Fifty
Years in the Making
The
Independent Eye Comes to Norfolk
 |
| The Independent Eye |
A
fascinating evening is scheduled at The Venue on 35th in Norfolk on September
30. Conrad Bishop and Elizabeth Fuller, a writing and acting duo from
Sebastopol, CA, will take to the stage with readings and sketches that highlight
their half-century partnership and shared career as The Independent Eye--traveling theater
troubadours.
Their
appearance is part of an East Coast tour, “Riding the Changes,” a road trip to
cities from Boston to Norfolk to promote their new book, Co-Creation:
Fifty Years in the Making.
Written
as a dialogue, Co-Creation is a
conversation between Bishop and Fuller as they remember who they are and where
they’ve been.
They’ve
got stories. As a married couple with two children, now grown, they have lived
a nomad’s life performing original plays across the United States into Canada and as far abroad as Israel. Theirs has been the prototype—make that
“the archetype”—of the hard-scrabble life of independent theater artists in
millennial America.
Now
in their early 70s, aged but not old, they are still creating and staging their
off-beat brand of bitter-sweet, absurd, comi-tragic, surreal yet touchingly
real character portraits—so numerous by now it’s as if they’ve made a career as
ageless twin souls portraying their own reincarnations with each other.
At
the Venue, they’ll be talking about their experiences, reading back and forth
from their book, and exhibiting their unique style with performances of a pair
of their sketches, one from their early days, the other more recent. They will
also be signing books and offering a variety of CDs and DVDs of their work for
sale.
The
evening will be a special one for me. The Independent Eye appeared at a
critical point in my life and inspired me to jump into theater, something I
knew I could do but, for one reason or another, hadn’t tried since early
college. That was thirty-five years ago. It’s been twenty years since we last
saw each other. As the go-between bringing them to The Venue, I am excited about
this reunion. Bishop
and Fuller met as students at Northwestern University in Evanston, IL, and married in 1960. She quit school to
work while he went on to get a PhD in theater from Stanford University and begin professional life as a college
theater professor. When that proved too confining, he and Fuller left academia
for a full-time commitment to independent production at Theater X in Milwaukee, a collective company they’d helped found
in 1969. In 1974 they left Theater X to form The Independent Eye.
My
path crossed theirs in 1977, when they moved to my hometown, Lancaster, PA. At that time I was a discontented
37-year-old editor and writer at a weekly alternative newspaper, the Lancaster Independent Press. One night
at a meeting of our local men’s consciousness-raising group, I let loose my
laments about creative dissatisfaction and career stagnation which surprised
and even irritated some of my friends and left me feeling almost guilty for
bringing it up—not really what I thought men’s CR was supposed to be about, but
that’s another subject.
That
night a man was there for the first time who was new in town. He said his name
was Conrad Bishop, he was an actor and writer, and, with his wife, founder of a
small acting company called The Independent Eye, which had recently moved to
town to stay for awhile.
Bishop
had traded the secure future of a college professor, albeit of drama, for the
vagaries of a life creating avant-garde productions wherever an audience, small
or large, could be assembled. He and Elizabeth (Linda Bishop then) and a former
art student, Camilla Schade, who joined them in Baltimore shortly before they
came to Lancaster, performed their original material at colleges, churches,
schools, prisons, low-budget theaters in seedy neighborhoods, and even in private living rooms.
Something
about this guy and his story caught my imagination. Images of Renaissance troupes
performing on hay wagons in town squares or in taverns or converted barns in France and Italy and Bohemia floated up behind my eyes. It seemed
alluring and exotic to me. A door opened. But I wouldn’t go through it for
another two years.
I
didn’t get to know Conrad then because he never returned to the group. I never
knew why. But of course, like many in town, I went with great curiosity to the
first local Independent Eye productions, one of which was Shakespeare’s Macbeth, an intense, fast-paced
spectacle done entirely with puppets.
. Every bit of Shakespeare’s intended pity
and terror came alive for me on the stage, yet no actor’s face ever
appeared—only their bodies clad in ninja-style pajamas as they manipulated the
life-sized puppets—a full cast of characters including separate puppets for
each stage in Macbeth’s increasingly tortured descent into madness.
I’d
never seen anything like it. I thought to myself, I’d love to be part of
something like that.
Two
years later, I auditioned for an opening as a fourth actor with The Independent
Eye, but I was passed over. Briefly crushed, I revived. I began writing plays
for an amateur theater company several of us had formed, The Susquehannock
Players. Ten years and many plays later I was finally qualified to work for The
Eye as an actor, appearing in several productions before our paths diverged. In
1989 I joined another group of actors to form Theater of the Seventh Sister
(still producing in Lancaster) and Bishop and Fuller went back on the road, moving to Philadelphia in the early 1990s to open Old City Stage
Works, their creative base for the next eight years.
In
1994 I moved to Norfolk, and in 1999 The Eye moved to Sebastopol, a small town
50 miles north of San Francisco, where they continue to develop new work,
recycle old ones, write articles and books, compose and record music, produce
radio shows and videos of their plays, and make new puppets. Most impressive of
all, they maintain a relationship, which is what the evening with “Riding the
Changes” and their book Co-Creation
are really about.
Looking
back now over those years in Lancaster from the mid-’70s to the early ‘90s, I’m
reminded of how artistically vibrant they were. Lancaster is an old, small, conservative city—America’s first inland town—resting on the rigid
bones of Englishmen and Anabaptists. We had community theater with its standard
plays and college theater for the high brows, but there was not much cross-over
or independent experimenting until the Eye came to town and raised the level of
professionalism, attracting other professionals to the area who opened theaters
and hired people like me who were learning the craft and becoming professionals
ourselves.
During
the years The Independent Eye was there, Lancaster became a theater town. Several of us made
all or most of our living at it. There were classes in all the performing arts,
workshops and new plays going up throughout the year, and more and more people
began to act and sing and dance and write and make theater. It was a fertile
time in fertile soil, when Lancaster County raised artists as well as corn and
tomatoes.
That
scene is gone, of course. Many from that era don’t do theater any more. Some
have died. Some have moved on. And the opportunities have shrunk.
But
from what I hear from old-timers in Norfolk, it’s no different here. Probably it’s the
same everywhere. We are, it’s been said, a nation in decline, and in such times
artistic energy becomes disabled or channeled into propaganda or invective.
And
I doubt The Independent Eye would take credit for what one of my friends called
“the Lancaster Renaissance.” But it really was like a Renaissance then, a fire
lit that spread and burned bright for awhile before it became controlled and
tempered by overseers. That’s why it gives me great pleasure to see The
Eye—Bishop and Fuller—still at it, still crazy after all these years, still on
the road amazing people with their off-center bicycle ride on tightrope after
tightrope without falling.
For
a slice of life in the theater as it really is, come out to The Venue on 35th, 631 W. 35th St., Norfolk, on Sunday evening, Sept. 30, at 7:30. Admission is a $2 donation. Refreshments
are available. Seating, however, is limited. For reservations, call
757-469-0337. For more information on The Independent Eye, visit their
well-stocked website.
"Our packing list is done. Our to-do
worklist is growing shorter by degrees. Our faithful housesitter is preparing
to sit. And I'm having performance-disaster dreams. All of which means that
it's only two weeks before we head eastward.
