The Woman Who Brought The Wind

Straying from my “all movies all the time” repertoire, I recently saw a play that just can’t be ignored.

Snuggled away in the rolling hills of Southern Wisconsin is the little hamlet of Mineral Point, famous for its unparalleled hospitality, independent thinkers, funky arts scene, and Cornish Pasties. Right in the middle of Mineral Point’s historic district, tucked between nineteenth century stone cottages, is the Shakerag Alley Arts Center, home of the Alley Stage. In the late summer dusk, audience members, perfumed with citronella, trooped up the rustic brick walkway to an intimate outdoor theater, the stage implanted in the base of an evocative rocky cliff. The play was “Los Vientos De Marzo”- “The Winds of March”.

I first met Lynn Werner in a writing workshop at Shakerag Alley. She was a small woman with a thick silver braid hanging down beneath an artsy head scarf, and piercing, slightly mischievous eyes. They were eyes that had seen the worst but Lynn was a poet and I suspect that helped them retain their glint. She said she hoped I could make it to a one-woman play that she was preforming at the Alley Stage in a few months.

As she made her way onto the stage that hot August night, she was accompanied by a haunting tune…

If a wind should blow, do you hear them call,

Or do you say “It is merely the wind”?

If a wind should blow, do you hear them cry,

Or do you say “It is merely the wind”?

The set was simple, just a few cardboard boxes, a stool, and a clothes rack draped with colored cloths and a birdlike ethnic mask. A vibrant salsa melody wafted over the sound system and Lynn began to dance. As she unpacked the boxes, a Coca Cola bottle, a small wooden chest, she was a free spirit tossing tissue paper in the air.

Without warning, the melancholic sound of wind cut through the salsa music like a chilly blade. Howling, it swept us back to a time when the free spirits, the salsa music, were inaudible.

It took us back to Columbia where Lynn was a filmmaker, interviewing and documenting the stories of the Columbians, the workers, the mothers, the friends, the revolutionaries, the culture whose voices were being silenced beneath a gale of governmental oppression. Through herself, Lynn conveys the resigned agony of a wife who will never see her husband again, a man in the field who battles the sun for survival, and her own vigor-infused friends fighting for their people, their country. We visit the buxom fish-selling women of the wharfs and the side of an understanding priest. We travel from the serene shade of a tree, to the sweltering expanses of sugarcane. Lynn is the documentarian, the subject, and the lens.

But it was really an autobiographical story. It was the the story of a woman who wanted to open the ears of the world to the voices of Columbia, who wanted to bring the struggle for human rights out of the darkness; but who felt guilt. She was fighting for a people, not with them. What right had she, an outsider, to try and feel the anguish, the spirit, of an entire nation? And she had left it all. Most of her films were destroyed, her friends assassinated. She had come home to safety, but she could not escape the voices of the wind.

And so, that muggy August night in quiet, peaceful Mineral Point, Lynn went back to Columbia. And using words in that vulnerably unassailable way that very few can, she took her audience with her. On a stage in Southern Wisconsin, she brought Columbia to life and in doing so reminded us that seldom is it “merely the wind”.