Last of the Breed Comedy on the wild side
April 16th, 2008, 5:12 pm Hobbies And Interests
Last time we checked in with former Idahoan and writer Maria Dahvana Headley, she was briskly walking down a busy New York City street in 2007 on her way to a read from her best-selling memoir, “The Year of Yes” (Hyperion, $17.21). That book, and the wave of success that followed, propelled her into hyper-speed, a tempo that suits her personality. She is a bit more relaxed these days, hanging out at the Fulton Street Center for the Arts for the past month. She has been rehearsing her latest writing project, “The Last of the Breed,” a new comedy commissioned by Boise Contemporary Theater. She is covered in feathers, and so is the theater center’s basement, where she is building a faux stuffed bald eagle from synthetic bits and turkey feathers. “My life is pretty weird. I’ve never put limits on what I would or wouldn’t do,” Headley says. “But this,” (she nods to the half-feathered eagle), “is pretty weird.” Sherman the Eagle is one of two stuffed characters (voiced by actors Michael Denney and Joe Knezevich) in Headley’s wacky comedy about a recluse, Wyatt (Arthur Glen Hughes), who finds his life turned inside out after he is listed under the Endangered Species Act as The Last American Wild Man. The listing is to protect his land from an encroaching resort development. Instead of keeping the world at bay, he ends up bringing it to his doorstep, and releasing the voices in his head.”Breed” is the third original play the theater has produced in as many seasons, a goal artistic director Matthew Cameron Clark set in 2005. It is the third collaboration with Headley. Clark pestered Headley for a year until she agreed to take on the project. “I’m so glad he did. This play wouldn’t exist without this theater,” Headley said. Once she agreed to do it, the play came to her in a moment of inspiration that could only happen to someone who grew up in Idaho, she said. Headley grew up in Marsing, where her father bred sled dogs. She explored writing and discovered theater in Boise as an apprentice for the Idaho Shakespeare Festival. She wrote her first play at Valivue High School in Nampa. As a senior, she won a spot at the National Foundation for Advancement in the Arts, a fellowship for young artists. The next year, she was working at the Sundance Institute’s Playwright’s Lab. Headley, 30, now lives in Seattle with her husband, Robert Schenkkan, an actor, screenwriter and Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright. “I was looking for a story that people here, and in the West, would really connect with,” she said. “Then I remembered something Helen Chenoweth said.” Chenoweth, the late U.S. congresswoman from Idaho, often stirred controversy with her colorful, sometimes shocking, statements. During the campaign that would unseat Democratic Rep. Larry LaRocco in 1994, the conservative Chenoweth said it was not salmon that was endangered, because it can be bought in cans at Albertsons. Rather, it is the “white, Anglo-Saxon male” that is under threat of extinction. Chenoweth died in a 2006 car accident, but that quotation lives on.”It was so out there and crazy that it stuck in my head,” Headley said. “It’s such a ridiculous concept that it was a great jumping-off point.” Once she connected with the idea of eminent domain, the governmental right to expropriate private land for public use, the play took on its own life. “It speaks about America. So much of our history is about the struggle for land. Who really owns it, and who has the right to it?”Then the story began to bubble and grow. “I started thinking of all the kinds of people who would be attracted to that situation and then pushed their characters to extreme,” Headley said. That’s the easiest way to get funny, she said. “It couldn’t happen, but it could almost happen. I think that’s where the comedy lives,” she said. Headley populated her play with about 20 characters, such as an eco-warrior girl, wild-game hunter, lawyers and an extreme collector seeking an aphrodisiac harvested from the rare American Wild Man. Five actors tackle them all and often find themselves playing polar opposites, after an extremely fast change. “I wanted to make it interesting for the actors and the audience,” Headley said. “People like to watch actors reinvent themselves in front of them,” she said. Tracy Sunderland plays a Fish and Game officer who protects Wyatt; she also plays the attorney who tries to take his land. Headley peppered lots of Idaho inside jokes in the characters’ names, such as New York City actor Lada Vishtak’s character Sveltlana Hemingway, or one of Knezevich’s characters named Ross Chenowell (a little nod to Helen). Dana Oland: 377-6442
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