In progress:
Origin of the paradox
By
Sherif Nakhla
John Dillon's career in the theatre spans three decades. From 1977 to 1993 he was Artistic Director of one of the US's leading theatre companies, the Milwaukee Repertory Theatre. He has directed new work by many established playwrights, including David Mamet, Larry Shue, David Rambo and Joanna Glass, and mainstage productions in major venues in the UK, Russia and Japan. A contributor to the American Theatre magazine, he is currently in Cairo as a Distinguished Visiting Professor at the American University in Cairo where he directed Reader by Ariel Dorfman.
Reader is about a futuristic American government censor named Daniel Lucas who is reading a novel by a man named David Malko. The novel is about a Latin American government censor named Don Alfonso who is reading a novel about a futuristic government censor named Daniel Lucas who is reading a novel by a man named David Malko and so on and so forth. It seems to me that David Malko is the only real flesh- and-blood person, although he is a fictional character too, where Don Alfonso and Daniel Lucas are both fictional characters that Malko has created. At the end of the play Malko is killed and the fictional characters take on their own freedom and act the way they choose to act rather than the way the director wants to move them. So in a way the fictional characters take on a more authentic life than real characters.
Some time ago I went to Latin America and was particularly impressed by the theatre scene in Chile. I organised a Chilean theatre festival in Milwaukee at the time. A couple of years later there was a national theatre conference that many theatre activists attended. One of the featured speakers was Ariel Dorfman. The conference took an interview format, and due to my interest in Chilean theatre I was chosen to interview him in front of the crowd. We stayed in touch for a while, as acquaintances. I was later diagnosed with throat cancer, and Dorfman used to check up on me regularly. That cemented our relationship.
I've done many premieres where I would have to work a great deal with the playwrights, but even when I'm not doing a premiere I'll call the author just because I'm very interested in a play's creation. It's wonderful to call a playwright and ask them, 'What do you mean by that?'.
One of the great assets of directing a contemporary play is that you can go right to the source if you have any questions. Theatre people tend to focus on theatre problems; actors trying to solve a scene, lighting and set designers worrying about creating different environments, but playwrights are interested in issues outside the theatre. Just like this play deals with human rights and censorship among other aspects.
The most important thing to know about Dorfman is that his life completely changed on 11 September, not the 9/11 that shocked the world in 2001 but 11 September, 1973, in Santiago, Chile. At that time the military of Chile, supported by the American federal intelligence agency, overthrew the democratically elected government. At the time Dorfman had been working in the presidential palace, and on that day, when he was supposed to be there working he was not. Instead of him another man was in his place, a man who was tortured and later killed. Dorfman has a recurring nightmare; he sees that man who was in his place being tortured and murdered except that the man has Dorfman's face. This idea of identity reversal, the paradox of seeing someone else and yourself at the same time became central to his work. This idea of split identity was always present in his work but that day ignited it and it became a permanent fixture.
Dorfman is a Chilean who was born in Argentina, of Russian parents, and who grew up in New York. The idea of one man with two names is very much at the heart of who Dorfman really is as a person. To begin with, his name is not Ariel Dorfman, his father named him Vladimo Dorfman after Vladimir Lenin. Ariel hated the name because the children at school in New York made fun of it. When his father moved from Argentina to New York Dorfman was moved to an English/ Spanish speaking school. At that point he had already decided to change his identity. He changed his name to Edward and refused to speak Spanish, which was his first language.
During the McCarthy era his father was working in New York at the United Nations. But his father had to leave New York and the family moved back to Chile. At first Dorfman hated Chile: he wanted to speak English, but gradually he began to embrace Chile as his own country. For some time he refused to speak English and only spoke Spanish. Again, a man of paradox, and for the third time he changed his name. There was a famous South American writer who wrote an essay about Shakespeare's The Tempest in which he questioned why America was rich and Latin America poor. He said America was like Caliban; it is ruthless and gets what it wants whereas Latin Americans are like Ariel, the spirit who tries to serve and please. Hence, by accepting the name Ariel he was really accepting an identity as a Latin American. He became Ariel Dorfman.
One aspect that seems consistent with every playwright I've ever known is that they don't write their characters, it is the characters that are the ones that guide the author through the development of a play. It is during the writing process that the characters have most freedom as opposed to when the play is complete and signed by the author. Reader takes place during that phase of character freedom, during David Malko's writing process.
It is strange for me to work here because I'm surrounded by American designers who are working in English. In Japan, where my previous project took place, I had to work with an interpreter because the actors spoke only Japanese. In many ways Egypt is more different from the US than Japan. At the same time directing at AUC is closer to directing in the States than was my experience in Japan. It's a strange mix, but I'd love to come back to Cairo and work on something else soon. It is an exciting city.
