The first day Donna Blue Lachman was in Haiti, a hotel receptionist, who also happened to be a psychic, stopped her in the lobby.
There in the lobby of the huge hotel, Lachman fainted dead away. Because she felt like the woman was right. And for the rest of her trip, she took extensive notes.
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Lachman, now artistic director of the Blue Rider Theatre, was eventually awarded a fellowship from the Illinois Arts Council to write After Mountains, More Mountains: The Haiti Stories, a play based on her experiences in Haiti that opened in March 1989. But the stories got filtered through the designers and the other actors, and it turned into a much different piece than she wanted.
While the show is named after the Haiti stories, Lachman says the other material is crucial to the performance. When she decided to actually go ahead and do this one-woman show, Lachman began to feel that though the Haiti stories were the core of the show, there was something more important she wanted to say that the stories just didn’t tell.
That statement doesn’t come without a lot of trepidation. Although most of Lachman’s work has been autobiographical, none has been as purely so as Saturday’s show. It will have no sound, no fancy lighting–just Lachman on a bare stage telling her stories.
