In 1981 I was a 34-year-old student at Indiana University Southeast, exploring art and literature. A counselor suggested that, based on the number of English courses that I was taking, I should declare that as my major. I did, and all these years later, I still have many of the “blue books” that IU gave students to write essays for class. In some of those books, one of my Lit professors made red-inked comments, and one comment was especially gratifying to me. When Dr. Brengle scribbled “lit ref” next to a line I had written, it was an acknowledgement that I had tied the subject in some way to the literature that I had read or learned. I think he was glad that I was paying attention, and I was, especially to lessons and readings of poetry. Those lessons stood me in good stead during my recent attendance at two IndyFringe performances.
“The Veil” was a one-person “monologue beyond life and death,” presented by Raja El Majzoub, “a third-generation Palestinian refugee from Lebanon.” On the tables where attendees sat, there were various props to be used in the show, including cardboard masks. As he quietly speaks of pain, rejection, and a need for acceptance into a culture, he touches on wearing a mask to hide one’s true feelings. His literature asks, “What happens when the mask becomes your only face?” I was struck by the reference as it mirrors the Black experience in this country. The African American poet, Paul Lawrence Dunbar wrote “We Wear The Mask,” and asks “Why should the world be over-wise // In counting all our tears and sighs? // Nay, let them only see us, while // We wear the mask.” After Raja El Majzoub’s performance, I approached him and introduced him to Dunbar’s poem, the spirit of which I heard in “The Veil.”
Another IndyFringe offering was “Dysentery! The Musical,” which tells the story of the Clearwater family, “the world’s most dysfunctional pioneers” who have to deal with bouts of dysentery along the Oregon Trail. Dysentery is dealt with in part, by utilization of the “Poopin’ Pail.” There are “love triangles, ghosts, bandits…” and of course, bouts of dysentery. At one point in the shenanigans, Granny Clearwater, played by Kelsey VanVoorst, states that despite all the mishaps and misdeeds, she will carry on, with her “prime whiskey, rage.” After the show, I spoke to one of the performers, asking if anyone knew the Alan Dugan poem, “Love Song, I and Thou.” The woman said that she would ask the writer, Matt Kramer. In Dugan’s poem, the narrator speaks of how “Nothing is plumb, level, or square,” and how he built the house himself, “and got // hung up in it myself.” He “danced with a purple thumb // at this house-warming, drunk // with my prime whiskey: rage.” Alan Dugan and Granny Clearwater were drinking the same whiskey, but more importantly, they shared the spirit of the delivery of a gift to an audience.
I loved my classes at IUS and had I world (and wealth) enough and time, (see the poet Andrew Marvell) I would have spent far more years in those chairs, learning and growing. I cannot note that the poetic allusions that I heard in the two IndyFringe performances were specifically literary references, though they seemed to be, to me, and I appreciated the gift. I pass it along to you, and though “I labour by singing light” at my “craft or sullen art” (as the poet Dylan Thomas wrote) I do so with a joy for the poetry of life.
cjon3acd@att.net