London’s Scars, presented by Coffeehouse Productions, opens May 15; plays Thurs.-Sat., 8 pm; Sun., 2 pm; through June 27. Tickets: $30. Odyssey Theatre, 2055 S. Sepulveda Blvd., Los Angeles; 310.477.2055 or odysseytheatre.com or plays411.com/londonsscars.
A cast of five will be wearing their scars proudly starting May 15 at the Odyssey Theatre when local playwright Richard Martin Hirsch unveils his latest world premiere entitled London’s Scars, directed by Darin Anthony. It tells of the aftermath of a Palestinian suicide bomber’s deadly strike in the Knightsbridge area and the young woman afflicted with amnesia found wandering near there. As events unfold, it is learned she had spent the night before the attack with the bomber.
Richard Martin Hirsch
Hirsch explains the play’s genesis: “A couple of different things came together, personally and politically, to inspire me to explore this story. The world is so quick to place blame on others it’s hard for people to let go of events. Nothing can be an accident. Therefore everything is preventable. It stems from a need to always be in control. That leads to the necessity of always wanting to assign blame for whatever happens we don’t approve of or find distasteful or sometimes downright horrific.
“On another level the bios of those 911 terrorists tell us they were so against western philosophy and culture they deliberately sacrificed their own lives to kill some of us. Yet in the days before boarding those planes they visited topless bars and drank alcohol and at least one of them reportedly spent the night with a call girl. The hypocrisy struck me as so intense. On the one hand they’re making the ultimate statement they can make against western culture but the last thing they do before making their statement is to go out and experience the very things they find decadent about western culture.”
As the play moves forward and the audience learns of the amnesiac’s prior involvement with the bomber, greater questions naturally intrude for both ticket buyers watching the story and characters onstage living it. We all want answers. In the play hospital administrators and government agencies exert pressure to learn those answers in the person of an expressive arts therapist tasked with the assignment of infiltrating the girl’s memory loss to learn the truth.
Hirsch drew from a personal friendship he and his wife Susan have with a psychologist in the field of expressive arts therapy to craft that character. “It’s a legitimate field where therapists use a variety of creative avenues to treat mental patients. They do all kinds of things like play-acting, singing, dancing, painting, puppetry, mask making, sculpting as another way to look inside a person to penetrate whatever neuroses may be contributing to their behavioral problems. They are licensed psychologists who are also teachers or gifted in art. As a playwright I thought there might be great danger in presenting a traditional doctor/patient dynamic where they’re just sitting opposite each other in a question and answer format. This way it became possible to open it up theatrically with a variety of dramatic devices and interesting stage pictures and still accomplish the job of probing into the nature of the girl’s interaction with the Palestinian.”
Hirsch has twice been nominated for Ovation and LA Weekly Theatre Awards. His plays do not have a short gestation period as Hirsch routinely writes, workshops, rewrites and hosts staged readings of all his plays before they arrive at a full production. London’s Scars proved no exception and in fact it underwent a few title incarnations as well as scene changes and dialogue revisions en route to its present version.
He says, “I originally called it Rigors of Happenstance. I liked the title. Others though expressed problems with it. I then called it Regarding Those Responsible which seemed to go over a little better but still met with a bit of resistance. I kept turning ideas and phrases over in my head searching for the right combination of words to intrigue a potential audience to entice them to explore it further and I literally envisioned that title–London’s Scars–on a theatre marquee.”
Rob Nagle and Meredith Bishop
Indeed the title operates on a few different levels. It utilizes the ambivalence of a world-class city and renowned tourist destination with the blemish of a physical imperfection. It alludes to the actual bombing incident in which over a dozen innocent, unsuspecting victims tragically died. It also refers to the emotional aberration now suffered by the girl who spent time in the terrorist’s company.
With his christening of the play complete Hirsch then concentrated on bringing it to life on the page. “I went through a series of starts,” he says, “and the story began to evolve as the characters took on a life of their own. My initial drafts are always somewhat unkempt. I buckled down and honed the scenes over and over to make the story clear.” Then after his usual rounds of readings and workshops, he decided, “I’ve gone too long now without a production of one of my plays so I petitioned family and friends to raise funding to put it up.”
Is he also producing it then? “Yes,” he replies. “I haven’t made a big deal out of that because the writing is much more important to me. I guess I was also cognizant of the fact this could be construed as a vanity production which I suppose in a way it is. That being said I wanted to push myself to see what was involved in getting a production fully mounted. I’ve learned it’s a huge amount of work. In fact it’s the hardest work I’ve ever done in my life. I write all day, then go to rehearsals every night and deal with all the matters of props, sets, costumes and what have you in addition to the ever-present problems of financing. But I’m learning a lot and having a phenomenal time.
“Darin is younger than me but very knowledgeable in his stagecraft and encourages our actors to explore emotions and motivations on their own. Good actors always create their own back-stories but Darin pushed them to discover more and to share what they discovered. At this point the actors know their individual characters better than I do. And not to denigrate prior casts I’ve worked with, this cast has been so great at delving into deeper levels of the story. Dramaturgically it’s been a great experience for me.”
Darin Anthony
Anthony met Hirsch and encountered London’s Scars when it was still Rigors of Happenstance in his capacity as artistic director of the Living Room Series at the Blank Theatre Company. Plays he has previously directed include Bach at Leipzig at the Odyssey Theatre and US Drag at the Furious Theatre. He recalls, “We did a reading of the play two years ago at the Blank and I subsequently got to work with other plays of Richard’s as well. When the opportunity came to direct it, I naturally wanted to do it.”
They were fortunate to retain three cast members from that initial reading (Meredith Bishop, Imelda Corcoran and Rob Nagle) and went shopping for their two replacements. “We auditioned 15 or 16 people,” he remembers, “but we didn’t put notices in the trades. We called in people we knew or knew of. I had directed Ann Noble in her play Sidhe (pronounced “shee”) at the Road and that’s how she came to our attention. For our terrorist we needed a person who was not entirely sinister but also had some charming qualities. I had seen Ammar Ramzi at the Road in a production of Big Death and Little Death. We called him in from that.”
Anthony enjoys working with Hirsch. He says, “We jumped through a couple of hoops at first when I encouraged Richard to do some rewrites before we even started rehearsals. I think that was good for both of us. I wish every writer were as open and easy to work with as Richard. He’s very open to adjustments. The cast too proved extremely helpful throughout the process.”
Hirsch has had many years to familiarize himself with the playwriting process beginning with his undergraduate career at UCLA where he earned a BA in economics. Quizzed on how such an unlikely major led to his current life course, he explains, “I was following the family path in those days which meant going into business which is exactly what I did. After graduation I went into the furniture business with my brother. But I had also minored in English which led me to read lots of literature. The more I read the more I realized I liked to write. So later I enrolled in the MFA writers program at UCLA and started writing short stories of my own.”
Meredith Bishop and Ammar Ramzi
Confessing to a particular fondness for Kurt Vonnegut’s short stories and Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying, he nevertheless found himself drawn more to the exchange of dialogue within the play format as opposed to the strictures and requirements a novel might impose. He considers, “It’s a different vocabulary between plays and novels, I think. I don’t believe I know enough adjectives or words to describe things for hundreds of pages. Dialogue comes naturally to me. Part of that was the family I grew up in. We had lively discussions and disputatious arguments on lots of subjects. I was also a fly on the wall as a kid observing what the grown-ups did and said to each other. So today I have so many voices, ideas, thoughts and opinions inside me that if I don’t somehow get them out, my head will explode. I have to keep writing.”
Apparently he has to keep exploring too. Each of his plays seems to dip into another segment of society whereby his audiences soak up bits of arcana they might not have expected. In that respect he’s teaching while he’s entertaining, a combination particularly appropriate for his 2008 Theatre 40 drama The Monkey Jar which took place in an elementary school and was dedicated to his daughter Holly with the following program notes: “It is an act of love–written with more empathy and admiration than she’ll probably ever acknowledge–for how truly difficult it is as a young person to be taught. There’s a proverb ‘Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day. Teach him how to fish and he will eat for a lifetime.’ My variation is ‘Teach a student a quadratic equation and she’ll likely forget it within a month or two. But teach her how to love learning and you’ll never have to teach her another damn thing.’”
He admits about Holly, now 19, “I don’t think she loves learning yet. She’s not been highly academic but always very artistic. Some teachers come across as bullying or mean-spirited because they’re so preoccupied with their test scores that they tend to overlook the visual or creative gifts of a person.”
Hirsch seemingly does love learning as well as taking delight in disseminating what he’s learned through his art. He believes, “If I’m not sharing what I’ve learned, I’m at least sharing what I’m struggling with. How I select my subject matter is my gut reaction to what affects me emotionally and then what I think might be interesting to an audience. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve found myself more interested socially and politically in different topics. I read sections of the newspaper today I never read as a young man.”
As history repeats itself with mankind filling up reams of newsprint with subtle variations on those same old human mistakes carried over from generation to generation, Hirsch acknowledges the challenge of telling stories for the stage without tripping into the trap of literary cliché. He thinks a moment before offering his formula for avoiding formulaic playwriting.
“For each of my plays I hope audiences come away thinking about it. There’s lots of complex ideas floating around in the world but there’s also basic, simple truisms. My aim is to present them both and not label something as totally bad or totally good. I hope I can tackle the same old things in different, unexpected ways to jog people into those thoughts and discussions to make their trip to the theatre worthwhile.”
So far his track record bodes well that those in attendance at a Richard Martin Hirsch production will emerge from the experience enlightened and entertained but never scarred.
Feature image of Imelda Corcoran and Ann Noble and production photos by Chris Goss
Article by Gary Ballard
