Target Margin Theater has just started their latest series of lab productions, under the heading Theater of Tomorrow (continuing through June 6 at Long Island City's Chocolate Factory Theater). It’s a pretty big undertaking for a small company, bringing in the talents of numerous directors, actors and production staff. They’ve endeavored to present eleven different plays from a time in the American theater when the ground underfoot was shifting in many different directions—from 1900-1946. Along with these productions they’re presenting a night of jazz, an artists salon, as well as a discussion on the use of dreams in theater.

On the surface it might seem a little bit like an academic exercise, but much of the work and the context in which it was originally presented speaks directly to the time in which we find ourselves today—theater is struggling to figure out what its role is in the culture, how to survive in difficult economic times, and how to keep pushing boundaries when it seems like there are none left to cross. Not to mention that we find ourselves in a shifting political climate that may not be quite as extreme as the beginning of the 20th century, but has certainly been creating a dramatic context all its own. I asked David Herskovits, the founder and artistic director of Target Margin Theater to chat with me about the project and contemporary theater.

The L: First, tell me a little bit about how Target Margin Theater came to be.

David Herskovits: The theater really came about because I realized that there were certain things that I wanted to do in theater that were not going to find a home in mainstream institutional theater, as it existed almost 20 years ago [when the company was founded], and as it exists now. So I realized that if I wanted to do these things, I needed to just raise money, find people who were interested in what I wanted to do and do it.

What are the things you felt were missing in mainstream theater?

I'm interested in difference as an artistic principle—the gap between anything out in the world and us encountering it. There's a constant tension in the aesthetic experience, between what's familiar and what's challenging our expectations. And there's a certain mystery about what it is, what it means or what it suggests to us. You go to the theater a lot and essentially things tell you what they are, even so-called avant-garde things. They just tell you what they are. Whenever I go to theater like that I feel like I'm being shouted at from the stage. And, you know, I'm not so interested in being shouted at for sixty minutes.

Give me an example of one of these shouters?

The ones we all know are from movies and TV—instances of culture going to great pains to ease the bridge between themselves and their audience. The classic example is movie music; the music is telling you how to feel—now we're supposed to be happy, now we're supposed to be sad.

So it's the extreme literal that you're reacting to?

Another example that you see in the theater all the time is when a director takes a classic play and puts it in a period. If you do Shakespearean comedy in the 1920s then it's flappers and Gatsby types who play tennis on Long Island and we're made very comfortable by that. We're like, “Right, right, right, this is the world I'm in, this is how I'm supposed to feel about it, I recognize these people.” What's interesting to me is to present people with the complete depth of mystery, complexity, and contradiction that exists in a theatrical event.

An analogy for this is the experience of travel. When you go to another place that's really alien from you, everything around you is on fire, it’s electrified a little bit because you can't assume anything. You don't know how to cross the street, you don't know how to talk to somebody, or how close to stand to them, or whether if you nod your head it will mean what you think it means, you don't know what you'll have for breakfast because they don't serve scrambled eggs. And so all of the tiny decisions that we don't deal with everyday we have to encounter anew. We recognize this is breakfast, but we've never really seen breakfast like this before. We're like, “Wow, so I'm having fish for breakfast, cool.” And then my reflection on my own breakfast at home or in the diner becomes different and enriched. And that experience of travel and that celebration of difference is the heart of the matter for me. So there's always a move to challenge what the expectation is, a move to open up the mystery, to embrace the contradictions or complexities of what any particular work or idea may be.

And why use theater, why not another medium?

The immediacy of the encounter, of being in a room with people, an experience that unfolds over time. Not just the immediacy of it but the ephemerality of it. One of the things that's really important to me artistically is letting go. We tend to really work over moments, to try to make them just so, to possess them and to fix them, to shape them, and so the theater is a constant sort of tragic-comic dance of putting all that together and then having it fall apart every single time. It's always about repetition and you never really repeat. And that’s just life, you know—just let it go. This is what we have, we just have this crazy little moment. What I try to do in the theater is to go into a room and make a world the way that I think the world is exciting to live. And then for at least sixty minutes I can live in that world and invite other people into it. So really I just want to live in this kind of insane world all the time and this is a little area where I can do it.

Which brings us to this new insane world that you've created, Theater of Tomorrow, which is quite an epic project.

What's really epic is the amount of material that was being produced in the United States in this more or less random period that we selected from 1900 to 1946, from the beginning of the century to the end of the WWII. I was working on a play by Tennessee Williams, Camino Real, which he started writing after the war in the late 40s. The play is really crazy and sort of famously experimental and poetic and difficult. As I was working on it, I thought, where did this come from? I knew enough to know that there were antecedents to this kind of work, but sometimes it feels to people who know Tennessee Williams like he suddenly went crazy. Instead of writing a play in a kitchen he wrote a play in a dream. And of course that is not at all the case. What you have is amazing waves of not just one movement, but many movements, of different groups of people, starting around the turn of the century, reacting against their institutional theater and the cultural mainstream, trying to take control of what they were doing in small groups and in small rooms that were economically viable for them—there's a very practical and social and political aspect to it. And that's in the teens.

Then you get to the WPA and there's this whole other wave of engagement. And then, of course, there’s the European avant-garde. You had the glorious first wave of late 19th century European avant-garde in many different expressions, and then you find people over here reading these plays or looking at these pictures and hearing about these events. You get people like Eugene O'Neill trying to write an expressionist play. Everyone is also discovering Freud, so people are starting to write plays where their subconscious speaks out loud. And then they're deciding that a play should just be like a poem, it should just be expressive of a state—why does it have to be a story anyway? They’re asking all these very basic and exciting questions about how we can challenge our received notions about what a play is or what an experience in a theater is. And it's just great. I mean, some of this stuff is sort of chilling and humbling because you realize all of these substantial people are writing about it and talking about it, reporting it in the paper. And we don't give this a moment's thought.

I mean, we know about Eugene O'Neill because he went on to write certain great stuff, and eventually American theater becomes crystallized as Long Day's Journey Into Night. And that's a great play, but before that vision of what the American theater is became crystallized this enormous freedom of potential existed. Right now I'm working on a play by Gertrude Stein (A Family of Perhaps Three). I love Stein and have long been interested in her work and she's one very particular branch of this movement and was doing her own very rigorous experimentation over many, many years. But then you get other people who are less well known, you get Susan Glaspell and certain plays by Zora Neale Hurston that we found and the short experimental works that Thorton Wilder was writing in the 1910s and 20s.

What you're talking about is a moment when theater was struggling to identify itself in some sense, at least in America, and I'm wondering if you see something similar happening now?

I very much share the feeling, at least in our community in New York City, which is really where I live and what I can speak to, that it's a time of fantastic ferment and possibility on the part of many young and not so young people who are trying to rethink what they're doing in theater. There's been a particular movement in the past decade or so with new vaudeville and burlesque—that's a part of it, but to me it's just one strand in the bigger picture because in a way, and I don't mean to demean it because I like that stuff, but to me that's just a fashion, people are into that right now stylistically in the way that 20 years ago they were into neon lights or slow motion. So those particular style things come and go. But I do feel like there's a lot of people bringing great energy to it, trying to reinvent what theater is.

You know, in the 60s one big thing that happened in the American theater was the burgeoning of the regional theater movement and the institutionalization of the theater and it was a lot about them building big buildings and putting money into certain kinds of institutional structures and the idea that every town needed a flagship theater. And my personal feeling, and you can quote me on this, is that the regional theater movement is aesthetically inert and culturally irrelevant. And in a way the second part is more important than the first, because look, I have my aesthetic opinions and who cares what I think, who cares if I think the work is exciting or not, and I know many people in the regional theater movement are working in good faith to create work that they believe is very rich and meaningful artistically. But more importantly they have just sort of spun into their own orbit culturally. You have these multi-million dollar edifices in towns all over America where people do these plays to serve a very small group of people that makes certain people feel like, okay we've got a theater, we can check that box off, but it's not really integrated in any meaningful way into the life of that culture, in the broadest sense of community—poor people, rich people, old people, young people, people of all races. They are kind of in a little bit of splendid isolation.

You mention in a letter that's posted on the company’s website that you believe very strongly that all your work is political, so I'm wondering how you think this project is political, if it is, and in what sense?

I really do believe that everything that we do is political. Theater is local, it exists where it is, when it is, then and for those people. As such it's got to be an expression of and in response to whatever that context is. So context is everything. And for me that means very basic things like casting and staffing pieces aggressively in diverse ways. And that's something that we are now well-known for, that's part of the image of the company and I'm very proud of that. And that doesn't just mean race, although race is an important part of it, it means all kinds of other things. It's being aggressive about what the group of people on stage is and what that represents and how it reflects on the content. Which doesn't always mean that the group of people on stage has to be a mirror of the context around it, it's just that there's a conversation there. In terms of this particular project, as I've said, I think that people in my community are excited about challenging audiences’ ideas of what a theatrical event is. If they're not, I would like them to be. So, in a way, I'm trying to say, hey, what do you think this is, and what do you think it might be, and do you realize that 100 years ago someone else thought this too?

Some of the work that we're doing has more direct social content. One of the plays is the WPA piece (Liberty Deferred) that's just this insane phantasmagoria about American history. And then obviously the works by Zora Neale Hurston (Cold Keener and The House That Jack Built) are an expression of her consciousness as an African-American, as an African-American woman, and also her own alienation from the Harlem Renaissance. So nothing is simple, nobody is a spokesperson for anybody but themselves and she's a very vivid example of that. And then, even in the O'Neill plays, in Thirst, you get three people in a boat—one of them is this silent Jamaican worker, sitting in a boat with an upper-class white lady, and a sailor. The play is very poetic and kind of mysterious and it's about death, but it's also this odd little microcosm about people's hang-ups and social tensions.

Talk to me a little bit about the other show you're working on this season, Tennessee William's Camino Real. You mention in your marketing for the show a lot about the relationship that Elia Kazan had to the show.

Here are these two guys who are so important to our received ideas of what an American play is, and it's a moment when they're trying to do something really, really different. And, you know what, they fail. Camino Real flopped on Broadway, nobody knows what to make of it, they hate it, the critics hated it. Then, essentially, in that very moment, American theater becomes crystallized as a particular kind of naturalism—in playwriting, in acting, in production. And Kazan and Williams are avatars of that naturalism. And that's fascinating. I am on the branch of the tree where Camino Real doesn't really fail, it actually creates a lot of other interesting things, it goes off the mainstream and the mainstream decides we can't do a play like this on Broadway. And the context to this laboratory (Theater of Tomorrow) is the background to that, it's the moment before things got crystallized, it's what leads up to something like Tennessee Williams, then a young playwright, trying to push his craft and re-imagine the American theater and doing it in the heaviest commercial forum.

So I want to jump from there to the inheritance of the contemporary theater. What is the inheritance that theater artists are reacting against? Economics are obviously one thing that's been causing many changes in the theater since arts funding fell apart in the 90s, so it seems like everybody is trying to find new economic models and new company models. What other things do you think contemporary theater artists are reacting to, artistically or culturally?

I think that an important part of the context that we're reacting against, in fact, is the homogenization of culture, which has to do with the mass dissemination of other products like a triple-latte or a movie or a television show. A minute ago I was talking about the fact that the theater is local and ephemeral and one of the things about our context now is that in fact everybody does share an enormous number of things—we've seen the same television shows or movies, we have the same musical points of reference, it's harder and harder to find variety on the radio, it's harder and harder to find a shop where you can get things that you can only find in that shop and not in every other shop in the country. And that's true about time-based entertainment as well.

You know, if a bunch of theater people get together from around the country they'll talk about theater but they'll inevitably end up talking about movies because that's what they can share. To a certain extent I think what's interesting is that we start to react against that. So maybe the interesting thing is, with so much globalization and homogenization going on at every phase of the culture it throws the extreme uniqueness of the theatrical event into high relief. And that's a problem, but as is often the case with things like this, the problem is its own solution. The very fact that it's so unique and ephemeral has to be what we embrace and what we explore has to be relevant in this cultural context.

Click here for the full schedule of the Theater of Tomorrow series.