to infatuation during the darkest moments of our lives, and Malvolio’s ambition, which he has nurtured with constant fantasy, conquers every other bit of good sense in him. They have unquenchable longings which they insist upon pursuing against all good judgment and prudence.

And this is a truth of the human heart. Shakespeare while letting us laugh and shake our heads at his story, still has it right. Our longings take hold of us and some go so deep that we cannot shake them off, they grip us and bother us until in a desperate desire to be free of them, we finally ignore all the voices of caution and do surprising things. Very surprising things. Come what may.