Depth Chargers: Intervirew with Arin Arbus and Hari Nef by Alisa Solomon

INTERVIEW DEPTH CHARGERS

AN INTERVIEW WITH ARIN ARBUS AND HARI NEF BY ALISA SOLOMON

Hari Nef (Jimmy). Photo by Gerry Goodstein.

Midway through rehearsals, Alisa Solomon sat down down with director Arin Arbus and actress Hari Nef to chat about the mysteries of Des Moines, their approaches to the play, and, of course, depth chargers.

ALISA SOLOMON Denis Johnson has a devoted following for his poetry and novels, but is less wellknown as a playwright, especially on the East Coast. How did you come to be interested in Des Moines?

ARIN ARBUS Jeffrey [Horowitz] went to a reading of the play and came back interested in and haunted and baffled by it. I was working full-time at TFANA then, and he got a copy and gave it to me. I read it and had a similar response—interested and haunted and baffled—and we did a two-week workshop with Denis at TFANA. This was around 2015. It was a really gratifying experience. I loved working with Denis and I felt like my understanding of the play really grew. I staged the whole play, which was a dumb thing to do because when you stage something complicated in a hurried fashion it can’t land properly, so we put it aside. But I kept thinking about it for years. It just felt so urgent to me. During the pandemic, we did a Zoom reading and the play worked in a powerful and visceral way. So, the Theatre decided to move ahead with a full production.

ALISA SOLOMON What did you find so interesting and haunting?

ARIN ARBUS The play resonates on so many different wavelengths, but when I try and articulate what I think the play is actually about at its core, it sounds very general. I think it is about being alive in a body. And therefore, one must confront the “gales of God” [as Marta puts it]. I think it’s about our country. The event of the play is a bizarre ritual. The characters are so alone in their predicaments, their grief, their sorrow, or their paralysis. There are

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barriers between them that they can't break through. And yet, the event of the play for me is that through karaoke and through alcohol, they come together and have an amazing ritual of communion.

ALISA SOLOMON For a play that's about what it is to be alive, there's an awful lot of talk about death and people being on the edge of the abyss of mortality. It almost seems to take place in a liminal space between night and day, between life and death.

ARIN ARBUS Purgatory.

ALISA SOLOMON Yes. And at the same time, the setting is highly realistic. Hari, as an actor, what it is like to inhabit a theatrical space that is at once hyperrealistic, surreal and even mythic?

HARI NEF I think that's what attracted me to the text originally. I saw this play as an unprecedented synthesis of many different kinds of theater. You're seduced into a sense of being at the kitchen sink again. You walk into the theater, and you see this middle-class dwelling from somewhere in America and these people at this table. And slowly, you are destabilized from that naturalistic mode, going into moments of dream play, going into moments of absurdity, going into a Lynchian, Freudian nightmare, going in and out of things that you might recognize, but prove almost hallucinatory or psychedelic. And I've never played with a text quite like that, especially on stage.

ALISA SOLOMON How are you enjoying working on stage, which is rare for you?

HARI NEF I thought that theater was going to be a bigger part of my life when I graduated from school almost a decade ago, but I kind of got sucked into

ALISA SOLOMON

Hari Nef (Jimmy) and Michael Shannon (Father Michael). Photo by Gerry Goodstein.

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Left to Right: Hari Nef, Arin Arbus, and Michael Shannon in rehearsal for DES MOINES. Photo by Hollis King.

the Hollywood thing a little bit. Being invited to do work like this, I had an appetite for it. [The fact] that this play is so much about the body resonated with me, because I feel simultaneously galvanized and restricted by the body that I bring to work like this. And I felt that this play, in contrast to almost anything else that I have encountered, lives in a dangerous place about bodies. It lives in a dangerous place about tricky bodies or broken bodies or imperiled bodies or othered bodies. It doesn't provide easy answers for the souls that live in those bodies, but it doesn't let anyone else's body off the hook. I think this play is maybe something that other girls in the casting conversation might have looked at and gone, “Eew, I'm not doing that.” Or, like, “This is problematic,” or “This isn't good representation.” I'm not concerned with that [laughs], especially if there are other things going on in the play that are more interesting. And that's how I felt about this. There's something mischievous going on here, which appeals to me. ALISA SOLOMON What you just said suggests how there are some sensitivities, justifiable sensitivities, around representation and who it is who does the representing, in all aspects of the cultural sphere these days. This play could raise some questions and even hackles: you know, here's a play written by a cis-hetero able-bodied white man, with a lot of characters who do not share those characteristics. Like Jimmy, the character you play: a white trans woman who uses a wheelchair.

HARI NEF I haven't actually thought about it that much. I think the play is good, and so it doesn't really matter. That's where I come to it from. I'm interested to field audience questions and talk to friends about it, for sure. I understand that I came to this character because of the surface level things that I can bring to it, but that's not the context in which I view Jimmy. Playing Jimmy, I get to be a through-the-looking-glass version of a Tennessee Williams ingénue and I get to be a monster. I get to

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be the optimism, I get to be the abjection, I get to be the voice of the future, and I get to be the voice from somewhere else. There's so much about her that is contained in her identity politic. But if you actually sit with the play and turn the Twitter-feed part of your brain off, there are people's souls on the line here: the punishment of the damned, or grace. The body is transcended in this play, and that's the mission I'm on.

ALISA SOLOMON Your reference to Tennessee Williams makes me think of how this play fits into a certain realm of American drama. The first time I read it, it felt to me like a play from the late sixties, like something you’d have seen at Caffe Cino or La MaMa back then: early Sam Shepard or Lanford Wilson, with a dash of the Theatre of the Ridiculous. How do you see it in the landscape of American theater?

ARIN ARBUS As Hari was saying, you see the set and expect a certain thing and you aren't going to get it. Even if you look at how these characters change through the course of the play—and they do, profoundly—the way that change is expressed is not like other plays. Denis doesn't give each character a long speech about what they have discovered about themselves and their relationships.

ALISA SOLOMON But they do have their karaoke moments, which is, perhaps, a substitute for, or even exaggeration of, that sort of speech. This might seem far-fetched, but those moments remind me of the fantasy numbers in Sondheim’s Follies.

ARIN ARBUS Somebody said that the characters in Des Moines break into song because, like in a musical, they can't express themselves in speech. But I don't know. Even the karaoke numbers are not tracing a traditional arc. I do feel like Denis is leaning on Tennessee Williams, Shepard, Chekhov, and other playwrights and all our expectations that we have built by watching all those plays.

Left to Right: Heather Alicia Simms (Mrs. Drinkwater), Michael Shannon (Father Michael), Hari Nef (Jimmy), Arliss Howard (Dan), and Johanna Day (Marta). Photo by Gerry Goodstein.

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ALISA SOLOMON Based on just the bit of rehearsal that I saw yesterday, it seems you’re teasing the audience with those expectations: characters take their time making coffee on stage, for example, rinsing out the pot, setting up the coffeemaker, and so on. I could practically smell the coffee just by suggestion in the bare rehearsal room!

ARIN ARBUS Yeah. I guess that's true.

ALISA SOLOMON So, is it fair to say that you're emphasizing the stylistic contrast?

ARIN ARBUS Yeah, but that's in the play. That’s not me.

ALISA SOLOMON Though, of course, you do bring a lot to it! And TFANA audiences might see a trajectory in your work at the Theatre over the years with Shakespeare and, especially for this play, in the surreal aspects of The Skin of Our Teeth and the emotional intensity of Strindberg.

ARIN ARBUS To me, it's all the same stuff. I think of Shakespeare as being the most experimental playwright, always building new forms. And in a similar way to this play, relying on an audience's expectations and then frustrating them. To me, it’s all the same task.

ALISA SOLOMON One of the strong images in the play, tied to behavior of course, is the depth charger—a shot of booze poured into a glass of beer that the characters drink quite a lot of. I think of Jimmy as being a depth charger of the action. Does that resonate for you at all, Hari?

HARI NEF Yes. It was early in rehearsal when we all realized that one of the central dialectics of this play is awake versus asleep. Each character goes in and out of his or her own states of wakefulness and slumber through the whole play. But Jimmy emerged in our early table work definitively as the play’s ambassador of wakefulness, the person who is present, the person whose eyes are open, the person who is looking forward, who's both most of the body and most constricted and othered by her body…but also the person most equipped to use that body to go somewhere. ALISA SOLOMON Despite, as the character Mrs. Drinkwater points out, the absence of ramps that would enable her to leave in her wheelchair.

HARI NEF Well, we witness the miracle of her potentially being able to walk again, which I think is one of the definitive moments of the show. Jimmy’s first line is, “I woke up.” As soon as I was able to wrap my head around that, I understood Jimmy as an accelerationist figure in the play: somebody trying to speed everything to its logical conclusion, with the hope that that conclusion is going to leave things better for her and for her family. But also, if that conclusion is kaboom, I think Jimmy is at peace with that as well. Charging the depths.

Jimmy's the only character to peek through the fog of the play and directly address anything. One of my favorite lines of Jimmy’s is when she is in the scene with Father Michael. He starts speaking cryptically about the street and the corn, and she looks at him and goes, “What are we talking about?” [Laughs]

Jimmy is going right into the core, into the depths of the situation, because she is unfettered by the minutiae of her immediate surroundings. She feels freed from all of that. As soon as you want to peg her as a guide or a narrator or some kind of shaman, she does something extremely alienating and difficult to square, and potentially left field. You don't know whether she's four steps ahead, four steps behind, or four steps to the side. And I get to decide that, and you get to decide that. And that's really fun. These are not things that I get to plumb when I'm doing a studio comedy or something like that. I'm here to get weird and have fun and work with people who are very cool and very experienced.

ALISA SOLOMON Going back to Jimmy’s question, “What are we talking about?” That’s a great line for Denis Johnson to have put in the mouth of a character. The audience may be wondering the same thing! At rehearsal yesterday, some of the cast was joking about how obscure or confusing the play is. Do you want to leave the audience in a place of mystery, or is there something that adds up in this play?

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Left to Right: Arliss Howard, Johanna Day, and Arin Arbus in rehearsal for DES MOINES. Photo by Hollis King.

ARIN ARBUS There is something that adds up. And there's mystery too.

HARI NEF In the era of the streaming binge, people get very uncomfortable if they do not have a firm grasp on the who, what, where, when, why, and how within the first five minutes. And if they feel destabilized in that regard, they're going to change the channel. But you can't do that in the theater. People have got to sit with it. That's what I love about live theater. There is a ritual aspect to it and a devotional aspect to it. I would hope that if you sit with this play and open your eyes to it and sit with its ambiguities, it can play on feelings and allow you to draw conclusions that you might not recognize.

And I don't feel like we're totally out to sea here. As these characters charge deeper and deeper, there are bits of texts and gestures and things that happen on stage that get to the depth of what’s going on with them, and these things are existential, historical, and emotional. There’s a relief and a release that happens as these characters burrow deeper and deeper into their cups, where potentially the audience is going to lean in closer and closer and get hotter and hotter. And then the tablecloth is literally pulled, and everything goes onto the floor. Then you have to pick it up the next day.

ALISA SOLOMON As much as the audience may have to work to see connections—or have the patience to let the connections emerge—the characters themselves seem to speak in non sequiturs and digressions and from inside their own dreamscapes. And yet they communicate with each other, in the codes of people whose lives are intimately interconnected, which don’t sound like the distilled language of crafted dramatic dialogue, and can seem incomprehensible to outside people.

HARI NEF Jimmy is the character pushing against the myopia and obtuseness with which people relate to each other in this play. During her first scene with Father Michael, she's telling him about the terrible thing that happened to her. And he goes, “I see.” And she's like, “Don't say you see, don't give me that. I just showed you my big ugly.” And in the morning-after scene, everybody's off in

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their own little worlds and Jimmy's the one who brings it to you.

ARIN ARBUS You sort of think that at the end of the [karaoke] scene, they’re going to wake up, that everybody's had a catharsis, everybody's had this communion. They've expressed things that they've never been able to express to anyone ever before. And you want, then, for there to be the logical resolution the next day that satisfies, that is the effect of that purging. But what happens the next morning is that everybody's hungover and sleepwalking. Except for Jimmy. It isn't like a fifth act where people are transformed. I think Denis is frustrating that expectation: that’s how life is, much more so than a traditional dramatic structure. It's also 6:00 AM and who knows what happened after the end of the first scene. They’re all kind of a mess.

ALISA SOLOMON Given your uses of words like ‘ritual, ‘communion,’ and ‘miracle,’ let's talk about the religious layer in this play. Sometimes it feels like religion is mocked but there’s a way it is also taken profoundly seriously. I love the line when Marta tells Father Michael about her prognosis, and he responds by saying there’s little one can say about the prospect of impending death, and she replies, “But to have a priest be the one who says it—that says something.” In a play that's not in the slightest sentimental, that is strangely touching.

ARIN ARBUS I think part of what is operating in the play is a sort of shattering or exposing of the true reality of institutions like the church or the family or marriage. And yet I do think that there is a sense of something spiritual, or of grace, that the characters are grappling with. Marta refers to the “gales of God.” They’re trying to make sense of events that are incomprehensible and absurd and that are hard to have faith through. And then there is what I think of as a miracle, which is Jimmy standing up. Also, the ritual that they share has something ecstatic and connected to spirituality in it.

ALISA SOLOMON

Left to Right: Hari Nef (Jimmy), Heather Alicia Simms (Mrs. Drinkwater), Johanna Day (Marta), and Arliss Howard (Dan). Photo by Travis Emery Hackett.

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HARI NEF I am aware that religion and spirituality-–and Christianity in particular—are recurring themes in Johnson's work. In this play, we are presented with images of American Christian spirituality. It's always Christmas for Jimmy, who is running around wearing a Santa hat and there's a Christmas tree, and yet she says that all priests are liars. Something's going on there. The usual image of a priest is as a Catholic ambassador, but here we have Father Michael, who doesn't seem particularly invested in the souls of the people around him. He reminds me of Dale Cooper from “Twin Peaks”—the private eye who has never once solved the case, but you loved to go on the journey with him anyway, or the American hero who has never once saved the day. Father Michael is the priest that has never once saved anybody's soul. I think Jimmy sees that and is trying to draw something out of him: What's really going on? What do you really want to do? Are you my friend? Are you someone like me? Jimmy is aware of where she is and who she's with, and I think that running around in the Santa hat is kind of punk to her. It's a middle finger.

ALISA SOLOMON Arin, you used the word ‘urgent,’ to describe the play. What makes it urgent?

ARIN ARBUS Some of these characters are psychically isolated, and they are, as Hari said, myopic. They are very limited in their views of other humans and that is exposed and a struggle in the play. Dan and Marta, who I think love Jimmy deeply, misgender her through the play. They have never encountered Mrs. Drinkwater, who has lived in the same town and when she mentions having gone to college, Marta says she didn't know so many Black people went to college. Myopic is a really good word. That kind of myopia is familiar to anyone paying attention. What’s amazing about the play is that the characters don’t change in that regard, but they do come together in a powerful experience of sharing.

ALISA SOLOMON What feels urgent for you, Hari?

HARI NEF I try not to think about these big thematic questions when I'm in rehearsal. But sometimes I can't help it! What feels urgent is that being seen, being heard, and being understood on the level of the individual is put at such a high premium now. It is very fashionable to reveal yourself, to court people's understanding and their recognition, especially if you have papers and proofs and experiences that show that you deserve more recognition, you deserve more understanding, you deserve more validation. And my politics, I think somewhat surprisingly to a lot of people, are moving away from this obsession with the individual and thinking more about the collective, about this idea of communion, about this idea of pushing past these externalities of the flesh and experience and figuring out what brings people together.

I started thinking about that a lot during the last presidency when I realized that I was a part of something huge on a nationwide scale that I didn't even recognize. And how silly was it that I didn't recognize that? And what does that mean for how I'm thinking about myself and thinking about my community and thinking about my country? The idea of communion became really appealing to me, the idea of understanding other people with other points of view. Despite how separate and different each character in this play is from the others, they're able to come together in the twilight of that first scene to laugh at each other, to applaud each other, to get each other drunk, to listen to each other, to confess. And that's what feels true..

ALISA SOLOMON is a teacher, writer and dramaturg living in New York City. She directs the Arts and Culture concentration in the MA program at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. Her criticism, essays and political reporting have appeared in a wide range of magazines and newspapers, including the New York Times, Nation, Forward, Theater, and Village Voice (where she was on the staff for 21 years). Her book, Re-Dressing the Canon: Essays on Theater and Gender (Routledge, 1997) won the George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism. She is the co-editor (with Tony Kushner) of the anthology Wrestling with Zion: Progressive Jewish-American Responses to the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict (Grove, 2003). Her latest book is Wonder of Wonders: A Cultural History of Fiddler on the Roof from Metropolitan Books (Holt).