Playwright Joe Pintauro:

Keeping Faith, Moving On

 

 

On a rainy morning “good for the garden,” as he remarked, play­wright Joe Pintauro welcomed me into the Sag Harbor house that has been his home for the past twenty-six years. It’s just a few minutes from Main Street, and Ed Doctorow is a neighbor. Here he had welcomed Nel­son Algren seventeen Junes earlier. In the double living room, a baby grand displayed the Schirmer’s yellow-covered Chopin Noctures. A bay window on the left looks out onto a grape arbor. Framed prints of sailing vessels grace interior walls. Tailored slipcovers protect the upholstery. John Steinbeck’s name on a high shelf of the bookcase reminded me that the Nobel laureate spent his last years on Long Island’s East End; Pin­tauro replied that widowed Elaine Steinbeck, when she drove by, would stop to chat. I contemplated an abstract, dense, and highly colored painting and, on the table below it, between a pair of handsome chairs with well-polished curves, a fantastic ceramic fish, and I listened to the rain. The date was 2 June 1997. Then Joe Pintauro brought good English apricot tea and settled opposite me, casual in blue sweatshirt over green tee-shirt and a pair of black trousers.

Born in 1930, full head of hair going white, he looks vigorous and outdoorsy, a decade younger than his years. He has integrated earlier careers as poet, priest, novelist, adman, and teacher into a commitment to theater and is author of thirty-some one-act and a dozen full-length plays. I asked were the yellow and purple irises between us from his own garden. No, his would bloom later, these came from the North Fork. He’d been there to tape voices to study for a commissioned play, Heaven and Earth. Tentatively I posed some questions—and Joe Pintauro took the lead to talk about his early years.

 

To an older half-sister, he owes his initiation into the perform­ing arts. Twice a week, when he was only four and she nineteen, she took him by train from Ozone Park in Queens to Brooklyn. She parked him there at the Valetta Ellet School of Tap and Ballet, paid for his lessons, and went off “to make out with a Sicilian.” For six months they kept this baby-sitting arrangement secret from his parents; but when he was caught dancing at home, he confessed. His father, a cabinetmaker who together with a brother had built the house the family lived in (and other houses in the neighborhood), made a platform for the child to dance on, to pro­tect the floors. Later, his mother accompanied him to lessons, with gymnastics added. At age six he went on stage with his dancing class at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. As the Mad Hatter, he danced and sang:

 

Mad as a hatter

Crazy as a lark

Happy as a bedbug

Out after dark . . .

 

He had done several shows at BAM by the time he was twelve. On the block, though, playing stickball in the street, he’d be sum­moned for dancing school—his mother would call “Joseph! Jo­seph!”—and of course the other boys heard too, and knew. Then he wouldn’t go any more. He wanted “to hang out with the Italian kids, play basketball, get red satin jackets and be one of the Lib­erty Avenue Dukes.” Johnny Scarpetta taught him to smoke. Joe said “dat” and “dem” to sound like the others. Unlike the others, he was stage-struck.

Born and raised in Ozone Park, he lived all through his grade-school and high-school years in the same house. He is named for his mother’s mother Giuseppina Giuliano, deceased before he was born, who immigrated from Nola. His mother’s father, Philip Iovino, was a born New Yorker, whose family’s arrival preceded the “Italian invasion” by “a lot of years.” His father’s mother Con­cetta Mancuso and his father’s father Antonio Pintauro were from Sarno, near Pompeii. His father’s brother Nunzio Pintauro taught music at Rutgers, and all Nunzio’s children played the cello. Nun­zio and Aunt Rose used to visit, “so much graciousness and love and formality.” There was much visiting, since his mother was one of thirteen siblings, and his grandparents had fifty-six grand­children—of whom he was the last-born. (“All those cousins!” I blurted. Extended family suggests a large cast of characters and many stories.) His mother’s elder brother, one of two bachelor un­cles, was Episcopalian, and he grew up sensing a permissibility of personal choice. Aunts abounded, mostly older than his mother. Here Pintauro recalled a scene in Fellini’s 8 1/2 in which Marcello Mastroianni is bathed and wrapped in white sheets, cared for as he had himself been cared for by all those women. The cat, Fannie, is named after his mother’s last surviving sibling, who died five years ago.

Pintauro describes a supportive home life: “We knew that our parents were good. We knew there was an unconditional com­mitment to our welfare. They were allowing us this arena of dis­content that we called our adolescence. But we didn’t want that to corrupt on us.” His mother helped him (and other children too) with school work, and she wrote letters for recent immigrants. For a while she presided at the PTA. She tutored him to the accompa­nying whirr of his father’s electric saw in the basement—his father loved woodworking. She coached him when, leader of a slave up­rising, from Vesuvius young Joe practiced defying Rome as “Spartacus to the Gladiators.” (He declaimed several lines of the speech to me.) His elder brother went to Stuyvesant High. He em­phasized that his other half-sister (he had a half-sister from each parent’s prior marriage), and not at all his mother, was his model for the agoraphobic hysteric in Snow Orchid. With surprise he con­cedes that the motif of mental illness recurs in his plays, especially the figure of the manic depressive; but the source is not in his own richly satisfying family life. His fiction, too, recycles life-experi­ences—but transmuted; thus the defunct father of priest-protago­nist Tom Sheehan in State of Grace is a cabinetmaker like Pin­tauro’s father—but a drunkard, who lived with wife and son “as if he were a boarder that paid rent.” Though close observation makes it ring true, the fiction is not autobiography.

Supportive, too, was the old neighborhood. St. Mary’s Gate of Heaven down the block replicated a Belgian cathedral, with rec­tory, convent, chapels, academy, and school on the grounds. French was spoken. People were kind. He enjoyed high school. Earlier, his grades had been bad (“My aptitude test would go through the roof,” but achievement did not match) and yet from early on he was constantly putting on shows. At John Adams High, “a public school like a private school,” he flourished. He said, “I hung out with a bunch of kids that more or less controlled the culture of the school. We put on the shows, we ran the dances. I loved English. They just put me in Journalism. Even though I was a sophomore, I was in with all these seniors. I got three years of Journalism. I had a great relationship with Mrs. Unser. I could nail headlines spaced just right, get the ‘five w’s’ into the lead. But algebra—” he paused. “My brother was brilliant. They said ‘Verbally you’re a great mathematician.’ I just couldn’t do the numbers.” He reveled in assigned readings and studied Italian: “I loved every minute of it.”

Such enthusiasm for school! Pintauro responded, “The excite­ment of learning, which is such a delicate experience, is so easily destroyed. The bureaucracy of teaching is appalling.” He referred also to diminishing status of teachers, who no longer belong to a community’s aristocracy, no longer represent an ardently desired, eagerly pursued culture that they know how to impart. When I asked about his own teaching, he mentioned a brief stint at Sarah Lawrence. Possible that he knew Grace Paley there? Yes, he did. He taught fiction-writing also at New York University’s Tisch School of Dramatic Arts, playwriting at Southampton College of Long Island University, and film-making and film criticism at Marymount; but he does not plan any further teaching.

By the time he went to college, his mother was dying of breast cancer. His sense of safety and of the world was profoundly al­tered, “fortunately and unfortunately.” He couldn’t accept sepa­ration from his mother. “I wanted to impress her and I wanted to shock her; but I didn’t want her to not be there.” Following his brother’s lead, he had applied for the liberal arts curriculum of Manhattan College. Told he could be accepted in the Business School, he took a degree in advertising, which paid off when he wrote copy at Young and Rubicam. He later completed a B.A. in philosophy, graduate courses in American literature at Fordham University, and courses in poetry at Columbia’s School of General Studies with Dorothy Van Ghent and Leonie Adams.

Study for the priesthood required a special dispensation. He had not been allowed to attend Catholic school or assist as altar boy because he was considered an “esposito”—born out of wed­lock, for his parents hadn’t married in the Church. (Though his mother had been widowed, his father was divorced.) The semi­nary of Our Lady of Angels in upstate New York where he com­pleted a four-year course in theology was intellectually liberal, he still thinks so, though seminarians wore cassocks and studied texts in Latin. There he began writing plays. Ordained, he was as­signed to a Brooklyn parish as a diocesan, what he calls “the in­fantry of the priesthood.” For eight years he served as a priest, stationed in New York parishes during the countercultural Sixties. “Trying to be celibate holy gentle and respectful . . . meant terrible stress. The need was endless, but: you had given your life already, so what was left? I think I burned myself out rather rapidly. Relief should come from the good example of other priests, and from a sense of solidarity,” he says. Instead, he found cruelty and insen­sitivity of superiors, and prejudice among the clergy. (In an earlier interview he had told Dan Rattiner, “I think life would have been very different for me had I become a Jesuit. I wasn’t really cut out to be a doughboy priest” [Rattiner 43, 96].) He left the Church in 1967 with full permission; and yet in a sense he never left, but aligned himself with such renegades as Father Dan Berrigan, with whom he traveled and performed underground masses, and Sister Corita, with whom he spent several weeks in California. Billboard artist and pop lyricist, color-illustrator of Pintauro’s volume of poems To Believe in God (the first part of The Trilogy of Belief), she gave him a giant orange military parachute that had formerly decorated the home of a friend of hers; he only recently put it into a yard sale so that someone else could have a turn at it. Erosion of priestly zeal along with ongoing devotion figures in his second novel, State of Grace, in which a priest must choose between the two loves of his life, the Church and a woman.

The priest in the novel studies in Rome, but Pintauro himself did not. As priest in an Italian parish, however, he had felt “in the bosom of Italy,” and he cherishes happy memories of that time. “I liked the old from-Italy Italians who could hardly speak English, and whose attitude to me seemed to be, He’s American but he likes us, he’s not ashamed of us. And I got more from them than I gave them,” he adds.

But we are conversing in Sag Harbor, a village about seventy-five miles from Manhattan. An old whaling port, Sag Harbor is now sort of in the Hamptons for, though not on a direct line from the Shinnecock Canal to easternmost Montauk Point, it too has its marina, antique shops, fine restaurants, and tucked-away exqui­site rustic houses; it, too, attracts celebrities from high finance, the fashion industries, and entertainment. How did he come to settle in Sag Harbor? This query evoked recollections of childhood summers in Northport, similar to old Sag Harbor: “The house there was U-shaped and set behind a wall, with a front courtyard. Uncle Philip had horses; he was a teamster and had horse-drawn wagons. There was a horse barn. It was a place hard to give up when they closed down the house.” He speaks fondly of another family in East Northport: “The Halls invited us, on Sandy Hollow Road. The grandmother wore long, black clothes.” One Fourth of July, Mr. Hall put a Roman candle into the hand of each child and lit them in turn. Four-year-old Joe, held by his mother, was al­lowed to shoot his upward. “That’s dangerous,” remarked the mature Joe, “nowadays the Roman candle would be stuck into the ground,” and he mused about learning to negotiate dangers safely under the watchful eyes of loving adults. “Those farms disap­peared,” he said, but as though to bring them back he spoke about a time when he waded into a fluffy yellow sea of baby chicks, per­haps a thousand of them. Before he was stopped he had tried to teach several chicks to fly. . . . Immune to poison ivy, he was set to pulling it out. Even as a child he knew he could make himself use­ful.

“Fishing automatically happened,” and he still enjoys fishing. A friend from Brittany knew where mussels were to be found, and how to get flounder. “A nephew who became friendly with Al Daniels learned striped-bass fishing and is still a great rod-and-reel fisherman, with lures only, not eel. At the end of the sum­mer,” and he might have been teaching, “you go out to Montauk with rod and reel, and just follow the birds. In earlier times, whenever there was a northwest wind, scallops washed up onto the beach. We could go with shopping bags and pick them up.” Appreciative of the sea’s bounty, he laments destruction of fishing as livelihood and as family pattern in his play Men’s Lives.

In 1959 he and his brother bought a house in Sag Harbor. They liked to water-ski. Says Joe: “My father came out, and kicked the house, and said ‘It’s a good house. Buy it.’ My brother will never give up that house, the house that our father kicked.”

Sag Harbor also boasts the Bay State Theatre, which makes for convenient showcasing. This not-for-profit, 300-seat, professional theater on Long Wharf was founded in 1991 by Sybil Christopher (Richard Burton’s ex-wife), Stephen Hamilton, and Emma Walton (Julie Andrews’ daughter). Operating from March through De­cember, it presents new, modern, and classic works. In its first five seasons, most of its premiered productions have moved or are slated to move Off-Broadway, regionally, and abroad. “Big names” have been attracted: stars like Alan Alda, Julie Andrews, Betty Comden and Adolph Green, Ann Jackson, Eli Wallach; noted directors; and, along with Pintauro, such playwrights as Jon Robin Baitz, Larry Kramer, Arthur Laurents, Terrence McNally, Murray Schisgal, Paula Vogel, Wendy Wasserstein, and Lanford Wilson. Along with cooperation comes an element of competition and what Joe Pintauro refers to as “the problem of protecting in­tellectual properties.”

Much as playwrights may wish each other well, inevitably there are losers and winners and, among the latter, smaller and bigger winners. Thus Raft of the Medusa, Pintauro’s AIDS play, first produced at New York’s Minetta Lane Theatre in December 1991 after an earlier showcasing the year before, went to Boston in 1992, the West Coast in 1993, Washington and Denver in 1994, and gathered many favorable reviews.[1] Yet Terrence McNally’s Love! Valour! Compassion!, about eight homosexual males (two of them living with AIDS) who come together at a Victorian country house for a summer of soul-searching, won a Tony as best play in 1994 and has already been screened in a film version with the same di­rector and much of the original cast. “The film joins a refreshing crop of recent releases . . . that portray gay relations with direct­ness and multidimensionality,” said reviewer Alicia Potter.[2] Raft of the Medusa is less sentimental, more prickly, informative, and thought-provoking; perhaps it, too, will be filmed. Film is where the money is. Madonna, Pintauro mentioned, has taken an interest in his works.

How significant to him is a hyphenated Italian-American iden­tity? “I discovered being Italian about myself,” he replied, “and it was like reading a magazine from the back end. It was a big shock that the world had ideas about me.” Evidently “Italian Ameri­cans” are neither entity nor constituency to him; he discovers af­finities but cannot expect them. During the Eighties, “before Vin­cent Gardenia died,” he met a group of Italian-American playwrights, but the occasion left no memorable moments and was not consequential. As for identity, he prefers self-representa­tion to ascription. For many years he has acknowledged French influences, including Sartre and Beauvoir, and in June 1997 he was reading Damned to Fame, a biography of Samuel Beckett. The copy of Amistad I had noticed on a side table was inscribed by author David Pesci to Pintauro’s companion of twenty years Greg Therri­ault, a successful ceramist turned psychotherapist.

Pintauro made a distinction, “I wrote Cacciatore as an Italian American, but not Snow Orchid.” As a boy he had frequented his friend Tony Fiorello’s house. That passionate large family owned a restaurant, and he loved listening to their blue-collar way of talking. He felt the turmoil of speaking in a language not one’s own, with dissonance between local dialects (for instance Nea­politan and Sicilian). He wanted Snow Orchid to make a vocal contribution to the mainstream; responsibility to conserve weighed heavily. The play grew in authenticity through many re­writings, with input from trusted readers. “I didn’t know what Scorsese would go on to do,” he adds, referring to Mean Streets and other films, and to the agony, anger, and vulgarity of Italian Americans in a hostile environment. Yet Pintauro admits a pro­pensity of people to become as they have been portrayed and he can imagine a reproach, “You portrayed us that way.” Presented at the Eugene O’Neill Conference in 1980, Snow Orchid won Pin­tauro a residency and was staged in New York in 1981 with Olympia Dukakis, Peter Boyle, and Robert Lapone; it has also been done in London. It seems the “immigrant play” is not yet obsolete; Vittorio Rossi’s The Last Adam, for instance, about Italian immigrants in Canada, had a 1997 run at New York’s Theater 22 and Snow Orchid can still be staged to good effect.

Other literary figures have gone back to ancestral towns in Italy to connect with roots or celebrate success, perhaps affording like John Ciardi to offer a plaque, accepting to be honored while a band plays and television cameras roll. Has Joe Pintauro ever been back? No, he told me, Nunzio and Rose (his uncle and aunt) went back, and she returned to the United States depressed. What the Italian heritage means to him came clear not from studying schoolbook Italian, not from visiting the ancestral towns of Sarno and Nola, but from a sort of epiphany when he was in Venice during October 1996. He spoke with intensity of how, at Palazzo Grassi, he saw the exhibition “I Greci nel Occidente,” “The Greeks in the West”: tombstones, paintings, artifacts, statuary. Suddenly, in stone, survivor from antiquity, epiphanic, there he stood: the Actor! Surviving centuries, the figure posed with head tilted, the back of one hand against the hip, posed and costumed for a fe­male role, yet the clinging stone drapery acknowledged male genitals. The Actor, visible and tangible link to theater of two millennia earlier, when women did not act on stage, remains a figure sophisticated and witty, “as sophisticated and communal as art of the Renaissance,” said Pintauro, elated. As though the sculpture conflated space and time, he marveled, “My parents who met in Brooklyn came from this area settled by the Greeks.” That discovery linked him with the poetic and philosophic trage­dies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, the comedies of Aristophanes—and with the religious origins and social function of drama.

He brought out a color photograph of the map from the exhibi­tion, on which red dots designate Sarno and Nola. It is Magna Graecia, fanning out from the Bay of Naples. Like Syracuse in Sic­ily, Naples began as a Greek colony, and Greek civilization ex­tended over an area far larger than the peninsula of present-day Greece. The Sibyl of ancient Cumae, now Cuma, rivaled in fame the Delphic Oracle. Just beyond Herculaneum, or what is left un­buried by volcanic eruption, a center of macaroni manufacture and coral- and shell-carving is still called Torre del Greco, Tower of the Greek. Holding the photograph of the map, momentarily distracted by imagining the contrast between verdant Italy and parched Hellenic mountainsides, I said “The Greeks must have been excited by so much green.” He misheard me. “Not greed,” he protested. I explained what I’d meant about “green,” but the other word echoed. “They brought so much,” he said, “that’s why I pre­fer the term ‘settlements’ to ‘colonies.’” Whichever the term, origi­nal ties loosened as the Greeks assimilated with their new neigh­bors. For Pintauro, now, Italian identity implies greater closeness to the Greeks.

Happily again he continued, “I’ve been going to Italy a lot . . . driving around Tuscany. All these places are so small. Coming from New York City [I see that] they’re tiny.” Books on the coffee table between us reflected his enchantment with Italy: the Scala edition of Masaccio, in English; Giotto/Durer; Chiara Libero’s Tus­cany. In Venice, where Carla Poli still runs her husband’s comme­dia dell’arte school and company, one of Pintauro’s short plays was translated into Italian. He stays in touch with Gabriella Can­field in Florence, who married into the family of Cass Canfield of Harper & Row, publishers of Pintauro’s eleven volumes of poetry.

How had he found his literary direction? A play written in 1965 was chosen by an Edward Albee workshop in Manhattan’s Circle in the Square as one of ten for ten young directors. His director turned out to be Dustin Hoffman; one actor in it was Robert Du­vall. At about the same time, his poetry was finding readers. The collections were published within five or six years after the first, To Believe in God, became a bestseller. He does not now overvalue his poems of the Sixties, but has referred to them as a step above Rod McKuen. He cherishes critical praise of his novels, and it is well earned. But his writing moved more and more toward per­formance.

Among the plays, Cacciatore got him his first New York Times review. Set on Shelter Island, it presents a husband and wife at odds about their priorities. He has kept her in frantic poverty while hoarding to buy the house where they could “get away from it all,” pretending it is his gift to her, while she worries about their son’s future and her severed relationships. She cooks chicken cacciatore because “it means home, wherever I smell that smell,” but with the stripping away of pretenses maintained through thirty years of marriage, home becomes a new kind of prison. This play is scheduled for a new production: “Eli Wallach and Anne will do . . . both Cacciatore and Seymour, rewritten, at a new thea­ter.” An Italian-American chauffeur with a Jewish actress-girl­friend generate the action of Seymour in the Very Heart of Winter.

The collected one-acters, first published simply as Plays by Joe Pintauro and then, revised, as Metropolitan Operas, is dedicated to Nelson Algren. Pintauro has told how Algren, whom he’d met in 1974, was later evicted from Southampton lodgings. In awe of his writing, Pintauro took him in, recommended inexpensive storage, and had a real-estate friend scout out a domicile. He wrote of Al­gren: “His characters repelled and fascinated me. Algren had wrung poetry out of human degradation and made it glow with his strange benediction. Though Algren, the son of a Swedish fa­ther and a Jewish mother, was in no sense religious, I had always thought of him as a missionary of the underclass, . . . .” Algren praised the novel. They became friends; but Algren’s social be­havior too made difficulties, because he felt continually provoked: “The Hamptons backed him, together with the whores and out­casts of his fiction, into an ideological corner.” He would hold forth on Saturday mornings at Canio Pavone’s newly opened book store. Yet he was also a gifted listener, and from him Pin­tauro learned how to transform working people into “more vocal, vivid versions of themselves.” When Algren died of a heart attack, Pintauro coordinated funeral arrangements.[3]

     Cold Hands, the novel Algren praised, was praised also by re­viewers. As a “gay novel” it has nothing to do with bars, baths, cruising, for the homosexuality is so central, so deep, that its roots are invisible. The attraction between cousins is like a blood bond out of D. H. Lawrence. The cousins who “meet as waifs in a world largely dominated by indifferent or incapable parents . . . are sepa­rated as children and then reunited as young adults.” Terribly in love, they overcome many obstacles but succumb to social hostil­ity. Novelist Evan Hunter called the book “deceptively simple, hauntingly beautiful,”[4] noting that the problem posed at the start is met squarely and resolved splendidly. Another novelist, Alan Cheuse, in the Los Angeles Times said Cold Hands resorted neither to euphemism nor exploitation: “Pintauro, by contemplative and controlled narrative, restrains the melodramatic and mutes the shrillness.”[5] Others agreed that quick delineation of character, dialogue that rings true, evocative imagery, and dreamlike texture convey the dilemmas of individuals bound by family ties as well as passion. They saw the central character trying to become hu­manly whole, and the author’s greatest powers in the qualities of his prose, the respect for integrity of events and objects in them­selves. Also noted were the wit, tenderness, and dignity of the book’s cameos. Russell Banks, another fan of Algren’s, wrote “Pintauro’s presentation of the connections between childhood, adulthood and sexuality are as revealing as they are evocative.”[6] In other words, Cold Hands (like Carson McCullers’ The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter or James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room) resonates be­yond the “gay novel”’s implied strictures.

Matter-of-fact about the homosexual content in the plays and about his own homosexuality (“after years of therapy,” he re­marked), Pintauro showed me four volumes of collected gay plays edited by Michael Wilcox. He knows that some audiences are disturbed by homosexuality in the plays, as they are by low-class behavior, violence against a father, and mental illness. He has his own limits, too: “I cannot watch Dirty Talk. It’s so cruel, so heart­breaking, so vulgar. I could put it on paper but I can’t watch it. But I can’t censor myself. I believe in getting it out, not just for me, but for everyone.” Eight years as a priest in addition to all the ear­lier preparation are summed up: “All that repression . . . if we don’t put a light on everything inside, we’re not helping any­body.” Lights have indeed been beaming on “everything inside,” for “‘bare-all memoirs’ are being written by ‘educated and privi­leged people,’ writers who are tackling subjects traditionally ‘associated with poor white trash.’”[7] Many memoirists are women; among the men should be counted Philip Roth (Patrimony, 1991) and Richard Rhodes and Michael Ryan in their sexual histories (Making Love: An Erotic Odyssey, 1992 and Secret Life, 1995). That memoirs about lurid secrets are now ostenta­tiously advertised indicates a national mood both confessional and prying—but perhaps also a need to know more than journal­ism conveys. As memoirs dominate best-seller lists, they make the stage safer for previously excluded subjects.

Treatment of the subject, however, makes a play less or more marketable. Love! Valour! Compassion! affirms traditional “family values” of committed love, fidelity, and domesticity; it links per­version to immaturity, resentment, and hangups; predatory lust, though natural, is shown as violating hospitality and undermining honor. Nudity seems delightfully natural in the context of skinny-dipping and other intimacies. At the same time the film deals di­rectly with carnality, not only eroticism but also disease and dy­ing. Theater takes over where the screen demurs; for instance, New York productions in June 1997 included Making Porn (about the gay pornography industry), Men on the Verge of a His-Panic Breakdown (about Hispanic gay immigrants), Baby Anger (in which a baby son achieves stardom when cast in a TV commercial as a girl). And the theater can interpret more profoundly; thus Broad­way has the gripping and intelligent Gross Indecency: The Three Tri­als of Oscar Wilde. Paula Vogel, awarded the 1998 Pulitzer Prize, who opened her new play How I Learned to Drive to rave reviews in New York just about when Mineola Twins and Hot ‘n’ Throbbing ended runs in Providence, has introduced, besides pornography and incest, also pedophilia. An interviewer once asked her “Why are you still advocating and fighting? You’re one of the lucky ones!” “And I have to say people,” she replies, “if you’re in the arts, you’re struggling every day. . . . What you did yesterday is not good enough. It’s history.”[8] Pintauro keeps reinventing anew—and also revising.

I asked why he keeps revising the one-act plays. “While you’re alive,” he replied, “you have a responsibility to all of your work. . . . Plays are like us. Every once in a while we need a shower and a nice clean shirt.” In some plays, what’s not complete requires further taking advantage of opportunities.

Never, though, will he rewrite Dawn, from the trilogy By the Sea, By the Sea, By the Beautiful Sea. This commissioned play pre­miered during Bay Street Theatre’s 1995 season. In a rather conde­scending review of the subsequent production at City Center’s Stage 2 (New York Times, 31 May 1996), Vincent Canby said that it evoked the Hamptons in a spirit of “Aren’t We Having Fun?” and the scenery is gorgeous even when people get in its way. In Dawn, the first of three one-act plays (the others are by Lanford Wilson and Terrence McNally), Quentin has come with his sister Veronica and his wife Pat to honor the will of the siblings’ late mother by spreading her ashes in the sea at dawn of August 12th. Divorced, lonely, emotionally dependent, Veronica tries to sabotage her brother’s marriage by telling of his wife’s infidelities; but he de­fends his wife, and she defends his sister. Canby’s comment, “They’re the sort of characters to which you can feel guiltlessly superior,” says more about him than about the play. Every single word of Dawn is hanging from some framework, Pintauro says; to displace a single word threatens the whole. While plays about the sea are perennial, often critical reception does not match overall success. Ben Brantley, reviewing the $10 million musical Titanic (New York Times, 24 April 1997), about the century’s most famous maritime disaster, damned it with faint praise: “it doesn’t sink.” At worst “hokey and stereotyped” though efficently narrative, with “technically astonishing sets,” it “never seems to leave port” and remains unaffecting. Yet this lavish retelling of the 1912 mari­time disaster won five 1997 Tony awards including the coveted prize for best musical, and has been a big money-maker on both stage and screen; it garnered more Oscar nominations than any other film since 1951. With regard to Dawn, I side with the play­wright.

Pithy, apparently starting in the middle of the third act, hence demanding close attention, the short plays can be adapted and recombined in programs for different audiences. They were per­formed seven or eight per evening by New York’s Circle Lab in 1987, as Rapid Fire. Wild Blue, a group of eight one-acters with gay themes, was staged in New York in 1987, in Washington in 1994.[9] Another group of nine, in which characters come to terms with strained relationships, was presented at the Vineyard Theater in New York as Moving Targets.[10] Twelve one-acters made up four programs of Second Story Theatre’s Short Attention Span Work­shop in Providence in June 1992. Short plays hook viewers screen-habituated to quick takes, readers of “postcard” (or “sudden”) fiction.

Taut dialogue, sure command of latent tensions, and shifting ambiguities characterize these plays. In Two Eclairs a happy young wife comes home with briefcase and groceries, after a day of sell­ing real estate, to her self-absorbed husband, a sculptor; bit by bit she uncovers his affair with her sister, a double betrayal. In Uncle Chick, a gay man declares his love on the night he learns his uncle is also gay. A priest in Rules of Love hears the confession of a woman who has been his lover. The curmudgeonly old aunt of Lenten Pudding balks at meeting her large family’s expectations. Several plays challenge compassion by inviting negative judg­ments of characters, then giving the viewer a chance to redeem prejudice. About the twelve short plays I saw in Providence, critic Bill Rodriguez wrote: “Pintauro is great at turning the volume on the ambiguity up and down, which forces us to pay attention if we hope to form any opinions about the characters. Sort of like in life.” He says too, “Dramatic exchanges are pared to the bone.” After lauding individual plays and performances, and the skillful co-direction, the review concludes commending “an evening of substantial enjoyment.”[11]

In the memoir mode, but fictional and dramatized, was Beside Herself, performed during 1989. In it a lonely older woman, hun­gering for sex and self-definition, is given a chance at happiness by the arrival of a virile young man. Characters from the past ob­serve events in the present, younger selves watch the heroine go through her later life, and the audience must intuit the nature of this composite reality as fused in the single character Mary Can­dee and the new man in her life. Pintauro referred with chagrin to the Village Voice review of Circle Rep’s Beside Herself in which Mi­chael Feingold opened bluntly: “Writers read.” He accused Pin­tauro of recycling Arthur Laurents’s 1956 A Clearing in the Woods. Feingold covers himself by saying “Nor do I know if Joseph Pin­tauro had ever so much as heard of A Clearing in the Woods before he wrote Beside Herself . . .”—in fact, Pintauro says, he was led to first-time acquaintance with that earlier play after Feingold de­scribed his as derivative, suggesting that Tennessee Williams had done the same thing better in The Rose Tattoo. Feingold’s unfair­ness still rankles. Last year the indisputably original and eminent Edward Albee used the strategy of blending three characters into life-stages of one single woman, in Three Tall Women. A reviewer of the touring production in Toronto compared that with five ac­tresses playing the same woman at different stages of life in Michel Tremblay’s Albertine in Cinq Temps, remarking that “where Tremblay has them reaching for the moon, Albee has them gasp­ing their last.”[12]

David Kaufman more fairly accepted as a convention Pintauro’s use of separate characters to represent distinct stages of a single life, but he then deprecated the play for “heavy symbolism” and called it “tacky” even while praising Pintauro’s “poetic aspira­tions.”[13] Judiciously, Mimi Kramer in her New Yorker review called the production “a real uplifter,” discussed Pintauro’s inno­vations (including differences from earlier plays by Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller, acknowledged influences), and noted Pintauro’s “generosity toward actors.”[14] Frank Rich in The New York Times respectfully termed Pintauro “a serious writer with a sincere mission” even though he considered that “his play apo­theosizes women from afar while pretending to understand them from within.”[15] Pintauro’s response was to write more plays—to keep risking unjust comparisons, and even to risk being “scooped.”

Raft of the Medusa takes its title from the accident made famous by Gericault’s painting in the Louvre: in 1816 the Medusa, a French ship, ran aground in mid-ocean; lifeboats saved many, but one hundred and fifty persons were abandoned on a makeshift raft with little hope of survival. The plight of the doomed, whose only hope of rescue is the chance of being spotted by a passing ship, and who meanwhile must watch each other dying or struggling and conniving to survive, is analogous to interchanges among a group of men and two women during an AIDS group-therapy ses­sion, during which reactions to the disease precipitate hostilities, empathy, confrontations, and confession and unmasking. Com­mon fears and suffering, like common knowledge, may augment antagonisms, and each character has to get past blame, denial, guilt. The play’s characters are openly or secretly homo- or bi- or heterosexual; black, white, and hispanic; rich and poor; AIDS has a motley clientele. Felicia, for instance, a shy seventeen-year-old, who (says Pintauro’s description of her) “has been pushed around by well-meaning adults whom she can’t trust,” contracted AIDS from the boyfriend. The disease, as is well known, spreads not only sexually but also by contaminated needles of drug-users—and may be spread in other ways either accidentally or by some­one bent on revenge (the “poison dick” mentioned on page 52). Doug taunts Cora, “Are you a hemophiliac, Cora, or did you get it from your dentist?” (17). The play points to complicity on the part of the health professions: during the Sixties, therapists inspired by the new “openness” encouraged patients, on grounds of honesty and authenticity, not to be afraid of feelings, but to brave social intimidation, and to recognize and live out “forbidden” erotic feelings—such therapists thus unwittingly helped spread conta­gion of a still unrecognized ailment; and the doctor in this play, as Pintauro puts it, “has stepped into his own nightmare” (11). Even now doctors distribute clean needles to discourage use of con­taminated ones—but doctors cannot control what uses will be made of those needles after they are no longer clean.

The play reveals the folly of considering anyone, including oneself, exempt from effects of the AIDS presence in the world. It shows the power of the desperate or vengeful who are infected. During the course of the play a viewer or reader learns a lot about symptoms of, reactions to, and treatments for the disease; the list of complications terrifies first by its obscurity (cryptococcal men­ingitis, encephalitis, toxoplasmosis [40]) and then by the shorter and more familiar terms (thrush, colds, flu, diarrhea, throat sores). Even more is learned about courageous living under constant threat of debilitation and ultimate death. (When Jerry says “We’re all dying, infected or not,” Jimmy rejoins “We’re all living, in­fected or not” [29].) More than most others, those carrying the AIDS virus also carry a sense of mortality. Suicide can tempt; they feel the decades of a normal lifespan being sucked out of them. Use of public funds comes into question: Michael asks “What about the peace dividend?” and Larry replies “Gone on ‘Desert Storm’ and the Savings and Loans” (42). When homophobic Alan, trying to blame, says “You drank from the dirty well,” Alec says (addressing Cora) “The well was life. We all drink from it” (46). This truth is Cora’s clue, but not only hers; the audience or reader must likewise accept that “The well was life. We all drink from it.” Raft of the Medusa resembles plays about men under fire in war­time, and perhaps most especially David Rabe’s play Streamers, written and enacted by veterans of the Vietnam War. In defiance of political affiliation or lack of one, whatever one’s attitudes to­ward the war, whether or not one would like this or that man, the play compels recognition of fellow (and sister) human beings caught up against their will in struggles they did not freely choose and refusing to be mere victims.

Vulgar language in Pintauro’s play is never gratuitous. It con­veys residual self-hatred, or overflow of fury and confusion, or rage over deceit, or the best way to address what is not at all nice. Discovery of interloper Larry’s secret, that he is neither gay nor infected, but “wired” to record the therapy sessions and write them up for money, will precipitate the play’s peak violence. The power of secrets is also explored through Cora; the man from whom she contracted the virus seemed an “Irish peasant” with “a waft of something nice and Catholic that crossed these real blue eyes” (19); but he was bisexual, and fled her love; this premarital affair left her unwittingly infected, and when she and her husband were tested and knew the results, she says, “He tore off my coat and broke my glasses” (19). Impact of AIDS on marriages is also suggested by a construction worker who has done time for using drugs; “I also got gang banged in Rikers,” he says (23); but since his wife and children test negative, he refrains from marital sex—”without them to leave behind, my life is shit” (23). The audience gets to know even the mute member of the group, whose signing Jerry must interpret—and whose brief messages are eloquent. The play cannot be called “depressing,” since the life-force of its char­acters constantly breaks through. In a sardonic-sentimental “happy ending” Larry’s defused terror is imagined as a front-page headline, “Cursed then cured”; but the imaginary miracle, far from embittering, leads the group to hope for salvation.[16]

Raft of the Medusa was performed Off-Broadway in 1991 and in Washington in 1994. A film version could reach far bigger audi­ences. Before McNally’s, other plays about AIDS had already been translated into film—like And the Band Played On, the 1990 Long­time Companion, Paul Rudnick’s comedy Jeffrey, and the 1995 quasi-feminist “dramedy” Boys on the Side. Most innovative and most lauded of plays dealing with AIDS is Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, A Gay Fantasia on National Themes. Part One: Millenium Approaches (1993) and Part Two: Perestroika (1994), which invokes a greater dimension of time by including historic figures Roy Cohn and Ethel Rosenberg and conceives a far greater dramatic space that allows for celestial beings. For Pintauro’s play as for this, film is no substitute for flow between live performers and their audi­ences; but it has potentially greater impact in educating and stimulating the national imagination.

 In 1992 the Bay State Theatre premiered Pintauro’s adaptation of Peter Matthiessen’s book Men’s Lives, about commercial fisher­men of the South Fork. Of the book Jonathan Raban said it “shows a stubborly surviving culture being carelessly exterminated.” The fishermen “have been clam dredging, lobster potting, launching dories into the surf, setting traps and nets and lines, in an unbro­ken family chain that reaches all the way back to the original Dutch and English colonization.”[17] Matthiessen had lived among them for thirty years and knew them as close friends; in the Fifties he fished professionally with his own rigs and captained a charter boat. Intimacy is the book’s strength, for what the men tell him is rich in local lore and technicalities. This very intimacy makes the account of decline the more painful. At first, an intact community is shown working hard, under few restrictions, not earning a lot but finding fish abundant and land affordable. As a tourist econ­omy boomed, sports fishermen lobbied for prohibitions against netting bass, the most profitable catch, using conservation as a ra­tionale and prevailing because of their greater numbers. The “systematic destruction of a community, a way of life, a proud history” by those with more money and political clout, who cov­eted the land and the beaches, was achieved by licenses and taxa­tion, revaluation of property, and finally legislation that put fish­ermen out of work. Urban development and industrial pollution abet the shift. In reaction, notes Raban, “Marriages cracked; tem­pers frayed; there was a streak of acid in every casual social en­counter.” The book ends with a funeral. On the South Fork, older men continue to fish but encourage their sons and grandsons to leave the water.

The play compresses all the book’s exposition, sometimes pith­ily, as when Walt says “Goddammit, those Bass aren’t near so en­dangered as we are” (44). After the Governor has signed the Striped Bass bill (45), Walt says: “Sir, you make me sick to my soul. After fifty years of calluses and drownings and cut up hands from shuck knives, you pick up a little pen, you write your name and we disappear from our own land and our own selves. Tell me Sir, how did you manage to do so much with a damned little pen? You make me sick to my soul. You do.” The speech somewhat echoes Dylan Thomas’s “The Hand That Signed the Paper Felled a City.” The epigraph to Men’s Lives, “It’s not fish ye’re buyin, it’s men’s lives,” is quoted also in Cod by Mark Kurlansky, who says the line is uttered by a fishmonger to a customer haggling over the price of a haddock, in Sir Walter Scott’s The Antiquary of 1816.

The play’s mournful ending underscores the human cost of “progress.” Pintauro registers the pain as unprepared families lose both livelihood and way of life, but not its inevitability: Since 24 million people live within one hundred miles of Long Island Sound, the hundred-mile-long body of water that separates Long Island from Connecticut and mainland New York,[18] the resultant pressure on the South Fork was only a matter of time. The history of wealth can be described as accumulation through the loss of others. Will and Ariel Durant explained a long time ago in The Les­sons of History, how life is competition, “peaceful when food abounds, violent when the mouths outrun the food. Animals eat one another without qualm; civilized men consume one another by due process of law.” Because the situation is presented as unique and local, however, the play does not in my opinion have full tragic resonance, though it is good theater and a good read.

Concern with atrophy of traditional occupations and frustra­tions of unemployment shows in Reindeer Soup, a play for children published in 1996 that contains a monologue about the father’s being laid off, and is central to his new play Heaven and Earth. Taken from Newsday reporter Steve Wick’s Heaven and Earth: The Last Farmers of the North Fork, it opened in 1997.[19] Pintauro had to dramatize the documented plight of families working the land for generations who are now threatened, by economies of scale, with the end of the family farm. Joe mentions precedents that relate to farming, “even Most Happy Fella.” “I don’t want my play to be lost among others. I have to triumph with my voice. It’s going to be poetry. . . . I’m trying to write an American play. . . . America was really defined by the prairies, the expanse. It was a horizontal definition of the New World. With the advent of the skyscraper it became vertical. There’s an overlapping; particularly in this area people are caught in the crossroads between the horizontal and the vertical, where land and sky and water are being overtaken by the industrial, profit-motive incentive. Real estate. Computer farming, high-tech machinery and equipment. Personal effi­ciency.” These issues will be in the play, but transcended for artis­tic values. “I play Aaron Copland over and over again,” he con­tinued. “That big American landscape full of muscle and religion is what’s driving this play.” He spoke of God, Nature, the Land, mused on weather, diseases, accidents. The previous day he had been gardening, while all over the nation farms were turning into real estate and farming was becoming a gentleman’s hobby.

Along with revising early plays and composing new ones, Joe Pintauro is starting a theater company, the Manhattan Drama Collective. He says he already has “a toe in the water.” This group will do The Dead Boy, his play based on Father Bruce Ritter of Covenant House, which he has already directed in Haarlem, the Netherlands.

 

During our conversation perhaps a dozen telephone calls had come in. One was about his having lunch with his niece for her birthday, and another informed him that the lunch was canceled: pupils at her school were being sent home because contamination of the school’s well-water required noisy repairs. I asked whether he minded interruptions. In fact, sometimes they come as relief. They do not impede: “The work is like growing hair: every day you get up and you do more work and you grow more hair.”

It was still raining when we left the house, but I stopped to admire the neat terracing and planting at the side of the house. Joe Pintauro pointed out his tomato plants and a wire-encircled crop of basil: “That’s Italy.” He has another house that’s rented, and beyond the tulip tree a white-painted carriage house is being con­verted, as projects overflow, to a new studio. Inside: two leaning bicycles where stairs led upward; raw countertop and inset sink; a small table; the fragrance of planed wood. Woods beyond. Water. Inspiration and refreshment for the ongoing work. Stability makes risk-taking affordable—though encroachment always threatens. The “bull market on Wall Street” has caused a real-estate feeding frenzy in the Hamptons, where undeveloped farmland is said to be selling for as much as $200,000 an acre, and a sixty-acre Sa­gaponack farm nearby was recently sold to a developer for twelve million dollars.[20] Manhattan is only seventy-five miles away—Joe Pintauro maintains an apartment there, too—but his home is in Sag Harbor. Commitment, steadiness, growth—and always the fresh starts.

 

Blossom S. Kirschenbaum

Brown University

 

 

Works Cited

“A Playwright Finds There’s Life Between ‘Heaven and Earth.’” The New York Times 27 July 1997: LI6:1-6.

Banks, Russell. “Nelson Algren: The Message Still Hurts.” The New York Times Book Review 29 April 1990: 34.

Kurlansky, Mark. Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World. New York: Walker, 1997.

Matthiessen, Peter. Men’s Lives: The Surfmen and Baymen of the South Fork. New York: Random House, 1986.

Pintauro, Joseph. “Algren in Exile.” Chicago (Feb. 1988): 93–101, 156–63.

___. Beside Herself. New York: Broadway Play Publishing, Inc., 1990.

___. Cold Hands (novel). New York: Simon & Schuster, 1979.

___. Men’s Lives; based on the book, Men’s Lives, by Peter Matthi­essen. New York: Dramatists Play Service, 1994.

___. Metropolitan Operas: 27 Short Plays. New York: Dramatists Play Service, 1997.

___. Plays by Joe Pintauro. New York: Broadway Play Publishing, 1989.

___. Raft of the Medusa. New York: Dramatists Play Service, 1992.

___. Snow Orchid. New York: Dramatists Play Service, 1997.

___. State of Grace (novel). New York: Times Books, 1983; Bantam (paper), 1983.

___. To Believe in God (poems). New York: Harper & Row, 1968.

Rabe, David. Streamers. 1977. New York: Knopf, 1979.

Rattiner, Dan. “Who’s Here: Joe Pintauro, Playwright.” Dan’s Pa­per 16 August 1996: 43, 96.

Wick, Steve. Heaven and Earth: The Last Farmers of the North Fork, with photographs by Lynn Johnson. New York: St. Martin’s, 1996.

 

 

 

 


[1]See for instance Mel Gussow, “The Way AIDS Harms Not Only the Afflicted,” New York Times 23 Dec. 1991, C15: 1; Melanie Kirkpatrick, “Theater: Revolu­tionary Tales,” Wall Street Journal 10 Jan. 1992, A7: 1; Louise Kennedy, “New Theater’s Flawed but Gripping ‘Raft of the Medusa,’” Boston Globe 15 May 1992, 84: 1; Ray Loynd, “‘Raft of the Medusa’ a Searing AIDS Drama,” Los Angeles Times 22 Oct. 1992, F19: 1 and “‘Raft of the Medusa’ Still Packs a Punch,” Los Angeles Times 9 April 1993, F16: 3; Peter Stack, “Joe Pintauro Won’t Mince Words,” San Francisco Chronicle 28 Jan. 1993, D2: 1; and Sandra Dillard-Rosen, “‘Raft’ Navigates Fury of AIDS Epidemic,” Denver Post 18 Nov. 1994, E4: 1.

[2]Alicia Potter, “Trailers,” The Providence Phoenix 13 June 1997, II: 28, col. 5–6.

[3]Pintauro, “Algren in Exile,” 93–101, 156–63. Algren represented, along with everything else, a connection to French influences; Gallimard has just published an epistolary collection from Simone de Beauvoir’s letters to him—they had what La Stampa calls “una formidabile liaison tra il 1947 e il ’52”; see Enrico Benedetto, “De Beauvoir Algren, lettere di fuoco,” La Stampa 21 febbraio 1997. De Beauvoir had already divulged their affair in 1965, making Algren furious; but the 615 pages of letters just published also document the Paris-Chicago liter­ary and cultural axis.

        Terkel at age eighty-five was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters; see Mel Gussow, “Listener, Talker, Now Literary Lion: It’s Offi­cial,” The New York Times 17 June 1997, B1: 1–5, B5. After Division Street, about Chicago, and Hard Times, about the Depression, Terkel published the col­lected interviews of Working, which became a Broadway musical. It is easy to see thematic affinities between the two Chicago writers and Pintauro, and a common concern with voices that articulate what many feel but do not know how to say.

[4]Evan Hunter, “All Male Cast” (review), New York Times Book Review 2 De­cember 1979: 15.

[5]Alan Cheuse, “A Novel Free of Old Restraints” (review), Los Angeles Times 28 October 1979, Book Section: 8.

[6]In “Nelson Algren: The Message Still Hurts,” New York Times Book Review 29 April 1990: 34, which appeared when two small presses were reissuing Algren’s novels, Banks makes the point that “greed, sadism and misogyny are the warp and woof of our social fabric” and “pimps and prostitutes, con men, drug addicts and alcoholics, homeless wanderers, illiterate whites and blacks ‘trying to make an honest dollar in a crooked sort of way’” are not so marginal as respectable readers might like to believe. The Man with the Golden Arm (1949), which won the first National Book Award for fiction, and A Walk on the Wild Side are con­sidered Algren’s masterpieces. Pintauro shares Algren’s passion for justice and what Banks calls “unsentimental respect and unabashed affection for the power­less.”

[7]Caroline Knapp, “Media, Myself & I: In Defense of the Memoir,” Providence Phoenix 13 June 1997, I: 7. Knapp is quoting the Boston Globe. I borrow from her citations of Roth, Rhodes, and Ryan.

[8]Quoted from Sam Coale, “Vogel’s Voice: Hot ’n Throbbing: An Interview with Paula Vogel,” East Side Monthly [Providence, RI] June 1997: 30.

[9]Steven Holden reviewed the 47th Street Playhouse production in The New York Times 20 Sept. 1987, I, 86: 1. Jeanne Cooper reviewed for The Washington Post 17 Feb. 1994, C7: 1–2.

[10]Reviewed in The New York Times 30 Jan. 1990, C14: 5.

[11]Bill Rodriguez, “Brief encounters,” review of Plays by Joe Pintauro (directed by Pat Hegnauer and Ed Shea at 2nd Story Theatre), The Newpaper (now Provi­dence Phoenix) 18 June 1992, II: 5.

[12]Pat Donnelly, “New Albee Play Three Tall Women Strikes Universal Chord” (review), Montréal Gazette 20 April 1996: D-3.

[13]David Kaufman, “The Impossible Search for Greatness” (review), Downtown 1 Nov. 1989: 15-A.

[14]Mimi Kramer, “Appearances” (review), The New Yorker 6 Nov. 1989: 130–32.

[15]Frank Rich, “A Woman from 4 Viewpoints at the Circle Rep,” The New York Times,18 Oct. 1989, C15: 1.

[16]A kind of relief for the audience is suggested by a Letter to an Editor that quotes an exchange between Michael and Cora. Michael: “Gays saved more straight [expletive] and do they listen? They’re so in love with blaming us they can’t see the gift we gave them.” Cora: “What gift is that?” Michael: “Time.” See “A gift of time,” Providence Journal 10 May 1994: editorial page.

[17]Jonathan Raban, “This Is the Way a World Ends,” The New York Times Book Review 22 June 1986: 1.

[18]This figure is taken from jacket copy of Mary Parker Buckles, Margins: A Naturalist Meets Long Island Sound (New York: North Point/Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1997).

[19]Heaven and Earth opened at the Bay Street Theater after this interview and ran through the month of August 1997. Sloane Shelton played the mother; surround­ing her were “her two sons, a Polish girl, a black farmhand and an Irish lobster­man from Montauk.” See “A Playwright Finds There’s Life Between ‘Heaven and Earth.’”

[20]John T. McQuiston, “Organization Is Formed to Protect East End,” New York Times 6 Mar. 1997, B9: 1.