A Contract With the Artist - By Ilene Mitnick

You are about to come face to face with a humbling truth in David Hays’ adaptation of James Agee’s and Walker Evans' literary masterpiece, "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.” In 1936 Fortune magazine sent Agee and Evans to Alabama to produce a photographic and verbal record of living conditions among sharecropper families mired in desperate poverty. After eight weeks on assignment, Agee’s impassioned, and some say ‘subversive’ account of what has been called a departure from traditional journalism, was rejected by the magazine; however, in 1941, Houghton Mifflin published the now revered “…Famous Men.”

Artistic Director Jeanie Rapp’s passion for the avant-garde and desire to push the boundaries of the stage continue as she invites the audience into the intimate beginnings of staging a play. Rapp asserts that “the actors’ relationship with the text, the stage and the audience is raw and vulnerable and this reading allows you to witness that experience.”

A veteran set designer, Hays now wears his director’s hat, as well as an impressive writer/adapter’s hat, bringing us his vision of a book given to him 60 years ago. He says, “The tragedy of people ‘caught’ has haunted me since first reading it.” Hays’ desire is to deliver in a way that “puts you with these people,” he says “...right inside their lives so as to feel what it’s like to be so unable to make decisions in your own life.”

Just as Agee and Evans won a family’s trust in order to immerse themselves in their daily existence to give us words and pictures, we now invite Hays’ work to transport us to a place we’ve not known. To put ourselves in the boots of another. To explore a matter-of-fact approach to a myriad of dilemmas inherent during a dark period of history. And, to experience how, even in the most hopeless of conditions, humanity does prevail.

Margreta Stage embodies its tagline – A Theater of Discovery – as it opens a window for us to experience an undiluted deliberation of human dignity. A heart-wrenching story, by itself, doesn’t anchor a production. In order to be struck by the reality of a performance, we confront the relationships and the passions portrayed by the actors who must convincingly create a character and commit to the director’s vision. And what of the audience’s role? We watch for words, listen and construct a text as much as Agee, Evans and Hays have done. We shape our own experience as we synthesize new notions and images, which in many cases are expressions of ones that already exist. 

Our ability to feel an indigent tenant farmer’s pain requires us to surrender what is safe and comfortable – to suspend our current sense of self in order to be open to a performer’s influence. How else can we be dead center in someone else’s plight? When we open ourselves to a world through another’s eyes, we can tenderly unravel the words and pictures of Agee, Evans and Hays. 

But theater is not real life. Although, if you accept the contract between the artist and the audience, you may find relevance in the drama and you may experience an epiphany that inspires a kind of empathic, merciful stir.  Although we will be given only the outline of a family’s circumstances in this performance, we will live intimately with them feeling the pinch and the pulse of being trapped in uncertainty and despair. Yet we will also be audience to a larger composition as we witness their pride, strength and spirit.    

Agee went to great lengths to honor the tenant farmers as worthy and valued and captured it for a broader audience. The least we can do (if we’re keeping our side of the contract, that is) is be open to walking away with a different view of the world. We’ve just eavesdropped on other people’s stories. Some of them achingly sad. Some dignified.  But none less than human.  That’s why being here matters.