Lokkal- todo SMA

Lola recently turned 92, and has been performing on stage since the age of four and a half. She is the pure essence of natural acting. In the words of Michael Gottlieb of Players Workshop, Lola is "the doyenne of theater in San Miguel" and "a local legend."

A few months ago, I got up the nerve to ask Lola if I could work with her. She said she'd be delighted, but pointed out that in recent years she's been doing far more directing than acting. There are simply not many roles for women her age.

Writing is my profession. Over the past decade, while living in San Miguel, I worked on a movie script with Nick Pileggi (Goodfellas, Casino), developed a television series with producer Michael Jaffe, and saw my New Yorker article on a Chinese gang turned into a rather bad feature film, despite the involvement of Martin Scorsese as co-producer. Hit Men, my book about the record industry and the Mafia, is being adapted as a TV series – at least, according to the Big Kahunas at CAA. For me, film and television take a backseat to theater.
So I started casting about for a character, an American woman in her nineties, to write for Lola. I wanted the story to take place in the present. The idea struck me pretty quickly: a former Hollywood screenwriter, branded a Communist during the Red Scare of the 1950s, blacklisted and sent to prison, confronting her past after decades of silence.

The one-act play I wrote for Lola is called The Cauldron of Fire, and runs from Thursday, January 25 through Saturday, January 27, at 7pm, and Sunday, January 28, at 2pm, at the San Miguel Playhouse, Avenida Independencia 82. It is paired with a second dramatic monologue, 13 Things About Ed Carpolotti, by Jeffrey Hatcher, performed by the wonderful Judy Newell. I am directing both plays. Advance tickets are 200 pesos, at Solutions (Recreo 11), or online (sanmiguelplayhouse.com), and 250 pesos at the door, starting one hour before show time.

Helen Goldman, Lola's character, is not based on an actual person, but the events she describes in the play are historically accurate. In 1945, the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) became a permanent congressional body, and two years later began its ignominious assault on the movie industry. Ten men, including screenwriters Ring Lardner, Jr., and Dalton Trumbo, were sent to prison for refusing to answer questions. Scores of other men and women were blacklisted and no longer able to work in Hollywood. A surprising number of people cooperated with HUAC by giving up the names of other purported Party members – including their own friends – and kept their jobs.

In The Cauldron of Fire, Helen Goldman, who had gone to prison for contempt of Congress, is about to have a fateful meeting with a director she has not seen in over sixty-five years, a man who named names and kept on working. Helen's life has been a series of betrayals – by her friends, her country, and by her own high-minded ideals to make a better world. What will she have to say to a living betrayer, one of the small handful of survivors, like herself, of the Hollywood blacklist?

While conducting research for the play, I tried to determine whether any victims of the Hollywood blacklist were in fact still living. I came up with only five people: actress Lee Grant, 92; screenwriter Norma Barzman, 97; screenwriter Walter Bernstein, 98; actress Marsha Hunt, 100; and actor Norman Lloyd, 103. Meanwhile, actor Kirk Douglas, who makes the somewhat grandiloquent claim that he ended the blacklist in 1959 by securing a parking pass for Dalton Trumbo on the Universal Studios lot, recently turned 101.

In writing the play, I found I needed to make Lola's character 97, five years older than her actual age. She doesn't appear to mind.

Program

San Miguel Events newsletter sign up

Click ads