History

In 1997 and 1998 Pilgrim Theatre embraced its most challenging project since its inception. Jean-Claude van Itallie’s The Tibetan Book of the Dead (or How Not To Do It Again) engaged 18 artists who used as inspiration the elements of fire, water, air and earth with which they had been working at Pilgrim Theatre’s center for theatre research in the hills of western Massachusetts. Based on the classic Buddhist text, the script dealt with the transmigration of the soul and the choices to be made as the spirit hovers in suspension between life and death. In 1998 The Tibetan Book of the Dead, researched and rehearsed for over a year, made its powerful impact on Boston audiences. Often playing to standing room only audiences, the production addressed difficult issues of a universal nature which are of immediate concern to many cultures at the end of the 20th century. The strategic planning for The Tibetan Book of the Dead project, directed by Kim Mancuso, began in the summer of 1997 as artists came together to research the text in a month of rigorous improvisation. Negotiations with Boston Center for the Arts enabled us to secure a marvelous space for the premiere of the work - the Cyclorama. They collaborated with us on strategies for funding and press coverage in Boston. The production earned high marks from the Boston critics, standing room only audiences, and many requests for another run of the production. Pigrim Theatre’s work on this project is the subject of the final chapter of Susan Letzler Cole’s book, Playwrights in Rehearsal (Routledge, 2001).

Pilgrim Theatre’s mission statement assumes a global vision. In 1995 and 1996 our production of Letters from Sarajevo, which was featured in a Monitor Radio Special Report, brought the voices of that besieged city to this country. Among our audiences were Bosnian, Serb and Croatian refugees. One of the leading UN medical workers (a Bosnian) who’d spent the war in Sarajevo, chanced upon our production during his visit to Harvard University. He spent his post-performance evening telling our company of his experiences and convincing us to bring the production to Sarajevo because he felt it was an honest representation of the human struggle going on in the city at that time. “And citizens of Sarajevo would be moved to know that someone in the West recognized that their story must be told....” Regrettably, for financial reasons, we were unable to bring our performance to Sarajevo. Instead, a video of Letters from Sarajevo was shown on TV Sarajevo.

In October of 1998, we were invited to preview Moon Over Dark Street (a cabaret of theatre and song by Bertolt Brecht featuring the music of Kurt Weill and Hanns Eisler) at New York University’s conference, Brecht: a Centennial Perspective. The performance, which met with strong critical acclaim, opened at The Boston Center for the Arts, where it ran in repertory for three weeks with Missing Persons/Panic, two original works written and directed by Pilgrim Theatre’s Susan Thompson. In 1999, these three productions were invited as part of Boston’s Women on Top Festival and Kermit Dunkelberg was again named one of Boston’s more valuable performers of the ‘98-‘99 season.

With The House Not Touched by Death, Pilgrim again engaged with a living playwright, Janna Goodwin. She worked with us during the development of this timely production, written for radio, and staged with live music, which takes to task the U.S. healthcare system. An intrinsic part of the project was a post-show discussion of the present state of healthcare in our country, with panelists ranging from end-of-life specialists from Boston to country physicians; from cancer-survivors to politicians. In conjunction with Hospice, Pilgrim Theatre toured Massachusetts statewide, where families and Hospice workers came together to discuss their experiences and shared strategies.

In April of 2002, Pilgrim premiered FAUST 2002, a contemporary confrontation of the ancient myth which knits Goethe, Marlowe, Gertrude Stein, George Sands, William Blake, Byron, and F.W. Murnau into a phantasmagoric tangled web. The production tackled the question: what are we really wiling to sacrifice for knowledge, love and power? The original work, collectively created by the artists of Pilgrim Theatre under the direction of Kim Mancuso, was invited to the Malta International Festival of Performace in June of 2003. We received funding for the tour from the Fund for U. S. Artists at International Festivals Abroad (a subsidiary of the National Endowment for the Arts), and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology School of Humanities and Social Sciences.

In February of this year, Pilgrim participated in the worldwide anti-war initiative, The Lysistrata Project, and created a staged reading of Aristophanes ancient comedy at the BCA’s Cyclorama. 40 actors and musicians participated as across the globe over a thousand readings took place in 60 countries.