Image from Hiroshima Maiden, photo by Eric Wright (2003) [Enlarge in New Window]

Dan Hurlin: Hiroshima Maiden

Growing up, performance artist Dan Hurlin couldn't bear to watch Lucille Ball in her classic sitcom I Love Lucy. He'd stay with the show while Desi Arnaz as Ricky did his thing, then switch channels when the comedienne made her entrance. The reason? "I couldn't stand to watch her fuck everything up."

This memory is an autobiographical element that serves as a framing device in Hurlin's latest theater piece for puppets and live actors, Hiroshima Maiden, set to premiere in 2004 at the Dance Theater Workshop in New York. Hurlin will have a boy in front of a television set, channel flipping between I Love Lucy and This Is Your Life, the NBC show hosted by Ralph Edwards from 1952 to 1961. It's a narrative device invoking a larger world and simultaneously examining "the impulse to stare at something when we don't want to." Hurlin refers specifically to arguably the most bizarre and haunting episode of This Is Your Life, when the guests were the Hiroshima Maidens, Japanese women who had survived the U.S. atomic bombing of Hiroshima but were severely disfigured and had come to America in 1955 for reconstructive surgery. To help pay for their medical expenses the women agreed to be on the show, which typically featured a guest of honor and the highlights of his or her life. Offstage was a person--a mystery guest--who had played a significant role in that person's life and whose identity the guest of honor would try to guess. In the Maidens' case, the mystery guest turned out to be the co-pilot of the bomber plane Enola Gay, Robert Lewis.

In his research Hurlin learned that the Museum of Television and Broadcasting did not have a tape of this particular episode in its archives--an aftereffect, he believes, of the State Department's blackout until 1964 of images of human suffering from those horrific bombings. Traveling to Hiroshima in 2001, he met one of the Maidens, Michiko Yamaoka--15 years old in 1945--who graciously agreed to an interview. At the end of the interview, moved by her dignity and grace, Hurlin was in tears.

The Hiroshima Maidens deals with victims of power, approaching their multilayered, painful realities in nonlinear fashion. It's a topic that surfaces in many of Hurlin's earlier works, such as his 1990 Obie-winning A Cool Million, as well as 1995's No(thing as powerful as) Truth, a critique of William Loeb, the real-life demagogic journalist and editor of New Hampshire's Manchester Union Leader. While Hurlin conceived of and started working on Hiroshima Maiden before the September 11th tragedy, the awfulness of that event "won't affect the piece's sequence, [but it] will resonate within it, shading the ways in which we perceive these women's victimization and their humanity."

As a theater artist working in the medium of puppetry, Hurlin's approach to the use of puppets is broad. "To my mind a puppet is any object that can be put to performative use," says the artist, a 2002 Guggenheim Fellow. In the case of Hiroshima Maiden, his nine puppeteers will bring life to characters inspired by Bunraku, the Japanese theatrical tradition of intimate storytelling through puppetry that began in the 17^th century. Hurlin stresses that he won't be utilizing Bunraku so much as a Bunraku-style approach, incorporating elements from this classical form with his own eclectic, simple, yet imaginative devices. More important perhaps than his seasoned technique is his empathy for his characters. This he ascribes to his being both a Mayflower descendant, very much within dominant culture, and a queer, setting him simultaneously outside that same dominant culture. He's privy to both worlds--and a witness to the unsettling secrets they hide.

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THIS PROJECT'S CATEGORIES: Performance > Puppetry | Asian Themes | History | New York | 2002