“One, two, one, two. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten. One, two,
three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten. One, two…. One, two. One, two, three,
four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten. Okay.”
When I was very much younger I saw Spalding Gray sit behind a table and just tell stories,
and that was a fantastic thing. And I thought oh yeah, maybe one day I’ll try to make
a show like that.
“Climbed into his hammock feeling particularly alone because he was in the middle of a busy
human community unable to communicate, and then…”
It’s kind of a painstaking process, I mean I make it in the same way as I make any show,
I build it up in bits. A fragment here, and a fragment there, and then I go to the next
bit, and the next bit, and I try to tell the story and then I try to stage the story. So
it’s a process of deconstructing and reconstructing and trying and failing.
“This good, good, good…” “Good morning!”
“Ah, good morning Mrs. Applebaum, I’m on the phone with ConEd.”
“Oi ConEd, no no no I just want to see my little girl.”
“Little? she’s 15. Yes yes yes I’m still here.”
There’s a lot of preparation when you do solo pieces because not only do you have to
prepare like a regular actor prepares - vocally and physically - but you also have to prepare
emotionally, you are the only one on that stage, and in a way the energy of the audience
is directed towards you, so you have to be grounded enough to be able to accept that
energy and reflect it back to them
Doing a solo piece is really daunting. I’m a person who likes to work in a team, and
I happen to have a really great team on this, but when I’m up there, I’m up there by
myself, and there’s no place else to go, but I do rely on the audience. The audience
becomes the other character in the piece for me, and so whatever I’m getting from the
audience I’m able to take and incorporate and find a way to take it in and give it back
and give back to them, so there’s this constant exchange of energy. But to have nobody else
up there, it’s really, it’s frightening, there’s no net.
The way that I tell the story is with microphones so that I can get a more intimate, closer
relationship with the audience, and to take that even a step further, I ask every member
of the audience to wear a set of headphones. You say well why are we wearing headphones,
we’re coming into a theatre we all want to be together we want to hear each other?
Well, the piece is partly about what happens inside your head as well as inside the head
of Loren McIntyre. In other words, it is about solitude. It’s also about somebody who feels
cut off. And I was trying to think how can we make people feel cut off from one another
even though they’re in a big audience? And there, the headphones are extraordinary, because
everybody in the audience feels that they’re having their own individual relationship with
the piece.
“Advertising’s main functions are to inform, persuade, and influence…”
I also use a microphone, which is called a binaural head. You have a pair of headphones
and you’re listening to this head, it can seem as though you’re literally there in
the position of the head. It has been called three-dimensional hearing. I can whisper something,
and it can feel as if I’m very very close to you, and so you get in the intimacy of
the emotional life of people in a very very powerful way.
“There’s gonna be a hurricane today, Mrs. Applebaum, do you have your D batteries?”
“Hurricane, oi, I lived through the Depression. We had nothing barely but the shoes on our
feet, and we did it without the help of double D’s.”
“D batteries, Mrs. Applebaum.”
What happens in that you’re on stage and it’s you and 100 people, 200 people. I know
that those 200 hearts that are staring at that one heart of yours, they just really
want to see an open heart. Human beings, they can feel when you’re just acting, and what
happens is that you start to lose them, and when you start to lose them, that’s pretty
challenging because you need to, like, get them back.
“Gandhi, Gandhi Gandhi Gandhi Gandhi Gandhi. Remember when you were ten and had dance,
karate, theatre, student government, SAT classes? Who goes to SAT classes at ten?”
Pike Street is a play about a family in the Lower East Side, during a day when a hurricane
is coming to New York City. Evelyn is Candace’s mother, and about four years ago when Evelyn
was working for the MTA, Candace had a brain aneurysm, and she was rendered speechless
and unable to move. What we see in Pike Street is a mother who is trying her best to, with
the kind of new age techniques, trying to heal her daughter emotionally and physically,
while also healing her family.
“No no no no no we’re not going to a shelter. Why? Well we went to the one at Seward Park
the last time it was the storm of the century, and all the generators were old and tapped
out, and by the third day all of the hipsters wanted to charge their phones and laptops
on the same outlet as my daughter’s dialysis. And then we gotta deal with all the kids screaming
‘Mommy, mommy, mommy, what’s the matter with that girl, what’s the matter with that
girl?’”
Having been from the Lower East Side, where in the 70s and the 80s it was definitely not
known for its chic folks as it is now, I always felt in a way that I was living in an invisible
community, an invisible neighborhood. But one thing I loved about living in the Lower
East Side was that the neighbors really looked out for one another, and so Pike Street is
kind of an honoring of those neighbors, the community, who really not only look out for
one another but can rise when things like hurricane Sandy happen, and they’re forgotten.
Mrs. Johnson is a school-teacher, and she had an affair with one of her students. She
has kept this story a secret for forever and has not talked to anyone else about this,
and you watch this woman come to grips with and at the same time lose all of her bearings
as the process of the play goes on, as she reveals this story.
The first person you see on the stage in The Encounter is me. I am a creator of the piece.
I let the audience into the process of writing it.
“He slipped out of his hammock, out of his hut and it came right down. All of the huts
were coming down. People were standing around in the clearing…”
The second character that you see on the stage is also me, and this is the character of a
father. Why should I distinguish between these two things? Because I believe fundamentally
that nobody is one single person. The narrator gets to introduce another character, who is
this man called Loren McIntyre.
“He lay back and tried to think his way into his unconscious. ⅕ of the world’s
freshwater is in the Amazon basin, where does it begin?”
*echoing*
By the end of the 1960s he was perhaps the principal photographer for the National Geographic
in South America, photographing the Amazon Basin. They said, we have heard that there
are people coming out of the forest who are uncontacted, so he was dropped in, and quite
quickly, because he knew how to do this, he made contact.
“God it seems so unlike these people, they never think of the future, they don’t whore
or store up belongings. Time for them feels like an invisible companion, something comfortable
unseen like the air. Yeah but for [unintelligible] time is a possession, it’s an increasingly more
efficient machine.”
We live in a moment in which the world is in great distress of one sort or another.
We have overused our natural resources, the climate is changing, the planet is heating
up, the ice is melting, the seas are rising, the animals are dying, the deserts are becoming
evermore arid, people are migrating. So, thinking about these issues has become very urgent
to me, because I have small children and I’m thinking about the planet that we are leaving
behind for them. And what are we trying to do? How are we trying to help them, or how
are we trying to draw attention to the fact that we need to act and react to what’s
going on around us?
“It felt like a message, that the headman had not spoken. McIntyre spoke no [unintelligible]
and the headman spoke no English, so he looked directly at him. But the headman did not return his
gaze…”
Right at the end I give a message, that was given to Loren McIntyre by the headman, and
the phrase is very simple: some of us are friends, and in this moment of extreme division
between us all in the world, perhaps we should all be friends, we should all be communicating
and trying to think of what we’re doing with this very beautiful world.
Bernie Telsey, the casting agent, wrote to me and he said hey, I know Neil wrote this
piece, what do you think? What do you think of solo shows? And I said well, I think they
can be boring, and vanity productions, unless you have a really great director with a really
great concept. And he said, well we got Leigh Silverman. Now I’ve always wanted to work
with Leigh Silverman, and I said, oh my god I can’t believe you’re saying this. Because
I really I was very nervous about doing it, I didn’t want to take it on. I knew how
daunting it would be to learn it. I knew how hard it would be with everything else I had
going on to really be able to give it the time that I wanted to give it, and it really
scared me, it really did. I just, I guess it still scares me, in a way, and I suppose
in a way that’s good, because it’s keeping me alive to the process of it.
Neil LaBute is an extraordinary writer. I mean he is so very specific. There’s language
that is so tight and taut and so much gives the emotional movement forward of the story,
and every single moment as I was learning it, I had to fill in a backstory on every
single line. That’s why it took me so long to learn it, is because if everything is not
filled in, you’re skipping over things that carry great emotional weight.
What Leigh Silverman did with me was she had me, as we rehearsed it, she had me go through
the entire play. And then she would give me notes, and then we’d go back and work on
the specific notes that she had. And what she kept talking about all the time was that
underneath this story is this third rail, this emotional third rail that’s going on
all the time, and you have to have the alacrity and the emotional capability to move from
one piece to another within the space of seconds, because that’s what’s happening to this
woman as she’s telling this story.
She also talked to me about something else that I thought was really extraordinary. She
said, you’re wearing this other skin, and at certain points just look for the zipper
to sort of take that skin off, but you know where the zipper is and everything’s gonna
be fine. And then, she said there are places where what will start to happen is you can’t
find that zipper, and when you can’t find that zipper, things start to escalate and
then pieces of you start to fall off of you. And I just thought those were such extraordinary
directions because they’re very, they’re emotional directions, they’re not just what
you think about, it’s what you feel.
When you are performing and you’re directing yourself, it’s a great freedom because it
means you can change something if you want to change it. But also at the same time, it’s
an enormous challenge because I’m so used to being on the outside and watching that.
Not being able to do that sometimes feels terrifyingly restrictive and I’m not sure
whether it’s any good or not.
The first thing I tell a director is I say okay, there is the solo performer/actor?,
and then there is the writer ?. So if you have questions for the writer, if you could
direct it to the writer and say hey writer ?. I’ve got a dramaturgical question, and
if you have notes or questions for the actor, speak to me as an actor because I don’t,
they’re not together. Yes there is only one body, but when I am rehearsing I’m trying
not to edit, because I feel like that writing is not coming from a genuine place, it’s
coming from a place of ‘I need to change this.’
“Is she gone?” “Yes, Papi, she’s gone.”
“Oh, my god es a ?” “Papi, is it possible to not start every
morning with racism?” “You think they see me and they say that’s
a man? No, they say that’s a spick!” “Good morning, I don’t want Gandhi to
hear your negativity, good morning, good morning to you.”
“Negativity, psh!”
If you have characters who are talking to one another, maybe a fun thing to do, and
this is really just one technique, would be to kind of like snap into them instead of
morphing into them. Like for instance, in No Child I have a character named Jerome and
he’s you know out, he’s out a lot, and then I have a character named Shondrika, and
she’s up in here. So instead of kind of morphing from Jerome to Shondrika, maybe there
was a kind of snapping from one kind of like you know from Jerome, Shondrika, Shondrika,
Jerome.
“I don’t let it bother me it’s just, she, she feels the feelings of others and
it swallows her so it’s just less stress for everyone if we stay home. Besides we can’t
bring her chair down five flights” -- “Tell ‘em the elevator’s broke” -- “The
elevator’s broke - en, broken. Yes, I’ll hold.”
When I think of solo performance and I’m trying to teach a class I say, have you ever
just come home and told your parents about the wacky thing that happened in school? That’s
what solo performance is. Or if you think about being at a bar and telling a story to
five of your friends at a bar and everyone’s listening, that’s all that solo performance
is. Solo performance is nothing new, this has been happening since the dawn of man,
and it’ll continue to happen.