My New Play (on The Group Theatre)

In the Maze of Our Own Lives, which I've written and directed, inspired by the story of The Group Theatre, opened on October 20, 2011 at TJT in San Francisco and will run until November 23. It’s the most ambitious project I’ve ever taken on, and, in many ways, is a culmination of my work up to now. It’s an offering that I want everyone I know to share.  

You can see the full schedule, get tickets and see a video we made last summer during a workshop for the play at Brown Paper Tickets

Robert Avila, one of the Bay Area's finest theatre critics and writers has just written a feature on the play for the SF Bay Guardian.

I co-founded TJT in 1978 when I was exactly thirty-three years old.  On my last birthday, I was sixty-six. For what amounts to half my life, I’ve been able to work within a single artistic home, something rare and wonderful in the world of  American theatre.

But all homes are temporary and TJT, that dream made real, is about to end – at least in its current form. Many of you have already heard this news and know why we’ve decided to close the company at the end of the 2012, thirty-fourth season.  If you haven’t, there’s a brief account on the TJT website, http://www.tjt-sf.org.

The founding members of The Group Theatre created  a community of trust that allowed them to “build a dream”  together and, from it, make a new kind of theatre – one that could shape a still-young, American culture. The plays they produced – particularly those by Group member Clifford Odets – became touchstones for generations of American writers: Arthur Miller, Alfred Kazin, Bernard Malamud, Grace Paley, among others.

For me, the great discovery of my five years of research has been that the Group’s story is, perhaps, its greatest and most far-reaching gift to all of us who followed. As I came to know the landscape of that story, I recognized its contours in the turbulent history of all the American ensemble theatres whose work inspired TJT’s: The Living Theatre, The Open Theatre, The Free Southern Theatre, Bread and Puppet, Teatro Campesino, and more. I saw that before 1931, when Harold Clurman, Lee Strasberg, Cheryl Crawford and about twenty more young theatre-makers started the Group, there had been no ensemble theatre in this country.  I felt as though I had found my ancestors.

When my travels through the 1930s began, I had no idea that TJT was approaching its own end as an ensemble theatre or that In the Maze of Our Own Lives would launch its last season. Life, in all its brilliant, ironic and poignant artistry, has rhymed our story with the Group’s. There’s a hard-won wisdom embedded in that story: the closing of any single theatre is not, as Harold Clurman put it, a catastrophe.  So it is with TJT.  He continues to say that the real catastrophe would be the loss of the values, the impulses, the inspiration and the energy that gave rise to the Group, to the dream of a theatre that could be “a dwelling place for the whole family of decent humanity.”  

Neither did I have any idea, when I began work on this play, that  a new movement like  Occupy Wall Street and all the gatherings it has inspired around the world would be embodying so many of the same hopes for real democracy that motivated the Group. 

In the Maze of Our Own Lives is an offering to the ancestors and to the future. In 1978. Albert Greenberg, Naomi Newman and I made TJT’s first original piece of theatre, Coming from a Great Distance, the first piece of modern Jewish ensemble theatre in this country, as far as we know.  At the time, I knew almost nothing about the Group Theatre.  Much of what I’ve learned as we crossed the great distance from then to now is embedded in this play and this production. 

It is said that the last words of the legendary figure, the Baal Shem Tov, subject of TJT’s 1978 play, were, "I am going out one door, to come in through another." May this work be the “other” door through which the soul, spirit and story of The Group enters. In these times, we can’t live without it.

In the Maze of Our Own Lives would not exist without the enormous collective contribution of the cast, designers, musicians, staff, crew, our families and supporters of all sorts.

Maze card design by Julie Giles

Dance of Exile photo by Irene Young

In the Maze of Our Own Lives photos by Ken Friedman