The Director's Voice, Vol. 2

Jason Loewith

• Verlag: Theatre Communications Group
• Jahr: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781559367318
• Thema: Media & Performing Arts
• Thema: Theatre Direction & Production

“Directors today are equipped with a larger toolbox than their forerunners, standing on their shoulders as well as those of pioneers in non-Western theater, experimental visual art, community-based theater, and the ever-evolving commercial theater scene.”— Jason Loewith

This second volume presents a cross-section of the most diverse and dynamic stage directors defining today’s American theater, in conversation with director/producer Jason Loewith. A follow-up to the immensely popular first volume, which has sold over eighteen thousand copies, much has changed in the twenty years since The Director’s Voice debuted. “The nonprofit model has been turned on its head,” Loewith notes. “Institution-building is out for these directors; creating a distinctive voice from a multiplicity of influences is in.” Together, these directors sketch a compelling portrait of the art form in the new century.

Interviews include: Anne Bogart, Mark Brokaw, Peter Brosius, Ping Chong, David Esbjornson, Oskar Eustis, Frank Galati, Michael Kahn, Moisés Kaufman, James Lapine, Elizabeth LeCompte, Emily Mann, Michael Mayer, Marion McClinton, Bill Rauch, Bartlett Sher, Julie Taymor, Theatre de la Jeune Lune (Barbra Berlovitz, Steven Epps, Vincent Gracieux, Robert Rosen, and Dominique Serrand), George C. Wolfe, and Mary Zimmerman.

Jason Loewith is a producer, director, and writer. He has served since 2002 as artistic director of Chicago’s Next Theatre Company, where he conceived, co-wrote, and produced Adding Machine: A Musical, which had an award-winning run off-Broadway.

THEATRE DE LA JEUNE LUNE

Balancing Acts

IN 2003, I ASKED THE FIVE COartistic directors of Minneapolis-based Theatre de la Jeune Lune—Barbra Berlovitz, Steven Epp, Vincent Gracieux, Robert Rosen and Dominique Serrand—whether they considered themselves an ensemble.

SERRAND: We have a new word. Now we say a “congress.”

ROSEN: I think that sounds socialist.

GRACIEUX: No, it actually—

SERRAND: Now we call ourselves a “congress”!

BERLOVITZ: You call us a “congress”!

SERRAND: No!

BERLOVITZ: I know, I know it’s in the [artistic statement] . . . I [she sighs] . . . well.

In the end, the terminology didn’t matter. Three years later, the company jettisoned 28 years of collective governance, appointing Dominique Serrand as sole artistic director. And two years after that, in 2008, the company sold its building and closed its doors. Even a 2005 Special Tony Award for Outstanding Regional Theatre for their visionary body of devised work—from circus-inspired, movement-based evenings of comic lunacy to visually lush and imaginative revisions of the classics—wasn’t enough to save Jeune Lune. As Serrand prophetically told me in 2006, “You always get the award on your tomb.”

Although the company’s precarious financial position—a reported debt in excess of $1 million against an annual budget of only $1.5 million—was the reason for the sale of their magnificent home in a former Allied Van Lines warehouse, the reason the artists did not remain together to create work was far more prosaic: after thirty years, the collective simply fell apart.

But to dwell on the company’s demise would deny its extraordinary accomplishments and longevity. The seeds of Jeune Lune were planted in the early 1970s, when Parisian actor Dominique Serrand and Minneapolis native Barbra Berlovitz met while studying with French movement, mask and clowning teacher Jacques Lecoq. They began performing together, and were soon joined by two other graduates of Lecoq’s famous school: Vincent Gracieux, another Frenchman, and Robert Rosen, a childhood friend of Berlovitz’s. In 1978, the four teamed up for a Parisian production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Theatre de la Jeune Lune (“theater of the young moon”) was born. They began splitting their time between France and the United States, creating and performing work in French for the Parisians, and translating it to English for the Minneapolitans. Minneapolis actor Steven Epp joined the troupe in 1983, and the company settled there permanently in 1985, establishing themselves with what became a signature comic work (and frequent moneymaker), Yang Zen Froggs. The company purchased the cavernous warehouse in 1992, and through a process of creative demolition, turned it into a spare, beautiful and flexible six-thousand-square-foot performance space.

They opened the building with an extremely ambitious project, borne of an artistic yearning the four founders had long shared. That piece, Children of Paradise: Shooting a Dream ( based on the making of the legendary French film Les enfants du paradis) put Jeune Lune on the map, winning the American Theatre Critics Association New Play Award for 1993. “No more extraordinary theater work will appear this season,” crowed Newsweek when the play toured to Yale Repertory Theatre.

From then on, Jeune Lune’s delirious, insightful and visually magnificent works toured nationally and internationally, and thrilled its home audience in Minneapolis. Though artistic and administrative decisions had been made collaboratively through its history, the arrangement was informal until the four founders asked Epp to join them in running the company. The five officially named themselves co-artistic directors in 2001.

Although all five artists share a background in movement-based performance, they each took a seat in the director’s chair on occasion, and all five shared responsibility for generating new work in a way unlike that of any major theater in the country. Projects would germinate organically when one or another of the directors found an idea—usually a source text—intriguing. Weeks, months or years of conversation followed, with the others adding to a communal pot of knowledge around the source. When the idea finally achieved critical mass, it turned into workshop, then rehearsal, then performance.

“The Lunies” (as they were locally known) created three, four or even five works a year, most in this way. Some texts were written solely by one member of the congress; others were authored by some (or all) of them collectively. Of the classics they put on, they gravitated most to Molière, Mozart and Shakespeare, frequently revising texts or combining them. (It’s no surprise the texts that most interested them were classics that provided opportunities for physical, textual and visual exploration.) Even when they produced plays in a more traditional manner (like scripts by 20th century luminaries Arnold Wesker, Bertolt Brecht, or Eugene Ionesco), those productions inhabited the kind of theatrically exuberant worlds that were their hallmark.

No matter the source material, a Jeune Lune production was graced by an intuitive and joyful melding of the physical and the intellectual, employing circus arts, rigorous physical performance, occasionally mask and mime, and always stunning visual metaphor. The acting embodied the kind of immediacy and clarity of vision you’d expect from long-time collaborators who rejoiced in risk and answered only to themselves and their collective vision. As they wrote in their 2003 artistic statement:

What is common to all our work is its poetic gesture. Everything is sacred, and everything is on the move. Like the moon, we reflect and influence . . . Whether it’s a novel, an opera, a circus, a classic, an invention, it is a Jeune Lune show because it comes about through us.

As their mentor Lecoq used to say, “everything moves.” Through their collective imaginations, Mozart’s Magic Flute (1999) became a raucous cabaret enveloping actor and spectator, Molière’s Don Juan and Mozart’s Don Giovanni meshed into a cross-country road trip called Don Juan Giovanni (1994) and the relationship between an author and his fictional subject morphed into a puppets-and-people performance called Gulliver, a Swift Journey (2001).

But by the time I first met them in 2003, the “congress” was working less and less collaboratively. Serrand was spending a large amount of time freelance directing with other regional theaters, and had fallen in love with opera directing. Projects would be taken up that only used one or two of them at home. And the institutional pressures of running a major regional theater began to change the aesthetic and process behind the work. For example, I watched a serious debate among them about whether productions needed to appear polished at first performance thanks to a long rehearsal process, or (as Serrand insisted) it was more important to do a couple of weeks of rehearsal and then just “show”—present what you’ve got, see if it has legs and then go back to work on it. Would the audience accept a play that previewed for six weeks and opened only on its closing night? Could such a system work in the 21st century for a theater the size and heft of Jeune Lune?

When Serrand was named sole artistic director in 2006, Rosen and Gracieux took “leaves of absence,” while Berlovitz (still acting with the company) stepped away from institutional responsibilities. I asked Serrand whether they had dissolved the congress.

No we haven’t. I’m the head of the congress . . . I’m working with a congress of artists and right now I’m the leader . . . [but] people are looking in all kinds of directions to think and refocus about their own work. For years we were trying to work more individually on our own projects. And we got to a point where we realized we needed to find a sense of unity in the direction of the organization, and to readdress the position of each one of us as artists. It was a very courageous endeavor, for all of us to say, “let’s relook at our work,” and if people want to go . . .

Obviously, our main preoccupation is to stay alive and healthy, but not at any cost. If the recipe to be successful means we have to change our artistic production, then there would be no reason for Jeune Lune to continue.

Not quite two years later, Jeune Lune announced imminent closure. Vincent had already moved back to France, where he now works primarily with an English company called Footsbarn. The other four retain their roots in Minneapolis and work to differing degrees and in different capacities there and around the country. Epp and Serrand founded a new performing venture, The Moving Company, in 2009, and have produced three shows together working with former Lunies. But the five artists have not worked collaboratively since 2006.

Despite the demise of Theatre de la Jeune Lune, we decided to include this interview not only as a salute to their rare artistry, but as a snapshot of a difficult moment for an artistic ensemble. I interviewed all five of them at once in an attempt to gain insight into their way of working. Nothing about how Jeune Lune operated fit the dominant American models of artistic creation. So why should their interview be any different?

SEPTEMBER 2003, THEATRE DE LA JEUNE LUNE, MINNEAPOLIS

Let’s start with the obvious question—how do all five of you work together? How can five people possibly choose a play?

BERLOVITZ: I would start with the fact that we’re twenty-five years old, and over the course of twenty-five years, we’ve had different experiences of how that’s worked, and how that hasn’t worked. Vincent, Dominique and I directed the first two or three shows as a threesome. We codirected. And that continued in different forms over the years. But most of the time, now, we have a single director.

Given that, how do you define the word “director”? None of you are trained as...