A Playwright's Glimmers of a Fugitive Childhood
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/03/theater/03zayd.html
By PATRICK HEALY
Published: September 2, 2009
When Zayd Dohrn began writing "Sick," a play about a Manhattan family
going to extremes to shield themselves from pollution, he tapped into
anxieties around him: he was living in Beijing at the time, during
the height of the SARS epidemic, and he had moved there from New
York, where environmental fallout from the Sept. 11 attacks was widely feared.
But Mr. Dohrn, now 32, had even more personal experience to draw on.
Until he was almost 4 years old his parents, the former Weather
Underground leaders Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, were living with
him in hiding in Morningside Heights, and using assumed names even
for Zayd, who was known simply as Z.
Only a handful of memories remain with Mr. Dohrn from that young age,
and yet those years on the run from the police followed by his
mother's brief time in jail after she and Mr. Ayers turned themselves
in have fueled an abiding fascination with living under extreme
conditions and pressures.
His work is drawing attention from a growing number of theaters
across the country, with "Sick" running at the Berkshire Theater
Festival through Sunday. Another play, "Reborning," involving a woman
trying to recreate and rewrite her past, was produced for the Summer
Play Festival at the Public Theater in July.
"A lot of what I think and write about deals with constraints and
looking for a way out, especially in family situations, when the
struggle to live free of constraints can take an emotional toll," Mr.
Dohrn said recently over coffee near Columbia University, a few
blocks from the 123rd Street apartment where he and his parents lived
in hiding.
"It may sound strange, but I didn't feel especially smothered by my
family's constraints, even though I was aware of them," he continued.
"They were simply something I was aware of. The worst year for me was
when my mother went to jail. It was so sad and scary. I remember
visiting her and sneaking in 'Winnie-the-Pooh' and 'Charlotte's Web'
through the metal detectors so that she could read to me."
An earlier play of Mr. Dohrn's, "Haymarket," is his most overtly
political and historical work, about a real-life 19th-century
gathering of radical demonstrators in Haymarket Square in Chicago. A
bomb goes off during their rally, and some of the radicals go into
hiding afterward. The incident evokes an experience of Cathy
Wilkerson and Kathy Boudin, who fled a Greenwich Village town house
in 1970 after the accidental explosion of a bomb killed three fellow
members of the Weather Underground, an organization that conducted a
campaign of bombing public buildings in the 1970s as a form of protest.
Mr. Dohrn does not include any explicit echoes of his parents in
"Haymarket," though, and he said that in general he tried to avoid
heavily reflecting his own life or theirs in his work so far.
"For me it's not very interesting to write about myself or my
parents," he said. "That doesn't create any special friction for me."
Still, Mr. Dohrn said he could imagine writing a play someday about
the experience of his father during the 2008 presidential election.
Mr. Ayers, now an education professor at the University of Illinois
at Chicago, became a lightning rod for opponents of the candidate
Barack Obama because the two men were acquaintances and neighbors in
Chicago. Leading Republicans attacked Mr. Obama for having ties with,
in Mr. Dohrn's words, "this extreme caricature of my father as a
so-called unrepentant terrorist." (Mr. Dohrn's mother is an associate
professor of law at Northwestern University.)
"It was a very weird experience, sitting down with my dad and
watching CNN and Fox News and 'The Daily Show' describing him as this
wild symbol of extremism rather than as a human being," Mr. Dohrn
said. "While it wasn't particularly painful my dad and I would
laugh about some of the coverage it was surreal and at times quite
ominous. I could certainly see creating a play out of the experience."
"Sick," meanwhile, was inspired foremost by Mr. Dohrn's observations
of residents of Beijing wearing surgical masks, closing their shops
and staying indoors during the SARS crisis. (This year's swine flu
epidemic gives the 2003 outbreak of SARS, also a respiratory illness,
a particular relevance.)
Mr. Dohrn was living in Beijing with his wife, Rachel DeWoskin, a
writer and actress, who had a starring role in a television soap
opera, "Foreign Babes in Beijing." In the play the mother in the
family played by Lisa Emery in the Berkshire production first
enters the stage wearing a surgical mask, and uses air filters,
oxygen tanks and other means to purify the air for her two teenage children.
"Sick" has also been produced by theaters in Dallas, New Orleans and
New Jersey, and Mr. Dohrn said he was hopeful that the play would
have a run in New York City at some point. Theater critics have been
mostly positive and encouraging about the work. A critic for The
Boston Globe, reviewing the Berkshire production last week, described
"Sick" as a "witty, original dramedy" with "a brilliant if flawed
script" marred by an anti-climactic second act.
The director of the Berkshire production, David Auburn, is himself
the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright of "Proof," which also explored
the bonds and tensions of a close-knit troubled family. ("Proof" ran
for more than two years on Broadway, winning the 2001 Tony Award for
best play, and was later made into a film.) Mr. Auburn said he was
recruited to direct "Sick" by one of its Berkshire cast members, Greg
Keller, who put him in touch with Mr. Dohrn.
Mr. Auburn said that while he recognized themes in "Sick" that might
reflect Mr. Dohrn's experiences with his own parents, he added that
he never spoke at length with Mr. Dohrn about living underground as a child.
"It's not something we ever really went into, in part because I tried
to keep my focus on the text," Mr. Auburn said. "I'm always
interested in what the playwright intends, what they are trying to
express, and usually that comes down to figuring out each moment with
the actors in a given scene. But I didn't see a need to dwell on Zayd's past."
Mr. Dohrn added that as much as his plays may have echoes from his
own past, "Sick" also reflected his own experiences as a new father himself.
"My wife and I had also just had a baby when I was working on 'Sick,'
and I was thinking a lot about how to raise this fragile newborn," he
said. "Relatively normal, sane people can really go kind of crazy
when it comes to protecting their children."
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