360° SERIES V I E W F I N D E R : FA C T S A N D P E R S P E C T I V E S O N T H E P L AY, P L AY W R I G H T, A N D P R O D U C T I O N
W W W . T FA N A . O R G
TA B L E O F CO N T E N T S The Play 3
Notes from the Artists
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Perspectives
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The Clown's Fall and Rise, by Richard C. McCoy
The Playwrights 10
Biographies: Jos Houben and Marcello Magni
The Production 11
Interviews: Approaching the Horizontal
Marcello Magni and Jos Houben in Conversation with Ayanna Thompson
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Creative Team
About Theatre For a New Audience 24
Mission and Programs
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Major Supporters
Notes Front Cover Art designed by Milton Glaser, Inc. This Viewfinder will be periodically updated with additional information. Last updated November 22, 2017
Credits "Perspectives" curated by Jonathan Kalb. Marcel and The Art of Laughter 360° | Edited by Literary & Humanities Manager Torrey Townsend | Copy-edit and Layout by Peter James Cook Literary Advisor: Jonathan Kalb | Council of Scholars Chair: Ayanna Thompson | Designed by: Milton Glaser, Inc. Copyright 2017 by Theatre for a New Audience. All rights reserved. With the exception of classroom use by teachers and individual personal use, no part of this Viewfinder may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying or recording, or by an information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Some materials published herein are written especially for our guide. Others are reprinted by permission of their authors or publishers.
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360° VIEWFINDER NOTES FROM THE ARTISTS
Marcello Magni and Jos Houben in Theatre for a New Audience’s production of MARCEL. Photo by Henry Grossman.
A NOTE ON MARCEL The Gag is a poem. It makes us laugh by the effect of surprise, the virtuosity of the performance and the humanity it reveals. It frees us from day-to-day predictability, celebrates the art of the actor in close complicity with his audience and reveals the universality of our physical condition. Marcel is this human gag that we all are. In the real world with its multitude of obstacles he keeps his balance as well as he can. And despite the fact that the age of his body no longer allows the agility of his youth, he still has a trump-card up his sleeve: his child spirit. He invents short-cuts, catches us off-guard, pushes us off-limits… For Marcel the battle is never gained, but it’s not lost either.... This new piece is born of our desire to recall the silence and the body movements of our beginnings with Théâtre de Complicité: a celebration of the universe of the burlesque. -Jos Houben & Marcello Magni A NOTE ON THE ART OF LAUGHTER The Art of Laughter began as a masterclass in which Jos Houben explained what he spends his life doing: teaching clowning, comedy and slapstick, doctoring and fixing people’s material so it stands up and flies. As Houben began playing it in front of audiences, it became something more, an almost philosophical, maybe anthropological, but certainly not a logical conference about comical behaviour and the uniquely human phenomenon of laughter. The show was also inspired by working with and learning from the real specialists in the world of physical comedy, Engineers of Laughter like Pierre Byland and the late and great Johnny Hutch… It was further shaped by a diverse set of international audiences, from Buenos Aires to Tel-Aviv, Naples, Vienna, Berlin, Amman, Paris, London, Amsterdam, Ljubljana… and now in New York. -Jos Houben M A R C E L A N D T H E A R T O F L AU G H T E R 3
PERSPECTIVES
Jos Houben (head) and Marcello Magni (tail) in Theatre for a New Audience’s production of MARCEL. Photo by Gerry Goodstein.
The following quotes are selected perspectives on the plays from notable scholars and artists. “A pianist practices day after day for the muscles that guide his fingers to become so flexible that we can begin to speak of the art of piano playing. Actors do exercises to develop their bodies but this has no meaning until they go beyond their muscles. Both Jos Houben and Marcello Magni spent years in the rigorous schooling of Jacques Lecoq, and then the demands on each performer in the Théâtre de Complicité, to develop their thoughts, bodies, and feelings to the point where making theatre can truly become an art. It is a work of high theatricality that the two – Marcello and Jos – create together as one performing body when they bring to us Marcel. In The Art Of Laughter, Jos goes way beyond what he can explain in words, it is in every inch of his finely tuned instrument where a smile and answer take their real place, which leads us into the great unknown. This art is The Art of Laughter. Marcello has similarly developed his craft through many living experiences.” - Peter Brook “Jos Houben and Marcello Magni are two towering figures representing some of the highest form of physical theatre and clowning existing today. They are splendidly brilliant.” - David Shiner, Lucille Lortel Award Winner for Old Hats with Bill Irwin 4
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DIALOGUES THE CLOWN'S FALL AND RISE RICHARD C. McCOY
Jos Houben in Theatre for a New Audience’s production of THE ART OF LAUGHTER. Photo by Gerry Goodstein.
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os Houben’s The Art of Laughter presents itself as a “public master class” on reasons for laughing. At first glance, the idea of a class on laughter may seem like an inauspicious undertaking. Mark Twain famously said that explaining a joke was a lot like dissecting a frog; you may learn a lot in the process, but, in the end, you kill it. But in Houben’s performance, explanation works brilliantly because he dexterously embodies and enacts every example. He begins by outlining several principles, and his last is the most fundamental. This is the simple but not necessarily obvious point, since most of us live in our heads, that everyone has a body. The body of every actor makes live theater so compelling, distinguishing drama from every other art form; these are real people with real bodies on stage, not portraits or statues, or characters in a book, or the disembodied voices
of poetry, or the shimmering images of film. Jos Houben is a virtuoso of physical comedy, a skillset that includes clowning, mime, funny faces, and slapstick. With their stumbles, collisions, and pratfalls, clowns continually remind us of the body’s vulnerabilities and embarrassments as well as its physical reality. Marcello Magni and Houben, the stars of Marcel, studied physical comedy with the legendary Jacques Lecoq (1921-1999). Geoffrey Rush, another student of Lecoq’s, paid tribute to his teacher’s essential lessons at a memorial service: “'Jacques Lecoq taught me how to fall over, get slapped and be a failure.'' Falling and failing are essential requirements of physical comedy; as for the third, St. John Chrysostom, the 4th-century church father, defined the clown as “he who gets slapped.” Houben explains in The Art of Laughter M A R C E L A N D T H E A R T O F L AU G H T E R 5
THE CLOWN'S FALL AND RISE RICHARD C. McCOY how falling is an affront to human dignity, which generally requires standing erect. Humans have evolved to stand up, and we regard this as one of our most distinctive accomplishments, elevating us above other species. Ontogeny repeats phylogeny in each of us since we begin life crawling on all fours but soon learn to walk upright. Unfortunately, we also inevitably decline and die, and many descend by degrees to canes, walkers, and wheelchairs. Eventually we all will be brought down to the horizontality of the deathbed and grave. This descent recalls the riddle of the Sphinx posed to Oedipus in Greek mythology: what walks on 4 feet in the morning, 2 at noon, and 3 in the evening? The riddle traces the arc of humanity’s rise and fall from the infant crawling through an upright adulthood to stooped and lame old age. In Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, Oedipus rules Thebes because he got the answer right, but he doesn’t grasp his answer’s implications for himself and cannot anticipate his own downfall. Most regard this grim fate as a tragedy, but Houben cites the laughing philosopher, Democritus, who insists that the only sensible response to affliction and death is laughter. This may seem a cruel response to life’s sorrows, but Houben paradoxically asserts that pain, misery, and misfortune are funny. Indeed, he contends that we enjoy watching him get hurt, and the laughter that greets his performance evidently confirms this. In this respect, Houben may agree with another funny man, Mel Brooks, who said that “Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die.” An eminent French philosopher, Henri Bergson (18591941), articulated these ideas more solemnly and schematically in his essay “On Laughter.” Bergson elaborates on the premise that life is a comedy to those who think and a tragedy to those who feel. He argues that laughter requires what he calls a “momentary anesthesia of the heart” that allows a straightforward appeal to our brains alone. Indeed, he insists in all caps that comedy “MUST NOT AROUSE OUR FEELINGS.” Bergson’s rather cold-hearted perspective on comedy is also 6
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profoundly conservative. He sees laughter as a means of enforcing social conformity through mockery, ridicule, and humiliation of its comic butts. Bergson’s ideas can be traced back to yet another ancient authority and classical Greek philosopher, Aristotle. In his Poetics. Aristotle says that tragedians like Sophocles present superior characters whose falls inspire pity and terror in an audience, whereas comedians like Aristophanes present inferior people whose mishaps prompt mirth and amusement. Their mishaps may be painful to them, but we look down on them rather than regarding their sufferings with awe. The preferred name for comedy’s most ridiculous victim is “clown.” The word “clown” became current in the English language in the late sixteenth century, coinciding with Shakespeare’s career. It’s hardly a compliment. It usually meant a clumsy rustic or yokel. In his New Arcadia, Sir Philip Sidney calls the boorish servant the king employs to guard his daughters in their pastoral retreat a “rude clown.” Sidney’s Apology for Poetry criticizes English plays of his own time as “mongrel tragicomedies” for “mingling kings and clowns.” Shakespeare’s Hamlet seems to echo Sidney’s sentiments in the hero’s instructions to the players when Hamlet inveighs against actors who improvise for vulgar laughs and insists, “let those that play your clowns speak no more than is set down for them” (3.2.36-7). Yet Hamlet himself admires the gravedigger, identified in the script as a “clown,” for his sharp wit. Indeed, Hamlet concludes that social distinctions between country bumpkins and city slickers have become so blurred “that the toe of the peasant comes so near the heel of the courtier” (5.1.132-3). Even Hamlet himself sometimes plays the fool and “put[s] an antic disposition on” (1.5.170). Clowns and fools prove to be essential dramatis personae in the gravest of Shakespeare’s tragedies, and these presumed butts of the joke often push back against condescension and mockery by their presumed betters. King Lear’s Fool tells him “I am better than thou art now. I am a fool, thou art nothing” (1.4.184-5). Clowns come in for plenty of abuse, and Lear’s
THE CLOWN'S FALL AND RISE RICHARD C. McCOY Fool is continually threatened with whipping. The clown’s vulnerability goes back to Italian commedia dell’arte, a form of popular improvisational theater, in which the servant or zanni, Arlecchino or Harlequin, is repeatedly smacked around by various masters. Marcello Magni and Jos Houben continue this same routine in Marcel. The taller Houben orders the shorter Marcel around and subjects him to various tests and tasks. Houben takes on the demeanor of a particularly officious martinet, especially when he dons a lab coat. One of the most excruciating moments in Marcel’s tribulations occurs when he gets his hand stuck under a ramp searching for matches; he’s trying to sneak a smoke while Houben’s taskmaster is offstage. Marcel gestures frantically to an audience member who briefly comes to his rescue. This violates one of the first principles Houben declares in The Art of Laughter: lines between audience and actor must be firmly preserved. Houben reappears, glaring sternly at both, and the delinquent audience member slinks back to his seat.
the sound of the smack. We are partly relieved of blame for these sadistically guilty pleasures by an assurance that they’re not as bad as they look. Comedy can also generate compassion as well as detachment despite Bergson’s conviction that it anesthetizes our feelings. Sometimes laughter is mingled with groans of sympathy. Moreover, amidst all the slapping and abuse by Marcel’s odd, mismatched couple, the pair ends up kissing each other twice. Sometimes they even collaborate as Below left: A slapstick. Wikimedia Commons. Below: Illustration of an Arlecchino carrying his slapstick. "Harlequin (1671)" from Maurcie Sands' Masques et bouffons (Comedie Italienne). Paris, Michel Levy Freres, 1860. Wikimedia Commons.
Houben’s sadistic boss also administers so many smacks to Marcel’s face and head that Marcel eventually preempts them by slapping himself. This is the essence of slapstick, a key feature of physical comedy. Houben is obviously right when he claims in The Art of Laughter that we enjoy this kind of thing and it confirms St. John Chrysostom’s idea that the clown is “he who gets slapped.” But the slap-stick is, in fact, a prop, dating back to commedia dell’arte and devised to protect the actor from real harm by amplifying
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THE CLOWN'S FALL AND RISE RICHARD C. McCOY well as compete, although the pecking order is preserved. Marcel and his master work together on a hilarious show horse routine. Marcel even undertakes a few misguided attempts as a horse head but he can’t get the head on straight. The taller Houben eventually makes him wear the tail, reducing him once again to the butt of the joke. Still, they proudly canter about the stage, elegantly coordinating their moves and stopping only when Marcel cannot mount the ramp. One of the most poignant moments occurs when Marcel recalls accompanying his grandfather to the circus. There he saw Pierrot, a stock character and clown from commedia dell’arte. He emulates this character and his traditional costume, trimming a newspaper to make a white ruff. Pierrot is a far more romantic concept of the clown, often depicted with the moon as his only companion while he pines unrequited
for Columbine. In Antoine Watteau’s “Italian Comedians” (1720), Pierrot takes center stage for a commedia dell’arte curtain call, giving an otherwise pitiful character dignity and preeminence. Pablo Picasso paints himself as a clown in Harlequin motley in his “At the Lapin Agile” (1905), investing his self-portrait as clown with a quiet and melancholy dignity. The reversal of the pecking order is complete in the films of Charlie Chaplin, and the character he introduced in The Tramp (1915). Describing his approach to his subject 10 years later, Chaplin wrote, "The whole point of the Little Fellow is that no matter how down on his ass he is, no matter how well the jackals succeed in tearing him apart, he's still a man of dignity.” Marcel achieves a similar reversal in its final segment. It traces Marcel succumbing to the passage of time and his inevitable decline and
Marcello Magni in Theatre for a New Audience’s production of MARCEL. Photo by Gerry Goodstein.
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THE CLOWN'S FALL AND RISE RICHARD C. McCOY fall into the grave. We end up returning to the realm of tragedy that laughter is meant to ward off. Near the beginning of this segment, we hear a cheery round of “For he’s a jolly good fellow.” A package descends from on high which contains a gift of a cane. Once again, we’re reminded of the riddle of the Sphinx and Oedipus Rex. The music turns funereal as Marcel staggers atop the ramp with his cane and eventually collapses. Houben’s taller man dressed all in black and dark glasses stands over the body to prepare it for burial. He takes the cane from Marcel, using it to manipulate his limbs and lay out the corpse. At first, Marcel’s limbs bounce back, demonstrating a resilient élan vital, but eventually his body goes limp. Houben
as undertaker prevails, covering the corpse with a cloth. But then, Marcel seems to levitate aloft and rise from the dead. Marcello Magni as Marcel pulls off a simple but powerful stage trick by once again standing and then walking upright, using two sticks to raise the cloth before him. This seemingly miraculous resurrection is accompanied by an initially solemn, then rousing New Orleans Jazz funeral march, ultimately joyful and euphoric. Once again, physical comedy gives an otherwise tragic fate – “le fin final” – an exhilarating spin by showing how a clown can rise from life’s ultimate downfall. • RICHARD C. MCCOY is a member of Theatre for a New Audience's Council of Scholars, and a Distinguished Professor of English at Queens College and the Graduate Center, CUNY. He is the author of four books – Sir Philip Sidney: Rebellion in Arcadia (Rutgers, 1979), The Rites of Knighthood: The Literature and Politics of Elizabethan Chivalry (California, 1989), Alterations of State: Sacred Kingship in the English Reformation (Columbia, 2002), and Faith In Shakespeare (Oxford, 2014) – as well as many articles on Shakespeare’s plays. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Council for Learned Societies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Folger Shakespeare Library, and The Huntington Library. He has also served as a speaker and consultant for Shakespeare performances for the Royal Shakespeare Company, Canada’s Stratford Shakespeare Festival, Classic Stage Company, Target Margin, The Public Theater, and The Shakespeare Society. Above left: Antoine Watteau, The Italian Comedians (c. 1720). National Gallery of Art. Wikimedia Commons. Below left: Pablo Picasso, At the Lapin Agile (1905). Metropolitan Museum of Art. Wikimedia Commons. Below: Charlie Chaplin as The Tramp eating his boot in The Gold Rush (1925). Wikimedia Commons.
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THE PLAYWRIGHTS JOS HOUBEN & MARCELLO MAGNI JOS HOUBEN is a Belgian native. He studied at Jacques Lecoq School and with Philippe Gaulier, Monika Pagneux, and Pierre Byland. As an original member of Complicité, he co-created and performed in A Minute Too Late and collaborated on many projects with Annabel Arden, Simon McBurney and Lilo Baur. Jos was a director and co-writer of the cult comedy troupe The Right Size (which won Laurence Olivier Awards for Best Entertainment 1999 and Best New Comedy 2002) playing in the West End and OffBroadway. For Thames TV he created and performed Mr Fixit, a silent slapstick TV comedy for children. He was also creative director and associate producer for Ragdoll TV’s Brum – The Magical Little Car. He created and performed Quatre Mains, a theatre piece for four hands with Andrew Dawson. He has collaborated with Greek contemporary music composer Georges Aperghis on several shows in Paris, including Commentaires, Zwielicht, and Paysage sous Surveillance. He has directed for Theater YBY in Salzburg, BPZoom in Paris, Les Flamiches Noires in Belgium, In 2006 he performed Jos Houben in Theatre for a New Audience’s with Marcello Magni in Fragments, directed by Peter Brook at production of THE ART OF LAUGHTER. Photo by Gerry Goodstein. Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord and on a world tour, including TFANA. In 2013 he co-created Répertoire by Mauricio Kagel for the Théâtre d'Arras and the Bouffes du Nord with Françoise Rivalland and Emily Wilson. Jos is also working with Jean François Peyret on RE: Walden, presented in 2013 at the Avignon festival and in 2014 at Théâtre de la Colline in Paris. Since 2000 he has been a teacher at Jacques Lecoq School. MARCELLO MAGNI studied at Jacques Lecoq School in Paris, with Pierre Byland, Philippe Gaulier, and Monica Pagneux. Co-founder of Complicité in 1983, he performed in A Minute Too Late; Help I’m Alive; Anything for a Quiet Life; Please, Please, Please; The Visit; Out of a House Walked a Man; The Winter’s Tale; Street of Crocodiles; Foe; and the opera A Dog’s Heart. Marcello has a passion for the Commedia dell’Arte and, with Jos Houben and Kathryn Hunter, created a solo show Arlecchino. He performed at the National Theatre in Marivaux, and at Shakespeare’s Globe in The Merchant of Venice, Comedy of Errors (both Dromios), and Pericles. In 2006 he performed with Jos in Fragments, directed by Peter Brook at Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord, in the documentary The Tightrope about Peter Brook’s work, and in The Valley of Astonishment by Peter Brook and Marie-Hélène Estienne, created at Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord. He has performed in Fragments and The Valley of Astonishment at TFANA. He was also the movement director of A Magic Flute by Peter Brook. He produced, directed, and performed in Tell Them That I Am Young and Beautiful (Arcola Theatre), and acted in Playing Cards: Hearts directed by Robert Lepage. He Marcello Magni in Theatre for a New Audience’s production of MARCEL. Photo by Gerry Goodstein. recently choreographed Faithful Ruslan in Belgrade Theatre Coventry and Citizen Theatre Glasgow. Films include Nine, The Adventures of Pinocchio, Doctor Who, and Mr. Turner. Marcello is the voice of Pingu. Marcello has collaborated with Mark Rylance, Hideki Noda (Japan), George Kimoulis (Greece), Annie Castledine, Neil Bartlett, Helena Kaut Howsen (Poland and UK), Mike Alfred, David Glass, Jack Sheppard, Nancy Meckler, and with Kathryn Hunter. 10
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INTERVIEWS APPROACHING THE HORIZONTAL MARCELLO MAGNI AND JOS HOUBEN IN CONVERSATION WITH AYANNA THOMPSON a clown. But, in a way, we wanted to give a sense that this test was more for life, and to be able to see if a person is still able to move and to be capable to be part of society. We wanted to make Marcel a person who is tested to see if he is still worth something; if he’s worth something in life; if he has a value. AYANNA I loved how irreverent he was at times. MARCELLO Well, I think maybe he’s irreverent, but
I feel that he still has in himself the resonance of the same will, or the same joy, or the same sense of life and pleasure of life that he had when he was young. So, in a way, he will not give up.
Jos Houben and Marcello Magni in Theatre for a New Audience’s production of MARCEL. Photo by Gerry Goodstein.
In a pair of interviews, Ayanna Thompson, Chair of Theatre for a New Audience's Council of Scholars, spoke first with Marcello Magni, then with Jos Houben as the two prepared to bring Marcel and The Art of Laughter to TFANA. AYANNA THOMPSON Can you describe Marcel? MARCELLO MAGNI Marcel is a day in the life of
a man who has to undergo a test. He has to be assessed for something, but we don’t know what. There is this dark figure of this inspector, doctor, bureaucratic—almost like a “fonctionnaire,” as you say in French—that will give him a pass, or a card, in order to be able to practice his profession again. Little by little in the show we understand that the gentleman is trying to get a test to be a performer,
This show came after me having done a solo show called Arlecchino which Jos directed with Kathyrn Hunter, and that play was about commedia. And Jos performed by himself in The Art of Laughter. I was continually saying to Jos, “Listen we’ve done this show Arlecchino and I am all the time alone, and commedia is always based on the response to the proposition of another performer. And I’m alone. It’s a nightmare. It’s a nightmare! You have to respond physically to somebody slapping you, or somebody hitting you, or somebody not giving you money, or somebody insulting you. And I’m alone. I need to play to another person. This is ridiculous.” And Jos, having performed hundreds and hundreds of times this wonderful lecture by himself, and being asked by the Bouffes [du Nord, in Paris] to produce a new show, thought it was quite obvious that his investigation about the body and my investigation about comedy and physicality in commedia dell’arte could find a merging point together in a show in which I was under his provocatory function. He’s like a little devil. I told him many times, “You’re like a dark energy. You’re like time. You’re like these policemen, or these doctors that are never pleasant in life.” And there is this victim that is Marcel who is a bit irreverent. He’s like the puppet that comes out of the box on a spring because he doesn’t want to stay inside; he M A R C E L A N D T H E A R T O F L AU G H T E R 11
INTERVIEWS: MARCELLO MAGNI AND JOS HOUBEN AYANNA THOMPSON doesn’t want to be told he’s dead. AYANNA Can you talk more about the process of
the show’s creation? Because I love the idea that this came out of you and Jos doing one man shows in which you felt like you weren’t fully equipped because there was nobody to respond to. MARCELLO To play with. To play with. For a long
time, Jos thought that his function in Marcel would be a really spare one. So, the first period, when we were at the Bouffes, we were meeting every day for three or four hours, and Jos sat all the time in the audience and made me do improvisation. And every day he was provoking me with something different. He made me sit on a cardboard box, and this cardboard box gave out after a while because the corner started to disintegrate and you find yourself sitting on the floor. So Marcel would put the box into a more vertical structure by using another side of the box.
And again after two minutes I find myself on the floor, and then again use the last possible aspect of the box that would still have some dimension to the verticality. I was crushing more and more of this box, and then Jos would say, “Remake the box! With Sellotape!” And I would quickly try to put it back, and then he’d say “Sit down!” So it was this absurd number in which I was trying to sit on something that I was destroying by my own weight. I felt it was like a torture. And I loved it in a way. But at one moment, I asked him: “Why don’t you test me physically?” Or I’d say, “Why don’t you respect me?” Because I found that it’s almost slightly cruel. But when you’re old, your eyes are checked from side to side, lights are put into your eyes, and you’re there going, “Am I working? Is my body still…? Am I still…?” You’re put on a table, and machines are beeping and checking you out and you go, “What’s the result? What’s the result?
Marcello Magni in Theatre for a New Audience’s production of MARCEL. Photo by Gerry Goodstein.
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INTERVIEWS: MARCELLO MAGNI AND JOS HOUBEN AYANNA THOMPSON Am I going to die?” And with that feeling, I said, “Why don’t we push this aspect of the test more and explore the seven ages of man. In a way, I felt I would love to see if I could have sort of a Dante journey into old age. Or vice versa. And Jos said, “Why don’t we oppose it?” And we try to go between youthfulness and old age; youthfulness and middle age; youthfulness and old age; and so on. And I said, that’s a good thing.
be elegant like in Pierrot, but also something that is anarchic like the Marx Brothers or Charlie Chaplin. They don’t want to stay down. They always will turn right and left, and appear where they shouldn’t be.
And Jos had this sense of verticality. Losing verticality. That is how we end at the end of our life, we end up horizontal. So the set came out as this spiral, as a provocation. This sense of a circus, this sense of Sisyphus going up a mountain.
MARCELLO For me, the dilemma between the
The show started to fall into a logic, and we built more of a strange relationship between my character and Jos’s in which Jos’s character represented death, time, authority, and I am more like, in clown terms, the “Auguste.” And he became the white clown.
AYANNA And also to imbue some of that anarchic
[In clowning, the “Auguste” is the lower-status, buffoonish foil to the higher-status, more refined “whiteface.” - ed.]
MARCELLO Right. And doing Shakespeare with
AYANNA I think that’s brilliant. I wonder if you
could talk about the tension between comedic acting skills and classical acting skills. comedic and the more serious is constant. And for me, I would wish to marry the two. So I want to give a darker dimension to the comedy as something that is there at the same time. energy into the classical performances… MARCELLO Totally. AYANNA …which I think in Shakespeare’s plays are
often conjoined.
pleasant. I’ve been in hospitals, and Jos too. And we have been where you have to get a license, or a permit, or a new card for social security, and Jos wanted me to be like this squirrel or this wild cat that would be jumping around while the authority was not there. Mischievous.
Kathryn Hunter, that’s what she tried to bring out, for example, in the Dromios in The Comedy of Errors. I was at The Globe playing the two Dromios, playing both of them, and there was a big problem: How are we going to perform the last moment where they meet? And Kathyrn had this instinct that they are one in the same. It’s one person. Like when they are in the womb they are one but they are two. And so when I came at the end she made me perform the meeting of the two with a puppet that I was manipulating in which the other myself was there. And when we hugged we became one. So the visual image was quite poetically beautiful. When I had that consciousness of playing the comedy of the two, I knew that I was going towards that image. And that made me much happier as a comic performer.
AYANNA Yes, I think that’s the part I picked up
AYANNA And then the tension that you sometimes
as being so irreverent because Marcel has so much light and life in him that that it bubbles out.
feel between the comedic and the classical is relieved in that moment?
MARCELLO Yes, there is an anarchic force in the
MARCELLO Totally. And for me in Marcel it’s
comic. There is something that destroys. It can
shown in a very simple, simple moment—at the
I dragged him into the show so to speak. Because I think at the beginning, he thought I could have replaced him with somebody else because the show would have been centered around me. But it’s fundamental what he does in the show. AYANNA And the fact that he is this dark figure
that everyone encounters in their lives— MARCELLO Yeah, and he’s mysterious, and he’s not
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INTERVIEWS: MARCELLO MAGNI AND JOS HOUBEN AYANNA THOMPSON moment I say my grandfather taught me about comedy. And it’s true. So I want to celebrate something that is part of my true life. My father painted Pierrot. My grandfather was an acrobat. To me, in the comedic, you have to bring something that is very personal. AYANNA This leads me perfectly into asking about
your physical process because you are in amazing shape and you’re doing things that are remarkable in Marcel. I didn’t realize that your grandfather was an acrobat, so I was wondering about your physical process, and also about your relationship to your physical process as you’re getting older. MARCELLO (Laughs) That’s why today I went to
an osteopath, and I did a yoga class. It’s because it gets harder and harder. And I think what Jos Below and opposite: Marcello Magni in Theatre for a New Audience’s
production of MARCEL. Photos by Gerry Goodstein.
wanted to celebrate is how our bodies are losing something. And the tension that exists in realizing that an older person can maybe still do it. There is something touching. We’re working towards this stage in which we are standing, we are strong, we are jumping, and we never fall. And when we fall, we come back in a second. But there is a moment when we fall, and our falls become more painful, and we stay down, and progressively we stay down more and more until one moment we will be down and horizontal. So that’s what I think Jos is trying to hit by choosing me as a performer. Because I just worked in Coventry on a show in which there was this gentleman that played a dog, and I couldn’t believe what he did physically as a dog. Jos could have chosen a performer like that, but then the resonance would not be the same. But because he takes me, the parable of it getting more difficult makes the show more touching. AYANNA It does, very much so. MARCELLO Because I think the audience feels that
I might have a problem. AYANNA Yes, and those moments when the
audience is gasping because you might fall off the highest part of the spiral. We’re right on the edge our seats, saying, “No no no no!” MARCELLO Exactly. Exactly. But the first day
of rehearsal, I went up and I touched the extra structure that is like a frame, and I went up, backwards, and I fell. I went down and I hit the muscle of the leg on the structure, and I hit my back and my head on the floor at the Bouffes... and that’s concrete. And I went to the hospital. And it was an extraordinary awakening moment for me, because I went, “Damn it. This is dangerous.” And it is because the ramp starts with an inclination outside of the circle, and the further you go up the inclination goes inside the circle. What our designer has built, Oria Puppo, it’s brilliant that shape. It’s really brilliant. But it’s slightly dangerous. AYANNA Because it’s a true spiral, twisting in
opposite directions. Right? So even the set itself 14
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INTERVIEWS: MARCELLO MAGNI AND JOS HOUBEN AYANNA THOMPSON has a little bit of that anarchic energy that you are talking about.
way this sense of being put under the test is losing your balance.
MARCELLO Oh, totally. We wanted to give more
AYANNA That’s profound. I’m wondering, since we
meaning to the shape. So Jos did an homage in there to the circus. To the image of getting older. Like life is going up, and at one moment you reach a climax. Marcel is a very personal thing for both Jos and me about this stage of life that is very much about our bodies. On the 24th of September I had an operation to my heart, and I’m recovering. I could not train as hard as I wished, and I took everything very gently. And Jos has another problem in which he has a heart that could stop at any time. So that consciousness made us be aware of ourselves as people in our lives. And comedy is connected to a man being not in a vertical position. It’s about falling. Lecoq used to say that when we lose our balance we become funny. When we lose our correctness, our dignity, we become funny. So we wanted to explore the fall. So in a
talked a little about audience reactions to Marcel: can you describe your ideal audience? MARCELLO We enjoy when the audience is not too
scared to intervene. Because in a way, we solicit an interaction. We break the fourth wall. And we think that the show is in between that dimension and we create this bridge in which there is a contact, there is a complicity. That’s the spirit the early Complicité shows were working with—that the show could at any moment go on the other side. AYANNA So your ideal audience would be one that
intervenes on Marcel’s part? MARCELLO More than intervene, but that feels that
there is not a curtain, or a wall, or a barrier. That the show happens between us and them. We invite
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INTERVIEWS: MARCELLO MAGNI AND JOS HOUBEN AYANNA THOMPSON them. We invite them more than demand. Yeah. We invite them to participate.
with students, sometimes on my own, in which I explained what I was doing.
The show, without making too much of a point, has the echo of other things. And because there is an echo then the audience can dream or have intuition, have a sensation in another dimension. Because I think we don’t want to define it in one way. We are very much physical performers, and we try to make something appear to an audience almost like a silent movie. And we wanted to celebrate what we feel through this language that we think we’re putting into Marcel. •
And the second part of the history of The Art of Laughter is that at a certain moment I got a carte blanche because I got an opportunity to present something at Battersea Arts Centre in London. And this occasion reproduced itself later in Paris as well, in the Théâtre le Samovar. They said, ”If we gave you an evening, what would you do?” And somebody once told me. “That master class of yours is so simple and accessible, you could do it for any audience,” and this stayed in my mind. And I thought, ”Let’s have a shot at this.” I started to write key phrases. So I started first with verticality, and then moved to muscular tensions. And I started to structure it. And this worked very well later. Very well. I had a great success.
AYANNA Can you tell us about the genesis of The
Art of Laughter? JOS HOUBEN I am an actor and a teacher and a
director of theatre. I have always created my own theatre, starting all those years ago with Simon McBurney and Marcello Magni with the theatre company Complicité. Marcello and Simon were the really funny ones in the company. I just learned to be straight, and by learning to be straight I learned a lot about how comedy works—especially how that very physical comedy that we were generating works. When I was working in London with Complicité, I got invited by two English guys, who were calling themselves “The Right Size,” and they wanted to make funny stuff. They were just interested in making people laugh, and I started exploring this with them. And they invited people from the old “music hall” school—they’re all either in their nineties or dead now, people like Johnny Hutch— and these guys came, they showed routines and steps and eccentric dances, and I just enjoyed it so much and became fascinated. And then the shows became quite successful, and the British Council funded us to tour internationally, and we went to places like Yemen and Malaysia. And as it happens sometimes in these countries people say, well our festival has sponsors, or the local politicians want to come and see what they’re spending their money on. So I devised a little master class, sometimes 16
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When Peter Brook heard that I had done this thing, he said why don’t you come and do this at the Bouffes de Nord, in the theatre. And I went, “Woah. In this temple of theatre? This is just a demonstration.” And he wouldn’t let go. Peter Brook doesn’t like it when you say no to him. So his assistant came and said, “Come on, why are you saying no to Peter? You’re slippery like a fish.” I remember this line. Anyway, they gave me seven evenings, before the main show slot of Beckett’s Fragments. And then I really had to say, “Okay, be very zen about this. I won’t pretend to know more than I do in front of these very sophisticated Parisian audiences.” But it went whoosh! I could not believe what happened to me. I was in the newspapers; I was on radio. It was like I hit a soft spot with the French. There is something about the simplicity of it, and the honesty of it. The fact that it was so bare. That it was so stripped down. I think the simplicity of my presence is almost a gift to them. And then, there is something about the body that is always talked of in terms of problems, or skills. When I say “movement” to my mother, for example, she thinks of ice skaters and trapeze artists, not of herself. And all of a sudden, people discover that they move—everybody moves. The secret of the slapstick of Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin is
INTERVIEWS: MARCELLO MAGNI AND JOS HOUBEN AYANNA THOMPSON not that we laugh because they get it wrong; we laugh because they fall back on their feet again. It is the celebration of our virtuosity. I talk about their legs, their pelvis, their bellies, their head. I use the word dignity maybe fifteen times. I feel like I give the audience their body back. Sort of fundamentally saying our bodies are good. We are fine, whether you’re short or tall, or you walk with a limp. There is something very healing, I think, in that message. So it’s a multi-layered experience for an audience. AYANNA Do you think that through your experience
playing the straight man that you learned something about the body as well? And about recovery? Because is it the straight man that enables the comic person to keep going? JOS Yes, I think I learned almost everything Jos Houben in Theatre for a New Audience’s production of THE ART OF LAUGHTER. Photo by Gerry Goodstein.
about this. Where they find imbalance, I had to re-balance. I learned that if there is not some sort of balance, and an organized presence, physically, that all that anarchy would become irritating. A movement is only perceived when there is a fixed point available. And later I was in contact with professors and researchers on the brain, and there is something about the way we perceive things that is constantly between balance and imbalance, between misshapen and straight, between disharmonic and harmonic. I learned by constantly representing the harmony, or the beat through the off-beat, a lot about comedy. The Marx Brothers are devils, and yet we love watching their devilishness, their mischief. But somewhere there must be some sort of person that supervises that. We need to be able to run to safety somewhere. I mean, that’s all very philosophical, but I’ve certainly learned, by default, that in order to fall over you’ve got to be able to come back up again, and somebody needs to help you come back, or some hierarchy needs to remind you what is right and wrong. And we are very sensitive to that already as children. We need an authority so that we can be deliciously mischievous. AYANNA Right. Because actually what they say about
children—and you probably know this since you have children—is that they misbehave the most at home, where they feel the most comfortable and supported. JOS Completely. They need to know. They need to
transgress in safety to learn. Because children have an enormous sense of power, desire, curiosity, and they need to know where the boundaries are. And if you don’t set them, they go crazy. But if you set them, they will push those boundaries. That’s life’s energy. That’s the purpose of life. That’s also how we discover things, by constantly pushing boundaries. And children do this in a very primitive and very powerful way. And in a very intelligent way, as well. Because children are intelligent. But one thing children don’t have is experience. They’re not stupid, they’re not naive, they’re not weak, they’re everything that a human being is sort of crystallized in a little ball of energy. We can only take risks when we feel safe somewhere. M A R C E L A N D T H E A R T O F L AU G H T E R 17
INTERVIEWS: MARCELLO MAGNI AND JOS HOUBEN AYANNA THOMPSON AYANNA I wonder if it is strange for you to have to
AYANNA So do you think of yourself as playing the
do that alone on stage in The Art of Laughter, where you don’t have the counterbalance onstage?
professor, or are you yourself on the stage?
JOS Yes, of course, and that’s why in the show
teaching persona. So when I teach at the Lecoq School in Paris, it’s in a very big room. And I have learned to speak big and loud, with very clear sentences and very clear gestures. Otherwise everybody gets lost. And that persona over the years, is so ingrained in me that I can very easily transpose it to the stage. But it is me in my teacher form. Are you as a teacher as well?
Marcel we play two characters in a situation. It’s a play. Whereas in The Art of Laughter, I really have to be very careful not to step over that line and become a character. Because theatre is essentially reaction. And if you are alone on stage, you can react to nothing. There is nothing to react to. Theatre starts when a second character walks in. And we’re going, “Oo, what’s gonna happen between those two?” That’s drama. What happens between human beings. So I’m on my own. And, of course, that’s what solo performers do. They talk at the audience, to the audience, about the audience. Because there’s no one else to talk to. There’s no one else on stage. So that’s why The Art of Laughter stays in that voice and that tone and that modus of the teacher. Although what I do and say little by little becomes more and more crazy and absurd.
JOS I think, because I teach a lot, I have my
AYANNA Yes, I’m a teacher as well, and I know
exactly what you mean. When you’ve lived with that persona so long, it’s easy to put that skin on very quickly and take it off very quickly. JOS Very quickly! Yeah, yeah. Sometimes I talk to
other people as if I’m teaching them. And you have to climb back down from your little lectern. But yes, teaching is role playing. And it’s pretending that you know sometimes when you don’t. It’s a game.
Jos Houben in Theatre for a New Audience’s production of THE ART OF LAUGHTER. Photos by Henry Grossman
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INTERVIEWS: MARCELLO MAGNI AND JOS HOUBEN AYANNA THOMPSON AYANNA You said that there are certain principles of
comedy, or of laughter, that you go through in the workshop, and now with this performance piece. So what are they? JOS First of all, they are concerned with falling.
We are this interesting being that needs to struggle and try many times. As it happens I’m now in a park with a baby that’s twelve months old, and it is just starting to find its upright stance. It’s in her nervous system to want to be upright, but at the same time, we fall all the time. When we are babies, this is very easy because we are very close to the ground. But when we are grown-ups, or later on in life, falling is a very dangerous business. So we are very sensitive to the fact that we are constantly correcting, constantly having to negotiate with the forces of gravity. And this then has its consequences in everything that humans do. So being upright and the brain being on the top of our body is something that is so fundamental to us that everything follows from it. It is such a
serious business for us that falling over therefore becomes either something really bad, or something really joyful when we do it on purpose. And we like to push each other over, and we construct fairgrounds, where we go on rollercoasters, and we simulate falling. There is something wonderful, and something that is very delicious, to be able to fall in safety. On trampolines. To play with the fact that we can go up and down without getting hurt. So, laughter for me starts there. And in any culture where I’ve been—in Africa, or in Asia—verticality is always linked to dignity, or to royalty or to importance. And we construct totems and we raise flags very high, or we put them halfmast when we are sad. And I’m telling you, there are often double whammies. For example, I was in Senegal and I did a twenty-minute extract from The Art of Laughter at the British Embassy on a huge porch outside. There were lots of dignitaries and lots of students from university, and everybody was, of course—except for a few English people, me, and the ambassador—not white. And when I played a
Marcello Magni and Jos Houben in Theatre for a New Audience’s production of MARCEL. Photo by Gerry Goodstein.
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INTERVIEWS: MARCELLO MAGNI AND JOS HOUBEN AYANNA THOMPSON chicken, all hell broke loose. Because not only was a human being pretending to be a chicken, but a white man! And they fell on the ground. There was something punctured about an old colonial, ingrained memory where whites are always there with the money, or with the power. That this white man behaved like an animal was for them… I mean, they all rolled on the ground. And they started all chicken dancing around me. It was fantastic. And again, behaving like an animal is something they did not like to do themselves in the workshop. They did not want to go on all fours and move around like animals. They hated it. All these things are, for me, permanent and universal. The Art of Laugher exists as it does because I did it in so many different contexts, and I constantly looked for things that were true, or as true as possible, whether it’s in Japan, or in Hong Kong, or in the United States or in Argentina. I think if I had done workshops about comedies and had always stayed in France and Britain, I would have touched on more specific cultural or linguistic aspects of it. I don’t explore, you know, the mathematics of humor or the linguistics of humor. AYANNA There is something about repetition in
humor too, though. Just thinking very lightly on mathematics, right? There’s something weirdly funny about repetition and when it starts to be annoying, and then when it starts to be funny again. JOS Yes. Yes. We need repetition, otherwise the
world is anarchy. We need to make sure that something is reproduced exactly the same. When the light goes red, the traffic stops. We need that. But also, we need surprises. And if there’s a wonderful balance between predictability and unpredictability, life is rich. But if we only have predictability, like you say, we become very irritated. Or we go into a sort of a sleep-walking state; our senses are numbed by repetition. Or, if there’s only surprise, we go crazy. That’s why I think humans can be very still and look at the sea, or at fire, for a very long time. Because there is the total predictability of the sea, yet every wave is a new surprise. Every flame is a new flame. And that, for me, I always go back to. The elements always have that. If we play with 20
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that knowledge—that our nervous systems pick up repetition and patterns, and that’s why if you set up a pattern, then of course the person picking up that pattern will expect that pattern to repeat itself—and you create a surprise in the pattern, then you get a laugh. And now this is a bit of mathematics, if you want: if an event happens once, it’s unique. If it reproduces itself, we automatically expect that a third time it will re-occur. So you cannot play a gag before two beats; you always play it on the third beat. AYANNA I love the notion of verticality and falling
as universal principles because I read an article a few years ago about training football players here in the U.S. And they asked them to watch a video of a two-year old and they made the football players reproduce motion by motion everything the twoyear old did. And they couldn’t do it because it was too hard; too physically demanding. JOS That’s fascinating because that brings me to
another big part of my history, the Feldenkrais method. I was taught at the Lecoq School by a teacher, Monika Pagneux, and what she taught was fundamentally different from all the others. And she had worked with Moshe Feldenkrais, who was this Israeli scientist, and who was also a professional judo player and sportsman, and who had injured his knees. And he refused any surgery because knee surgery was not what it is today. His wife was a pediatrician, and he spent hours in his wife’s practice and he observed babies. He started to imitate patterns of baby movements, and he re-taught himself to walk and his knees healed. The Feldenkrais method, which I am now a practitioner of—and I studied it in Britain and in Tel Aviv—has become a method of questioning movement. Not teaching movement. Saying what are you doing and how can I do it differently? How can I create options in my behavior? And, therefore, it’s a method where you learn about learning. Because we learn through movement. So the Feldenkrais method has really informed The Art of Laughter because not only is there the text and the surface of what I am talking about, but also in
INTERVIEWS: MARCELLO MAGNI AND JOS HOUBEN AYANNA THOMPSON my behavior, in my body, there is all this knowledge, all these things I learned. So very secretly I teach the audience a lesson. They even talk to me after and say, “When I walk out of your show, I walk differently.” Because I show them what it is to be on all fours. I undulate in front of them. I fall forward and I find again my balance. And that’s the deep subtext of The Art of Laughter. Because in order for them to recognize this, they somehow reproduce these movements in their nervous system. Then when they get up, seemingly having done nothing, they have learned something and find other options in their way of walking. The Art of Laughter for me is really a lecture—or a lesson—about our physicality, and the way that we can, by looking, observing, and reproducing, constantly build new patterns of behavior, and new patterns of movement. And that’s where the source of The Art of Laughter is, the Feldenkrais method. That’s why I don’t allow anybody else to do that show, because they would not have the awareness. AYANNA Wow, I didn’t know that. I knew about the
Feldenkrais method but I didn’t know that you were a practitioner, or that that was behind the show. It makes sense that audience members leave feeling a different relationship to their own physicality. JOS Completely. Yes. And they don’t know what
it is. And they wouldn’t know if I explained that it was that—and that doesn’t matter. At all the shows I’ve been involved with, I use comedy to actually access something else. And in Marcel, it’s the aging of the body, the memories of life—the body of a six-year old, the body of a ninety-year old when he leaves the body, of a forty-year old when he does his work-outs. These are different phases in our life. We all go through them. Audiences are enormous fans of Marcel because it’s about them. And that’s why Marcel could not end with him leaving with his bags, effectively having been refused his license, or whatever the surface narrative is about. That’s why he has to die and levitate. AYANNA Yes, it’s beautiful. It’s really fantastic JOS Yes, yes! There’s very pertinent and profound
reasons behind the writing of Marcel.
Marcello Magni in Theatre for a New Audience’s production of MARCEL. Photo by Gerry Goodstein.
M A R C E L A N D T H E A R T O F L AU G H T E R 21
INTERVIEWS: MARCELLO MAGNI AND JOS HOUBEN AYANNA THOMPSON AYANNA I got to talk to Marcello a couple weeks
ago and he did reveal how fragile he’s been feeling physically and that so much of the show is about what happens when you’re approaching the horizontal as opposed to the vertical, right? JOS Yes, yes, absolutely. And we re-watched a video
of ourselves thirty years ago, and we go: “Wow, look, we move like teenagers! Look! We were so light!” So it’s a strange thing for us. I look at him and he looks at me and we’re fifty-eight or fiftynine, and say… That’s it. That’s what we’re doing. There is a finality about this. Which at least we embrace and we celebrate, and we in a way say thank you to our bodies in this show. Thank you for everything you’ve given us. Thank you for having been there, being a source of enjoyment and mystery and Beckettian absurdity. For as long as it lasts. AYANNA I think that’s what the audiences connect
to on a profound level: seeing people celebrate their bodies even as they’re not the perfect ideal of an eighteen-year old body, if you’re an American…. JOS Totally, totally! Yes. And you put your finger
on it there. In our culture, not only in America, but in Western culture, we are obsessive about youth. That means we can’t grow up. That means we can’t be happy. If we are so obsessive about youth and health we are afraid of life. Because life will push us on. Life will age us. We will break a foot. We will lose a tooth. Where’s the problem? And we are so afraid. And now
it becomes crazy—everyone’s stopped eating gluten! What’s the problem with gluten? There is no problem with gluten. Ah, my god. AYANNA But that’s why both shows are so
beautiful. It’s like let’s celebrate these bodies even as they’re changing. Like let’s celebrate this, and let’s think about it, as you say, in terms of balance. JOS Yes. Balance. And our lungs, and our kidneys,
and our livers are very powerful filters. Give them something to filter. If you have a car, you don’t leave it in the garage, you use it! You drive it around! I’m sorry, I’m on my horse now. Of course, don’t abuse it. It’s balance. Exactly. Distribution and balance. Constantly balance. Left leg right leg, left leg right leg otherwise we just hop around on our right leg and we are ridiculous. • These interviews have been edited and condensed. AYANNA THOMPSON is the Chair of Theatre for a New Audience's Council of Scholars, and a Professor of English at George Washington University. She specializes in Renaissance drama and focuses on issues of race and performance. She is the author of Teaching Shakespeare with Purpose: A StudentCentered Approach (Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2016, co-authored with Laura Turchi), Passing Strange: Shakespeare, Race, and Contemporary America (Oxford University Press, 2011), and Performing Race and Torture on the Early Modern Stage (Routledge, 2008); she wrote the introduction to the revised Arden3 Othello (Arden Shakespeare, 2016); and she is the editor of Weyward Macbeth: Intersections of Race and Performance (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), co-edited with Scott Newstok) and Colorblind Shakespeare: New Perspectives on Race and Performance (Routledge, 2006). Professor Thompson is the VicePresident (and President-elect) of the Shakespeare Association of America.
Jos Houben and Marcello Magni in "Act Without Words II," from Theatre for a New Audience’s 2011 production of FRAGMENTS by Samuel Beckett, directed by Peter Brook and Marie-Hélène Estienne.
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THE PRODUC TION CREATIVE TEAM ORIA PUPPO (Scenic & Costume Design). Stage and costume designer, Oria Puppo works between Buenos Aires
and Paris. In Argentina, she has sets and costumes for directors like Diego Kogan, Rafael Spregelburd, Roberto Villanueva, Ciro Zorzoli, and Alejandro Tantanian. She also worked as technical director for the Buenos Aires International Festival from 1999 to 2007. For Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord, she has participated as technical director in works by Peter Brook and Marie-Hélène Estienne, Tierno Bokar from the novel by Amadou Hampaté Bâ, Mozart’s A Magic Flute (co-created with Franck Krawzcyk), and as a costume co-designer for The Suit based on the novel by Can Themba. Recently, she did the décor for Handel’s Resurrection directed by Lilo Baur at the Paris Opera Atelier Lyrique, and sets and costumes for Jean Genet’s Maids directed by Ciro Zorzoli with Marilú Marini in Buenos Aires. PHILIPPE VIALATTE (Lighting Design) started at the Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord in 1985 as a light operator on Le Mahabharata,
directed by Peter Brook. He assisted Jean Kalman for the light design of Woza Albert and La Tempête, directed by Peter Brook. Since the creation of The Man Who in Paris in 1993, he has designed the lights for Peter Brook’s plays in the Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord: Qui est là, Je suis un phénomène, Le Costume, The Tragedy of Hamlet, Far Away, La Mort de Krishna, La Tragédie d’Hamlet, Ta main dans la mienne, Tierno Bokar, Le Grand Inquisiteur, Sizwe Banzi est mort, Fragments, 11 and 12, and recently A Magic Flute, The Suit, and The Valley of Astonishment. PAUL VELLA (Production Stage Manager). Theatre for a New Audience: The Skin of Our Teeth. NYC: Julius Caesar at Shakespeare in
the Park, The Juilliard School, Prospect Theater Company, and New York Theatre Workshop. Regional: Trinity Repertory Company, Barrington Stage Company, Swine Palace Productions, Ocean State Theatre Company, Merry-Go-Round Playhouse, and Little Theatre for the Rockies. Paul is a graduate of the University of Northern Colorado and a proud member of Actors’ Equity Association. JONATHAN KALB (Production Dramaturg) is Resident Dramaturg and Resident Artist at Theatre for a New Audience and Professor
of Theatre at Hunter College, CUNY. He has twice won the George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism. The author of five books and hundreds of articles, essays, translations and other works, he writes about theatre on his blog “Something the Dust Said” at www.jonathankalb.com. BLAKE ZIDELL & ASSOCIATES (Press Representative) is a Brooklyn-based public relations firm representing artists, companies and
institutions spanning a variety of disciplines. Clients include include St. Ann’s Warehouse, Soho Rep, The Kitchen, Ars Nova, BRIC, P.S.122, Abrons Arts Center, Taylor Mac, LAByrinth Theater Company, StoryCorps, Irish Arts Center, Café Carlyle, Peak Performances, Batsheva Dance Company, The Playwrights Realm, Stephen Petronio Company, The Play Company, and FIAF’s Crossing the Line Festival. JEFFREY HOROWITZ (Founding Artistic Director) began his career in theatre as an actor and appeared on Broadway, Off Broadway,
and in regional theatre. In 1979, he founded Theatre for a New Audience. Horowitz has served on the Panel of the New York State Council on the Arts and on the Board of Directors of Theatre Communications Group. He is currently on the Advisory Board of The Shakespeare Society and the Artistic Directorate of London’s Globe Theatre. He received the John Houseman Award in 2003 and The Breukelein Institute’s 2004 Gaudium Award. DOROTHY RYAN (Managing Director) joined Theatre for a New Audience in 2003. She spent the previous ten years devoted to
fundraising for the 92nd Street Y and the Brooklyn Museum. Ryan began her career in classical music artist management and has also served as company manager for Chautauqua Opera, managing director for the Opera Ensemble of New York, and general manager of Eugene Opera. She is a 2014 Brooklyn Women of Distinction honoree from Community Newspaper Group. MICHAEL PAGE (General Manager) joined Theater for a New Audience in 2013. TFANA credits include King Lear, The Killer,
Peter Brook’s The Valley of Astonishment, Tamburlaine, Soho Rep’s An Octoroon, Fiasco Theater’s The Two Gentlement of Verona, Isolde, Pericles, A Doll’s House/The Father, The Servant of Two Masters, The Skin of Our Teeth, and Yale Rep’s Happy Days. Prior to TFANA Michael was the general manager of the Tony Award winning Vineyard Theatre and managing director of Barrow Street Theatre where he managed the US premiere of Nina Raine’s Tribes and David Cromer’s landmark production of Our Town, and Craig Wright’s Mistakes Were Made with Michael Shannon, among others. M A R C E L A N D T H E A R T O F L AU G H T E R 23
ABOUT THEATRE FOR A NEW AUDIENCE About Theatre for a New Audience Founded in 1979 by Jeffrey Horowitz, the mission of Theatre for a New Audience is to develop and vitalize the performance and study of Shakespeare and classic drama. Theatre for a New Audience produces for audiences Off-Broadway and has also toured nationally, internationally and to Broadway. We are guided in our work by five core values: a reverence for language, a spirit of adventure, a commitment to diversity, a dedication to learning, and a spirit of service. These values inform what we do with artists, how we interact with audiences, and how we manage our organization. Theatre for a New Audience Education Programs
S TA F F
Founding Artistic Director Jeffrey Horowitz Managing Director Dorothy Ryan General Manager Michael Page Director of Institutional Advancement James J. Lynes Finance Director Mary Sormeley Education Director Katie Beganics Director of Marketing & Communications Alix Milne Associate Producer / Director of the Studio Susanna Gellert Associate General Manager Matthew Cleaver Theatre Manager Steven Gaultney Facilities Manager Jordan Asinofsky Box Office & Subscriptions Supervisor Allison Byrum Production Coordinator Joshua Kohler Finance Associate Jacob Farber Facilities Associate Rashawn Caldwell Marketing Manager Maya Shah Education Manager Victoria Barclay Development Manager Jena Yarley Development Associate Maggie Greene House Manager Wednesday Sue Derrico Literary & Humanities Manager / Assistant to the Artistic Director Torrey Townsend Downtown Brooklyn Arts Management Fellow Alexandria Ryahl Press Representative Blake Zidell & Associates Resident Literary Advisor Jonathan Kalb Resident Casting Director Jack Doulin + Sharky Resident Director of Voice Andrew Wade
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Theatre for a New Audience is an award-winning company recognized for artistic excellence. Our education programs introduce students to Shakespeare and other classics with the same artistic integrity that we apply to our productions. Through our unique and exciting methodology, students engage in hands-on learning that involves all aspects of literacy set in the context of theatre education. Our residencies are structured to address City and State Learning Standards both in English Language Arts and the Arts, the New York City DOE’s Curriculum Blueprint for Teaching and Learning in Theater, and the Common Core Learning Standards for English Language Arts. Begun in 1984, our programs have served more than 126,000 students, ages 9 through 18, in New York City Public Schools city-wide. A New Home in Brooklyn: Polonsky Shakespeare Center After 33 seasons of award-winning and internationally-acclaimed productions, Theatre for a New Audience’s new home, Polonsky Shakespeare Center, is a centerpiece of the Brooklyn Cultural District. Designed by celebrated architect Hugh Hardy, Polonsky Shakespeare Center is the first theatre in New York designed and built expressly for classic drama since Lincoln Center’s Vivian Beaumont in the 1960s. The 27,500 square-foot facility is a unique performance space in New York. The 299-seat Samuel H. Scripps Mainstage, inspired by the Cottesloe at London’s National Theatre, combines an Elizabethan courtyard theatre with modern theatre technology that allows the stage and seating to be arranged in seven configurations. The new facility also includes the Theodore C. Rogers Studio (a 50-seat rehearsal/ performance studio), and theatrical support spaces. The City of New York-developed Arts Plaza, designed by landscape architect Ken Smith, creates a natural gathering place around the building. In addition, Polonsky Shakespeare Center is also one of the few sustainable (green) theatres in the country, with an anticipated LEED-NC Silver rating from the United States Green Building Council. Now with a home of its own, Theatre for a New Audience is contributing to the continued renaissance of Downtown Brooklyn. In addition to its season of plays, the Theatre is expanding its education and humanities offerings to include lectures and activities for families, as well as seminars, workshops, and other activities for artists, scholars, and families. When not in use by the Theatre, its new facility is available for rental, bringing much needed affordable performing and rehearsal space to the community.
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BOARD OF DIRECTORS
Chairman: Theodore C. Rogers Vice Chairman Robert E. Buckholz President Jeffrey Horowitz Vice President and Secretary Dorothy Ryan Members Robert Arnow John Berendt* Cicely Berry, CBE, Hon. D.Lit* Sally Brody Robert E. Buckholz William H. Burgess, III Zoë Caldwell* Robert Caro* Merle Debuskey* Dr. Sharon Dunn* Dr. Charlotte K. Frank Dana Ivey* John J. Kerr, Jr. Seymour H. Lesser Larry M. Loeb Catherine Maciariello* Audrey Heffernan Meyer Caroline Niemczyk Rachel Polonsky Barbara Rifkind Theodore C. Rogers Michael B. Rothfeld Philip R. Rotner Mark Rylance* Daryl D. Smith Susan Stockel Michael Stranahan John Turturro* Kathleen C. Walsh Monica Gerard-Sharp Wambold Jane Wells Frederick Wiseman* *Artistic Council
THEATRE FOR A NEW AUDIENCE MA JOR SUPPORTERS Even with capacity audiences, ticket sales account for a small portion of our operating costs. The Theatre expresses its deepest thanks to the following Foundations, Corporations Government Agencies and Individuals for their generous support of the Theatre’s Humanities, Education, and Outreach programs.
The 360° Series: Viewfinders has been made possible in part by a major grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities: Exploring the Human Endeavor. Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this Viewfinder do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities. A Challenge Grant from the NEH established a Humanities endowment fund at Theatre for a New Audience to support these programs in perpetuity. Leading matching gifts to the NEH grant were provided by Joan and Robert Arnow, Norman and Elaine Brodsky, The Durst Organization, Perry and Marty Granoff, Stephanie and Tim Ingrassia, John J. Kerr & Nora Wren Kerr, Litowitz Foundation, Inc., Robert and Wendy MacDonald, Sandy and Stephen Perlbinder, The Prospect Hill Foundation, Inc., Theodore C. Rogers, and from purchasers in the Theatre’s Seat for Shakespeare Campaign. Theatre for a New Audience’s Humanities, Education, and Outreach programs are supported, in part, by The Elayne P. Bernstein Education Fund. For more information on naming a seat or making a gift to the Education or Humanities endowments, please contact James Lynes, Director of Institutional Advancement, at 212-229-2819 x29, or by email at jlynes@tfana.org. Theatre for a New Audience’s productions and education programs receive support from the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature; and from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.
Additional support for these programs is provided by the generosity of the following Foundations and Corporations through either their general operating support or direct support of the Theatre’s arts in education programs: PRINCIPAL BENEFACTORS
The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Booth Ferris Foundation Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton LLP (pro bono support) The Hearst Foundations National Endowment for the Humanities New York City Department of Cultural Affairs The Polonsky Foundation The SHS Foundation The Winston Foundation LEADING BENEFACTORS
Bloomberg Philanthropies Deloitte LLP The National Endowment for the Arts The Shubert Foundation, Inc. The Starr Foundation The Harold and Mimi Steinberg Charitable Trust The Thompson Family Foundation MAJOR BENEFACTORS
The Sidney E. Frank Foundation Hearst King & Spalding LLP Kramer Levin Naftalis & Frankel LLP Latham & Watkins LLP New York State Council on the Arts The Fan Fox and Leslie R. Samuels Foundation Stavros Niarchos Foundation
SUSTAINING BENEFACTORS
Anonymous (3) The Bay and Paul Foundations The Howard Bayne Fund Consolidated Edison Company of New York, Inc. Debevoise & Plimpton LLP Jean and Louis Dreyfus Foundation, Inc. The Dubose and Dorothy Heyward Memorial Fund The Geen Family Foundation Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP The J.M. Kaplan Fund The Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation Jean and Louis Dreyfus Foundation Loeb & Loeb LLP Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison May and Samuel Rudin Foundation, Inc. / Fiona and Eric Rudin Select Equity Group Sidley Austin LLP Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom LLP The Tow Foundation PRODUCERS CIRCLE— THE ARTISTIC DIRECTOR’S SOCIETY
Anonymous (1) Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld, LLP Axe-Houghton Foundation Hughes, Hubbard & Reed LLP Litowitz Foundation, Inc.
Macy’s Marta Heflin Foundation Mayer, Brown, Rowe & Maw LLP Morgan, Lewis, & Bockius LLP Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe LLP Michael Tuch Foundation, Inc. PRODUCERS CIRCLE—EXECUTIVE
Barbara Bell Cumming Foundation The Bulova Stetson Fund DeWitt Stern Group, Inc. The Joseph & Sally Handleman Foundation Trust A The Irving Harris Foundation Lucille Lortel Foundation The Bulova Stetson Fund PRODUCERS CIRCLE—ASSOCIATE
Actors’ Equity Foundation, Inc. Calamos Wealth Management The Norman D. and Judith H. Cohen Foundation EMM Wealth Management Forest City Ratner Companies The Friars Foundation Kinder Morgan Foundation Lucille Lortel Foundation Laurie M. Tisch Illumination Fund
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