'Szechwan's' Bandleader, On Keeping Brecht Lively

This month's hot ticket has been on Fourth Street, where Taylor Mac is bringing Brecht back to life in the critically lauded Good Person of Szechwan. Rollicking, zany and heartfelt, it is everything we've been told Brecht isn't supposed to be—and it is absolutely marvelous. Although the show is built upon Mac's typically white-hot all-singing, all-dancing performance, Good Person is bolstered by its house band: The Lisps.

A Brooklyn-based band whose instruments include a suitcase full of bells and a built-in washboard, their look is whimsical but their sound has meat. In 2012, they premiered Futurity, a musical of their own. Astor Place Riot spoke this morning with bandleader César Alvarez, about doing musicals yourself, and how to keep Brecht from boring. Good Person of Szechwan runs through February 26th. I suggest bludgeoning whomever you have to in order to secure a ticket.

How did you get attached to this project?

Basically, Taylor Mac is an acquaintance and sort of a hero of mine. They were trying to nail down what they were doing musically with the piece, and Taylor said, "What about César Alvarez, and that band The Lisps?" They were looking for somebody whose musical approach would help them tell the story, but would also be fun and wacky and not quite on the nose. If you read what Brecht said about music in his plays, it's that the music should be its own, standalone thing. 

What's great about having a band doing the music is that we're an autonomous creative unit. We have our own style and approach and performative language, and we bring that to the piece. We're not a pit band—hired guns who show up to play the score—but a creative group that's there alongside, commenting on the story, critiquing it, and enriching it. What's fun about the production is that it's totally wacky and fun and ridiculous, but it's also very Brechtian without being academic.

What do you mean by that?

Brecht is an incredible lion of dramatic writing, and he came up with an entire philosophy of what theater should do. In the translation and canonization of that brilliant idea—of theater as a way to raise the consciousness of humanity—it's become academicized. The usual translation of Brecht's German word—which I'm never gonna say right—is "the alienation effect." [Director] Lear [deBessonet] translates it differently. She translates it as "making strange."

Translating it as "alienation effect" has led people to think that Brecht wants you to alienate your audience. But Brecht was a populist, a fan of vaudeville and silent film and jazz. He wasn't interested in alienating his audience—he just didn't want to hypnotize them. This is Lear's genius—she's figured out a way to take this incredibly dense work, and make it both poignant and relevant, but also really fun to watch.

Between this and your 2012 musical Futurity, The Lisps have gotten very theatrical. How come?

A band can be very insular. We love each other to death, but after seven years, you get sick of working with the same people. When we wrote a musical, we suddenly had twelve new band members!

Now we're a band that's gotten really good at stepping out of our comfort zone. As the MP3 generation takes shape, what you start seeing is bands redesigning themselves for a more collaborative and networked world. As analog as our band is, what we're doing theatrically has everything to do with the fact that it's not enough to just make albums any more. People are searching so desperately for performance, real life experience and three dimensional entertainment, that a lot of bands are starting to reach outside the typical touring and recording format.

It's the best thing we've ever done as a band.

I'm working on a musical right now with a friend of mine who's a musician and a composer. He's never written a musical before—what would you tell him?

My advice is, do everything the opposite of how you think you should. We didn't have any idea how to put on a musical, but we just put it up. Everyone who actually does musicals would say, "Don't do that!"

We just played our musical for our friends, giving us the chance to workshop it in this incredible way. We never played our musical with just a piano, we always had the full band there. That's what helped us get it produced, that we just did it ourselves. 

I'm dying to see a DIY musical culture. When bands and composers and electronic musicians start pulling their music out of the forty minute set in the bar, and start telling a story. How cool would it be if there were an indie musical culture in New York?

The word "musical" carries a lot of baggage. But in the end, it's a deeply American form that's influenced everyone in some way. Everyone's seen musicals. Everyone's seen The Lion King. Everyone was in their high school musical. Even the most disaffected indie kid was in Grease or Hair. The form is much more open than Broadway might have led you to believe.

Are you planning on more musicals?

Right now I'm working on a space musical, which merges the experience of a musical with that of a video game. I'm interested in thinking about how changing technology is going to alter the way we experience musical theater. And we're continuing to work on Futurity, looking towards its New York premiere, which will be imminent.

How Does David Ives Start A Short Play? Quickly

Like some sort of magical flying rabbit, Primary Stages' current revival of All In The Timing is light, fluffy, and will have you home by 10 o'clock. When most Broadway shows threaten to end just before 11 pm, that's a value not to be understated. But that's not all! All In The Timing is simply delightful. Don't believe me? Ask the Times.

Last week, I spoke to director John Rando about what makes this evening of one acts click. Today, the interview ran at Bullett. Right now, you can read it.

As you’ve directed it, All In The Timing rockets past quick enough that the actors barely have a chance to breathe. What makes that speed possible?
David’s writing is so distilled, and so like music. My job is teaching his tempo. It’s a very detailed, specific process, where an actor has to find a through line, find a character, find an emotional reality—and at the same time recognize that the language is heightened and sharp and quick. Being able to do that takes a lot of musicianship from the actors.

This seems like a collection of plays that, directed badly, could fall flat on its face. How did you avoid that?

With David’s short plays, the first twelve lines of the play are the heart of the show. Getting the beginning of the play right—visually and emotionally—makes it all make sense. We’ve got three monkeys sitting around and typing and randomly trying to produce Hamlet. It’s ridiculous. But making that very clear at the very beginning allows the audience to catch up quickly. Because they’re short plays, you don’t have time for exposition. Your exposition’s over before you know it.

I like that. If, after the first twelve lines, you haven't set everything up, you're doing it wrong. David Ives knows. He's a funny guy.

On a related note, am I the only person who's sick of the phrase "an evening of one acts"? I used it above, and I'm not proud of myself. In the intro to the Rando interview, I called it "a clutch of one act comedies." I'm going to keep trying to come up with clever new words for that kind of thing. The day's theme is vocabulariety. You heard it here first. And probably last.

Need A Smile For Your Umbrella? I Know A Guy

Victor Hugo's 1869 melodrama The Man Who Laughs is best-remembered as a story about a smile. Its hero is Gwynplaine, a young boy condemned to a life in the circus after his face is carved into a gruesome, permanent grin. The character, famously played by Conrad Veidt in a 1928 silent film adaptation, is among the influences for Batman's Joker. It is not a long leap from Veidt, to Nicholson, to Ledger.

Through February 24th, the Stolen Chair Theatre Company presents an adaptation of Hugo's story, performed in the manner of a silent film. Completely without dialogue, it tells its story through creative staging, talented acting, and 102 projected title cards. It is not a parody of the genre; it is not a museum piece. Instead, it is one of the loveliest bits of theater New York has seen this year. This afternoon, Astor Place Riot spoke to director Jon Stancato about the Joker, his actors, and the prosthetic that keeps his laughing man smiling.

I saw this play on Saturday, and I haven't been able to get Dave Droxler, who plays Gwynplaine, out of my mind. You guys got really lucky with him, didn't you?

It's kismet. I can't imagine anybody better able to tackle the specific challenges of the role. He can break your heart and make you crack into laughter in the same second. To mimic Gwynplaine's permanent smile, the actor has to wear a prosthetic device which holds his face in that smile position. Stephanie Cox-Williams, our designer, has created a prosthetic that he can wear for ninety minutes. There's been a lot of talk over the years about how to create the Joker character, the man who laughs, and she's done a very good job creating something wearable.

Dave has basically no use of his mouth in the piece. He's without voice, and all of his expression has to come from his eyes and the movement of his body. 

How comfortable is that prosthetic?

I think Dave is a very, very generous soul, in that he tells me it's wearable because he knows I would be kept up nights if he didn't. The first few drafts of it, he would take off the piece, and the smile lines would remain on his face for a few days afterwards. He's such a soldier that he would say no, no, it's okay. But we worked with Stephanie to make sure that wasn't happening as often. The latex scars that run up the sides of his cheek help deflect some of that discomfort. We have a little spray water bottle that he uses to keep himself hydrated between scenes, because he can't close his mouth to drink. 

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I think he really, really enjoys the challenge that this creative limitation gives him. I think there's something really satisfying in knowing that Conrad Veidt and Jack Nicholson and Heath Ledger have all had to deal with this challenge in different ways.

Does Dave have a favorite Joker?

I'm not sure! I'll have to ask him. He posted a picture on Facebook of a figurine of the Jack Nicholson Joker standing behind the Heath Ledger Joker.

My favorite is the Mark Hammill one, from Batman: The Animated Series. But he doesn't have to wear a prosthetic.

In the 1928 Man Who Laughs, it had to be a silent film, because Conrad Veidt couldn't speak at all with his device in. It was an internal denture that kept him from moving his lips at all. Dave at least can comfortably mouth words.

But Veidt could take his out between takes.

Dave's stuck there for ninety minutes.

If your actor can't move his mouth and can't use his voice, how do you help him build an interesting character?

Luckily, we only worked with actors who were very adept at scripting their own bodies. I'm a movement-based director, but not a choreographer, and I can't come in with a vision of how everybody should be moving in this play. We bring in specific bits of the scenario, little plot points that need to be accomplished, and give the actors an opportunity to build the movement sequences themselves. Based on what they've done, we're able to refine it and say, this moment was really clear, this moment wasn't. It becomes an editing process.

We spent a lot of time exploring how to express very simple emotions with the body. We watched a lot of movies together. We read a lot of articles. We learned what was okay and what wasn't within a silent film. You talk about how directors shouldn't give line readings? I've been giving chin readings. There's something about the silent film aesthetic that can only be accessed with a lifted chin. There's something about the way the light and shadow fall on the chin. Every actor in the play got the same note from me again and again: "Chin up, eyes wider! Chin up, eyes wider!"

A big part of any silent movie is the title cards. Did you and the playwright, Kiran Rikhye, have any kind of rule of thumb about when a card was needed and when it wasn't?

She and I never had formal discussions about when an intertitle was necessary and when it wasn't. The script I had to work with was the series of intertitles and the staging written in between. Almost every rehearsal, she'd get a sense of when the intertitles no longer felt necessary, and when we needed another one. She was very careful not to overstep the bounds of what the medium is allowed to do.

I loved when you do close-ups, with the actor downstage, looking at the audience, his face lit in golden light. Those were the moments when I most felt like I was watching a silent movie.

What I love about those moments is, those are moments when we're most directly emulating a film trick. And it should completely fail, because this actor, instead of being forty feet tall, is just sitting there, five to six feet tall, in front of that down light. But they do feel that they are that big.

Well that's great! You've created a bit of magic. Even you don't know why it works.

What I said early on was that I wanted this to be magical, I wanted to create a sense of wonder in the audience with every lights-up. And the team brought that. I've now seen it dozens of times, and the magic never fades.

Horse Trade Prepares to Say Goodbye to The Red Room

Theater folks from the Bowery to Avenue B were saddened last week at the news that the Red Room, a black box theater on Fourth Street, will be closing after more than a decade serving the needs of theatrical madmen across New York City. Today, Astor Place Riot spoke to Heidi Grumelot, head of artistic development at Horse Trade Theater, which operates out of the Red Room and the neighboring Kraine and Under St. Marks theaters, about the space's past and her theater's future. 

Why is the Red Room going away?

We've been renegotiating our lease since the beginning of January, and our landlord has told us that he wants to repurpose the Red Room space into something besides a theater. We're retaining the Kraine and Under St. Marks, but starting April 1, he's going to be using the Red Room for his own purposes. In response, we're doing a crazy thing called Blaze of Glory to give it a proper send-off. I just sent out an email to all of our past and current residents who've done meaningful work in the Red Room, and within three days I've gotten together an incredible list of performances for March.

I know how important the development work you do in the Red Room is to you—how are you going to replace the space?

We're looking. We're just looking. We've gone to see a few spaces already. Nothing's developed yet. We're definitely serious about where we can continue to afford to do this work. If anybody has space—and I know how silly it sounds to ask that in New York—we're on the hunt right now.

Are you going to stay in the neighborhood?

We've talked about different opportunities uptown or in Brooklyn, but when you think about it, this is where we've always been.

Did your landlord give you any indication why he wants to repurpose the Red Room? Is it just that he wants something more profitable than a Black Box in there?

I think that's the plan. The rent that we're paying is staying the same, but we're down one space. He's trying to get another source of revenue in there.

To put it bluntly, that sucks. 

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We're calling this Blaze of Glory because this room has so much history. Amazing and beautiful stuff has happened there. Suzan Lori Parks came and did this underground thing, Watch Me Work, which later moved to the Public. Lots of film screenings have happened with celebrities and other notable people. My understanding is that some of the people at UCB, like Asssscat, started at the Red Room. RadioTheatre, all these artists. 

It's such a warm space, it's so flexible, it's so intimate, and it's small enough that you can afford to experiment in ways that you really can't in a 99 seat theater. The thing that I've been thinking about since we found out about this is the impact of one little room and what that can do for a community, and just thinking about all the amazing things that have started there. You have to have a room to start stuff.

And there just aren't enough really small, affordable black box spaces, especially in the Village.

I know! The neighborhood is getting a little fancy.

Is this going to be a major financial hit for you?

It's definitely a bit of a hit, yeah. After the trouble we had with Under St. Marks a couple of years ago, it's been clear that you just have to have your own space. Horse Trade has always operated a little different from other theaters around town. We've been successful in sustaining ourselves only on rentals and box office, so losing the Red Room will have real financial impact. But we're launching a new nonprofit called HT Presents, and we have eyes on the future. We have a game plan to build something that isn't at the mercy of the ten year lease cycle of New York City real estate. 

What's the plan for the next few months?

The plan is the Kraine and Under St. Marks for now, and everybody should come hang out at the Red Room between now and April. Come and enjoy it while it's still here!

"'Rent' Is The Nerdiest Thing That Ever Existed"

I think the best show I saw last month was The House of Von Macramé, a madcap, bloody musical currently playing at The Bushwick Starr. Today, I interviewed the playwright, Joshua Conkel.

What makes fashion such a juicy subject for a musical?

I’ve always loved fashion. I love clothes. I think of clothes as art, and I love the way that people can express themselves through what they wear. What I don’t love is materialism and label whoring and that sort of stuff. I find that really unappealing. That comes into conflict a lot in my life.

You like fashion, but not the fashion industry.

Yeah. It’s fun to make fun of. In terms of theater, theater is pretty geeky, and I for one would like theater to be cooler and hipper and more wild. So the play was an attempt at that.

The music was certainly a lot cooler than most of what you’ll hear in a musical, even a contemporary one. The synth has a lot of sex in it.

A lot of these rock musicals are not rock musicals. Rent is the nerdiest thing that ever existed, and nothing like the Bohemian 90′s sound that it’s pretending to be.

Read the rest here, sucker.

When the interview was posted, Conkel posted this on Twitter:

I sound like such a dick in this interview AND I LOVE IT. bullettmedia.com/article/playwr…

— Joshua Conkel (@JoshuaConkel) February 4, 2013

I think it's my favorite thing anyone's ever said after an interview. He's wrong, though. He doesn't sound like a dick—he sounds like a guy who's sorry that the artform he loves is too often held hostage by lameness. I think many of us can relate to that.

Let's Talk About Ghosts; Let's Talk About Set Design

The current revival of Cat On A Hot Tin Roof is not, in my opinion, as bad as the critics think. While I found the mishmash of Southern accents and off-stage servants' chorus distracting, I also found a lot to like with this lush, not-terribly-subtle production. Mostly, I loved the set—a dreamy fantasy of life in the aristocratic south whose soaring windows wouldn't feel out of place at the Met Opera. Some critics complained that the massive space distracted from the intimacy that is at the play's heart, but to them I blow a raspberry. The set was gorgeous—it was the directing (and sound design) that's caused the play problems.

This morning, I spoke to designer Christopher Oram, the genial Englishman responsible for the play's scenery. He had a lot of interesting stuff to say, and got quite passionate when I asked him about the choice, in previews, to experiment with having the ghost of Brick's friend Skipper lurk about on stage.

There was a lot of anger about it. It was anger! There was something vile that man wrote, reporting hearsay, but it created such a riot, an absolute riot, and after that it became very hard. A dozen reviews mentioned it, even though it wasn’t in the version of the play they saw. It became a bit of industry gossip, baggage those reviewers brought in when they saw the play.

The point is, Skipper is in the play. He’s mentioned constantly. He’s the third part of the triangle. Having him there really helped Scarlett and Ben [Walker, who plays Brick] establish the weirdness of their relationship. The removal of it didn’t change their relationship.

I’m saddened that one isn’t allowed to experiment. If we’d done it on opening night and it had been removed and we’d gotten the flak, then fair enough. But isn’t that the point of previews? With the Internet, literally the first performance becomes public property. This also makes the critics slightly redundant., if a critic brings that gossip, that baggage into the review.

As much fun as everyone had laughing at the idea of Skipper's ghost, I think there's something to like about a big-budget production having the good sense to admit it was wrong before opening night. No sense punishing a show that's already admitted a mistake.

Read the rest of the interview here. It's a good one.

Mulan Saved China, and B.H. Barry Saved "Mulan"

It doesn't take much for a play to leave me glowing. All I want is to see a good script handled intelligently, with no slow parts, some strong performances, and nothing pretentious to get in the story's way. That doesn't sound like much, but those who see a lot of plays know it's more rare than you think. Golden Boy, playing on Broadway for the next week, is one of those happy exceptions. I saw it on Friday, and haven't quit buzzing since. It's a gorgeous production, and it has a bit of Grade A stage combat, directed by Grade A fight director B.H. Barry. I spoke to Barry yesterday afternoon, about Golden Boy, Treasure Island and Mulan. 

Boxing is so essential to this play—what challenges did you find in designing Golden Boy's combat?

It was one of the strangest challenges ever. All the company went into boxing lessons, and they finished up knowing a lot more about boxing than I did. But the guy playing Golden Boy [Seth Numrich] was not quite as fast as the other boxers, so I had to slow them down.

What they learned was a modern style of boxing, so I had to reorganize what they learned into something that was more theatrical. I mentioned to them that they had to make the hero look better than they were. One of the guys who was really good, he was very, very fast, so I made him an old slugger—someone used to throwing his punches really heavy, a guy who had been beaten up a lot in his life. 

What I do is, I try to tell stories through fights. Just doing the fights themselves, anyone can do that. It has to be about character, and it has to tell the story. 

It's one of the more fun interviews I've done in a while. Read the rest over at Bullett, and move heaven and earth to see Golden Boy if you can. I've got the film version on my DVR and am planning on watching it this week. If you're lucky, I'll tell you how I like it.

If Only Every Play Had This Many Fistfights

Adam Szymkowicz has the kind of last name that keeps reporters up at night. How many Ys? How many Zs? It's giving me heartburn just thinking about it.

But it's worth it, because he's a nice guy and a good playwright. I saw his Hearts Like Fists on Wednesday, and interviewed him yesterday. We talked about Kansas! 

Now Adam Szymkowicz, a playwright known for quick-witted genre play, has dipped his toes into the ever-pleasant waters of geekdom. His Hearts Like Fists has been running for the last few weeks at Long Island City’s Secret Theatre. It closes tomorrow, but like all great superheroes, Adam Szymkowicz will return—in next spring’s Clown Bar, produced by the good people at Pipeline Theater Company. We spoke to Adam yesterday, about, well, all sorts of things.

Where did this play come from?

I don’t remember, exactly. It was a few years ago. I’ve played a few times with genre—like I have a cowboy comedy Hamlet, and a film noir play. I wanted to do something with comic books. I started reading a bunch of X-Men and some other Marvel stuff, and I tried to do my own version of that genre. A world that’s normally more about action, I made about love.

Read on!

Unfortunately, Hearts Like Fists closes tomorrow. But Clown Bar, which opens in March, is gonna be even better. Watch this space for more information.

Well, you don't have to spend all your time watching this space. I probably won't mention Adam again until March. If you want up-to-the-minute information about him, you're better off hiding in his closet or just following him around. But if you're just interested in Clown Bar, check back in spring.

Fifty Pounds of Foam Makes For One Sweaty Actor

What kind of challenges did you face in designing this colossal suit? 

It's the biggest thing that I've had to fabricate for the stage. The fabrication of it began in July, but we've been on this project since March. As you know, without the fat suit the play isn't quite convincing. It was a long process of trial and error, because no one had really made something so big. Something like Fat Bastard, or those celebrities that go around and are fat for a day, that's always a joke. We wanted something that would be convincing, and not evoke a comedic response but empathy and humanity.

The question was, how do we make it real on an Off Broadway budget? We had to have it ready for the actor to rehearse in it almost from day one. Because everyone else's job depended on the suit being finished, it was important that we do our job way in advance.

So how did you make it work? 

It was about what worked on Shuler's body. We knew going in that we couldn't begin until we had the actor. From my research, every person who gained weight, every person who is six hundred pounds, they all carry it in different places. It was all about Shuler's anatomy. He asked us to make it heavier, so he could feel enough of the pull of gravity so it could be semi-realistic. So we had to experiment with how much foam to put on it, what kind of foam,  thicker foams and thinner foams and how to make each part move independently.

It became sculptural, in a way. We had a fitting with Shuler for four hours, putting pieces of flab in various spots on Shuler's body and seeing where it felt right.

How much does the thing weigh?

It weighs about fifty pounds. It does look like more. It probably couldn't and shouldn't weigh any more because Shuler has to sit in it for so long. It's quite hot. 

He sweats a lot during the play. How much of that comes from the weight of the suit, and how much is make up?

Some of it is him, and some of it we've added. The idea is that the play is five days in this man's life, and we made the choice to have him not change clothes. We figure, Charlie probably doesn't have access to very many outfits, and right now he probably doesn't care much about changing clothes. We have five different shirts that we rotate through the play that get increasingly sweaty and stained. They deteriorate as he deteriorates.

Was he excited to get into the suit?

He's been such a champion, so game for it. He was really collaborative with the process from the beginning. He would wear it all through tech, fifteen hours a day, and you can't pee in it. It takes two people to take it off him. It's kind of masochistic, but it's been helpful to him, to help him get some understanding of how it is to be Charlie. He did a lot of research as well, watching people of this size move and breathe. His performance is partly the suit, but it's also him selling it.

So you're pleased with how it turned out?

It was a labor of love. Everyone came into this excited and challenged by the prospect of having such a big piece on stage. Everyone involved was committed to maintaining the integrity of the character. That was the challenge—not poking fun, not making it too big, so that we could create a reality for this world. We did an incredible job—better than expected for such a small space. The audience is literally a couple of feet away, which means we had to really do our diligence and make every piece authentic. We're all very proud.

Yesterday Was Halloween, So This Is Topical?

I have a long story about the effect the hurricane has had on theaters around the city coming in a little bit. In the meantime, here is this utterly fluffy, not-at-all-topical interview I did with Otto Penzler, asking about The Big Book of Ghosts.

Otto Penzler, owner of The Mysterious Bookshop and all-around pulp fiction buff, is also an accomplished editor. Roughly once a year, he edits a collection of stories for Black Lizard Press. Past volumes include The Black Lizard Big Book of Black Mask Stories, The Big Book of Adventure Stories, and Zombies! Zombies! Zombies. This year, he gives us The Big Book of Ghost Stories, a thousand-page tome packed full of spooks and spectres which is perfect for reading round the campfire—or, for our readers in lower Manhattan, round the flashlight. Bullett emailed Penzler last week to ask him some questions about the genre.

When assembling a collection of this length, how do you keep it focused? Is the theme of ghost stories enough to bind it together, or do you need something more? 

Ghosts, or any of the BIG anthologies I’ve done, is pretty well focused. The book has a huge range, from the Victorian classics to the pulps to the moderns. The one overwhelming element I tried to focus on was that they be readable, well-written, fun (that’s three, but they coelesce into one).

I’m a big fan of H.P. Lovecraft’s over-the-top Gothic storytelling. Who are some less well-known authors who wrote in a similar vein?

Pulps writers, of which there are many in the book, some of whom are relatively unknown. G.G. Pendarves, Paul Ernst, Henry S. Whiehead, Wyatt Blassingame, Greye La Spina, Henry Rousseau—none of them will ever be accused of being restrained stylistically.

There's more. Oh my yes, there's much more. Well, some more anyway.