WELCOME TO RAMALLAH
By Sonja Linden and Adah Kay
Directed by Charlie Riendeau
Produced by Compass Theatre & Paola Hornbuckle
With: Allison McDonald, Saiid Zamingir, Haig Koshkarian, Sherri Allen

Back by Popular Demand!
5 Shows only!
12/6 7pm
12/8 7:30pm
12/13 7pm
12/15 7:30pm
12/20 7pm

After the play, as my wife and I wandered out through the lobby toward the evening dark, a woman draped in swaths of black fabric called out, “There will be a postshow outside in five minutes!” About six people gathered to see what was what. When the woman — La Jolla Playhouse teaching artist Sherri Allen — emerged to join us, she began running down a list of questions and making notes of our answers. An example:

“What did you think the play was about?”

Person A: “Finding the transcendent virtue in everyday things — Beethoven in the beer-hall waltz, and the mother and her daughter, who is content to be ordinary.”

Allen ran down the list, her pen twitching away over the clipboard. “Were there any particular scenes that will stay with you? Were there any points that weren’t clear? What did you think of the nudity? What was done particularly well?” Then she asked for general feedback.

Person B: “I thought the first act was very slow — it didn’t go from emotional beat to emotional beat. Instead, it went from intellectual point to intellectual point.”

And so on. Toward the end, Allen pulled back the curtain a bit: “The play, from the playwright’s point of view, is about obsession. Beethoven’s obsession with the waltz, and Katherine’s obsession with finding out why he was obsessed with it — it’s her life’s work. The daughter is the metaphor for the secondhand waltz. Katherine’s daughter does not meet her expectations because Katherine knows what she wants and is very driven. She’s devoted her whole life to one thing, and her daughter wants to try out different things.”

Person B: “But the mother is not obsessed with the daughter.”

Allen: “No, she’s obsessed with her own life’s work — she neglects her daughter.”

Person B: “How does one illuminate the other if she’s not obsessed with her daughter?”

Woman: “The daughter craves the mother’s approval. She feels she’s never met her mother’s expectations.”

Person A: “Beethoven is obsessed with the minor work. But Mom is not obsessed with the parallel minor work, which is the daughter. That’s why Person B is saying that the one doesn’t illuminate the other, because Beethoven is obsessed with the waltz, but Mom is obsessed with Beethoven.”

Person B: “If Mom was obsessed with making the daughter into what she wanted the daughter to be, maybe we would be able to make that emotional connection between the two more easily.”

Woman: “That’s interesting. No one I know of has made that observation. I’m sure that will be very fascinating to the dramaturge and to the playwright himself.”

“The audience feedback always got back to me,” says Kaufman. “Those were my questions. I put it all in my head. When you begin to hear over and over that something is fantastic, you know that that part is working really well. When you hear over and over that there is confusion around a character, you had better look at that character. It’s not that specific comments made a difference, but I read and studied everything. The whole ending of the play changed between the second and third preview in La Jolla. That was based on feedback from both the audience and the collaborators.” The audience joins in the creation of narrative; the art becomes the starting point for a kind of conversation.