Irish Echo - September 4-10 2002

Theatre Company plumbs community for new voices

By Joseph Hurley

One of the primary assets of the Aisling Irish community center in Yonkers    is a former broadway actress, Holly Villaire, who is the artistic director of the Hamm & Clov Stage Company, currently operating out of Aisling’s headquarters.

            Hamm & Clov takes its name from the tortured and self-torturing characters in Samuel Beckett’s “Endgame”, one of the greatest and most resonant plays in the great Dublin-born dramatist’s canon, and certainly second only to “Waiting For Godot” in terms of its overall reputation.

            By the time Aisling Center was founded, in May 1997, Hamm & Clov had been around for nearly a quarter of a century.  Begun in 1972 by Villaire, her then-husband, the director David Villaire, and producer Eric Krebs, the group had as its goal the furtherance of experimental and “difficult” theatre, much of it, as the name Hamm & Clov might indicate, of Irish origin.

            Despite her married name, which has become the surname she uses professionally, Villaire’s original name was Holly Hood and she claims Irish roots, but not very recent ones.  “If you go back 300 years,” she said, “I’m Irish.  Our family’s Irish beginnings go back to the 1700’s.”

            Aisling’s mission statement states that its purpose is to provide educational, cultural and social services for the Irish immigrant community, and a plaque on the wall of the organization’s McLean Avenue offices displays the word “immigrant” prominently.

            Villaire’s goals for Hamm & Clov’s participation at Aisling would appear to conform gracefully with the institution’s objectives, although the patterns of Irish immigration are subject to continual alteration and will probably remain so.

            “The Aisling Irish Community Center services the Irish community in Yonkers and Woodlawn,” she said. “ They have many services, and they were kind enough to offer us the space out of which to work, and to seek out and develop talent in the Irish community, perhaps particularly among the Irish who are new to the area, and new to the country.”

            As it happens, Villaire was born and mainly raised in Yonkers, and her family home is only a little distance from McLean Avenue.

            In its earliest days, Hamm & Clov was a charter member of the influential Off-Off-Broadway Alliance, which became known by the acronym OOBA. Later, the organization became the Alliance of Resident Theaters/New York, better known, perhaps, as ART/New York.

            For a number of years, Hamm & Clov lay dormant, until, just around the time of 9/11, Villaire made a connection with the Aisling Center and the group took on a new and different sort of life.

            “I really wanted to find new talent, so the Irish Echo put a little article in the paper for us, saying that we were having a talent search,” she said.  “What our whole operation is about is developing new voices and calling upon people who are not ordinarily thought of as writers and actors.”

            Certainly not writers and actors in the conventional sense, which is, in a way, Villaire’s point.

            The article flushed out a surprising number  of fledgling writers and performers, and Villaire began to schedule a series of informal gatherings, held each Sunday afternoon at the Aisling Center.  People would appear, sing songs, tell stories, read portions of things they’d written, scenes from plays, novels, and often fragments from projected memoirs.

            Eventually, Villaire decided she wanted to produce an evening of performances by the individuals who had been taking part in those Sunday afternoon sessions.

            “We put together a piece called ‘Anam’, which means ‘soul’ in Irish, and we were just going to do it in the room we use at Aisling,” she said.

            They rehearsed, off and on, in September, October, and November of last year, and, somewhere along the way, the venue was changed, much to the delight of Villaire and her performers.

            “The Westchester Arts Council heard about what we were doing and someone from their folklore department came down and listened to part of it, and asked if they could co-sponsor it,” Villaire said. “Then the city of Yonkers asked if they could co-sponsor it, too.”

            That explains why the program for the debut performance, on Dec. 1, 2001, was headed “Hamm & Clov Stage Company, in cooperation with the Westchester Arts Council, The Yonkers Department of Parks and Recreation, and the Aisling Irish Community Center presents ‘Anam’.

            “I went to the city of Yonkers looking for a larger space”, Villaire said, “when they found out that we were going to do it as a benefit for Irish-American victims of Sept. 11, they came up with this gorgeous 750 seat theater at the Mark Twain School on Woodlawn Avenue in Yonkers.”

            The school offered another plus in Villaire’s view. “I wanted to do it in the neighborhood,” she said, “so that people could just walk over very casually if they wanted to.”

            The evening was free, but through donations, “Anam” raised over $2000 for the 9/11 fund.  In May, there was another performance of the show as part of the Westchester Arts Council’s Irish House Party in White Plains.

            “The people we found in the talent search,” says Villaire, “evolved into a kind of little family.  We worked up the material for what became ‘Anam’ just by getting together and sharing stories.  I asked them to go home and write the stories they’d told us, and, eventually, I persuaded them to perform the material on stage.”

            Understandably, some of the individuals were shy, but Villaire’s powers of persuasion were strong enough that the evening came together in good form.

            Some of her hopes for the future involve experienced, professional performers.  On Sunday, June 25, veteran Broadway actor Timothy Jerome, who, years ago, had been an early Hamm & Clov participant, came to the Aisling Center and did a rehearsal reading of Beckett’s celebrated one-act play, “Krapps Last Tape.”

            Villaire hopes that Jerome, who only a week earlier had starred in the world premiere of Patrick Page’s play “Swansong,” at Lucille Lortel’s White Barn theatre in Westport, Conn, will return to Yonkers for a further series of fully-staged performances of “Krapp’s Last Tape”, and that she will be able to coax other professionals into appearing for her.

            Mainly, however,” Villaire said, “ I want to continue to find the richness of the stories people tell, as well as finding these new artists who don’t even suspect they can do this sort of thing, and see how we can bring all this to the public. What ‘Anam’ did for the group that did it was to create a great felling of pride and self-esteem and artistry.  People rose to the level they didn’t believe they could reach.  I was thrilled by the richness that I found, like gold in a stream.”