Ionesco Interview #2: Amy Wagner

What initially drew you and Phoenix Rep to Ionesco and to THE LESSON in particular?

AMY WAGNER:Our company was looking to build a repertory within our season and we had already decided that the other half of the rep would be Jean Anouilh’s Antigone. We wanted to create an evening of comical one-acts that would compliment that tragedy, and immediately thought of The Lesson. It seemed a perfect way to celebrate the versatility of French drama in the twentieth century. We were all familiar with The Lesson, but we did not want to pair it with the pieces that normally accompany it like The Chairs or The Bald Soprano. We didn’t even plan that the second piece would be another Ionesco play, but after some digging, we came across The Painting, a wonderfully funny play that is rarely performed, so then we built an evening of Ionesco. We consider The Lesson a classic piece of drama from an extremely important and influential period of absurdist writing. What draws me to it is its humor. It is a very funny play. Humor is very democratic, but here it isn’t situational or employed for the sake of a narrative. Ionesco’s humor becomes a method of delivering something much less easier to process. The play isn’t about being funny, and it isn’t about a message. This is what appeals to me.

As a director, how do you approach Ionesco's unique comic voice?

AMY WAGNER: I think that Ionesco intends his characters to be “types” and often clowns. Certainly, he’s saying something about people in general. The Painting goes even further. Ionesco subtitles it a Guignol and writes pages describing the clownish characterization he envisions for each role. Our production, directed by Kevin Confoy, also created a more circus atmosphere at certain points. There were even big shoes, fat suits, and confetti. For The Lesson, I found myself making cuts mostly to preserve humor and to spin us toward the ending with the right pacing. I also added a more sexual overtone, which was often blatant and sometimes buffoonish, both for the Professor and the Student. I even added a Groucho Marx impression. I actually like some of the more clownish moments in Ionesco’s plays for their ability to surprise us and send us in a new, unexpected direction.

Did you learn anything about Ionesco’s style by producing these two one-acts together?

AMY WAGNER: They seemed wildly different animals. Somehow, The Painting made The Lesson seem more “normal”. The Painting was a far broader and more outrageous piece, as far as the characterization and what happens are concerned. However, the language of The Lesson is more absurd and indulged. There were also some commonalities between these two early works. We began to notice how many of the same phrases cropped up in both plays, and also how the dynamics of authority shift back and forth for the characters in both, and of course, the violence. I think that by producing the plays to be performed together lets us explore the range of elements important to Ionesco’s style. Although The Lesson is a classic piece on its own, I think that The Painting provides us with a larger portrait (please excuse the pun) of the absurdist master’s skills and informs our understanding of the kind of theatre he was trying to create.

Which elements of Ionesco's particular brand of absurdism continue to be relevant today?

AMY WAGNER: The clutter of language seems particularly relevant, mostly because our culture is so cluttered with sound-bytes and nonsensical snippets of language delivering information. Look at email and instant messaging. We employ certain abbreviations and acronyms that become words themselves. When I was teaching high school, my students would actually turn in papers with @ symbols. Everything is short-hand, but that’s compensated by the fact that there’s just so much of it. We’re plugged in all the time, constantly streaming. That’s absurd. How can we possibly think we’re defining our own meaning in our lives when we live like that? This is what Ionesco was warning us. But then, maybe we’re not interested in dealing with the same existentialist issues that Ionesco and his contemporaries explored. Maybe we’ve moved onto something else. Perhaps today, the issue is not that there is no meaning, but rather that everything has meaning. How do we cope with that? Maybe finding our own meaning for is not about rejecting those meanings that are outside of us, but rather by selecting which meanings we want for ourselves. That’s our exercise of freedom in this information age. We’re not authors of our lives; we’re editors.

What is your favorite Ionesco play? Why?

AMY WAGNER: I’ve always liked The Lesson. I like that it challenges the subject of knowledge itself. The notion that education and just the process of transmitting learning becomes a method of subjugation and conformity is fascinating to me. I’ve been both a student and a teacher and I consider myself someone who loves learning. Ionesco warns that in learning we are accepting what we are told and simply aping back what has already been determined for us as knowledge; it is decided for us. A similar case is made in The Painting about art. Certainly, societies have made up the knowledge that they want taught in order to suit political aims. History textbooks are a prime example, but the fact that even basic mathematics and philology are challenged in this play really crystallizes the idea. We cannot just accept what we are told is fundamental. We have to make our own meaning. Of course, what I got from the play when I first read it as a kid was that it was just an anti-Nazi play, but I see it has more to do with any society of conformity, not just that brand of fascism. I also like that the play poses its challenges without providing a solution or an alternative. We are left only with the notion that the consequences of this dangerous conformity, including violent destruction, will continue to play out. The cycle will repeat and that the same results should always be expected.

Though once a scathing critique of both theatre and society, absurdism has been fully co-opted by both. How can indie theatre artists continue to be true to the spirit that originally informed this work?

Well, to be true to Ionesco’s type of absurdism means that you must be funny. However, the co-opting I think you may be talking about is simply the use of absurdism to be funny-for funny’s-sake. I think that Ionesco’s Absurdist Theatre, or I guess as he preferred, Theatre of Derision, was about mocking the world around us. For example, he sported excessive clichés and idioms to mock their usage. Most of today’s “absurdist” works, and I’m thinking more of television and film, choose to mock individuals; mean or disgusting things happen to “real” people, and none of us as the audience are actually implicated. Our own lives never come into question, because what we’re watching is meant as an entertainment for escape from ourselves. There’s also that particular genre of weird-for-weird’s-sake, which I think has its place too, but if we’re talking about what the major dramatists of absurdism were aiming at, then I don’t think it was simply about exploring nonsense, but also about burning questions regarding human existence. To me, the key to being true to the spirit of classic aburdist theatre is to continue to require audiences to question their lives and the world around them. It’s an awful lot to ask from audiences, and many will flinch or reject it. Many will just simply not like it. But an indie artist will present it nonetheless, because he thinks it is important.

What's coming up next for you and Phoenix Theatre Ensemble?

Rest. But not for long. Actually, the Phoenix is producing two more shows this season: On the Verge by Eric Overmyer, and Maud, or The Madness, a one-man play by Alfred, Lord Tennyson. Those will open in April and May, respectively. We are currently developing a new play that is being written for us by our Playwright-in-Residence Glyn Maxwell, which will be presented next season. Later this month, we will also host a memorial event for Eve Adamson, our friend and artistic mentor, who passed away in the fall. The Memorial will be on January 29.

Ionesco Interview #1: Edward Einhorn

Untitled Theater Company #61 describes itself as a modern theatre of the absurd. How did this mission evolve for you as an artist and for the company in general?

EDWARD: My brother (who runs the company with me) began reading me Ionesco as a very small child. He’s nine years older, so I was introduced to the theater of the absurd as a seven-year old. Obviously, it has always been very important to our aesthetic as a result. I gravitated towards choosing plays from that genre from the beginning, and I gradually realized that everything we did owed something to theater of the absurd.

However, having said all that, I think that we will be changing our official mission a bit to a Theater of Ideas. I think it encompasses the Theater of the Absurd, but I find that people are having an increasingly hard time knowing what Theater of the Absurd is; or rather, sometimes people believe they know, but what they believe is not what we do. Calling ourselves a Theater of Ideas gets rid of some of that baggage. But it won’t truly change our programming—it will still be as indebted to Theater of the Absurd.

Stolen Chair was still in Philadelphia when the Ionesco Festival was happening in 2001. According to your website, the events of 9-11 happened 5 days into the festival. Aside from the logistical difficulties this must have created, how do you think it shaped audience reactions to the festival?

EDWARD: To an extent, Theater of the Absurd is shaped by tragedy. Ionesco was shaped by World War II. Havel was shaped by the oppression of the Communist regime. One doesn’t need to have tragic world events surrounding you to understand Theater of the Absurd—but it certainly does serve to highlight the meaning of absurdism. Life is full of tragedies, sometimes many and severe, sometimes less so. We survive through them, only to die in the end. And it’s funny. The worse it is, the more the need to laugh at it. Theater of the Absurd fills that need. And certainly, New York was a city in need of laughter after 9/11, the kind of laughter that still acknowledged the tragedy, but laughter nonetheless.

The Village Voice wrote, at the time, that "Dizzying ambition is what animates every aspect of this sprawling festival, which generously provides New Yorkers in the grip of a dark time an opportunity to encounter an unfailingly inventive playwright's response to his own traumatic age." I think New Yorkers were able to understand absurdism in a whole new way after 9/11, a perspective that I still see to an extent currently.

Did you learn anything about Ionesco’s style by producing his entire oeuvre?

EDWARD: Definitely. I knew a lot about Ionesco coming into the festival, but reading the plays and seeing them all on their feet are two very different things. Sometimes I felt like I was watching one, long play. Ionesco varies between a punchy comic absurdism more common in his early plays and a surrealist almost lyrical form of absurdism more common in his later ones. But seeing them all together I could see how even in his earlier plays there is a underlying hint of the wistful, lost and tragic feelings of the later plays, while the later plays suffered unless the productions found the moments of the sudden, unexpectedly ridiculous.

Which elements of Ionesco's particular brand of absurdism continue to be relevant today?

EDWARD: All of it. Of course, you’re asking a prejudiced party, but I think the basic themes of Ionesco’s plays are eternally relevant. One of the difficulties Ionesco tackled was the basic failings of language and the difficulties of communication, a theme that only gets compounded over time. When his characters can’t find meaning in language, they look for it in ideology or, in his later plays, in their own selves. Always, the search is a doomed one. But it is a search that human beings will continue to go through, throughout time, and that essential theme is something that never ceases to be relevant.

What is your favorite Ionesco play? Why?

EDWARD: The Bald Soprano. He wrote a nearly perfect play, if there is any such thing as perfection in playwriting, but it followed none of the rules of theater. It is an object unto itself, and the fact that it works is almost a miracle. It changed theater, but even Ionesco could never write anything else quite like it.

Though once a scathing critique of both theatre and society, absurdism has been fully co-opted by both. How can indie theatre artists continue to be true to the spirit that originally informed this work?

EDWARD: Theater that is truthful can never be co-opted. Absurdism is just a style, a way of getting to that truth, but saying something truthful, especially if no one else is saying it, is always dangerous. But being truthful doesn’t just mean repeating the truths found in old works of absurdism, it is finding new things to say, things that need to be said now.

You just wrapped the enormous Havel Festival. Who's on the short list for your next featured playwright?

We may not do a playwright next—it may be a novelist or writer whose works we will adapt for the stage. There are a few I have in mind whose style would really fit the style of our theater. But I’m not saying who yet.

For more information on Edward Einhorn's work, please visit the homepage of Untitled Theater Company #61.

Have you bought tickets yet?

Well...have you?

No?

It's okay. I'll wait here. Go do it now.

Good. Was that so hard? Now you can sleep soundly tonight, assured that when you arrive at the 40-seat Red Room on January 5, 6, 7, 11, 12, 13, 18, 19, 20, 25, 26, and/or 27, there will be a seat for you at the world-premiere of Stolen Chair's Kill Me Like You Mean It.

Doesn't that just make you feel all warm inside?

Ionesco Lives!

...says NYtheatre.com. Check out their review of two Ionesco one-acts currently playing downtown.

Now that almost all of the film noir interviews are sitting on my desktop, I think it's time to start chatting with indie theatre's Ionesco-philes. I guess we'll just have to launch another interview series...

A train that turns into a bird: Performing absurdism

Today I was asked to articulate how absurdism and naturalism differ from the actor's point of view. This is roughly what I came up with:

One can visualize a character's naturalistic "through-line" as a train moving progressively closer towards a final destination. It might change speed, it might have to avert obstacles and change tracks, but its only objective is to arrive at its scheduled station stop. Once the train reaches its destination, it has undergone a complete (and coherent) journey and this journey changes it (or at least its location).

Now, imagine that same train cruising towards its final destination, only this time the train temporarily turns into a bird. It flies along for a little while, perhaps reaching its nest or perhaps not. At some point it transforms back into the train in exactly the same spot it flew away. As it continues to drive down its track, it might change into a car, a submarine, a bumble-bee, each time diverting into a new journey, only to return back to the tracks. And then, once the train finally arrives at its appointed destination, it finds itself back at the station it originally departed from; there has been no change, and the train simply begins the journey again.

Did anyone follow that over-extended metaphor? I'm not sure I even did, but I guess what I'm getting at is that in absurdism, the character may have a primary objective, but he/she has to indulge quite a few other objectives which might have nothing at all to do with that super-objective (ex. Romeo's super-objective might be to marry Juliet; absurdist Romeo still wants to marry Juliet, but must stop along the way to count his chest hairs, to pretend to be a lizard, and to prove that God is dead, all with the same commitment as his romantic goals). These detours will run to the end of their course and then deposit the actor right back into the struggle to reach his/her final destination. Unfortunately, due to the cyclical nature of most absurdist plays, the character never has the opportunity to reach the final destination, and even if he/she does, this success is often tempered by the realization that the achievement of the objective was ultimately futile (turns out Romeo and Juliet have gotten married, divorced, and remarried several times a day for the past 10 years).

Where this clearly gets frustrating for a perfomer is the attempt to create a character that can contain the primary objectives AND all of the divergences. It might be more useful to think of a multiple-character model, as there is rarely any thread connecting these disparate moments. Robert Leach, in an essay on Meyerhold (not an absurdist), articulated what could be extrapolated as a primer on absurdist performance, substituting "set role" and "mask" for "superobjective" and "detour":

"When he [Hamlet] finds Claudius praying, his set role is that of the Revenger; but moments later, in his mother's bedroom, his mask is that of the disobedient child...like Hamlet, we change: we behave as a child when with our parents...as a supplicant to our Bank Manager, as a 'good fellow' to our acquaintances at the pub, as a conscientous worker to our boss, and so on."

Where absurdism throws all of this into disorder is that the absurdist playwrights would have us act like a child with the Bank Manager and as a conscientous worker with our parents. But the actor's task remains fundamentally the same...

Okay. Enough. Comments?