Be
careful what you ask for. At last year’s RAT Conference in Seattle, where artists from
independent theatres throughout the U.S. gathered to talk about their work and
working together, Austin actor Jason Phelps asked Erik Ehn, San Francisco
playwright and driving force in the RAT movement, when he was going to write a
play for Frontera@Hyde Park Theatre (F@HPT). “I’d like to do that,” Ehn
replied.
Now, he has, and the result is the most ambitious project that Frontera@Hyde
Park Theatre has undertaken, developed through its most complex creative
process to date. The script was not written solely by Ehn but in collaboration
with the F@HPT company, involving contributions by several writers over many
months. It’s been worked on in homes across the country, workshopped in Austin,
ultimately assembled by Ehn, and staged cooperatively by F@HPT Artistic
Director Vicky Boone and company member Margery Segal. As it’s grown, the
project has had a whirlpool effect, sucking in Kristen Kosmas, Seattle-based
performance artist (slip); Lisa D’Amour, Michener Fellowship recipient and
playwright (The Shape of Air, the upcoming solo piece Oscar Snowden and the
Magic O); and Shoshana Gold, local actor (Quilters) and director (3am); as well
as F@HPT company members Phelps, Megan Monaghan, Daniel Alexander Jones, and
Brad Wilson. The script has been through a variety of names and structures. In
its current form, which includes a fake French opera and a movement chorus, it
is titled Enfants Perdus.
The logistics involved in staging Enfants Perdus are intense. Lighting and
sound equipment have had to be moved outside of Hyde Park Theatre and onto
scaffolding that now surrounds the building. The movement “overture” takes
place along 43rd Street and in the parking lot of The Movie Store, across from
the theatre. The audience has to be moved literally from one scene to the next,
forced to traipse through alleys and back doors. All this presents nightmares
for the production crew and stage manager. I know because I am the stage
manager and I am indeed having nightmares.
But this complexity also offers a kind of grand theatrical gesture born of a
diverse sharing of ideas. In this, Enfants Perdus embodies the tenets of the
RATs, the loose collection of small theatres devoted to producing bold work on
the cheap. “The intention,” wrote Ehn in Yale’s Theater magazine after the
first RAT conference in eastern Iowa, is “to assemble like-minded theatre
workers who labor outside or at odds with the mainstream in order to create
mechanisms for communication, establish a collective identity, and exchange
work and ways of working.”
If collaboration is the first rule of RAT, “big cheap theatre” is the second.
I got together with Ehn to talk about what the second rule means and how
Enfants Perdus fits the RAT model.
Austin Chronicle: So what is “big, cheap theatre”? Why should one aspire to
do it?
Erik Ehn: First of all, it’s nothing new. I think it’s theatre’s native impulse
to have a pure and significant effect that overreaches any material capability.
As I understand it — and this borrows from Katherine Owens up at the Undermain
Theatre in Dallas — it’s unstoppable theatre. That’s what the “big” part
means, and that’s what the “cheap” part means as well. It depends on brio and
specificity and absolute conviction. There are devices that make big effects
possible on the cheap, like a shifting scale or a metaphor or a part of the
whole. But the indispensible element is conviction. So a peanut shell becomes a
rowboat because the actor is convinced it’s a rowboat.
I think we’re coming to a curve in theatre history where we’re actually
getting left with small, expensive theatre. If you go that road, if you go big
and want to solve bigness with expense, you’ll just get diminishing returns
until you’re struggling to fill your season out with two- and three-character
plays, cast with a TV star.
Big, cheap theatre is not a celebration of amateurism, and it’s not a
celebration of poverty. It’s really advocacy for perfect expression. In big,
expensive theatre, expertise can shift away from artistry and into really
splendid but sometimes purely technical accomplishments. So, if you want a wall
to come down, you build a wall and bring it down pneumatically rather than
re-inventing what a wall might be. The danger also in solving a problem with
money is that you can disassociate the effect from the actor’s will, so that
the actor may or may not be convinced that the wall is coming down, but you
press the button and the wall will come down. In big, cheap theatre, the wall
won’t come down until the actor says it comes down.
AC: Is that your motivation for writing the stage directions that you do,
like “the pieces of lightning assemble to form a skeleton with the head of a
hungry wolf”? To create something that really can’t be constructed on a limited
or non-existent budget and must be believed by the actor to make it work?
EE: I’m promoting a sense of generosity. I want the actors to be all over the
audience. I want them to have to throw themselves into the audience without
reservation. I want big things to happen between the actors and the audience.
So I describe big events in the stage directions.
AC: How does that apply to your phrase “real, no bullshit”? It has become a
mantra for the cast.
EE: I imagine the importance of that first occurred to me when I was directing
[Sam Shepard’s] The Tooth of Crime years ago. There is a stage direction in it
that says one of the characters is supposed to blow his brains out. After all
of the high style of the play, all the lingo and the types, Shepard says that
it all comes down to the raw courage of the actor. The effect of having his
brains blown out is not an explosive charge in a tube; it’s fearless literalism
on the part of the performer.
For a fairy tale to work or for a dream to work or for the I Ching to
work, images have to stay with the literal. A book or a coffee cup or a stick
has to be exactly itself and put to very practical use. And then metaphor is
sparked out of that. I hate pretending and I hate make-believe. One should
actually cause a specific effect in order to create poetry. If a stage
direction calls for a sea voyage, the way to get to a sea voyage is not to come
at it through pretending to be at sea. You come at it by actually displacing
your gravity, for example. That’s what the root of a sea experience is. If you
have to kill someone or strip someone of authority, you don’t pretend to be all
worked up or pretend to be angry, you may actually violate the actor’s space or
take a pen out of the person’s pocket, thieve something from the person. It’s
the small actions performed acutely so a larger meaning can come forward.
AC: What’s the larger meaning in Enfants Perdus?
EE: It finds my heart by two roads. One is the cooperative experience of
the formal consideration: working with so many fine writers and finding a way
to move forward with them. I suppose you could say it’s like a family vacation
where I’m driving the car. But the character of a family vacation isn’t the
driver’s experience; it’s the whole-family-throwin’-the
chili-dog-around-the-Scout experience.
I typed and take a kind of formal responsibility for managing the text, but
it’s been very meaningful to work with and for the people who have come
together [on the F@HPT project]. So, there’s that — the formal meaning.
And then, in terms of an emotional connection to the story of the play,…
I’ve been absorbed by thoughts of finality lately. The 1900s are about to close
down, but that’s kind of obvious. More personally, I have in my head a picture
of my father, who was a graphic designer in Oklahoma. When he came up, he was
using X-acto knives and wax, cutting tiny pieces of the alphabet out and
pasting them down by hand. I don’t know when exactly, but about 10 years ago,
it’s as if a great storm came up and blew all his tools away. His entire way of
working, the knowledge of his hands, was taken away from him. His nerves were
snipped. He went on to learn computers, but it was like taking on someone
else’s biography.
I feel the same thing has happened in theatre, in a way. I grew up with a
certain expectation of what it was to make theatre or to interpret a play. I
think theatre is being made new ways and interpreted new ways. I don’t want to
be caught by surprise in the storm. As I said before, if I’m not careful with
my art, I’ll disassociate from it and get blown away.
AC: What are the new ways that theatre is being made? Where is the
storm?
EE: In schools, theatre is often taught by English teachers who read plays as
if they were novels, which misses the essence of what a play is. I think a
literary approach to theatre is ebbing. I think theatre was attached strongly
to personality for a long time. Individuals felt entitled to remove themselves,
to achieve as individuals. This is true, I think, of actors, writers, and
artistic directors. But theatre is stripped of a lot of its wealth and will no
longer allow individuals to concentrate capital — aesthetic capital or actual
capital. So theatre is becoming more collaborative. I think we’ve learned to
distrust language at large, and I think movement, rhythm, is informing theatre
in new ways. So the words are all out there; we just haven’t learned how to put
them together in interdisciplinary, inter-whatever, ways.
That’s actually pretty backward, looking at language. “Inter” implies that
things are separate and need to be brought together. The next step is to find
terms for our art that are unique, so that it is not a combination; it’s an
actual cake.
AC: So, has the process for Enfants Perdus been successful, or do you
think about it in those terms?
EE: Well, I always think in terms of
success. I never set out to blow it. I think the project succeeds, from my
point of view.
There was that struggle around issues of ownership that came on early for me,
but everyone involved is so civil and articulate that I think I came close to
accomplishing the kind of release that I hoped I would get to. It might be
easier as a writer, especially a writer who is 1,500 miles away, to get over
some of these things without meditating up on a mountain somewhere. So I can’t
speak for anyone else. Personally, I’ve had a great time. I can’t wait to work
with Frontera again. I think Vicky is a strong director. Margery is a gifted
dancer. This project took on a kind of process that was natural to its
impulses. I think it’s also a process that can be duplicated down the road. We
discovered this process; maybe this process now can be the cause of another
project, this collaborative chivalry here. n Enfants Perdus runs Oct 11-Nov 2 at Hyde Park Theatre. Oscar Snowden and the
Magic O runs Oct 18-26 at HPT.
This article appears in October 11 • 1996 and October 11 • 1996 (Cover).