Playwright Makes Art Out of ‘Dark Memories’

Playwright John O’Keefe’s past is catching up with him, but if he is feeling any dread, it’s not coming through the telephone. Usually, he is holed up in his San Francisco home, penning solo and group theater pieces, dense with thickets of language sculpted by a writer’s keen memory of a disturbing personal past.

But this autumn day, he is calling from the town of Vining, Iowa (“a Bohemian town of 78 people and one store that’s the only hang-out”), where the “American Playhouse” production of his screenplay adaptation of his solo work, “Shimmer,” is being filmed.

“We’re shooting just a few miles away at the state juvenile home in Toledo, Iowa, where I lived from 1954 to 1956,” says O’Keefe, 51, “and right where ‘Shimmer’ is set. I had been here a few times since my rough days as a kid without a real family, and the really dark memories have faded as I’ve gotten to know the kids who live there, and seeing how the place has really improved since then.”

In Los Angeles, where O’Keefe says he has perhaps better luck with his plays than in what he terms the “moribund” Bay Area theater scene, a more recent bit of his past is about to close. His macabre, Grand Guignol-tinged “Mimzabim!”, which opened Oct. 11, ends tonight at Hollywood’s Theatre of N.O.T.E. under the direction of Roxanne Rogers, who played in O’Keefe’s original Padua Hills Playwrights’ Festival staging in 1984.

“I’ve had a lot of requests from places wanting to do this play,” says O’Keefe, understanding that its comic-nightmarish vision of a young girl named Sara with a mind-altering blood enzyme exploited by a team of ghoulish scientists is alluring to risk-taking theater groups. “But I was reluctant to give permission to just anyone who asked, especially to a conventional theater. But since Roxanne was the original Sara, she knows ‘Mimzabim!’ ‘ (an invented word for ultra-madness). She’s been there.”

Having viewed a videotape of the only other “Mimzabim!” staging by O’Keefe at San Francisco’s underground Club Foot, Rogers can confidently say that hers “is the first really full production of it. The look blends Jackson Pollock with ‘Andy Warhol’s Frankenstein,’ and our playing of it is in a horror style. The way John wrote demands actors willing to verbalize along jazz rhythms and get extremely physical. Almost everybody’s gotten hurt--(actress) Karen Hott mashed one of her heels--and we’ve bashed a few holes in the theater walls.”

Indeed, bashing down theater’s boundaries has always guided O’Keefe’s aesthetic, but he senses that his own art is moving past the old borders of either experimental “lab theater” developed at Berkeley’s defunct Blake Street Hawkeyes or the monologue/prose form of “Shimmer.”

A recent project is a long distance from these worlds. His drama about the Bronte sisters, “Sisters of the Wind,” commissioned and being developed by Berkeley Repertory Company was given a reading this month at the Matrix Theatre as part of the Audrey Skirball-Kenis Theatre reading series.

Another change for O’Keefe, a longtime exemplar of the playwright-director hyphenate, is seeing his work staged by others: Rogers’ “Mimzabim!;” several productions of his play “All Night Long,” and an upcoming (February) London Fringe production at the Man in the Moon Theatre of “Shimmer” and his macabre “Don’t You Ever Call Me Anything but Mother.”

Director-actor Michael Arabian, who recently performed O’Keefe’s “The Magician” at the Hudson Theatre, calls him “one of the most exciting writers in the country because his work is absolutely visceral and risk-taking in a way that only Sam Shepard comes close to. He starts with ordinary characters, then takes them on a journey where they get in touch with their animal selves. He’s also one of the rare theater artists who can write, direct and act equally well.”

O’Keefe says that he wants “to reach a wider audience, but without compromise. The solo work allows that, but a film of ‘Shimmer’ extends that further,” he says, noting that “Shimmer” will be released theatrically “sometime” in 1993 before it airs on PBS’ “American Playhouse.”

Though “Shimmer” is a closer reflection of O’Keefe’s orphaned life than “Mimzabim!,” the latter “definitely has autobiographical origins, even though it deals with this odd little girl in a wheelchair. It comes out of that time when I was abandoned, when the thinking in the 1950s was ‘better living through chemistry.’ Some medical people mistook my distress as being mentally imbalanced. I conceived of it as a theater work that would really push actors, but I also wrote it as a reaction to an overzealous psychiatric community.

“As personal as my work is, it’s always at least half-fiction. If you look at Joyce’s ‘Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,’ or Beckett’s ‘Malone Dies,’ they’re very autobiographical and invented at the same time. I guess I’m thinking about this a lot since I’m working on a novella about an odd boy in a Catholic orphanage. The Iowa autumn right now is crisp and crystal clear, and it’s making me want to stay here an extra week or two, just to write.”