Lorenzo Thomas wrote his “Two One-Act Plays” in 1964, the same year that witnessed the explosive Cherry Lane Theater production of Baraka’s Dutchman. Baraka, then still known as LeRoi Jones, had been in a playwright’s workshop with Edward Albee, whose Zoo Story had been produced in America just four years earlier on a bill with Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape. Only eight years had passed since the Coconut Grove, Florida, American premiere of Waiting for Godot, featuring well-known screen actors Tom Ewell and Bert (cowardly lion) Lahr. It was a time of great ferment in theater; a time when that ferment achieved a level of what Baraka was to term populist modernism. Lahr even appeared on a popular television game show in the wake of his Godot appearance.

A very young Lorenzo Thomas was taking all this in. Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun had been the first Broadway play written by a black woman, and the first directed by an African American, and that had only come to pass in 1959. In 1961, Saint Marks Playhouse opened their production of Jean Genet’s The Blacks, a production that gave a tremendous boost to the careers of Roscoe Lee Browne, Lou Gossett, Jr., Cicely Tyson, James Earl Jones, Maya Angelou, Charles Gordone, Godfrey Cambridge and Moses Gunn. Cambridge would marry Barbara Ann Teer, who went on to found Harlem’s National Black Theater. It was this potent mixture of experimental theater and black theatrical talent that gave us a Black Arts Movement in the late 1960s led by poet/playwrights like Amiri Baraka, Sonia Sanchez and Larry Neal. It was a moment when even the commercial theater was given to experiment, and something like Marat/Sade, with its near-assault on the audience, could become an international hit.

And Thomas’s colleagues in the Umbra Poets Workshop were part of all of this. Both Lloyd Addison and Oliver Pitcher were writing plays. Poets’ theater was very much a part of the conversation among these writers, and the ritualistic aspect of much of the drama being staged found its immediate expression in the Black Arts Movement in such plays as Baraka’s A Black Masque Humor, too, was an essential part of the equation, perhaps most scathingly exemplified by Baraka’s Jello and Sidney Poet Heroical. “Two One-Act Plays” is young Lorenzo Thomas at his most bitingly satirical. In introducing one of his early poems that he liked to read even years later, he elaborated a purported motivation. Having surveyed the rather short list of black poets getting into print, he reported, he found that most of them were African poets writing surrealist poetry in French badly translated into yet more surreal English; so he set out to write a poem that would sound like those more successful and published poets. The poem itself was far more than that, though, and “Two One-Act Plays” is far more than a send-up of plays like The Blacks or even The Brig.

[Text copyright Aldon Nielsen, 2010. Photograph of Paulene Myers, Raymond Patterson,Margaret Walker, Paula Gidding, Herbert Martin, Gwendolyn Etter-Lewis, and Lorenzo Thomas, L-R, sourced from report on the 1972 Dunbar Centennial at the University of Dayton at Jump Back Honey. See also Nielsen's blog post on Thomas' work, "But Which Way Is Redemption?"; Dale Smith on Thomas at Book Slut; Thomas' author page at Penn Sound and his 1973 reading of "High Heel Jesus"; Nielsen and Thomas on "How We Place African American Poetry" (2003); Time Step, a chapbook originally published by Kenning Editions in 2004; Patrick Durgin on the recent (circa 2005) work of Lorenzo Thomas, in Jacket Magazine; and Thomas' obituary from the Houston Chronicle, care of Tom Raworth. Order The Kenning Anthology of Poets Theater: 1945-1985 online from Small Press Distribution, Amazon, or postage paid by ordering directly from the press. Further discounts are available by subscription to Kenning Editions.]

Dating from the late sixties, Hannah Weiner’s Code Poems are widely recognized as among the earliest attempts to explore poetry as code and code as poetry (an interest she shared with Jackson MacLow, though apparently neither was aware of the other’s experiments at the time). Weiner’s book uses the International Code of Signals for the Use of All Nations (a visual system for communication between ships at sea), which consists of strings of letters that signify longer phrases that would be commonly used in communications between naval vessels at sea.

In November 2007, Laura Elrick, Rodrigo Toscano and Kaplan Harris performed a version of Weiner’s “Romeo and Juliet” (originally published in Code Poems) at St. Marks Poetry Project for the celebration of the publication of Hannah Weiner’s Open House, edited by Patrick Durgin. Unlike the original performances of this piece (which employed the use of large flags marked with the code), Elrick and Toscano used walkie-talkies to signify the dialog’s coded content.

LE: Patrick asked us to share some of our reflections about the performance we did of “Romeo and Juliet.” It’s hard to know where to begin because Weiner has been so important to so many different New York poets. And I had a substantial relationship with her work for many years too, reading everything I could find when we first moved here in the late 90s, enlisting Kevin Davies to bring all his books to our proofreading job in the basement of a Wall Street financial institution – Clairvoyant Journal, Silent Teacher Remembered Sequel, and Little Indians. Around that time Judith Goldman also shared a copy of her then in-process dissertation about HW with me, later published as this essay. All this is to say that I definitely remember coming across “Romeo and Juliet” a number of years before the St. Marks event, but at that point I was focused on reading it primarily as a textual practitioner, as someone interested in the idea of the code and the predetermined vocabulary as a decentering device.

Later, when we started thinking about how to render “Romeo and Juliet” for performance (quite a different relationship to a text it seems) – this was for the Kenning event at ACA Gallery held in early 2006 and organized by David Kirchenbaum – I remember that we realized fairly quickly that it would have to be some sort of translation, mostly because we didn’t have the resources or the time to construct the flags. However, I’d also been working with voice recognition software around that time, and I was interested in the uncanniness of the computer’s translations of the poems I was voicing into my mic…I mean, so much of the text had a “censored” feeling because the vocabulary of the software program was so antiseptically limited. Yet, the intended meanings would always sort of seep in from the side anyway in a very funny way, so that what was “heard” was then the logic behind the vocabulary limitations. The code speaks. Or what the code negates speaks, through the code itself.

Early performances of “Romeo and Juliet” that I had come across were of course really substantially different from what would later become our version, and I was initially nervous about such a drastic intervention—I think we haggled over it for a night over take out in our living room. While researching the piece in preparation for our meeting, I had read a description of a performance Hannah had arranged in the yard of St. Marks in the late 60s in which players stood on platforms in far corners of the yard, raising flags with the letter strings stitched on them, while shouting their lines. In another version, a video I found from a much later date (but which I am now unable to locate – if anyone knows the whereabouts of this video, please contact us!), Hannah stood alone in a wide green field somewhere in New England at a far distance from the camera, silently raising the coded flags in a slow and repetitive rhythm; only the sound of birds echoed from a mass of trees behind her. Though it is striking how different these renderings are, both versions emphasized the visual nature of the code, as well as the machine-like automation of the “nature” of the user/s communication. In both, distance is at a premium.

In our version, I guess the central feature is to highlight the intimacy of the code, and especially the hilarity of this supposedly natural heterosexual encounter taking place in pure code. It is a technically complicated code (with its roots in colonialism and militaristic “exchange”) that both “ships” speak, but it renders them dumbly unsensuous. The sheer clumsiness of the maneuvers that must be accomplished between the two romantically inclined “ships at sea” with their estranged bodies and official orifices—like the employment of walkie-talkies in the bedroom. I think you first came up with that idea!

RT: Yes, those walkie-talkies. Let’s see, I’ll try and retrace the steps of how we got to using those things…

First, at the first Post_Moot conference (“a convocation for innovative poetics”) in Oxford, Ohio, I remember doing a performance of my Eco-Strato-Static with Tom Orange on a wide stage. I had specified that the mics be placed far apart. And boy did my hosts supply! The mics were so far from each other that I lost contact with Tom’s physical presence altogether. The audio-spatial experience of that evening stuck with me for a long time. The sense that every speech utterance could be thought of as a re-instantiation of a social-psychic “place” (i.e. “and where are you now?” “in which direction are you headed?”, etc)—that was a key insight.

But also, I had been studying the theoretical (as well as practical) outlines of Richard Schechner’s “six axioms for environmental theater.” Schechner defined environmental theater as theater that uses the space (defined as the area and time in which the performance takes place) in accordance with its own properties as well as those of the performers, groups, and content working within that space.  The idea was that one had to account for the separate characteristic and performative properties of a given space, even before it is “used” or practiced upon by humans. This a qualitatively different approach to space than trying to bend a given space into a “stage,” however modified.

Added to those encounters, I had been working with Utility Worker’s Union at the Queens training facility (an industrial complex along the East River), and all day long people were coming in and out of trainings using walkie-talkies. I remember really liking the punctuated “over-and-out” style of speaking. Nobody could talk over anybody for even a micro second, which of course, created a special kind of tension for people overhearing an exchange. The affirmative response form (the “copy you”) seemed almost dreadfully fated, so a special kind of humor arose from it. Curious too, was the electronic-mechanical “tsh” that came from pushing the speaker button. Though it was non-semantic—it said something! Many things actually, depending on where the exchange was going.

Ok, so one day, as you and I were trying to figure this thing out (we had actually kicked around the idea of a planned wrestling match between us while performing Weiner’s piece), we saw the walkie-talkies sitting on a bookshelf. I picked one up and read one of the lines. You immediately followed suit—and there it was—the main performance parameter laid down. Or so it seemed!

Well, well first we needed to find a third wheel, and Kaplan Harris was shoe-in. Kaplan can do a great poker face with strange affect mixed in, and with very clear intonation. I had discovered this when he helped out with a Collapsible Poetics Theater piece (“Humana Ante Oculos”) at the Yockadot Poetics Theater Festival a few years before. So once he was roped into it, we were pretty much set. Ok, what was still missing? Oh! Only the space, the people, the “psychic” (deep-ideological—unconscious—unseen) dispositions of the reader-actors! In other words, 90% of the performance!

Funny to think about it now, but it hadn’t really fully occurred to us was that Laura and I were going to be read largely through the fact that “in real life” we were/can be these attention-focus curious scrappy go-lucky fuckers from hell! We were only halfway conscious of that read in the performance, which prevented a sense of real hammy (that was key), you know, we were “earnest.” I think people were laughing with us and at us at the same time as we tried to “clarify” Weiner’s (quite ingenious) critique of hetero schmaltziness. It’s like that being half consciousness of our whole bag between us—the beautiful, the ugly, the clear, the confused, the utopian, the dystopic, etc—all that was played out with our body movements in the actual space. I remember being completely unafraid to pursue and be pursued, to hide out and to pop out of a sudden. All sorts of social gender contradiction “release points” were exposed, so that the firmness of Weiner’s critical text stood out like a rocky ledge seen from a distance, indeed, quite more visible than if we had “owned it” as something to “perform.”

[Text copyright Laura Elrick and Rodrigo Toscano, 2010. Photo of Hannah Weiner, Scott Burton, Anne Waldman, Vito Acconi, Berndette Mayer, Eduardo Costa, John Perreault, L-R, sourced from Perreault's Artopia blog report on "1969." Order The Kenning Anthology of Poets Theater: 1945-1985 online from Small Press Distribution, Amazon, or postage paid by ordering directly from the press. Further discounts are available by subscription to Kenning Editions. See also Hannah Weiner's author page at the Electronic Poetry Center and this opportunity to mailorder Hannah Weiner's Open House at a discount; read Maria Damon's review of the book at Kaurab, if you need convincing.]

On June 3, 1956, Robert Duncan, nearly six weeks into his teaching stint at Black Mountain College during its final year of academic operation, wrote to Denise Levertov that in the month that had intervened between his previous letter to her “I have written or finishd writing ‘The Origins of Old Son’ which has some nice songs and to my ears right now one beautiful speech partial dythyrambic. But perhaps the busy inertia of the classes in poetics – well, ‘busy inertia’ could also be ‘disturbing excitement of’ because in the process I am stultified by wrestling with tekniks beyond my own practice.”[1] “The Origins of Old Son” is a turbulent play, to be sure, with lots of word play, expressive tics characteristic of Duncan’s work during this period, and a strange array of characters, including Medusa and a god-like but hampered “Birddoll.” It is possible that this play was an attempt to create something to counterbalance the intensities of the poetics classes he was teaching, the ones causing him to wrestle with techniques beyond his own practice. Though Duncan never indicates which of the speeches from the play was beautiful and dithyrambic, I suspect he means Medusa’s initial incantation:

Monstrous.  Woe.  Shame.  Disease.

All ancient things recoil.
The proto-lick-it babe in his tree’s swaddlings pees
        beginnings,
philo-suffier, and says WET comes first,
        the elemental stream is wet, I bet.

Remorseless snakey rain begot
snake hair downrunnings. Cold and hot
        first quantities were.
Shame.  Disease.  Fear.  Wrath.

Toward the end, this first speech of Medusa’s shifts into a mode of nursery-rhyme nonsense, fixing on this primordial babe’s lack of potty training:

His teary begins         his dry ends meet
when eda puddle faeces sphinx.
He grows, she shrinks.
He lies, she growls and dies.

Woe.   Shame.   Disease.

When he pee please to stutter starter,
all dragon truth crawls down his wall
	to lizard size.

Old Son’s first words in the play, said right after Medusa concludes her speech, are: “He pee. He pee. He pee. He pee”. Which prompts Grandma (the third of the four characters in the play) to announce, “Lord, he’s wet his cantos!”

Duncan met Olson in Berkeley in 1947 when Olson was on a trip out to the West Coast; he stopped in Berkeley to research the California Gold Rush. Kenneth Rexroth had recommended Olson meet Duncan.[2] It seems clear, in retrospect, that these two poets recognized in each other kindred realities, articulated soon after, and for a generation quite forcefully, in Olson’s “Projective Verse,” published in 1950. Duncan seems to have related to that statement for the rest of his life, as well as to Olson’s thought and poetry, too. But where Olson’s sense of literature and literary tradition might be understood as canonical and archaeological, Duncan’s sense was more experimental and eccentric. Which is to say there was always a tension of taste and knowledge that stretched between them, even as they depended on each other’s friendship. In 1954, Duncan wrote to Olson, in reference to a recent commentary on The Cantos that had been published, “All the academy that despised here my ardent consultation of the Cantos (as a breaking up into movement of the old log-piles) now address themselves to sorting, identifying, deifying the old log piles to spite the energy set thereabout to break it up. Only Stein remains freshly disreputable. And the ‘objectivists,’ ‘dadaists’ and ‘surrealists’ (of the absolute order – Breton, Tzara, Magritte, Peret) indigestible to the professional readers.”[3] Into the Poundian pedagogical world of Olson’s Black Mountain, Duncan delivered freshly disreputable doses of Stein, Dada, and Surrealism. This, I think, is part of what is happening in the strange, antic, infantilizing, satirical stage show of “The Origins of Old Son.”

The play was performed in 1956 at Black Mountain. When Duncan arrived at the once thriving and sprawling campus for his first visit in 1954, he found it in a state of perilous disarray and decay. It was winter then; the students were sparse and the faculty fewer. Duncan found the place “run down.” “We stayed in the so-called Gropius building, which by that time was a derelict piece of modernism – nothing looks more run down than an art moderne building ten years later.” By the time he arrived to teach during the spring and summer of 1956, the school was a ghost of its earlier glory. “By spring, 1956, when I actually taught there, the large dormitory building was not too bad to live in, but the school was very noticeably derelict. One had only to walk about to find deserted laboratories with broken glasses, and splendid kiln equipment which had just gone to ruin.”[4] Vincent Katz describes how those grim last days of Black Mountain were alleviated by Duncan’s theater productions, “which got everyone collaborating again, in a new way, yet with some of the old Black Mountain spirit.”[5] On the play’s typescript, given to Olson, Duncan wrote an inscription that reads: “inscribed to Charles, who – as here – provides the fulcrum for what ever practices out of a geometry this imaginary one might move a real world by – RD 56.”[6]

Playwriting played a recurrent role in Duncan’s creative activities of the 1950s and early 1960s. During this time, in addition to “The Origins of Old Son,” he wrote, among other dramas, Faust Foutu, Medea at Kolchis (also performed at Black Mountain), “A Play with Masks,” and, notably, “Adam’s Way, A Play on Theosophical Themes,” which is the one dramatic work of Duncan’s that made its way into the poetry books of his major period. Most of these plays read like a mash-up of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, especially the Bottom parts, with elements of Stein, Dada, Surrealism, and nursery rhymes, pulled off with the dramatic flair of Helen Adam’s ballads. Clearly, Duncan put a lot of energy into these plays, including their performance. In February, 1966, there was a “concert reading” of “Adam’s Way” at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver for which Duncan prepared extensive “Narration” notes, meant to be read as prologue, commentary and amplification of the recitation of the play itself.[7] But it’s just as clear that most people don’t think of Duncan as a dramatist, and I suspect that most of his dedicated readers think of his playwriting as much as a curiosity as a contributing force to his poetic powers.

How should we think, then, about “The Origins of Old Son”? I’m inclined to expand on Vincent Katz’s description that Duncan’s plays at Black Mountain were intended to get people collaborating and to infuse new energy into a dying system. I doubt Duncan intended this play (or any of the others he staged at Black Mountain) to revive the institution in any way; he could tell that it was dying. I suspect, instead, that he was taking advantage of the potential of Black Mountain’s transitory and liminal twilight moment: using parody to summon absurd and mythical truths. Charles Olson is the Old Son who is portrayed as a giant baby, whose powerful protectress is a nonsense-spouting, malapropism-and-pun uttering Grandma, who hides Old Son from the appearance of a mysterious, Jehovah-like Birddoll, described by the Grandma as “the Lowerd Almighty.” (And who may be a representation of Olson’s mentor Edward Dahlberg (KAPT, 546).) There’s the celebration of a Catholic mass in the play, presided over by the theologically versed Medusa (she makes a speech about agape). And there’s a sense of the transformation of Old Son – who says “Fee Fie Foe Fum” at one point – from a giant baby into a giant man. It’s unclear whether Olson played Old Son when this was staged, but who else could have filled this role? Hijinx and parody in full view, Medusa’s and Old Son’s final speeches are nevertheless exemplary of Duncan’s poetic powers, which, in 1956, were at the beginning of their most memorable expression:

MEDUSA:
I am no One then. I am terrible Earth.
All who go forth by day return to me.
Out of my dead come all flourishings,
all green irruptions, white or orange interruptions.
There is no measure but by the foot that
lifts from me or returns to me. See,
the farmer plants his good seed,
broods good thots above his plot,   a father
comes into the precincts of the Great Mother,
his crop prospers. Yet all things
are dragon teeth sown,  grown from Earth that resists man.
The Medusa is true face of the good Earth
in farce forced, but crownd queen
by human will that radiates like snakes.

It’s May. It May be. The farce has force that drive the, disorderd,
heat comes. These first ones, following the Old Way, across continent
came, and sang a hot time to the old town. That was a Mountain. In
the beginning. Carried on their backs. Badman, Mountain backd was
maybe. Man. Was May then, and dangled columbine, secreted violet,
let loose confusions of dogwood. Old-Son is Sun of the Old Way, the
way across. Repeated in the yoga demonstrating firewalker, these first
ones crossd eighteen thousand years, campd with the Persians. And
effeminate trousers invaded manly diaperd Mediterranean greece. Drank
with the Scythian breeders of horse fermented mare’s milk from the
civilized skull. May then, may be month of Hearts, that was first a
Grail, the cup that held holy blood. A skull. A beaming skull…

Duncan’s satire in this play is fully hibernal: the cycle of life it represents is coming to an end. The dragon’s teeth have been sown in the ground where they wait through the winter to sprout – a farce forced but necessary. Just so, a beaming skull becomes the cup of life for Old Son – portent of a new life.

[1] Robert Duncan to Denise Levertov, June 3, 1956, in The Letters of Robert Duncan and Denise Levertov, edited by Robert J. Bertholf and Albert Gelpi (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), p. 38.

[2] See Tom Clark, Charles Olson: The Allegory of a Poet’s Life (New York: Norton, 1991), p. 125.

[3] Robert Duncan to Charles Olson, June 17, 1954, in “Robert Duncan on Charles Olson: Eleven Letters,” edited by Robert J. Bertholf, Sulfur 35 (Fall 1994), p. 89.

[4] Robert Duncan to Ann Charters, June 9, 1969, quoted in Vincent Katz, “Black Mountain College: Experiment in Art,” in Black Mountain College: Experiment in Art, ed. Vincent Katz (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), p. 211.

[5] ibid., 215.

[6] Robert Duncan, typescript, “Origins of Old Son,” Charles Olson Research Collection, Archives & Special Collections at the Thomas J. Dodd Research Center, University of Connecticut Libraries.

[7] See “Narration for concert reading of ‘Adam’s Way’” in Audit/Poetry 4.3 (1967), pp. 24-30.

[Text copyright Peter O'Leary, 2010. Photo of Robert Duncan, Charles Olson, and Ruth Witt-Diamant, L-R, sourced from The Poetry Center of San Francisco. Order The Kenning Anthology of Poets Theater: 1945-1985 online from Small Press Distribution, Amazon, or postage paid by ordering directly from the press. Further discounts are available by subscription to Kenning Editions. See also the Duncan Symposium sponsored by the Chicago Poetry Project, April, 2010.]