Accidental Angels

The greatest dream of any artist is that his or her work will awaken something in people, that it will open up hearts and bring something in them to light.

In the fall of 1985, the Texas Monthly ran an article on Richard Avedon's photography exhibit, In the American West, then on display at Fort Worth's Amon Carter Museum. Everybody was talking about it. Some viewers were disgusted by what they felt was Avedon's staged version of the West: freaks who had been separated from the rest of the human race by their savage environment; haggard, hopeless faces against a backdrop of unrelenting white. Others felt a kinship to this hollowness, to the faces ravaged by wind and lost dreams. With this range of reactions, the exhibit stirred many Texans to examine this myth they were living and to define themselves from the inside out.

Even before the Avedon exhibit, Jim Fritzler, director of Big State Productions in Austin, Texas was putting together a workshop for his theater group. It was not clear what the next project would be, but Big State had been toying with the idea of doing an evening of one-person, one-act plays.

The public reaction to the Avedon exhibit provided the final impetus for Big State's upcoming workshop, which they called "In the West." The workshop was originally set up to be a three-week-long process in which each participant would get the chance to direct, write, and act in three separate monologues. Artists from outside the Big State family were invited to join the project, and I luckily found myself in this group. At one of the first meetings, we all took turns swapping tales of childhood. We discovered that although some of us had never written a lick, we were rich in stories, and somewhere in each of us was a writer. So the process began with 15 artists, some familiar and some not so familiar to one another, thrown together to try to bring our portraits to the stage.

The nightly meetings that followed seemed harum-scarum at first — and our main concern often was wondering where to go for coffee afterwards. We had some doubt as to exactly what was going on and how it would turn out. Writers who knew how hard it is to write were secretly skeptical about those of us who hadn't even written letters to our mothers since college. Almost all of us felt shaky in at least one of our assigned areas of responsibility.

Once the monologues began to appear on paper, however, the workshop took on a new feeling. We were coming close to something, "some world," and we were all arriving there at the same time. All of a sudden we had these monologues, and simultaneously 15 voices piped up to deal with the intricacies of making them work. We created a wife-beater who loved his wife, a boy-child left alone in the woods by his parents, a woman pleading her sanity in court. All had to be cut and rewritten, but nothing was ever discarded as completely unworkable. Feelings of "owning" a particular monologue were set aside for the good of the play. Somewhere in those 15 monologues was a show. How they would all fit together was still a mystery.

Three days before our show opened, Jim Fritzler returned to Austin from New York, where he had been during the entire workshop process. What he discovered on returning bore not the lightest resemblance to the Avedon exhibit. In place of the stark, despairing faces was a group of live-wire characters, each with a bucketful of faith and dreams. The actors Fritzler left a month earlier had moved from a sense of separation to a sense of union. We had gotten there by what Jo Carol Pierce, a playwright and "In the West" participant, describes as "the left­handed path," or, as it seemed to most of us, simply by accident.

"In the West," the workshop, became In the West, the show. After a premiere performance at a university theater, we moved to a small museum where people packed in, standing and squatting among marble busts of Texas heroes. They cried and cheered and told us that they saw themselves and people they knew up there onstage. These characters could have lived anywhere. Unlike Avedon's subjects, they were not freaks determined and limited by the land in which they lived.

Austin Chronicle theater critic Robert Faires saw our characters as "people . . . in whom faith runs deep. And whether that faith comes from the land or a religious upbringing or some purity of soul, it sustains these people in a way that bread cannot."

That was poetry enough for 1985. We had a hit, and no one was more surprised than we were. In the West has run for seven months in Austin and has played Fort Worth twice, almost always to capacity houses.

The show seems constantly to change and somehow stay the same. We rework or drop monologues, add new pieces, have new actors do old pieces. Our original structure — with each participant writing, acting, and directing — fell apart, and each of us began to do what we do best. Now we all discuss and vote on major artistic decisions, a process that is often chaotic, but that spirit demonstrates itself in the show. We critique each other's performances of the week before, audition new pieces, and haggle over a barrage of new and old business. From an original 15 monologues we have accumulated close to 40, and have added another five actors to our group of 15. We somehow managed to have the original monologues copyrighted; the application contained no less than 20 signatures, each claiming equal share of the manuscript.

After our first flush of success, producers from out of town started arriving. They told us that a 20-actor, 20-writer theater production was too unwieldy a package for most producers to touch. They also offered tips on how to make In the West work better. The audience response seemed to indicate that it was working well already and didn't need a lot of fixing. Still we panicked slightly, these people being from New York and California. After a few weeks of fretting over production concepts, we made no drastic changes. We continued to hone what we had and to try new things. By doing this, we discovered the unifying element that existed there all the time. In the West gives perfect voice to one of Big State's original statements of purpose: "thematically to affirm positive human nature."

When asked just why In the West has been embraced so wholeheartedly by audiences, we all have our own theories, but we also admit we don't really know why. In trying to explain it, we frequently use words like "honesty" and "love." But the most common explanation has to do with what Jo Carol Pierce describes as the show's "gritty spiritual nature that doesn't ever name itself, because once it does, it gets self-conscious." The characters of In the West are very much a part of this mundane world, yet at the same time they walk in some larger realm that people seem to yearn to touch.

It's one thing to be stopped in the grocery store to hear how the cashier loved your show. It's quite another experience to hear that he was so inspired that he went home and wrote a monologue — and that he would be very happy for us to consider putting it in the show. In the West is made up of stories from people just like that cashier. It makes audiences feel that their stories are worthwhile, too, and that what they have to say is just as important as what is going on onstage.

None of us knows where In the West will go from here. We have plans for bookings across Texas and other parts of the United States, with a possible tour abroad. Nothing is sure except for a general agreement among us that if it closed down tomorrow, it still would have been an amazing thing.

A founding member of Big State, John Perkins, believes our mission is "to keep doing this show until it's done." Maybe one day we will know why it works, and it will all be over. Or maybe it will just begin again. Whatever the outcome, it has given us all faith that what we do matters. And that faith gets passed on to those who come to see In the West.

In the last monologue, Tresa, who drives a litter-gitter for the county, invokes scripture: "'Be ye not forgetful to entertain strangers,'" she tells the audience, "'for, thereby some of you have entertained angels unaware.' And that's what I think you are, too. An angel unaware."

And that's what we feel like sometimes — human beings accidentally doing the work of angels.