Theater As If It Matters One Theatrical Place in Amer- the Dynamic Diane Paulus Breaks All Four Walls

Montage Art, books, diverse creations

18 Open Book 19 Again, A Dangerous Art 20 Chapter and Verse 23 The Son Also Rises 23 Sharks, Fiction, and Wall Street 24 Off the Shelf

roots”)—and theater in general, should be. “I’m deeply interested in the audience,” she says. “I’m a populist. I believe in the audience’s in- telligence, and want them to have a voice. Opera is the Theater As If It Matters one theatrical place in Amer- The dynamic Diane Paulus breaks all four walls. ica where peo- The Donkey Show in ple will actu-

rehearsal, with Paulus ally boo. Why? Paulus D iane by Craig Lambert (above, far left, and inset) directing Tytania Because opera mmediately after college, Diane Pau- series. Paulus announced a different goal. “I atop a cube, assisted fans are so pas- lus ’88 returned home to New York City want to be Robert Brustein,” she said, “and by the four Fairies. sionate about and enrolled in a two-year training pro- run the American Repertory Theatre.” what they be- o f courtesy g es; gram at The New Actors Workshop. This past summer, nearly two decades lieve and what they want. I would rather It’s a prestigious program: Hollywood later, she realized her dream, becoming have an audience boo than fall asleep.” I director Mike Nichols and theater direc- artistic director of the repertory company More often, her audiences have been tor Paul Sills taught her. On the final night, that Brustein, professor of English emeri- singing, dancing, and cheering. For The several students stayed up late at a café, tus, founded at Yale and brought to Har- Donkey Show, her first ART production, saying goodbyes and discussing their am- vard’s Loeb Drama Center nearly 30 years Paulus (with her husband and collabora- ima b e/landov Glo L ee/Boston bitions. Some just wanted to get an agent. ago. She brings an ambitious vision of what tor, Randy Weiner ’87) has changed the atthew J. J. M atthew

Some wanted to become film stars; others the ART (American Repertory Theater, company’s Zero Arrow Theatre into a t: hoped to act or direct on Broadway or do the spelling of “Theater” now anglicized club named OBERON, a 1970s disco set- improv comedy or win a lead role on a TV at her suggestion, accenting its “American ting for a radically re-imagined version of le f From

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A Midsummer Night’s Dream. (The renaming David Owen ’78 lives in a of Zero Arrow, reportedly, is permanent.) o p e n b o o k 1700s house across a dirt The audience throngs into the nightclub road from a nature pre- (yes, adult beverages are available) and serve, surrounded by wild- dances for the first half-hour amid a cast, T h e H i g h - r i s e life. Compared to his first in costume and in character, that mingles home, in Manhattan, it’s an and dances with them. Four Fairies— Ecotopia ecological catastrophe of chiseled young men wearing little more energy consumption. Green than glorified loincloths and eyeliner— Metropolis: What the City Can Teach the Country about True Sustainability (Riverhead, gyrate atop cubes on the dance floor and $25.95) explains. From chapter one: invite theatergoers to gyrate with them. The play unfolds in blackout sketches that y wife and I got married right the United States. The most devastating pop up in spotlights all over the room, out of college, in 1978. We were damage that humans have done to the played at times almost literally in audi- M young and naïve and unasham- environment has arisen from the burn- ence members’ laps. Not a single word of edly idealistic, and we decided to make ing of fossil fuels, a category in which Shakespeare’s dialogue is uttered, but the our first home in a utopian environmen- New Yorkers are practically prehistoric action is true to his characters and their talist community in New York State. For by comparison with other Americans, in- relationships, and moves ahead via disco seven years we lived quite contentedly cluding people who live in rural areas or anthems like “I Love the Nightlife,” “We in circumstances that would strike most in such putatively eco-friendly cities as Are Family,” and “Last Dance.” Portland, Ore- The Donkey Show, which premiered in gon, and Boulder, 1998 in New York and has since run in Colorado. The av- Edinburgh, London, Madrid, and Evian, erage Manhattan- France, is the first of Paulus’s “Exploding ite consumes gas Shakespeare” triptych, the trio of produc- oline at a rate tions that open her first season. For Oc- that the country tober, she booked the innovative British as a whole hasn’t theater company Punchdrunk to stage— matched since the install might be a better word—Sleep No mid 1920s, when More, “an immersive production inspired the most widely by Shakespeare’s Macbeth, told through owned car in the the lens of a Hitchcock thriller” at the Old United States was Lincoln School near Brookline Village, the Ford Model T. Massachusetts. In late November, The Best Thanks to New of Both Worlds will tell The Winter’s Tale with k Kranen/istoc L in gb ee k -van York City, the aver- the musical sounds of R&B and gospel.

© Klaas Klaas © age resident of New (An unexploded Winter’s Tale, performed Americans as austere in the extreme: Though dense York uses less gaso- by the ART’s Institute for Advanced The- our living space measured just 700 and paved, line than the aver- ater Training class of 2010, was also on the Manhattan is square feet, and we didn’t have a lawn, exemplary in age resident of any Loeb theater docket for early October.) a clothes dryer, or a car. We did our energy use and other state, and “I am serious about the mission of grocery shopping on foot, and when greenhouse-gas uses less than half ART—to expand the boundaries of the- we needed to travel longer distances emissions. as much as the av- ater,” Paulus says. “I am very passion- we used public transportation. Because erage resident of Wyoming. Eighty-two ate about theater not being defined as an space at home was scarce, we seldom percent of employed Manhattan residents ‘elite’ art form. I want to see it return to a acquired new possessions of significant travel to work by public transit, by bicycle, vibrant, vital place, not only as a center of size. Our electric bill worked out to or on foot. That’s 10 times the rate for culture, but at the center of our society. In about a dollar a day. Americans in general, and eight times the fifth-century B.C. Athens, theater was at The utopian community was Manhat- rate for workers in Los Angeles Coun- the center of social and religious life; Ae- tan. Most Americans…think of New ty.…The average New Yorker (if we take schylus was competing with Sophocles York City as an ecological nightmare, a into consideration all five boroughs of the amid the birth of democracy. The theatri- wasteland of concrete and garbage and city) annually generates 7.1 metric tons cal experience should not be confined to diesel fumes and traffic jams, but in com- of greenhouse gases, a lower rate than rituals of what we think theater is—to sit parison with the rest of America it’s a that of residents of any other American in chairs bolted to the floor: that’sone kind model of environmental responsibility. In city, and less than 30 percent of the na- of theater. Look at Indian culture or me- fact, by the most significant measures, tional average, which is 24.5 metric tons; dieval Europe—theater hasn’t only been New York is the greenest community in Manhattanites generate even less. about realism and naturalism. “[Richard] Wagner said to turn the

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drink and shout. co-founded CityStep, “haunted the Loeb,” For the ground- and wrote a senior social-studies thesis on lings of Shake- The Living Theatre, the New York-based speare’s day, it experimental theatre group. She didn’t was very earthy. want to be an actor “and wait by the phone, I look at other hoping for a job,” so after completing her forms of live en- two-year workshop training, she earned tertainment— an M.F.A. in directing at Columbia; she has pro wrestling, worked as a freelance director since 1997. rock concerts— Paulus has done plenty of musical theater, to get my inspir- including opera (all the Mozart-Da Ponte ation.” operas, for example) and, two years ago, a Paulus grew London opera based on the David Lynch up as a “theater film Lost Highway. In 2007 and 2008, she di- arts kid” in New rected a revival of Hair in Central Park and York City; her then took it to Broadway, where it won a father acted and 2009 Tony Award. Above: A disco directed, and she Traditionally, at the end of Hair, the au- ball and DJ over- danced with the dience mounts the stage and dances until look the Donkey Show audience as New York City they are spent. That’s part of the plan. cast members en- Ballet as a girl “You’ve touched them and made some act a scene. Left: and studied piano kind of transformation,” Paulus explains. A Fairy leaps. for 10 years. But “You want that to have an outlet. It’s not “practicing piano just the play on the stage—it’s the gather- six hours a day by myself didn’t feel ing of people.” Paulus’s invitation is direct

tern/ ART like the heart of what the arts meant and sincere: “Come be in my shows.” S to me,” she says. “I loved the creative

M arcus process in a group—many people house lights out to keep the audience fo- coming together and making something cused on the stage,” she continues. “But great.” There were four formative years of people once went to the theater to flirt— the “wild creative activity that undergrad- to see other people in the boxes, to eat and uates engage in” at Harvard, where Paulus Again, A Dangerous Art The brutal, desperate poetry of Frederick Seidel by adam kirsch

t may be hard to believe, reading contemporary poetry is obscure and form- the small epiphanies and self-flattering less, yet utterly unchallenging—but its revelations that are standard in contem- willingness to confront areas of experience I porary American poetry, but for much that we are more comfortable ignoring. of the twentieth century poetry was a dan- No poet working today knows that dangerous art. When T.S. Eliot fused sordid gerous truth better than Frederick Seidel urban scenes with high literary allusions in ’57, whose heartbreaking and deliberately The Waste Land, or Robert Lowell confessed scandalous poetry is collected in Poems his childhood traumas and mental illness in 1959-2009 (Farrar Straus Giroux). “I am civi- Life Studies, or Sylvia Plath recreated herself lized,” Seidel writes in the bluntly titled as a suicidal avenging angel in Ariel, read- “Kill Poem,” “but/I see the silence/And write ers reacted as those poets wanted them to: the words for the thought balloon.” Those with shock, sometimes with outrage, but words—the ones we think but know better always with the fascination that only genu- than to say out loud—are the ones Seidel ine risk can bring. What made modern po- can’t stop himself from repeating. One of the etry modern was not really its experiments most notorious examples is “Broadway Mel- M ahaney Frederick Seidel

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