Do you see the video screens onstage as a metaphor for the afterlife, where people can be preserved as images forever, as opposed to the transient nature of performance? No, not consciously but one of the reasons I want to work more in video or film is because I’m getting increasingly frustrated with the fact that the theater work disappears. I want to make something people can pick up ten years from now.
Do you prefer shooting on video as opposed to film? I couldn’t afford film. I made a film back in ’79 but the great thing about video is I can work so much faster and can edit it all by myself. That makes a big difference, being able to edit it.
Yes, I believe a saw a clip of that. Wallace Shawn is in it? Yes. It was a long time ago. It was too theatrical, I think. Also, I was doing it through editors and didn’t have the freedom I have now where I can fool around with it myself and make it into what I want to make it.
Can you tell us about the photographs that line the wall of the stage? They are spirit photographs of mediums at the turn of the century made to convince people that ghosts exist. There were séances calling up ghosts; obviously it was trick photography but it was used to sell the idea that ghosts really exist. I thought it related to this idea of going to these different countries, that we would go to the country of the dead at the same time. And I must admit that my spiritual concerns have to do with various authors who pose the question about whether we are essentially dead to the real life that is going on. Are we living a pretend life of surfaces? Are we the living dead and real life is elsewhere, where we think death resides?
When you’re making these pieces do you feel you have moments where you’re closer to that “real life”? Yes. That’s why I make them. I don’t say I achieve it. I’m fallible and always making mistakes like everybody else, but yes, that’s why I’m making them.
Blindfolds have an important significance in this production, which to me speaks to something about the limits of my agitated day-to-day consciousness. Absolutely. If you blindfold yourself you can’t use your normal eyesight to seize all these illusionary things and you can see deeper. In the darkness you can discover the light, you know.
And there is a lot of light in the show, there are those blinding blasts of light. Oh, I know, I’ve always done that.
But it’s also about 45 minutes into Deep Trance before the house lights go down. Are you growing less willing to grant the audience the comfort that comes from being hidden in the darkness? Yes, yes. I’ve never used the house lights on so much. And I also like that feeling, you know, that in spite of the fact that my plays are maybe hard to get into for people and there’s something very stand-offish about them, I want to combine that with the feeling that you are in the same room as the play and you are co-present. As you are watching it, it is watching you. You’re all together in this room, watching this event that is admittedly not completely easy to fathom, a mysterious event.
At certain moments toward the end, the audience can briefly hear your voice giving instructions to the actors in the film. Yes, I like working the way that I work with video, which is very fast, keeping a lot of mistakes and sometimes keeping that in the film. While I’m directing the film I’m continually telling the actors, like they used to do in silent movies, okay, now you go to the left, now you fall down. So once or twice we let a little of that come through.
Did you leave that in to demystify the process? You know, maybe. I don’t think theoretically when I’m working, I just think intuitively. And it just seemed right in that moment. Because I’m suppressing a lot of it, of course. And occasionally I thought, okay, maybe a little of my voice in the background gives it a little twist and, again, emphasizes this fact that you’re watching something that is being made.
In a program note, you point out that yours is "always a defective operation". Why defective? Well, I think all human operations are defective operations. If you’re trying to do the impossible, which is I think the only interesting thing to do, you stumble. You make allusions to it, you scramble up a few steps, you fall back a little. It is never a completely fulfilled thing; I think that’s true of the greatest art. Believe it or not, Hamlet isn’t perfect. [Laughs.]
There is a message at one point that tells the audience that their face can be projected on the screen for $25. Has anyone taken you up on that? [Laughs.] No.
Is that something you’d consider if the price is right? No, that’s just pulling people’s strings. We’re all vain, we’d all like to be in the movies. Again, I don’t calculate these things. We’re sitting there in rehearsal day after day thinking, “What can we do here?” And I try an awful lot of things I throw out, an awful lot. But sometimes something bizarre comes to me and it just seems right for some reason.
What inspired you to leave the performers lying on the floor at the production’s end, rather than the typical curtain call? In the early days of my theater, when I began, we didn’t take curtain calls because I just didn’t like the audience applauding. I thought it was a way of getting rid of the play so they could have that release and go back into life. And last year there was no curtain call. But this year, I don’t know, it seemed like a good image. I wanted the audience to leave and the idea of the actors lying there sleeping on the stage as the audience left seemed somehow related thematically to what I’m trying to do. And of course I was trying to be a little provocative and think of a way to end the play without taking a curtain call, which for me would be inappropriate for this play. But I didn’t want to do the same as last year.
Are you aware of any specific influences in the cultural landscape that informed Deep Trance? Approximately 8,000. Everything. I mean, I read and see everything and a lot of that filters back into my work, there’s no question about that.
So there’s nothing that really stands out as something that particularly inspired this? No one thing. But I read a lot, especially in philosophy and psychoanalysis and see a lot of art. I’m selecting bits of music from all kinds of sources.
I read that you have plans to abandon the film projection for you next production. Why is that? Well, two reasons. One, I’m really interested to see if I can use this material I’m shooting in different places and just make a film. I have material from Germany that I was working on all summer that is just going to be a film. And I have material from two other countries. There is a play I want to turn into a film and, as I say, I would like to not disappear, I would like to leave something. And also, the aesthetic I am increasingly into I think is more problematic in the theater. You know, I don’t want to have to worry about pleasing people - you know I never have. But I think I feel freer working on a film. I know if it isn’t liked immediately maybe it will be liked in ten years.
But the other reason is that I’ve done three plays with film now. At the beginning I thought maybe it couldn’t be done to my satisfaction. I think with this play [Deep Trance ] I’ve proven to myself that now I know how to do it and I’m doing it. And so why do another? So I’m going back to doing a play with speaking actors next year and I don’t know if will return to doing the combination of theater and film.
If I was taking someone to see this who had never been to see one of your plays, is there anything that should be said to prep them? The only thing I would say is don’t think there are a lot of symbols you’re supposed to figure out. It is supposed to be, believe it or not, an emotional experience. Now, it’s emotional in terms of savoring a moment of being in a place where you’re confronting something that is asking you a question. Here are associations coming up, can you just deal with these associations and not feel frustrated that we’re not giving you any answers? It’s a sensory experience, I think.
What’s the most memorable thing you’ve heard someone say after one of your productions? My third production was way back in 1970, it was an opera called Elephant Steps that we did at Tanglewood. And afterward somebody said to me, “You know, Richard, I loved the show. But even more than the show, I loved watching myself watch the show.” I don’t think anybody’s ever topped that.
In the program note you also write that you have been making theater since you were 9-years-old. What was the nature of that work and how has it changed? Oh, when I was 9 my parents took me to see Gilbert and Sullivan operettas and I went back to grade school and staged them and made the scenery and played the lead and wrote the review in the local Scarsdale newspaper! So I was making theater all through high school and college and then it changed radically. I came under the influence of Jonas Mekas and the whole underground cinema movement when I came to New York in the 1960s. And I started wanting to make a theater that was as personal and as radical as what I saw these young people in New York doing with film.
Photos of Richard Foreman and Fulya Peker by Paula Court.
