.I had known Joe and worked with him very closely over the last decade of his life. He was an extraordinary individual whose contributions to the American Theater are many and significant.
Encke met me for a cup of coffee to talk about Joe and tell me a little about his project. There already exist some very good footage of Joe, especially from the 1960's and 70's when he was at the height of his fame. In the early 1990's, however, Joe suffered a stroke after undergoing an open heart surgery, and became aphasic.
Aphasia is a disorder that occurs when the language center of the brain becomes short-circuited. A person knows exactly what it is that they want to say, they just can't find the words to say it. It's a frustrating condition to live with.
Joe was in rehabilitation for a year, and worked with a speech therapist for a long time. He never completely regained his old facility with language, but what emerged was in many ways far more interesting. He became a poet. A walking haiku. He was usually pretty clear and somehow managed to get his thoughts across. But the language he found was often startling. I remember once he was describing the artistic experience. He said this: "Theater is often heaven or... basement."
Joseph Chaikin was a five-time OBIE Award winner, including the first ever Lifetime Achievement Award. In the 1960's he founded a theater company called The Open Theater which created some of the most ground-breaking plays of the day including America Hurrah and The Serpent (both by Jean-Claude van Itallie). In the 1970's he formed another company called The Winter Project, an ensemble whose members include Ronnie Gilbert, Tina Shepard, and Will Patton.
Joe is famous also for a book he wrote called The Presence of the Actor. He knew Samuel Beckett personally and directed several of his plays, both in Europe and here in the states. And he was very close friends to playwright Sam Shepard, with whom Chaikin collaborated on such plays as Tongues, Savage Love, The War In Heaven, and When The World Was Green: A Chef's Fable.
I met Joe in 1991 and began working with him as an actor on a new collaborative project about disabilities. Most of the company were actors with a disability of movement. The play was about mobility and cultural attitudes. I was one of two able-bodied actors who were to represent the rest of the able-bodied world. This project developed over the course of ten years, and was the thing that Joe returned to over and over during the last decade.
We then began teaching together. Workshops for Actors and Directors. Joe would choose a small number of playwrights to focus on (always Beckett and Shakespeare), and we would bring together a group of 12 actors and 6 directors for scene-study over the course of six weeks. I learned more in those workshops watching others than perhaps all my years of training.
I also had the priviledge of being directed by Joe in such shows as Chicago by Sam Shepard, A Movie Star Has to Star in Black and White by Adrienne Kennedy (both at Signature Theater Company in New York), and The Glass Menagerie at Yale Rep. I got a taste of what it may have been like to work with him back in the Open Theater years when I was a member of the company in a re-working of his famous Winter Project play Tourists And Refugees, workshopped at the Manhattan Theater Club.
So when Encke King asked whether I would be interested in speaking with him about Joe I was thrilled. He told me they were looking for materials about Joe's life post-aphasia. It was a good excuse for me to go to my obscenely-overcrowded storage unit and do some editing. I found a milk-crate full of materials from my work together with Joe. I had been meaning to archive this material at some point. Now seems as good a time as any.
And so, dear reader, you will be the first to share with me what I uncover from my personal Chaikin archive. This truly was a great life in the theater.
I'm off now to rehearsal. Today I begin work with director Eva Burgess on a new piece, untitled, which explores America in the 1950's through the lens of Grace Metalious, author of the scandalous Peyton Place. Wish me luck.
See you bac here soon!
Wayne
