RANDOM SIGHTINGS by Polly Warfield 
 August 30, 2001

Frogman

    Glenn Hopkins is an American original. Names like Johnny Appleseed, Woody Guthrie, Will Geer, and Walt Whitman come to mind. Hopkins, like them, marches to a different drummer. A longtime theatre person with a lot of irons in the fire, he describes himself thus: "The Other. The oddball. I look around to see what everyone's doing, what they're not doing that needs to be done, and then I do that."
    "I work 20 hours a week, mornings, teaching English to the foreign born," he said. "It's enough to live on and I have afternoons and evenings free for theatre, writing plays." He considers himself primarily a playwright, but he's also a Green party political activist. "The Green movement started in Germany; it's 10 years ahead of us. What began here 20 years ago as a fringe movement is now a party. Ralph Nader got enough votes in the last election to put Bush in the White House." Depending on your point of view, that's good or bad. To Hopkins, it's promising, a harbinger.
    Speaking of which, he's at work on a play about frogs as harbingers of world change. Greek playwright Aristophanes beat him to the frog theme, but his is a musical, Mark and Barbara Frog. "On top of the Andes, and every mountain, where there used to be thousands of frogs, now there are 10. Frogs are disappearing from the Earth," said Hopkins. "Frogs are the pioneers who brought life to the land from he oceans. In the American Indians' cosmology, based on 30,000 years of observation, the frog predicts the future."
    Hmmm, depressing. But Hopkins promised his play will "sparkle." Its music, which he composed, is "very froggy. With bassoons." Harris Smith would like to stage Hopkins' frog show at his Masquers' Cabaret in October. But it was unfinished as we spoke, and its playwright didn't know when it would be, or if.
    Hopkins' Venice Mootney Theatre Company, at its zenith in the '80s, in July celebrated 25 years of theatre in LA with a staging in Venice of his play ...All in the Same Boat. Critics have described it as "intriguing," "outrageous," "Brechtian." His play Surrogates won praise for "best dialogue this side of Shepard." Kathleen Foley, reviewing White Bread for Drama-Logue, hailed Hopkins for "writing from the heart, rather than the pocketbook." The late Quentin Crisp was featured narrator in Hopkins' Robin Hood, which, someone wrote, "looks like it's being done by the Marx Brothers, Benny Hill, and Monty Python all at once." Hopkins' Animal Husbandry won praise at London's Royal Court Theatre for being "fluent, detailed, complex, and intriguing."
    A big man, 6'1", with a round, benign visage, and brown eyes at once quizzical, kindly, and keenly discerning, Hopkins' focused, lively mind is more concerned with planetary than sartorial matters. He was casual in T-shirt, jeans, and red canvas sneakers when we met at MOCA to get acquainted and talk about theatre. We viewed Rodin sculptures on the terrace, heading for the Edward Hopper exhibit , but, talking all the way, ended up somewhere else, like leaves in the wind, viewing the "Road to Aztlan" (an exhibit since closed). Listening to Hopkins is an experience, as his concepts, pronouncements, and opinions pop, crackle, and jostle one another like popcorn over a high flame. At lunch at MOCNs outdoor cafe, I learned that West Los Angeles' University High School, where Hopkins teaches adult classes, sits on "the springs," a sacred Indian site for 6,000 years. "Twenty-seven thousand gallons of pure, delicious water go down the drain to the ocean every day. Wasted! In a world that needs water. What we do is crazy! Uni should be a business high school," Hopkins declared. "Uni students should be in the bottled-water business!"
    I learned that Hopkins and his Korean wife, concert pianist Christine, have a "wonderful" 4-year-old daughter, named Choice.
(You were expecting an ordinary name?) And that his 28-year-old son, Buckminster Hopkins, from his first Marriage, is named, of course, for Buckminster Fuller, visionary inventor of the Geodesic dome. I heard Hopkins' opinion that we'd be wise to choose the president's cabinet.
before we choose the president. That what the world needs now is "feminine energy". ("I'm so sick of this macho thing!" he said.) He told me life on Earth comes from the moon, rhythms of life from the tide pools--and majorities are often wrong.
    A phone has informed me that Hopkins finished his frog play, now scheduled for an October premiere at Masquers'. I confess I missed all Hopkins' Venice Mootney plays--I admit it, fearing blatant leftist bias and agitprop. Obviously I was wrong. I won't miss Mark and the Barbara Frog.

  RANDOM SIGHTINGS by Polly Warfield