Conversations with Anne

Anne Bogart

• Publisher: Theatre Communications Group
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781559363754
• eBook ISBN: 9781559367219
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Theatre

From one remarkable mind to another, Conversations with Anne documents the series of intimate interviews that theater director Anne Bogart has conducted—before live audiences—with major artists and cultural thinkers at her West Side studio over half a decade. In these extraordinary conversations, Bogart and her guests consider such free-ranging topics as the driving forces in their work, the paths their lives have taken, and their visions for the future of their field. Bogart delves into the daily thoughts of these artists and thinkers whom she most admires—a group that, collectively, has profoundly shaped the arts and artistry in America over the past twenty-five years.

Interviewees include: JoAnne Akalaitis, Lee Breuer, Ben Cameron, Martha Clarke, Oskar Eustis, Zelda Fichandler, Richard Foreman, Andre Gregory, Bill T. Jones, Tony Kushner, Tina Landau, Elizabeth LeCompte, Eduardo Machado, Charles Mee, Joseph V. Melillo, Meredith Monk, Peter Sellars, Molly Smith, Elizabeth Streb, Julie Taymor, and Paula Vogel.

Anne Bogart is artistic director of the SITI Company, which she founded with Japanese director Tadashi Suzuki in 1992. She has received two OBIE Awards, a Bessie Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship, and is a professor at Columbia University, where she runs the Graduate Directing Program.

Eduardo Machado

Eduardo stirs the pot. Whatever pot is around he is sure to stir it. And the world is a better place for that stirring. He is a great playwright and a master teacher of playwriting. He is very articulate about his influences and he is, in turn, an influence to a vast array of young playwrights and theater people. Eduardo was the artistic director of INTAR in Manhattan and is currently a professor of playwriting at New York University.

Many of Eduardo’s plays are biographical, and for good reason. His life story is traumatic and the imbalance has had a dramatic effect upon his writing. Born in 1953 in Havana, Cuba, Eduardo immigrated to the U.S. at age eight, sent by his parents to flee Castro’s revolution. He arrived in the U.S. speaking no English. He lived with relatives in Hialeah, Florida, and moved to California when his parents arrived a year later. Eduardo began to write plays when a therapist suggested that he compose an imaginary letter of forgiveness to his mother for sending him away. In 1977 he met playwright Maria Irene Fornes who proved to be a powerful inspiration in his life and work. In 1980 he moved to New York City. Since then he has been busy stirring many pots. But mostly Eduardo has been writing.

Eduardo is indeed prolific. His plays include The Modern Ladies of Guanabacoa, Once Removed, Broken Eggs, Fabiola, A Burning Beach, Stevie Wants to Play the Blues, In the Eye of the Hurricane, Kissing Fidel, Cuba and the Night, Crocodile Eyes, Havana Is Waiting, The Cook and That Night in Hialeah. And this is just a small sampling.

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Eduardo also directs, acts and makes films. When he is unhappy about something, he does something about it. If he feels, for example, that a particular playwright is being ignored, he will produce and direct a play of their’s. He makes sure that it gets into the world.

I had the great fortune to direct Eduardo’s play In the Eye of the Hurricane at Actor’s Theatre of Louisville during the Humana Festival of 1991. Besides the play being big, beautiful, personal, poetic and political, I have to say that Eduardo and I had an awful lot of fun together. We laughed a lot, we gossiped a lot, and we thoroughly enjoyed the process of rehearsal, talking and eating. Sometimes we cooked. One night we cooked a Cuban shrimp and rice for the entire cast and crew. It was fantastic.

But there are more sides to Eduardo than the fun one. He can be passionate and angry about the status quo; frustrated by the way things are politically, artistically, economically; impatient for change; ready to slash out verbally and call things the way he sees them. He is infamous for his fiery speeches and his loyalty to people that he believes in.

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September 26, 2005

AB: Eduardo Machado is now the artistic director of INTAR. He has a show there right now called Kissing Fidel, which is controversial as hell, right?

EM: Yes.

He’s a writer I’ve admired for many years. I had the great pleasure of directing his play In the Eye of the Hurricane years ago. Eduardo really writes for theater, as opposed to film or television. I’d like to talk a little bit about where this really unique vision of a theater comes from in your deep, dark past. And I’d also like to talk about process and also just about the field we’re in today, what it’s like—your thoughts and ideas. What was it that drew you to theater in the first place?

I never wasn’t in the theater—since I was a very little kid. The house I grew up in in Cuba had a round tank of water that looked like a stage to me, so I started acting out plays when I was like two. I never ever thought of doing anything else.

You started as an actor?

I started as an actor because I couldn’t spell, so I thought I would never get to be a writer because of the language difference. And because I love becoming other people. I found that very comforting. Then, at a certain age, I found it extremely frightening to become other people. I came to realize that I couldn’t shake it off. I would realize two months later that the part that I was playing was not me. I got in a very harsh place in a play by a writer named John Steppling. So I wrote a play, and then Ensemble Studio Theatre in L.A. did a reading of it. It was a half-hour play. They talked about the play for like two hours, and I knew them well enough that I knew if they were talking about it for two hours, it meant something happened. A friend told me we were getting NEA money so I could apply for a grant. I did, and I got a grant for my first play. My friends who are playwrights tell me that that’s not fair. I locked myself up in a room to write and stopped acting, which is something that I regret. I thought you could only do one thing—and I became a writer.

How old were you when you left Cuba?

I was eight.

Can you describe that circumstance? I think it has a huge effect on who you are.

I left right after the Bay of Pigs. We left because our businesses were taken over by the government. I left on one of the Peter Pan Flights for kids. I didn’t end up at an orphanage like other kids did. I ended up with my aunt.

So your family sent you?

My family sent my brother and me.

Why?

To . . . not become communists. And to, I think in a certain way, protect us. They thought we were going to go to Russia. It was actually a CIA scam as it turns out.

In the Eye of the Hurricane is a beautiful play about that time. When you and I first met to talk about the play, you said, “You know, Anne, you have to understand”—we were talking about the design—“people think that Cuba’s like any other Latino country. My family wanted to be the Kennedys. The way we dressed—we were really not what people imagined.” Of course, the first design we got back from the designer was full of—

Like Taco Bell.

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It was like Taco Bell. Exactly what it shouldn’t be—the worst cliché. I think that the family you came out of is very particular, and I know some of your family members through your plays. There you are in this cauldron, in this huge political moment. Your family stays. You leave.

It’s very dramatic and it makes great stuff for fiction. My family never did anything quietly. They liked the newspapers, they liked the tabloids, so whatever power they had, they used it to be in the paper—especially my dad’s father. If he was dating a showgirl, it was in the paper. When I went back to Cuba to the town where I’m from, which is near Havana, I saw this huge house amongst the very little houses, and it all became very evident to me why they could want so much attention and get it. That colors my work. My work is about very egomaniacal people who only know what they want—and get it.

You grandfather was Oscar in Hurricane?

I have two grandfathers. The grandfather I would like it to be is named Fernando. My other grandfather started off selling fruit on the street when he was eleven and then owned a bus company. So both were pretty driven people.

And they stayed behind?

They stayed behind and then came in ’66.

And where did you go first?

I went to Hialeah, next to Miami. Then we moved to Los Angeles, which is where I grew up.

And that’s where you started acting.

I got my union card when I was seventeen years old. I played extras on Maude and All in the Family. Then I joined Ensemble Studio Theatre where I did more serious theater. Then I was part of Padua Hills Playwrights Festival.

This is where Maria Irene Fornes comes in?

That’s where I met Irene. She mistakenly one day told me to write something. And I did. Because I walked into her class.

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Irene had a huge influence on you.

When I look at my writing I think I’m very lucky because I had Irene, and I had the people at the Ensemble Studio Theatre. James Hammerstein taught me something else, which was how to rewrite, how to be tough, how to have standards.

Can you describe Irene’s workshop?

Irene’s workshop was upstairs at the INTAR building that was just torn down. It had an oriental rug. Irene had these eight tables built. We had a coat hanger that had brass elephants. All the coffee and demitasse cups were paper cups. She didn’t want writers to have real cups. And we’d do kung fu for forty-five minutes. Then we would sit down and all write together. I lived across the street from Irene at the time, and Irene and I wrote every day together for two or three years. We would read stuff to each other after we wrote it. It was all long-hand. We’d go home and type it. There’d be piles of scripts. In her workshop, I wrote Broken Eggs, Rosario and the Gypsies, The Modern Ladies of Guanabacoa.

And what was it that Irene released in you?

Passion. She taught me that anything can happen and anything goes. Irene gave me the right to express myself, which no one had ever given me. She gave me freedom. Irene’s a very interesting person. Being around Irene is like being around the Pied Piper. You can drown if you follow her all the way, but if you follow her just enough it can give you a tremendous amount of liberty to express yourself.

You are in the process right now of rescuing Irene’s work from oblivion. Irene is disintegrating—I think that’s no secret—and her apartment is full of plays that nobody knows what to do with.

She really influenced my life for ten years, until I was around thirty. We had a falling out. And now that I’m fifty-two I’m back to being completely surrounded by her. It’s really fascinating. She forgot we had a fight, though, so it was good.

You know I’m going to ask you about the fight.

I think the fight is an important thing. I was writing The Modern Ladies of Guanabacoa. The Ensemble Studio Theatre was going to do it, and Irene hated the play. She said it was the worst play I’d ever written.

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Did she say why?

No, but one day she invited me over for dinner and she said, “I haven’t read the rewrite, so we’re going to read it together.” Carmen, her mother, was sitting right there. She started reading the play. She went, “‘Short hair, short hair, the answer to all my prayers.’ Bad line.” And she crossed it out. Three hours later she had crossed out the first twenty-two pages of the play. It took that long to read twenty-two pages. I went home and I woke up the next morning and I thought there was blood all over my walls. I called the guy who ran the apartment and I said, “Did somebody die in this apartment before I rented it?” He looked and then he said, “We’ll repaint tomorrow.” I was walking to EST, and I said to myself, That’s not blood, that’s ink. I went back to the apartment and I had taken every pen in the house and thrown it against the wall—unconsciously broken them and thrown them against the wall. That’s the biggest lesson Irene ever taught me.

Which is?

Do what you want to do. It doesn’t really matter if people who you admire like it. And so we had our big fight. At that point I thought it was either her or me, and that I needed to survive. Irene used to tell me stuff like, “You’re as bad a writer as Eugene O’Neill.” And I went, “Oh, thank you.” We had a very turbulent relationship. The person who is making a documentary about Irene called one day and said that Ire...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Other Books By Anne Bogart Available From TCG
• Introduction
• Richard Foreman
• Peter Sellars
• Charles L. Mee, Jr.
• André Gregory
• Paula Vogel
• Martha Clarke
• Julie Taymor
• Bill T. Jones
• Zelda Fichandler
• JoAnne Akalaitis
• Joseph V. Melillo
• Lee Breuer
• Elizabeth Streb
• Elizabeth LeCompte
• Meredith Monk
• Eduardo Machado
• Ben Cameron
• Tina Landau
• Oskar Eustis
• Molly Smith
• Robert Woodruff
• Mary Zimmerman
• Mary Overlie
• SITI Company
• Copyright Page