N. B.
This play was written for Wastepaper Theater, a poets' theater that performed off and on for twenty years (1973-1993) in Providence RI.
Most of the plays were given on a simple raised platform at one end of a gallery in the Rhode Island School of Design's Museum of Art. Others were in lofts or lounges, always with primitive lighting and no technical assistance.
For my own plays, there was at best a rudimentary script and often none at all. The version given here is not something from which the actors worked, but as I have been able to remember it.
I have broken the speeches into lines in order to indicate vocal patterns. It should be clear that these are not verse patterns—the dialogue is entirely in prose.
—Keith Waldrop, note from the start of Hope; Or, the Ruins of Empire.
***
We interrupt this weekly series of self-regarding spirals to address the original intent of this newsletter.
While I do believe repetition is the only proof that something matters or exists, I have begun feeling somewhat addled looking through a year and a half’s worth of posts to see if what I am saying today is something remotely different from what I said last week or fifty weeks before.
The original intent of The Beyond Place was to select pieces from The Hoosac Institute Journal and observe them from the “director’s chair,” so to speak. That idea fell by the wayside as I regaled you with tales of youth, attempts at theoretical musings, and endless levitations to the stratosphere.
As I know I did write in a previous post, I had the pleasure of taking my first English literature survey class in college from Keith Waldrop, who, at the time, I didn’t know from a hole in the wall. This was pre-Google, and pre-“Rate-My-Professors,” the most awful of all evaluation sites that appeared in the academic internet landscape in the early 2000s. You can read more about how Waldrop’s class changed my life here.
When I threw myself into reviving The Hoosac Institute in 2018 the first people I wanted to invite to contribute were Rosmarie and Keith Waldrop. Their creative work and their press, Burning Deck, have inspired me and in many ways guided my efforts in bringing the Hoosac Institute to life.
Rosmarie sent in two great poems you can read here. She also sent a text by Keith, a play he’d reconstructed from memory. A play he created for the Wastepaper Theater in Providence. Upon reading the play I was so excited, I asked Rosmarie for all the Wastepaper plays in hopes of producing them. She sent them. I will make it happen.
If you’ve ever lived in or visited Providence, Rhode Island, you’ll know it’s a damp and mysterious town. Rain in sheets, slick slate sidewalks, Georgian and Neoclassical architecture. Home to so many ghosts, including that of H.P. Lovecraft, famous writer of the strangest unclassifiable fantasy-science-fiction-horror-gothic stories.
Providence: a year-round smell of piled-up fall leaves (as you’ll read in the play). A melancholy, a sense of loss oozes up from between the cobblestones. Maybe you are oozing down into the cobblestones instead. Hard to tell. Unheimlich.
Maybe you’re sensing the presence of the founder, that exile of exiles, Roger Williams, kicked out of the Puritan community in Massachusetts for trying to get them to agree to freedom of religion. He headed downriver to establish his own place, befriending Native inhabitants and buying up their lands to expand his own.
In my Providence, I am walking for hours in the darkness of an October afternoon. I’m peering into the glowing golden windows of 18th century houses set on crooked foundations in narrow streets. My feet scuff; soaked sycamore leaves wrap themselves around my ankles and stick. Bark crunches underfoot.
In my Providence, there is nobody on the streets. Gas lamps flicker. Horizontal rain starts up again. Hastening, bent-head, my nose catches the sweet smell of freshly-baked Portuguese bread. It comes and goes. More water in my shoes than in the puddles.
Arriving home to radiators, I steam.
***
Now, you’ve waited long enough. Here is the play, just click on the screenshot and you’ll access the whole piece.
Hope; or the Ruins of Empire.*
by Keith Waldrop
*One last editorial note: “Hope” is, of course, a sentiment or a desire. It’s the thing with feathers (thanks, Emily Dickinson). It’s also the name of the long street going through the East Side of Providence, where Wastepaper Theatre held its performances between 1973 and 1993.
Thanks for reading.