How Can This Moment Be As Alive As Possible?

Jerry Lieblich is a playwright, and the founder and lead artist of the Third Ear Theater Co.; Paul Lazar is a director, choreographer, and actor based in New York. Paul is directing Jerry’s latest play, The Barbarians, which is “a play about a description of a play about a group of scientists gumming up the linkage between language and political power” — in the sense that, “what if the President declared a war, but the words wouldn’t work?” Ahead of The Barbarians’ premiere (this Friday, February 14, through March 2 at LaMaMa’s Ellen Stewart Theater in NYC), the collaborators caught up about bringing it all to life. 
— Annie Fell, Editor-in-chief, Talkhouse Music

Jerry Lieblich: So, Paul, we’re three weeks into rehearsal now, and we’ve got a week left before tech. How are you feeling?

Paul Lazar: Oh, very good. All my collaborators are so good on both sides. The actors are very inventive, and they’re very galvanized in their focus. So I feel very good about where we are and where we’re headed.

Jerry: I’m curious how different the staging or the production is turning out to what you maybe initially envisioned when we started the rehearsal process.

Paul: That’s a question that, if I were able to answer it, that would be a problem. What I mean by that is, if what it was in my mind as opposed to what it is now were both very solidified, that would indicate that it hadn’t yet taken on a life of its own. But the fact is that I don’t know anymore what I had in mind initially, and I’m not able to picture an alternative version of what it is other than what it actually is now becoming. I’m sort of in the thrall of something that has its own life and language and energy and momentum, and I can’t really compare it to something from the past. It’s a little like when you have kids and you say, “Wow, remember when they were such and such an age?” And when they’re still in your care, you don’t remember anything from a prior time. All you know is what’s happening now. 

Jerry: Right. You’re confirming something that I’ve felt about you as a director that I’m really impressed by, [which is that] you’re extremely present in the room, and to the ideas in the room, to the physical thing that’s there. You do seem to have a really uncanny ability to let go of preconceived notions and let something be what it’s becoming without imposing something on it. I’m curious if that’s a skill you have consciously developed over time, or if that’s something about your general temperament that’s kind of always been there.

Paul: What I think it comes from is I’ve worked collaboratively. You know, Annie[-B Parson, Paul’s wife] and I made Big Dance Theater — almost by accident, because we got a job to direct a play, which neither of us had done, but Annie had choreographed and I had acted. So she brought the choreographic thing, and I brought some notion of the theatrical thing. But the thing that gave Big Dance, I think even from the beginning, its unique quality was my stagings were choreographic and her choreography was theatrical, because we were both sort of bending our aesthetic to be in conversation with the other person’s. The thing of yielding an idea to somebody else was kind of the secret sauce, you might say. So I’m always hoping that somebody gets it sufficiently on the wavelength of what I’m doing, but then has their own impulse to add to it. I’m sort of looking to be thrown off course — but not thrown all the way off course to where we’re doing somebody else’s thing that I might like but don’t understand. It has to be something I’m feeling.

Jerry: Does your ego ever get in the way of that? Because it seems to me like it doesn’t. And that’s really impressive to me. It’s rare.

Paul: For the most part, no. And again, that’s because of these maybe 30 years of collaboration. And you know what? It’s funny you say ego specifically, because a long, long time ago, I was on an airplane and Jerry Stiller was sitting next to me. We started chatting — we had a couple mutual friends through things — Second City — it doesn’t matter — and somehow we got on the subject of Stiller and Meara, and the way that he and his wife worked together. He said, “You gotta set your ego aside when you want to collaborate.” That made a real impression on me. And then when we work together, I saw that that letting go of things, even that you really feel strongly about, often paradoxically creates the best result. Now, if my heart is really in something, and something somebody proposes is going to take it away, I’m really looking to say, “Well, how do I make a marriage of those things?” I don’t necessarily want to throw my idea out the window right away… 

Anyway, that’s all by way of saying: I guess my ego is pretty in check in terms of theatrical collaboration. It’s a positive reinforcement through the years.

Jerry: Yeah. But something else I’ve watched you do is, if somebody brings up an idea, you always let it be tried. Even if I can tell you’re not necessarily so into it.

Paul: Yes. 

Jerry: You let it happen, and then usually you do find some kind of marriage. Either it totally doesn’t work at all, or usually there’s some glimmer of it that is actually in the right direction. But I never see you strike anything down before seeing it.

Paul: Right. Because I guess my experience is, you can think, Man, that’s not going to work. But then you do it and either it surprises you and works, or 98% of it doesn’t work but there’s some aspect of it that does. And it’s like, “Good, I’ll cop that.” 

Another thing that was influential — and this is presumptuous of me — but I’ve been in the room a lot with the Wooster Group, too, and something that’s really fun about their rehearsals is everything is grist for the mill. You know, somebody might try to impede rehearsal because they’re bored, and just do something completely inappropriate as a way to say, “I want to take a break.” You know what I mean? But if it’s funny or interesting or weird enough, it could end up in the piece. 

Jerry: Which again, I think is these same skills of being really present and aware and being really open to all these influences, not shutting down anything as being irrelevant or a bad idea. Which is really hard to do.

Paul: Yeah, yeah. It takes practice. But everything in the room is a potential ally.

Jerry: Something else I’ve noticed is: it’s clear to me you’ve read the script like, a zillion times, and your copy is so marked up with all of your ideas. And then during rehearsal, you don’t touch it and you never have it in front of you, and you’re always asking us, “What’s the next thing that happens?” [Laughs.] I’m curious what that’s about, and how you came to that as a practice.

Paul: Well, something I really enjoyed deeply, and still do, is the time prior to meeting with the actors, imagining stagings. At least at that moment that I’m dreaming it up and writing it down, if it’s working in my imagination it feels like, Wow, this is great. I have a usable idea. I’ll do that many, many, many times over, and each time I go through there may be things that stay from the previous time, and then a lot of things change. So I’ll have many imaginary versions of the thing. And then when I come into the room, I know I’m going to go from this page to that page, whatever section, and I have a pretty solid familiarity with some version so that if we’re standing there without knowing what to do, I can put that on the table and get the ball rolling. But I’m enough away from all the versions so that once the ball gets rolling, it’s great to be out in the ocean. So it’s like this weird little trick where, if pressed, I could say, “We’ll go here to here to here to here to here.” But if not pressed, I’d like it to be, “I don’t know, what’s next?” 

Jerry: When you talk about your process of daydreaming and imagining through the script, how is that imagination? Are you seeing a stage in your head? Are you feeling it in your body? 

Because for me — I think this is why I’m not a great director — when I imagine something visually, it’s actually very disconnected from physical reality. I can see a cartoon in my head very easily, but then when I’m like, But where would they be on stage? It’s so impressionistic for me. How concrete is that for you? 

Paul: It’s pretty concrete. I’m imagining the theater, the room where it’s happening. What is the space offering me? Well, there’s some pillars, there’s a balcony… I see the theatrical space and imagine, If you really were directing this right now, what might you do? It’s not helping me to be fanciful in that way. That’s probably extremely helpful for a writer. Because anything can happen.

Jerry: And then it’s your problem.

Paul: [Laughs.] Exactly. But it’s not helpful if I start imagining things that I can’t execute. 

You’ve been living with this play a long time now — this is sort of a mirror of the first question you asked me — what this play means and what it’s about, is that different than what it meant and what it was about at the time that you wrote it?

Jerry: It’s a good question. I mean, it’s been eight years, which is crazy. It’s a long time to sit with a text. I think I’ve grown more confident in just letting things be and not piling on metaphors or explanations. When I think about the earliest drafts, for instance, there was — I don’t think you ever saw this, but there was an early draft that had a four-page monologue about the history of ant evolution. Did you ever see that?

Paul: No!

Jerry: It was very factual. It was basically a book report in the middle of the play. 

Paul: And who delivered it?

Jerry: One of the attorneys. It was at the moment when the president is looking down and everybody’s building the pyramid, and she’s like, “They look like ants.” And then somebody says, “It’s like they’re soldier ants obeying the queen.” And then the attorney was like, “Objection. That’s not how ants work. They’re not obeying the Queen. Here’s how ant behavior works, here’s how it evolved, this is what it tells us about social structure…” It was the kind of thing where I, in some way, thought it was conceptually funny to basically at the climax of the play have everything pause and give a lecture about ant evolution. Which is very funny when I describe it, but it’s totally dramatically inert, obviously.

That stuff was in there, and there used to be a lot more about chaos theory and fractals. And I was thinking about emergent systems of social organization and, what are collectives and what are different forms of collectivity? If there is, on one hand, this very autocratic, completely fascistic thing of, “I’m going to tell you all where to be” — like a Riefenstahl movie, everybody’s standing in line and perfectly in sync with each other — there are other models of looking at [collectivity]. Like in chaos theory, the idea of a strange attractor, which is basically a form of order that’s happening in a different dimensional scale.

Paul: As Steve [Mellor, one of the cast members] mentions.

Jerry: Yeah. So there’s little glimmers of that. There used to be a lot more as I was trying to think about, what is a social collective? What is a body politic? What is a “we”? A lot of these [ideas] showed up in monologues that ended up getting cut, but it feels like it still haunts the play.

Paul: Yes.

Jerry: And in terms of how the meaning of the play has changed: I feel like I’ve grown to trust that that’s just kind of in the marrow of the play, and it’s in a way in the form of the play. Like, yes, there’s a narrative. But as you’ve said many times, the narrative is almost an excuse for the digression. And the way each individual scene, or even moment, is acting is very independent. Sometimes watching rehearsals, it feels almost like vaudeville to me, where it’s like, “OK, now there’s this bit with Old Dog Turd, and there’s this bit with the Man Suspended from the Ceiling,” and they’re all extremely disconnected. It still feels like, “This is this moment, and all we’re doing in rehearsal is, how can this moment be as alive as possible?” Not thinking about anything else.

Paul: Right, right.

Jerry: And there’s something about that extreme presence to the texture of the individual moment that the greater whole emerges from. Which is how I wrote it, also. It was very much just like, “What’s the next word?” And not thinking about it and letting it come through. So there’s a way in which those themes, which I used to have people talking about, feel to me—

Paul: Like they’re now actually built into the form of the play.

Jerry: Exactly. And I think they always were. But with eight more years of writing experience, you need to trust that, and not worry about every audience member walking out being able to articulate that necessarily.

Paul: Well, readers of this article, February 14 to March 2 is The Barbarians at La MaMa. And you don’t want to miss it.

Jerry: No, sir!

(Photo Credit: www.pelenguino.com)