Money matters Abundance takes on the economy of class BY JOHNETTE RODRIGUEZ

New York-based playwright, director, and performance artist Marty Pottenger has an insatiable curiosity about the way the world goes ’round, be it the war in the Balkans (Winning the Peace and Just War), the 60-year project of building a water tunnel underneath New York City (Obie Award-winning City Water Tunnel #3), or the economic disparities in American society (Abundance). It is the latter, a community arts performance project, that comes to Providence next week, with a multi-media theater piece November 7 and 8 at the Carriage House and a public workshop, co-sponsored by the Rhode Island Council on the Humanities and Everett Dance Theatre, on November 4 at the Rhode Island Foundation (attendance is limited; call 273-2250 or 351-4825 to be included).

Abundance, written and directed by Pottenger and co-directed by Steve Bailey, draws on interviews conducted over the past three years. Pottenger talked to more than 400 people, from multi-millionaires to minimum wage earners and welfare recipients. She wanted to bring about conversations among people from different parts of the economic spectrum in order for them to share their experiences about money and to consider the possibility that there are enough resources for everyone on the planet. She asked a series of questions about money, ending with: " What is one thing that would change in your life if you knew that from this moment on everyone everywhere would always have enough? "

Abundance is touring to just eight cities before a three-week run in New York in January. Based on seeing City Water Tunnel #3 at the Carriage House in ’98, I’m betting that Abundance will be a funny, thought-provoking, carefully crafted, and completely memorable evening of theater. I caught up with Pottenger by phone earlier this week.

Q: How did you get the idea for this piece?

A: It was a combination of reading great statistics: the fact that we spend $61 million a year on carbonated soft drink beverages and $95 million a day on lottery tickets — $35 billion a year. And the fact that money’s something that we’re inundated with information about — best sellers, magazines, radio shows, newspapers, stock market reports, TV shows every day of the week, entire channels devoted to money — and yet there’s a profound and thorough silence, a taboo, on actually talking about it and telling your stories about your experience, which would at least lead people to be able to think better. So that taboo serves no one and yet is very much in place.

Q: How did you start gathering information?

A: I did these dialogue groups in New York for a year, once a month. One time I asked people to bring in financial papers of their lives and make collages out of them. It was so clear that people had lived in fear of their personal financial papers all their lives. There’s this toxic drawer. I call it " Drawer of Disasters and Dreams, " where people stuff these papers in their home and live like that’s a radioactive place. By these people becoming artists and making a collage out of the papers, they completely transformed within seconds to being in charge and thinking about the papers as their materials and had a very powerful relationship to them. They could have lived 100 more years and never had a powerful relationship with those papers. That use of art is how I think about social change.

Q: What is the structure of the play? Is it a drama or is it individual people telling their stories?

A: There are four main threads, but the stories all interweave. One is a dialogue of nine people meeting over the course of a year; they are played by five actors. Those are based on actual people. One is a relationship between a white 81-year-old billionaire and his African-American manservant of 30 years. The white billionaire’s name is Lazarus and his manservant is Job. It’s a very intense relationship that takes place in the mansion.

Another thread is word arias — five of them — they’re lyric, spoken-word poems with choreography, elemental movement, using phrases from the interviews I did across the country. The fourth thread is two New York City sanitation men who offer the audience a lot of information about current economic facts in the United States today. One is a consumer thing, one is a wealth distribution thing, and one is just great statistics.

Q: Did the Lazarus and Job relationship come out of someone that you met?

A: Uh-huh. Although it’s as mythic as everything else. The video only comes up in Lazarus and Job’s part of the piece, with black-and-white security footage from Lazarus’s houses all over the world and cartoons and nature footage. It should serve as a powerful metaphorical underpinning. Lazarus in the play (not in real life) collects premier American historical paintings, such as George Washington Crossing the Delaware, Thomas Cole, Bierstadt, Remington. So, actually, during the show, the audience experiences the history of the United States from the 1700s on through these paintings. It felt important to me to look at our different historical periods as part of my discussion about money and economics. Where have we been? What are the pieces of our puzzle?

Q: How did you get access to the billionaires?

A: Actually they were the tens or hundreds of millionaires. I met them through personal connections, through people who knew people who knew people. That kind of money buys a lot of privacy and that was part of the experience of doing the piece, getting to have a relationship with that secrecy.

Q: What was the most surprising thing you learned from the interviews?

A: That, in response to the question about " If everyone had enough? " most people said they would make art. They’d draw, they’d sing, they’d paint. It was a little upsetting but very moving.