Alien Nation
With her chiseled features, dancer’s physique, and halting English, you might mistake her for an eastern European film star. Ten years ago she might have longed to be that star: after finishing high school in her native Krakow, she auditioned for the local drama school but was told that her overbite and poor diction made her ineligible. So she gave up acting and emigrated here. She now tends bar.
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Had she stayed in the theater, it’s unlikely she would be auditioning today for Ping Chong, one of the most acclaimed avant-garde stage directors in the world. He’s in the midst of a five-week residency at the Duncan YMCA Chernin’s Center for the Arts. Chong isn’t looking for actors. He’s recruiting eyewitnesses to the “human diaspora” of the 20th century, people who have crossed borders–of nations, classes, ethnic identities, political affiliations–and found themselves stuck in the role of semisuspect outsider. They’ll tell their stories in Undesirable Elements, a performance piece about people negotiating the precarious divide between their native and adopted cultures. The show opens this Friday and runs for the next six weeks. Today Ewa doesn’t have to show a head shot or perform a monologue, she just has to tell her life story.
Chong makes sure his assistant jots down this detail and continues on in a similar vein, trying to map the tiniest contours of history onto Ewa and her family. The collapse of the Soviet system and the rise of Solidarity is embodied in the image of an adolescent Ewa waiting in line for three hours to buy sugar.
Ewa’s tale of her first trip to Jewel captures the culture shock of the new immigrant. “Here was food within arm’s reach,” she recalls. “It was like being in Disneyland. I stayed in there for hours.”
At the end of her three-hour interview, Ewa gets the good news that she’ll be in the show, overbite and all. “It has always been my dream to be able to sit here and tell you my feelings,” she says. “It’s important to me to be in this show because for years no one cared what happened to us.”
