L.A.’s ‘Green Card’ Gains Admission to a Big Apple Festival

The First New York International Festival of the Arts has begun here, and amid the 350-odd events afoot is a production from Los Angeles called “Green Card”--whose author says she does not want to be a writer.

“It’s very lonely and somehow the rewards are not worth the pain of it,” said JoAnne Akalaitis. “I have no literary ambitions at all, so none of my ego is invested in that.”

Akalaitis, 49, a founding member of New York’s Mabou Mines, a leading avant-garde ensemble, prefers to think of herself as a director. With “Green Card,” which has its New York debut today, she gets to be a writer-director.

A collage of images, music and dance, her play depicts the experiences of immigrants to America, from Ellis Island at the turn of the century to Los Angeles in the ‘80s.

Now in a 12-day run that began Monday at Off-Broadway’s Joyce Theatre, “Card” first premiered in 1986 in Los Angeles at the Mark Taper Forum, which commissioned Akalaitis to write it, aided by a Rockefeller grant.

A New Yorker whose stage dossier includes the critically acclaimed “Dead End Kids: A History of Nuclear Power,” she has revised part of “Green Card,” but not because of the reviews it got in Los Angeles.

“I’ve never been influenced by a critic in any way, good or bad,” she said. “It’s best not to pay attention to them.”

The rewrites began, she said, when finally, after what she calls “some kind of endless back-and-forth” on whether the play would be produced in New York, she got a definite “it’s on.”

“When I knew it was being done again, I changed it,” she said, not for the New York theater inspectors, but because, as with any artistic endeavor, “you re-examine something and see some things that could be different.”

Specifically, she said, “I wanted to make the second act tougher on the audience, to really deal with certain realities of political life, like torture.

“I also felt that in the earlier production”--which she also directed--”there was a certain kind of distance and elegance about it that maybe I wanted to make more intense. So I worked on that.

“And also the normal kinds of ‘author’ things like, ‘let’s make this shorter,’ or ‘this never played so here’s a chance to cut it or rewrite.’ ”

What is she trying to say in her play?

That the history of immigration to America has got “to be seen through a different filter,” she said.

And that is, she added, that “this country has changed enormously and there are people here”--exemplified by the Latino and Asian communities in Los Angeles--”whose presence is very powerful. . . . And that these people are very exciting, and we have to nurture and appreciate their presence.”

The play also notes, she said, that there are Vietnamese and Cambodian refugees, the human aftermath of the Vietnam War, “who don’t want to be here, and they’re here because of our foreign policy.”