Curtain rises on new play about Jean Donovan, martyred in El Salvador
Lisa Wagner, who re-created Dorothy Day in the play Haunted by God, has re-created yet another amazing and complicated woman, Jean Donovan, in a new play, Points of Arrival, which premiered in early March in Kansas City.
Wagner has portrayed the founder of the Catholic Worker Movement hundreds of times in the one-person play she co-authored. It has been presented in parishes, schools and at conventions all over the United States, in Europe and Canada. Since leaving CTA's Performing Arts Ministry in 1992, Wagner has formed a new group, Still Point Theater Collective: a Ministry of St. Stephen's Lutheran Church in Chicago, and has been laboring over the new, three-person drama with playwright Paul Amandes and veteran Chicago director Beau O'Reilly. CTANews interviewed Wagner recently on how it all came about.
CTANews: Why Jean Donovan?
Lisa Wagner: When Jean was killed in El Salvador in 1980 along with three nuns, she was 27, about the same age I was at the time I first got interested in her life four years ago. I felt a kind of connection with her. Also I had been working at a Catholic Worker house on the south side of Chicago where AIDS patients lived. Like her, I had been exposed to so much loss and grief, almost weekly funerals. I read a biography of her, and our personalities seemed alike in so many ways -- sort of funny and outgoing.
CTANews: So what did you do?
L.W.: I left the Catholic Worker house in 1993 and went on a two-month retreat. Then I called Jean's parents in Sarasota and visited them to gain permission for a play. If they hadn't wanted it, I wouldn't have done it. We got acquainted and they liked the idea.
CTANews: You then began writing?
L.W.: Oh no, I went to El Salvador in 1993 and met with members of her mission team. I saw where she worked and lived. I went to several villages where she worked. The villagers gathered around and warmed us with stories about her. I saw the chapel where she led the gospel celebrations and played the guitar. They had put up on the wall there a crucifix of the risen Christ -- a rare thing in El Salvador -- and a photo of Jean beneath it.
CTANews: When you returned you began the writing?
L.W.: Not yet. In 1994, Paul Amandes went to Cleveland and interviewed 11 friends and relatives of Jean's. Later I returned to Florida and interviewed her parents in depth. And when I was in Ireland, I went to Cork and interviewed a priest who had a great impact on her when she was in college. Then in Los Angeles I met the man she was dating before she went to Central America. For the past year or so, Paul and I have been putting it all together. We've been helped by grants from the Joliet Franciscan Sisters and from Call To Action.
CTANews: What did you discover? What kind of a person was Jean Donovan?
L.W.: She was very sunny and friendly and really generous. But she was also very loud. She could even be a bit obnoxious at times. She liked to party and drink -- the sort of person who lights up the room when she enters. She wasn't pious or anything. I love her because she was so contemporary. I related to that.
CTANews: And she voluntarily went to this hotspot in El Salvador?
L.W.: That's what's so interesting. She had a very good job as an accountant at Arthur Andersen in Cleveland, but she felt something was missing. She sensed a kind of call to serve. So she signed up for a position on the mission team sponsored by the diocese of Cleveland. But she couldn't acknowledge her motives. She told some of her friends she'd be doing accounting for the mission, learn Spanish, and maybe get a really good job later in Buenos Aires. Some of her friends kidded her. They gave her a T-shirt that said, "St. Jean, the Martyr."
CTANews: She was changed by El Salvador?
L.W.: She came to know Oscar Romero. I think that was the biggest influence -- that and the people and their courage and suffering. She wasn't a person to talk a lot about spirituality. But the people saw something deep in her. She had been in the country a year and a half when Romero was assassinated in March 1980. Nine months later she and the three nuns were murdered.
CTANews: What are you trying to communicate in the play?
L.W.: We're really raising questions that everybody has to face. What is commitment? How far should you take it? What does it mean to live a faithful life?
CTANews: She is for you a really contemporary heroine?
L.W.: I think it was said best by her cousin, Colleen Kelly, when we interviewed her. We put her words into the play toward the end: "Jean was a fragile, scared, flawed person. But dammit she was a hero! She faced a very scary situation and stayed when she had a chance to get out because that's where she thought she belonged."
Points of Arrival will be on tour in the spring and will have an extended Chicago run in the summer. Parishes, schools or persons interested in bookings can contact Lisa Wagner at 312-271-5568, or they can write to her at Still Point Theater Collective, P.O. Box 257682, Chicago, IL 60618-7682.
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