Oliver Mayer

I can’t tell you how thrilled I am to be about to see Wallowa: The Vanishing of Maude LeRay at the Son of Semele Ensemble. I’ve always enjoyed watching this company of actors work but I never thought I’d get to work with them — certainly not from the ground up on a new piece of this magnitude and deep feeling.

I owe Don Boughton big-time. He brought me into this process. As you may know, he directed my last play The Wiggle Room at Company of Angels. Wallowa is his baby and he is more than simply the director here. With this story of a 76-year-old woman who disappeared in the Wallowa Mountains of eastern Oregon in 2007, he is trying to understand some deep mysteries not only about survival but about the resilience of the human mind, particularly as it ages. He is somewhere between a code breaker and a ballet choreographer, and his music is the constant and particular sound of the Wallowa Forest.

This whole process has been a real departure for me. In my 25 years of writing, I almost always get the idea myself, write the thing on my own and then present it to a theater, a director or someone who can help me get it to the next level. Nearly two years ago, I came to rehearsal at Don Boughton’s behest and really sat and listened to what he had to say to the ensemble at SOSE about the story that would become Wallowa. I made a deal that day to not write anything without connecting it somehow to what was happening in the room between Don and the actors.

Based on the amazing exercises and viewpoints taking place, I would come home and devise short scenes that utilized the discoveries made that day. In this way, and with an amazing ease and economy, I created much of the first act. As for act two, Don brought in a Nez Perce tribe creation myth, and I wanted to use it somehow. At a certain point, I just decided to dive in head first and present it to Don and company as a kind of play within the play. The end of the play is kind of a synthesis of the previous two acts, as we begin to understand what a person must do to survive major trauma and how everyone — family and others — is affected.

Alexander Wright and Dee Amerio Sudik (Photo by Matthew McCray)

My job has been to try to distill the extraordinary work taking place deciphering the big questions we have about this place called Wallowa — its history and its mystery, not to mention what happened to Maude up there. Don showed us the art work of Joseph Cornell early on, and for this piece I used his metaphor of compartmentalizing the world. It’s been one hell of an adventure. It’s a little bit like deliberately getting lost, in order to find a new way home.

We started working on this nearly two years ago, before 127 Hours but sometime after Into the Wild. People can really get into stories about being lost — whether in the desert or the forest or wherever — and I was fascinated by the subject. Don is passionate about it, to the point that he has actually walked where Maude LeRay was lost in the Wallowa Mountain Range in 2007. He even let himself stray pretty far from the path in order to feel what she must have felt, being alone without road markers, way outside cell phone range, existing amid the vast indifference and strangeness of the forest alongside animals and memories.

One of the questions we asked everyone in the play was, “Have you ever been lost?” As it turns out, most of us have felt that feeling. Whenever I tell the story of this play, and the listeners wonder what happened to Maude, my wife always says, “She was kidnapped by aliens.” Could be! All I know is that the deeper you get into this story, the more questions seem to open up — not just about Maude, but about everyone involved. We all get lost in one way or another. There is a lot of adventure, some thriller, and a little bit of whodunit, in this tale. It’s the kind of story that gets a hold of you and does not let go.

So what really happened? Come see.

Wallowa: The Vanishing of Maude LeRay, presented by Son of Semele, opens April 8; plays Fri.-Sat., 8 pm; Sun., 4 pm; through May 8. Tickets: $12-$22. Son of Semele Theatre, 3301 Beverly Blvd., Los Angeles; for further information, go to www.sonofsemele.org.

Oliver Mayer is the author of 20 plays including The Wiggle Room, Dias Y Flores and Laws of Sympathy. He is associate professor of dramatic writing at the University of Southern California School of Theater. For more information on Oliver Mayer visit www.olivermayer.com.
The play is conceived and directed by SOSE company member Don Boughton, an actor and director who began his career with the Improvisational Theatre Workshop at the Mark Taper Forum.