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Homebody: John Kazanjian on Ronald Reagan, market forces and the bus

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  • Homebody: John Kazanjian on Ronald Reagan, market forces and the bus

    Homebody: John Kazanjian on Ronald Reagan, market forces and the
    business of art

    New City's stripped down staging of Tony Kushner's intimate one-act
    reminds us of the power - and perils - of theater

    Crosscut.com (Seattle, WA)
    June 04, 2013

    By Jean Tarbox

    A bare red brick wall. A table of colorful hats. Space enough for 15
    audience members to watch a woman reveal her fantasies of escaping to
    Kabul, Afghanistan. Theater does not get more intimate than New City's
    current production of Homebody, Tony Kushner's 1997 play.

    Now in its 31st season, New City Theater brings us another gift. Mary
    Ewald delivers the hour-long monologue, infused with Kushner's
    linguistic acrobatics and wicked humor, proving that the deepest
    essence of the theater is the connection between actor and
    audience. We do not need sets, lights, costumes or even a stage to
    create this connection. We just need a superior text and actor.

    Kushner wrote Homebody in 1999 as a one-act. In early 2001, he
    expanded the deeply thoughtful political text into a three-act play,
    Homebody/Kabul. In a revised 2004 edition of the piece, Kushner gave
    theaters permission to perform Homebody as a separate production.

    New City is an alternative, artist-run theater, which has been
    producing contemporary work in Seattle since 1982 under the continuous
    leadership of artistic director John Kazanjian and performer Mary
    Ewald (who are married to each other). In the tradition of
    experimental directors Peter Brook and Andre Gregory, New City's
    productions have pushed the art form in new directions, broken
    boundaries and challenged the assumptions of the culture in general.
    Funded by federal and private grants in the 1980s and early `90s, New
    City collaborated with such prominent avant-garde playwrights as Maria
    Irene Fornes, Richard Foreman, and Suzan-Lori Parks. Since that time,
    New City has presented scripts by Wallace Shawn, Samuel Beckett, Caryl
    Churchill and others in its SODO Warehouse residency, and Kazanjian's
    living room. New City Ensemble is now settled in a new home, a
    storefront space converted into a theater at the far edge of Capitol
    Hill (18th Avenue and Union).

    I met with John Kazanjian recently to discuss his vision of what
    theater can be, the current state of theater in Seattle and how New
    City Theater has managed to remain afloat.


    Jean Tarbox: What is the mission and value of the arts, the theater
    especially, when it comes to tackling important, relevant and
    uncomfortable issues?

    John Kazanjian: I'll invert that question. For me as an artist, I know
    what I'm doing is totally subjective and that's the way I want it to
    be. The New City Theater is a home for artists who think out loud in
    public through their artistic expression.
    Audience members and artists alike all share a social responsibility
    to decide what each feels the world is about and what each may want to
    say about it. The artists compose, create and give the theater a
    recognizable attitude. The theater's chosen playwrights and plays
    possess a social conscience that supports the writing, but the writing
    never dictates a response from its audience. The alternative theater
    intends rather to investigate a multiplicity of points of view within
    the world, aiming to precipitate reflection and shared discussion.

    JT: Has Seattle's theater scene succeeded, or failed, to address
    relevant and uncomfortable issues?
    It's very difficult to talk about the Seattle theater scene without
    talking about the national cultural landscape. We are now experiencing
    the glacial effects of 30 years of neo-liberal policies of free market
    economics, privatization and decreasing size of the public sector.

    Nearly 45 years ago the American regional theater movement emerged as
    a reaction against the growing commercialization of
    Broadway. Supported by the newly-established National Endowment for
    the Arts (NEA) and innovative funding by the Ford Foundation, theater
    arts were decentralized, with artists making a living in their own
    communities and ticket prices subsidized so that everyone had access
    to the art. This was the situation in Seattle from 1962 through the
    mid-1980s, and theaters of every size and type flourished.

    JT: What changed in the cultural landscape to alter the theater scene
    in Seattle?

    The ability to present different points of view on difficult issues
    diminished once the funding structure for not-for-profit theaters was
    altered. What do the arts do? They open up multiple points of
    view. There was a political strategy that occurred through the `80s to
    shut down controversial voices - whether individual artists or
    alternative theater venues.

    President Reagan proposed eliminating the NEA and the National
    Endowment for the Humanities. The Congress refused. Still, Reagan
    argued that the arts should be in the competitive marketplace like any
    other product, and by 1988 that position slowly gathered energy and
    exploded onto the landscape. The NEA rescinded its =80=9Cspecial
    projects' grants, and politics came into the funding process.

    The size of a theater's operating budget and not the quality of the
    work was the formula that determined how much money a theater
    received. The commercial criterion was a subtle form of entrapment for
    the theater companies because it forced them to make themselves
    bigger. The `business of theater' started upstaging the creative side.

    JT: How did this pressure on not-for-profit theaters to become more
    market-driven affect the type of art they presented?

    It was progressive. The main stage Seattle theater companies invested
    in building larger theaters with multiple stages to attract larger,
    more prosperous audiences. Needless to say, these expansions also
    competed for resources that the small and mid-sized theaters depended
    upon. Those original small and mid-sized theaters presenting different
    points of view have disappeared from our landscape. [Editor's Note:
    Seattle theaters that have closed their doors include Empty Space,
    Group Theater, Pioneer Square Theater and the Alice B. Theater.]

    Rather than being a means for producing art, institutions became ends
    in themselves - the art now serving the institutions rather than the
    other way around. What went away? Support for playwrights, actors,
    directors and designers. Worse, development of new plays and vital
    production of existing plays dwindled.

    If theater is thrown into the commercial marketplace, it is
    disproportionately dependent on ticket sales and people making
    donations. So the theater has to start thinking commercially, and this
    changes the palette of what can be done. It is very difficult for art
    that makes you think to survive. On the contrary, the goal of the
    commercial market place is primarily entertainment - make the audience
    feel good, make them walk out happy. The seasons become conservative,
    audiences homogenous and the production of new work is inadequate to
    sustain a theatrical future.

    JT: What was the specific impact of these changes on the quality of
    theater in Seattle?

    Once the multiplicity of arts organizations disappeared, the
    employment base for artists living and working in Seattle was
    dramatically reduced. Many left the theater altogether. The population
    of working actors in their 50s and 60s is radically diminished. When
    you look at other cultures that have subsidized arts [e.g. Great
    Britain or France], the actors that are working on the stages show the
    full breadth of humanity. So you will see actors in their 60s and 70s
    working next to a teenager of 17, and the power of humanism that is
    present on the stage in the art form is there.
    Regional theater is arrested with a diminished cultural voice because
    of the way the system works. Actors are hired, they rehearse for four
    weeks, are on the stage and then gone arranging for the next job on
    another stage, or in another city.


    The artists on our stages, including my own, are as talented and have
    the same capability of brilliance as artists performing at the Seattle
    Symphony or Pacific Northwest Ballet. Yet, these latter art forms
    provide a more powerful experience than the theater in town. Why?
    Because the quality of the play, its density and its cohesion are not
    as fully realized with the same integrity as what you'll see in the
    Symphony or Ballet. The theater operates with short-term artist
    employment and a standardized, inadequate four- to five-week rehearsal
    period.

    When artists live where they work, they are mentoring, working on new
    material and developing together all the time. Theater artists aren't
    allowed to do that here. So the quality of the theater is lower than
    what our playwrights and our actors can deliver.

    JT: How has New City Theater survived when so many of Seattle's small
    and mid-sized theaters active in the 1980s have disappeared?

    We opted out of the institutional path in the mid-1990s because we
    wanted to maintain an artist-based theater. I saw that with the
    decrease in funding, we could not continue to do the kind of work we
    did because it had a small audience base. We sold the original New
    City building that now houses Hugo House so that we could continue to
    pay artists. We have never embraced subscription, never tried to get
    big. I was always committed to working with an ensemble of the same
    people. That was something I wanted to do from 1982 on, and we've done
    it. Today we operate as the New City Ensemble, with just four of the
    original members: Mary and me, and designers Lindsay Smith and Nina
    Moser.

    JT: Why produce Tony Kushner's `Homebody' now?

    The Homebody is a charming, eccentric woman who makes me laugh,
    self-reflect and have hope. We are still in Afghanistan. Gore Vidal
    once called the U.S.A. the `United States of Amnesia.' I don't want to
    forget our place in Afghanistan's history, nor the plight of the
    Afghan people, or the plight of the soldiers fighting there. And it is
    world class dramatic literature by a living American playwright, who
    blends the personal and the political, the real and the fantastical
    into a rich theatrical tapestry.

    If you go: Homebody plays Friday and Saturday nights, 8 p.m. through
    June 22 at The New City Theater (1404-06 18th Avenue at Union Street,
    Seattle 98112). For info: [email protected] or
    206-271-443. For advance tickets visit
    www.brownpapertickets.com/event/384747, or call 1-800-838-3006.



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