Blue Mars - Kim Stanley Robinson [293]
Afterward the theater company came over to the restaurant to eat, and Maya talked with the director, a middle-aged native woman named Latrobe, who was interested to meet her, to talk about the play, and about Brecht’s theory of political theater. Latrobe proved to be pro-Terran, pro-immigrationist; she wanted to stage plays that made the case for an open Mars, and for assimilating the new immigrants into the areophany. It was frightening, she said, how few plays of the classical repertory reinforced such feelings. They needed new plays. Maya told her about Diana’s political evenings in the UNTA years, how they had sometimes met in the parks. About her notion concerning the blues in the lighting of that night’s production. Latrobe invited Maya to come by and talk to the troupe about politics, and also to help with the lighting if she wanted, which was a weak point in the company, having had its origin in the very same parks Diana’s group had used to meet in. Perhaps they could get out there again, and do some more Brechtian theater.
And so Maya dropped by and talked with the troupe, and over time, without ever really deciding to, she became one of its lighting crew, helping also with costumes, which was fashion in a different way. She also talked to them long into the nights about the concept of a political theater, and helped them to find new plays; in effect she was a kind of political-aesthetic consultant. But she steadfastly resisted all efforts to get her on stage, not only from the company, but from Michel and Nadia as well. “No,” she said. “I don’t want to do that. If I did they would immediately want me to be playing Maya Toitovna, in that play about John.”
“That’s an opera,” Michel said. “You’d have to be a soprano.”
“Nevertheless.”
She did not want to act. Everyday life was enough. But she did enjoy the world of the theater. This was a new way of getting at people and changing their values, less wearing than the direct approach of politics, more entertaining, and perhaps in some ways even more effective. Theater in Odessa was powerful; movies were a dead art, the constant incessant oversaturation of screen images had made all images equally boring; what the citizens of Odessa seemed to like was the immediacy and danger of spontaneous performance, the moment that would never return, never be the same. Theater was the most powerful art in town, really, and the same was true in many other Martian cities as well. So as the m-years passed, the Odessa troupe mounted any number of political plays, including a complete run through of the work of the South African Athol Fugard, searing passionate plays anatomizing institutionalized prejudice, the xenophobia of the soul; the best English language plays since Shakespeare, Maya thought. And then the troupe was instrumental in discovering and making famous what was later called the Odessa Group, a half-dozen young native playwrights as ferocious as Fugard, men and women who in play after play explored the wrenching problems of the new issei and nisei, and their painful assimilation into the areophany— a million little Romeos and Juliets, a million little blood knots cut or tied. It was Maya’s best window into the contemporary world, and more and more her way of speaking back to it, doing her best to shape it— very satisfying indeed, as many of the plays caused talk, sometimes even a furor, as new works by the Group attacked the anti-immigrant government that was still in power in Mangala. It was politics in a new mode, the most intriguing she had yet encountered; she longed to tell Frank about it, to show him how it worked.
In those same years, as the months passed two by two, Latrobe mounted quite a few productions of old classics, and as Maya watched them, she got more