November 6–13, 1997

noises off

"It's not a question of what satisfies me," she replies. "Throw that out of the window. It's a question of life."

 

Vanessa Stops By

Vanessa Redgrave brings her one-woman show to Philadelphia. How'd we get so lucky?

By David Warner

 

"You're not going to believe this," a colleague told Jodi Longo one day this summer. "Some woman just called and said she was Vanessa Redgrave..."

What's more, the woman said she wanted to stop by for a visit.

Soon.

Longo thought it was a prank. As director of Amnesty International USA's mid-Atlantic region, she is accustomed to pranks; hers is one of two Amnesty offices in Washington, and because "this work can get kind of depressing," the two offices frequently play jokes on each other.

But just in case the famous British star of stage and screen was in fact about to come through the door, "I said, 'Well let's get some materials together.'

"And sure enough, this beautiful woman walked in who was Vanessa."

A few days after that, Longo, taking her cue from Redgrave's strong interest in the rights of asylum seekers, arranged for her to visit a halfway house in Reading, Pennsylvania for former political detainees, and to talk with members of the Wayne, PA chapter about their Refugee Resource Fund, which helps persons in and out of detention with resettlement, legal fees and other costs.

This week, Amnesty—and Philadelphia audiences—will reap the rewards of that visit: Redgrave makes her first-ever stage appearance here on Sunday at the Independence Seaport Museum in her one-woman show Planet Without A Visa. Though slightly different from European incarnations (no imported Chilean musicians, for one thing — too expensive), Sunday's version of Planet, which benefits the refugee fund, will be the first ever seen by American audiences.

An Oscar-winning actress from a legendary theatrical family walks in off the street and winds up volunteering to do an American premiere of her one-woman show, all for the benefit of a little Amnesty chapter in Wayne?

It might sound incredible if it were anybody else but Vanessa Redgrave. Her passionate commitment to political causes is as well-known as her formidable acting talent—maybe moreso. And even over the phone, her focus is formidable; it's almost as if those translucent blue eyes were being fixed on you in person.

Ask her what she finds personally fulfilling about political activism and she immediately sets the parameters straight:

"It's not a question of what satisfies me," she replies. "Throw that out of the window.

"It's a question of life."

She can, however, trace her anguish about global injustice to very specific early childhood experiences. At 60 she still remembers the bombing of Coventry, England during WWII ("I was 4 years old when I saw a city in flames"); reading newspaper accounts of Nazi concentration camps as a young girl; and hearing the radio broadcast of the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights in 1946. That document holds particular resonance for Redgrave today.

"The U.N. Declaration included and still includes the right of every person to seek and be given refuge and asylum from persecution," she says. "Today, governments, having signed these declarations, are breaking them."

She compares the present state of affairs to the conditions before WWII, when British and American immigration officials turned away Jews fleeing Nazi Germany; though the U.N. Declaration was intended to prevent any more such fatal blunders, she suggests that current policies are again proving unsympathetic to refugees from totalitarian governments.

Pennsylvania prisons have for quite a while acted as a prime dumping ground for undocumented or illegally documented refugees (categories political refugees frequently fall into), because the prisons in PA are plentiful and convenient to the port of NYC. The recent reopening of detention facilities in NJ and Queens has reduced the flow of newly arrived refugees into the PA system, but new immigration legislation and anti-terrorist legislation is contributing to an atmosphere of "expanded enforcement," says Amnesty/ Wayne's Juanita Kirschke, which means the nets are being cast wider for illegal immigrants who have already been in the country a while.

Kirschke works on the front lines as an Amnesty volunteer, assisting detainees at Berks County Prison in getting legal and other kinds of assistance while in jail and after their release. (She makes the point that it's not so much detention itself that is the problem, it's the rural locations where these refugees are detained; asylum seekers need to be in touch with lawyers and counselors, and "detaining them in county prisons in the middle of cornfields really doesn't help a lot.")

Redgrave and Kirschke met when the actress traveled from Washington with two Amnesty reps to visit Freedom Gate, the Reading halfway house for released inmates of Berks, including political detainees. She spent the day hearing stories of the hardships suffered by asylum seekers, from the ignominies of prison to the loss of contact with families, and that night attended a dinner at the Haverford Friends Meeting House and listened some more.

"I think we exhausted her completely," say Kirschke. "We wanted to tell her so much and show her so much, I don't know how she endured it. But she did with great grace."

She not only endured, she gave advice. One man from West Africa spoke sadly about his difficulties reuniting with his wife and child.

"She immediately took out pad and paper and started talking about how the problem might be overcome," recalls Kirschke. "She actually gave us ideas. She's very practical and gets right down to detail.

The details discussed during supper that evening emphatically did not include the subject of acting.

Mary Ann Morgan, a member of the Wayne chapter, sat next to Redgrave during supper. But even though Morgan heads the fine arts program at Radnor High School, where she directs all the school plays, she was loath to talk theater.

"I remember it crossed my mind to say 'Guess what I do?' but it wasn't appropriate. She was there for something else. She was not there as an actress."

Sometime that evening, though, Redgrave did tell members of the Wayne chapter that she wanted to return and do a benefit. And it was lucky for Amnesty that Mary Ann Morgan had some theatrical connections because, when a committee was formed a month later to discuss the possibility, Morgan was able to put them in touch with someone who ran a theater—David Michael Kenney of DMK Productions. A former student of Morgan's late husband Brian, a much-loved Philadelphia actor who died in 1989 and who was also a member of Amnesty, Kenney (or DMK as he is widely known) runs the Independence Seaport Museum Theater and has extensive experience in making professional shows work.

When Redgrave arrives this weekend, she'll work out the staging with DMK on Saturday night and then do a tech rehearsal Sunday morning before her 3 p.m. performance. What should audiences expect?

"I've often been at difficulties when people say, 'What is it?'" she answers. "It's like a play—I play all the parts."

But the "parts" are varied, drawn from a wide range of texts, scenes and poems by the likes of Maya Angelou, Bertolt Brecht, Leonard Cohen, Ismail Kàdàre, Pablo Neruda and Tennessee Williams, and songs by Yugoslav composers.

"It's a deeply felt view of a whole history from the 1930s to today" with one crucial thread running throughout: "In the main all were writers who had to seek asylum themselves. Brecht fled Germany. Neruda had to be in exile in many periods of his life."

And Tennessee Williams? "He understood as no other English writer what it meant to be an immigrant who has to leave his beloved home."

Redgrave had a notable triumph as Lady Torrance, the second-generation Italian immigrant in Williams' Orpheus Descending, in a Peter Hall-directed production that played London and New York in the late '80s. The NY reception was particularly gratifying because it reflected a kind of reunion with American audiences following the flap that was stirred up by Redgrave's support of the Palestinian cause, most famously by her Oscar acceptance speech for Julia in 1977. Not that Redgrave softened her stance; in her 1994 autobiography, she makes the point that America caught up with her, not the other way around.

For Vanessa Redgrave, activism, particularly in defense of human rights, is as much her life's work as acting is. In fact, her art and her political engagement—as Philadelphia audiences will see on Sunday—are inseparable.

"Art is hopefully not about solidifying preconceptions," she says. "It's about re-examining life."

Vanessa Redgrave in Planet Without A Visa, Independence Seaport Museum Concert Hall, Penn's Landing, Sun. Nov. 9, 3 p.m. Tickets $25-$35—price includes reception with Redgrave after the performance. Upstages: 569-9700. Amnesty Int'l: (610) 449-2808.