Process in Performance

Process in Performance Vol. I.

A Conversation with Ellen Lauren

Monday, October 17^th 2011

 

Nick Westrate: Hi, so this is our first in the series that we’re now calling Process in Performance. We’re gonna do these interviews once a month with some of the great artists that we have in the theater working today, the first of whom is Ellen Lauren. (applause) So, just a quick note about the project and how and why we’re doing it and what’s going on: It started off, I have to say thanks to Jim Nicola and Linda Chapman who weren’t able to be with us tonight, who run this brilliant theater. And I came to them with an idea, and Linda helped me develop it, about how we expand the way we as actors talk to each other about the work. And it was spawned out of—I went to Juilliard, and I got a very specific kind of training there that was very much based on what I think a lot of acting training in America is based on, which is Naturalism and Stanislavski. And then I ended up seeing some crazy-ass theater, the SITI company included, the Wooster Group included, and my head kind of exploded and I thought this is not theater- these are not plays- this can’t happen. And I had a slight breakdown, and a very good friend walked me through it. And a few of you in this room have probably have walked through that with me. And I ended up realizing that that’s actually my favorite kind of work: what we call avant-garde work, or semi-avant-garde work, or non-traditional work. So all these conversations are kind of going to be about—not kind of, definitely going to be about—the traditional ways of working in the theater versus what is considered the avant-garde. So that’s where I came up with it.

Ellen Lauren: Is that what we’re talking about? I’m so screwed. (big laughs)

NW: And Ellen Lauren I’m sure you all know because you’re here seeing her for a reason. She’s the Associate Artistic director of the SITI Company, and you could say their lead actress—she wouldn’t say that—I consider her their lead actress. Do you like the word actor or actress?

EL: I like the word actor.

NW: Their lead actor. She also runs the Suzuki Institute—is that what it’s called?

EL: I’m an associate artist in the Suzuki Company of Toga, Japan, and I teach for him—his summer program.

NW: And she has performed for SITI and for Toga all over the world. And all over this country, before being in SITI and before working with Suzuki, at just about every regional theater you can imagine. And she just finished doing the Trojan Women in Malibu at the Getty Museum there, and she is on the faculty in Toga, Japan, Suzuki, and at the Juilliard School. So that’s a little introduction to Ellen.

EL: It’s a lot.

NW: That’s a lot of stuff. So do you believe in the avant-garde? What is the avant-garde, I guess, would be the first question. Define the avant-garde for me. Do you believe in that term?

EL: (overlapping) Alright, Nick! Um...do I believe in that term? First I want to—I really mean this—I feel really nervous and humbled. And I recognize that there are my colleagues in the room, and peers. And I understand I—probably more than likely—if I say something you agree with, it will sound like I’m smart, but all I can really do is try to articulate things that I understand many of you have either shared with me or that we share in common. So I’m not here to pontificate about that. I just feel like I need to establish that because I know I do have colleagues and friends in the room. The avant-garde...It’s interesting when you said tradition, a “traditional way,” and the “avant-garde way,” because I’m actually a very traditional person, but I’m traditional in the oldest sense of that word. In the idea that for me, my understanding so far, the avant-garde, “before the front,” what it really means is—and my mentors have taught me—is the collision point where tradition meets the weight of having to create new things with old stuff. This thing called avant-garde isn’t denying or getting rid of tradition, it’s simply reinventing it, transforming it, and using old things, ancient things, to make contemporary work in the world. And this means, along the way, a lot of feelings get hurt, a lot of mentors feel crushed and betrayed, because you have to take old thing that you’re taught and gifted with and make your own way with it. You can’t buy anything wholesale. It’s something that people think that I’ve done, for instance, with my relationship with this man named Suzuki Tadashi, in buying it wholesale, which you have to take it all on, and then push through that and make your own statement with it that stays within a respectful dialogue with that person that handed you those things. Does that make sense? So for me, the avant-garde—it’s a scary word isn’t it?—it always makes me think of black fishnets and, you know, smoky ratskellers. But it’s really a collision point, and the avant-garde can take place in any kind of traditional setting, and the regional theater is for instance a traditional setting for making theater in this country. And I think that it lives and breathes in the bones of that kind of theater too. But that’s what I’m interested in, actually, is studying, really studying and taking apart old forms and old rules and skill sets that haven’t always been the basis of making good theater.

NW: When SITI was created, when you and Anne did that, did you find that there was a collision point with Suzuki?

EL: Oh very much so. Absolutely.

NW: Is that something you can talk about?

EL: I can. I will say in terms of the story of the SITI Company—and I don’t know if you (indicating the audience) know the SITI company—it was born out of a collaboration between, and a like-mindedness, and an agreement between Anne Bogart and Suzuki Tadashi, and a group of us that were studying for the most part, although not exclusively, with Suzuki. He was very interested, in that he was interested in the energy, the actual health and wellbeing of the American actor in the late 70s/early 80s. We were healthy, we were tall, we were loud, we were up for the work that he was doing with his company and he was attracted to that. And the more that he worked with us just as students—we would come to Japan and study and train with him, or learn about it in the states—the more interested he was in establishing something here in the States. He met Anne by trying to find a partner to make this new company. Anne came into the mix with some actors that she knew. Suzuki brought to Anne a group of us. And the collision happened certainly on a personal level between Suzuki and Anne. With great joy and respect! I mean that in the best sense. I think they had a couple of tousles, but I think they’re both pretty non conflict people when it comes to working out problems—and setting up a new company was a big problem. We did agree to not worry about how to set it up: the superstructure of it, get enough money, get the administrative stuff. We just made the work first. That’s what we did; and all the problems are now coming to bear. The collision point between Suzuki’s sensibility and his companies legacy, and what they were handing us, and Anne’s rich imagination and her set of aesthetic interests and this idea of asking a set of questions. And that that’s what we we’re going to do as a group: we were going to ask questions and then go about answering them in a variety of different ways. So that the work the SITI Company does doesn’t necessarily always look the same. We don’t go about making our work the same way. It’s not an attempt at creating a style that’s a hallmark of SITI, although I know of course we have that because we’re the same group. The collision point—I’ll tell you who was really caught in the crosshairs was me, because I was one of the actors, playing Agave in Dionysus, which is Suzuki’s Bacchae, and I was also playing Elektra in Anne’s production of Orestes by Charles Mee. We were doing both of these in rep, and Suzuki has a very strong sense of what it means to play a Greek hero and that is very different from what Chuck Mee writes on the page if you know his work, and very different from what Anne Bogart brings into the room, if you know how Anne works: in a very lateral way, a very horizontal way. And I remember sitting out by the river in Tokaimura, Japan, every morning, smoking. I’m not a smoker, but I had to smoke in Orestes and I was just—I couldn’t do anything right. The moment I got my dials tuned and calibrated to walk into Dionysus rehearsal I found myself in Orestes rehearsals, and I wasn’t facile enough at the time to recalculate, or realize the points of intersection and just ride those...like a bitch, you know? Just ride real hard on those. I felt at that time, and that’s almost twenty years ago, that I had to be these two completely different actors. And I tried so very hard, and you know if you’ve ever been in that situation that you end up screwing yourself pretty hard that way. But it was great learning experience. So I represented the collision and all of the problems that can come up that way.

NW: And haven’t you played Agave for a very long time?

EL: Very long

NW: How many years?

EL: Well in the end I played that role for almost seventeen years, which is something we don’t get the chance to do in this country. I’ve had the great privilege in SITI Company of working somewhat like that, in that we have a repertoire. This is an old traditional antique way of living and being in the world and of being a citizen is that you have a repertoire so that the seasons of your life change and the role becomes something like Agave—am I shutting you down?

NW: No, no.

EL: The role becomes the sundial. And the sundial, if you know, it doesn’t change. You change as the sun, so as you change as a performer this constant tells you what o’clock you are. And I played Agave from my young, young days into my maturity as performer and I grew around that role a skill set that I wasn’t realizing that were applicable to simply being in the world, being in theater, being a citizen in the world as a theater artist. I’ve come to understand that, and that is the great thing about staying with one thing for a long time: you really, really begin to understand the things that are the most important to you that you want to speak about. And for me that means the things that I want to share, the things I want to impart and teach, if you believe that you can teach anything. I know that people don’t like that word; they call it coaching, but I’ve always loved the word teach.

NW: And as you did it, as you went around that sundial, did you find that what you wanted to teach with that role changed and varied or did you find that that was pretty constant?

EL: No, I didn’t know anything until it started to emerge from the experience the things that were constant, the things that I began to see as being a bell tone, that I began to recognize and then I began to make, as Stanislavski would say: I began to understand the goals, my goals, the goals of the production, Anne’s goals, SITI’s goals, and so then it became my responsibility to figure out the runway to get there. And some of that is a mutual shared experience with my colleagues, and some of that is an individual experience as an artist.

NW: Is that a particular burden of the actor, having to figure out all those goals from all of those people or do other artists in theater have that same onus or is it just us?

EL: Well I’m not sure because I’m only an actor. And when I say that I mean that—I believe that that’s a very big term, and carries with it a lot of jobs. I need to know a little bit about the visual arts and design because I’m in it; I’m of it; I’m a part of it. I need to be able to know how to cut a payroll because if I want to know how to do work my own way I need to know how to administrate it; I need to know how to talk to a fundraiser blahblahblahblah. Right? And when you’re small and making work, as we need to do, with limited resource, you learn to do many, many things. But I—again I’m speaking from a very particular point of view because I’ve been lucky in that the people who have been my mentors and my colleagues and friends are two very distinct theater directors. And I, for many reasons, many, and this isn’t the night to talk about why those reasons came up: a lot of it dumb luck, a lot of it hard work, some skill, some talent, but opportunity as much as anything. And that’s the word I want to go at: it’s not the burden of the contemporary actor it’s the opportunity: that for me a life of conflict and collision and difficulty is really invigorating, really invigorating. And we have to do that now: we have to find meaningful obstacles and hopefulness from facing off with those obstacles. That may sound a bit generic and like I’m blowing smoke up your ass and it’s not, I really, really believe that: that the obstacle just can’t be steep enough. Just bring it. And I do think it falls on the actor because I think of all the theater artists in making work the actor is responsible for creating and pulling together the traditional world and the contemporary—and I say this a lot when I teach—and that burden, perhaps, falls heaviest on the actor—to pull those two things into a single experience for the audience.

NW: Which then reminds me of your definition of the avant-garde, the contemporary and the traditional and that collision.

EL: I also think that that’s what character means in terms of what—I’m sure in there you’ve got a question “do you believe in character?”

NW: We talked about that and I’m not so sure, the jury’s out for me.

EL: I always throw that out in class and I have such a good time—I worked with Nick at Juilliard, so we’re old colleagues, and I would say things like “there’s no such thing as character” so now’s his chance to sort of try and—

NW: Figure that out—

EL: But I think that those things—when I say there’s no such thing, what I mean is there’s not this thing outside the self. Character is really only when one’s artistic skills meet an artistic experience, and they (bangs fists together)—there’s fission. That’s all character is. And artistic experience is inclusive of the text that you’re doing and the space in which you’re standing and being in, and the environment or the logic, the atmosphere of the room, what you’re wearing, who you’re saying it to, and when. But all of those things make up this image called character. But that’s actually what an audience is perceiving as being—

NW: And then we spend all this time in acting school or in Stanislavski book, writing our little character journal. You know, this whole kind of tome that if we make up enough crap about this fictional person on the page—

EL: Oh but it’s not crap

NW: Yeah but like if I describe what he ate for breakfast this morning then all of a sudden I’m gonna be able to play Hamlet—

EL: Whatever floats your boat—

NW: Yeah that’s true

EL: Really, I don’t want to sound dogmatic here and I tend to, so forgive me, I don’t mean to be strident. Because if I want to say, you know, “I think Hecuba has Ovaltine in the morning,” (big laughs in the audience) I can make sense out of that because then I can say, “No shit she does! Because how else is she getting up and down off that ground and you know, okay, bring it, bring it! What’s next, bam, wow!” (laughing) So I can actually make a logic that way.

NW: You actually use that character journal!

EL: Yes! There’s a little bit of a, we—I’ll actually just speak on behalf of my company if I may and say we are often asked, or it’s assumed that we are not interested in a psychological or emotional verisimilitude or homework. Nothing could be further from the truth. It may be that we don’t enter in that way first and foremost, but that’s always the goal is the level of richness of emotional experience in the room between human beings and the exchange of that, the cyclical exchange between you and me and you.

NW: And it comes down to what people decide is verisimilitude I guess or what—when that criticism is leveled at the SITI company or at the work, you have to think—

EL: Which it always is (laughs) and that’s good.

NW: What makes you think—I mean I think that’s a lot of the root of this question that started this whole thing. I’m starting this whole thing with a question, like you said, your work comes from the question of what is that natural, real, realness? You know, that lovely John Lee Beatty set, with the Lazy Susan with all the spice rack inside that makes people feel like that’s a play?

EL: I love those sets

NW: I love them too, they’re amazing, but what is that thing that those critics or those people who are leveling that criticism looking for, and where does that come from?

EL: I mean far be it from me to speak really authoritatively on it. I do think there are some basic things that are very hard to do while speaking the written word. And that counts for a lot. In other words, for me, we can all agree, there’s nothing real about it. There’s no sense of verisimilitude except for what’s actually, actually happening on a physical level, the physics of what is actually happening in the room. And for me, the ability of the artist, whether we’re creative or interpretive as actors—that’s something we can all gnaw on that bone for an hour—but the ability to hold one’s body in an objective light and the ability to use space and time, the ability to be still. And when speaking the written word, this is a very, very difficult thing to do. It’s a different thing than we’re told, it’s a different thing than we’re taught, is to actually hold still, and to have a physical experience while speaking the written word. That is—and those of you’ve who’ve been in the studio with me you know that’s my thing—that is the single most difficult task for the actor: is to have as rich and constant a physical experience while speaking the written word, and keep those two things at a very, very high level in your consciousness and objectivity while you’re having—and hopefully having because of that concentration—a very rich emotional experience in the room, intellectual experience, doing all those things you need to do. You need to be the voice of the playwright, but that’s not the only job and that’s a big problem now in this idea of verisimilitude: this idea that you’re supposed to represent the playwright’s idea, which for me couldn’t be further from the truth. It is part of your task, but if that were your task, then it’s simply better to get a big box of the texts and throw them at the audience and tell them what page to read, because it’s just a digit. Yes it represents human energy and thought, but you have to make it analogue and that’s a whole other set of decision-making skills and steps. Does that make any sense to you?

NW: It makes a lot of sense.

EL: Yeah but you’ve had class with me. (to the audience) Does that make any sense to you guys? (laughs) That is, if you think about it, that is the (unintelligible), to keep your physical experience at a very, very heightened level. And I don’t mean that you’re clinging to the ceiling; it can look like you’re behaving normally in a kitchen with a spice rack and your dog is dead. Right, those kind of plays? That kind of situation. But there’s really nothing real about what it is you’re doing except managing those things, managing the invisible. That must be it: managing the invisible, because that’s really what you’re working with.

NW: If I may go backwards in time, for you, before you went to Japan. (EL makes flashback gesture) To rewind the flashback—Ellen Lauren flashback—you were working all over the place, here in the States, doing plays with spice racks about dead dogs?

EL: Yeah some of them!

NW: A lot of naturalistic, normal plays?

EL: Yeah, yeah, some of them were.

NW: What was your way of working like then and what led you to start working in a different way, or led you to Suzuki in Japan? Because that happened before SITI right? Before Anne? I know it happened before Anne.

EL: Yes, I met Anne In Japan, through Suzuki. She’d come to see the premier of Dionysus a long time ago and I met her after that performance and we thought: huh, so strange—because she went to high school with my brother. Right? Yeah, crazy. Because Anne and I—our fathers knew each other from the Navy—were Navy juniors. So anyway, I met Anne in Japan, but before that—and I want to clarify: I wasn’t all over the place, I actually had very limited experience in terms of what it means to be an actor in this country. I’ve never had a manager; I’ve never had an agent. I’ve never done an audition process as a daily bread and butter skill. And I have such unbelievable respect for that. I have colleagues and friends who do that and I’m just constantly asking how they do it. And they’re so good at it; they seem so good at it. Anyway, I don’t know how to do that. I was in the regional theater. Prior to that, if you really want to go back, I came from a very disciplined background. I was in equestrian. On the United States equestrian team, and I was asked to get off the team by the IOC (The international Olympic Committee) for a lot of reasons. It wasn’t substance abuse, I’ll tell you that. So just get that out of your little dirty minds. But it was for other reasons, some of which was not maintaining my amateur status, and taking money. There, it’s out. (audience laughs) But many athletes do that. So I was coming from an athletic background and parallel to that I was drawn to making plays, the way we’re all drawn into the theater. I left the equestrian world and I went up into the mountains of West Virginia and bought a little house—I was just gonna drop out. And I went to West Virginia University because it was right there. It was almost free; it was so cheap. But at that time, there just happened to be—you know the artist Viola Spolin? And Paul Sills, her son? She was teaching there, and there was just this amazing group of people and I fell in with them and started a life that was already this thing called the alternative or the avant-garde, devised work, improvisation. And I loved that. And then I did Shaw plays and all that. And I went out—my first job was touring federal penitentiaries in an improvisational company. And I have to tell you the name of it because it was under a program—a government program—which are all gone, these programs—but it was called Project CULTURE. Yeah, swear to God. Now listen, listen to this: Creative Use of Leisure Time Under Restrictive Environments. (big laughs in the audience). And I toured with the company...(reacting to laughter) yeah...and we would go into penitentiaries and do workshops with the prisoners, the inmates, and we did everything from moderate to maximum prisons. And I did that for a year and a half. And it was great. But then I realized, Oh!—I don’t know why, but you have these bolts—that I really wanted to do Shakespeare, you know? I really wanted to be an actor that could stand up and just crack one over the green monster with the big stuff. Just pitch it, pitch it at me and I want to be able to do it. So, what do you do? Well, if you live in the United States you go to grad school. So I went—and at that time I was with a girlfriend, Frances McDormand—auditioning. She got into Yale; I got into another place and I went to that other place. But I only went to that other place for a year and a half and then I started working, and then from that point on I worked in the American regional theater. And I just went from excitement to boredom in a pretty systematic way over a course of ten or twelve years in the American regional theater. And I tried everything to stay engaged. And I had a very good lifestyle, all things considered. But then I got exposed to this cat in Japan named Suzuki.

NW: Boredom? Sorry, I’m just going off of that—boredom with...Can you talk about the boredom? Boredom with the plays? With the roles? With the process?

EL: Well I was doing the Shakespeare and that’s—I just—I didn’t...Even though I was in companies and at that time in the regional theater...at that time, the regional theater—back in the (unintelligible)—there were companies. We were companies: at the Alley Theater, the Massachusetts other theater, and I was in the Milwaukee Rep in another company and I think there are still a few. But even still, for me, they became less and less a definition of what company is, which is shared artistic experience. And shared artistic experience isn’t making plays; plays are what you do with that shared artistic experience. That’s the product of the experience together and what was that experience? And that was what I couldn’t find. We partied, and you know, but I just kept getting more and more bored. And the plays were good or they were not good, but it wasn’t about that. It was about something else that could happen and transpire between the people in the room on a lateral level and that meant a shared experience, which meant a shared vocabulary, which meant something bigger than all of us exponentially in the room. And then I met Suzuki, and that was what this cat was doing with his company and with so much generosity and ferocity. This group of people shared that point of view about how to be in the world, how to be. And I was deeply, deeply influenced along with other people who are to this day, many of them my colleagues. And although I think we each have a different takeaway from that, we do have some common nuts that we hit on and have kept us together for now entering our third decade, where everything else falls away and those are the bankable things in the room: is that, that thing that constantly refreshes you, the thing that’s constantly refreshing us as people, the things that we can’t quite answer the questions that still keep coming up and the delight in one another’s conversation with the things outside of us and with one another. So the boredom it, yeah, that’s where it came from.

NW: And you still now do plays outside of the company on occasion?

EL: I work with Suzuki.

NW: But just Suzuki and SITI now?

EL: Yeah. That’s wild isn’t it.

NW: So it’s been a while since you’ve worked outside of the company with a group of actors.

EL: Yeah. I just got asked to do Paulina in The Seagull at the Alley Theater and I called up the director and said, “Are you fucking kidding me? Paulina? You need Arkadina???? I’m there but I’m not playing Paulina... (mimes a cigarette and speaks in a sultry diva voice) There are small roles. (big laughs) Actually.

NW: This is the thing that I think, and I could speak for many of my friends in this room, what we are so jealous of: is this company, this thing you have, this way you get to talk to each other. Because so may of us working, you end up getting thrown together in a room with all these people from various places, various temperaments, various levels of experience, various aesthetic taste, and we start working, and we listen to the director, and we do that. That’s what we all try to do, and then we all try to stay out of each other’s way.

EL: Do you really? Is that really how you’re working?

NW: Not always. It depends on the company. It depends on the company, and certain things open up, certain conversations—open up usually at a bar, when you’re partying. Things open up and you realize, “Oh, ally! Like-mind. Let’s start...” you know? And then sometimes you hit a room, when we’re very, very, very lucky—you know? I had that experience last year, in this room, with Little Foxes. You just get in this room and everyone’s like “foom!”—

EL: (overlapping) I know, this is a great room.

NW: —and you can really, really go and all get on the page and feel like, as an actor, you are really contributing to the aesthetic piece, being a part, like you described, of helping all these goals along. But my question is—

EL: I have to tell you one thing about this room. One of our first pieces was called The Medium here. This was an apartment, where we lived, those of us who didn’t live in the city yet. Lived in this room! It was an apartment—

NW: With the same skylight.

EL: Anyway, I’m sorry.

NW: But my thing—what?—where?—what do I do Ellen, what do I do!? What do we all do, and how do we create this vocabulary with each other?

EL: Well I want to clarify: I walk two sides of this. One is that I worked really, really hard and in some ways you’ve got to be careful what you wish for because you might get it if you work really hard, which is I have this extraordinary relationship with two wildly different artists and I have to make sense of that. At the same time I’m envious, and I think maybe that’s not always so good for me, that I do need to take a leap and go play Paulina, which you know, I was making a joke about that—actually it just wouldn’t work out in my life right now—that I should do that. I think there’s company and then, particularly in this city, there’s another company like us right now: there’s this group that we’re always in relationship to and working with and in dialogue with and disagreeing with but that it’s all around us. It exists, this company. I mean, NYTW happens to be one of the oases for us to come and gather and talk or come and see the work that they’re doing on the stage. This idea of company is being re-imagined right now I think in this city. I think it’s being re-imagined all over the world. Because I have the great privilege of working with people who are coming to study with SITI or Suzuki from all over the world. This is one of the great gifts in my life, is meeting artist from all over and disagreeing with them, learning from them. But it, for instance, you are in a company. (to Nick) You are actually building—with wanting to do something like this—you have a constituency and a group of people that you’re working with, your brain is whizzing with. So I have great faith in that. But you do need great leadership and that’s really missing in the world today. And I don’t know where it’s going to come from. I do and I don’t—and I mean the Anne Bogarts and the Tadashi Suzukis of the world. Major seminal thinkers. People who’ve changed the tide. And I’m not sure what’s going on with that. The Grotowskis. Where are they? Who are they? I’m not saying—I’m saying I don’t know right now.

NW: We had a pre-chat together before everyone came and we were talking about all the different artists who are coming to do this series and we were wondering who—because most of them are of your generation—who that next generation is as well.

EL: And they’re there, I just may not (know them), because I live in a fairly insulated world. And I know Suzuki’s asking this; he’s really asking this question and Anne as an educator alone is influencing a whole new generation of people there’s no question about it. But I am wondering who is taking that and just (makes a violent tearing gesture) really, really ripping open something new.

NW: I can’t believe to say this but we’ve actually been going for forty-five minutes and I swore I would allow other people in the room to talk to you other than me, so I’ll say that even though I’m only on page two of my Proust questionnaire—

EL: (overlapping) You could hand it to somebody—

NW: (overlapping) I could throw it at them tell them page seventeen. I guess I’ll open it up to you guys too to talk and continue the conversation. Its just a conversation in a room, you know.

Audience Member: I have a question, I’m pretty sure that I saw you in—I can’t think of the title, I’m embarrassed to say but it was the George and Martha play and was all drawn from quantum theory and—

EL: Yeah, quantum physics.

AM: Yeah it was the craziest thing I’ve ever seen in my life.

EL: Yeah Tom and I did that. It’s a piece called Going Going Gone. You saw that? Wow!

AM: Yeah my husband is a director and we met Anne at UVA—I’m much older than him, but we were engaged and she came down to UVA when he was getting his masters and we had a lovely day with Anne. Anyway, sidebar. But I was quite blown away with everything about it and I’m embarrassed that it’s the only SITI production I’ve seen. But in the structure of it, what was systematic and physically alive and so vital about it, like blew me out: I wondered about where does organic—how do you find an organic life when that structure is so defined? You know what I’m saying? I mean, you know you do a show every night and you’re in repetition and you know your boundaries and you know what you’re doing and you have to bring it to life so I realize there’s an aspect that has to come to life within that. But, I don’t know...

EL: I’m going to try to answer that. Well first I’ll say—and Tom, please, pipe in—we made a piece called Going Going Gone which was—we staged Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, much to Mr. Albee’s dismay, and we removed the text and we put in basically an argument between classical and quantum physics. So that it was Anne—let’s see if I can clarify why—Anne was on this—as she gets—just fascinated and consumed with physics, and wrapping her head around it and listening to these tapes. And she realized that as she drove and would pop in a tape—this is how old this was, a tape—as she drove and was busy, she was actually understanding what she’d just heard rather than sitting there and listening to Stephen Hawking and trying to really grock it. So she had this idea that if you do something while trying to come at the audience with information they might hear something and put it together on a level that you can’t get reading it, that would exponentially also be a theatrical event in the room that was emotional and visceral and you know, rip snort. But what we had was a script that had the Virginia Woolf text on one side and then its doppelganger on the other side, of the classical and quantum stuff that was sampled from all this material—I mean dense, dense stuff. But we’re playing Virginia Woolf. I may be shouting about a black hole—

AM: You always knew what the relationships were that was the crazy thing.

EL: Yeah, but it was a real mind fu...twist. And you may have had a different experience tom but we would say “line!” and you would get a black—a wormhole or whatever and then you’d go “subtext!” and you’d get “What a dump, George, what’s that from.” Now my line is, “God does not play dice.” “Subtext!” Oh, it was just so complicated until it did become...and I think what you were watching was that collision, you know? And skills meeting experience. Which is why I love these directors: Suzuki and Anne. They bring experience, they slam it down on the table, both incredibly different. But both with a respect to the thing that the audience is the experience of the actor. That is the thing that has sustained the theater and will sustain the theater and that is what they serve. That is it. And so I think that’s’ what you were watching. It was kind of a rock show wasn’t it?

AM: Totally.

EL: You want to add to that Tom?

Tom Nelis: No.

EL: I keep wishing we’d do that piece again, although it’s probably fairly antiquated some of the arguments in it.

Audience Member 2: No one would ever know that!

EL: It just be like, “Oh my god he’s strangling her! And shouting about black holes.”

Audience Member 3: I wanted to talk a little bit about that collision because I think we think of it a lot now as the collision between—

EL: Egos

AM3: Well, no, I guess. But something technical and something organic and them being opposing and that, you know, even as an actor, if you’re in a fairly naturalistic play and you’re asked just to freeze while another scene happens over here and then it comes back to you: that interruption of the sort of organic life that you’ve built up I think as an actor. Or when I’m directing and I ask them to freeze I can see the actor think, “How do I freeze and still maintain an organic life?” So I guess it’s the same collision we’re talking about, but I feel like that’s where process as an actor always gets tricky.

EL: It does get tricky and I think that’s hard on you as a director because the actor has to constantly be reminded that the theater is a poetical environment. It’s a place of metaphor and a poetical landscape. It is not a—what do I mean—I mean—and Anne says this so much more beautifully than I—but the things we do in the theater are the things that look stupid on film, or they look dumb when their put into that medium. Because it’s a place of scale: we’re dealing with really, really large things or really, really small things; we’re dealing with unbelievable movement or this quality of stillness that we can’t find anymore, or don’t know how to literally do technically in our contemporary world. The quality of a heightened stillness, and an artist who knows how to control that, a director who knows how to guide that. A language of not using the word “freeze,” and finding other words that represent the poetical logic and atmosphere of what you’re trying to create, that an actor can grab onto and have an organic experience in a suspension. Right? Very, very, very much so. But these are the conversations that have to happen. And the conversations are the shared experience out of which the play comes. I agree with you though, that the word collision—I’m often called on it or nailed on it in that it somehow implies that people come to insurmountable odds and that somebody has to win and somebody has to give up, and that entails personality differences and power in the room, and that’s not what I’m talking about. Although those things, because we’re human beings, come up. But that’s why we do theater. That those things are supposed to come up and then we’re supposed to represent how we work through those things and then we bring that to bear in front of an audience. Because to have the worst kind of fight onstage you have to have the most collaborative agreement between you as human beings. But we all know that.

NW: A poetical language.

EL: Yeah a language of poetry.

NW: And sometimes literally we’re speaking in a language of poetry and then it’s completely unimaginable that as actors, “Oh, that’s actually what I have to do.” Okay I’m going to stop talking and let other people talk, because I will continue to talk.

Audience Member 4: You said you do and you don’t know where that next generation of theater—the Anne Bogarts, the Suzukis—will come from. And I just want to hear you talk about the part that does know.

EL: Well I have the great fortune in that I teach, and I teach in a lot of different venues. I teach at Juilliard which is like...Juilliard. It’s Juilliard, right? It’s a very respectable...system. (big laughs)

NW: I think there are a few too many people in this room who went there.

EL: No, I—really—there’s not enough time—really I’m so grateful that I’m exposed to it because I feel like I’m going there. I get to sit in on faculty meetings with brilliant people, brilliant people. But it’s a very particular kind of system. I teach at my own studios with my company with my colleagues. We teach everyday, some of you guys are attending that right now. I teach for Suzuki, and so I’m in a lot of different venues around the world that way. And so I’m exposed to artists, particularly in the situations where the arts are coming to take the work that I’m sharing. And so there’s a particular curiosity from the kind of person that seeks this work out, a particular kind of courage and tenacity, spiritually as well as physically. And so, for instance, there’s somebody in this room that I met in Finland that just made me laugh; I liked them as a person. I’ve come to know them now a little bit more because they keep getting drawn back to the training that I teach and I’m coming to see that person as a very important artist in his generation. It’s a guy. And that, as a performer, what he’s capable of doing. I don’t know, when I say where are the Suzukis, where are the Annes, it’s because I’m not privy right now in the studios and in the rehearsal processes of these artists, that I’m able see what it is they’re innovating, what they’re doing. And honestly I have not so far this autumn gotten out enough to see enough work because I’ve been out on the west coast doing the piece we just finished. That’s a lame-o answer and I am hesitant to name names, I guess out of respect, but I do sense it. And its not just individuals...maybe that’s what I want to say. It is collectives, it is groups that I’m seeing, that are either influenced by the SITI company in some way and have gotten together, or I’m seeing people...yeah, I’ll leave it at that. That it can be a group that can change things, and that’s not looked at enough in this country. The group aesthetic, the idea of a group in a country that celebrates the individual as getting up with your own bootstraps and that the independent artist the individual is what we really, really celebrate in the US of A, not the group aesthetic. It’s a dirty word; it really is, a group.

NW: Because it makes you socialist.

EL: It’s socialist, it’s dirty. (laughs)

Audience Member 5: Could you talk a little about your relationship with the different directors that you do work with? Because it really struck me when you said that we go into rehearsal here as individuals and then as the social structures break down and we get loose we find our allies. But it’s a secret. When we connect artistically, it’s a secret. We don’t want the director to feel it because then the director thinks that we’re ganging up, or that the company’s trying to take the play away. And I think what brought us all into this strange world in the first place was the connection and going “Oh you have the same question that I do?” And these texts, like: “Okay, let’s all raise this and see what we can figure out about our questions,” But then we start trying to make a living out of it and we have these directors who didn’t come from the same training program and who use a different language. That it all of a sudden—we all disappear in the room and then we talk in corners of rooms. And I’m just wondering what’s your experience and how do you relate to the director and how do your directors relate to you even though they’re very different with each other? What is the artistic communication that happens?

EL: Well, the perception of Suzuki is that I come in—people ask me this a lot. And if you know anything about Suzuki, his reputation is of being a very...he has strong points of view. So the perception is that Suzuki tells me what to do. And then I just hang on for dear life and try to pull that off. But nothing could be further from the truth, in the sense that I’ve never met another director where I’m more responsible for what it is I bring to bear in the rehearsal room than Suzuki. And in this way Suzuki honors the theater artist actor above and beyond anything else in theater. Loves them, loves them, loves them. But it comes with great responsibility, great responsibility. And he’s also a master in what it is he’s looking for and at. He is a master of the stage. He is a master of the craft of acting. You may not agree with it or like it, but he is a master of it. And so the relationship is: I put out a lot of material and I get a lot of response back. And then he lets me freefall. And then he’ll say well, you know, “You’re playing it like Beethoven and it’s Mozart.” You know, and you go home to your hotel room and you’re like “Oh, god!” But when I get feedback from him like that—and that’s literally something he told me on opening night of King Lear, and I had an hour and a half before the curtain was up—I have to make really quick choices, really quick choices, really, really fast decisions:what am I going to do, what does that mean? It can’t mean for me some sort of “I’ve got to change my mindset and think more Mozartian.” It means I’m breathing wrong. It means I have to restructure where I’m breathing. It means I’m probably speaking too stoccato. It means that when I’m stopping my body I’m breaking and I’m telegraphing that to the audience. I have to translate it into the language that he’s also taught me and come back with a poetical response. When I work with Anne, when we work with Anne—this is something, maybe you’ve seen Anne at play or at work—if we all had brown bags on our heads, and you came in to see us working—which already makes me laugh, thinking about that—you wouldn’t know who Anne is. You would not be able to figure out who is the director. You would be just baffled. You would have Brian Scott, who’s our company lighting designer, who’s doing your show right now—he would be gassing on about something. Darron West our sound designer—many of you maybe know Darron: one of the great Dramaturgs, if such a thing exists in this country, just one of the a great storytellers. And then the actors. And Anne is, among other things, she’s a provocateur. She says this herself: she starts things. She gets the gas, she gets the match, she goes “poof!” and then she’s out. Almost to the point you wanna go: “would you please get in a little more?” But that’s the dialogue. She’s so smart about it; she’s really out. And you think—and she’s talking about some dumb thing like “this should be like this instead of this” but she’s actually watching that happening, watching you figure something out. It’s happening very, very laterally in the room. And then when we hit a disagreement, which is all the time, because company doesn’t mean you get along; it means you disagree, or you agree to disagree so to speak. What happens then is we stand around, in silence sometimes, and we wait until we figure it out. And when we get stuck we quit and we go home. And when we’re on a roll, and this is problem we have because we’re in the union and we have to work by all these rules—but we don’t often—but its very, very horizontal. You wouldn’t necessarily know what Anne does; she’s very sly about it. And as a result I have learned, my colleagues have learned, how to do a lot of different things, and learned how to watch and how to read. How to read and how to write for one another. So I’m writing—I’m writing with my body; I’m writing with my choices. And now the rest of us read it. We use that kind of language: talk about the viewpoints for instance—writing and reading as a poetical language. So, I’m trying to think of the last director—we worked with Richard Foreman a little bit this summer, because we are interested in starting to cross-pollinate with other people and Anne is so, so busy. And that was a gas; that was just wild. And Richard was in the room with us and he sort of enjoyed going (mimes driving a car) “Oh, I think I know where everything is here, and this thing actually has some giddy-up in it.” And that was a whole different set of stimuli to get from Richard. I don’t know if you’ve ever worked with him but its so fun and active and absolutely different from Anne.