Theatre of Place - The Cure

The Cure is the first play that I created for Ziggurat Theatre Ensemble which had none of the trappings of theatre. It was not in a theatre space, there were no programs. No sets or theatre lighting. The actors wore no stage make up. And there was no curtain call.

I, of course, didn’t invent this kind of performance. But it was new to me. And it was a powerful experience for me and the actors and the audience to be a part of.

I had originally staged The Cure in a library basement in Vermont and it was the first piece that I ever created out of whole cloth. “Devised” is the phrase we are using now. That production had a lot of problems which I couldn’t see at the time. Although the audiences subsequently told me what they were.

It was eight years before I was able to get back to it, to try to solve the problems, and I restaged it in Los Angeles.

We performed it in a room at the United Methodist Church in Hollywood. It was a medium-sized hall with a carpeted floor and large windows. The audience waited in an adjoining room until the play was to begin. I told them that it would run about an hour, and that at the end we would open the doors to let them out. (That sounds ominous, as I write it…) At the appointed time, we opened the doors and the spectators entered and sat in any of the seats which were available along the two long walls, facing each other with the action in the center. The room was lit by electric sconce lights which were part of its architecture. There was a table in the center of the room and a teenage girl lying face up on that table. It was clear that the girl was sick in some way and a man, worried and emotionally drained, waited next to her. We will call him the Father.

Michael Klock as the Father and Zeidy Martinez as the Girl

The audience watches the Father wait for 10 or 15 minutes. This was a long time for the audience to wait and was a way of fumbling toward a real-life event, and not a dramatic one. The play would be plenty dramatic later.

Presently, a man and two women arrive.  We will call them the Healers. They arrive from a door which opens directly to the outside. We could have even seen them approach had we been looking through the double glass doors. During nights when it was raining, they would come in wet with umbrellas.

Left to right: Tim Ottman, Dawn Akemi Saito and Lyena Strelkoff

The Father is relieved to see them, and it is clear that he is meeting them for the first time. When they meet, the Father discovers that none of them speak English. Not what he expected. The Father and the Healers try to communicate without understanding each other’s languages. The man and the women make it clear that they are waiting for one more person who is late. So they all sit and wait. Another five minutes goes by.

Left to right: Tim Ottman, Dawn Akemi Saito, Lyena Strelkoff and Naila Azad

Finally, the last visitor enters from the outside. She also does not speak English. 

The four Healers, now all assembled, set about examining the girl on the table, whose breathing is labored and heavy, but shows no other signs of life.

They do their best to comfort the Father and to assure him, (again not in English) that they are going to try to help the girl. 

Foreground: Tim Ottman. Behind: Lyena Strelkoff and Zeidy Martinez (on table)

What ensues is their healing ceremony. This is the bulk of the play. I will briefly describe this part although it will convey nothing about the experience.

Foreground: Naila Azad. Left to right behind: Lyena Strelkoff and Michael Klock

The ritual of healing is an unusual ceremony, which begins with strange vocal intonations and a laying on of hands. And it climaxes with what appears to be a brutal exorcism. The Father does not know whether the healers are helping or harming the now-screaming Girl. So he tries to intervene in a violent way. In the end, the Girl is cured and awake, and the main Healer is dead. But it is unclear whether the Girl’s cure was brought about because of the Father’s intervention - or in spite of it.

Foreground: Zeidy Martinez and Dawn Akemi Saito. Behind: Michael Klock, Tim Ottman

At the very end, there is no one left in the space, we open the outside doors and the audience is free to leave. (Technically, they were free to leave at any point...)

I wanted to give the audience the experience of witnessing something that could have happened in real life. And the place is crucial to this. 

If a man’s daughter is inexplicably sick and he has exhausted all conventional means to cure her, he might resort to this: bringing her to an empty room in the back of the church where he takes the chance on the intervention of strangers.

Even in the staging we were careful not to use conventions that would betray any theatrical artifice. The actors spoke to each other as they would and did not “project.” They did not “cheat out.” There were no ushers or house managers in the space. The actors and I rigorously tried to give the audience the illusion of watching a real event. The play vacillated between meticulously rehearsed moments and considerable improvised stretches in between them.

It was also nice to just do one play where no one came out beforehand and told you to turn off your cell phones (and in those days, pagers.) No one told you where the fire exits were. No one told you what was playing next week. Or asked you to subscribe to the season. Or asked you for a donation. 

It was a way of saying to the spectators, if you go into that room and are very quiet, you will actually witness something real, which also happens to be extremely dramatic. I have been to many plays which attempted to subvert the audiences’ conventional expectations. I am always grateful for this, regardless of the quality of the play.

And here’s something interesting. The play was reviewed in an unprecedented way.

On opening night, there was a reviewer there from the LA Weekly. The theatre editor of that same paper, Steven Leigh Morris, also came to that same performance, separately from his reviewer. Morris was not there to review it, just to see it. 

The reviewer didn’t like The Cure and his review appeared in the following week’s paper. But Morris had a completely opposite reaction and printed a rebuttal review directly under his colleague’s. I have never seen this before or since, anywhere.

Morris’s review began:

“We critics presume to reveal plays; often it’s the other way around. I was so smitten with the production generally dismissed in the previous review that I feel compelled to defend it.”

And it ended:

We, like the father, are mute witnesses to a dangerous exorcism, a rising wave of movements and sounds that is hypnotically primal, sensual and supernatural. It’s like stepping off a plane into a foreign land and being privy to a private if enigmatic sacrament, where reason is an uninvited guest. The ceremony, like the language, is entirely invented so cultural or historical context is beside the point. This is among the most beautiful and pristine theatre pieces I can remember.”