On a bitterly cold Wednesday morning, Martha Boesing is sitting at a long table near the front of the stage in the not-exactly-overheated Weinstein Center for the Performing Arts at National-Louis University in Evanston, watching rehearsals for her new play, “My Other Heart.”
As it happens, one of the female leads, Jenna Ward, has suddenly come down with the flu and has been sent home with a fever of 102 degrees, leaving the rehearsal space to actresses Diane Houghton and Shanesia Davis, who at the moment has her baseball cap on backwards. Boesing suggests the scene should be played more quietly, and director Russell Vandenbroucke agrees, telling his performers to proceed “at a Mediterranean pace-not frantic.” Boesing then inquires about a “bit of business” that is occupying Davis. “When you’re licking the juice off your hand,” the playwright says, “be aware you’re dealing with a very potent poison.”
Poison is only one of the ingredients in her play, which opens Wednesday in Northlight Theatre’s performance space, the Coronet Theater, 817 Chicago Ave., in Evanston. Set in 1494 against the background of the Spanish Inquisition, “My Other Heart” focuses on the unusual friendship between Pilar (Ward), the wife of one of Columbus’ navigators, and Guacarapita, a.k.a. “Cara” (Davis), a young Tainos Indian woman presented to Pilar by her husband as a gift/slave from the New World. (The Tainos phrase for “friend” is “my other heart.”)
“Pilar is young, passionate, impulsive, fiery and very loving-as well as being an absolutely liberated woman,” Boesing says later over a cafeteria lunch. “Her father taught her to read. She and her husband have a degree of friendship and intimacy and caring for one another that wasn’t too common at that time. Partly, I did that to contemporize it, and partly so that the journey she had to take wasn’t so enormously unbelievable. I’m sure there were women like this. There are in every culture.
“But Pilar is also like a bird in a cage, and it’s almost like Cara comes in and pulls the cage apart. I think of Cara as a feisty, spirited young woman who has the wisdom of her culture. She’s an angry woman who didn’t go willingly into captivity, and she’s also intelligent; Columbus picked her as an interpreter. Again, I didn’t want to make her journey so far-fetched.”
Boesing has been billed as a “feminist playwright,” a label with which she feels comfortable, although she tacks on a caveat: “Of course, `My Other Heart’ has feminist aspects to it, but that seems almost irrelevant to me. I mean, do you call a play about the lives of two men a `masculinist’ play?”
“This is too complex and rich a play to be nailed with a simple description,” adds Vandenbroucke. “You could also say that it’s a spiritual play, that it’s a political play, that it’s an emotional play.”
Boesing looks down at her salad-bar selection and smiles. “I do have one of those horrible tales-which, in fact, makes me a feminist today. I was a student at Connecticut College for Women and had a writing teacher who really liked my writing a lot. But at the end of the year he took me aside and said, `It’s really too bad you’re a woman, because you might have been a really great writer. No woman can be a great writer. They just don’t have the mental equipment to do it.’ I mean, I had idolized this teacher. And it was a women’s college!”
Raised in Exeter, N.H., where her father taught English at the famous prep school, she got hooked on theater while apprenticing in summer stock as a teenager in the ’50s. After college, she moved to Minneapolis with her first husband, who was studying political science at the University of Minnesota. For several years she did lighting design and worked as an actress, and she and her second husband, an actor and composer, became a folk-singing duo. (“Think Judy Collins and you’ll have it.”) She is also the founder and onetime artistic director of a professional women’s theater company in Minneapolis called At the Foot of the Mountain.
Boesing, who has two grown daughters (one of whom is an actress) and a grown son, has written a lot of one-act plays but only three or four of what she calls “play-plays.” One, “The Web”-which she describes as a play about forgiveness, the story of a women’s studies teacher in New England-was produced at Trinity Square in Providence, R.I. She will have another work opening in Minneapolis on April 1; “Hard Times Come Again No More” is based on the writings of Meridel Le Sueur, a noted Twin Cities proletarian writer of the ’30s who is still writing at age 94.
“My Other Heart” is one of the biggest Northlight productions in terms of cast size-a chorus of 13 will include townspeople, clerics, condemned Jews, sailors and conquistadors. It is being financed with the help of a $30,000 grant from the Kennedy Center’s Fund for New American Plays and a $10,000 grant from the Elizabeth F. Cheney Foundation.
Director Vandenbroucke says that even though “My Other Heart” is set 500 years ago in Spain, “it’s really about relations today. It’s about two women who learn from one another; it’s about what a friendship can teach; it’s about a search and struggle for a woman to discover her true self and her identity. It’s also a play about a clash between religions-Christianity and Judaism and, implicitly, a hateful pagan religion. It’s a clash between genders and a clash between continents, the Old World and the New.”
Boesing got the idea for the play in 1980, while working on a piece for a Minneapolis company called In the Heart of the Beast Puppet and Mask Theatre, which was doing a play for the Columbus quincentenary.
“One actress improvised a scene where she is a Spanish wife looking at a slave. The wife experiences her own lack of freedom when she sees this woman dancing. I was so moved by this, I thought that would make a wonderful subject for a play, and it sort of haunted me.
“It’s an incredible coincidence that the day Columbus left on his first journey is the very day that Jews had to leave Spain during the Inquisition. It was the date of their last allowed day. So he couldn’t leave from the port of Cadiz, which was the great big port. He had to leave from Palos de la Frontero, the town where the play takes place.”
For research, she read such sources as Columbus’ own journals, the log and history of Bartlome de Las Casas (a Dominican friar who traveled with Columbus), Cecil Roth’s “History of the Marranos” and Samuel Eliot Morison’s classic biography of the explorer.
In the play, Columbus (known to the Spanish as Cristobel Colon) periodically appears as an aging, fanatical apparition that holds imaginary conversations with Pilar.
“It’s an intrusive device,” Boesing concedes, “but it’s hard to leave him out of the play if you’re writing about his era. I mean, things like the way he regarded these native Americans-his complete change-around from when he first thought he was in paradise, and later saw them as vicious heathens. And his trying to defend the killings and tortures that were going on, and his crazed search for gold, which, it turned out, wasn’t even in the Caribbean.
“In his journals, he’s hoisted by his own petard; I was so fascinated by that. He was clearly a driven visionary, and one has to respect that, but I also think he either was responsible for, or allowed to happen, the tragic genocide of a people.
“All that made me see that he needed to be integrated into the play, that he had to be inside Pilar’s brain. She has this sort of obsessive conversation with him because he’s taken her husband away to this unknown place. One of the ideas of the play is that the oppression she’s experiencing as a Jew has as its root the same oppression Cara and her people experienced. So Colon not only has taken away her husband, he’s brought suffering upon this woman who has become her friend.”
Before returning to the theater, Boesing roffers: “You know, the vogue in American theater has been very much toward form and not content.”
