Ramie - The John Lennon photo

Once that crisis had been put on hold, we settled in vividly painted chairs in the main art gallery to talk about Ramie Wikdahl’s career as visual artist, stage designer, teacher and theatre director - and a vision of theatre rooted in her inheritance as the child of Japanese-American parents. She reviewed for me a major reorientation as a visual and theatre artist which started back in the early years of the 21st Century. "I hit a wall. It was back in 1999 or maybe more like in 2001. Anyway, it started with an internal process of questioning: why am I doing theatre? Why doesn’t it feel the way it used to feel? In that same period, MPC was going through major shifts and changes. I was teaching classes, directing shows, handling most of the PR and helping Sky (Rappaport) and Andrew (Craig) with fundraising. I felt over extended. I had to choose what I wanted to be when I grew up! It was hard. I am never good at stark, either/or choices - I don’t like black or white options, except in visual arts pieces. Making judgments is a struggle - and, yes, that affects my directing.

YACsters

"In 1999 I started the Portable Theatre Company with Peter De Bono's encouragement and support. The first couple of seasons it was limited to MPC drama students using the SRO, creating shows based on ‘Fractured Fairy Tales.’ The shows were free and tended to be linked to main stage productions. Out of that there grew the Midnight Show - but we had to change that for the sake of MPC staff to the Mid-night Show at 10:30 pm, lasting 90 minutes and ending at midnight. It premiered some student written work - the first was GOD IN THE MACHINE - where five student writers were given one sequence each about a man facing Heaven, Purgatory, Hell and so on. So the scripts got returned and read. The writers got involved in the casting and re-writes. . . It was a big success. We were sold out: had to jam people into every available space in the SRO. It brought in the sort of 20-something crowd that tends to stay away from main stage productions. A second Portable Theatre show was PAN by Amanda Platsis and directed by Tiffany Torrez, both Monterey High graduates and a YACster - that’s what we call kids who work at the Youth Arts Collective. Amanda is a really strong writer and a fine actress."

PAN - Portable Theatre

The Portable Theatre helped focus the reassessment Ramie made of what she calls her "juggling mix" of directing, designing and teaching. One key element in solving the puzzle was her growing involvement with young actors in training. A second was her visits to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. "I was already going regularly to Ashland to see a top professional repertory company at work. Around this same time I began transforming a sizable shed in the Rogue River region into a studio. These days I go to Oregon not only to watch theatre but to throw paint around - inside the studio or out in the open air. That all started in ‘99, and I’ve been doing it ever since."

Conventional theatre pieces from the Samuel French catalogue or popular Broadway retreads were losing any appeal they might once have had. . . Ramie started then, and continues now, to seek out theatre that can still work a distinctive kind of magic for her as a member of an audience and a child of both the East and the West. "OSF did a production of SEVEN GUITARS - and for the first time in years, I felt myself having that unbelievable audience experience. My body was in suspended mode...I was transported into the world on that stage. When a performance like that is over, you exhale and just say, 'Ah, so!' So much of my directing and teaching was keeping me from it: you can’t have that moment. You’re too busy watching and evaluating and assessing people and their work. You even catch yourself doing it when you’re just off to see friends in a show. They want to say to you, ‘Hey! Snap out of it!’"

M. BUTTERFLY -1992 MPC Theatre Company

More and more work with young actors has helped that to happen for Ramie Wikdahl. "New and young theatre students come with a capacity for involvement and wonder wired into them. They’re fearless on stage. They don’t struggle. All that old stuff about ‘What will I look like? What are people going to think or say?’ just isn’t there to get in the way. They bring back the playfulness that is central to theatre when its not being dictated by limitations that just tighten you." Another past defining moment came when Ramie read M. BUTTERFLY. "It intrigued me. When I saw the Broadway production. I knew ‘I’ve got to do this someday.’ And once again it was Peter who gave me the opportunity. I had a similar experience picking up a copy of Alan Aykebourne’s MR WHATNOT and laughing out loud to tears as I read through it. Now, I find myself asking why so few recent plays are able to hit me in that way. Is it something missing in present-day theatre writing? Is it just that the wrong plays are crossing my bedstand? Am I not seeing enough of what is being put on in places off the Monterey Peninsula? I really don’t know!

MR WHATNOT - 1998 MPC Theatre Company

"In the Spring of 01, seeing Mary Zimmerman’s METAMORPHOSIS was another turning point. It was a show that originated in Chicago. I’d seen pictures and read newspaper pieces about the show on visits to Chicago, but I didn’t see the actual production until Berkeley Rep did a combined version with Seattle Rep. It’s staged in and around this big pool of water and based on the classic Greek plays. Zimmerman teaches play production in Chicago, but her degree is in the Classics and she adapts and directs and co-designs these reworkings of Greek myth. By the end of the very first story, I was in tears. I was out of my body. The whole play worked my own personal bit of metamorphosis. It was extraordinary. It’s her style: it combines words and movement and music with great classic stories and themes, and that’s something I feel I am much better at than the standard Samuel French comedy or drama.

"So I tried to work in that way with the 2002 CHRISTMAS CAROL in the SRO. I’d found a tight compact and wonderful dramatization, but I needed something that came from my Asian awareness of the power of visuals - scrims and silks and beautiful movement - to tell the story. It seemed a strange thing to do with a popular English classic, but the idea wouldn’t leave me alone. I was in Oregon and out on a walk with Roz Zanides when she mentioned a Shakespeare she’d seen in England that used giant parachutes. ‘How about a big silk parachute for CHRISTMAS CAROL?’ was her suggestion. Well, I called around to military supply places in the area and found one in Grants Pass that had two 24-foot-diameter used parachutes. One was multicolored, which I didn’t want. The other was white and cost $60 - and I knew I had my vision for CHRISTMAS CAROL. We were already in the early rehearsal stage at MPC - so when I walked in and said ‘It’s all going to be built around a big white parachute.’ I saw expressions that were a good illustration of what the King of Siam meant when he talked about ‘a puzzlement.’ At least on the faces of the older members of the company. The younger ones immediately thought it was cool. And it worked well. It’s still talked about locally and there’s a possibility of doing it again this coming December in the SRO."

CHRISTMAS CAROL - 2002 MPC Theatre Company

Ramie Wikdahl’s search for theatre magic seems to spring from her varied gifts as painter, performer, teacher and director. And that, in turn, seems rooted in her mixed Asian and European heritage. "My first theatre was Japanese theatre. My mother is Japanese - an interpreter who married an Irish/American army officer in occupied Japan after the war. It was my grandmother who took me to theatre - Kabuki, Noh, Japanese puppet theatre. She herself had performed as a dancer in the storytelling/dance presentations that are a central feature of Japanese theatre. And my great uncle was a Kabuki actor. I was going on five when I came to the U.S. to live in Monterey till I was ten when we returned to Asia - this time to Saigon - and hence from twelve to about seventeen I lived back in Japan. My live-theatre going experiences were all Asian until high school field trips to Stanford and San Francisco."

"These days - not a lot of scripts in themselves do the kind of thing that works that magic for me. I guess you just have to take something like an English classic and without destroying it, serve the writer and the story in ways that break through old barriers. I don’t direct on the main stage any more - or in familiar solid standard shows. I no longer freelance as director/designer. I’ve reached the stage where I don’t need to go on saying 'Yes' in order to establish myself. I can decline work if it doesn’t allow me this expression of style."

Ramie’s latest project is a program of new short plays never before staged. It will happen in the SRO in May and the material is original scripts by local writers. "It’s exciting to work in theatre as collaboration. The collaborator so often missing is the playwright. The challenge of this performance will be to do something never touched or spoken before - taking it from ground zero to production - Page to Stage Theatre. It’s a process where actors and directors have the learning experience of seeing how playwrights work. The originator and the interpreters collaborate from the start."

Yet along with Ramie Wikdahl’s commitment to experiment and improvisation goes a conviction that the director’s ultimate task is to serve the script and its creator. "When I started as a stage designer I had to learn that I was not there to express my personal vision but to serve the vision of the director. It was a hard lesson to learn. I wanted to embrace and hold my personal creative idea. Now I reverse it when I’m holed up in my Oregon studio. All that solitude sets you asking, ‘Hey, where are the opinions? What’s the Stage Manager got to say about all this?’"