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Talk About Walkabout

By Jeanne Schiffman

Lisa Pelikan and Simon Levy take on Lynne Kaufman's Daisy in the Dreamtime

Karen Jo Fairbrook stars as Daisy Bates and Beethovan Oden as King Billy in Daisy in the Dreamtime

19 March 2004 - Staging Daisy in the Dreamtime is clearly a labor of love for those involved in the six-character, historically based drama, which opens this week at the Ford as a West Coast premiere.

For San Francisco novelist/playwright Lynne Kaufman, the play--published in the Smith & Kraus anthology Women Playwrights: The Best Plays of 2003--is the culmination of a decades-long fascination with Australian Aboriginal culture. But it was only a few years ago, when she read a literary fictional biography, Daisy Bates in the Desert, that Kaufman found a theatrical hook.

In 1913, Daisy Bates, a middle-aged Irishwoman, went to live among the aborigines in the outback, where she devoted the rest of her days to trying to preserve their traditional way of life. She fed and doctored them, fought to keep out the railroad, and recorded for posterity their rituals and myths.

As the central figure in Kaufman's fictionalized play, the fiercely independent Daisy (Lisa Pelikan) loves the aborigines' lack of materialism, connection to the earth, and detachment from the modern world's perception of time. When another real-life figure, Lutheran missionary Annie Lock (Suanne Spoke), wants to bring modernism to the tribes, the two fanatically idealistic women are in conflict.

"I used the historical events as a jumping-off point for what I think is a universal theme: You can't stop progress no matter how hard you try," says Kaufman. "That's the poignancy of it: Progress is relentless." For Kaufman, the play's historical particulars intersect with a personal conundrum: "What gives meaning to our lives? How do we simplify our lives?" she wonders.

Integral to the play is the Aboriginal concept of "dreamtime," a religious belief system in which past, present, and future co-exist in perpetuity. The play's nonlinear chronology forms a dreamtime of its own.

A passionate researcher, Kaufman went to Cecil Rhodes' house in Oxford to read Daisy's own reports and books as well as newspaper articles about her. After drafting the drama, the playwright flew to Adelaide, where the library has Daisy's letters plus a glossary she created of her tribe's language. Kaufman also examined cave paintings in the outback.

Director Simon Levy and actor Lisa Pelikan, equally enthralled by the culture, delved into research of their own. For Levy, Kaufman's play is an opportunity to pursue his passion for anthropology. "One of the appeals of theatre is that I can go off into all these worlds, as researcher, ethnologist," he says. "I feel I'm always in the laboratory." The plight of indigenous peoples touches his heart, especially as it relates to environmental issues, and he sees all those social concerns in Daisy.

The cast watched movies about Aboriginals, including Walkabout, The Last Wave, and The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith. Pelikan read Daisy's book The Passing of the Aborigines, books about her, and "tons of material" on the aborigines. She also consulted an anthropologist to learn about Aboriginal peoples today. "Their way of living is what we're all really trying to get back to," says Pelikan. She notes that Daisy learned 188 Aboriginal dialects. Pelikan's accent in the play is based on a tape recording of the real Daisy.

Daisy Bates had a pretentious way of referring to the tribe she lived with as "my people," and certainly she was arrogant. "But," says Pelikan, "she had to have enormous self-confidence to have done what she did. She was laughed at, condemned, yet she persevered. If we did not have her records, we wouldn't know about the aborigines of that time." It was Daisy who documented the tribal lifestyle before it began to be destroyed by white people--that is, before Aboriginal children were taken away from their families, to be raised in white orphanages.

Levy had hoped to bring in an Aboriginal actor from Australia to play the tribal leader, "King Billy," but, none being available, cast African-American actor Anthony J. Haney in the important role.

For Levy, Kaufman's script resonates both emotionally and visually. He says that Daisy's journey, as depicted by Kaufman, is in itself a dreaming. "In Aboriginal culture, everything is considered sacred," he explains. "If you kill a kangaroo because you have to eat, you still consider that kangaroo sacred, and then you're in 'kangaroo dreaming.' In Aboriginal art, they named their art pieces 'Lizard Dreaming' or "Waterhole Dreaming.' So for me, this play is 'Daisy's Dreaming'—I'm trying to create a piece of Aboriginal visual art." To that end, he is employing sound and light effects to move the action and the players freely through time and space. A live didjeridoo player, Andjru Werderitsch, conjures the sounds of Australia.

"I want the audience to somehow experience dreamtime, but not intellectually," says Levy.

Pelikan adds wistfully, "I myself have fallen in love with the way of life the Aboriginal people created." BSW

"Daisy in the Dreamtime" will be presented by the Fountain Theatre at the Ford, 2580 Cahuenga Blvd. East, Hollywood. Thu.-Sat. 8 p.m. Sun. 2 p.m. Mar. 20-Apr. 25. $25. (323) 461-3673.

Source: Backstage

'Daisy' playwright finds inspiration in gutsy women

By Misha Berson
Seattle Times theater critic

March 19, 2004 - San Francisco playwright Lynne Kaufman admits to an abiding fascination with "larger-than-life characters. I'm very drawn to those strong women who break the stereotypes — and then pay for it."

The majority of Kaufman's 13 produced plays borrow from the biographies of actual female nonconformists and trailblazers — painter Georgia O'Keeffe ("Our Lady of the Desert"), feminist author Simone de Beauvoir ("Shooting Simone"), Marilyn Monroe ("The Next Marilyn").

And her newest work, "Daisy in the Dreamtime," was inspired by a gutsy, self-made anthropologist-writer (and renegade farm wife) named Daisy Bates.

The real Bates left Ireland early in the 20th century to live on a rural spread in Australia. But she grew bored with the dreary life there, and she left her husband and child to pitch a tent in the outback and study Aboriginal people — quite a daring thing for a white woman in 1913.

"Daisy in the Dreamtime" has piqued considerable interest since its Off-Broadway debut in 2003. Currently, it can be seen in two West Coast productions. The Seattle version, at the Richard Hugo House through April 3, is presented by Golden Fish Theatre and directed by company artistic director Cynthia White.

The script for "Daisy in the Dreamtime" also will be anthologized in the upcoming book "Best New Plays of 2003," published by Smith & Kraus.

Kaufman seems delighted by the attention for "Daisy," a play she says was influenced (as were many of her previous works) by her friendship with famed author-teacher Joseph Campbell.

"I met him at (the New Age center) Esalen and invited him to teach and lead three international tours for the University of California extension program, where I've worked for years," she recalls. "He was my teacher and mentor, and I was so influenced by his views of indigenous peoples and the universality of myth."

Kaufman first discovered Bates through a biography about her ("Daisy Bates in the Desert"), and later by digging through libraries in Australia. "I had access to her journals there, and it was exciting to find a copy of a glossary she'd put together of the tribe she lived with, and their language," the playwright explains.

"I became very interested in her and her spiritual search. At my stage of life, I'm trying to figure out what's most important. Daisy lived out in the bush for 30 years but said, 'I have everything I want and nothing I don't.' I thought there was such purity in that."

She also was drawn to the "dreamtime" philosophy Bates found among Australian tribespeople, in which past, present and future are conflated. "They believed every living thing and being was connected to every other living thing, and life wasn't dominated by the fear of losing time or the need for more and more possessions."

The fictionalized central conflict in the play, Kaufman notes, is between Daisy and a Lutheran missionary, Annie Lock. Daisy wants to help preserve native traditions; Annie's mission is "to help the Aborigine people come in to the 20th century, at a time when the Trans-Australian Railroad was on its way."

The clash between these two intrepid women's worldviews, the spiritual versus the pragmatic, is one part of the story. Another aspect, says Kaufman, has to do with an Aboriginal man called King Billy, who returns to his own people after a demoralizing stint toiling on the farm of Daisy's racist husband, Jack.

While in Seattle, Kaufman also worked with White and local actors on a new in-process play "Magician's Choice." She's recently published her first novel ("Slow Hands") and will see her second book, "Wild Women's Weekend," come out in print this June.

Not bad for someone who didn't start writing plays until the mid-1980s, when in her 40s. "I wrote short stories before," relates Kaufman, the wife of a San Francisco physician. "They had to be short! I was raising two kids and didn't have time to do a play until they were in school full time."

"Daisy in the Dreamtime" plays Thursdays-Saturdays through April 3 at Hugo House, 1634 11th Ave., Seattle; $15-$20 (800-838-3006 or www.goldenfishtheatre.org).

A Los Angeles engagement, at the Fountain Theatre, plays through April 25.

Source: Seattle Times

Cranky heroine weakens 'Daisy'

By Joe Adcock
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER THEATER CRITIC

March 23, 2004 - Daisy May O'Dwyer Bates (1861-1951) is one of those picturesque characters who abound in Irish and Australian lore. Bates pertains to both. She emigrated from Ireland to Australia, where she became a doyenne of Aboriginal culture.

Bates is the central character of "Daisy in the Dreamtime," a sort of docudrama by Lynne Kaufman that is playing at Richard Hugo House (a Golden Fish Theatre production).

As by Karen Jo Fairbrook, under the direction of Cynthia White, Bates is obnoxious: self-righteous, narrow-minded, resentful, bitter and unfriendly.

We are given to understand Bates was a good listener -- at least when Aborigines were talking. Her claim to fame is that she spent 16 years living in a tent and collecting data about Aboriginal people.

Kaufman focuses on the demise of an extraordinary culture. Filtering that tragedy through cranky Daisy Bates trivializes it.

Beethovan Oden portrays one of Bates' informants. He does a good job with an exotic Aussie/Aborigine accent. He creates a sense of mystery, dignity ... and doom. He is a Stone Age mystic confronted by a combination of machine age progress and greed. No contest.

Rachel Hornor depicts a Lutheran missionary. Sometimes she is the main object of Bates' contempt. And sometimes she personifies what is best in Bates -- a concern for victims. Playing Bates' grandmother (and also, for a couple of minutes, Queen Victoria), Teresa Frost's main job is to evoke pre-Christian Irish mysticism. As a cartoon British bearer of what Rudyard Kipling referred to as the "white man's burden," Alan Bryce plays a patronizing ethnographer who, according to legend, established an exalted reputation by appropriating Bates' data.

According to Australian historians, Bates was a bit of a rascal. She abandoned two husbands and a son. As a journalist, she supplied British and Australian newspapers with sensational stories from the wilds of Australia (with details of cannibalism). She was not an unrecognized voice crying out in the wilderness. In 1934 King George V awarded her Great Britain's Order of Commander of the British Empire.

In trying to ennoble Bates and turn her into a tragic heroine, Kaufman misses an opportunity to create one of those colorful legends worthy of both Irish and Australian folklore. Her first husband, after all, was Breaker Morant, the devious rogue who became a Boer War saint and martyr.

Source: Seattle Times

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