Homebody: John Kazanjian on Ronald Reagan, market forces and the
business of art
New City’s stripped down staging of Tony Kushner’s intimate one-act
reminds us of the power – and perils – of theater
Crosscut.com (Seattle, WA)
June 04, 2013
By Jean Tarbox
A bare red brick wall. A table of colorful hats. Space enough for 15
audience members to watch a woman reveal her fantasies of escaping to
Kabul, Afghanistan. Theater does not get more intimate than New City’s
current production of Homebody, Tony Kushner’s 1997 play.
Now in its 31st season, New City Theater brings us another gift. Mary
Ewald delivers the hour-long monologue, infused with Kushner’s
linguistic acrobatics and wicked humor, proving that the deepest
essence of the theater is the connection between actor and
audience. We do not need sets, lights, costumes or even a stage to
create this connection. We just need a superior text and actor.
Kushner wrote Homebody in 1999 as a one-act. In early 2001, he
expanded the deeply thoughtful political text into a three-act play,
Homebody/Kabul. In a revised 2004 edition of the piece, Kushner gave
theaters permission to perform Homebody as a separate production.
New City is an alternative, artist-run theater, which has been
producing contemporary work in Seattle since 1982 under the continuous
leadership of artistic director John Kazanjian and performer Mary
Ewald (who are married to each other). In the tradition of
experimental directors Peter Brook and Andre Gregory, New City’s
productions have pushed the art form in new directions, broken
boundaries and challenged the assumptions of the culture in general.
Funded by federal and private grants in the 1980s and early `90s, New
City collaborated with such prominent avant-garde playwrights as Maria
Irene Fornes, Richard Foreman, and Suzan-Lori Parks. Since that time,
New City has presented scripts by Wallace Shawn, Samuel Beckett, Caryl
Churchill and others in its SODO Warehouse residency, and Kazanjian’s
living room. New City Ensemble is now settled in a new home, a
storefront space converted into a theater at the far edge of Capitol
Hill (18th Avenue and Union).
I met with John Kazanjian recently to discuss his vision of what
theater can be, the current state of theater in Seattle and how New
City Theater has managed to remain afloat.
Jean Tarbox: What is the mission and value of the arts, the theater
especially, when it comes to tackling important, relevant and
uncomfortable issues?
John Kazanjian: I’ll invert that question. For me as an artist, I know
what I’m doing is totally subjective and that’s the way I want it to
be. The New City Theater is a home for artists who think out loud in
public through their artistic expression.
Audience members and artists alike all share a social responsibility
to decide what each feels the world is about and what each may want to
say about it. The artists compose, create and give the theater a
recognizable attitude. The theater’s chosen playwrights and plays
possess a social conscience that supports the writing, but the writing
never dictates a response from its audience. The alternative theater
intends rather to investigate a multiplicity of points of view within
the world, aiming to precipitate reflection and shared discussion.
JT: Has Seattle’s theater scene succeeded, or failed, to address
relevant and uncomfortable issues?
It’s very difficult to talk about the Seattle theater scene without
talking about the national cultural landscape. We are now experiencing
the glacial effects of 30 years of neo-liberal policies of free market
economics, privatization and decreasing size of the public sector.
Nearly 45 years ago the American regional theater movement emerged as
a reaction against the growing commercialization of
Broadway. Supported by the newly-established National Endowment for
the Arts (NEA) and innovative funding by the Ford Foundation, theater
arts were decentralized, with artists making a living in their own
communities and ticket prices subsidized so that everyone had access
to the art. This was the situation in Seattle from 1962 through the
mid-1980s, and theaters of every size and type flourished.
JT: What changed in the cultural landscape to alter the theater scene
in Seattle?
The ability to present different points of view on difficult issues
diminished once the funding structure for not-for-profit theaters was
altered. What do the arts do? They open up multiple points of
view. There was a political strategy that occurred through the `80s to
shut down controversial voices – whether individual artists or
alternative theater venues.
President Reagan proposed eliminating the NEA and the National
Endowment for the Humanities. The Congress refused. Still, Reagan
argued that the arts should be in the competitive marketplace like any
other product, and by 1988 that position slowly gathered energy and
exploded onto the landscape. The NEA rescinded its =80=9Cspecial
projects’ grants, and politics came into the funding process.
The size of a theater’s operating budget and not the quality of the
work was the formula that determined how much money a theater
received. The commercial criterion was a subtle form of entrapment for
the theater companies because it forced them to make themselves
bigger. The `business of theater’ started upstaging the creative side.
JT: How did this pressure on not-for-profit theaters to become more
market-driven affect the type of art they presented?
It was progressive. The main stage Seattle theater companies invested
in building larger theaters with multiple stages to attract larger,
more prosperous audiences. Needless to say, these expansions also
competed for resources that the small and mid-sized theaters depended
upon. Those original small and mid-sized theaters presenting different
points of view have disappeared from our landscape. [Editor’s Note:
Seattle theaters that have closed their doors include Empty Space,
Group Theater, Pioneer Square Theater and the Alice B. Theater.]
Rather than being a means for producing art, institutions became ends
in themselves – the art now serving the institutions rather than the
other way around. What went away? Support for playwrights, actors,
directors and designers. Worse, development of new plays and vital
production of existing plays dwindled.
If theater is thrown into the commercial marketplace, it is
disproportionately dependent on ticket sales and people making
donations. So the theater has to start thinking commercially, and this
changes the palette of what can be done. It is very difficult for art
that makes you think to survive. On the contrary, the goal of the
commercial market place is primarily entertainment – make the audience
feel good, make them walk out happy. The seasons become conservative,
audiences homogenous and the production of new work is inadequate to
sustain a theatrical future.
JT: What was the specific impact of these changes on the quality of
theater in Seattle?
Once the multiplicity of arts organizations disappeared, the
employment base for artists living and working in Seattle was
dramatically reduced. Many left the theater altogether. The population
of working actors in their 50s and 60s is radically diminished. When
you look at other cultures that have subsidized arts [e.g. Great
Britain or France], the actors that are working on the stages show the
full breadth of humanity. So you will see actors in their 60s and 70s
working next to a teenager of 17, and the power of humanism that is
present on the stage in the art form is there.
Regional theater is arrested with a diminished cultural voice because
of the way the system works. Actors are hired, they rehearse for four
weeks, are on the stage and then gone arranging for the next job on
another stage, or in another city.
The artists on our stages, including my own, are as talented and have
the same capability of brilliance as artists performing at the Seattle
Symphony or Pacific Northwest Ballet. Yet, these latter art forms
provide a more powerful experience than the theater in town. Why?
Because the quality of the play, its density and its cohesion are not
as fully realized with the same integrity as what you’ll see in the
Symphony or Ballet. The theater operates with short-term artist
employment and a standardized, inadequate four- to five-week rehearsal
period.
When artists live where they work, they are mentoring, working on new
material and developing together all the time. Theater artists aren’t
allowed to do that here. So the quality of the theater is lower than
what our playwrights and our actors can deliver.
JT: How has New City Theater survived when so many of Seattle’s small
and mid-sized theaters active in the 1980s have disappeared?
We opted out of the institutional path in the mid-1990s because we
wanted to maintain an artist-based theater. I saw that with the
decrease in funding, we could not continue to do the kind of work we
did because it had a small audience base. We sold the original New
City building that now houses Hugo House so that we could continue to
pay artists. We have never embraced subscription, never tried to get
big. I was always committed to working with an ensemble of the same
people. That was something I wanted to do from 1982 on, and we’ve done
it. Today we operate as the New City Ensemble, with just four of the
original members: Mary and me, and designers Lindsay Smith and Nina
Moser.
JT: Why produce Tony Kushner’s `Homebody’ now?
The Homebody is a charming, eccentric woman who makes me laugh,
self-reflect and have hope. We are still in Afghanistan. Gore Vidal
once called the U.S.A. the `United States of Amnesia.’ I don’t want to
forget our place in Afghanistan’s history, nor the plight of the
Afghan people, or the plight of the soldiers fighting there. And it is
world class dramatic literature by a living American playwright, who
blends the personal and the political, the real and the fantastical
into a rich theatrical tapestry.
If you go: Homebody plays Friday and Saturday nights, 8 p.m. through
June 22 at The New City Theater (1404-06 18th Avenue at Union Street,
Seattle 98112). For info: [email protected] or
206-271-443. For advance tickets visit
, or call 1-800-838-3006.
www.brownpapertickets.com/event/384747