The descriptive adjectives ”avant-garde,” ”postmodern” and, above all, ”controversial” have trailed JoAnne Akalaitis ever since she began her career as a director in 1975. A woman of strong opinions and a director of strong stage images, she does not like being pigeonholed this way.
”I wouldn`t know a postmodern thought if I had one,” she protests, and, she adds, ”The work I do is very classic, old-fashioned theater. I`ve been around so long. I`m not avant-garde at all. On the other hand, a friend of mine told me about a performance in New York which consisted of an overweight woman taking off her clothes and describing her sexual practices, which was followed by a short film showing the slaughter of fur-bearing animals. Now, that`s avant-garde.”
Still, the pesky adjectives persist-through a production of Samuel Beckett`s ”Endgame,” set in a deserted subway, that aroused the playwright`s wrath in advance of its 1984 opening at the American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge, Mass.; through a brilliant, lavish staging of Jean Genet`s six-hour ”The Screens” last fall at the Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis, and through a critically bashed 1989 production of Shakespeare`s ”Cymbeline” at the New York Shakespeare Festival that provoked a major ”case study”
reappraisal in American Theatre magazine.
On Monday night, Chicago audiences will have a chance to judge Akalaitis` work first hand, when her staging of John Ford`s violent drama of incestuous love, ”`Tis Pity She`s a Whore,” opens at Goodman Theatre. The fact that this production of the 1633 drama marks her Chicago debut is somewhat ironic, since Akalaitis, now an internationally recognized artist, is a native of the Chicago area.
Born in Cicero, where her father worked for 40 years in the old Hawthorne Works of Western Electric, Akalaitis was, from her earliest days of acting
”in every school pageant that came along,” interested in art and the theater. Her two most formative artistic experiences occurred, she says,
”First, when my parents took me to see `South Pacific` at the Shubert Theatre, and I saw a woman wash her hair on stage. And second, when I saw Jean Cocteau`s `The Blood of a Poet` at a Doc Films program at the University of Chicago. I wasn`t exactly sure what it was, but I knew it was art. A few years later, I saw `Citizen Kane` at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and I knew that was art, too.”
The first member of her Lithuanian-American family to go to college, Akalaitis was a premed student at the U. of C., but switched to philosophy and received a graduate fellowship to Stanford University in California.
Leaving school and moving to San Francisco, she worked briefly there at the Actors Workshop, where, she recalls, ”Mostly, I sold orange juice.”
However, while in San Francisco, she met Ruth Maleczech and Lee Breuer, fellow theater artists who, along with David Warrilow, Akalaitis and her then-husband, the composer Philip Glass, formed the Mabou Mines theater
collective in New York in 1969.
Mabou Mines, which gained its title from a Nova Scotia town they had visited, quickly became an innovative, important part of the New York theater scene; and Akalaitis` direction of such pieces as Beckett`s ”Cascando,”
Franz Xaver Kroetz`s ”Request Concert” and the antinuclear ”Dead End Kids” won her five Obie (Off Broadway) Awards.
The Mabou Mines pieces were artistically and technically sophisticated works that combined music, speech, movement and stage design in new and provocative ways, but they were done on a relatively small scale, in part to fit the troupe`s touring needs. With works like the mixed-media ”The Photographer,” however, a production that Akalaitis says ”weighed like a millstone on my chest every day of rehearsal” before its American premiere in 1983 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, she moved into a large-scale piece created for a big stage. Since then, she has frequently worked at resident theaters throughout the United States, the Goodman being the latest to invite her.
Akalaitis had been wanting to do ”`Tis Pity” for some years. She originally intended to stage it for American Repertory Theatre, but the project was dropped in a dispute with the theater management. Robert Falls, Goodman`s artistic director and an admirer of Akalaitis` work who had long wanted to bring her to Chicago, invited her to stage the play here, and Akalaitis, after some thought, agreed.
(The play has been staged at Goodman once before, in 1975, when it caused a small sensation for its introduction of full frontal male and female nudity in a production directed by Michael Kahn that featured Franklin Seales and Christine Baranski as the doomed lovers.)
According to Akalaitis, ”I reread all the Jacobean plays a few years ago and found that this one was very modern-terse, direct, expressive, dealing with issues of domestic violence that are quite contemporary. There`s a very intense scene of hideous wife beating, for example, that could have happened behind closed doors in the suburbs today.”
Akalaitis has set the play in Mussolini`s Italy, a time when, she believes, futurism in art and fascism in government were creating a combustible mix of sex and politics. In collaboration with designer John Conklin, she has created a ghostly, surrealistic setting for ”a town without pity” in which the play`s violent deeds are committed-”a place that exalts and terrifies at the same time,” according to Akalaitis.
”The idea of doing the play in its period never had the slightest interest for me,” Akalaitis admits, but it wasn`t until she came across a book of surrealist art in the New York University library that she found the key to her concept. The picture that captured her attention was by the French- American artist Yves Tanguy of ”a strange landscape and hostile environment” that she immediately connected with the play.
As she dug deeper into surrealist art, she also explored the architecture of Antonio Gaudi, the paintings of Giorgio de Chirico and the photographs of Man Ray, because of the way, Akalaitis explains, ”he treated women`s bodies.”
Several of the actors in ”`Tis Pity” have worked frequently with Akalaitis. These include Jesse Borrego and Lauren Tom, who portray the lovers Giovanni and Annabella, as well as Joan Cusack (see Gene Siskel`s interview with her on page 12), Erick Avari and Don Cheadle. Along with these are such Chicago actors as Larry Brandenburg, Ross Lehman, Barbara Robertson and Steve Pickering, all of whom Akalaitis describes as ”very hot, responsive to new things.”
Akalaitis` early rehearsals generally begin with vocal and physical warm- ups, so that the actors can ”electrify their bodies and see themselves in space,” a state she considers very important in acting. ”I don`t sit around a table much,” she says. ”I`m too impatient for that. I want to get the play up on its feet as soon as possible, and I want the actors to start working deep inside their bodies. A lot of people don`t know how to do that, but it`s very important in establishing working relationships and in forming a group of people into a company.”
This process is influenced in part by a brief, but important period of training that Akalaitis had with the Polish director Jerzy Grotowski, who sees actors as ”physicalized beings.” Partly it comes from a bit of acting advice given by Genet, whom she considers ”the great dramatic writer of the 20th Century,” that each section of a scene should be played as if it were a play in itself. In this way, acting, Akalaitis believes, becomes ”a constant series of openings and closings. It`s dangerous, but when actors do it, it`s thrilling.”
She also believes that ”theater is found in life and yet it`s different than life. I`m not interested in Woody Allen realism.”
From her Mabou Mines beginnings, Akalaitis has paid careful attention to the design of her productions, working months in advance to create the right look, light and sound for her vision of the play.
She knew that she wanted ”someplace American” for her production of
”Endgame,” for example. When, almost literally, she stumbled on it through a glimpse of a man walking through a deserted railroad tunnel, she says, ”It was the most amazing experience of my life.” The fact that Beckett later took her to task for changing the locale of his play came as a great sorrow to her, because she considers it ”the most perfect modern play.”
Similarly, when most of the New York critics described her ”Cymbeline”
in such terms as ”a travesty,” ”a horrible mess,” and ”staggeringly, unremittingly, unconscionably absurd,” she was amazed at the ferocity of the attack on ”a piece of which I`m very proud. We went through months of work to get it right. We were serious people doing serious work. I didn`t call up George (Tsypin, the set designer) one morning and say, `Hey, George, let`s do this zany spoof of Shakespeare.”`
In part because of this critical firestorm, Akalaitis is reluctant to talk about herself in the presence of a newspaper person. She will not discuss her age (about 50), her former marriage to Glass or her personal life, and she does not like to be photographed. ”You see,” she explains, ”they have this custom in New York of interviewing you before a play opens and then using it against you in their reviews.”
She is, however, a charming and bright conversationalist, and, when she speaks of the dozens of letters the Guthrie Theatre received from teenagers who had seen and were moved by ”The Screens,” she says, softly, ”That makes me happy to be in the theater.”
After ”`Tis Pity,” which will run through April 7, Akalaitis will be working on several pieces: a collaboration with playwright Eric Overmyer that they call ”The Mormon Project,” a possible remounting of ”The Screens” at another large resident theater and a revival of ”Cascando” at the Public Theatre in New York. She has no desire to have her own theater, since, she says, ”I sort of like the idea of being an outsider, though I do think it`s important for women to be on that power level.”
Some day, given her interest in music and design in her productions, she would ”love” to do opera and a musical, preferably her favorite of all time, ”Guys and Dolls.”
”I don`t know,” she says. ”I never know where things come from. I just like the fact that you can put a lot of stuff on the stage. The other day, as we were going through another day of back-breaking work, I said, `I may be turning into a very good producer of grammar school pageants.` So I`m not much of a theorist. But I do tend to direct things I don`t understand so well.”
