CLINTON ST. QUARTERLY By Anne Gerety In 1970, when Kent State happened, we were at the end of our stint at Portland State with the American Theatre Company, which is another story. We had known we were being severed from ATC the summer before, much to our naive surprise. Were we too radical doing The Gladiator with a black Spartacus, were we simply too political at all doing Robert Lowell’s The Old Glory, were we too risque doing Camino Real, was there not enough support, since nothing we did seemed up to the Olympian standards of Portland’s movie reviewer? In any case, we didn’t fit into academia and were at the end of our rope, so to speak, and loathe to leave Portland for many reasons, including the school where our younger kids were, MLC, Portland’s Summerhill. A few months before, we had rented a storefront across the river with the idea of experimenting with theatre in whatever way we wanted, and we first used it that week to rehearse street theatre when we went on strike in sympathy with the students. We had been rehearsing our final production, The Cherry Orchard, another play about the dissolution of a culture. Only the week before we had done a production of The Balcony, you know, the Genet play where the revolution is happening outside the brothel, and inside men are acting out their fantasies of power, and women are deriving their power from helping them get off on it. And after the strike was supposedly over, at midnight on Friday, we were to start business-as- usual. The Cherry Orchard was supposed to have opened on Friday night, but we postponed the opening 24 hours and began rehearsal Friday at midnight. It was eerie because just the previous week we had been on stage in the brothel while a revolution raged around us outside and that night while we were rehearsing trucks were ramming barricades outside, there were rumors of guns, and I don’t know if I really remember it, or think 1do, there were occasional loud reports. Anyway, everyone was very excited, and while rehearsing the party scene sometime toward early morning, we found ourselves dancing around a very drunk Indian with a metal hand in a business suit who had wandered in and sat down on a chair in the middle of the classroom that we were using for rehearsal space. I was worried because Nicholas, who was 14 at the time, was out in the middle of it and close when the hardhats were cracking skulls, and the following day or sometime soon after there was a huge parade down to City Hall with my mother somehow in front, having been pushed forward, everyone being really delighted to see a little-old-lady-with-white-hair in the front lines, and there was a demand for the mayor to show his face and be accountable. He didn’t, but his aide did, a large, overweight, pale, puffy- faced excuse in a grey business suit, and the whole thing was on TV with Terry right next to him, saying very clearly, “ You’re making a fool of yourself.” And the next thing we did at the Storefront was a really gross production of Lysistrata. Well, we actually never performed it at the Storefront because it was commissioned to be done at a private rock festival, and later we did it in Bellingham at the college, and still later at the Old Church, where Lannie was so upset because she had worked so hard to save the Old Church for cultural 44
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