WEST VIRGINIA, 1978: Lisa D’Amour is in the throes of a debut production—a site-specific passion play for Easter Sunday. Show business is never easy. The audience scales the mountainside with difficulty. The lead actor—D’Amour’s best friend, whose long hair clinched the role—struggles with the weight of playing Jesus. (Literally: She’s having trouble shouldering the cross as she trudges toward the vegetable-garden Golgotha.) Maybe the next production will go more smoothly. After all, the playwright’s only eight.
NEW YORK CITY, 2006: Lisa D’Amour’s intrepid spirit remains insatiable. Perched on a sofa at New Dramatists, where she is a resident member, the 36-year-old New Orleans native (and former Carnival Queen) recounts a childhood packed with road trips and intense outdoor play. A mischievous twinkle in her eyes belies an otherwise unassuming demeanor (she’s dressed in nondescript khakis and a white T-shirt). It’s easy to understand why her colleagues describe her in the language of paradox: Her work is “inexplicably familiar,” notes Anthony Barilla, artistic director of Houston’s Infernal Bridegroom Productions, where D’Amour is a resident playwright; she possesses a “mysterious clarity,” ventures Loretta Greco, artistic director of New York City’s Women’s Project, which produced D’Amour’s The Cataract this past year; she is “zen and wild all in one,” declares Polly Carl, producing artistic director of the Playwrights’ Center in Minneapolis, where D’Amour has spent considerable collaborative time.
D’Amour’s inventive early years have transmuted into a theatrical sensibility that is uninhibited, intensely visual and unapologetically ritualistic. “There’s something about the ritual of the moment,” she says. “I insist on dealing in a concrete, tactile way with the magic reality of performer and audience living and breathing in the same room.”
The recent work of the Obie-winning playwright and director reads as a map of her itinerant past. Her earthen-but-sensual The Cataract, produced last season at Perishable Theatre in Providence, R.I., in collaboration with the Theatre of a Two-Headed Calf, as well as by Women’s Project, was inspired by St. Anthony Falls in Minneapolis, a city where D’Amour occasionally lives and often works. Her Tale of a West Texas Marsupial Girl debuts at Minneapolis’s Children’s Theatre Company in January. Marsupial Girl, as well as Hide Town, which opens Nov. 16 at Infernal Bridegroom, reflect D’Amour’s hankering for the Lone Star state, where she spent her graduate school years. Meanwhile, Stanley (2006), at New York City’s HERE Arts Center through Nov. 18, hearkens back to her New Orleans roots. (“I was born in St. Paul and spent parts of my childhood in Maryland and West Virginia,” she grudgingly confesses. “But I rarely claim that because I feel like such a Southerner.”)
In Austin, D’Amour earned her MFA at the University of Texas studying with Erik Ehn, Mac Wellman and the late David Cohen—and within months of graduating, she was collaborating on Ehn’s Enfants Perdus (a premiere with Frontera at Hyde Park Theatre that nearly turned the venue inside out in its radical staging), as well as participating in Ehn’s RAT network. Simultaneously, she was testing her own skills as a solo performer in Austin with Into the O, a short piece inspired by the logo of a local appliance store.
It was around this time that D’Amour met Katie Pearl—an actor and director with a similar zeal for visual language and site-specific work. The pair began with such collaborations as a 14-hour site-specific performance at an intersection in Austin (a series of slow-moving events in a grove of trees that, according to Pearl, “people never looked at because they were too busy driving past it”) and a pair of solo performance installations, Slabber and Dress Me Blue/Window Me Sky.
“We began with a shared interest in making people see what’s really there,” reflects Pearl. “And that impulse has remained primary: How do you get people to see a person or a place?” The duo’s recent projects spring from their early site-specific endeavors. (Pearl directed the Women’s Project production of The Cataract after collaborating with D’Amour on LandMARK, a 24-hour multidisciplinary event in 2005, which was actually performed on the 2,100-foot-long bridge spanning the river below St. Anthony Falls.)
In D’Amour’s Anna Bella Eema, directed by Pearl for Refraction Arts Project and Physical Plant in Austin in 2001 and for New York City’s New Georges in 2003, a girl is left to her own devices by a reclusive mother and makes her own little girl out of mud, while their trailer park home is slowly demolished to make way for a superhighway. Nita & Zita, this time with Pearl acting and D’Amour as writer/director, teases out the true story of New Orleans sisters Flora and Piroska Gellert, self-proclaimed international dancers. That show, which premiered in New Orleans in 2002 and has toured to New York and Minneapolis, garnered the pair, along with actor Kathy Randels, an Obie Award in 2003.
“We think a lot about the entry into things,” muses Pearl. “The worlds we create are often strange, so we think about how to give the spectators a way in that will allow them to open up to the experience.”
Pre-show experiences are one such way. In Dress Me Blue/Window Me Sky, costumed intermediaries welcomed the audience with whispered suggestions on how to interact with the space. In the prelude to 1999’s Slabber; maps and cassettes distributed by volunteers guided participants to the undisclosed performance location. In Limo, commissioned by the Whitney Museum of Art in 2004, cards accompanied programs and the five viewers who held cards with gold stars were whisked away with Pearl in a limousine at the end of the evening. Even in the more proscenium-framed Anna Bella Eema actors utilized pre-show time to test a battery of props and sound instruments in full audience view.
Most of the places D’Amour conjures can be found on a map. She asserts that the world of Hide Town—born of a recent obsession with Texas Panhandle ghost towns—will be familiar, its solitude suggesting any American small town or suburb. But Hide Town is a product of manifest destiny in reverse. In D’Amour’s microcosmic but densely inhabited futuristic universe, what once was New Mexico is covered in ice, and Hide Town—formerly a hub for outlaws, prostitutes and a thriving buffalo hide business—is now a one-saloon town at the edge of the inhabitable world. “Everything you know is called into question,” D’Amour explains wryly. “In Hide Town, you can’t hide from yourself.”
Oh, and it’s also about abduction, loss and identity. Some inhabitants of Hide Town may or may not have been abducted by aliens taking the form of camels. (D’Amour’s habitual research led her to discover that the U.S. military once imported camels as cheap labor, but their soft feet proved useless in the hard sands of the American Southwest. Ghost camel sightings are still reported today.)
The playwright chuckles. “Sometimes I feel like the strength of my plays is that they have so many ideas in them. And that the weakness of my plays is that they have so many ideas in them.”
“With Lisa’s work, the emotions and the words are completely familiar, but the way they’re strung together is completely different,” says Infernal Bridegroom’s Barilla, noting that this juxtaposition of known and unknown isn’t uncommon in a D’Amour play. “She throws herself into the abyss constantly when she writes. She’s truly an adventurer.”
D’Amour’s characters often haunt the margins of their worlds. The title character of Stanley (2006) is no exception. The one-man show written for her brother Todd follows the quest of a man who believes he is the incarnation of Tennessee Williams’s iconic leading man. He’s a delirious outcast in search of what he’s lost, haranguing any who cross his path. Inspired by the siblings’ shared love for Williams, Marlon Brando and New Orleans, Stanley (2006) merges the elder D’Amour’s wordplay and direction with the younger D’Amour’s physical comedy, and features live video feed by Wooster Group media veteran Tara Webb.
“If Stanley is about anything, it’s about haunting,” muses Todd. “From the moment Brando inhabited Stanley Kowalski on Broadway in 1947, he haunted the role. And the role haunted him. He changed the role of the leading man, and the very style of American acting.” Brando’s carnivorous instincts have morphed, in Todd D’Amour’s performance, into feeble confessions muttered through a handmade megaphone.
The question of how Katrina would affect Stanley, which was already in development when the hurricane struck, was unavoidable, and has evolved into an opportunity for both artists to respond to the destruction of their hometown without veering into sentimentality. “Stanley is an investigation for us,” Todd asserts. “What does it mean to be transient, to be a refugee? To lose everything? Your possessions? Your soul?”
His sister echoes the sentiments. “This character [in Stanley] has an unbridled frustration, with questions so big that, not only can he not find the answer, it’s hard for him to articulate the questions. That’s the way so many people still feel about Katrina. We’re looking at the frustrations of our city through the frustrations of this character.”
D’Amour, who was forging her way up West Virginia mountainsides at age eight, has yet to tire of traveling. Every phone call is likely to catch her in a new place: in Texas to ready a premiere; in Louisiana, to visit family and friends; or at her new home in Brooklyn, where her latest commission for New York City’s Playwrights Horizons, In the Thick, is set. Regardless of the place, though, a journey with Lisa D’Amour is likely to prove magical, transformative and unexpected.
Krista Apple is a teaching artist and an MFA acting candidate at Temple University in Philadelphia.
