Nancy and I go to plays. We've been doing this over 30 years. It has been one of the adhesives in our relationship.
We recently saw "Paradise Lost" at the Intiman. This is an interview with Lori Larsen, actor in the play, by Stephanie Coen of the Intiman Theatre. I am reprinting it here to share with you all.
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In “Paradise Lost,” playwright Clifford Odets dramatized life in the 1930s. In her performance, actor Lori Larsen makes those long-gone woes feel part of the present
Apr 14, 2010, Vol: 17, No: 16
These days, it’s hard not to compare our current economic state with an earlier one that befell the world 80 years before. Many draw parallels between the Great Depression – with unemployment hovering above 20 percent, with personal income plummeting 33 percent or more – and today, when reports that banks only repossessed 79,000 homes in a month amounts to good news. Comparisons between then and now only gain strength when some in the media refer to our current era as the “Great Recession.” But how did people in the 1930s view their situation? And what can we, in the present, learn from the stories of the past?
Several days a week, since March 26, Lori Larsen has been trying to figure that out while others watch. That’s the night Larsen, and a cast of 14 others, opened in Intiman Theatre’s production of “Paradise Lost,” by the playwright Clifford Odets (1906 – 1963). Set in the early ’30s, Odets’ Depression-era rendering imagines what life might have been like for working people, in that period that’s known to most of us from history books or iconic photographs. In the play Larsen plays Clara Gordon, the matriarch of a family that, over the course of three acts, has the screws put to it: bad business deals, foreclosure, homelessness, chronic illness, death, mob dealings. You know: drama, of the type that graces the stage. And as the screws tighten, Clara tries her best not to flinch, to remain present and address each problem as it arises. Sitting in the audience watching Larsen’s performance, it’s hard not to be drawn in, to want to sit down at her kitchen table and admire – and sometimes fault – the ways she tries to get out of every bad situation that seems intent on pinning her down. She’s got the practical “I’ll-take-care-of-it” mother thing down.
But since waltzing onto stage and sitting down with the actor is usually frowned upon, sometimes you have to settle for another option. In this case, sitting down to lunch with Larsen, to talk of the play and economic hard times. It might feel incongruous, then, to have this conversation at the Grill, Nordstrom’s basement restaurant. Larsen herself admits she only knows it because a friend played piano there. But what better place to chat about depressions and recessions, homes owned and lost, money gained and squandered than in a store where, 10 yards away, a basic t-shirt can be had for $55 or a pair of sunglasses can set you back $450? There, Larsen described what it means to be a poor, yet happy, actor in a little-known play.
You grew up here.
Yeah. I was born on 71st and Greenwood, in my grandmother’s house. John Bastyr delivered me. [Laughs.] I grew up on 17th Street, in the University District. You know that chestnut-lined street? I grew up on that street. It was a very normal middle-class upbringing. I decided, when I was 17, to become an actor and I’ve been an actor ever since.
But I’ve never made much money. I’m in your lowest poverty level group [she laughs], which is fine. I had the good fortune, in 1976, of buying a house for a very small amount of money. A very miniscule amount of money. In those days, nobody wanted to live in Seattle. It was $2,000 down and $150 a month, for 30 years. You know, I paid it off. I still live there, in the C.D. I’ve had some, you know, tough times: There was the crack epidemic in the neighborhood. It’s changed a lot.
I’m so fortunate: I make between $18,000 [and] $22,000 a year every year, and that usually includes about five grand of unemployment. I mean, I just live really low-key. And I watched the real estate go up and up and up and up and up and up and up and up, and the real root of our economic crisis [is] housing is unaffordable. There’s no working class anymore. You’re either [at] Real Change or you’re a yuppie. What’s in between? My [property] taxes are $5,000 a year. I can’t wait to be 62 when I get a break, for being poor, on my taxes, because they’re killing me.
How would you describe “Paradise Lost?”
There’s been a lot of emphasis on the recession and Depression, but I think of it as a family story, a story about a family and family dynamics.
One of the things I was so struck by was [the cast] read some Studs Terkel–
Yeeess.
—his Depression-era writings. I read a lot of the interviews he did. And these people were talking about all the hardships they experienced during the Depression. But every single one of them, to a person almost, had nostalgia for the sense of community that existed during the ’30s, that got lost in the war era, when the men all left, and then in the ’50s, when everyone flew to the suburbs. As affluence grew, existential reality grew. And the sense of being there for others, the interdependence of people, was something that almost everyone was nostalgic for. You know: Some guy doesn’t have anywhere to stay, the furnace man, you put him in the basement. You’ve got a neighbor, you used to have a pretty close friend, he comes over all the time, you feed him. His daughter marries your son and then he moves in with you. And yeah, you’re exasperated at the time, but then [you’re] looking back on that time with incredible nostalgia for all the ways that human beings helped each other.
There are a lot of economic stresses on those people. And they have no safety net in those days: There’s no Social Security, there’s no old age pension. There’s nothing. If you lose, you gotta start over. There’s no unemployment. The safety net was created out of the suffering of those people.
There was this one guy who came and moved all the furniture out of people’s houses, in the Studs Terkel [interviews], and they would go back to the people who had hired them and say, “Well, the mattress was filled with bedbugs, we couldn’t take it.” And the mattress was fine, but they just wanted to leave it there for the people, so they would have something to sleep on. And people were always finding creative ways of helping each other out: While the system was trying to pull people apart, people were stepping up. So I was really struck by that.
One of the things that happened to me while I was doing this play was my wallet was stolen. I was in a restaurant, my purse was open likes this [she unzips it]. There wasn’t anyone around. And I went over [she stands up and pretends saying to wait staff, ‘Hey, you forgot to bring me my soup,’ then sits back in chair] and when I came back, it was gone. Stolen. And it was right during tech week [the week before opening night]. I had to get new credit cards, the whole [shebang]. But I noticed that when my wallet was stolen, I felt lighter. Of course, it was sad and all that, but there was also this sense of lightness for a whole day, two days: I didn’t have any money, I didn’t have any credit cards, I didn’t have any I.D. I just had me. I felt this weird sense of lightness and [Buddhist nun and author] Pema Chödrön says, “The closest you get to enlightenment is when you’re feeling completely groundless.” It helped me understand that there’s a light side to losing everything. It’s not to discount the suffering involved, but there’s also another side to the coin, which I’ve been exploring in my performance and it’s much more accurate to the truth, than always being so unhappy. I don’t know if you run across that in the homeless people you know, this kind of lightness.
It varies: I think for some people, it’s very heavy. But for other people, they feel they don’t need it: Why do I have to have all this stuff weighing me down? I can just do what I want, and go where I want and be who I want, and I don’t have these tethers.
I think the value of this play is that you look at this one moment, when they lose everything, and then you can reflect: What would I do? How would it come down for me, if I had no place to go, with nothing left? How would I respond?
You mentioned the Great Depression and right now, we’re in the so-called Great Recession. And there are all kinds of news reports about what’s going on: people losing their homes, becoming homeless, health care. How do you think drama allows us to investigate something like economic reality that may not come across in journalism or news reports?
Well, Obama sort of got over the last health care hurdle when he took that little boy and told his story, remember? [Marcelas Owens, 11, from Seattle, stood next to Obama when the President signed health care legislation on March 23. Marcelas’ mother died of complications from pulmonary hypertension when Marcelas was 8. His mother had been denied health care coverage.] A story, which has emotional content about real people and what they actually experience, is the only way we are capable of experiencing empathy. We need a story. That’s why we tell each other stories: to shore up our compassion, shore up our empathy. When you tell a story, you’re absorbed by the drama of it and that drama enables people to feel empathy, which is the key to being human. It’s really the key. A dry story in a newspaper, with statistics: It’s hard to put a human face on that. You could extrapolate “Paradise Lost” for anybody who’s facing foreclosure.
Compassion and empathy are quite sophisticated contemporary notions. It’s been a long evolutionary path for us to get to the point where the Dalai Lama is the big celebrity that he is. It’s been a huge evolutionary path because compassion requires the ability to put yourself in another person’s shoes. And drama has that capacity. It’s the miracle of movies. And the theater is even more immediate because it’s right there.
So you’ve got this great scene –
Where I lose my moral compass.
Could you set it up, what you go through?
Well, [my character and her husband, Leo, have] lost everything and the business partner proposes that we burn down our business to get the insurance to save our skins, and my husband says, “No,” because he’s got a strong sense of integrity and morality. We’ve lost everything due to criminality of the business partner and when I find out that’s what went down, at first I’m appalled. And then I’m reflecting on it for a moment: “Well, since there’s no other way out, maybe we should go for that.” And I have a moment of moral turpitude, a lapse, where I ask him to think about the idea of maybe [burning down the business] and he gets mad at me. I realize I’ve stepped over the line and that’s what makes our relationship so strong: that he’s a moral compass for his wife.
So she has a moment where she goes over to the dark side, just out of desperation, and he reins her back in right away. They’re saved from doing anything stupid like that. But as a result of that moment, the spiral down to having absolutely nothing begins. She can see the writing on the wall. But their relationship is such that he’s foolish and he doesn’t act when he should, and as a result of his inability to act, things fall away from them in ways that could have been prevented. Women in those days couldn’t really step up and run things, husbands were in charge. She says, “I wanted to go for [a] loan myself, but Leo says it’s a man’s job.” And by the time he goes, there’s 48,000 [people] in line ahead of him.
There’s also a parallel with health care.
We’ve got this son who needs health care. And with no money, no business, we can’t provide for our son. So that’s part of where her desperation comes from: It’s not just losing her house, but they’ve got this child, their last surviving son, who’s dying, who needs help, who needs care. Imagine changing his soiled pants, trying to feed him – Did you see the movie “Awakenings?” Same disease [encephalitis lethargica, which can debilitate someone until he can’t speak or move] that Robert DeNiro had, that’s what [the son] has. There was an epidemic in the late teens, early ‘20s that sort of swept through the United States. He’s one of the vestiges of that epidemic and it’s a horrible, horrible thing.
So yeah, they’ve got a lot of difficulties and to behave heroically in the face of all those difficulties is not something that most human beings can do. It brings out the worst in people. It certainly brings out the worst in Clara.
Are you familiar with many playwrights of that era?
You know, I’m not. I mean, the patois: the rat-tat-tat-tat of that. The faster the better. Clifford Odets is a true genius in terms of making it easy for the actors to flow with the lines. I’ve been really, really impressed, having done a lot of plays, of what a great wordsmith he was in making dramatic situations. He was a master. He was only 28 when he wrote this.
And when does it close?
April 25.
And when is your [60th] birthday?
April 23. I’m playing that night. I’m pretty happy about it. It’s a perfect thing to be doing. I love working. It really makes me happy. You know, I don’t work that much. I don’t work as much as I’d like. It’s just hard to get a job. It’s really hard.
Stephanie Coen
Director of Communications I Intiman Theatre
206.204.3320 I stephanie@intiman.org
www.intiman.org
2010 SEASON
Paradise Lost I The Thin Place I Ruined
A Doctor In Spite Of Himself I The Scarlet Letter
