FIELD NOTES FROM THE PADUA HILLS THEATER WORKSHOP AND FESTIVAL
In 1977 and 1978, I wrote three full-length plays that all received public readings, the first of which was at a venue organized by Oliver Hailey. He liked what I had written well enough to attend the second one, which was held at Beyond Baroque. The play was about a serial killer in a small beach town in California whose victims were children; that part was read by Leland Hickman. Hailey and his spouse left after the first act. “You don’t have children, do you?” they asked me as they left. “If you did, you would never have written this play.” Jim Krusoe’s reaction after the reading was different: “I kept wondering why all these poems were in a theater script.”
Shortly after I finished the third play, I saw a notice in the L.A. Times that I wish I had seen the summer before: a project called the Padua Hills Theater Festival was looking for participants. I ended up spending a month in the foothills of Claremont, taking workshops with Marie Irene Forces and Michael McClure and helping out with production work. One of the playwrights I grew close to that month was Walter Hadler, who was also an actor as well as playwright.
My own experience at Padua was transformative in ways that were different from anyone else’s who ever took part in that experiment. After that summer, I realized that I would never fit into the world of theater. I wasn’t a theater person. My life was in poetry, though I have hardly been someone who fit comfortably in that world either. To be a poet on the West Coast of the United States is most often to remain at odds with the prevalent canon of the east coast. Even as I began a renewed dedication to publishing the books of other poets in the late 1970s and early 1980s, I still couldn’t resist the pull of Padua. Every summer I attended their festival of plays and I began to regard my attendance as a kind of sacred pilgrimage. It was at this festival that I was introduced to playwrights such as John Steppling, whose play “The Shaper” remains one of the most important plays I have ever seen, Martin Epstein, and Leon Martell. I had always known of the work of Forness and Mednick, though their plays I saw at Padua (Mednicks “Coyote Cycle” and Fornes’s “Mud” and “Fefu”) were astonishingly hypnotic.
Padua Hills, in its first incarnation, lasted until the mid-1990s, and I recollect at least four other sites where the festival took place. It has since resurrected itself closer to the center of Los Angeles, but I have been too busy with my late-in-life academic career to visit it. What recently stirred my heart, though, has been the publication of a book about the Padua Hills Festival founded by Murray Mednick in the late 1970s. It is collection of essays, poetics, commentary and memoir that deserves to be read by anyone who aspires to commit themselves to a life permeated by the imagination. My sense was that the best person to review this book, “OUTLAW THEATRE,” would be another poet, and so I asked Paul Vangelisti to take a look at it. His essay has just appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books and it is the best possible introduction I can offer you to this book.
My only wish about this book is that Walter Hadler could have been more present. The plays he had staged as part of the Festival are not even included in a list of the work presented over the years.
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/off-off-broadway-west-on-guy-zimmermans-outlaw-theatre-field-notes-from-the-padua-hills-playwrights-workshop-and-festival/
“Off-Off-Broadway West: On Guy Zimmerman’s “Outlaw Theatre” by Paul Vangelisti
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