Bringing Gilgamesh to its second incarnation at the MCA reminded me a bit of my San Francisco Mime Troupe days. Those too were shows that has to be deconstructed and packed in a truck. (Or, in this case, a Chevy Malibu or Honda Accord.) But unlike political satires put up in Delores Park, Gilgamesh now has theatrical lighting (thanks to Sarah Hughey). Like SFMT, we have music. In fact, Rob Steel and ensemble’s symphony of hand-held instruments rings even more clearly. Still though, we had the challenge of adjusting to a new space, with completely different acoustics and sightlines and exits. We’d spent the second week of October asking the actors to BE LOUDER. Suddenly, in the MCA theatre, the beauty of quiet revealed itself once more, and Komunyakaa’s poetry bloomed.
One of the things that theatre and poetry have in common* is the distillation of complicated ideas into crystalline images. Being an ancient epic, the tale of Gilgamesh is rife with epic symbols: the forest of the gods, the snake that sheds its skin, the life-giving plant…
Komunyakaa’s body of work traffics fearlessly in these touchstones, creating and re-creating his own versions into a fresh vocabulary. Gilgamesh’s mother questions his humanity with “When is the last time/ you gave your mother flowers?” And when his friend dies, our hero/anti-hero repeats simply “and I sit here and I sit here and I sit here” … until “a maggot drops from Enkidu’s nose.” In both this piece and his others, the poet paints the ugly beautiful and the beautiful with its ugliness.
From “Poetics”:
The sack of bones in the magnolia,
What’s more true than that?
Before you can see
her long pretty legs,
look into her unlit eyes.
A song of B-flat breath
staggers on death row. Real
men, voices that limp
behind the one-way glass wall.
I’ve seen the legless beggar
chopped down to his four wheels.
Komunyakaa draws his vocabulary from the world around him, past and present: urban renewal, war memories, love, friendship. The ancient world and our world are not so different after all.
“We Never Know”
He danced with tall grass
for a moment, like he was swaying
with a woman. Our gun barrels
glowed white-hot.
When I got to him,
a blue halo
of flies had already claimed him.
I pulled the crumbled photograph
from his fingers.
There’s no other way
to say this: I fell in love.
The morning cleared again,
except for a distant mortar
& somewhere choppers taking off.
I slid the wallet into his pocket
& turned him over, so he wouldn’t be
kissing the ground.
*
One of the great joys of the Oriental Institute performance was hearing Komunyakaa and Gracia speak about their process of creating this play as adaptor and dramaturg. They will speak again following Saturday’s performance. Can’t wait to hear new wonders revealed.
(* I confess that this relationship between theatre and poetry is a bit of a personal obsession. See
http://heretheremag.com/theatrefilm.htm and
http://www.caffeinetheatre.com for more on the subject.)
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