A PLAY REVIEW: Conversations with a Tramp
The
production of the play Conversation with a Tramp has been wandering
around the country for about 9 years.
It might, one of these days, come to your town, so I thought I'd share
with you a few of the reflections and feelings it evoked in me when I saw it
some four years ago at the University of Nevada' Student Union.
I went to
see Conversation with a Tramp with considerable skepticism. The play does not not focus on an imaginary
character but on John Muir, a historical figure who was still living,
crusading, and sauntering the American West at the beginning of this
century. To be sure, Muir's life
provides a rich enough drama for a sensitive artist, but one learns from
experience that, more often than not, such dramatizations fail; many works of
art successfully display historical or artistic truths, but only a few manage
to combine both.
Moreover,
this production, the audience was told, was going to be a one‑man
show. Lee Stetson collected the
materials for this play, wrote it, and was going to perform it, alone, for some
two hours. The task seemed
insurmountable. To begin with, to
succeed, Mr. Stetson had to be a first‑rate historian‑‑he had
to be almost as familiar with Muir's life as he was with his own. Then he would need to immerse himself in his
hero's emotions and personality, to pick the really meaningful episodes of
Muir's life, render them in a play form, and act them so well as to sustain,
single‑handedly, his audience's attention with this life of an eloquent
"tramp."
I had, besides, some apprehensions about the play which stemmed from my own personal background. I still believe‑‑even now‑‑that the Sierra Nevadas are among the most beautiful spots in North America, and that they provide some of the best places where solitude might be found by "nerve‑shaken" city people. Moreover, Muir's life‑‑that strange combination of spirituality and practicality, of a solitude seeker and of a political crusader‑‑holds for me a bit of the fascination which the lofty peaks of Yosemite held for him. Every human being who seeks to confer some meaning to his or her life would do well, I long thought, to study and emulate in a small measure the life of that irreverent vagabond. I read therefore much that Muir wrote and which has been written about him and, like it or not, had some preconceptions about what should, and should not, be selected to highlight Muir's life.
So, you
see, I would be a particular difficult customer for Mr. Stetson and his
"one‑man tour de force."
I arrived five minutes before the hour, paid the required five dollars,
positioned myself at a strategic place from which I could escape at a moment's
notice, and steeled myself for the worst.
But this lifelong friend of mine‑‑skepticism‑‑failed
me this time. Conversation with a Tramp turned out to be a sweet
surprise; embodying that very combination of historical accuracy and first‑class
art which is so difficult to achieve.
In fact, in my view this play deserves a far wider exposure than it
seems to have received so far.
The play
takes place at Muir's study in Martinez, California. We meet him five days before Christmas Eve of the year 1913. He is 75 years old, with white flowing beard
and sparse hair. Still, the old fire,
although somewhat subdued by his bodily decline, is burning bright. He has been fighting for years now to save
his beloved Hetch Hetchy Valley from being turned into a water reservoir for
the city of San Francisco, and tonight the final, irreversible decision
regarding the valley's fate will be made by President Woodrow Wilson. Try to imagine yourself, an old man,
fighting tirelessly for something which for you is not a mere valley but a
spiritual shrine‑‑perhaps even God's conception of the beautiful‑‑at
home with a few friends, waiting, at the twilight of your journey, for Wilson's
decision. A decision which will be
made, moreover, by a man you consider a cold history professor, who (unlike
Teddy Roosevelt, Muir's one‑time hiking companion) does not understand
the spiritual meaning of this struggle, who never visited this shrine, and who,
even if he did visit it, would have probably come up with some sacrilege like
"you have seen one Redwood, you have seen them all," as one of his
successors in office one day would.
One might
be indifferent to wildness and Muir's values; one might support nuclear
explosions or the future passing away of the bald eagle; but one can't help,
during the two hours of Lee Stetson's solo performance, seeing things through
Muir's clear eyes.
In the
first act we are taken back to Muir's childhood and his strictly religious
upringing in Wisconsin, to his years of solitude in the Sierra Nevadas, to that
stormy night which Muir spent, almost drunken with nature's magnificence, at
the top of a gigantic Douglas fir, absorbing it all in a way that is so
characteristic of children but which is uncommon among adults. And through it all, during the play's first
act, there is the underlying, repeating theme of waiting for the final answer
about Hetch Hetchy Valley's fate.
Despite
the odds, at the end of the first act the Old Man is hopeful‑‑Wilson
will not veto the bill. One gets the
feeling that Muir can't, he simply can't, believe that the "temple‑destroyers,"
after all these years of toil and hope, will have the final word.
But they
do. In the second act Mr. Stetson faces
the formidable task of creating the required change of mood that this final,
heart‑rending defeat must have caused, yet without engaging in
uncharacteristic oversentimentality.
Again, I don't think this subtle change could be
conveyed more effectively than it has been conveyed in the performance I
saw. Mr. Stetson takes us back, for
example, to Muir's temporary blindness and the profound transformation that
those few months of darkness entailed.
If only given his eyesight again, this time he would surely know how to
live and enjoy God's handiwork! And
again, whether we like it or not, Mr. Stetson compels us to ponder: Must men be struck with temporary blindness
to see the light?
It cannot
all be retold here, so I shall only describe one more touching episode from
Stetson's play. Towards the end of the
second act, Muir goes on to reminiscence about his childhood escape from a
contaminated well. He has been digging
for weeks deeper and deeper into the earth, away from the sunshine and nature's
choir of wild things. One morning, his
father and brother drop him in a bucket down the well, which is by now 80‑feet
deep. Unknown to them, poisonous gas
has seeped into its bottom. Muir is
immediately overwhelmed by the noxious fumes and is unable to summon enough
strength to ask to be lifted up. And,
by this time, he is out of the bucket.
If I remember the story correctly, only the sight of an oak branch he
sees above him as he collapses against the wall enables him to feebly call to
them to lift him up, and only his father's desperate pleas can exert a strong
enough influence on him in his semi‑conscious state to step into the
bucket and be saved.
Each of us
must decide for himself whether he too, as Stetson unquestionably implies,
dwells in a poisoned well, and if so, wonder:
What, in 1991, could guide us up‑‑as the oak branch and his
father's voice guided Muir‑‑to the pure, unpoisoned, sunshine air?
Conversation
with a Tramp, we are told, is available for production in other
locations. To do so, you need to
contact Lee Stetson at Box 811, Yosemite, California, 95389.