One day toward the end of the Bush era, Donna Blue called New York looking for the revolution. She had lost track of it sometime after her guerrilla theater days in the late 60s, when she had, among other acts of antiwar, dressed as a Vietnamese woman and wailed through the halls of the Capitol in Washington.
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Lachman had been told by a Haitian voodoo priestess that she’d be doing the life of Luxemburg. “It wasn’t a prediction. It was a spiritual guide connection,” she says. The priestess said, “For your next project you will portray Rosa Luxemburg.” Lachman’s reaction was, Who? She had a lot of catching up to do.
A few months later, in early 1989, she began working on the project, at first in fits and starts, researching the life of the humanitarian revolutionary and the history of political theater She reread Julian Beck’s The Life of the Theatre–musings and manifestos about power, freedom, and action and descriptions of the Living Theatre’s travels (often involving arrests) and performances. (Samples: “Too much perfection on Broadway. They make a graven image, all, all of them vanity. . . ” “This is a period of emergency. Therefore emergency theatre is the theatre of awareness.” “Improvisation is related to honesty and honesty is related to freedom and freedom is related to food.” “An art which does not address itself to the horrendous problem of the division of the world into classes increases the universal anguish.”)
Lachman reenacted this phone call in one of “me” portions of The Language of Birds: Rosa Luxemburg and Me, a one-woman show she presented at the Blue Rider Theatre last fall. It reopens January 21 to coincide with the theater’s six-week event “The Legacy of Rosa Luxemburg: A Conference Where Artists and Revolutionaries Meet.” Malina is one of the featured speakers. Writer and radio commentator Andrei Codrescu will give the keynote address this Wednesday, January 19. Local panelists include artist Carlos Cortez, Alderman Dorothy Tillman, actor Susan Nussbaum, and journalist Salim Muwakkil.
Or in Malina’s case, anarchism. Malina says she differs from Luxemburg philosophically–Malina is a pacifist and says Luxemburg believed in armed struggle–but admires the way she boldly acted on her beliefs. “That is an example for us artists, activists, teachers, writers, people doing the work of the world.”
Now she’s revamping and deepening the show. It’s still more conventional in form than the Living Theatre’s work, but there are parts where the traditional barriers between audience and performer are removed. “I’m scared,” she says, of Malina’s reaction, hoping she’ll like the show.
