SYMPHONY OF RATS
The Wooster Group
The Performing Garage
33 Wooster St. between Grand & Broome Sts.
Through May 9, $20 rush tickets, $35 in advance, 7:30 thewoostergroup.org
In 1988, the Wooster Group staged Richard Foreman’s Symphony of Rats, written, directed, and designed by Foreman, the treasured avant-garde playwright and founder of the Ontological-Hysteric Theater. In 2022, the company asked Foreman if it could present a new adaptation. Foreman responded, “You can do whatever you want! I hope it’s completely unrecognizable.”
Mission accomplished.
The 2024 iteration of Symphony of Rats is a hallucinatory journey into outer and inner space that begins with a fever dream in which Ari Fliakos offers, “Symphony of Rats is about the President of the United States as someone no different from the rest of us: a mixed-up, stupid, fallible person bounced back and forth by forces outside his control. The President is receiving messages by means other than the known senses, and he doesn’t know whether to trust them or not, just as we all receive messages . . . from our unconscious, . . . or God, . . . or the media, . . . or our past experience . . . , and often don’t know . . . whether to validate them by paying attention to them and acting upon them, or to dismiss them as . . . irrational impulses we hope will pass.”
It’s a necessary prelude, as everything that follows, under the precise direction of Elizabeth LeCompte and Kate Valk (who appeared in the 1988 original), is beautiful madness.
Fliakos plays the President, who sits in a wheelchair commode at a pair of tables at the front of the set. To his left is Guillermo Resto, who makes deep-voiced declarations through a basketball hoop on its side. To his right are Niall Cunningham, Andrew Maillet (who provides additional sound and video), and assistant director and stage manager Michaela Murphy, fiddling on laptops. Jim Fletcher moves around the stage, portraying a doctor, a scientist, a gnarly rat, and other characters.
LeCompte’s set also includes blackboards, clotheslines on which cardboard is pushed and pulled, an old easel, a narrow column with a basketball on top, a changing scenic backdrop, and projections of an adorable circular digital being who climbs up and down a pole and goes for a walk in its stick-figure-like body.
Over the course of eighty wildly unpredictable minutes, the actors break out into new tunes by Suzzy Roche (“The Door Song,” “The Human Feelings Song,” “The Ice Cream Song”), study an impressive fecal log that comes out of the President, debate going to the chaotic Tornadoville, contemplate ingesting a magic lozenge, discuss evolution and children’s books, recite William Blake’s “Tyger Tyger,” and watch clips from Ken Russell’s 1969 cinematic adaptation of D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love and Steve Beck’s 2002 horror film Ghost Ship. There’s an MST3K aspect to the whole show, which features sound and music by Eric Sluyter, video by Yudam Hyung Seok Jeon, lighting by Jennifer Tipton and Evan Anderson, phantasmic costumes by Antonia Belt, and dramaturgy by Matthew Dipple. Tavish Miller’s technical direction is a marvel as complex audiovisual elements pop up everywhere.
Although you should not be obsessed with figuring out the details of what constitute the plot, there are references to the President’s mental well-being, world hunger, sleeping leaders, and environmental catastrophe, evoking the current sad state of the planet. There’s also a scene in which the President juggles the globe à la Charlie Chaplin in The Great Dictator.
“Trust me, trust me. It’s so much fun to be inarticulate, Mr. President. Trust me. It really is so much fun,” Jim advises. Later, the President admits, “I think I’m losing my mind.”
Everything in Symphony of Rats might not be immediately recognizable, but it is most certainly not inarticulate, providing provocative fun as only the Wooster Group can.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]
Eric Berryman shares African American toasts in Wooster Group’s Get Your Ass in the Water and Swim Like Me (photo by Marika Kent)
GET YOUR ASS IN THE WATER AND SWIM LIKE ME
The Wooster Group
The Performing Garage
33 Wooster St. between Grand & Broome Sts.
Tuesday – Saturday through February 3, $39-$79 thewoostergroup.org
In 2019, the Wooster Group production of The B-Side: “Negro Folklore from Texas State Prisons,” a Record Album Interpretation earned a Drama Desk nomination for Unique Theatrical Experience for Eric Berryman’s multimedia adaptation of a 1965 LP compiled by Bruce Jackson, consisting of performances by inmates of color on segregated agricultural prison farms.
Writer and actor Berryman and director Kate Valk are now back with their follow-up, Get Your Ass in the Water and Swim Like Me, continuing at the Performing Garage through February 3. This time Berryman dives deep into Jackson’s 1974 book and 1976 disc, Get Your Ass in the Water and Swim Like Me: Narrative Poetry from Black Oral Tradition, a collection of folktales known as toasts, made for heroes and antiheroes in the Black storytelling canon.
The set, by Wooster Group founding member and director Elizabeth LeCompte, evokes a radio DJ studio, where Berryman sits at a long table with a laptop and various electronic instruments; to his right is a microphone, behind him a monitor, and to his left a standing table with a smaller monitor. He is joined onstage by drummer Jharis Yokley, who adds percussion throughout, from pounding solos to gentle brushstrokes. As Berryman recites the toasts — some of which have been recorded by Rudy Ray Moore and George Clinton — he occasionally projects video and photographs on the monitor, from a car chase to archival footage to live shots of himself.
Berryman kicks things off with “Titanic,” which honors Shine, a Black man on the Titanic who kept “warning the captain and the white people that the ship is going down. They don’t believe him. So he says, ‘Fuck y’all, I’m out.’ He jumps overboard and starts swimming to shore. The white people on the deck start yelling, ‘Please come back and help us!’ And in one version of the toast, as he’s swimming away, Shine says, ‘Get your ass in the water and swim like me.’” Berryman’s retelling is fast-paced and rhythmic, with rap and hip-hop inflections that go well beyond mere recitation.
In “Signifying Monkey,” a forest primate battles a lion and an elephant. “Partytime Monkey” takes place at a party on Juneteenth, but the unhappy title mammal is incensed that he was not invited. In “Joe the Grinder and G.I. Joe,” a man returns from WWII to find his wife has been unfaithful. “’Flicted Arm Pete” is about a fornication contest that gets out of hand.
Drummer Jharis Yokley and actor Eric Berryman share a personal moment in Get Your Ass in the Water and Swim Like Me (photo by Marika Kent)
The tales are filled with tawdry sex and extreme violence — bullets are flying everywhere — but as funny as they are, there’s also an underlying sense of discomfort, particularly with a primarily white audience, as the stories contain stereotypes reminiscent of minstrelsy. Berryman compares these over-the-top characters to Greek myths, where such figures as Hercules and Jason “would do stupid shit because they knew it would help them uh, uh, more quickly achieve kleos, and get kleos . . . A community creates the heroes that they need.”
Berryman (Primary Trust,Toni Stone) is not just sharing old fables but exploring Black identity then and now. At one point he digresses into a discussion of his own name, how disappointed he is to be anchored with the plain “Eric” when he has relatives called Qasim, Idris, Indira, Akeem, Alenka, and Adia. (He does note that there is a Gary but does not share that it’s his uncle, Grammy-winning jazz saxophonist Gary Bartz.)
In addition to the eight toasts, each evening includes an improvised Q&A between Berryman and Yokley; the night I went, Berryman asked the charming drummer, producer, and songwriter about his favorite grade from K through 12 and what he is afraid of, again incorporating ideas of personal identity into the play and creating a further bond between the performers and the audience, some of whom sit in chairs on the stage.
The show concludes with the all-time favorite “Stackolee,” a tale of murder and mayhem that has been recorded in different versions by Mississippi John Hurt, Doc Watson, Wilbert Harrison, Long Cleve Reed, Lloyd Price, and Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, among others, its familiarity spotlighting the centrality rather than the marginalization of the Black experience in American popular culture.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]
Jim Fletcher plays Frankenstein’s monster in Tony Oursler’s Imponderable (photo courtesy Museum of Modern Art)
Who: Jim Fletcher What:Film series Where:Anthology Film Archives, 32 Second Ave. at Second St. When: June 11-16 Why: In a January 2020 twi-ny talk, actor, writer, and editor Jim Fletcher, who is beloved in the experimental theater scene, said of his working with such companies as the New York City Players (NYCP), the Wooster Group, and Elevator Repair Service, “I’m working with people I love. It seems I never asked myself what kind of work I wanted to do, and also never the follow-up question, who best to do it with. In that sense I’m not a productive person. I think when you get close to people, you spontaneously start working in some way . . . out of sheer energy or whatever it is. Surplus.” Fans of Fletcher’s stage work (Pollock,Isolde,Why Why Always) might not realize just how productive the deep-voiced actor is, but they can find out in the Anthology Film Archives series “Jim Fletcher On Screen,” running June 11-16.
The mini-festival consists of eight programs comprising sixteen shorts, documentaries, and features starring the tall, bold Fletcher, from Roland Ellis’s ten-minute Break Down, Nicholas Elliott’s Icarus, and Laura Parnes’s Blood and Guts in High School (an adaptation of the book by Kathy Acker) to Shaun Irons’s Standing By: Gatz Backstage (a behind-the-scenes look at the eight-hour Gatz), Zoe Beloff’s Glass House (based on an unrealized science fiction project by Sergei Eisenstein), and Ellen Cantor’s Pinochet Porn (an episodic narrative that was completed after her death). NYCP founder Richard Maxwell is represented with The Feud Other,The Darkness of This Reading, and Showcase, the latter promising, “Gradually getting dressed, [Fletcher’s character] discusses life on the road, memories, moron jokes, the conference he is attending, business strategies, and a pivotal deal that went down recently under intimate circumstances. He sings.” Yes, Fletcher sings!
The celebration of all things Fletcher concludes June 16 with visual artist Tony Oursler’s 3D Imponderable, which was the centerpiece of a MoMA exhibition in 2016-17 and in which Fletcher portrays his dream role, Frankenstein’s monster. Fletcher will be at Anthology to talk about his work at several screenings, bringing along some of his friends and colleagues. Be prepared to join the ever-growing Fletcher faithful; we are legion.
Pelagea Vlasov (Kate Valk) has some qualms with the butcher (Ari Fliakos) and his wife (Erin Mullin) in The Mother (photo by Nurith Wagner-Strauss / Wiener Festwochen)
THE MOTHER
The Wooster Group
The Performing Garage
33 Wooster St. between Grand & Broome Sts.
Tuesday – Saturday through November 20, $40
Return engagement: February 18 – March 19, $30-$40 thewoostergroup.org
It’s hard to believe that in its nearly half-century existence, the Wooster Group has never before presented a work by Bertolt Brecht, the German modernist whose revolutionary ideas about theater appear to be right in line with the experimental Soho company’s vision. So it’s exciting not only that the Wooster Group is now tackling Brecht’s seldom-performed 1932 play, The Mother, but has done such a fine job with it.
Not to be confused with Brecht’s more well known anti-Fascist Mother Courage,The Mother is one of Brecht’s Lehrstücke, a learning play meant to bring the actors and the audience together while also taking a social stand. “The aim was to teach certain forms of political struggle to the audience,” Brecht wrote in 1933 about the show when it was at the Schriften zum Theater. “It was addressed mainly to women. About fifteen thousand Berlin working-class women saw the play, which was a demonstration of methods of illegal revolutionary struggle.”
Based on Maxim Gorky’s 1906 novel, the play is built around the simple and illiterate Pelagea Vlasov (Kate Valk), who just wants to make tea and soup and protect her son, Pavel (Gareth Hobbs), who recently had his pay cut by a nickel an hour. “Me, I’m no help to him anymore,” she says. “I’m a burden.”
Pavel is involved with a pair of radicals, Semjon (Ari Fliakos) and Masha (Erin Mullin), who are illegally handing out leaflets calling for a strike against the powerful Suklinov factory. They are assisted by a teacher named Fyodor (Jim Fletcher) who doesn’t believe that their actions will lead to any viable change.
“Like the crow in the snowstorm, feeding her baby, she can’t feed her, what does she do? No way out, no way out. And crows are the smartest animal in the world, after humans,” the teacher talk-sings. “Whatever you do / It won’t be sufficient. / The situation’s bad / It gets worse. / It can’t go on like this / But what is the way out?”
The Wooster Group rehearses its unique interpretation of Bertolt Brecht’s The Mother (photo by Erin Mullin)
When she discovers what Pavel is up to, Pelagea turns courageous, demanding to hand out the leaflets herself so her son can be safe. A policeman (Fletcher) starts sniffing around, so Pelagea moves in with the teacher, who is not thrilled that his calm life has suddenly been upended. After the workers’ representative, Karpov (Fliakos), returns with an unsatisfactory deal, the revolutionaries sing, “Good, this is the breadcrumb / Ah, but where is / The whole loaf?” Events get ever-more dangerous as Pelagea takes up the cause, praising Communism, while the police, factory sympathizers, and strikebreakers loom in every corner.
In true Wooster Group style, The Mother is wildly unpredictable, hysterically funny, and emotionally poignant, winding itself in and out of Brecht’s words. Addressing the audience following the song “Praise of Communism,” the teacher explains about Brecht, “You know, for somebody who says he doesn’t want emotions in the theater, there’s a lot of emotion in that song, you know — it’s the end of madness, it’s the end of crime, is that not sentimental?” Props are smashed and then replaced. Projections by Irfan Brkovic on the back wall and a monitor focus on the factory town and a rallying flag, with original music by Amir ElSaffar.
The set, built by Joseph Silovsky, consists of a long table where the characters often sit, interacting with a laptop and the script itself; a small room where Pelagea worries about her son; a clothesline used for multiple purposes; a chalkboard where Fyodor writes important words; two doors that are labeled “Way” and “Out,” a sly reference to the song “The Question of the Way Out”; and a keyboard played by Pavel. There’s also a monitor above the audience that shows old crime movies, dictating the pace and enhancing the themes for the performers. Cofounding artistic director Elizabeth LeCompte ably brings those disparate elements together through eighty tense minutes and eleven scenes, including “What can a mother do?,” “The Mother gets a lesson in economics,” and “The war is here.”
WG founding member Valk and Fletcher (the teacher, the policeman, the prison guard, a strikebreaker) are always a joy to watch, and they lead the way in this stellar production. Fliakos (Semjon, Karpov, the gatekeeper, jobless Gorski, Vasil the butcher) and Mullin (Masha, the butcher’s wife, the Bible lady) stand right with them through minor costume changes and musical breaks. No one portrays the worker Smilgin because, as the narrator explains, they didn’t have enough money in the bank.
Speaking of money, LeCompte points out in a program note that a “spirit of repurposing” guided the show. “Nearly everything in the production has been repurposed from previous Wooster Group works. This includes performers, ideas, set elements, and all but two props: the aqua typewriter and yellow telephone. In addition to Brecht and Gorky, the company used such sources as educational media (PeeWee’s Playhouse,Kukla, Fran, and Ollie), Slavoj Žižek’s YouTube videos, the 1958 German version for the Berliner Ensemble, Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Mother Küsters Goes to Heaven, Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, books by and about Brecht, and 1930s gangster movies on TCM.
Continuing at the Performing Garage through November 20 (the show is back for a return engagement February 18 – March 19), The Mother was initially supposed to premiere in 2020, but the group took advantage of the additional pandemic downtime by continuing to work on it. (It debuted in June 2021 at Vienna’s Wiener Festwochen.) During the lockdown, I watched several videos Wooster posted about their progress, and their process, not all of which made the final cut — if a production like this can ever be called final. The script has a warning that “it may contain text that no longer appears or has been changed, and it may lack text that has been added for a given performance.”
Just as Brecht, in writing The Mother, was teaching about political struggle and theatrical form (he called the play “a piece of anti-metaphysical, materialistic, non-Aristotelian drama — that is, dramatically seen, of a very highly developed type”), the Wooster Group is teaching political struggle and Brecht himself to the audience, which is seated on mats on risers, with no backs. It’s been done previously as a melodrama, a call to action, and a politically driven full-on musical, but the Wooster Group has made it into something else entirely.
Who: Frances McDormand, Kate Valk, special guests What: Live series about the Wooster Group Where:The Performing Garage Zoom When: Thursday, January 28, $50, 8:00 Why: Two-time Oscar winner Frances McDormand and Wooster Group founding member Kate Valk are teaming up for the new virtual series Fran & Kate’s Drama Club, in which they will interview special guests and show clips exploring the history of the Wooster Group, one of New York City’s underground gems. The company, based at the Performing Garage on Wooster St., was founded in 1975 by Valk, Elizabeth LeCompte, Spalding Gray, Jim Clayburgh, Ron Vawter, Willem Dafoe, and Peyton Smith and has been presenting innovative and experimental works ever since. The club kicks off January 28 at 8:00 with a look at Juliet Lashinsky’s “The Archivist,” part of the online DAILIES series featuring archivist Clay Hapaz. Among the short pieces are McDormand quoting Bertolt Brecht from The Mother, McDormand reading from the article “Fair Treatment for Theatre Labor: A Right to Perform Plays” by Catherine Fisk and Alisa Hartz, Valk and Vito Acconci in Raul Ruiz’s The Golden Boat, Valk in five episodes of Sugar High, and video and photos from the current rehearsals for The Mother, in which Valk plays the title character. Fran & Kate’s Drama Club is a fundraiser to ensure the company completes The Mother and two other Covid-sensitive productions, a collaboration with Eric Berryman and an audio recording of Daniel Paul Schreber’s 1903 book Memoirs of My Nervous Illness with McDormand, Maura Tierney, and Ari Fliakos; tickets are $50.
THE WOOSTER GROUP: A PINK CHAIR (IN PLACE OF A FAKE ANTIQUE)
NYU Skirball Center for the Performing Arts
566 La Guardia Pl.
January 23 – February 2, $35-$50
212-992-8484 nyuskirball.org thewoostergroup.org
There are certain actors who just pull you in instantly; from the moment you first see them onstage, you’re hooked. For many, it might be Al Pacino or Nathan Lane, Audra MacDonald or Mary Louise Parker. Jim Fletcher is like that for a lot of intrepid, adventurous theatergoers. Tall, balding, and ruggedly handsome, the Ann Arbor native didn’t start acting until he was thirty-five, in 1998; previously he had been a teacher, a caseworker, a dogwalker, an art handler, and a pedicab driver, among other day jobs. For the past two decades he has performed extensively with some of the premier experimental theater groups in the city, most prominently Richard Maxwell’s NYC Players and Elizabeth LeCompte’s Wooster Group, in addition to collaborating with the art collective Bernadette Corporation. Among the shows Fletcher has appeared in are Elevator Repair Service’s Gatz, Maxwell’s Isolde, and Compagnie l’heliotrope’s Pollock.
A poet as well, he’s also ridiculously busy; in the past few weeks, as we conducted this interview over email, he and Sean Lewis reprised Bro-Tox at La MaMa, he stopped by the Kitchen to check out Maxwell’s latest play, Queens Row, and he’s heavy into rehearsals for the Wooster Group’s A Pink Chair (In Place of a Fake Antique), which runs at the NYU Skirball Center January 23 through February 2. The production, which was previously seen at the company’s much smaller home, the Performing Garage in SoHo, is a tribute to Polish avant-garde theater director and artist Tadeusz Kantor, with Kantor’s daughter, Dorota Krakowska, serving as dramaturg. Fletcher plays a priest; there are some funny behind-the-scenes videos on the Wooster Group’s website in which he makes a cross and plays silly word games with the cast and crew. (The cast also features Zbigniew Bzymek, Enver Chakartash, Ari Fliakos, Gareth Hobbs, Andrew Maillet, Erin Mullin, Suzzy Roche, Danusia Trevino, and Kate Valk; to find out more about the Wooster Group, the Carriage Trade Gallery on Grand St. is hosting a multimedia retrospective of the company through January 26.) Below, Fletcher discusses, in his inimitable poetic style, his dream role, working with some of the most original creators in theater, and his carpentry skills.
twi-ny: I was at a lunch party a few months ago and got into a conversation with a woman about experimental theater. She burst out about how much she loves an actor named Jim Fletcher, and we proceeded to rave about various shows we’ve seen you in. It seems you have a cult fan club out there. How does that feel?
jim fletcher: It feels great. Please elaborate! Mind you, I’m going by what you’re saying. It sounds like there’s energy bouncing around. I love that. More. Surplus. Slurplus. You know, house rules. . . . There’s energy out there in the room, I love it too, I’m devoted too. Devotion is juicy.
twi-ny: Devotion is indeed juicy. You are part of several experimental collectives that have devoted fan bases of their own, primarily the New York City Players, the Wooster Group, and Bernadette Corporation. How did you get connected with them?
jf: I’m working with people I love. It seems I never asked myself what kind of work I wanted to do, and also never the follow-up question, who best to do it with. In that sense I’m not a productive person. I think when you get close to people, you spontaneously start working in some way . . . out of sheer energy or whatever it is. Surplus.
Jim Fletcher played Frankenstein’s monster in Tony Oursler’s Imponderable (photo courtesy Museum of Modern Art)
twi-ny: What are the main differences between working with Richard Maxwell and with Elizabeth LeCompte?
jf: It’s easier for me to say what they have in common. In both cases it’s deep water, bright, alive. Like swimming in the ocean. Limitless, often extremely simple. Always big. And buoyant. Potentially dangerous because there’s power and a lot of desire. I’ve been lucky to work with them both. Ever-fresh. Always something other than what I would have imagined.
With Rich, among so many other things (ongoing), I learned the practice of active listening in the room, with your body and with your subtle body for that matter . . . whatever body you can muster. Listening to time, listening to others, to minds, listening to story and to space, without withdrawing your energy or agency, your own reasons — what can that yield, where will it go? Honestly that’s something you can pursue for as many years and hours as you have available, with audience.
With Liz I saw the whole situation get put into motion. You get a little as if your feet are off the ground. Could go in any direction at any time. Dreaming of flight. Something’s gained in translation. Movement. And she employs very complex orchestration — of lighting, sound, voice. Language. Set design. Onstage behavior. Machinery. And yes, video. All indisputably unified by the principle of a single viewpoint, that of a person watching — specifically, of her watching. It’s quite thrilling. You know sometimes as a performer in these great stage architectures of hers I simply don’t get it until I see the videotape of us trying to do it. There’s no way to really perceive it or even imagine it from onstage.
twi-ny: For a nonproductive person, you seem to work nonstop in a wide variety of genres. Among the characters you’ve portrayed over the last few years are Jackson Pollock, Jay Gatsby, and Lemmy Caution. Do you have a dream character you’d love to play?
jf: When I was first getting to know the artist Tony Oursler, he asked me that same question over coffee, “What’s your dream role?” I said “Frankenstein,” meaning, of course, Frankenstein’s monster. Seems like a year later as I was going into his studio for a few hours’ work, his assistant Jack [Colton] said to me, “I think we’ll get you into the Frankenstein makeup first.” Total surprise. Zero preparation. No time to think about it. It was so much like a dream. And my text was a song that Tony had dreamed that night, “Spark of Life.” He’d woken up and recorded it as it had come to him and I listened to it several times while Enver Chakartash and Naomi Raddatz did a genius monster makeover on me, which took all of a half hour. Frankenstein the created being. I sang it into Tony’s camera and it was strange. When I finished he pulled his face from behind the monitor; there was a tear rolling down his cheek. The tear of Frankenstein.
twi-ny: Ah, that was Imponderable, which was the centerpiece of his big MoMA show. I saw him and Constance DeJong bring back Relatives at the Kitchen two years ago. You’ve been in numerous productions at the Kitchen, as well as La MaMa, Abrons Arts Center, and the Performing Garage. For the next two weekends, you’ll be at the Skirball Center with A Pink Chair, which was previously staged at La MaMa and REDCAT in LA. Skirball is doing amazing things under Jay Wegman. What has the process been like bringing A Pink Chair there?
jf: [Skirball director] Jay Wegman makes things flow. He makes a deal spontaneously, no head-scratching, and sticks to it. Sometimes you have to sort of check yourself and say, yes, he’s really doing this. You can feel the Wegman effect when you’re working inside the institution — it was like that at Abrons too when he was there. A lot of heart. A lotta lot. He doesn’t flinch. And he seems radically relaxed somehow.
Once I was meeting with him in his office at Abrons and I casually admired this or that thing on his wall or on the desk, to which he repeatedly replied, “Do you want it?” It was very disarming and somehow a challenge. A kind of destabilizing personal bounty. I think he was serious. That’s the wild effect he has. . . . He leaves you pondering that to yourself: “I think he was serious? . . .”
twi-ny: Have there been any major adjustments to A Pink Chair given the larger stage and much bigger house?
jf: The show is feeling great in Skirball. It was conceived on a large scale, so it looks at home here. Skirball is a great space. The crowds here somehow have a kind of living room feeling . . . rather than some kind of modeled civic space. It’s a civic space that’s not trying too hard to look like one. It just is one. Very comfortable. Not obsessed with being the last word in design.
But so many of the shows I’ve seen here look great! I have noticed as an audience member here that I feel I’m able to be in contact with people sitting all the way across the room from me. Not every theater has that. Is it the curved rows? The warm array of nipple-shaped glass lamps as ceiling lighting?
As far as adjustments, we are spending a lot of time getting the sound right. That’s a major adjustment for any new venue we go to. Liz plays the room like a hi-fi set.
Jim Fletcher carries away Suzzy Roche in A Pink Chair (photo by Steve Gunther)
twi-ny: Speaking of being in the audience, when I am not in the audience watching you onstage, I often see you in the audience of other shows. What do you like to do on those rare occasions when you’re not in a theater?
jf: Burpees. Other stuff too. 🙂 Let’s spend some time together.
twi-ny: We’ll do so at Skirball, so getting back to A Pink Chair, can you talk a little about your character, the priest?
jf: About my character, I want to say up top, again: costumes by Enver Chakartash, in collaboration with Liz. When you swirl, it twirls. I have enough sense to know when a costume is doing the work for me, so I stay out of its way and let it do it.
The set is kind of like a territory, with different zones and thresholds, and a void, and a highly populated sector. In the most basic way I’d say A Pink Chair is a visit to the Underworld. A daughter (true story) engages a theater company (us) to help her go there to try to make contact with her father who was the great theater artist Tadeusz Kantor. How did we think to look there for him? That’s where he seemed to be headed in the final play he actually saw through to production, I Shall Never Return. The performers in A Pink Chair sometimes feel like pieces, subject to the zone they are in, and able to move in ways specific to each person. Mind you these are not explicit rules . . . it’s just how it has developed. Like laws of nature. What you’re seeing is a history of intelligent development . . . aimed at you, me, the unknown soldier, coming to see the show. My character the priest is one of those that is able to cross the void, for instance.
twi-ny: According to a behind-the-scenes video, it looks like you had a bit of a problem nailing your own cross; what are your carpentry skills like?
jf: I guess a crucifix is probably about the simplest thing you can make from wood. The rugged cross: Nail one piece of wood to another bisecting the smaller one, but not the larger one, at right angles. They say Christ was a carpenter. . . .
