LOOKING AHEAD

Let’s give our audience a Brechtian curve ball: instead of starting the conversation with La casa de los espíritus, please “alienate” our audience by talking about what you are workingon now for your next production. (This is place for good p.r., so indulge!)

I’ve two new plays premiering within a month of each other. Instructions for Breathing opened at Passage Theatre in New Jersey under Daniella Topol’s direction on April 16^th and  runs through May 10^th. On May 10^th  my play Wreckage premieres at Crowded Fire Theatre in San Francisco and runs through June 6^th . I’m currently also working on a new play commission from New York University and editing new anthology for Manchester University Press entitled Out of Silence: Censorship and Self-Censorship in Theatre & Performance, which, if all goes well, should be in print in 2010.

BACKGROUND / USE / ABUSE OF BRECHT

“I love Brecht, and I couldn’t resist” was a quote attributed to you in the New York Times in their preview of the play. Your quote is specifically in reference to the inclusion of songs in the production, but let’s first use it to plumb the depths of your background in Brecht and the Brechtian. Where, how, what did you first encounter Brecht and how, if at all, do you continue to draw upon Brecht?

I first encountered Brecht’s plays in translation in high school. I was interested in writing for the stage and checked out Mother Courage from the school library. It was the first Brecht play that I read and I was quite taken with the play and its “strange-ness.” It was unlike anything else I’d read before, and certainly was troubled (in a good way) by the manner in which the lead characters actions made me feel.

In college (at UNCC) I kept seeking Brecht’s work out on the page in (mainly) Eric Bentley’s translations. I read in rather quick succession Baal, In the Jungle of Cities, The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, Man is Man, The Good Person of Setzuan, Caucasian Chalk Circle, The Threepenny Opera. The Rise and Fall of the Mahagonny and Happy End. Also, listened to Kurt Weill’s scores Threepenny, and Mahagonny. I was intoxicated with the work and how it continually challenged me as a reader. In graduate school (at UCSD) I was dramaturge on a MFA-director production of Puntila and His Man Matti.

I think Brecht is always a writer I seek out to wake me up or at very least make me think about theatre and form, especially when I can’t find my way out of a writing tunnel, so to speak and get caught in the US’ particular and peculiar tenacious grip on realism, and not even realism in the modernist sense, but a sort of faux realism. In regard to seeing Brecht’s work in performance, I’ve seen Robert Woodruff’s astonishing staging of A Man is a Man at La Jolla Playhouse with Bill Irwin in the lead. That production remains in my mind to this day one of the most exhilarating productions I’ve ever seen. I also saw Lisa Peterson’s staging of Tony Kushner’s adaptation of The Good Person of Setzuan also at La Jolla Playhouse; as well as stagings of Mahagonny (one directed by John Doyle and another by Jonathan Miller), stagings of Threepenny (one directed by Scott Elliott and another by John Dexter)), and Jim Simpson’s production of Baal at the Flea Theatre in NYC.

Specifically, how does Brecht figure into your use of music and song in the production?

I’ve written music and lyrics for many of my plays including 12 Ophelias, Alchemy of Desire/Dead-Man’s Blues, Fugitive Pieces, Prodigal Kiss, and Iphigenia…a rave fable. Music and song are for me central elements of the dramatic vocabulary. Of course, songs serve different functions in plays. In The House of the Spirits, I was interested in creating songs of ceremony (wedding), songs of dreaming (lullabies), work songs and love & protest songs: songs that illuminate the action, create space for contemplation, that serve as markers for tough emotional journeys for characters (Pancha raising her child alone after she’s been raped by ranch owner Trueba), song-lessons mothers sing to their children, and songs of love, defiance and revolution. The play contains these songs moments that break the flow of action, that create space for social commentary on the character’s lives, and also that serve as sequences of time passage.

The use of video projections during the production seems, of course, one of the more Epic Theater practices of the production. Or…?

I’ve been working with video as a dramaturgical element of my writing for several years now. It began with my interest in still photography, and Warhol’s screen tests in my play The Archaeology of Dreams. Then I wanted to explore how moving images (pre-recorded and live feed) and still images can play off of each other in Magnificent Waste, Lulu Ascending, Iphigenia…a rave fable, Steal Back Light from the Virtual, The Tropic of X, the multimedia project The Booth Variations, and the use of surveillance video in Lucinda Caval and Wreckage.

I’m fascinated by how the audience’s gaze can be affected by the mix of live actors, pre-recorded performances, filmed images, and still images of different sizes. My fascination has less to do with the cool-ness of media against the heat of performance in a conventional sense and more with how image(s) is related to memory and emotion – to virtuality and dreams. In the Epic sense, the distancing effect of an actor playing to herself on film, for example, in Iphigenia… creates a layer of awareness of not only the storytelling devices used in performance but also registers how we see actors in space and experience Performance. In The House of the Spirits, I wanted to create a space in the text for the interplay of the virtual haunted hand-written, hand-drawn world of Alba’s fragmented psyche and the live ghosted world of her family histories: manifest on the stage.

THE ADAPTATION

Adapting a novel is one thing, but Allende’s novel in the 27 years since it has been published has been recycled / adapted / transformed numerous times (multiple translations, several theater adaptations, a film adaptation, etc…). Did you draw upon any of these iterations or did you stick with the primary source?

I stuck with the primary source. I’d seen Billie August’s film many years ago and although it had a dynamite stellar cast I just wasn’t moved by the film. I thought the film didn’t quite capture the tone of Allende’s voice. As for the other theatre adaptations (Book-It, Bilingual Foundation for the Arts, York Theatre/UK) I honestly didn’t want to be affected by choices other adaptors of the material had made. Not in a selfish or precious way, mind you. Rather, I wanted to be able to dream and dialogue with the novel in my own time and manner. The book is massive and un-wieldly dramatically, and I felt that I needed clarity of focus to find my way through it for the stage.

You are an experienced translator of aesthetic material, but for this production you had to re-fashion the Spanish text onto a Spanish-speaking stage in an English-Speaking country. Did this affect your normal approach to translation / adaptation?

I really separate my translator’s hat from my playwright’s hat, even though sometimes they inevitably overlap. I’ve translated Federico Garcia Lorca’s work, and plays by Calderon de la Barca, Lope de Vega, Antonio Buero Vallejo, Julio Cortazar, and contemporary pieces from Mexico and Cuba. I’ve also adapted from literal translation (from the Serbian) Sajtinac’s play Huddersfield. I’ve written hybrid free riffs of my own making from works by Euripides, Sophocles, Shakespeare, and Wedekind.

With The House of the Spirits, the first challenge I gave myself was to not use any of Allende’s text, but instead themes, characters and narrative arcs. So, it meant that essentially I had to invent a language for all the characters and the stage world and render a play in Spanish but also simultaneously write an English-language version of my own play. It was, well, writing two plays at once! And constantly translating and re-translating myself from version to version. The challenge of production came after. I knew the production would be in Spanish, since Repertorio Español always (at least in its last 41 years) produces work in Spanish. The audiences at Repertorio, though, are not always Spanish-speaking-only. Many are bilingual and others are English-only. Writing the English-language version of the play was then a practical choice as well as an aesthetic one.

In regard to how the many choices I made as a writer affected my work in crafting both scripts, I was deeply aware that my poetic voice had to behave differently in both languages – the nature of each language dictates this. I also knew that given the 50-year history (1920-1970s) of the novel, I had an obligation to somehow create passages of time not only through plot but through linguistic codes and usage: language spoken as indicator of where we might be in the timeline of story, as well as social class of character.

I have to say that writing these two versions really shifted my ways of working and thinking. I found myself working in a much more sculptural fashion with words, with juxtaposition of scenes and moments, etc.

The production is conducted in Spanish and simulcast in English, which seems to create some interesting dilemmas. Did you write the English material as well? Did you approach the adaptation any differently than you have with previous productions because of the simulcast aspect?

I did write the English version as well although I didn’t write it to be exactly simultaneous as in word for word. My interest was to write a play-able, stage-able English version that could live alongside the Spanish version. So, there are differences in cadence, rhythm, and in some places meaning. For me the idea was to create two different kinds of poetry that could complement each other. But not replicate each other.

Much has been made of the element of magical realism and Allende’s novel. Bringing / adapting transforming the element of magical realism to the theatrical stage seems a big undertaking. Did you draw upon certain theatrical forms in order to make the transition to the stage? For example did you draw upon Greek Tragedy, Epic Theater, Theater of the Absurd for ways of presenting magic realism on the stage?

Well, I always go to the ancient Greeks because the foundations of the works are generally so strong. The plots are lean and relentless for the most part, the language cuts to the bone, the interplay of choral passages to solo passages and to dramatic scenes is dynamic. The stakes are high and the view is both local and global. Magical realism, as Garcia Marquez defined it and marked so many writers for years, does not translate easily to the stage, even though the stage is medium for metaphor. Magical realism can seem perhaps literal sometimes in its effects in the page, but if you look at how Symbolist playwrights worked, there’s a key there to considering how to play the magical/spiritual (symbolic) and have it co-exist with the material world represented on stage. Greeks, Symbolists, Epic and Modernist Neo-Classical Theatre (if you think of T.S. Eliot, Lorca and Tennessee Williams in this group, for instance) offered me ways in.

Maybe we are reaching a bit too far here, but the general material found in the production (dictatorship / exile / death / survival, etc… ) seems to correspond not only with the life of work of Brecht, but also with his contemporary Lorca (also a writer you have worked extensively with). Is there some connection to be found here?

Not reaching at all! I really felt Lorca’s presence when I was writing this play. Also in many of my plays I’ve dealt with legacies of violence, dictatorship, censorship, exile, diaspora, death, survival, etc. The terrain is with me. My father is from Argentina and many in the family lived during the dirty wars, and my mother is from Cuba and she lived through the Cuban revolution. So, I’ve lived with stories of exile from my parents. I think to think about the act of writing as a means of, a necessity of, survival, of recording history (“good and bad”) is central to The House of the Spirits and to so many stories of family and society and politics. How one chooses to live life is a political choice. This is something I believe strongly and it’s evident in not only Allende’s story of exile and writing and remembrance, but in Brecht’s life and Lorca’s life cut short.

La casa de los espíritus (The House of Spirits) an adaptation by Caridad Svich of the eponymous novel by Isabel Allende (1982) is being produced by the Repetorio Español at the Gramercy Arts Theatre in New York City from March 19 through June 5, 2009.