Donna Blue Lachman isn`t a prima donna, but she does have a bad back. So the other day when she was discussing her New York living arrangements with Tim Johnson, the former child actor who`s producing her one-woman show at The Ballroom in midtown Manhattan, she asked if he could please be sure to rent her a place with a tub rather than a shower stall in the bathroom. She needed to be able to sit back and soak.
Johnson laughed. Where did she think he`d be putting her up? In a trailer camp? Of course she could have a tub. She was getting a whole suite. And membership in a health club, too-the same place Eartha Kitt goes.
Lachman could tell that like Dorothy and Toto, she wasn`t in Kansas anymore.
Or more precisely, she could tell she was dealing with a different sort of show business than they practice at the Blue Rider-the theater she founded seven years ago at 1822 S. Halsted St., where she and a few collaborators have put on a series of rough-edged, low-budget, amiably cosmic and mostly Lachman- centered productions while fending off waves of code-wielding city inspectors. You can say what you want about the decline of New York as a theater center, but when Lachman opens this Wednesday, performing her autobiographical ”Dancing Naked on the White House Lawn” for a guaranteed month at a rather nice cabaret, it will feel an awful lot like the big time.
”They`re doing a really big push on me,” Lachman said of Johnson and the rest of the team that`s taking her to The Ballroom.
”It`s like, this is your break.”
Not that she should have much trouble adapting to her new circumstances. Ever since she discovered hippiedom as a Skokie teenager, wearing Indian print bedspreads for dresses and slipping into Chicago on weekends to hang out with the hippies in Lincoln Park, the 41-year-old Lachman has made a life and a career and a calling of transformation. This woman has sloughed off enough skins to make a coat.
And, the title not withstanding, ”Dancing Naked” is that coat: the worn, warm record of Lachman`s transformations-a ”spiritual travelogue,” as her director, David Petrarca, describes it, taking her and us both from LSD to Stairmaster exercise machines and from the 1968 Democratic Convention to the Gulf War. ”It`s my life, my mythic journey, going out and coming back,”
Lachman said. ”But it`s also a chronicle of our culture-our culture in the last 20 years and how my life ran through it.”
For a good many of those years Lachman`s life was focused mainly on running away from Skokie. She was loathe to see herself for what she is-the daughter of a long line of Russian Jewish furriers, whose father maintained the tradition, making a livelihood of dealing in pelts for suburban ladies. As she remarks at the beginning of ”Dancing Naked,” Lachman still finds it easier to own up to her abortion, her years of cocaine use and her menage a trois than to her dad`s embarrassingly bourgeois, politically incorrect line of work.
After Lincoln Park and a brief sojourn at Shimer College, Lachman`s first stop was a California ashram called Still Point-a kind of testing range for New Age philosophies where the sharing ethic extended to sex. (Hence the abovementioned menage; Lachman still keeps in touch with the other female member of that triangle, phoning her most recently at a New Mexico mental hospital.)
From there Lachman went on to sample the more austere form of communalism practiced on an Israeli kibbutz; to perform around San Francisco as Blue the Clown; and to spend a year in Poland, studying with the great and mysterious theater guru, Jerzy Grotowski, who basically told her to get a life.
Which she did, perhaps a little too enthusiastically for her own good. Back in California during the late `70s-after a brief Thoreauvian episode involving a teepee and 100 pounds of alfalfa-Lachman taught acting and became imbued with the theatrical uses of trance and possession, ”directing workshops,” she remembered, ”where I wanted the actors to fly and make color out of their bodies. I was reading about shamanism and I was flipping out.”
It was in this state of mind, enhanced by more than a little of the cocaine that accompanied her through many of her adventures during this period, that Lachman made plans to go to Haiti and study voodoo. The trip was at once transcendant and catastrophic. On the one hand, she delved so deeply into voodoo, felt so at one with what she`s called her ”black Jewish African soul,” that she resolved to ”step through the fire” and be initiated as a mambo or voodoo priestess.
On the other hand, she ran dangerously afoul of ”Baby Doc” Duvalier`s tyrannical regime. Lachman remains convinced that a serious car accident she suffered there was in fact a voodoo assassination attempt. When she finally left Port-au-Prince, she did it in a hurry.
”Broken” is probably not too strong a word for Lachman`s condition after her return from Haiti. ”I came back (from Haiti) out of my mind. And I didn`t go back to California, where I had lived. I came back to live with my parents. I was 30 years old and I was demented. Theater made no sense to me. It was obsolete.”
Lachman went into waitressing and therapy. She didn`t stop sluffing skins, however. Shaken by a brush with urban violence, she lit out for Katmandu, of all places, trekking from there to a remote lamasery for a look at a three-day demon-exorcising ceremony that gave her back some of her lost faith in the healing power of theater.
Then, in 1982, she went to the American Southwest to take part in an
”ordeal” presided over by a Native American medicine man named Harley Swiftdeer. As Lachman tells it, she walked alone for two hours into the desert, until she found a ”power spot” on which to set a circle of rocks. She sat within the circle all night-without a fire, without sleep-raising and answering questions about herself. At dawn she heard music in the distance and felt a music coming through her. She sang quietly. Her only company was a hawk, yet she felt too inhibited, somehow, to express herself more fully.
When she saw Swiftdeer again, he knew she`d stifled her song. (How?
According to Lachman, he was the hawk: ”Did you think I`d let a gringa stay overnight in the desert all alone?” she remembers him asking.) ”Your song is your gift,” Swiftdeer told her. ”And not to sing your song is to be selfish. Be sure you share it. It is the spirit of the give-away.”
Obviously, she followed the medicine man`s advice. If ”Dancing Naked”
sums up Lachman`s 20-year odyssey through the world and her own psyche, it also culminates her seven-year effort to make artistic sense of that odyssey. To share her song. In the first official Blue Rider production, ”The Demon Show,” Lachman played a woman whose apartment becomes the scene of an epic, all-night, life-or-death struggle between her demonic addictions and her angelic spirit guides. In ”Passing On” she went to Nepal and heaven. In
”After Mountains, More Mountains” she retraced her journey into voodoo.
”After Mountains” was extraordinarily beautiful, but it left Lachman unsatisfied. She felt it was too lyrical in tone, too anthropological in content. She needed to expose the underside of that experience.
Consequently, she started working on what she called ”The Uncensored Haiti Stories”: a loose compendium of occult campfire tales delivered stand- up style, in the manner of cutting edge raconteurs like Spalding Gray. Before long the material was fanning out over a much larger area than Haiti, however, visiting other islands in Lachman`s past. She let it grow. The piece ran at Blue Rider with the word Haiti dropped from the title. Now it was simply ”The Uncensored Stories.”
Lachman sent a videotape of ”The Uncensored Stories” to a New York literary agent named Susan Schulman, along with a batch of scripts Lachman hoped to publish. As it happens, Schulman is married to Shelly Schultz, a veteran talent agent associated with the William Morris Agency. Schultz happened to see the tape ”as a matter of course, walking in and out of the room,” he said. ”It flashed on me that she`s kind of reminiscent of the early Woody Allen, who I was involved with.” Then he became her agent and set about getting her The Ballroom.
Lachman`s been working with director Petrarca for several weeks now, cutting out fat, focusing the narrative, toning down the shrill parts. And, of course, changing the title to ”Dancing Naked on the White House Lawn”-which Lachman actually did during a Vietnam War demonstration in the late `60s.
On Wednesday Lachman will leave her personal Kansas for yet another in her long list of personal Ozes. Unlike Dorothy, however, she won`t have the capacity to go back home. Or the desire, perhaps. For all her attempts to find the One True Thing in Haiti or Nepal or the American desert, Lachman is, as Petrarca remarked, ”about letting go of things.” Fortunately, she`ll have her stories, her coat of many skins, to wear on the way: a true, if slightly metaphysical furrier`s daughter.
