It was our first rehearsal for Salome, late spring 1991. I had managed to drag Mutahar Williams along. “Mutahah,” as it was pronounced, was his Subud name, but he was very English, his voice deep and resonant, like seasoned wood: an exquisitely-tuned instrument for poetry. We’d hit the coffeehouse poetry circuit trolling for players for Festival Dionysus, our anarchic take on the ancient Greek festival of wine and theater. I found Mutahar at Lizards on Santa Monica, or the Espresso Bar in the alley off S. Raymond in Pasadena. He was a professor at Occidental College and a considerable poet. The M in MTV still stood for music then, they actually showed videos still. Mutahar felt the time was ripe for poetry videos, so he made his own. Nature poetry, shot outdoors. I think I still have the VHS cassette somewhere. But I recruited him for the Ancients Chorus in Dionysus. He was one of those who remained skeptical of the show all the way through our run. Not as skeptical as the only professional actress in our patchwork company of poets, musicians, painters and general gung-ho creative types, who kept moaning, “This is going to ruin my career,” throughout every rehearsal. She never invited anyone she knew to the show. And she’d lose herself in back whenever the whole Gray Pony Chorus took the stage. Oscar Wilde’s Salome was our follow-up to Dionysus, and it would prove to be a fluke hit (as I wrote about last month, complete with cast and crew list, synopsis, etc.), but at that first rehearsal who could know? There were at least eight women there, and only three men: Mutahar, myself, and Blaine Steele, the director. (Peditto might have been there, too–our producer, and founder of the...
All That California Female Energy (Another Turn on the Pony) [Hippie Squared]...
posted by Jeff Rogers
Gray Pony’s Wild Ride [Hippie Squared]
posted by Jeff Rogers
We did Oscar Wilde’s Salome in our underwear in the summer of 1991 and got “Pick of the Week” in the LA Weekly for it, a big deal then. We had a hit play on our hands. We were the Gray Pony Chorus. It was a wild ride. That was the peak of our renown. Since then, we’ve vanished from the historical record. Our most illustrious alumni have dropped us from their resumes. Google us and you won’t find a single reference– other than this one, after today. (Mark Ruffalo co-directed a show we produced, but you wouldn’t know it from IMDB.) One who does remember us is Robert Prior, impresario of the acclaimed Fabulous Monsters theater troupe. I say this not to brag, but in wonder: he’s often told me our Salome was one of his favorite nights ever spent in the theater. If I didn’t already love him, I would love him for that alone. So when Robert directed a new production of Salome this summer, exactly twenty years after ours, I rounded up a reunion of our cast and crew to go see it. It seemed to mean a lot to Robert and his cast that we came. And that meant a lot to me. I have enormous affection for those old performing days. Before we did theater in our underwear, we were a fully-clothed poetry performance group. We scored poetry for multiple voices, and backed ourselves on wind and rhythm instruments, on stages and in coffeehouses– places like Onyx Sequel in Los Feliz (on the site of the present Cafe Figaro); Jabberjaw on Pico; and Highland Grounds in Hollywood, 1989 and 1990. Gray Pony’s Godfather, C. Natale Peditto, founded the group for his Master’s studying oral traditions at Cal State Northridge. The first...