THE PASSIONS OF DEREK WALCOTT

Author: By Patti Hartigan, Globe Staff

Date: Sunday, April 25, 1993
Page: B25
Section: ARTS AND FILM

The first call is the sweet one, but the phone soon becomes an irritable intrusion.

NPR and NBC call. CNN and CBS and every other network in the business want a "live" comment. A ragtag pack of reporters follows the poet to the neighborhood coffee shop. ("The local geriatrics were going, 'What's a Nobel? Is that a bagel?' " Walcott recalls.) Frank Capra meets Franz Kafka in this curious scene, upbeat yet slightly absurd. "I feel like a third-rate congressman," says the poet, who awoke to find himself transformed into a Nobel laureate. "I'm having a hit movie, 'The Exorcist IV.' "

The Fourth Estate dogs him with Stupid Press Questions at Boston University, where Walcott teaches English and playwriting. Does he have any regrets? "There are things I wish I had written, like 'Now is the winter of our discontent.' " Describe a typical day. "I work very early until noon, then look at nonsense on the TV in my pajamas." Why does he rise at dawn? ''To smoke."

"I wanted the lines to feel as if they still have the dew on them."

-- Derek Walcott, about his 1990 epic poem "Omeros"

It's mid-morning a few months later, and Indian Summer has long since flown south. But the walls of Walcott's living room are warmed by watercolors of verdant tropical landscapes and picturesque harbors. The poet is an amateur painter, and his art depicts the dewy sun-dappled beauty of his native St. Lucia in the West Indies. "There is some kind of devotion that happens in small places that is very intense," he says of the islands he calls home during the months he is not teaching at BU.

Walcott is primed to talk about "A Nobel Celebration," a benefit for three of his pet projects set for tomorrow night at the Charles Playhouse. But first things first. He must a) light a cigarette and b) find the phone. The cigarette is a Marlboro; the phone a cordless model whose handset has been misplaced.

The missing phone, it turns out, is a metaphor for the change Walcott has undergone since The Prize (as he's come to call it) and its $1.3 million cash award. "When you get The Prize, no one tells you what will happen with the phone," Walcott says. On cue, the irksome instrument rings somewhere in the far reaches of the condominium. Without so much as a "Back in a sec," the lanky poet disappears and returns empty-handed, phone still lost in space. "I get requests for all sorts of things. You let the phone ring. The mail is mountainous. One Indian guy keeps writing asking for money -- and not 10 bucks, either. $100,000 would be good."

The Prize does have its price -- the invasion of privacy. Nevertheless, it puts poetry and playwriting on the front page, giving Walcott and the world of letters long-deserved attention. The writer is widely known for his poetic oeuvre that blends Caribbean, English and African traditions. His most recent poetic achievement is "Omeros," a sweeping epic that intertwines Homeric legend, Western classics, West Indian culture and history.

But he is also a prolific playwright who founded the Trinidad Theatre Workshop in 1959 and the Boston Playwrights' Theatre at BU in 1981. And he recently established the Rat Island Foundation, which aims to create an international writers retreat on an island off St. Lucia, a kind of Breadloaf in paradise.

The two theaters and the arts center form a unified triangle for Walcott, and he will bring all three together tomorrow night at the benefit, which will feature selections of his plays performed by the Trinidad Workshop. The proceeds will benefit both theaters and the Rat Island Foundation. The Trinidadian actors will also perform Walcott's "Pantomime" (Thursday through May 2) at the Boston Playwrights' Theatre.

In this country, Walcott is known primarily for his poetry, but he dismisses the notion that the theatrical work is a secondary endeavor. "I don't see the poetry as separate from the theater," he says, pointing out that in the last year alone he's had productions in Stockholm at the Royal Dramatic Theatre and in England at the Royal Shakespeare Company at Stratford- on-Avon and Birmingham Repertory Theater. His version of Homer's ''Odyssey" opens in London at the RSC in June. Along with nine volumes of poetry, he's published four books of plays and won the Obie Award in 1971 for ''Dream on Monkey Mountain."

He's not, the cheerfully irascible writer will tell you again and again, a poet who happens to write plays on the side. "It's easy for people to look at the poetry," he says. "It takes more work to look at the theater, because it has to do with a knowledge of the society. People have a cliched idea of West Indian society, and if they took the society seriously, they'd have to take the theater seriously."

Three loyalties are central for him -- the Caribbean where he lives, the English language and his African origin. In the poem, "A Far Cry from Africa," he says, "How choose/Between this Africa and the English tongue I love?"

-- Swedish Academy Citation for Walcott's Nobel Prize

Walcott is a man of many cultures, a polyglot of African, colonialist and Caribbean traditions, a self-described "mulatto of styles." The son of two educators, he became intoxicated with the English language as a young boy, particularly with Shakespeare, which his mother recited around the house. "I remember thinking, 'I'm going to write something to please her, something good,' " he says.

In his introduction to "Dream on Monkey Mountain," the poet recalls staging playlets with his twin brother, Roderick, constructing "little men" out of twigs. The writer, now 63, had his first play, "Henri Cristophe: A Chronicle," produced when he was just 20. The theme, as the playwright once defined it, still resonates: "One race's quarrel with another's God."

Indeed, the eloquent themes of the poetry persist in the theatrical work. In the verse, he explores the curious conflict of origin and destiny. Regional identity comes up against the personal isolation of the artist; the wanderer gazes at his native land from afar. Seemingly disparate elements dance together in the verse: colonialism and Caribbean tradition, English and patois. The plays, too, address these themes. "Dream on Monkey Mountain" is about a man's search for cultural identity in the face of colonialism. ''Pantomime" depicts an ironic reversal of the Robinson Crusoe story played out by a down-and-out colonialist and his black servant, "a serious steel-band man." "The Isle Is Full of Noises" unfolds on an island that faces exploitation or revolution in the aftermath of colonialism.

Walcott had already had a half-dozen plays produced in the West Indies before he came to New York in 1958 on a Rockefeller Foundation grant to study with Jose Quintero and the Phoenix Theatre Company. Upon returning to Trinidad the next year, he began the Workshop, determined to eschew the mannered, Method-esque affectation he saw in New York. His aim was to create a strictly indigenous style, to tap something primal, to capture the language of a world where poverty coexists with tourism. In an essay celebrating the theater's 20th anniversary, Walcott wrote: "In the tropics, nothing is lovelier than the allotments of the poor, no theatre is as vivid, voluble and cheap."

I seek a theatre . . . that conveys the power of Jacobean theatre, that has the vigor of common speech, and that has the appeal of the Elizabethan pit -- vulgar, rhetorical, but memorable.

-- Derek Walcott, statement about Boston Playwrights' Theatre'

Walcott is leading Albert LeVeau, artistic director of the Trinidad Workshop, on a tour of his theater at BU. He settles down for a smoke in the dusty black box theater at 949 Commonwealth Ave. The Nobel laureate, casual in chinos, turtleneck and boots with square toes, is anything but casual about his tobacco. He smokes passionately and with conviction, the way an oenophile might sip a Bordeaux from a particularly good year.

He brings the same passion to the extemporaneous poetry of his everyday speech, especially when he is talking about his triangle, his theaters. ''No!" he didn't discover theater in New York and bring it back to the West Indies, he says, dispelling a colonialist notion perpetuated over the years by reference books and magazine articles. "No. No, no, no. That's like saying I came out of the jungle with a typewriter and suddenly started writing.

"There is a very sophisticated culture in the Caribbean that people don't know. To say that I began theater in Trinidad is not true. The only thing I innovated was to form a company and to pay the actors."

LeVeau, who will perform in tomorrow's benefit and in "Pantomime," confirms, "He gave me 10 bucks for my first production." Walcott, not easily upstaged, adds, "And he went out and spent it in the bar."

But this wasn't about a ten spot here or a ten spot there. In the heady early days, the Workshop set out to define a distinct Caribbean style, a theater that spoke to the people in their own language -- a marvelously lyrical blend of English and patois -- about their issues and their lifestyle. It comes from a culture in which performance is a part of daily life, in which people are not afraid to dive into exuberant tragedy with great sweeping gestures. It's spontaneous. It's musical. It's carnival framed by the proscenium arch.

"It comes out of a background that is very spontaneous," LeVeau says. ''We have the street carnival, and the whole population becomes actors. We have the calypso, with a particular rhythm that incites movement and dancing. It's freer, more extroverted. You can stand and look at a group of people on the street talking. There is more body language, more hands, more expression."

Rhythm, Walcott adds, is inherent in the culture. "It's not a black thing -- like 'Niggers can dance' and 'Niggers can play basketball,' " Walcott says. "There is something in the West Indian temperament -- white, black, green, Chinese, whatever -- that has a terrific spontaneity."

Walcott's poetic dramas have been performed all over the world and at regional theaters nationwide, including the Mark Taper Forum, Hartford Stage and Arena Stage. But they have not received many productions in the Boston area, even though the poet divides his time between homes in Brookline and Trinidad. "That's your problem," he says. "The category of 'black theater' is not an easy thing to do here, but I think 'black theater' is a despicable phrase. It's a trap, and we have to get past self-ghettoizing."

Walcott's musical "Steel" was, in fact, produced in Cambridge at the American Repertory Theatre's New Stages series in 1991. The ambitious piece aimed to explore the social and political ramifications of the development of the steel drum, but it was, by Walcott's own estimation, "chaotic." He's currently trying to find time between phone calls to rework the book.

Walcott directed the piece himself, and both he and collaborators would agree he's not the easiest partner. "He's tough on everybody -- but consistently tough," LeVeau says. "But one is prepared to pay any price to work with him, you know. He pushes people to the limits of their possibility. He's demanding in his pursuit of excellence."

If we take this too seriously, we may commit art.

-- Derek Walcott, "Pantomime"

Demanding, in a word. When will the article appear? Will local theater colleagues kindly hand over the names of their most generous patrons for his benefit? Will an assistant, who can quit if he chooses, please fetch three cups of coffee, sugar, sweet-and-low and strychnine, just name your poison?

The man who can make words obey structure lays down the rules. "If anyone uses the word 'multiculturalism,' I'm walking out of this room," he says during an interview. "We've had it in the Caribbean for a long time, and this country's just discovered it."

In a time of hypersensitivity about cultural diversity, Walcott is an iconoclast. The notion of "black" theater, he says, is a "domestic, colonialist trap." And "multicultural" casting just doesn't figure in the Caribbean, which has been a polyglot of cultures for centuries. "We don't think that way in the Caribbean," he says. "An actor could be Indian, Chinese, anything and we don't say, 'Oh, we're having a big undertaking.' "

The whole subject, in fact, annoys the poet, who prefers to define his identity in nationalist rather than racial or ethnic terms. Please, don't suggest that it's significant that a black writer won The Prize. "If you told me I was the first West Indian to win it, I'd say, 'Yeah. Sure. Right.' But if you point out to me that, as a West Indian, I'm black, then I get tired with that crap. It's of no consequence. It defines you in a limited way."

What is of consequence is The Prize, which is enabling the poet to unite his three interests -- the Playwrights' Theatre, the Trinidad Workshop and the Foundation. (The prize money, Walcott wants the world to know, came to less than the annouced amount thanks to the devaluation of the Swedish krona and the fact that the United States imposes income taxes on the Nobel award. "Why should they tax the Nobel Prize?" he asks.)

The ongoing projects provide a sense of continuity for the man who straddles two worlds. In the end, it is the work, not the glory, that feeds the soul of the poet, who has known the "exile of divorce" twice and is separated from his third wife. In "Fame," he writes, "This is Fame: Sundays,/an emptiness." The poem continues with bittersweet images of lame gladioli and the final statement of purpose: "A crawling clock./A craving for work."

Annoying diversions, however, keep him from such pressing projects as the
revision of "Steel" and a new play. (The subject? "I ain't tellin' ya'. It's unlucky.")

There are the endless phone calls, the requests for a piece of the man. He gets up again and searches for that elusive phone; he still can't find it. But when he locates the thing, he's going to disconnect it so he can get on with the business of poet, professor, playwright.

"You know," he says, whispering as if confiding to a co-conspirator, ''the poor guy who wins next year is going to have to answer the phone." Perhaps there's poetic justice, after all.

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