Theater Stages a Third World Revolution

Sometimes it takes a strong voice to awaken the sleeping minds of the disenfranchised. One of those voices belonged to Frantz Fanon, author of “The Wretched of the Earth” and other works that have become guidebooks for revolutionary thought in Third World societies.

Fanon was a psychiatrist who wound up practicing in Algeria, and his chronicles of those lost souls who changed his life are at the center of “Fanon’s People,” which opened Saturday night at Hollywood’s Fountain Theatre. The provocative text, based on Fanon’s writing, is by Toby Armour. It is directed by Fountain Theatre’s artistic director, Steven Sachs, and stars Richard Biggs as Fanon.

Armour has been fascinated with Fanon and his vision since first reading “The Wretched of the Earth.” Her background in New York theater, both as a dancer and playwright, opened up for her the theatrical possibilities of Fanon’s words. Her other plays, such as “Sky Woman Falling” and “Flo and Max,” have been seen in New York, London and Edinburgh, Scotland.

She is a choreographer and was artistic director of the Boston dance company New England Dinosaur for eight years. She has appeared as a solo dancer with the Paul Taylor Company and the Remy Charlip Company, among others, and at the Judson Dance Theater in New York’s Washington Square South. It was at the Judson that she began to combine the two disciplines of theater and dance.

“I found that words were intruding into the dance pieces I made,” she says. “I did a series of plays with dances in between at Riverside Studios in London. That was the first real attempt. I’ve always been fascinated by writing, by the silences around words as much as the words themselves. That’s a part of what Fanon’s case notes are for me. There’s a lot of silence, a lot that’s unspoken. Wasn’t it Yeats who said theater would be marvelous if you could get rid of the words?”

Speaking of the ‘60s, she says: “In my day, Fanon was always a name to reckon with. We had an image of a man who had grave predictions about the course of colonialism in the Third World and the course of revolution in the Third World. He’s best-known as a profound visionary in that respect. I would think Fanon’s ‘The Wretched of the Earth’ is on everybody’s list if they’ve ever taken any course about political movements in the 20th Century.

“I read it, and these case studies really leaped out at me. They’re about the people he treated, his case notes. I felt they should be brought to the stage. The language of the notes is so austere and shocking that I really began with the sound of those words.” She pauses, thinking of the words and the voices they represented.

“These people are only named by their first names. You can see why because of what they were involved with. They were terrorists and torturers and paratroopers, and they come out so clearly and starkly. I started with the sound of their voices, attempting to hear that.”

Fanon died in 1962 in Bethesda Naval Hospital in Washington at age 37. It was the end of an intriguing journey.

Born in Martinique when the French were occupying that country, he fought during World War II with the Free French and fell in love with France. His education was paid for by French authorities, an advantage that was not available to many black men from his homeland in his day. His character was also formed as protege of Martinique poet-statesman Aime Cesaire, a Marxist who was very much involved in the “negritude” movement of that day.

Biggs, who plays Fanon in the production, says Fanon wanted to get out of Martinique. “He found the best way was to use the French military. He took advantage of the opportunity to educate himself.”

Fanon became a psychiatrist and was assigned to a mental hospital in Brittany. “He decided that was going to be a little too simple and structured,” Biggs says. “At the time, the French were occupying Algeria, so Fanon requested, almost demanded, that he go there. Once he was there, his new reforms just turned the hospital upside down. He was very controversial.”

As an actor, Biggs is sort of a minor revolutionary himself. “When I came to Hollywood, I wanted to be a movie star so bad. I was 16 years old. Theater didn’t even cross my mind. I spent six years at USC, constantly working Ibsen and Chekhov, Moliere--then when I got out, I realized I had a better chance of playing Alceste in ‘The Misanthrope’ and getting paid for it, than being a co-star on ‘T. J. Hooker.’ There were more opportunities for a classically trained actor to go and do Shakespeare. So I found myself doing a lot of theater and falling in love with it.”

He also found himself working steadily on television and is now in a long run as Dr. Marcus Hunter on NBC’s “Days of Our Lives.” He says he does the soap “to pay the rent, but theater is what I intend to do.”

Armour says: “Rick, in a way, is sharing this feeling with the character he’s playing. He’s not satisfied with the boundaries that have been placed on him.”

Biggs agrees. “In the research I’ve done, I’ve found him a very fascinating man,” he says of Fanon. “For a long time, he wanted to be French, to be everything that was French. Somewhere along the line, he did an about-face and went to the total opposite extreme. That’s what attracted me, a man who, whatever direction he was going, complete right or complete left, he was going at 110 miles an hour.”

Armour says: “He’s one of the few people who looked at violence and attempted to understand it in terms of colonialism, what the roots of it are. In himself, there has always been the question of just what his own personal relation to violence was. His books were like burning standards for many revolutionary movements, including the Black Panther movement.”

“Standard reading for the Black Panthers,” Biggs says.

“Now,” Armour says, “Fanon is of great interest to the academic world. In that measure, perhaps there’s been less known about him in the world outside universities and scholarship. But the message is so very powerful.”