preview / By Bob Doran

Humboldt Green Invades Blue Lake

Dell’Arte’s Mary Jane: the Musical

(June 2, 2011)  The credo of the internationally renowned theatre company and school we know simply as Dell’Arte is akin to that most famous portion of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address — “of the people, by the people, for the people.” For Dell’Arte’s artisans, it’s something they call “Theatre of Place” — plays “about where you live, for and with the people where you live … work that goes deep into the landscape of place and people.”

For its annual Mad River Festival, starting June 23 and running well into July, Blue Lake’s Dell’Arte Company is hard at work on a musical theatre piece that takes a look at the green side of Humboldt’s current landscape. As we go to press, Mary Jane: The Musical is still a work in progress, and the way Michael Fields and Joan Schirle, Dell’Arte’s co-artistic directors see it, the piece will still be a work in progress when they debut it later this month. The plan is to continue their exploration of the place marijuana has come to hold in our community. This first run is simply a starting point.

Joan Schirle as Mary Jane in Mary Jane: the musical PHOTO BY TERRENCE MCNALLY

GALLERY >

It began with a character called Mary Jane (to be played by Schirle), a first-generation dope grower who came to Humboldt in the early back-to-the-land days. All they needed was a play and a playwright; Schirle and Fields were too busy to do it. Plus, they  recognized their understanding of the “phenomenon” of pot in Humboldt was not deep enough.

“The amount of research we needed to do, and still need to do, into how the marijuana culture pervades Humboldt life and, beyond that, Californian life, and beyond that national life, is something we didn’t have time to get into adequately,” Schirle said. “We just didn’t know enough to make a coherent play.”

Fields, who is writing the book for the musical, said he has wanted to do something on pot in Humboldt for years. Not long ago, he read a story in the Journal about a faculty group at Humboldt State working to create a national center for interdisciplinary research on marijuana (see “Higher Education,” April 28). “I was talking to this guy Josh Meisel,” said Fields, referencing the HSU associate professor of sociology who leads the study group. “They’re doing research at Humboldt State, trying to find metrics to measure the economics and looking at it from all different angles: psychology, criminology and so on. I was telling him, ‘I don’t know that we have a coherent point of view on it’ — and people expect us to have one.”

As Schirle noted, this is a “prominent and volatile issue,” and while Dell’Arte is certainly known for work with a strong point of view (the Scar-Tissue mysteries, The Road Not Taken and Intrigue at Ah-Pah, for example) they weren’t quite ready to take a stance on marijuana.

“We didn’t want to say we are for legal growing, or illegal growing, or for pot period,” she said. “Obviously we’re counterculture, but if we say we’re for legality, does that make us counter-counterculture?”

So they talked to Lauren Wilson, who wrote the main feature for last year’s Mad River Festival, the sharply funny, very local Blue Lake: The Opera. But she didn’t have time to write a play.

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