Tracking America
Heather Woodbury in Conversation with Caridad Svich
[Heather Woodbury's epic tales for
the stage take audiences deep into the unexamined crevices of
American life. In her solo-show "performance novel" What
Ever: An American Odyssey, Woodbury charts the stories of
more than a dozen characters that make up a cross-country, cross-generational
tapestry of outsider U.S. history. A raver from Oregon, a boho
octogenarian artist, and a street-wise, crack-addicted prostitute
are chief figures in What Ever's saga of displaced utopian
dreams. In her most recent multi-actor piece, Tale
of 2 Cities: An American Joyride on Multiple Tracks, fifty
years of Los Angeles and New York history collide in a live "mix"
spun by a young DJ. Spanning the years 1931-2001, the piece centers
on the razing of a Latino barrio to build Dodger Stadium and an
attack on an elderly Brooklyn woman at the Ebbets Field Housing
projects. The text samples news stories from the past and present,
creates an imagined audio grid of Los Angeles and New York, and
mixes these with extended narratives of the extraordinary ordinary
people who live in these cities. What distinguishes Woodbury's
work as a writer-performer is her ability to capture a wide variety
of linguistic idioms. High and low, uptown and downtown, country
and city sounds all mix effortlessly in her texts. Poised between
fiction and drama, her work refuses to enforce strict generic
boundaries on the linguistic and imagistic streams of thought
that enter consciousness. Elaborately woven and unruly, her plays
are documents of forgetting -- of neglected and disposable pockets
of a country tossed out onto the junkheap of history -- that are
recorded by Woodbury's exacting and compassionate sensibility.
I first met Woodbury in Atlanta, Georgia in 2005 where we were
both contributors to Dad's Garage Theater's Live and Uncensored
8 ½ X 11 Festival. Since then we have kept up with each other
as we have traveled disparate but simpatico artistic routes. This
interview was conducted via e-mail from September 2006 to January
2007 as Woodbury was writing, staging and performing Tale
of 2 Cities in Los Angeles at UCLA's Live Series and in New
York City at PS 122, where she is currently in an artistic residency.
]
Caridad Svich: Realism
is often a narrowly defined genre, especially in the American
theater. We are obsessed with realism and its supposed by-product
and chief value: authenticity. In the process, we often forget
that it is all, after all, artifice. How do you approach the realistic
conundrum?
Heather Woodbury: I like
to tell students, and other captives to my windy pronouncements,
that it's called realism and there's a reason for that. Naturalism
is just another form of artifice, as is everything that happens
on stage. There was this article that Margo Jefferson wrote some
years back about how artifice is what distinguishes theater, or
actually, what makes it necessary and unique. In film the artifice
is much more total and enveloping and therefore less underlined.
Theater, from the outset, is totally false. There's a bunch of
people in front of you in the same room pretending to be elsewhere.
So, it's truth, or authenticity, as you call it, that we're looking
for by practicing these antics on a stage, which sometimes mimic
believable behavior and sometimes not. When the whole project
is overtaken by the pretense of being "real," then, in effect
ALL you're doing is being artificial; you're hung up on a staging
gimmick, essentially, and missing the boat on revealing anything
new or moving or funny about being human.
Artifice needs to be boldly acknowledged.
As a solo performer I had a scene in my play What Ever
where the crack whore Bushie is beaten to death by yuppies near
the Hudson River. Now, how does a person act out beating themselves
to death? It's absurd. It's the height of it, the yuppies screech
off in their car, and our bloody anti-heroine crawls to a cement
overhang, watches the sunrise and dies. So, during this sequence,
I had a big bottle of ketchup which I'd squirt all over myself
after the yuppie characters "exited." What I found was that the
audience would laugh and then be more horrified. By making them
laugh, and using the fake ketchup blood, I was breaking through
the "reality" of my story enactment, acknowledging that I was
one person pretending. This dissipated the suspension of disbelief
and made us all in one reality, a collectively imagined one, in
which we knew that Bushie wasn't "real" but at the same time,
we knew she existed and was beaten and kicked and bloody and dying
as the sun rose over the Hudson. So it made it less realistic
and more true. Somehow or another.
CS: A false dichotomy
is often imposed on new theater writing: if you are to write a
serious, political play and talk about the world, then it must
be, well, SERIOUS and not engage simultaneously in the magical,
outrageous, or frivolous aspects of culture. I'm amazed by how
embedded this kind of thinking still is.
HW: Yes, and yet I've
often thought that if one were to airlift, say, one thousand clowns
into a war zone, hostilities would cease, through puzzlement alone.
Art is on a different wave-length, a different vibration. It is
social and political BECAUSE of that, not in spite of it. I really
get tired of this demand from the arts funding establishment (which
is probably a passing along of a demand made on them by their
benefactors) for art to be "more" than art. For it to be social
work. You know, outline precisely how you are going to educate
and facilitate under-served communities. I believe wholeheartedly
in connecting people, especially marginalized people, but I dislike
when art loses quality in the name of inclusion. A work of theater
can celebrate a community without didactically speaking for it.
Let people speak for themselves. A lot of socially earnest theater
is neither fish nor fowl. It's this muddy mash of intentions,
where real people's experiences get grafted onto some Greek myth
or another. I say, let the playwright be inspired by the social
foment, by working with people on their own individual expression
but let the playwright -- or director, actor, whatever -- be a
complete individual too.
This de-glamorization is very old school
communist, the "don't wear lipstick at the rally or you're not
a real radical" syndrome. Ironically, these faintly Soviet or
cultural-revolution-style theories, of art having to empirically
and materially -- rather than transcendentally and spiritually--
serve the masses, are filtered down to the institutional theater
world through funders who are generally corporate. I'm always
amused how this outdated communist idea that imagination must
be sacrificed to the "team" or collective is alive and well and
flourishing in global corporatism. Okay, I went off on a tangent
here. The point I'm trying to get at is that corporate funders
want non-profit theater to prove how they are serving the under-served,
addressing social ills, but it's superficial and a kind of bromide
at best because they strait-jacket vision and imagination. Non-profit
theaters have so many commercial pressures AND pressures to demonstrate
this "feel-good multi-cultural all one big diverse family" social
good that they don't often enough produce work that is alive (and
I'm not saying it isn't good, but) that is alive enough to be
transcendent, to galvanize people. Sometimes art seems more possible
in the commercial world, where there's only the ideology of the
sale to contend with, not that plus lip-service to, without the
true support for, socially conscious ideals.
CS: What's doubly unfortunate
is that in all of this social realism has been branded with the
stamp of dullness and earnestness. But if you look at the roots
of dramatic realism, at Ibsen's plays, for instance… it's hardly
so.
HW: I think this may have
to do with class. Ibsen wrote candidly about the bourgeoisie.
People are afraid to deal with class and ethnic particularities
in American theater. So, you get a lot of stuff about upper middle
class people that is quite accurate and well done, but doesn't
really SEE any other classes out there, that just assumes that
their middle class existence is the human condition, and then
you also get works rather overly respectful of the oppressed classes,
which is de-humanizing. So, yes, it does get dull and limited
and you can see why people might run screaming from it.
CS: Aren't we writers
responsible, though, for seeking out and crafting new languages
(emotional, pictorial, linguistic) for our stages that reflect
the world?
HW: This is the question,
really, if theater -- maybe live performance of ANY kind -- is
to continue to offer something which can't be gotten elsewhere.
Theater is the original interactive site, virtual reality, conjuring
place. It, etymologically, is a "place" for looking at something.
So, it is an atmosphere. It surrounds us in the texture of our
contemporary reality. An example I use in music is that folk music,
almost universally, incorporates nature sounds: flutes imitate
birds; drums: water and thunder -- these aural signs composed
the contemporary life texture of tribal and peasant people of
the past. Now industrial rock music is the sound of the age of
industry -- of the machine, of thrashing, grinding, screeching,
pounding. So, those are scavenged from contemporary reality and
put on a stage. It seems to me, in theater, we need to scavenge,
quite assiduously from our contemporary worlds, if we want to
remain pertinent. In this age of technology, of mind-boggling
deterioration of nature and of post-modern advertising, what are
the languages? I think, wow, so much content comes to mind: everything
from billboards, to words on discarded candy wrappers, television,
especially the sort of interstitial bits in television, what happens
between the big splashy numbers. I find infomercials endlessly
revealing and hilarious and who knows, maybe the natural world
is returning to consciousness again? What do polar bears sound
and look like as they drown? What did Hurricane Katrina look and
sound and feel like?
As
for form, well, I gave my last piece, Tale of 2 Cities,
the structure of a DJ mix, in an effort to reflect the kind of
form I think people are receiving and synthesizing their world
in. The DJ samples fragments from all over, and keeps a beat under
it and repeating melodies that tie it all together. The DJ makes
the fragmented and isolated world whole, or at least something
you can dance to. I tried to do that with dramatic and literary
tropes as my samples: lyric laments, old newspaper articles, lonely
e-mails, interrogations, etc. We have to look at the forms we
actually communicate in and respond to. Little portable screens,
little bitty phones, blogs, group e-mails, video games. There
already seems this urge on the part of video game aficionados,
an incipient movement, to make the games real. To play them out
in the world of the flesh. This sounds on the face of it kind
of creepy and sinister but it could have some brilliant theatrical
results. I do think there's a basic human need to see stuff acted
out, live and in the flesh. Arte con carne, as it were.
theater artists need to have fun with that, go find the new audience.
CS: What critics have
started calling "post-dramatic theater" has managed
to make an art of the current flesh, reflective of the fragmented,
disjointed lives we lead and the connective strands that join
us together. Why do you think the post-dramatic form hasn't found
its way as prominently into the U.S. theater vernacular as it
has in Europe?
HW: Money. There's a huge
amount of support here in the USA for dramatic storytelling. Movies,
TV and all that trickles down to theater, especially as so many
plays and playwrights are auditioning to be in TV or movies anyway.
And it is done brilliantly. America is at the top of this art
form of witty, wry, engrossing, socially engaged yarns. Theater
is often a sort of subsidiary art form, a lesser form that fertilizes
the apex of the form which is TV and movies. In Europe. there's
enormous support for theater to keep evolving. So, it has. And
there's a much richer history of theater as a total, elaborately
sensual art form. But in America's defense, we like drama. We're
a dramatic nation. We're self-dramatizing. We like big, noble
ideas and that's a good thing in some ways, though it can be dangerous
and phony, but there's something very hopeful and romantic about
it, earthy even, that I like.
I feel that I humbly follow in the footsteps
of American writers and gatherers such as John Dos Passos, Steinbeck,
Zora Neale Hurston, Imogen Cunningham, all of whom, with their
disparate and glorious talents, had in common that they were acute
believers in the cumulative eloquence of individuals' life experience.
There's a deep extravagance in taking the time to collect and
cull these voices, whether fictional or documentary, and there
is perhaps something almost taboo or faux-pas, anyway, about taking
that time to sift through and listen. Although my work is entertaining
and dramatic, often even whimsical and melodramatic, there's also
a weird anti-dramatic quality to it. The joy of just hanging out
in the little ebbs and flows of incidental people and their conversations.
There's a luxury in spending a stretch of time with characters.
Instead of insulated television time why not communal time in
a theater? It relates to what Jane Jacobs defined as what makes
city neighborhoods unique: they're about unplanned human interaction,
the alchemy of accidental connection with strangers, and to get
that sort of deeply human, off-the-cuff kind of experience, you
have to be willing to hang out for awhile, to let the unexpected
unfold.
CS: Your work reaches
for multiple perspectives and revels in contradiction. I have
the feeling that this multiple perspective actually helps you
acquire and mold your stories. Is that true?
HW: I do think the performing
aspect helps me listen and transcribe, because it's oral literature.
If you like. I read a fascinating article in The New Yorker
once about these ancient bards in India who still recite these
epic memorized poems or sagas in verse. These are a thousand years
old at least. Tales passed from one illiterate peasant bard to
the next. Now there are none left who know the complete story
but between them the story is still told. People gather for a
festival and hear one particular saga. It takes 30 days, twelve
hours a day, to tell. Apparently someone once taught one such
bard how to read and write, to facilitate writing these stories
down. He immediately began to lose his memory for them and became
dependent on the written word. I LOVED this fact. There's something
passed from ear and eye to tongue to body that is immediate and
wholistic and which the pen, the technology of writing, can interrupt,
much as the technology of the camera disrupts the transmission
of what happens in live performance. So, I do think I listen a
bit subconsciously as well as deliberately and this can be the
glue that makes my observations and imaginings more complete when
they come out for the first time, either on page or stage. What
I'm trying to describe is an almost instinctive, reflexive ability
which I think EVERYONE has, to sort of instantly record and store
other people's perspectives, but it's something that's gotten
fuzzy and half-forgotten, this channeling, this intuiting. It's
no longer practiced. I guess I'm trying to invent some new contemporary
version of a ritual that would help us synthesize, and conjure
up, who we are and what we want, truly want.
CS: Cultural tourism creeps
into a great deal of new writing for performance, often disguised
as travel. Storytellers and dramatists drop into a culture or
several cultures, use what strikes them, and then move on and
present the work under a veil of ethnographic, empathetic reading,
but the voices and figures used still do not have their say or
presence on stage. I am fascinated and troubled by the proliferation
of cultural tourism (sometimes presented through the lens of commentary
on globalization) that goes un-checked on our stages and performance
spaces, especially with work that takes from the other Americas
and Africa. I wonder how you position yourself in relationship
to travel and being in effect a migrant artist who is also an
L.A.-based artist .
HW: A friend of mine brought
an Armenian woman to see my play Tale of 2 Cities and
there's a one-minute scene where two customers are in a famous
Armenian chicken place in Los Angeles and the man is trying to
impress the woman and talking about a massacre -- a gun attack
-- which occurred in another Armenian chicken place several months
ago. He's just telling her this story to have something shocking
to relish and chat about in line. Then they get their chicken
and the conversation abruptly ends. All of this I overheard verbatim
and it had a resonance for me about how horrific losses become
just lurid, entertaining small talk, how everything can be consumed.
Now the scene is quite funny and one thing that makes it funny
is the spot-on imitation of the sort of no-nonsense, deadpan Armenian
women who work the counter in this particular famous chicken take-out
place. Apparently my friend's Armenian friend was dismayed by
the scene and felt that Armenians only got represented as these
chicken ladies with funny accents.
Now, I would argue that the scene kind
of referenced that there was more to Armenian experience than
this, the echoes of another, discarded story of massacre within
the lurid report of the urban L.A. gunman massacre. I would argue
that the whole play is about the specifics of class and race and
cultures and how as individuals we are both absolute products
of those particularities and also absolutely transcend them, how
these horrific losses and mindless consumings connect and bind,
separate and implode us. But I could completely understand how
that scene might have been, from her perspective, the most cursory
and paltry representation of her culture. I don't know quite how
to position myself other than as a human being with a specific
class and race and cultural heritage and, yes, privilege and then
take it from there by acknowledging those specifics and transcending
them through empathy and imagination. It's like traveling. You
can stay at the stupid resort and go on the guided tours, or you
can meet local people, hang out with them, stay somewhere modest,
try to contribute somehow to the place you're visiting. You're
still an outsider though. Hopefully you find commonality as well
as the delicious exotic. Hopefully you even see something about
their culture they are too close to see and in turn they tell
you something about yours.
CS: There is a spiritual
element in your work -- a strong spiritual communion, sometimes
trance-like -- that is suffused with concrete humor and detail.
How do you seek communion and understanding with an audience?
And have you ever engaged with audiences who have not been in
communion, and how have you bridged the divide?
HW: I pray every day.
I'm serious. I think we have to take faith back from the kooks,
globally. To me, the stage is an altar and all art works are a
form of elaborate prayer, an offering to the awesome, to that-which-is-beyond-articulation,
the unnameable. Art is the repeated attempt and failure to name
God. And that failure is something in itself and an offering to
the ineffable.
In many venues, but especially in Austin,
Texas, I had the pleasure of performing for audiences that were
hugely diverse -- blue-haired Republicans from Abilene, Texas,
together with nose-ringed squatter girls and everything in between
-- and it was my greatest pleasure that the piece, my play What
Ever, had characters with whom there was immediate identification
and recognition and others who repelled and grated so that eventually
the story wove not only the characters together but the audiences.
To create this feeling of community with audiences was the deepest
satisfaction I've ever had as an artist. As for the not-in-communion,
in Galway, Ireland, where I performed for the most blessed, avid
audience imaginable, I came to a climactic scene where my octogenarian
heroine Violet has had her poodle gunned down by an anti-abortion
protestor while she was escorting a girl to get an abortion, and
she tells the comatose poodle about a frightening and life-threatening
back-alley abortion she had as a young woman. Now, suddenly I
realized I was performing the scene for an audience 100% with
me but perhaps fifty percent divided on this moral, religiously
freighted question. I was in a nation where abortion was still
illegal. It was very emotional. Some older people left the house
during the story; one, apparently, even got sick. But they returned
and finished out the piece. I don't know what other art form can
directly address something terribly divisive like that to those
who passionately, sometimes violently disagree, and yet, keep
everyone together in it, listening. Okay, perhaps music, but we
all know music wins hands down as the great bringer-togetherer.
Let's give theater this one.
CS: Are there artists
whose methodologies or way of being in the world you are trying
to pass down? And how?
HW: What I love about
both Hurston and Mark Twain is that they were performers too.
Zora, who was the first anthropologist to collect black American
speech and folk tales, could reportedly hold a party spellbound
for hours as she riffed in her "subect's" voices, embroidering
on the overheard conversations she'd collected. Even those who
despised Zora -- as many of her Marxist peers did -- admitted
that she was endlessly entertaining and riveting, channeling these
voices at parties. And Mark Twain, of course, was some form of
proto-performance artist with his hilarious, prankish and brilliant
extemporaneous lectures, which he performed to sold-out halls
across the USA and in Europe and beyond. I love their celebration
of the American idiom, and their rampant employment of that idiom
for the exercise of their own imagination and erudition. So, there's
that and also, not one particular person, but I think a movement,
a cultural moment I grew up with, then came of age in -- the late
sixties, the seventies, the early 80s -- everyone from Richard
Pryor, whom I was lucky as hell to see at Radio City Music Hall
when I was eighteen, to Ethyl Eichelberger, whom I saw doing her
drag King Leer in a basement place called Eight BC in NYC, back
when East 8th Street between Avenue B and C was about as bombed-out-looking
as Dresden after WWII. There was a whole air of experiment, of
freedom to riff, of riding off a whole MOVEMENT of people, a whole
culture of irreverence and impatience and a belief in the magic
of chance, of exploring the random, and that's quite gone, but
I try to keep it as a beacon, that pure ecstatic avidity. I try
to encourage youngsters to recognize it in themselves and let
it burn, baby, burn.
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