These Exiles Find Their Own Strong, Able Voice

These exiles find their own strong, able voice

By Ollie Reed Jr.

Friday, October 20, 2006

One thing I've always appreciated about the darkness that cloaks theater audiences during plays is that it conceals tears but not laughter or applause.

I was reminded of that this past Sunday evening when I attended the final performance of "Undesirable Elements" at the VSANorthFourthArtCenter.

I have to admit I was torn when I arrived at the center about 20 minutes before show time. I'd been wanting to see this production since I interviewed Ping Chong, the New York City director and writer who created "Undesirable Elements" out of the life stories of five Albuquerque residents.

I was intrigued by the concept, anxious to see if Chong and his writing partner, Sara Zatz, had managed to turn the raw material of real people's lives into entertaining theater.

But I also wanted to watch the St. Louis Cardinals play the New York Mets in the fourth game of the National League Championship Series, which was going on at the same time. I've been a die-hard Cardinals fan since I was a little boy.

I reminded myself that the game would still be going after the show was over, so I bought my ticket for "Undesirable Elements," picked up a program at the door and found a seat in the center's handsome theater.

My interview with Chong had given me an idea of what to expect. I knew that three of the show's five principals contended with physical disabilities.

Tonya Rivera has cerebral palsy. She gets around in an electric wheelchair and speaks through an electronic computer.

Amanda Hilleque is deaf, and Larry Lorenzo is blind.

Rounding out the cast were Arlyn John, a Navajo man, and Anna Zollinger, a white woman who grew up in Switzerland and England but now lives in New Mexico and is the mother of a son who is half American Indian.

What they all have in common is that they have each felt as if they did not fit into the world in which they were living - a hearing world, a seeing world, a walking and talking world, a white man's world, a United States of America world. Each of them, at one time or another, has felt as if he or she were "Undesirable Elements."

Chong had told me this was more story theater than a play. He told me the cast would sit in one place on the stage and tell their stories.

What I did not expect was that I would be so moved by a cast that hardly moved at all.

Chong and Zatz did a masterful job of painting each person's story into the larger picture, so that John told us not only about his own life but also the long struggle for American Indian rights.

From Lorenzo, we heard about the childhood spider bite that led to his blindness but also learned about the prejudice that preys on most blind people.

Signing fluently, Hilleque revealed, via an interpreter who gave voice to her hands, not only her own story but also the history of education for deaf people in this country.

And none of it was stiff or dry. None of it felt like a lecture.

Instead, it was prose poetry, punctuated by the rhythmic clapping of the cast's hands, by the way they repeated key dates in unison.

It was poetry driven by Lorenzo's beautiful singing voice, John's mesmerizing Navajo songs and the joyous abandon of Rivera's wheelchair dance.

It was poetry that filled your heart at one moment and tore it out the next. It made you feel small next to the strong, brave, able people on stage.

I laughed because there was humor threaded among the hardship and the hurdles. I clapped to the beat of Rivera's dance because I couldn't help myself.

And at one point, wrapped in the charitable darkness, I wiped away a tear rolling down my left cheek.

I got home in time to see the end of the baseball game. The Mets beat the Cardinals 12-5.

Any other time, that would have broken my heart. But not this night. On this night, a baseball game didn't seem all that important.