• Paula Court

Near the end of our chat, Annie-B Parson asked me why I thought it was important to talk with artists about their creative process. Whether she intended it, I sensed some resistance in the question, a resistance I think she shares with other artists and that I, as a playwright, have felt, too. I think it’s good for certain aspects of a process to be inarticulate or unarticulated. Not because it preserves a romantic notion of mystery or prevents people from having access to the work, but because there is such a drive in our culture to tabulate and quantify and dissect every thing that we do—and much is lost in that process. A great deal ends up being oversimplified or made overly complex when we insist on getting the arts down in words or numbers. The inability to put it into words, the failure of language alone, is precisely why we so often turn to the arts for other modes and means of expression.

Inarticulateness is of particular interest in the new show on which Parson and Paul Lazar are collaborating with playwright Sibyl Kempson, Ich, Kürbisgeist, which opens today at The Chocolate Factory (co-comissioned with PS 122). I stopped by at the tail-end of one of their rehearsals last week to talk to them about the show, whose dialogue is written in a language that Kempson invented and which no one in the world, except those involved in the production, speaks—or has any knowledge of.

Parson and Lazar have been making work together as the Artistic Directors of Big Dance Theater for over 20 years. They’re also married. Big Dance Theater has gained an international reputation for creating thoughtful, surprising, and rigorous dance theater work that often brings together seemingly incompatible material, as they did in their 2004 work Plan B, which combined the secret recordings of Richard Nixon with an obscure figure in early-1800s German popular culture, among other things. Another commonality in their work, as seems to be the case in this new work, Ich, Kürbisgeist , is how they often seem to enjoy feeling like outsiders looking in on a culture or subject that they are not familiar with.

Parson touched on this idea in an interview with BOMB magazine in 2007, when discussing Big Dance Theater’s piece The Other Here: “We’re tourists in a sense to Chekhov, and to folk dance, and to Japan. We’ll always try to remain in this observing, learning stance; we like to bring that out.” In my own chat with them I asked both Parson and Lazar what that was about for them—that desire to observe and react to the unfamiliar. Lazar related an anecdote that the playwright Sibyl Kempson had told him, about being in a foreign country. “She really enjoyed letting the language wash over her—it liberated her from the verbal back and forth.” He went on to say that he enjoyed the unfamiliarity with the language in Ich, Kürbisgeist because it allowed him to “play this game where the odd surfaces of the language induce a more sharp and playful listening.”

Parson, a choreographer by training, spoke about a similar experience related to seeing dance: “As you watch a new dance piece, you amass a new movement vocabulary.” She and Lazar went on to walk more about the idea of being a “tourist” in a variety of settings, but what seemed to come across most clearly is that, for them, there was a value in the experience of having to acknowledge one’s own ignorance—that it freed them up to gain new information that may not fit with what they already knew or that may do something familiar in a totally different way.

A playwright writes her play, prints out a nice clean copy, mails it off to the theater, and her job is done. The theater takes it, sprinkles a little fairy dust on top, et voila, presto change-o, a beautiful, Broadway-ready production emerges ready for all the world to behold.

Not really.

First, it can take years to write a play, and then it can take another set of years for it to reach production. And in most cases, the playwright (when she’s a living playwright) is intimately involved in every step along the way, even in the production, from auditions to rehearsals to design meetings. And when the playwright is very, very lucky, the show gets a second production, or a third, or more. Even in these follow-up productions, the playwright typically follows the script to each theater and each rehearsal. Writing a play is just the beginning for playwrights.

Last week I chatted with writer Lisa D’Amour at Playwrights Horizons, the Off-Broadway theater where her show, Detroit, is receiving its third production and its first in New York, this one directed by Anne Kauffman. D’Amour gave me a backstage tour of the theater before we sat in the empty theater ahead of the night’s preview production, talking about what her daily life is like while working on this show.

This production is very different from the work for which D’Amour is best known in the theater community. She has for years created work that blends theater and installation art—it’s often site-specific, outside of traditional theater settings, and plays with narrative and structure. In those plays, she typically works with her long-time collaborator Katie Pearl; together they operate under the name PearlDamour. Detroit finds D’Amour taking on a different role—acting as the playwright, instead of the playwright/director/fundraiser/producer/sometimes-designer/collaborator/tour manager role that she usually shares with Pearl.

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A more conventional work, Detroit has followed a fairly conventional path to production, though in the 21st century, fewer and fewer plays follow the path that decades ago was standard for successful playwrights. D’Amour wrote the play in 2009, then had an informal first reading in a friend’s apartment. Soon after, the play ended up in the hands of someone at the Steppenwolf Theatre in Chicago, and they decided to organize a reading of their own. By fall of the following year, Steppenwolf was mounting a production. After that there was talk of a transfer to Broadway. The play became a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, as well as a finalist for the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize. Then, this spring, the play made its way to London’s Royal National Theatre, and opened officially yesterday at Playwrights Horizons here in New York.

The stakes always seem so high in New York City. Too high. For many young artists presenting their work on stages, in galleries, or elsewhere, there’s a sense that this is an all-or-nothing town. You get one shot, at very high expense (living costs, venue costs, advertising and public relations fees are much higher here than elsewhere), and as someone who isn’t a celebrity or backed by a large institution, you’re likely to have small audiences. Add to that the expectation that the artwork you create not only needs to meet outsize financial goals, but also needs to serve some kind of common good or have important things to say about the world, or else engage in serious aesthetic or theoretical conversations with other works of art that, in the vernacular, push the field forward.

Therein lies the rub—it’s not often that artists or their audiences really get to enjoy seeing the work. Beyond the above, for audiences, there’s the earnestness of a lot of new work by young people, something that can be scary when it results in heartfelt or ambitious work that falls flat or lacks coherence, because you want them to succeed and it just feels bad when it doesn’t, so you spend the whole time feeling uncomfortable and wanting it to end. Then there’s the intellectually tough or highly abstract work that even at its most brilliant requires a lot of engagement from the audience. There are certainly rewards to that kind of work, and I’m a big fan of a lot of it, but I bring it up here because I don’t sit back and relax when I see those works: I’m trying to actively open to the experience, paying close attention, attempting to parse what I’m seeing.

All of which is to say, it’s a rare and special treat to see a good show that’s just a lot of fun and isn’t overly complex or overly aggressive in packing itself with messages and ideas and commentary. In other words, it’s not that often that you get to go see a show that’s just a good time.

The Girl of the Golden West, a new play created collaboratively by the company Rady & Bloom, which is being presented as the final show in this year’s Ice Factory Festival at the New Ohio Theatre, is such a show. The play is adapted from an earlier Broadway play of the same name, written by David Belasco. In fact the play was such an enormous success in the early 1900s, that it was revived twice on Broadway, adapted as an opera by Puccini, rewritten as a novel by Belasco, and presented on film four separate times.

Rady & Bloom’s version is a tight 75 minutes, with the story being told primarily through song. The cast is compressed to four main players and three instrumentalists, who also take on occasional bit parts during the show, and the drama starts at an upbeat tempo from the first moments, barely resting until the very end. The story revolves around a bandit who travels to a tiny Gold Rush town in California, his love interest, his rival in love, and questions about whether or not he’ll continue his bandit-y ways or be reformed by love. One comically transgressive element is the show’s gender-bending casting: Starr Kwofie plays the town’s sheriff, and Brian Rady plays a barkeep as well as a sultry and high-spirited harlot. While all of the cast does good work in the show, Kwofie and Rady really shine, enjoying the chance to embrace and have fun with these Western archetypes, but also stretching a bit beyond the clichés not only of their characters but also of gender-bending itself.

As you can tell from the story description and casting, this is every bit the classic Western tale, and rife with all the attendant cultural stereotypes that come along with that about women, people of color, and morality. Belasco’s original may even have been partly responsible for cementing the popularity of the form and its archtypes in the American imagination.

But Rady & Bloom’s re-imagining of the work is playful, often tongue-in-cheek, and surprising in the ways that it manages to draw you in despite the simplicity of the story. There are a few false notes, particularly the awkward rap that actor Tom Hennes performs early in the play in his role as the bandit. And unfortunately, because the actors voices aren’t projected in the cavernous space of the New Ohio Theatre, a few chunks of dialogue are inaudible, particularly as the pace of the piece has the actors often speaking over one another. But you have to remember that we’re not on Broadway here—this is a downtown performance of a premiere (i.e. a largely untested play) by a small company given a very short run in a festival; this isn’t a multi-million dollar corporate-backed spectacle (thankfully that means it’s nowhere near the cost of a Broadway ticket). But it’s far more endearing for being what it is, and it’s an example why I will always prefer scrappy productions to slick products.

Rady & Bloom’s inventive and enjoyable work uses the ingenuity that theater people have been demonstrating for centuries: building a clever set with the resources they had, mixing in contemporary costumes that aren’t cheesy or overdone, and making use of the space and the material they had in some really clever ways. It’s a bit camp, a bit genuine, and mostly a good time.

So, go enjoy it. Beers are only $4 to boot.

Rady & Bloom’s Girl of the Golden West plays again today and Saturday. More info here.

Target Margin Theater’s annual laboratory continues through April 7 at the Bushwick Starr. Alexis Clements checked in this weekend and sends this report.

It’s surprisingly rare to see a group of artists enjoying themselves while doing their work in public. In private, anything is possible, but when they’re presenting their work for the public, artists can often be very serious, or, more precisely, very stressed out and nervous. They could be stressed out for any number of reasons: worries about whether or not everything they’ve been working on for so long and at some personal expense is going to pull together; anxiety over what the audience will think; questions about whether or not anyone is actually going to show up; concerns that if someone really important does come that they may not see the work in the right way or think of the artist as serious or important or worth their time; along with all manner of other nagging thoughts about money or relationships or family problems that they may have avoided while working on their art.

So, it’s unique to find artists playing freely these days. It’s also rare to find settings where artists are willing and able to exercise a real sense of collegiality—experimenting openly, trying out new artistic relationships with collaborators, and accepting that some things they try out may not work but that they’ll learn something anyhow.

This little pre-amble may make it sound as if I’m painting the annual Target Margin Theater (TMT) lab as something of a utopia. It’s not that, by any means—and it’s certainly not the only open playground for artists in the city. But still, it was kind of really great to walk into the Bushwick Starr, grab a PBR for $3, sit down and watch some artists plying their trade and enjoying it.

It made me think of something the scholar Ellen Dissanayake wrote in her book Homo Aestheticus: Where Art Came From and Why: “Play in animals (including humans) is an appealing and quite mysterious behavior. It occurs in many species in which animals play naturally, without being taught… They seem to play for play’s sake, for sheer enjoyment and intrinsic reward.”

This isn’t to suggest that the only thing going on at the Lab, or anywhere else in the art world, is play and play alone. There’s real work in most artists’ process, and many reasons—biological, psychological, ethical, philosophical, intellectual, economic, etc— why we get involved with and go see art in the first place. But some chunk of it does have to do with transcending our daily lives and just messing about a little—putting on a bathrobe and pretending it’s a royal cloak, or even engaging in darker forms of play that involve testing limits and looking into dreams and fantasies and fears. Few little kids who get bit by the artist bug have any concept of what the realities of life as an artist are going to look like and all ways that becoming a practicing artist complicates and fractures the experience of making art. There’s something more primordial in it, something we lose sight of in a world that tells us that in order to be anything you have to be a “professional” at it. And something about this year’s TMT Lab really evoked all that for me.

Every year TMT chooses a specific niche in performance and art history to focus on, based on what its next big upcoming production is. So, ahead of their 2010 production of Tennessee Williams’s Camino Real, the Lab was comprised of little-known works by Williams. Ahead of 2008’s production of Aristophanes’s Frogs, they did a Lab comprised of many of that writer’s works. The Lab is not just an academic exercise, it’s a chance to pull works out that haven’t been dusted off in ages, that wouldn’t merit, perhaps, a full-scale production, but are worth another look in a smaller setting. And, importantly, it’s a chance for artists TMT knows of and is interested in working with to mess about and get to know each other better—to stretch their legs a bit. Not to mention it provides TMT audiences with some rich context when they walk into the big show later in the season. It’s a thoughtful and smart approach that elevates the ideas and the artistry in a way that a lot of one-off productions could never accomplish.

This year’s theme is Futurism and the Russian Avant-Garde. I asked John Del Gaudio, TMT’s Managing Director, who led this year’s lab with the artist Kate Marvin, about the impetus behind this year’s focus and he said that it’s not only related to their upcoming production of Uncle Vanya, but also to a culminating project in 2014 that will involve an original piece, created by TMT, that will land at the intersection of the Russian Avant-Garde and Yiddish theater.

You don’t need to know about Russian Futurism or Russian history in order to see the shows. Having not beefed up on my history before going, I missed a number of the jokes in the puppet re-enactment of the Bolshevik Revolution, but the grandiosity, ridiculousness, and beauty of the paper puppets (not to mention the fact that it went on for only 20 or 30 minutes) gave me plenty of opportunities to enjoy the show. But feel free to Wikipedia it up ahead of time, if you prefer to nod knowingly at all the appropriate moments.

The most important thing to understand about Futurism in Russia is that the absurdity, expansiveness, and darkness are the products of paranoia in a culture that has for so long lived under the control of outsized totalitarian rulers. The Russian writer Masha Gessen described it well in her essay Paranoiastan:

When you live, as I do, in a country where things just seem to happen because they do, with no apparent plan or reason, you can do one of two things. You can accept that bad things happen to good people, bad people, and in-between people at random. This is difficult. Most of us don’t like to live with the idea that we could get arrested or killed or kidnapped at any moment. So we make up explanations, not so much for why someone has been nabbed, as for why we haven’t…The point is to convince yourself that you are safe. So, welcome to the world of the truly paranoid. Paranoia, according to Freud, is a hyperrational system within a given framework. The system makes sense; it’s the framework that’s crazy.

It’s no accident that Futurism created under fascist regimes. It was hyperrational in its irrationality, it was totally reactionary, and it toying with violence and the inane while laying waste to linear narratives. It was aggressive in its ambition to overthrow art-making—so aggressive, in fact, that the majority of Russian Futurists either ended up entering establishment politics after the Revolution in 1917, or being persecuted by the new government. Revolutionary endgames, as we’re all learning from the so-called Arab Spring, are far less clear and coherent than their initial strategies for overthrow.

So, with all of that in mind, it’s well worth the hike out to the Bushwick Starr to see a few shows, if you’re willing to just relax and roll with it. The night I was there I saw not only the puppet re-enactment I mentioned above, but also an absurdist chamber opera that was both funny and dark, a choreographed and tightly acted theatrical meditation on time, love, and death, and a surprising dance piece on failed attempts. It was a pleasure to be there.

• Moe Angeles in Sontag: Reborn.

In a society obsessed with self-actualization and finding one’s “passion,” it’s rare to see real glimpses of the wrenching struggles that some people go through while attempting to create a persona and a life that lives up to their ideals. Not to mention the pressures to mesh those ideals with the norms our society imposes in the form of vocation, class, race or ethnicity, sexuality, and religion. Self-actualization often implies that there is a single and stable self to be realized, to be found, and the project then becomes to live fully and only as that idealized self, controlling, ignoring or purging your errant desires and failures to live up to those lofty aspirations.

The Builders Association‘s new show Sontag: Reborn (in the Under the Radar Festival through January 15), depicts, in a rich polyphonic production, the ways in which the young Susan Sontag attempted to build a regulated self, despite the messy, confounding, nonconformist and indomitable elements within her.

The text of the play comes primarily from the late Sontag’s recently published early journals. The excerpts from her journals and writing that are in the show illuminate Sontag’s journey into adulthood, beginning with her enrollment in the University of California, Berkeley, after graduating high school at the age of 15, and then following her through her marriage at 17 to Philip Rieff, the birth of her son when she was 19 and her ongoing academic pursuits, which spanned numerous schools in both the U.S. and Europe, leading up to her arrival in New York City in her late 20s. Tied in with all that are discussions of her early relationships and affairs with a handful of women, as well as a couple of men other than Rieff, and the way in which the discovery of her rich and undefined sexuality both clashed with and ignited her intellectual pursuits. In the play, as in her journals, Sontag writes after her first romantic and sexual experience with a woman, “I have been given, in part, permission to live.”

Sontag: Reborn incorporates live performance and projections of a taped performance along with additional video projections. The live performance features a young Sontag, jotting and jostling through her intellectually formative years, while an elder Sontag is projected onto a scrim above and to the right of the younger woman. The effect of the elder looking down in judgment, editing and chiding her younger self, perfectly evokes the constant inner critic that Sontag seems to have grappled with throughout her life. Both depictions of Sontag are performed by the deft and rigorous Moe Angeles, who lends a high degree of humanity to a persona that in words can sometimes seem to reject its own humanity entirely.

By animating the written struggles of Sontag through live performance, The Builders Association, shows so poignantly the way in which any idea ultimately is born of a flesh and blood person who is fallible, full of foibles, and at least occasionally wracked by dysfunction. The rebirth of the title seems to come in many layers in the play—she is being reborn from her death in 2004; through her intellectual and sexual development she is reborn as an entirely new person; and through the self-creation of her writing, she rejects an accepted fate of any kind and births a new self of her own making.

In Reborn, The Builders Association represent the elder Sontag primarily as detached, dismissive and reproachful in response to the younger Sontag’s awkward, earnest, willful, and befuddled actions and ideas. But both selves are cut through with an intellectual intensity that is simultaneously embattled and beholden to the body in which it is contained.

Sontag, in Reborn and in the journals, seems to want to be something that no human can be—a living idealization, and she never gives up the project, at least not during the years depicted in the show. And it’s that undying ambition to be more than what she is that makes her seemingly aloof life into a very human story.

Her determination to live according to abstract notions about her role in the world, combined with her inability to accept certain parts of herself, is something many people struggle with, even when those abstract notions are in the more familiar guise of religious and political ideals.

While on the page her words may seem humorless, on stage, in Angeles’ capable hands, it’s that very humorlessness that provides careful and funny notes of reflection. She was only 15 when she went to Berkeley, and at 17, after only ten days of dating, she married a man eleven years her senior. Who but a teenager would enter into such an agreement so sure that she was making an adult decision?

The subtlety of Marianne Weems’ direction contributes in no small measure to the work’s success. Angeles’ hemmed in physicalizations, along with the voice she adopts and the repetitions in her motions—particularly the smoothing out of the pages of each journal as she starts anew—evoke a hopefulness and beautiful naïveté. Naïve not as a negative quality, but as the mark of an understanding that we can sometimes make things come into being simply by willing and working for them to be so.

This show portrays, above all else, a person with an urgent desire to live, and a willful determination to be and do something she believes to be meaningful. But it also seems to warn of the negative and destructive forces that too strong a commitment to an ideal can bring about. We laud happiness and realization of the self, but when that realization has to fit a certain model, there are downsides.

Sontag: Reborn plays at the Public Theater as part of the Under the Radar Festival through January 15.

(Photo: James Gibbs)