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Studio 360 with Kurt Andersen Episode 1339, Friday Sept. 29, 2012 (aired on WAMU Sept. 29) “Andrew McCarthy and Theater for the People” [Transcription by Megan Paolone, research assistant to Ombudsman Joel Kaplan]
Interview with Oskar Eustis: Putting the Public Back in Theater
Kurt Andersen: This is Studio 360, I’m Kurt Andersen. New York is the epicenter of American Theater. It’s not mainly because of Broadway. More important than any of those big-sized Broadway houses is a mid-sized theater company downtown called The Public. It was started by an amazing impresario named Joseph Papp and in the years since, The Public Theater has been premiering major innovative work after work. Hair, A Chorus Line, For Colored Girls Who Consider Suicide, or more recently, Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, GATZ and Passing Strange.
Musical interlude
The theater has just completed a major renovation and is about to start a big fall season. Oskar Eustis is the artistic director and one of the most influential people in American theater. Oskar, welcome to Studio 360.
Oskar Eustis: Thank you, Kurt.
KA: So you were an actor before you became this person? Was there a moment? I mean, you look good. I’m sure you looked great as a young man. You talk good—was there a moment when you just said, “Nahh, I’m not an actor”?
OE: I mean, I think we should explain to your listeners that my handsomeness is sort of unbearable.
KA: Yup. Yeah I know, I wanted to put up a plate so I wouldn’t have to see you.
OE: The moment that I ceased being an actor was actually at The Public Theater, Kurt. I did an audition for Joe Papp…
KA: The founder?
OE: The founder of The Public Theater. I was auditioning in 1976 for Henry V, and I was auditioning for it for a very small part and by the time I walked into that room, I literally walked out of the Anspacher Theater, which was at The Public, and in the hallway outside said, “I am never doing that again.” And I never did.
KA: But had you never auditioned before? What was so traumatic?
OE: At the heart of it, Kurt, is that I was always unable to lose myself in a character or moment. I was always thinking about what it looked like, thinking about how I could do it better, analyzing what my other performers on stage were—which of course made me very unpopular—and what I found is that critical consciousness is not something I could turn off. So I found a way to continue making theater with that critical eye or that interior dialogue about perfection was actually an advantage, rather than as an actor it wasn’t an advantage.
KA: It’s interesting that you were able to have the self-awareness to make that choice, at what, 20?
OE: 18. It hardly was self-awareness, but it was also, Kurt, that the world was already starting to give me the feedback and Joe was just the ultimate. This was not going to be my path to great success. I’ve said often when I teach that really the key to having a successful career is sort of establish a singing between what you want and what the world wants from you. You have to listen to what the world wants from you without losing what you want but you have to negotiate with that. People who are too inflexible about what they want and won’t listen to the world or people who just try to give the world what they want don’t end up happy.
KA: Well said. That should just go out to every would-be artist of any kind.
OE: What if we put it on public radio?
KA: There you go. Let’s try that. Dozens of The Public Theater’s shows have transferred successfully to Broadway productions. Chorus Line, maybe most famously, but also That Championship Season, Top Dog Underdog, Merchant of Venice starring Al Pacino recently, and Hair, of course 40 years ago and then once again recently with the big 40th anniversary revival.
Musical interlude
So as a 16-year-old in 1976, was that your attraction to The Public Theater as a young hippie?
OE: No, but actually I was hitchhiking around Europe at the age of 14 as sort of a semi-runaway, and I somehow got a ticket to the London production of Hair. And I got up at the end and danced on stage with those hippies, which was a tradition even then, and it was a huge moment for me because I had actually not taken the theater seriously. Theater was something I had done as a kid. But that was a moment when I realized that all my alienation and my anger, which was political anger at my country and the state of the war, it was a way to actually keep all that and yet be part of society. And I didn’t have to be alienated from them because I watched them and, this is an angry protest but nonetheless West End Theater. And it planted the seed that the theater was a place where dissident ideas could nonetheless be brought into the mainstream. You could be radical at the center, as David Herr [Hair?] always put it.
KA: And you still like it when political theater happens? When theater gets political and upsets people?
OE: Theater is always political, it’s just a question of whether its conscious of its politics and puts its politics, it problematizes them in a way that you can engage with them. But there’s always political assumption. It’s just what we believe about life.
KA: Sure, sure. But, well, it strikes me that theater, probably more than any other art form today, can make explicitly political points effectively. But, how conscious are you of the problem or the risk that you get bad art when you begin with agenda-pushing points?
OE: I’m constantly aware of that as a danger and there’s certain people that will say that some of what I’ve done has crossed that boundary. I don’t believe so because the political impulses that people have are as deep and vital as their familial impulses. We’re used to thinking of them as tendentious and narrow. The theater’s a terrible place for trying to sell a point of view. It is a beautiful place for saying, “Look at this assumption that you’ve been making and think about it from the other guy’s point of view. Think about it if this basic assumption about private property is wrong. Think about what the war in Iraq looks like from the Iraqis point of view.” It’s a beautiful place for raising those oppositional points of view and feeling of putting them in dialogue with one another. Art isn’t art if it isn’t simply making a statement.
KA: In other countries and other eras, we see again and again, reading history, reading the news, that onerous boundaries and rules to fight back against can actually make for good art in all kinds of ways. Is there any part of you that thinks, “Good, elect Romney, get a Republican Senate as well as a Republican House, and that’ll be good for theater and art”?
OE: There is not one piece of me that thinks that any improvement in the theater that would result from the election of President Romney would be worth the tremendous price that the world would pay for such a disaster.
KA: I figured you’d say that.
OE: Sorry [laughs].
KA: But, but, it’s a real point.
OE: Of course the point is correct. In situations where there is a clear enemy, it’s often easier. Let me give you an example. One of the great political plays of American history was done at The Public: Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart. That play, talk about a point of view. That play had an angry, anguished, utterly articulated point of view, that everyone from The New York Times to the mayor of New York was guilty of murder.
KA: About AIDS when the [something in French…] audiences really recognized that this was a disaster.
OE: Exactly. At that moment Larry had a target that was big enough to justify the enormous theatrical wrath and intelligence he brought on it. And that play helped change the world. That was a fantastic—Joe kept that play running for a year even though for months no one was coming, for months it was losing money. He said, “This play is so important. We’re not gonna shut this down until the world catches up with it.” And it was a great producer, a great play, and it made a difference, and having an enemy was what allowed that play to…
KA: You started The Public’s musical theater initiative, which is commissioned now a new musical version of Giant, based on the Edna Furber novel from the 1950s which became the James Dean movie in the 1950s. Tell me about that. It hasn’t opened yet.
OE: It’s in rehearsal right now, but I think it’s a major and beautiful work. It’s a gorgeous portrait of, and really what it follows it a marriage. In the movie, the Rock Hudson/Elizabeth Taylor characters.
Scene from the movie plays
It’s one of the most moving things about a long-term marriage that I’ve ever seen and as a married man who’s happily in a long-term marriage, we don’t have enough portraits of that in our culture. We’re really good on romance, we’re not really good on what it takes…
KA: And we’re really good at breakups too.
OE: Exactly. The much deeper and more important thing is what keeps a marriage together. But also it uses that marriage as a way of understanding how America is changing and understanding what is great and inspiring about America and what is poisonous and dangerous about America at the same time.
KA: Sounds like it’s headed for Broadway in 2013!
OE: I would be very happy with a run at the Newman.
KA: Umm, non-Broadway theater is almost never supported by ticket sales by themselves. Is that a faulty model, or just the way it is and we should get used to it?
OE: We should embrace it and celebrate it. Every society in the history of the western world, which is the only history I’m qualified to talk about, has had an art that is not simply not supported by the market. Art has always been subsidized in every society we know of. The question is, who does the subsidizing and who is the art for? If we take the government out of the equation we let the rich people do it.
KA: As they always have.
OE: As they always have.
KA: Bless them.
OE: [Laughs] But what they will do is subsidize the art that they want for them. All you have to do is look at the fine art market. Look at what happens to paintings. That doesn’t have a lot to do with democracy. I mean there’s fantastic theaters all over the country, but when all that national funding went away, all of those theaters were left alone and had to make their own way in the marketplace so to speak. And there were some good things that resulted from that, but in this very curious way, many of the theaters became blander, less interesting, less distinct, and their seasons started to look like all the plays that were successes last year in New York. Now this is in no way a measure of all theaters, but they became more conservative because they were more dependent on ticket sales and the audience. That’s the thing that I think a great subsidy system can do, is it can liberate these theaters to become more individuated and more distinctly themselves. And that’s good for everybody.
KA: But even just with the way things are now, it seems that overall you’re more hopeful than not.
OE: Absolutely. Look, culture does well in bad times, just to go back to your nightmare of electing President Romney. People need theater, and if you had been with us when we took Richard III or Measure for Measure into the prisons, you would feel that as a primal visceral human-defining thing. You could see those prisoners needed stories, the way we need air, the way need water. It’s stories that make us a collective. And need for that’s not gonna go away. Those of us that are in charge of the institutions and the delivery systems have got to live up to what is demanded of us to make sure that we’re making it as vital and as accessible as possible.
KA: Oskar Eustis, thank you very much.
OE: Thank you, Kurt.