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,
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.