By Lisa S. Brenner, Moisés Kaufman, and Barbara Pitts
Tectonic Theater Project teaches a devising method its calls “Moment Work.” Theatre Topics coeditor Lisa S. Brenner sat down with artistic director Moisés Kaufman and company member Barbara Pitts to discuss the Moment Work process and their upcoming book to be published by Random House.
Lisa S. Brenner:
In a special issue on Devised Theatre in The Dramatists in 2015, you said the term devised is not yet fully defined, or at least not in a way that precisely describes what it is; rather, it’s most often defined in opposition to more traditional ways of making plays. Do you still feel that way? Do you think devising is a useful term for this kind of work?
Moisés Kaufman:
I do. I think that what is required is a more rigorous definition. I’m really excited because devised performance is happening all over the country. Every major university and many high schools are beginning to do devised work. But in my mind, we need clearer definitions. When we teach Moment Work, we strive to have very clear definitions—devising profits from being clearly defined.
To me, devising is about creating theatrical narratives, starting from the elements of the stage. When I speak of Moment Work, I often say that it’s “writing performance as opposed to writing text.” And that’s a very helpful definition for us. So how can we define devising?
Currently, the most widely used model in the creation of new plays is the idea that a playwright goes into a room, writes a play, comes out, and gives it to a director; the director then goes into another room and stages the play. I don’t think that anyone is saying that that is a bad model—it’s obviously produced some very fine work. But it’s bad when that’s the only model in existence. There will always be playwrights who want to go into a room and create a play and come out and give it to a director. And I have directed many of those plays. And there’s great beauty that has been made that way.
But I think that the reason why we’re in such a thrilling moment in American theatrical history is because we’re pushing the boundaries of how the work is made. And devised theatre really addresses that idea that there are many ways of creating plays. And also the question of how we allow all the people who are collaborating in the creation of the work to participate in the creation of the narrative of the work.
So for Tectonic Theater Project, we have spent the last twenty-five years asking that question: What is theatrical? How do we create theatrical narratives, stories for the stage, and how do we tell stories onstage?
Barbara Pitts:
I’m working with Eastern Connecticut State to devise a play that’s not going have text. It’s a dance theatre piece based on interviews with people in the community. It’s called Thread, and it’s about their community’s industry of making fabric. So, partly they want it to be a movement piece because they want to engage their Hispanic community, and they wanted a form in which everyone could fully participate in the project [beyond language]. It’s going to be images, objects, movement, lighting, and figuring out how to tell the story of this community without ever moving to text. And Moment Work can do that.
LSB:
So does devising in general, Moment Work specifically—is it usually connected to some kind of a source material?
MK:
No, I think that you can begin to create a piece based entirely on a fictional idea. One of the things that most devised work has in common is a real desire to find innovative ways of having text in the performance, and finding innovative ways in which that text is either created or come upon. So I think that, in trying to define what is devising and how does one devise, we can begin to make some very clear definitions. For us, Moment Work is a way to keep finding ways in which the text carries part of the narrative, and the elements of the stage participate in constructing that narrative.
That leads to a question about the role of the playwright in devised work. There are infinite ways to devise work. And that means that there are infinite ways in which a playwright can participate in the process. For example, when we created I Am My Own Wife, we started by using Moment Work, but then Doug Wright took the ideas we’d created and wrote his play. So does that make I Am My Own Wife a devised piece? Another example: Elevator Repair Service did this beautiful piece in collaboration with a playwright [Fondly, Collette Richland]. Every word that was spoken on that stage was written by the playwright [Sibyl Kempson]. Sometimes you have a play like The Laramie Project in which we all went to Laramie and collaborated on the creation of that piece together.
What’s interesting is that devised work has the potential to engage playwrights in a multitude of ways. Because in devised work we can bring a playwright into the rehearsal room and encourage her to explore other ways of creating narratives using the vocabulary of that which is theatrical.
BP:
And what we’re hoping is that the more we teach Moment Work, the more those components of theatre go back to retaining their power and their equal footing. I think because our Western minds are so psychologically based, we often think of what we’re seeing onstage as only the words and the story that’s being delivered to us. And we’ve sort of stopped really having more of that visceral, whole sensory experience of what theatre is.
LSB:
It’s also sort of an American notion of the individual genius as opposed to the collaboration and the collective. And it is interesting because I work as a dramaturg, and studying with Tectonic completely changed my approach to dramaturgy. Soon after doing Tectonic’s intensive workshop, I was working with a playwright on a play about Thomas Edison. And the first draft was all based on telling the story through text.
And here’s Edison: he basically invented film, and he invented the phonograph. So you have film and image and sound. And these were not even players in his script and in his process. And so because of Tectonic, I suggested bringing those elements into the play. I said: “These things also carry narrative, and maybe some of this story could be told through other means besides the text.” And the playwright liked that idea and changed the play.
BP:
What’s cool is you only had to take a seven-day workshop with Tectonic to completely shift how you were thinking about it. So that’s why we’re on this crusade.
LSB:
So let’s talk a little bit about that method. How did you come about the method of Moment Work? And then how do you go about codifying this method?
MK:
Tectonic Theater Project was born out of a great sense of unhappiness with a lot of the work that I was seeing because so much of it was realism, naturalism (which are nineteenth-century forms) and so much of it lacked theatricality. And I kept thinking: “We have had experimenters in American theater. Eugene O’Neill was an experimenter. Sophie Treadwell was an experimenter. Even Tennessee Williams, creating a memory play, was an experimenter. Arthur Miller, when he has the ghost in Death of a Salesman, he’s experimenting.”
So we come from a long tradition of experimenters. And yet the default is always kitchen-sink realism, which, at its moment, was a great avant-garde form, right when it was first invented, because we came away from declaiming onstage to a much more realistic, naturalistic version of things. So naturalism was revolutionary to use the theatrical space.
The big question for Tectonic was creating a theatre where we could explore theatrical languages and theatrical forms. How do we come up with new ways of having a conversation with an audience? How do we come up with ways of using everything that is theatrical in service to a narrative?
BP:
Tectonic being the art and science of structure, of form—tectonic, as in architectonic.
MK:
So when you ask how Moment Work was born, it’s that. The first four years of the company, we were only doing works by other playwrights, who were themselves exploring form. So we would do Beckett, Sophie Treadwell, and new American playwrights who were dealing with formal issues, like Naomi Iizuka. And after a while it became clear that if we were being really rigorous about this investigation of theatrical languages and theatrical vocabularies, we had to deal with the issue of text. It wasn’t enough to use other people’s writings who were exploring theatrical language and theatrical form.
What had happened was that, in the four years that we were doing preexisting text, we developed a technique with which to explore it, and that was Moment Work.
LSB:
You used the word rigorous a moment ago. So I think there is this fear that this technique can become frozen, but at the same time your approach is rigorous. And that’s important to this work.
MK:
Yes, very much.
LSB:
So there needs to be something that can be passed on, a shared vocabulary that the company has that can be brought into other institutions, universities, et cetera.
MK:
Yes. Moment Work is a technique to create and analyze theatre from a structuralist perspective—or a method to write performance as opposed to writing text, or a way of writing dramatic texts using all the elements of the stage.
That’s our current definition. And we’re consistently not only using the technique, but expanding how we use it. And we started by making theatrical words, which are “Moments.” And then we started putting moments together, which is level two of our training, which is how you make sentences or paragraphs. And then level three is: How do you make short stories? And how do you create longer narrative?
BP:
So just to back up for the reader, making a Moment is framed by “I begin,” and something happens, “I end.” So we make these little containers and then they become building blocks you can move around to make your play. Often our rehearsals will start with “Who has moments?” So you’re encouraged, as the actor, designer, whoever you might come into the room identifying as, to think: “Okay, what do I think in the material we’re exploring is so compelling I have to make moments about it?” And you don’t have to know where they’re going to fit, if they’re going to fit. And then what we love is what we continue to drill down into.
So this was a process that I came into as an actor for The Laramie Project. And I just responded to it because, as a Virgo, as a very “what’s the point?” kind of person it really freed me up to create things that may never be seen again. And that was not something I ever really gave myself permission to do before.
And so there came a point where people started asking Moisés to come and lecture and to lead workshops. And then in 2004 Moisés tasked me with trying to create a manual, an internal manual that we could then begin to teach from.
MK:
The demand for Moment Work grew so much that we started having other people doing it. And I said, “It’s important to codify it so that we’re all doing the same thing.” And so that’s when Barb came and we started writing things down. And then I would teach a workshop, and the other teachers would be in the room learning and making sure that they were doing the same thing that I was doing. And then, obviously, once you have a group of people who have been working together for so long and they begin to teach, you begin to learn from each other. So I learned from them, they learned from me, and we began to develop our way of working.
BP:
The manual reads like a script. So we know, as teachers, what things need to be said. And then there are little alerts, things to look out for that often happen while you’re teaching. The challenge with the book that we’re writing now is that it’s not that document; it’s a history of the company, and it’s giving you a taste and a flavor for how the work gets made. So it’s not just translating the manual; there are challenges to putting any method on paper and then hoping that the reader can glean from what you’re saying what the experience would be like to be in the room. But of course nothing replaces being in the room, in three dimensions, making the work with each other.
LSB:
So, how else is the book different than the manual? And what’s the impetus for the book? What do you hope to do?
MK:
The book is part manual, part biography of the company, part rant—so you get some of the technique, but you also see how the technique was used in some of our work so that the people using it or reading it understand not only the technique, but how the technique was used in creating a body of work. And because hopefully a person will read it and say, “Oh, this is an interesting way of making work. And it led to X, Y, and Z. And it led them to think about it in these terms. I can do it with my story, or my ideas.”
You know, we’re very interested, in the book, in capturing how the technique gave birth to the work, and how the work nurtured the technique, so that there’s a dialectical relationship between thinking about how to do it and doing it, in between the technique and the finished piece. And then you can keep going back and forth and having that conversation. So I think that’s the difference between the book and the manual.
LSB:
Do you want to add to that?
BP:
There are some other collaborators who are the Tectonic company members who also go out and teach Moment Work. And many of them will contribute some essays on particular problems that might come up as you try to use Moment Work. How do you know what to bring in the room? How do you know what hunch to follow?
LSB:
So let’s talk about that a little bit more. Is there a way that discoveries can be made through Moment Work or problems can be solved? Is there a way that Moment Work can be applied to even commercial work?
MK:
I think Moment Work can be used to stage preexisting texts. In that case, what one is doing is one is truly allowing all that is theatrical to have a conversation with the existing words. I keep thinking that there is a way in which, when working on a preexisting play, there is always the danger that all you’re doing is illustrating the text.
BP:
I like how you’ll describe it as “dressing up the text.”
MK:
Well, there was a very mediocre critic who said that “the job of the director is to create a world in which the words can be believable.” And to me, that’s like telling an architect that the job of an architect is to create buildings that don’t fall down. Yes, it’s true, but it’s a miniscule part of what we do in creating work. So, yes, I think that Moment Work is something that can be very helpful in being applied to preexisting text.
I really think that there is a way in which creating theatrical narratives often begins by being an act of translation, meaning that we speak our everyday language, right? Or we write our everyday language. But when you’re creating a piece of theatre, what you’re doing is you’re finding a way of articulating your ideas, your concerns, your passions—theatrically. And if we agree that there’s a thing called theatrical language, there is a theatrical language we’re constantly learning how to translate, right?
But to me, the ultimate goal of Moment Work is to teach people to think theatrically so that you can become so fluent in a theatrical language that you can write performance as a point of departure. So you’re not translating—you’re speaking the theatrical language. And that’s really, to me, exciting. I mean, that’s the beginning of a revolution, right, that we begin to say, “Okay, I am going to start constructing these narratives theatrically, not textually,” using the elements of the stage. And I think this kind of thinking is taking root all over our country now.
BP:
And for us, the elements of the stage can be anything—it’s not a set list that we’re responding to. For us, the elements of the stage [concept] is just a way of tagging something so that we have a way to examine it and explore it. So we might say the element of the stage is costumes, or lights, or technology. How are we going to use technology? How are we going to limit our use of technology? Chairs—we make a lot of theatre with chairs, right? So how are we going to use set pieces? And we can label anything [as] an element of the stage: the element of surprise, the element of theatrical tension. And it’s just a way for us to learn how theatre speaks, both dramatically and theatrically.
And then, within that element, there might be a lot of different ways that it communicates: it might communicate something viscerally; it might just be beautifully aesthetic; it might have some kind of poetic or lyrical quality; it might really, clearly make a metaphor that then makes several lines of dialogue not necessary. So we don’t know until we get those things in a room and people respond to them what the elements of the stage can do and how they communicate.
LSB:
And some of the elements of the stage also depend on who’s in the room, right? I remember, studying with Tectonic, that you said this would be a really different list if we had circus performers in here. And it also depends on the physical space. Architecture is an element of the stage, but also the various capabilities of the people.
MK:
Yes, exactly. So it departs from the premise that there’s an infinite number of elements that can be used on the stage to create narrative, which is an exciting idea because it invites a number of things into the space.
Artaud, in The Theatre and Its Double, speaks about the experiential power of theatre, which is sensorial, almost ritualistic. To me, one of the things that Moment Work does is that it allows you to ask questions that Artaud himself would be asking and would be responding to because he was talking about an experiential theatre, a theatre of the senses. I think that, in the ’60s, there were a lot of people who read Artaud and were doing happenings and were doing a lot of things that were very visceral, very sensorial, but not narrative. Narrative was something that everybody rebelled against in the ’60s and ’70s. And to me, I think that we’re in a period of reconstruction. And the period is a period in which we’re saying, “Yes, and narrative.”
LSB:
Right, so you’re not banishing text; you’re not banishing the playwright. It’s just that this is one of the elements that can be part of the theatrical vocabulary, as opposed to the main element.
MK:
Exactly. And also, say, how can you use all of the elements of the stage in the service of narrative? I think that’s one big distinction for us at Tectonic because we are interested in how to use fully the elements of the stage, but we’re also interested in always having a narrative. We’re interested in storytelling.
In the ’70s and ’80s artists used to say that they were trying to “debunk the dictatorship of the text.” I am not interested in debunking the dictatorship of the text; I’m interested in using the text or allowing the text to participate as a partner in the construction of narrative.
LSB:
So is that part of the impetus for the book? I mean, a lot of companies, if they found something that was working for them, they might want to keep it private, make themselves unique. But it seems that in some ways you’re following the tradition of the manifesto—as in what you want to see manifest in the theatre world—that there is a desire to share this knowledge, and it’s coming from a desire to really change the way people think about theatre, and the kind of theatre that’s created. Is that accurate?
MK:
Yes. We’re trying to propose a different way of thinking and creating the work. And anything that in any way furthers our art form benefits all of us.
BP:
We get excited when we hear, “Oh, there’s a company in Seattle that’s using Moment Work now.” And we’re like, “Really? We don’t even know who they are!” And you have to be comfortable with the method being fluid, right, because even now, as a company, our company members are going out and making their own individual work. And they’re using Moment Work in a way that is speaking to what they want to do theatrically. And it might be very different than the way Moisés might lead a process or I might lead a process. So it’s going to continue to evolve, just like any other method has evolved with each new generation of actors and acting teachers.
You know, I think the main thing too that happens with our work, when we go into a room and we start doing Moment Work, often we have a hunch that something will make an interesting theatrical experience. So we explore that hunch. We make some Moments around it, we bring in some source material, and we bring in some objects. And we start seeing what’s there before we have the work. So we’re working on what theatrical forms will support this, as we’re developing what the content might be.
So with the play 33 Variations, Moisés had a hunch, and then he also had to create a fictional plotline, side by side. Those things were developing at the same time, like what is the visual vocabulary, the aural vocabulary of this play? And as you continue to work, then you see in the structure you’re creating: Where are the holes? Where do I need to create more moments to fill those holes? So we’re doing the form and the content at the same time.
LSB:
But some of this work is about the not knowing and giving yourself the time to explore. It’s particularly challenging when you’ve got a society in which you want to know something—in five seconds you look it up on your phone. We’re always knowing, so to speak.
BP:
And we want the answer, we want to know if we’re doing it right.
LSB:
Right, instantaneously—and doing it right, teaching to the test. And there’s something about this process. The fact that it takes time is, I think, one of the things that’s really wonderful about it.
MK:
Well, I think that what you’re saying speaks to our process because when we created Tectonic Theater Project, the way in which theatre institutions worked in America is that they have a season of four plays a year and a subscription [base] and a space. And when we created the company, we wanted to have none of those three. I didn’t want to be a landlord, and I didn’t want us to have a season where we had to do four plays a year. And I didn’t want to have a subscription base where people were waiting. No. What I wanted was a laboratory. If The Laramie Project takes a year to write, then it takes a year to write. That’s how long it took.
So I think that the current construct of how theatre works—and I wish I could say commercial theatre, but commercial and not-for-profit theatre work in similar ways—the model is very strict, right? You have three or four weeks of rehearsal, one week of tech, and then performance. And you can see how that model is problematic, right?
LSB:
And yet we started off by saying how popular devising has become, almost the rage. In fact, the whole impetus for me to do this special issue with Theatre Topics is because I recognize how hugely popular it is.
MK:
But here’s the thing. I think it’s hugely popular in university circles and in ensembles, in spaces where the art is the most important thing. Slowly, we’re beginning to infiltrate regional theatres, like we have people like Elevator Repair Service or the Civilians or Tectonic doing their work in different regional theatres. You can begin to see that, but it’s not nearly as prevalent in either regional theatres or on Broadway.
BP:
Also, on college campuses you often have two males and, you know, twenty-five females, right? So when you’re devising, you can create roles for the people that you have, and you can use their special skills. We would call that the “element of virtuosity.” So if you’ve got—in Too Big, the play that Lisa and I did at Drew University—we had two actors [who] could do backflips. So we had one moment that ended with two performers, who happened to both have long blonde hair, both doing backflips, because they could.
LSB:
In some ways that takes us back to Shakespeare—almost, writing for your company.
BP:
Yeah, we write for their strengths.
LSB:
I think also another reason why this is so popular on college campuses is because it’s a very inclusive approach in terms of representation—going back to the idea that what you’re creating is inspired by who’s in the room. And so then you can honor the voices and the individual identities, cultures, of the people creating the work. But it’s not necessarily a one-on-one correspondence between somebody’s identity and what they can supposedly do onstage, which tends to happen so much in the commercial world.
When we think about devised work, then, and maybe particularly thinking about Tectonic, how much of the company’s identity or mission is tied in with social justice, or theatre and social change, or some kind of a sociopolitical critique?
MK:
I think all theatre is political. And I think our mission statement is to explore theatrical languages and theatrical forms. But of course the work we make deals with us, with who we are as social, political, and human beings. Hopefully, if we’re doing the work well, the work will end up portraying, representing many different sides of who you are as a human being. So yes, our work is political and our work addresses social ideas, as well as all the other forces that shape our lives.
BP:
And I think part of the reason The Laramie Project has endured the way it has and then started to make us identified as a theatre for social change is because there was so much rigor about the structure of the play. And so it has endured, whereas, you know, maybe some other forms like the Living Newspaper, pieces that were much more responding to the current moment, they don’t necessarily endure. That doesn’t make them not valid or valuable, but it’s just not what our mission is, as Moisés said. Our mission is to explore theatrical language.
MK:
Yes. I think at Tectonic we’re always trying to reside in that space of interception between content and form. In other words, exploring ideas (content) and exploring forms (theatrical language). And so, yes, our work is political, and our work is interested in the art form.
LSB:
Maybe another way to think about this question is, what do you see as your relationship to Brecht?
MK:
Well, he’s one of our great mentors.
BP:
He’s your bro.
MK:
Yeah.
LSB:
[Laughs] Why? Why is he a mentor to you?
MK:
Because of his alienation technique and the idea that there can be a separation between the performer and the character. And that really did two very important things for me. In a general way, it allowed me to speak about this deconstruction of the elements of the stage. You know, it allowed me to clarify what I meant by that, because he was talking about that. He was also very influenced by Asian performers. So this whole idea that you could have a moment of such beauty, and then take a pause and take a bow and come back to it, was speaking of a theatrical narrative, right? And I was fascinated by that.
And I always was very interested in this idea of putting on a character and having the performer and the character present. If you look at the trio of Gross Indecency, The Laramie Project, and I Am My Own Wife, it literally is an exploration of that idea—character versus actor. So in Gross Indecency an actor comes onstage and in the text it says “The Actor.” And he says, “This is from this book, De Profundis, by Oscar Wilde.” He reads: “Do not be afraid of the past. If people tell you, you can’t change it—if people tell you it is irrevocable, do not believe them. The past, the present, and the future are but one moment in the sight of God. The imagination can transcend them.” Then the actor puts the book down.
And you have a company of actors quoting from other books: “This is from this book. This is from this book.” They never said, “I am Andy Paris and this is from”—but they were saying, “This is from this book.” Who were they? They were the actors in the play, right? So all of a sudden the actors in the play started having text, even if that text is only to introduce source material. That was Gross Indecency.
In The Laramie Project I take that a step further. Now the actors are not only having text—
LSB:
They’re characters.
MK:
They’re characters, they have names; they have journal entries. Their experience is juxtaposed against the experience of the characters that we have interviewed. And I’ll talk more about that later, about why we did that. But you see how it’s a continuation.
And in the third play, in I Am My Own Wife, it’s not only that the character has text and a journal and an identity, but the character’s story is as important as the lead’s story. As you may remember, in that play the character of Doug Wright, the writer who’s writing the story, goes to East Berlin to interview Charlotte Von Mahlsdorf—a German transvestite who survived the Nazis and the communists. Right? So you have the character of Doug Wright doing the research about Charlotte, interviewing her and writing the play. And Doug Wright says, “What am I going to do? She’s lying to me. How am I going to find out the truth about what really happened to Charlotte? How am I going to do this?” And ultimately the play is as much about his crisis in trying to find the truth as it is about Charlotte trying to survive the Nazis.
So the arc is complete—three plays that deal with the question of the actor-writer and the character or characters in the play. Both being present. So when you ask about Brecht—that’s the answer, that he has permeated every ounce of my research and every ounce of my ideas. And he’s a very, very strong strain in the DNA of both my work and Tectonic Theater Project’s work.
When I was living in Venezuela we had an incredible international theatre festival. So we had Peter Brook, we had Grotowski, we had Tadeusz Kantor, we had Pina Bausch, we had all of these people coming. The first time I saw a realistic play I thought to myself, “This is so avant-garde,” because I couldn’t imagine—like, somebody opened a sink and water came out. I thought “Ah!” You know, and I’m sure I had the same experience that Moscow audiences had when they saw The Seagull . . .
I went to a yeshiva all my life. And it was very traumatic for me, being a gay man and an artistic temperament in a yeshiva. You can imagine. But one thing that I did learn from them was a certain kind of rigorous erudition—you know, that there’s something about reading books and studying books and understanding the minutiae of somebody else’s thought. And I think that there’s something about that kind of minutiae and being that rigorous—that word again, right?— about how we study those innovators who came before us. And where do we fall in that legacy?
LSB:
What you just said is really interesting to me because, when I think about the Talmud, it’s all about multiple voices. So, you know, on one page you have one idea, and then people layering around that and layering around that and commenting on it. And if there’s conflicting ideas, both of those go into the final page. And so it’s interesting because when I think about Tectonic and Moment Work, it is about these multiple voices and all of these different elements getting to speak.
MK:
I never thought about it that way. But you know what’s interesting about what you just said? Wow, that’s a really interesting idea, that, yes, we’re doing a Talmudic treatment of all the theatrical elements by allowing all of them to participate in the dialogue, in the creation of the uber-text.
And you know that there have been critics who have said about both Gross Indecency and Laramie that both are both very Talmudic pieces. In Gross Indecency, literally, you are—it was like at the yeshiva: “Oh, Rabbi So-and-So said this”; “No, but Rabbi So-and-So said this other thing.” And that’s what they’re doing.
LSB:
Right, right—yeah. And starting with a question that you want to investigate.
BP:
And some people will say, “What’s the central question of your piece [for devising]?” We say, “organizing principle.” But you always have to be answering that question as the editor is coming into the process. You might love a moment and just go, “How does that answer our central question or our organizing principle? And if it doesn’t, it has to go. Store it away for something else.”
LSB:
It also strikes me that—I mean, I know you [Barb] primarily, originally as an actor. But in Tectonic or over the years you’ve grown, and you’ve also become a director and a dramaturg. So you’ve evolved with the technique, and the technique has evolved with you.
BP:
Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, I was looking at it, like, “How did I end up in this very privileged position, where I get to hear Moisés Kaufman think through all of his ideas and be his scribe and collaborator?” In Doug Wright’s last play, Posterity, about Ibsen, there’s a sculptor who has been commissioned to sculpt him. And I can’t remember how it’s articulated exactly, but he talks about Ibsen being the artist and he is the craftsman. That’s sort of how I feel about this relationship with the book-writing, like he’s the artist and I’m the craftsperson. You know, I’ll be the person who can kind of help him wrangle these ideas into a structure.
MK:
And I disagree with that completely. [Laughter] Barb is an artist, of course!
BP:
And that’s how the creative process works.
MK:
[Laughter] No, because I think that the thing that’s amazing about Barb is that, yeah, what Barb has that I lack is this kind of profound actorly intelligence. And with that comes this kind of incredible empathy, this kind of encyclopedic emotional dictionary. So, I think that what’s been wonderful about this collaboration is that we both have very different strengths.
BP:
But I do think it is one of Moisés’s great geniuses that he knows, like any good manager, he knows how to bring out the best in his team. So he figures out who’s good for what role.
LSB:
Right, which this brings up a final point for me, which is I think there’s a false idea that devised theatre is necessarily leaderless theatre.
MK:
Well, certainly not in Tectonic’s case. I mean, there are companies that work very much collaboratively that way. If I remember correctly, Five Lesbian Brothers used to make their work very collectively that way. We work quite collaboratively. But in each one of our pieces, there’s always one leader. So we all create together. But when it comes time to make a final decision, there is always one person who has the final say.
And that’s a very interesting job because, you know, if you have 400 hours of interviews, the leader better come up with a very good rule of how you’re going to edit those because everybody who interviewed anybody is going to say, “I want my character in the play. I want all two hours of my character in the play.” And you better have some really good reasons about why you can’t or you can.
So, for example, with Laramie, the organizing principle from very early on was “What’s the story of the town?” So that was the organizing principle. Then everybody would go up; we would talk about “This happened to the town: the media descended and they were very bruised by the media portrayal”; “They all went to the arraignment”; “They all found out that Matthew Shepard had been attacked”; “They all found out that Matthew Shepard died.”
And what’s interesting about that is that everybody was able to contribute because we had collectively decided what the story was going to be. But even within that, then there were decisions, right? Like if Barb had a text about what happened at the arraignment and somebody else had a text that was about what happened at the arraignment, and both texts were very good, how did I decide which text to use? So I started kind of inventing other rules, like: Is Barb’s character a character that we’re following throughout the play? Or is she a punctual character that has one magnificent part of text? And if that person might reappear several times, that person takes precedence over this person.
So, the job of the leader in that situation—yes, eventually I do get to say yes or no. But if I’ve done my job right, I have to use that power very seldomly because everyone is trying to tell the same story. And the way we create together is by, early on in the process, agreeing on what it is we’re trying to tell.
BP:
Well, and you allow for a lot of dissent in the room.
MK:
Yes.
LSB:
But two words still come back to me: one is rigor, and the other is narrative. I mean, it really comes back to those two things.
MK:
Those two things, yes.
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