Preview:
Eye on the Hurricane

by Amy Lilly

About halfway through our phone interview, Anne Galjour gets to the point. “Obviously, I think we should be running everything.” Women, that is. Everything, as in everything from the U.S. government on down.

I had expected a polite conversation with a Southern woman, an actor-playwright from outside New Orleans brought up in, I imagined, a typical, male-dominated environment. Instead, the voice coming over the line from San Francisco had a neutral Midwestern news delivery accent – “As a child, I was committed to getting rid of that accent,” – and a passionately feminist sensibility – “I don’t know how feminism got to be a bad word. I mean, forget these people, forget them.” Households in the deep South might have had rigid gender divisions, but the ruling power in Galjour’s house was her grandmother. Now a grandmother herself, Galjour has taken that heritage to the stage.

Hurricane, Galjour’s one-woman play, is her tribute to the unique culture and people of the Cajun bayou country in which she grew up. Her hometown of Cut Off in Lafourche Parish was a place where everyone spoke French outside of school and “people didn’t buy fish; everyone owned a boat and when you wanted fish, you went out and caught your own.” Hurricanes in Galjour’s childhood meant a day off from school, filling the bathtubs, huddling around flashlights and non-perishables at Grandma’s, and listening to the aunts tell stories of the great hurricanes past: Hilda in 1893; Betsy with its 140 mph winds; the women who tied their babies to the tallest tree to keep them safe from the floods.

Galjour wrote Hurricane in 1992 following Hurricane Andrew, and in 1994 it won the American Theater Critics Association M. Elizabeth Osborn New Play Award for an Emerging Playwright. She went on to write three more plays, mostly works for solo performance. After Katrina hit in 2005, Galjour revived Hurricane to raise money for the New Orleans arts organizations where her works were being performed. “Some of the towns it’s set in have been wiped out, so it’s like a living document,” she says.

Galjour will perform the play at four nearby locations in early February, a New England tour arranged through the Hopkins Center for the Arts (the Hop), where Galjour’s appearance is the lynchpin of a new three-year initiative called Class Divide. Starting at the Hop in Hanover, NH, Galjour will next travel to the FlynnSpace in Burlington, the Latchis Theater in Brattleboro, and the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts in North Adams, Massachusetts.

Profits from the Hop and Flynn performances will support ArtSpot Productions and Mondo Bizarro, two New Orleans non-profits that cultivate the local culture’s voices—the very voices that Galjour fears are threatened with extinction in a post-Katrina New Orleans all but forgotten by the federal government. The Latchis performance is a benefit for the Brattleboro Arts Initiative and for Southern Repertory, a New Orleans theater that recently commissioned two plays about Katrina. Hurricane will be directed by Sharon Ott and is a production from the Z Space Studio in San Francisco.

Galjour, who moved to San Francisco 25 years ago, recently returned to her home state for a two-week visit, staying with a family now spending their second year living in a FEMA trailer. She is passionate about conveying the scale of the devastation, which is still visible everywhere. “Louisiana has lost 4.9 percent of its population. The area which was destroyed is the size of Great Britain. Think Nagasaki. Think Dresden. I am not exaggerating,” Galjour says. “Europe had a Marshall Plan; Louisiana does not. I mean, the job of just clearing away the debris is way beyond any state’s ability to handle. There is literally not enough landfill room in Louisiana for that amount of debris.”

She recognizes that her efforts to raise money are small within this overwhelming picture of devastation, but added, “I guess you could say that theater is my church, and I’m a church lady, so I make my donations.” Last year’s beneficiaries were Southern Repertory and True Brew Theater, where her last play, Okra, was in the middle of a sold-out run. As Katrina closed in, a hopeful message was left on True Brew’s answering machine that was still there when the theater folded: Your tickets will be good for additional performances rescheduled for after the storm. They didn’t know then that the floor would literally buckle into a small mountain.

Galjour is adamant about keeping the plight of the New Orleans area in the public eye, but she is not one to give into pessimism. One positive effect of the devastation has been to mobilize and unite community members. “There is a level of community involvement there right now that rivals anything you’re going to see anywhere. I’m moved by it,” she says. There are the Golden Hearts, senior citizens, all women, who have gotten together for the past several years to write and perform their own plays. These women, ranging in age from 62 to 94, are the most vulnerable segment of the population, says Galjour, yet they continue to leave their homes to meet and provide support for each other weekly, as they always have. While visiting, Galjour helped drive them to their meetings.

“In my culture, we don’t have nursing homes,” she explains. “Everyone built their houses around the grandmother’s house. So my grandmother was the matriarch, and she ruled. Food was everything; it was all about power and control over that Magnalite pot,” she says, adding for my instruction that Cajun culture “is not blackened redfish, by the way. No French grandmother is going to smoke up her kitchen like that.”

“I grew up in the kitchen listening to my aunts tell stories. If I had stayed there instead of moving to San Francisco,” she reflects, “I would still be there listening; I would never have become a writer.” Galjour’s leaving at all was unusual; she noted several times that New Orleans has the country’s highest per capita rate of people who continue to live where they were born.

In San Francisco she established a career in acting and then playwrighting while rearing a son with her husband, who was “fifty-fifty all the way.” She also teaches playwrighting at San Francisco State University, where she has been a lecturer since 2000, and facilitates a local women’s writing group. “I did not have a model of a mother who worked outside the home,” Galjour says, yet it seems that she did not need one; the model of the strong woman was omnipresent.

“I think those women had more power than they realized,” says Galjour of her childhood mentors. What would they have done, had they realized their power? “They could have gotten better schools. They would have been running the school boards. And I think we still don’t realize how much power we have. We have the power to vote like a grandmother.”

What? “Okay. Does Grandma send her kids into harm’s way?” she begins, clearly in reference to the war in Iraq. “If Grandma’s next door neighbor does not have enough groceries to get through the week, would she just let that go? No. It’s just not in her nature to allow that. Would she allow her grandchildren’s friends to not know how to read? If she found out that the kids down the street were going to school without breakfast, and she had some Lance’s crackers in her purse along with her Kleenex and cough drops—? It’s just in our nature. It’s basic. If we vote like a grandma, there would not be this great division between the haves and the have-nots. And all this talk about God? We— women—bring in the divine. Because the most divine expression is making sure that everyone has what they need.

“I hope Nancy Pelosi votes like a grandmother,” she adds.

Galjour admits that Southern culture, even in her hometown, is no longer structured around gendered divisions of labor and power. Now, as in her case, both parents have to learn everything—“now Dad has to be able to make a good roue,” as she puts it—and what is lost, she says, is time – time to socialize and contribute to the community. But much is gained. She knows that her mother would have loved to finish college, and for Galjour—a first-generation college graduate—the accomplishment of which she is most proud is to have shown her son that it is possible to be a working artist in a secondary market and raise a family at the same time.

Galjour will coordinate her performances in each town with scheduled Story Circles in which local folks will be encouraged to share their own stories about growing up, and bring in photographs. The circles are part of her research for a new play commissioned by the Hop as part of their Class Divide Initiative, slated to premiere in Fall 2008.

Margaret Lawrence, Hopkins Center director of programming, says that Galjour is perfect for Class Divide, which is aimed at using art to increase public dialogue on issues of social inequality. “Artists like Galjour are in the vanguard of talking about these things and performance gives people a more sympathetic and accessible framework to think about important, thorny issues like class than, say, a lecture,” she says.

Even though Galjour is not from the area, Lawrence sees her as ideal for gathering the stories of local people, saying that Galjour’s work is humorous but always very respectful of the people on whom her characters are based. Galjour has scheduled story circles with a large range of residents, including farmers, Dartmouth College students who grew up in the area, and people old enough to remember their grandparents going into town by horse-drawn carts to clean the houses of the wealthy.

The story circles also seem to continue the circle that joins together Galjour’s life and work. During a visit to the Hanover area last summer, the regionalist playwright noticed many similarities to her Louisiana home. Not only did she see the same patterns of generations of families staying in the same place, many in trailers in isolated spots, but “it had that distinct character of a small community moved by a high level of volunteerism and participation in local events. When you’re in it, you don’t see how amazing it is. It’s not a lot of places that have that,” she noted.

Performances:

Hopkins Center for the Arts, Hanover, NH (603-646-2422; www.hop.dartmouth.edu), Tuesday and Wednesday, February 6 and 7, 7:00 p.m.

FlynnSpace, Burlington, VT (802-863-5966; www.flynncenter.org), Friday, February 9, 8:00 p.m.

Latchis Theater, Brattleboro, VT (802-254-1109; www.latchis.com), Sunday, February 11, 7:00 p.m.

Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts, North Adams, MA (413-662-5543; www.mcla.mass.edu), Friday, February 16, 7:30 p.m.

To join in a story circle, contact the Hopkins Center Outreach and Arts Education Department at (603) 646-3812.

Associate Editor Amy Lilly lives in Burlington.