I encountered Ken Roht’s theater work when I was invited by my friend Sissy Boyd to attend the 99 Cent Show in which she was performing. Sissy had been a Martha Graham dancer; she had not danced publicly in many years. She was quite insistent that Ken Roht’s originality and imaginative vision were worthy of her return to the stage.

 She was right.  I saw clowns and goddesses, hoochy mamas and twinkle-toed divas celebrating the bounties of the famous discount store, a staged festival-spectacle about American wealth and American poverty, The show made me feel joy and wonder.  I found myself helplessly exclaiming that I could not imagine how it had been done.  In fact, I asked Ken if I might hang out at the rehearsals for his next show.  I don’t think Ken knew quite what to say. But I knew that, having spent sixteen years reading novels and poems to prepare for interviews on my KCRW program, Bookworm, it was time to experience some living art.

 The show was He Pounces, a dark and visionary look at the consequences of male predatory energy.  I was convinced then, as I am today, that Ken Roht is one of the four or five most extravagantly gifted contributors to the contemporary theater scene, easily the most important working in Los Angeles. I found myself interpreting the piece to the actors and dancers, asking Ken if my intuitions were correct. I was honored when he asked me to function as the dramaturg on his new shows.

 Let me say immediately that whatever it is that a dramaturg does for other more traditional directors, it is not what a dramaturg does for Ken Roht.  Roht’s scripts emerge at a dazzling rate from a procedure that seems to involve dream, meditation and trance.  I think his process is to transcribe whole visions that he sees behind his eyes.  The scripts are blueprints for an experience that I only begin to understand after rehearsals have begun.

 And what scripts! Really they are poem-plays written mostly (but not entirely) in English.  They are collages of dialogue and stage picture, song and incantation. Sometimes the language will reach an amazing intensity before it collapses into a sort of dream-gibberish which is decoded (if at all) gradually. 

 What impresses me most about this stage of Ken’s work is his extraordinary confidence in the integrity of a script that may bewilder both his cast and his dramaturg.  I have learned to trust that sense will emerge at what can only be called an extra-literal level.  Like dreams, his works mean more than they know how to say in language. Fortunately his vocabulary is not limited to words.  A lavish rhetoric of gesture and dance, pantomime and tableau cause the language to explode into a cascade of felt significance that comes rushing at and over the audience to produce an effect that I would describe as meaning-as-elation.  Even the props in a Ken Roht play are expressive. As his actors begin to accept that the text is to be followed into its strange depths, a kind of play state evolves and the illusion of meaning takes shape.

 As a literary person, I carry a legacy of trust in the written word. As a result I have had to learn that avante garde theater often begins at the point where written language loses its moorings. The actor’s body is a whole thesaurus of non-verbal communication, his vocal range adds insistence and nuance to his movements.  The director choreographer expresses his vision by arranging physical presences in space:  his work brings revelation to spatial relationships.

 Which brings me, at last, to Echo’s Hammer. When Ken and I first visited theBoston Court Theater, we were immediately struck by the catwalks that traverse the upper reaches of the auditorium.  I think he immediately knew that the piece would need to move vertically as well as horizontally, that Echo’s Hammer would be organized onlevels. 

 For a theater artist like Roht, space is integral to meaning. When he saw the old Carnegie Library that houses The Center for the Arts in Eagle Rock, he immediately thought of a haunted house.  A haunted house requires ghosts.  An abandoned library is full of the ghosts of books. Before you knew it, a seven stage theater piece called Growing with Ghosts was busy being born.

 The levels of the set for Echo’s Hammer are seen as parallel lines, the levels organized into parallel planes of meaning. Pon and Deedo are an artist couple working on their masterpiece in their cold, mice-infested workshop on the stage’s ground level. Frank and Cheryl are a married couple working on their marriage in a futuristic world of clones and test-tube people – they live in plexiglass cages hung in midair above the workshop. Amazement is a goddess, Kali-like, on her catwalk, over the processes of creation and destruction.

 If Frank and Cheryl are, as the script tells us, “the voices of inane collective consciousness,” Pon and Deedo are the voices of a liberated artistic consciousness struggling to redefine its terms.  Pon and Deedo squabble about their work, their commitment to it and to each other and their doubled masculine/feminine roles.  In fact it is the hammer that seems to unify and focus their battles since it is used now to build the work of art, then as a weapon of attack, and still again as a sex toy.  It is in this arena of love, death and work that the play finds its ultimate resonance.

 If Frank and Cheryl live in science fiction future victimized by identity loss, sexual frustration and resentment toward the new bio-engineered races, Deedo and Pon live in the world of art with a capital A, predicated on fame, dominated by ego, dependent on the success of the work. Between these two worlds dances the anomalous character called Uncle, he is a representative from a simpler past.  He’s a cobbler, his art is marking shoes -- useful art.  He’s an artisan and he is satisfied with his work.  He speaks a dream version of Italian, he speaks in proverbs, he seems to emerge from a folk song or a fairy tale.   He takes pleasure in a simple flirtation with the servant Nancy, a flirtation that revolves around that good old emblem of purity:  a glass of cold milk.

 Freud tells us that in the balance of living, working and loving that the human being finds fulfillment. You might want to reword this as health, creativity and sex, or breath, imagination and carnality. Whatever your choice of words, it is easy to see that postmodern culture has forced an imbalance in this triangle of satisfactions. The characters on stage in Echo’s Hammer are in the grip of modern unhappiness, the same unhappiness that grips us all.

 If the function of art is to reformulate the old questions, the function of this particular dramaturg is to help the artist explore that reformulation more deeply. I hope the play offers a rich bounty of interesting and insoluble questions.