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Elephant Press Conference DAY I: ELEPHANT PRESS CONFERENCE On Monday morning, the first day of the Republican National Convention, our street theater group, eight strong, marches down 5th Avenue to present our "Elephant Press Conference" at Tiffany’s, where a Republican breakfast is going on. The video crew and reporters wait expectantly for the appearance of the elephants. The "Elephant Press Conference" is a faux-media event, where President Pachyderm, his wife and lawyer, all wearing elephant trunks and big ears, come in and tell the assembled reporters they have "had enough" and they are taking back their image from the Republicans who have abused it. President Pachyderm notes, "Elephants are gentle, elephants are true, living family values (pointing to people in the crowd) for you and you and you." He adds that the Bush Republican party is a party of exploitation, not the Lincoln party of emancipation. The reporters and a heckler bombard the elephants with questions such as: "What animal do you think should represent the Republicans?" The elephant president replies, "The vultures did express interest." Other questions: "What’s an elephant’s point of view on No Child Left Behind?" The elephant wife replies, "We don’t leave anyone behind." What about Healthy Forest and Clear Skies? The lawyer explains that Clear Skies allows more pollution and Healthy Forests means clear-cutting them. One reporter notes that Bush is a compassionate conservative. The elephant president fires back, "He’s only compassionate towards corporations." As the three elephants leave, the reporters try to get a picture of the baby elephant: a trunk peeking out of a blanket. With Reuters and other media outlets filming the event, it is like a real press conference. Even some of the police guarding Tiffany’s try hard to stifle a smile. We move on to where CBS presents its morning show. The building is guarded by police toting M16s. We begin the piece with the elephants on the steps, and are quickly chased away by a group of security officers in dark suits. We start again and a passerby shouts on seeing the elephants, "Oh my God, you’re kidding me." Two hostile construction workers, strong Bush supporters, sitting on the steps remark "It’s better to kill them over there (Iraq), than have them kill us here" One of them points to the elephant president’s plastic trunk and says, "What’s that, a dildo on your face?" We cross 5th Avenue, and walk along Central Park South, with the reporters following the elephants and peppering them with questions as we move past the Republican delegates exiting their hotels. The elephants complain about discrimination because of their gray skins. And when a jogger runs into the actress holding the bundle with the elephant baby she shouts, "He hurt my child." The scene is surreal with the actors wildly riffing on the material. One hotel worker yells to us, "I wish I had some peanuts." Next stop is the Time Warner building at Columbus Circle where we do the piece for a variety of people on the street. One woman dragging a child behind her angrily says, "I’m voting for Bush." After the second performance, one of our actresses collects the props and leaves. About five minutes later two cameramen from CNN come down to video us because their producer had heard about our performance. We tell them Reuters had taped us and they could get the feed. It was a lost opportunity to connect with the mainstream media on the street. But we had a great time with our "Elephant Press Conference." DAY II: TAKING OUR SHIRTS OFF AT TAVERN-ON-THE-GREEN We gathered again on Tuesday morning on Central Park West before the Republican economic roundtable breakfast at Tavern-on-the-Green to do "Taking Our Shirts Off." When we attempt to present our theater piece on the sidewalk near the Park entrance to Tavern-on-the-Green, the police put their hands on two of the actresses in our group of eight, and approach me to do the same thing in order to push us away. They order us to move across the street and we comply. But the cops create such a stir, that the assembled media, TV and reporters, follow after us to see our theater piece. "Taking Our Shirts Off" cites the woes of Bush’s economic policies for Americans and, after listing several, we sing "Dubya, Can You Spare a Dime?" a modified version of Yip Harburg’s Depression-era classic, "Brother Can You Spare a Dime?" and unfurl a banner declaring: "The Republicans Are Taking the Shirts Off Our Backs." The women take off their tops (they’re not topless) and the men on either end of the line remove their shirts and throw them on the sidewalk. The media is eating this up. They are a surrogate for the regular people on the street who are not watching our performance in great numbers. They ask us to do it again and again. One reporter keeps videoing me with my shirt off for the Associated Press. Another reporter keeps questioning me about where we get our information about the various Republican events. Reporters keep asking us if we were from A31, the alleged anarchist group. We tell the various press people we are peaceful independent theater artists who are concerned about Bush's economic policies and their effects on the poor. I ask a Post reporter why he is just standing around and he says he is waiting for something violent to happen. When ABC-TV showed a 10-second film clip of our performance later that evening, they juxtaposed our peaceful theatrical protest near Tavern-on-the-Green with the violent police action that night at Madison Square Garden, making it seem that the two events were related. Tensions were rising, the police seemed more nervous and edgy on the morning of the second day of the convention. DAY III: THE BOAT-IN ON CENTRAL PARK LAKE I really didn’t believe that they would rent rowboats on Central Park Lake on the day of the luncheon for the Republican House Speaker’s wife at the Boathouse Café in Central Park. I enter the Park an hour early and check out the situation. The boat house is open: business as usual. As I walk along the 72nd Street roadway to meet the rest of the actors near the entrance to the Park, I see two cops talking from the windows of their respective cars. I listen. One cop is saying, "I hear they’re planning to launch rubber rafts on the lake. We’ll be ready. I got this South American blow gun from my brother-in-law. We’ll shoot the rafts with the arrows." I know the cops are aware that something is up. When I meet Kayhan, one of the actresses who organized the theater group, I say, "I think there’s at least a fifty-fifty chance we’ll be arrested." But I say that I think we should go ahead. I couldn’t run out on an idea I had initiated in the group and one we had all developed. She says that anyone who didn’t want to participate didn’t have to. We had all agreed collectively that we would not directly do any actions that would get us arrested. I walk over to the boathouse and four of the actresses in the group soon appear. We decide to rent three row boats. There is no security check even though there are many cops clustered around the entrance to the restaurant. Two women in each boat will hold the banner, "The Republicans Are Taking the Shirts Off Our Backs" while I, by myself in another rowboat, will shout the economic slogans to the Republicans lunching on the terrace of the Boathouse Café. We go around the bend in the lake to rehearse our action on the boats. In the course of our rowing we recruit another couple in a boat with a sign, "Outsource Bush." An African-American man, in another boat, thinks we are having a prayer service on the lake. He comments that we seemed to be praying about the economy when he heard us singing "Dubya, Can You Spare a Dime?” We row back around the bend and place the three boats within twenty-five feet of the Boathouse Café terrace. I shout the slogans, we sing the songs and we take off our shirts for the Republican delegates. We do it several times and the delegates crowd along the rail of the restaurant watching us. About a dozen cops on a nearby rocky outcropping are smiling and one of them says we should do it again. A police official on the terrace watching us is very busy on his walkie-talkie. One of the delegates shouts, "You’re stuck in the mud and you don’t know where you’re going" as we drift towards the shore. A gondola with a group of delegates glides past and they applaud our performance but strongly state they don’t agree with us. The Gondolier, a young man, says he is rowing these Republican delegates, but he is going to vote for Kerry. At that point we wrap up our banner and row back to the boathouse dock. After I present my card and get a deposit refund on the boat, I , and several of the other performers are blocked from leaving and told to wait by a tough-looking man in a "Parks Department" shirt, obviously an undercover cop or FBI man. The police official with the walkie-talkie huddles with a bunch of cops trying to decide if they should arrest us. One of our performers, who stayed on shore, had made a call on her cell phone when she saw what was happening and a NYCLU lawyer appears on the spot where we are being detained, to observe what is going on. After about seven minutes, the "Parks" employee blocking the way removes his leg from the narrow exit point and tells us we can go and should move to the road immediately. I guess they couldn’t find anything to charge us with. He then orders another employee to go out on the lake and round up all the other boats. He says the lake is now closed to further boat rentals. As we are leaving I hear a cop saying, "We didn’t expect this." So much for homeland security. We all felt the Boat-in on Central Park Lake this past Wednesday was a triumph of imagination over the bureaucratic mind. It was a wonderful day for theatrical protest. Howard Pflanzer's plays have been performed at La MaMa ETC, Playwrights Horizons, Symphony Space, Medicine Show and the Kraine Theater (Cocaine Dreams). As a Fulbright Scholar(2003)in India he directed the world premiere of his play, The Terrorist, at the National Center for the Performing Arts (NCPA) in Bombay.
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