Talking about Theatre

BOOK REVIEWED: Sara Farrington, The Lost Conversation: Interviews with an Enduring Avant-Garde. Brooklyn, New York: 53rd State Press, 2022. Sara Farrington wasn't one to let the Coronavirus pandemic slip by in an anxious, listless, unproductive haze. She organized and conducted interviews with legendary theatre makers and performance artists who produced revolutionary work mostly in New York from the 1960s on. Her book, The Lost Conversation, collects those interviews, annotated with the progress of the pandemic and other news at the time of each interview. It documents a generation, a community in many respects, of people who knew each other and sometimes populated each other's projects. It looks back at these remarkable artists and allows them to tell their stories about how they managed to create memorable pieces when financing was essentially nonexistent. Each of the interviews in the book is introduced by an incongruous parenthetical about the stage of the pandemic and other events at that time. For example, the April 23, 2020 interview with lighting designer Jennifer Tipton includes the annotation that on that day President Trump said in a press conference that Americans should inject themselves with disinfectant to treat Covid, which caused the makers of Lysol to issue a statement warning against such a practice. For the June 12, 2020 interview with director Anne Bogart, founder of the SITI Company, Farrington includes a note about the contemporaneous murder of George Floyd by police officer Derek Chauvin and the subsequent nationwide protests. As those protests unfold, playwright Adrienne Kennedy responds to Farrington's question about watching the country continue to try and fail to come to grips with racial equality. Kennedy says in part, "I believe today will and has inspired many people to think about race and grow and cause change. Our sermons, songs, music, rallies, marches speak. However, I fervently believe that the individual Black American is the strongest key. I believe every individual Black American, when he awakes every day, has to understand the hatred and disdain he or she faces daily and must be prepared to confront it. " Her interview makes plain how Kennedy has lived the struggle against racism, apart from dissecting it in her writings. In his interview—days after the January 6, 2021 takeover of the U. S. Capitol— director-actor-playwright André Gregory, who founded The Manhattan Project, speaks about how he selected actors for his work: "I would have very long interviews. More than interviews, they were long talks. And if I sort of fell in love with the actor then I thought the actor was right. You can't tell much from an audition. " He says that there were no directors until the nineteenth century and opines that if the right group of people get together, a director is unnecessary: "There were two thousand years of theatre without directors. " So much for Regietheatre. He takes an unambiguously dim view of teaching theatre: "I don't think you can teach acting or playwriting. I don't think so. Nobody taught Wallace Shawn to be a playwright. . . . Nobody taught Tennessee Williams or Arthur Miller or Harold Pinter. "The era encompassed in the book is marked by the AIDS epidemic which struck heavily in New York's gay community and those involved in theatre, such as Charles Ludlam, the actor, playwright, and founder of the Ridiculous Theatrical Company. "I mean, the pandemic of AIDS consumed me because I was losing my closest friends. These were my closest friends. It was almost like. . . I was left with nothing inside of me, " says the actor Black-Eyed Susan, a founding member of the Ridiculous. She lovingly recalls working with Ludlam and going out dancing with him and others in New York in the early days, before AIDS: "When I first moved here, it was all wonderful. " She reminisces about Ron Vawter, "one of the greatest actors, " who worked with Ludlam and Black-Eyed Susan on some shows and who also died of AIDS. Ludlam and Vawter apparently had some artistic disagreements: "And he and Charles would go at it! And I'd watch them arguing and I remember thinking, 'Wow: they are both insane. '" Recalling the impact of AIDS in New York, the playwright-actor-director Eduardo Machado says simply, "It was terror. It was terror. "Farrington spoke to director-playwright Lee Breuer, founding co-artistic director of Mabou Mines, in May 2020, not long before his death the following month. As with others, she discusses how he survived financially and brings up a remark made by writer-director Richard Foreman during his own interview for the book that "the secret history of the avant-garde is that it was made by rich kids. . . except for Lee Breuer. " Breuer is gratified to have his special status confirmed: "I have complex emotions about that because it would have been nice to have some money. And it could have made my life a lot easier. But I think that something about being rich didn't seem to go down with me. That I'd be better if I was an underdog. " Perhaps confirming Foreman's thesis, playwright David Henry Hwang concedes that he is very privileged: In 1980, after college at Stanford, he moved to New York and his parents made the down payment on his apartment, His career immediately took off, so he wasn't worried. Playwright Mac Wellman says that he thought it wise to secure a teaching job, and he also benefitted from 200, 000 in grants early in his career. Somehow these groundbreaking downtown New York artists were able to produce their work. Several of the interviewees recall the earlier period of their careers as being remarkably carefree; money didn't matter and wasn't needed in this Edenic past. As Breuer explains, "People got together and they did the work and they didn't expect to be paid. They even often kicked in extra to get the work up. " Similarly, dancer-choreographer Deborah Hay, a co-founder of Judson Dance Theater, says, "Nobody had any money. Money wasn't even an issue. Most of us never thought about being paid. " That the performers worked without pay must have made the production budget more feasible in this unfinanced era. Director-writer JoAnne Akalaitis in her interview advocates for a "government-supported artmaking mechanism for all artists, that includes dance, visual arts, and music, " pointing to the historical example of federal funding for the arts during the New Deal, which included the Federal Theatre Project. With many giants in this field speaking freely in open interviews, it seems a lost opportunity not to have mined them more for discussions of their artistic processes, aesthetic values, or assessments of their achievements over many decades. While Farrington does encourage these artists to speak about those matters, she also seems emphatically interested in the real estate market in Manhattan at the time that they were arriving and starting out in their careers. She asks almost everyone up front where they were living back then and what their rent was. For some, this conversation devolves into a detailed rendition of successive apartments and their addresses and respective rents. Farrington was apparently struggling with the disappointment of her own recent project at the time that she embarked on these interviews. She was forced to figure out how she could survive and make her own practice work. The persistent real estate inquiries, apart from being less interesting, never recognize the time value of money: 500 for rent in 1965 would be the same as 4, 750 in 2022 accounting for inflation. The free-ranging conversations touch upon the role of theatre in today's world. "I work with a lot of young people in theatre who, for some reason, still gravitate towards it. I don't know why. Does it have any relevance anymore? " asks Wooster Group performer-director Kate Valk. Wellman asserts that theatre "needs to be reinvented every ten or twenty years. We're at that point now. " And Akalaitis wonders who's going to be the Ellen Stewart of tomorrow, referring to the founder, producer, and longtime artistic director of La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club, where many of the artists interviewed in the book produced work. Hwang postulates that theatre serves as an artistic incubator. From his perspective, "theatre starts the ideas, invents techniques, which then influence the American style of narrative in all art forms. " This is what makes it continually relevant. Farrington assembled an impressive list of subjects, two dozen in all. The list included the previously mentioned artists plus Robert Wilson, Ping Chong, Bill T. Jones, Nicky Paraiso, and several others. Her title, however, seems inapt since the people she interviewed are far from lost in the current conversation about performance. Adrienne Kennedy's Ohio State Murders (1991), for instance, just ran on Broadway. Although her economics are wobbly, Farrington's inquiry into the nitty-gritty of theatre life throws some light on the prohibitive practicalities of this art form. Wellman's aesthetic mandate calls for reconsideration of what theatre should be doing today in this generation. A parallel inquiry would consider how it is possible to present such work within the context of the current real estate market, health insurance and healthcare costs, and the universal need for retirement benefits. That complex of real-world problems must be taken seriously.