The Melodrama of an Emerging Dramatic Artist
Part Two—The Present and The Future
Eliot Fisher has directed and served as pianist for the last three Santa Fe Fiesta melodramas. Harnessing the satirical barbs of a bevy of alliterative assassins—his writers—Eliot has helped puncture the “Turn the Town into a Tourist Trap” and the “Star Struck Santa Fe Status Seeker” pretensions of local politicians and culture mavens.
In 2003, for the twentieth anniversary of the Engine House Theater, Eliot wrote and directed The Outlaw Barber of Living Proof, an original melodrama based on the outlaw Belle Starr’s 1868 hiding out in a small New Mexico village. He then transferred the play to Wesleyan where after some initial skepticism it received a rousing production and enthusiastic audience responses. Realizing he’d hit on a good thing, Eliot returned for his senior year at Wesleyan with a 1992 revision of a 1980 packet of information from the Santa Fe Fiesta Melodrama Committee on how to write a contemporary melodrama. Eliot’s senior year project was a contemporary melodrama whose narrative was based on a local controversy. Wesleyan is an activist school and “chalking” of any kind—political, social, advertising, toilet stall stuff—was outlawed. Eliot gave full vent to the absurdity of this directive and realized the true basis of his art “is playing with form and expectations. I want the artist and audience to experiment and to experience dislocation.”
If “play” is Eliot Fisher’s dramatic aesthetic, hard work and industriousness are what pay the rent for him. Formerly the musical director for Pandemonium Productions, Eliot worked on such plays as Aladdin, Grease, Disney’s High School Musical and The Jungle Book. He is currently musical director for Eldorado Children’s Theater where he has directed Godspell and Rocky Horror Picture Show. He is also rehearsal pianist for the National Dance Institute. Eliot is surprised he is surviving in Santa Fe by doing art: “It’s awesome. I have an investment in what I’m doing and I’m doing things I love—playing music and creating.”
While he’s always considered teaching “as my Plan B,” Eliot is currently supplementing his income by teaching. Moreover, he is enjoying doing so and sees it as part of his future plans. Immediately after graduating from Wesleyan, Eliot returned home and earned a second BA in Documentary Studies at the College of Santa Fe (CSF). He traveled to Airmores, Brazil, and completed a documentary film with colleague Anna Kings about a hydroelectric dam in the area. He was hired by CSF to return to Brazil to run a summer program and this academic year he’s teaching in the college’s one-year certificate program for documentary studies as Coordinator of Adult Programs. He’s impressed with his students: “They are passionate (mostly) women students with tons of life experience and wisdom who need logistical and technical skills.” Also, in the Fall of 2007, Mimi Roberts of the New Mexico State Department of Cultural Affairs and the new media Department at New Mexico Highlands University (NMHU) contacted Eliot to coordinate and document the “Site Santa Fe Biennial” entitled “The Lucky Number Seven.” With students from the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA), NMHU, and CSF, Eliot is working with “students who are learning the meaning of collaboration.”
When assessing what frustrates him the most about being a dramatic artist in Santa Fe, Eliot stresses the “lack of the willingness of groups and other artists to collaborate.” He is also bothered by being unable to “help Santa Fe thrive as a theater town” and by being unable to disabuse people of the myth that “to make it one must have a show in New York City.”
In the latter case, Eliot is taking an idiosyncratic route to disprove the “Big Apple” myth. He is planning to submit the 2008 Santa Fe Fiesta Melodrama to the New York Musical Theatre Festival. This is the populist festival that led to such musical hits as Urinetown, Altar Boys, and Q Street. Success at the festival would help put Santa Fe on the national theater scene.
When asked to discuss future plans, Eliot revealed he is in pre-production for an “experimental documentary” on immigration from Brazil to Boston. The focus is on the new American Dream as both “unattainable and continually inspiring.” He is also considering a screenplay for a film adaptation of his grandfather’s The Warriors.
However, Eliot was quick to add that he “wants to keep doing the same, keep improving, and be here (Santa Fe).” I’d love “my entire life to be projects” and “to make quality popular art that reaches huge audiences.” Eliot Gray Fisher even has three commandments that he tries to live by:
- Consider how you live.
- Consider how you make art.
- Err on the side of not compromising your principles.
When he reviewed his acting roles, Eliot summarized his characters as “old souls.” If he added the word “wise beyond his years,” Eliot Fisher could employ this theatrical self-assessment to himself.
