O Washington
Jones, Arthur
O WASHINGTON Arthur Jones Buried Alive Working-class feminism is still elusive, but it does exist. One place it's strong is at the local level in the labor movement. That's where Jehane Dyllan...
...Daughter of an Irish mother and an Italian father, Dyllan was first employed in a Memphis dry-cleaning shop where the fumes made her sick...
...I thought I was going to get an ulcer...
...Some of these union local presidents, in Jackson, Tennessee, were the most dynamic women of any class, of any age, I have ever met," she says...
...After her first marriage failed, Dyllan found that acting wasn't enough...
...And to witness means to let one's actions speak at least as loud as one's words...
...Next, because the third draft appeared to be more responsive to their critics' opinions than to their own, the assembled bishops reinstated stronger phrasing to show this clearly was their document, not Ronald Reagan's and not Rome's...
...People stood up and said things in the middle...
...In Lineman, the women on the assembly lines, but particularly Sweet Light-nin', the novice union organizer, are buried up to their necks in full-time work, full-time families, soaring ambitions, and crushed hopes...
...That's where Jehane Dyllan met it face-to-face while touring with her one-person play, Silkwood...
...11 The bishops are moving U.S...
...First, fearful that they had given the impression of bowing to White House pressure on the third draft of their "peace letter," the bishops quickly reinstated the word "halt" over "curb" in reference to nuclear arms production...
...She escaped to Boston and earned a Master of Fine Arts degree in drama at Boston University...
...Oh my...
...H Despite internal church turmoil, most U.S...
...It was alive and there were fights...
...is economics, and justice specifically means economic justice...
...Lineman is the mirror held up to the audience...
...To that extent, therefore, the peace letter could, conceivably, mean that almost everything is beginning to change in American Catholicism...
...The answer must be found abroad as well as at home...
...that people were alive for this kind of message, that ordinary people could be involved, that ordinary people could do fantastic things...
...colleagues, came out with a far stronger peace letter of their own than progressive German Catholics had anticipated...
...That doesn't mean proselytizing...
...They had full-time jobs, and they were serving all these people, and they had families, and they were wonderful leaders...
...If Dyllan discovered working-class women on the road, they may have helped her discover herself...
...Politics in the U.S...
...I've always done a lot of Catholic Worker-type work, so the other was the feeling of being touched by people who were of my own background...
...Will the final draft of their pastoral letter influence the arms race...
...But she didn't escape all the way...
...Their background was similar to mine...
...And German sensibilities are a strong factor in the current nuclear machinations of the superpowers...
...Technically everything was out of my control, but one thing carried me: how alive it was...
...Louis, she joined the Catholic Worker movement and lived in the notorious Pruitt-Igoe public housing complex...
...What happened to the Catholic bishops in Chicago...
...But these union women...
...One was toward art—a pull to escape from reality, from being born poor...
...While learning with Silkwood, Dyllan was already moving on...
...But those apprehensions are quickly dispelled...
...The German bishops, emboldened by their U.S...
...In St...
...On opening night at the Kennedy Center's Terrace Theater, a few hours after my talk with Dyllan, the audience showed it was impressed with Dyllan and her co-player, Paul Meachem...
...Catholics are coming to terms with their church...
...I had an image from my own growing up poor of what working-class women were like," said Dyllan during a break in final rehearsals for her new play, Lineman and Sweet Light-nin...
...Silkwood, by Dyllan's own admission, is a naturalistic and linear play...
...H By witnessing to the poor and for the poor, the church may be hoping to attract the poor and others to Christian beliefs that increasingly deal with a "social gospel" and social activism...
...To Catholics, to evangelize means either to "witness" or to convert...
...In current Catholic argument, there is no peace without justice...
...It's easy to be turned off by the idea of a play commissioned by a union, about unions, for a union audience...
...They were Shakespearean...
...And just as the Silkwood audience spawned Lineman, so the Lineman audience may well spawn the next Dyllan Play-Somewhere from the upper reaches of the hall, a voice called: "When are you going to do Dorothy Day...
...They felt they weren't accomplishing very much...
...She worked her way through St...
...So: H The bishops could be positioning American Catholicism as a major social force...
...Karen Silkwood was buried up to her neck in the awesome material she'd unearthed as an atomic plant worker...
...Beneath the surface, it's one woman consciously bringing Bertolt Brecht and Samuel Beckett to American theater in a new guise...
...Third, the final vote overwhelmingly supporting the strengthened document speaks of a new alliance of moderate and progressive bishops determined to move the Catholic Church off political dead center in the United States...
...I tried to take Silkwood to the real Karen Silkwoods out there," she says...
...She wanted to create something...
...She was talking to two unions, the Communications Workers of America and the United Food and Commercial Workers Union, about commissions for her next play...
...On the surface, Lineman is a play about union organizing...
...the audience reviews the play after each performance...
...Sprawled in an uncomfortable chair in a Kennedy Center dressing room, Dyllan continues, "There's a certain Southern poverty, there's this idea of limitations, very narrow visions...
...In Beckett's play, Happy Days, a woman is buried up to her neck...
...And worrying about what happened to them—and feeling like the Jew who escaped Hitler: a little bit guilty for being the one who left them behind...
...Her first try was Silkwood...
...I'll make no effort to review Lineman here...
...H There is something of a race against time, since those Catholics who are not coming to terms are leaving the church in significant numbers...
...At the end, somewhat in the manner of Brecht, the play is opened up to the audience...
...She wrote it after interviewing some 500 CWA organizers and retirees...
...They didn't see the grandeur of what they were doing...
...II Catholicism may be replacing Protestantism as the dominant religious influence in U.S...
...There have always been two very strong calls in my life," she says...
...What impact, then, on the arms race...
...Louis University as a nurse's aide and telephone operator...
...society...
...They were hot audiences...
...But the real significance of the Chicago meeting lies in its long-term consequences...
...Catholics into something they've never done: evangelization...
Vol. 47 • July 1977 • No. 7
