The Melodrama of an Emerging Dramatic Artist
Part One—The Past
On March 19, 2008, over mineral water and scones, I met with Santa Fe’s Eliot Gray Fisher to discuss his burgeoning career in the arts. Whatever criteria one may consider—genetics, upbringing, academic preparation, and inclination—Eliot was destined to be an artist. However, what is most striking about his early successes in the dramatic arts is how he has taken a tired, much disabused form—the classic melodrama—and breathed life into it to create a twenty-first century melding of high and low art.
Eliot Gray Fisher’s roots are firmly entrenched in an accomplished artistic family. His maternal grandmother who survived the Allied bombing of Dresden was a talented dance instructor at Colorado College well into her sixties. His maternal grandfather was also a respected professor at Colorado College, but is probably best known for his highly praised book on men in war, The Warriors. Eliot’s parents are also deeply involved in the arts. His father Rick is a sculptor and musician while his mother Lisa is a poet; both parents are teachers and educational administrators. Even his older sister Kristina who works on legal issues concerning social justice and the environment was a national award-winning fiction writer in secondary school and a legal writer of distinction throughout her undergraduate and law school careers. How could Eliot escape being a musician and author with such a background?
Clearly, Eliot’s parents were a major influence on his artistic interests. He especially remembers as a very young child how his mother would play imaginative games with him and his sister before they could read: “She’d sit at the typewriter and ask us to tell her a story that she would type as we spoke. Then we’d go off and illustrate the stories that we just created. This was fun.” Eliot learned to read early because when his sister learned to read before him, she would come to a point in a narrative and gasp. Then she’d tell Eliot that because he couldn’t read she couldn’t tell him the dramatic event that caused her (over-) reaction. He simply had to know what was happening.
In assessing his upbringing, Eliot came early to the unmistakable conclusion that “art was the family religion.” His parents were continually “writing music, telling stories, and making art.” Equally important for Eliot’s development as an artist, his parents were on the early edges of technology, especially in the use of film and video. As a result, Eliot grew up with the contemporary belief that “different media are not separate.” He saw at a very early age that all aesthetic tools were ripe for use and that subgenres were, ultimately, limiting.
Eliot’s introduction to theater began in elementary school. He acted in abridged versions of Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Hamlet in grades four to six. In sixth grade, he became hooked on the stage. He began to study music and composition on the piano and even composed a six-song, forty-five minute play, The Gift, which others over praised as being reminiscent of Moliere. However, Eliot’s assessment is much less highbrow: “I was very much influenced by the Disney cartoons of the day—Aladdin, Beauty and the Beast, and The Little Mermaid. I loved their melodramatic effect.”
While attending Santa Fe Preparatory School, Eliot continued his acting career: “I always felt old and wound up playing character parts in the standard high school musical revivals—Guys and Dolls, Fiddler on the Roof, and Oklahoma. My favorite part was Reg in “The Norman Conquests, a stuffy, middle-aged character.” More important, while at Prep, Eliot composed a musical comedy Tune Up! that is a parody of the form (The play’s subtitle is “A Musical for Those Who Hate Musicals.”) and a send-up of the rural American folk tale: “I was playing with the word ‘simple’ in all manifestations of the word.” While Brigadoon and Oklahoma influence the play, it is actually sui generis. Eliot submitted three songs from the play and won the state and then the Southwest Regional awards for musical composition. For this flurry of theater activity, Eliot was awarded the Mayor’s Excellence in the Arts Youth Award that is, in essence, a “lifetime achievement” recognition before he reached his majority!
During his undergraduate days at Wesleyan University (Middletown, CT), Eliot began a long-term relationship with classic melodrama. He would return home to Santa Fe during the summer term and work as musical director for the Engine House Theater in Madrid. Former owners Cliff and Edie Cato believed in performing naturalistic versions of classical melodramas, employing the traditional Delsarte method of acting: “They (the Catos) took it all very seriously while I found the form ridiculous and fun.” Thus, Eliot had a base of operations and a supportive community from the start of his work with melodrama, a form that he loved for “its interaction of players and audience.”
A product of the Age of the Simpsons—two major influences on his writing for the theater have been the seminal texts Philosophy and The Simpsons and Leaving Springfield—and influenced by the deadpan satire of Comedy Central’s Stewart and Colbert, Eliot believes that melodrama is “ripe for re-invention” and can be a “contemporary form with its tongue-in-cheek critique of contemporary culture.” Furthermore, Eliot is always addressing the question of whether or not theater is dying because of the dominance of film. Eliot desires to “challenge and confront his audiences and to wipe out the distinctions between high and low culture.” He’s chosen a reinvigorated and postmodern melodrama to help him achieve his aesthetic goals.
Wesleyan was a fruitful environment for a twenty-first century parodist. It is a true liberal arts school where he could take traditional humanities courses to “see the bigger picture” while majoring in film studies at a college “with no required liberal arts core courses.” In fact, the program was primarily an introduction “to pre-1970’s films for students who didn’t want to go to just a film school.” Discovering “that artists were regular people,” Eliot was encouraged (and required) to strike out on his own and to avoid the potential “for self-indulgence” that a film conservatory frequently offers. For Eliot, Wesleyan was Santa Fe transported to the East Coast: “I found myself in a supportive community for the arts and surrounded by talented, passionate people who were always doing interesting projects.” In turn, Eliot transported a bit of Santa Fe theater to the wilds of Connecticut.
