Deb: I started with them and then Ellie Kovan called me up, “Do you want to do a solo show?” I was like, “I can’t do a solo. No.” She said, “Do you want to do it on the seventeenth or the twenty ninth?” I said, “Well, the twenty ninth.” Okay. Then I went and did it. I thought, “Wow.” I wrote something for myself, a little thing for myself that wouldn’t have interested the other women. My job as a script writer in that company, and they wrote a lot of material for themselves, but I was the one who stuck it together and made the interstitial pieces fit together. This what I was doing would not have interested them. I did the “to be or not to be” speech from Hamlet dressed as Miss Tennessee with a banner in the combined bathing suit and talent competition, and while reciting this thing badly in a southern accent, showing my boobs and butt to the judges.
I had a bathing suit and fishnet stockings and high heels and rhinestones. I was obsessed with Hamlet since the time I started menstruating. I don’t know what the problem was with Hamlet, but no one’s going to cast me to play Hamlet. So I found that by doing that, I was able to both play Hamlet and show at the same time why no one would ever cast me to play Hamlet because I had to show my boobs and my butt.
It’s that dialectical thing where you’re doing something and you’re showing your desire to do it at the same time. Once I did that, I thought, “Wow.” So I wrote, I put together, this was in… in 1990 was my first full-length solo show at PS 122 and it was killer. It was so great for me. I was so happy I would leap up in the air when the music came on at the end of the show, I was just… So I began working solo steadily. I have eleven now, eleven solo pieces that I’ve toured throughout the US a little bit. Not much overseas because of my classes and the kids or whatever. I’ve been in residence and countless colleges and really enjoyed the prerogatives of standing alone on stage. It is an honor. It is a stunning honor when the lights come up and I… It’s just an honor, it’s a thrill.
It’s like, “Thank you so much, everybody.” Just even thinking about it gives me the chills that there is a group of witnesses who have honored me by coming to hear what I must say before I die. I don’t waste your time. You may think I’m wasting your time because you don’t like the show and I understand that, but I’m not going to waste your time by telling you things I have no need to say ever. I’m speaking from urgency. I’m speak—telling you stuff I really have to tell you.
The fact that people come to listen is, I never get over it. I never get over the honor of that. Nor do I get over the honor of writing full-length plays and other people stand there and say the lines. I write a lot of plays that I’m not in and that almost feels posthumous. I had to get used to that. Not standing up and putting my body against the language was something I had to get used to.
Jeffrey: How does the devised-ensemble-work-nature, you got through working with Split Britches, then feed the solo work that you do because you’re writing and creating for yourself. Here we are at the Pig Iron Institute chatting about embodied playwriting and about how, you’ll have to help me paraphrase, as someone just said, Richard today, Kemp said, “When you synthesize that sort of work and embody it in some way, you don’t have to do the same amount of work that the text has to do by putting it in your body.” So I’m wondering, that was a long way of saying how do all those things marry into the solo work that you do?
Deb: Writing feels very physical to me. When I’m writing, I’m feeling it’s coming from my body, and not only that, but then I have people feeding—a director, there’s a friend. There are people feeding in information. It’s me standing there. But the energy is coming from many sources. It’s coming from the person who made light. It’s coming from the director who… There’s a moment I like to talk about my director, MerriMilwe. One of the pieces I was writing about was about a woman from town who generally was wealthy and thought herself, me, beneath her or something. But one day in the supermarket, in the cereal aisle, she fell into my arms and held me. And when we separated, I saw there were tears in her eye and I said, “What is it?” And I said, “You look beautiful.” She said, “I feel beautiful.” I said, “What is it?”
She said, “I’m in love. I’ve never known love. My husband Huha doesn’t see me for who I am.” I said, “Who is it?” She said, “It’s my personal trainer. He sees me for who I am. When I’m speaking English, it feels like a new language. I don’t even know.” And oddly I said, “Welcome home.” That seemed like the only thing to say, and we had an embrace and everything, and the next time she saw me at some public event, she ignored me completely. So we were working on this monologue, the director and I. When I perform, when I’m speaking to someone who isn’t there, I see them and you see them because I see them. No joke. When I’m talking to you, I’m talking to you. You are there for me fully. So I was talking to her. The last line is, “The next time she saw me at some public event, she ignored me completely.”
So the director said, “I need you to walk downstage when you say that.” I said, “No, I can’t do that.” “Why can’t you do that?” “Because she’s standing there.” She said, “I want you to do that.” I said, “Don’t you understand? I’ve been talking to this person…” “Do it.” So I finished up and I stepped downstage and I said that line, and I burst into tears because the whole meaning of it was that that person was never there, that I was nothing to her. That physical dramaturgy that connected me to the whole meaning of that particular monologue. In other words, I stepped right through her the way she stepped right through. She was never there really.
That whole moment was about her. It had nothing to do with me, with caring for me, with allowing me the honor of caring for her. It meant nothing to her. She would’ve said it to the greengrocer, the mailman, the milkman, it’s meaningless. And I felt the sadness of that when I stepped right through her. So the director in that sense was one of the co-authors of that monologue. So it really is an embodied process, and I did a show on Zoom. It was supposed to go up and here in the Kimmel Center the weekend, April 2020, the weekend, they shut all the theatres down.
So I did it on Zoom and I had so many people helping me. I had a tech person helping me. I had Merri helping me, my friend Nobs helping me. Nobs’s husband, who’s really smart about theatre, everybody watching these rehearsals feeding into how I could bring it to life. So they were all there in that. The way that came off, I felt this was me. It was about my mother who had died and me conjuring her by telling jokes. I told six straight jokes. Nobody tells jokes anymore. I told six straight jokes, structure-narrative jokes because that was my mother’s straw.
My mother could tell a joke. She had the taut narrative structure, how to distract you, so you didn’t see the punch line coming. She didn’t like me at all. So we later in life connected on the level of humor. The woman was funny as fuck. She really was. So I conjured her by telling these jokes and she appears and there’s an image on the screen. It’s a square because Zoom, it’s a square. It’s kind of mauve square, and I spoke to it. People said it was very intimate, that show. I felt the audience laughing at these jokes. I felt it. It was just another act of imagination, like imagining the woman who embraced me in the supermarket. It’s embodied dramaturgy. The good dramaturg of solo work is a physical dramaturg I would say, that person who works with you on your text, through your body. So I guess I could answer that way. It really—even playwriting when I sit by myself, I feel like I’m collaborating with characters that come to me. I don’t come to them. They come to me.
I channel that. It’s a collaboration of energies. And then of course when a play goes up and I’m not in it, the actors do things to it that the wisdom, the energy, the colors come to the play that I could not even have imagined. And of course, just because you write something doesn’t mean you understand it. There’s that.
Jeffrey: You said that, right?
Deb: Yeah.
Jeffrey: In class or in conversation today, is these characters are talking to each other and I’m eavesdropping and I am letting them tell me what this story is. I have to discover it along with them, and then when you have an actor read the lines, it’s a new play. It’s another play.
A play is written several times. A play is not the text.
Deb: They write the play.
Jeffrey: They’re writing another—
Deb: A play is written several times. A play is not the text.
Jeffrey: I was having a conversation with somebody here too. I was like, “One of the reasons why I think ensemble and devised theatre spoke to me was that there were just times where I felt like I am such a dummy. I can’t read a script and fully imagine it. I don’t know what’s wrong with me that when I read something—”
Deb: Nothing’s wrong with you. Nothing’s wrong with you.
Jeffrey: I’ve come to forgive myself.
Deb: No, there’s nothing to forgive. Meaning like you see a schmatte, a dress on a hanger, who knows? You’ve got to stick your tits in it. Excuse my language.
Jeffrey: No, no. I love your language.
Deb: You really do. It looks like a rag and then you put it on. It’s like, “Oh.” Or it looks really attractive. You put it out like, “Bleh.” It needs the body. It’s an embodied art form. It comes from the body, returns to the body, the word made flesh, et cetera. This institute has so opened up my mind. I feel like this wind going through my mind. There have been so many perspectives on how to think about what it is we do as we create ensemble, as we teach ensemble thought, as we teach devised theatre, as we practice devised theatre, and so many different ways of codifying it, thinking about it, preserving it, making it, helping others make it. My mind has just been blown by this two weeks.
Jeffrey: What’s something that’s really sticking with you that’s exciting?
Deb: That session today, which I didn’t fully understand and really loved about MDA [Mechanics, Dynamics, Aesthetics].
Jeffrey: About the game theory?
Deb: Game theory about how we structure, how we can control as director and as leaders of people discovering how to make theatre, how we can apply those. Really, they come from the computer and I don’t like the computer, but they are applicable, that incredible connection. I deeply enjoyed the conversation from Rick Kemp about synesthesia and the neuroscience of creativity and all the ways it applies, and one of the things that’s been great has been discovering the ways in which I am doing some of these things without putting them in that. All the [Jacques] Lecoq stuff has been so useful to me because doing that, but I didn’t put it under that aegis. I’m doing so much of that and I’ve been educated. I’m uneducated then there’s so many smart people in the room, yourself included, but all these brilliant people approaching this from different perspectives.
Jeffrey: Part of the title here is Preserving and Transmitting Ensemble-Based Devised Theatre, and I’m wondering what did you come here to preserve or transmit?
Deb: I really wanted to make sure to expand my mind about how to give this gift to the next generations. The future belongs to other people. It was given to me. I want to pass it on. I am dedicated to doing that. I feel like teaching underwrites the privileges of performance. It is a privilege to stand on stage. I want to honor that privilege by passing this on to the next generation, making sure to keep myself current about how people are thinking about doing that.
I know that I am a language-dependent person, but that’s because I know that language doesn’t work. Language ultimately fails. Language fails. That’s why it is so suited to the theatre, because theatre is about the failure of language. If language worked, there’d be no need for theatre. Theatre is subtextual and metatextual. It’s what you try and fail to say. It’s what you say when it’s already too late.
I have come to find the courage to say that all plays are about love and all plays are about death. Everything else is subsidiary. That’s what we talk about. I want to be able to pass the ability to use language, use the body in service of the failure. The body, you can’t deny it. You can’t deny the body. You can’t. I mean language, yak, yak, yak. But I am a talker, as you see, and I’m a writer as you know. But the body keeps the score. It’s really, I want to pass this on. I want people to know it’s their birthright to stand and speak. We’ve been told, a lot of us, that “who cares what you have to say? You have nothing to say. Who are you?” We’ve been told that. A lot of us have been told that. So I want to stand. I want to be Cerberus at the gate to make sure that nobody gets in to tell my kids that they can’t say that or they can’t do that.
And I want to pass on methods that I know work. There is no one right way to anything. No great source of wisdom proclaims itself to be the only great source of wisdom. Anyone who tells me, “This is the only way,” see ya. I don’t think Jesus Christ said that. I don’t think in Christianity he said, “I am the way and the light. There’s no way to the Father, but through me.” I don’t think he said that. I think a bunch of men wrote that. That’s enough out of me. My theological ideas. I’m a Jew. What do you want?
Jeffrey: No, no. I think that is a framework that I think is beneficial to hear. Thank you for that. Who’ve been some of the greatest teachers for you?
Deb: Of course—
Jeffrey: Maybe two or three.
Deb: Of course, Paulina Klimovitskaya, who is a Russian teacher of acting. I didn’t study theatre in college. I was an English major. My teachers have been people outside the classroom, people outside, sometimes outside of theatre. My friend Nobs who’s taught me the most essential things I know about leading a deep and meaningful life. My closest friend, a guy named Ed Benson, who I worked with at a type shop. I ran a type shop. He was the original guy who ran the type shop and I was the systems manager of a computer system dedicated to type. He taught me so many important things about management and what it meant to make a whole system, a coordinated ensemble of workers, joyously come together to get a job done. He taught me a lot of deep things. My father was a great teacher of mine.
I lost him recently. He taught me. It is from him that I realized that you just can’t give up. Don’t give up. I never give up. I don’t give up. That’s so much of what it takes. He just told us to make the world better, try to leave the world better than where found it. He inspired us, me and my sisters, to rise to our high level, whatever that was, and from him I take a lot of my moral compass. There are many others, many people who have educated me along the way. My theatre teachers come from life. Merri Milwe, Margot Lewitin is a great director. She taught me that there’s precision, about precision in the theatre. A silence has a very precise length. It is not random. It’s not, “Oh, this is what I feel.” You have to get those silences. She dogged me about silences. She was right. She was right. So many people have taught me, I’m just an amalgamation of wisdoms that come from many sources.
Jeffrey: Yeah. Thank you. I don’t want to presume anything about the import of this institute that we’re at right now, but why is it important for this institute to be happening now?
Deb: We are under threat. We really are. There’s been a lot of talk about the arts and the way in which they get no support. In fact, they are disincentivized in this country, but we have some turbulence coming. There’s turbulence. We need to strengthen ourselves. We need to put our minds together. We need to rededicate ourselves to the many ways in which we can keep this alive. It’s a form of activism. It’s a form of re-socialization. It’s a form of affirmation, reclamation. It feels to me like it’s never been more important than now.
I don’t know about you. I feel traumatized by the past five, six years in this country with what’s-his-name. The idea that what’s his name, that I have to see this rapist come back that I don’t want to hear about this rapist. I can’t. The disrespect, the racism, the misogyny, the transphobia, homophobia, xenophobia, these horrible warring forces, the irrational political energy make—and I really do believe in the agency of theatre. I believe in its power to change minds and change lives. I’ve seen it happen. I am like a theatre evangelist, I know it sounds like, but I’ve seen it. It’s not something I read about, it’s something I’ve seen that a random group of people who are come together to make a piece become something else. It changes them permanently, that it has great agency. Not unlike that incredible protest we saw with a million people trying to live together to make it clear that they couldn’t stand this government anymore. That was theatre. It was a social theatre.
That there is power in agency in this, and coming together now at a time of unprecedented turbulence from the environment, from the political sphere, from the radical, the ways in which hatred has been given permission. It was always there, but now it’s been given full permission to articulate itself. Never has it been more important. And I feel that they did a great job putting this together. I really do. Very, very impressed by the breadth of minds in the room as well as by the people who have come to share their perspective and wisdom with us. It’s energized me in ways I don’t even understand. It’s too much. As I go swimming or as I walk the dog or as I live my life, it will filter to me. I’ve taken a lot of notes. I don’t even know what’s happened.
Jeffrey: Yeah. What are you looking forward to?
Deb: Looking forward to seeing my daughter showing up on Thursday. She’s the funniest person. You have no idea. I’m looking forward to returning to the classroom. I tremble before I walk in on the first day. I’m so nervous and so humbled. I am looking forward to my play going up, and I’m terrified about the play going up in February.
Jeffrey: Oh, it’s great.
Deb: I’m so nervous about it. Just because you write something doesn’t mean you understand. Okay. I’m working, whittling away at the mysteries of that. Thank you so much for your help.
Jeffrey: Of course.
Deb: Thank you so much for being present. Thank you.
Jeffrey: My pleasure. My pleasure.
Deb: So I’m very excited about that. I like to work in the theatre. I like it. There’s nothing so thrilling. It’s thrilling. Wonderful. What are you looking forward to?
Jeffrey: Oh, I’m looking forward to getting home.
Deb: Me too. It’s time to go home.
Jeffrey: Listen, we all love theatre, but what was really important is family and nothing makes that more clear than distance, and you’re just realizing every minute that, yeah, but wouldn’t it be great to share this with them right now? I wish I could tell them about this, and I do, and I tell my six-year-old all about the embodied poetry that we’re learning. I tell her about the shows that I saw.
Deb: This is good.
Jeffrey: I saw theatre inside of an aquarium. I look forward to expanding her sense of what things can be. That’s my short-term and my long term—
Deb: Absolutely.
Jeffrey: … is being that source for her in some way, I hope.
Deb: And now the small person.
Jeffrey: And an even smaller person who I hope also.
Deb: You have to get to know the small person. We just met him.
Jeffrey: Yes.
Deb: So we have to suss him out.
Jeffrey: Yeah, we got to figure him out.
Deb: Got to suss him out.
Jeffrey: He’s really smiley. So I think he’s got a sense of humor.
Deb: Maybe he’s funny.
Jeffrey: Maybe I don’t know.
Deb: He’s funny. No, he’s probably funny.
Jeffrey: Deb, no. I’m no fun. I’m not fun. Just kidding.
Deb: No, you are fun. And he’s probably a laugh riot.
Jeffrey: I hope he is. We’re waiting. We’re getting there.
Deb: I want you to get in touch with me about this.
Jeffrey: I will for sure.
Deb: Yeah. I want to hear about that.
Jeffrey: First person who held him, said, “Oh, he’s an old soul.”
Deb: Okay.
Jeffrey: And I’m like, “An old soul?” Okay, so let’s take it there. What is to unpack what that means?
Deb: I just got here. I’m a new soul. This is my first time.
Jeffrey: Are you?
Deb: Oh, yeah.
Jeffrey: Really? You think so?
Deb: It’s the first time, never saw this shit before.
Jeffrey: Ooh, fascinating.
Deb: Doing the best I can.
Jeffrey: Yeah. Yeah. Deb, this has been a delight. Thank you for making time to chat with me tonight. I am utterly overwhelmed with the crossing of paths that it took for everyone to be here and that we are all in this space together.
Deb: Isn’t it amazing?
Jeffrey: And I’m just blown away and I am so glad that we met and have this moment together. So let me from the bottom of my heart, sincerely say thank you for your time and energy.
Deb: Thank you too. Thank you for your interest in all of us. Thank you so much. It’s wonderful.
Jeffrey: Awesome.
Deb: And we will find ways of conversation in the future.
Jeffrey: Yeah, I hope so. Hope so. Thank you.
Deb: I want to know about the small person’s laughing.
Jeffrey: Yeah. You’ll be the first to know.
Deb: I’ll want to know about that.
Jeffrey: Thank you to Deb for her time in all ways. I could have talked to her for hours. And with any luck, I’ll get the chance to do so again. Deb pulled the words from my mouth that so often we are doing this work without a name and there are moments when someone comes out of nowhere and gives an exercise or process a name and says, “Well, it’s always been this. I learned this at such and such place.” She mentions this was happening to her with the Lecoq work that was happening at the institute. And I guess what I’m really thinking about here is how our instincts know more than we do in some of these processes. I truly appreciate the connection of how social and political work has evolved in ensemble work, and there is an odd connection about its mainstream growth coming out of universities along with the regional theater system.
Something that Allen Kuharski mentions in season four, episode three. But as Deb mentioned, Split Britches was bringing this work into different universities all across the country. So it’s curious to see how this work has grown through the eighties and beyond. Speaking of, our next guest will be John Schneider from Theater X of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. As a present Milwaukeean, I can tell you that Theater X has had a hand in the development of theatre around this city. This conversation with John actually blew me away in terms of how they brought international acclaim to their home and how they put their home on the international stage in the sixties, seventies and eighties.
All right, thanks for listening, artists. We’ll see you next time on From The Ground Up.
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