Posts Tagged ‘Sequoiah Hippolyte’

The Stanford Repertory Theater (SRT) has launched its annual summer festival with “Voices of the Earth: From Sophocles to Rachel Carson and Beyond.” The polished reading from nearly a hundred writers, thinkers, scientists, and politicians, compiled by the Artistic Director Rush Rehm and Charles Junkerman, Stanford’s dean (emeritus) for Continuing Studies, ends tonight, alas! But other shows on this year’s theme, “The Environment and Social Justice,” will debut in the coming weeks. Go here to read about two new plays, Polar Bears, Black Boys & Prairie Fringed Orchids, by Vincent Terrell Durham, and Anna Considers Mars, by Ruben Grijalva. SRT also hosts a popular film series.

“Voice of the Earth” was a moving tribute to our planet. However, the first quarter-hour made me wonder if the seven performers/readers could keep the show together for 90 minutes, entirely on snippets from the 7th century B.C. to now. Yet they did!

I had some quibbles about the tendentiousness – Reagan, Bush, Nixon, and inevitably Trump were excoriated, with satisfied groans from the liberal audience. But what about Obama‘s complicated relationship with fracking? And were the Native Americans really all peace and love and Great Spirit? (One quote referred to whispering to the bears, rather than killing them. Do not try that at home.)  There’s always a danger of sentimentalizing, even kitschifying nature, extracting the roughness and toughness of our familiar earth – it’s radical foreign-ness.

I was happy to see a number of Stanford “Another Look” book club author’s featured: J.A. Baker, Joseph Conrad, W.H. Hudson. And a few personal friends and favorites – Richard Wilbur, too.

Kudos to cast members Gianna Clark, Thomas Freeland, Jake Harrison, Sequoiah Hippolyte, Brenna McCulloch, Emma Rothenberg, Gabe Wieder.

I picked out a few quotes from the evening. Here they are:

“Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed; if we permit the last virgin forests to be turned into comic books and plastic cigarette cases; if we drive the few remaining members of the wild species into zoos or to extinction; if we pollute the last clear air and dirty the last clean streams and push our paved roads through the last of the silence, so that never again will Americans be free in their own country from the noise, the exhausts, the stinks of human and automotive waste . . . ”

– Wallace Stegner (from a letter)

Rilke, in a painting by Leonid Pasternak

Do you still remember: falling stars,
how they leapt slantwise through the sky
like horses over suddenly held-out hurdles
of our wishes—did we have so many?—
for stars, innumerable, leapt everywhere;
almost every gaze upward became
wedded to the swift hazard of their play,
and our heart felt like a single thing
beneath that vast disintegration of their brilliance—
and was whole, as if it would survive them!

– Rainer Maria Rilke, trans. Edward Snow

“… I lay on the bowsprit, facing astern, with the water foaming into spume under me, the masts with every sail white in the moonlight, towering high above me. I became drunk with the beauty and singing rhythm of it, and for a moment I lost myself – actually lost my life. I was set free! I dissolved in the sea, became white sails and flying spray, became beauty and rhythm, became moonlight and the ship and the high dim-starred sky! I belonged, without past or future, within peace and unity and a wild joy, within something greater than my own life, or the life of man, to life itself! To God, if you want to put it that way. Then another time, on the American Line, when I was lookout on the crow’s nest in the dawn watch. A calm sea, that time. Only a lazy groundswell and a slow, drowsy roll of the ship. The passengers asleep and none of the crew in sight. No sound of man. Black smoke pouring from the funnels behind and beneath me. Dreaming, not keeping lookout, feeling alone, and above, and apart, watching the dawn creep like a painted dream over the sky and sea which slept together. Then the moment of ecstatic freedom came. The peace, the end of the quest, the last harbor, the joy of belonging to a fulfillment beyond men’s lousy, pitiful, greedy fears and hopes and dreams! And several other times in my life, when I was swimming far out, or lying alone on a beach, I have had the same experience. Became the sun, the hot sand, green seaweed anchored to a rock, swaying in the tide. Like a saint’s vision of beatitude. Like the veil of things as they seem drawn back by an unseen hand. For a second you see—and seeing the secret, are the secret. For a second there is meaning! Then the hand lets the veil fall and you are alone, lost in the fog again.”

Eugene O’Neill, Long Day’s Journey Into Night