The evening combines original music, movement and storytelling with Rumi’s verse in some unique and dramatic ways. Although director John Heckel brought his selection of Rumi poems when the cast first met, everyone was asked to contribute their own favorite verses. “They shared with the group why this particular piece moved them, and what it touches in their experience of the world right now,” Heckel said. “We made collective decisions on what to include, and my task was to find a form to make this an evening of theatre.”
“We have a diverse cast, in terms of ethnicity, age and gender, both students and members of the community. So one of our first discoveries was a way to use this,” Heckel said. “At times during the production the men will do several poems by themselves, being witnessed by the women, and the women will do several poems witnessed by the men.”
The cast also divides at times into Elders, the Present Tense group (mid to late 20s) and the Future group of younger participants. “We’ll explore relationships between the groups, and what they have to say to each other,” Heckel said. “At first you have to recognize and pay tribute to the differences, and hopefully by the end of the evening the differences will collapse in on themselves, the way they do in Rumi’s poetry.”
There are several longer stories that Rumi tells that will be dramatized and spread throughout the evening. Music is an important part of the production, and Music Director Seabury Gould has been matching music to Rumi’s poetry for over a decade. He provides accompaniment on flutes and several stringed instruments, and members of the cast also play and sing.
But the essence for performers and audience alike is the direct impact of Rumi’s words. “Rumi is astounding, fertile, abundant, almost more an excitable library of poetry than a person,” said Robert Bly, the American poet who first suggested that Barks translate Rumi. “When I started reading Rumi, all at once I felt at home. I think many readers of his work have that feeling.”
“To be working with these words written almost 800 years ago that will be read and listened to 800 years from now,” noted Heckel, “that alone is a profound experience.”
The HSU production began with a wealth of material to choose from, thanks to the blanket permission granted by Coleman Barks, the foremost English translator of Rumi’s verses in a series of books widely credited for the Rumi boom. According to Barks, Rumi “is trying to get us to feel the vastness of our true identity...the joy of being human is uncovering the core we already are, the treasure buried in the ruin.”
For Heckel there is another reason to focus on Rumi at this historical moment. “In a contemporary world where we’re overwhelmed with a vision that all Islamic people are suicide bombers, I want to create a different connection with that civilization during this evening,” he said. “Rumi is a particularly interesting and unique way to increase our cultural understanding.”
“Rumi was surrounded by news of terrorism, just as we are eight centuries later,” noted Jonathan Curiel in the San Francisco Chronicle. “So where’s the bloodshed in Rumi’s writing? Like Jesus, Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr., Rumi insisted violence was an unsatisfying way of resolving issues...Sentiments like that have turned Rumi into one of America’s best-selling poets—someone whose thoughts on love and other matters are revered by hundreds of thousands of readers.”
Members of the cast are Jonathan Barrett, Jessica Charles, Bernadette Cheyne, Erin Harris, Jeanne Kirke, Sarah McKinney, Amanda Sharp, John Trautwein, Anthony Trombetti, Nicole Umayam and Arnold Waddell. Ivan Hess is the Scenic Designer.
“An Evening With Rumi” is in the Gist Hall Theatre at HSU, Thursdays through Saturdays December 2-4, 9-11 at 7:30 pm, and Sunday Dec. 5 at 2 pm. $10/$8, with limited number of free seats to HSU students at each performance, from the HSU Box Office (826-3928) or at the door. An HSU Department of Theatre, Film & Dance production. http://HSUStage.blogspot.com.