ARTICLE: "From Wesleyan to L.A., Via the Alaskan Route"L.A. Times, Friday, June 22, 1984

by CRAIG FISHER

When her play "Homesteaders" opens at the Matrix Theater Sunday, Nina Shengold won't be surprised if some members of the audience assume she's a man.

At the play's previous productions, Shengold says she observed theatergoers "looking in their programs at intermissions and saying, 'Oh, my God. This is by a girl,' " The play'rf strong masculine characters and themes, she says, have led many to believe that it must have been written by a man.

That's fine with her: She says she's always "rather enjoyed" people's perplexity about her.

Earlier this month, Shengold, 28, sat upstairs at the Matrix and recalled how growing up in Bayonne, N.J., she was "a pretty ambitious kid" who was directing plays by the time she was a senior in high school. She completed Wesleyan University in three years with a degree in directing, in 1974. and went to New York to become a director.

After four years of backstage work (lighting, carpentry and the like), however, she was still no closer to her goal. So, in the autumn of 1978, she headed west, and, for six months in 1979, lived and worked in the southeast Alaskan panhandle as, among other things, a deckhand on a salmon trawler.

"When you're steering a boat for anywhere from six to 12 hours all day—and all you're basically doing is looking out for floating debris and keeping your eye on the depth sound—it's very meditative. I got a tremendous amount of writing done just in terms of having that much time to think," she says.

Upon returning to New York, Shengold says she developed "Homesteaders" out of her reflections about people, like herself, who had sought an alternate, and often ragged, life style in Alaska, which she describes as "the opposite of the American dream... downward mobility."

"I was wondering why people in the 1980s would want to try to find themselves by living a very primitive life style, basically living off the land. To me, it was tied into the '60s dream," Shengold says.

"Alaska seems like a place outside of time. It's a place where people can get stuck in their own past."

"Homesteaders," which opened at the Capital Repertory Company in Albany, N.Y., in 1983 and was performed at the Long Wharf Theatre in New Haven, Conn., in February, is being given its West Coast premiere here.

It concerns five people (two men and three women) who are part of what Shengold calls the "subsistence-fishermen-hippie-dropout population" of southeastern Alaska. Although the play is set in 1979, Shengold says it's "as if '79 had stopped about 10 years earlier."

But, Shengold notes, Alaska is not truly an escape hatch: "You can't make your solutions geographically. However much you want to take yourself out of your old way of life, you're the same person. Ultimately to start over you have to come to terms with what you've been.

"That's universal. I don't think that just happens in Alaska."

Also read about HOMESTEADERS actress Veronica Cartwright

HOMESTEADERS was a selection of the 1984 Olympic Arts Festival
(see article below)