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Iphigenia 2.0 Marks a Joyous Reunion
Charles Mee and director Tina Landau began working together in 1992 when Landau directed a workshop production of Mee's Orestes at American Repertory Theatre's Institute for Advanced Theatre Training. Landau later directed Orestes in 1993 with the New York-based, site-specific theatre company, En Garde Arts. The two collaborated again on Mee's Trojan Women a Love Story, produced by En Garde Arts in 1996. Landau also directed the world premieres of Mee's Time to Burn (1997) and Berlin Circle (1998) at Steppenwolf Theatre Company. Signature's production of Iphigenia 2.0 marks their first collaboration in nearly ten years. Before rehearsals began, Mee and Landau sat down with Signature Edition to discuss Iphigenia 2.0 and their excitement to work together again.
Signature Edition: Your first experience working together was on Orestes. What was that like?
TL: You know, working with Chuck has been the joy of my creative life. There have been maybe two or three other people in my work who I feel the same way about; it was pure for me from the word "go." It's not only that if I could have fashioned tailor-made texts for me, these would be them - it's also that if I could have fashioned a human being, a playwright, for me, it would be Chuck. That's how I felt when I started working with Chuck. What he hopes to do and allows one to do in the theatre plays into and supports every desire, instinct, and philosophy I hold dear. I could say more, but I think Chuck should talk.
CM: Oh we've done a bunch of stuff together. It's just completely perfect. And then Tina dumps me. We did a bunch of stuff together, one after another, for several years, and then Tina dumps me.
TL: How did I dump you? Just that I stopped directing your plays and stopped returning phone calls?
CM: Yep.
TL: I did disappear.
CM: Yep.
TL: Yes.
CM: Tina had other stuff to do.
TL: Honestly, it does feel like a reunion and it started before this, maybe a year or two ago. I just got in touch with Chuck and was like, "Hi, I'm back. Might we do something together?" And he very graciously said yes and we started. We're actually going to have a meeting after this to talk about how we can keep doing things together for the rest of our lives.
SE: What is it about working with each other that works for you two?
CM: Well the easiest thing to say is that there are a bunch of directors who have hearts, and then another bunch who have heads, but Tina has both a head and a heart, and this is unbelievably rare. Also, the traditional notion in the western world since Ibsen, has been that a play is a literary text that a director places on stage. Tina and I share this love of music, dance, movement, stuff happening, spectacle, different kinds of text, all sorts of events. We don't think, "here's the text that needs to be placed on stage," but, "here is a three-dimensional event that is occurring in which there will be pieces of text, songs, dances, stuff, whatever." That love of a total kind of theatre, which we share, makes it so great to work together.
TL: Ditto. I read today, Chuck, something you said about the "immense energies" to be found in both the Greeks and Shakespeare. It really struck me, because that is what I hope we can bring into this theatre, immense energy. It's something that so rarely happens in our theatre today. I think we have all sorts of polite energies, well-thought-out energies, but not immense energies that are just running rampant and getting thrown against the wall. Chuck is not afraid to include anything in his work and to leave it open to interpretation. Today I had a talk with him about what Iphigenia does at the end of the play, and I was trying to think of a trick to get him to explain it. His refusal, which can be thrillingly maddening at times, to define or categorize, is one of the things I love most. And for me, it's been such a gift to work three-dimensionally because I've always felt a little like I'm straddling the acts of directing and writing, and have always experienced a blur between the two. I think of myself as writing with sound, lights, movement, and music. Chuck understands that deeply: that meaning is created, a story is told, and characters develop on stage, not just by what they say, but by whether the light cue is fading around them in a ten-count or a two-count. All that becomes part of the storytelling, and he embraces that like no other writer I've ever known. And he is the living writer I choose to work with.
SE: Chuck, you've re-constructed many Greek plays. Why Iphigenia at Aulis and why now?
CM: I had known from the beginning that there was this truly beautiful quartet of plays, which were the whole story. And it is the story of how an empire brings itself down, not by the acts of others, but by the acts it commits itself. And that's the story of the Trojan War, of the Greeks. Clearly that story begins with this most inconceivably horrible act. Think, what is the most horrible thing you can do? Kill your own daughter. And so, if you're capable of doing that, the civilization is over. So that's the beginning of the story. And I've known for seventeen years that eventually I'd have to write that play, but since I have three daughters myself, I haven't been able to bring myself to do it. Now that my last daughter is on her way to college in the fall and she's okay, I can do it. This is the completion of what Tina and I started seventeen years ago, and that needed to be finished, and now it's finished.
SE: How did you construct Iphigenia 2.0?
CM: I take the Greek play, I scribble in the margins the stuff it makes me think of, I make notes about those notes, and that leads to a chunk of text that I appropriate, or a piece of dialogue: "Oh well then he said this, then she said that, oh then he would say this, then she would say that!" I never start a play beginning at page one and going all the way to the end. I'm like a painter on a canvas, doing the lower left-hand corner, the upper right-hand corner, and something in the middle, so that I'm working on the whole thing all of the time. At some point I throw away the "scaffolding" and have the remaining work. That's how I've done all of these Greeks and that's how I did Iphigenia. To me it's obvious: the force of war that we are opposed to, the cure is then to love. For the Greeks, the word philia goes all through their vocabulary. There's no notion that there's such a thing as romantic or sensual love that is separate from family love, communal love, love of country, love of humanity, these are all part of a continuous spectrum. So clearly Euripides' Iphigenia is supposed to be two themes - the violence between people and the love between people, and Agamemnon destroys the love and allows the destruction of an empire. Then you begin to set them in a modern world, and you begin to put in stuff from today on the subject. There are a whole bunch of blogs on the internet by the guys who are now in Iraq writing about their experiences - why they're there, what they're doing, what they hate, what they meant to do, what they still believe they're doing. A lot of that stuff is appropriated verbatim. And then the bridesmaids - a lot of that stuff is also appropriated verbatim from blogs of young women talking about getting married.
TL: It's so interesting - what we're talking about. For me, one of the most striking transpositions Chuck has made is that in Euripides, Agamemnon is beholden to, listens to, and feels pressured by, words from the gods. In this case, the play begins with Agamemnon being told that the army will not sail, or not mobilize, not because the gods proclaim something, but because the soldiers are unwilling to fight if he's not willing to sacrifice one of his own. So the power has been transferred from divine beings to the people, and I think there could be no more direct expression of the time in which we live, now that we know that the Time Person of the Year is "You." I just think it's a brilliant, fundamental stroke that's made right at the top to set this play firmly in this moment.
SE: Tina, what attracted you to Iphigenia?
TL: Well, when I got in touch with Chuck after I "dumped" him, I believe I probably said something to him like, "I'll do anything of yours." I love Euripides, I love the Greeks. I think of Chuck as a kind of modern Euripides, as a parallel to how I imagine, or am told, Euripides in his time, took the world of Sophocles and Aeschylus, blew it apart a little, played with conventions, and was a rebel of form. The cliché is that Euripides really showed people as they are instead of as they should be, putting them on pedestals and showing them in their best, most heroic, light. I remember when I first started working with Chuck I almost had to stop rehearsing at times because it felt so brutally honest, exposed, like an open gaping wound. I remember thinking, "Oh, this is an expression of the way it is, period. It is not fantasy. It's not a wish. Although it can incorporate those, it just hurts and bleeds and bawls." I have the same feeling about this play. And also, the Euripides thing of being able to smash together comedy and tragedy and blur the lines between them - that's completely present in this play. There were two things I felt when I read this play. The first was how "of the moment" it is. I called probably three or four theatres instantly, before I knew this was happening, and said, "This has to be done this season, it actually cannot wait for another two years." The other thing that I felt was actually how taut this play is. I love the way in which its storyline is so pronounced, razor-edged, compared to other things we've worked on. It feels so very honed and sharp and formal, and the narrative really carries it. I was interested in that.
SE: How are you creating this world onstage?
TL: It was so funny because this is the first play of Chuck's I've worked on where there are no stage directions at the beginning, telling you what it looks like. So one of the first questions I asked Chuck was, "Where does this take place, what do you see onstage?" And several months ago he said something like, "Good question," and then, later, maybe it was a beach, and then maybe we talked about tents. But then about a month ago I said, "Chuck, tell me again, where does this take place?" and he said, "The Grand Ballroom at the Plaza Hotel." My mouth just dropped open and I was like, "You have to be kidding." Then I remembered something Chuck told me about when we first worked together, which was a notion about transparencies, like they used in old-fashioned animation. Like in the old Disney days, we could take a cell from Sleeping Beauty so it would be in a forest, and a cell from Little Mermaid, so we could have fish in the forest, and then a cell from Mulan, so we could have a woman with a sword riding on a fish in the forest, and I remember thinking, "Oh that's what this is." So I started thinking, "Yes and it is Aulis, it is America, it is Greece 2000 years ago, it is yesterday, it is a battlefield, it is a wedding site, it is an army camp, it is a cocktail party, and a vaudeville, and a debate, and - it is that and." And we began the design that way; we made a list of possibilities and ingredients and started laying them on top of each other, because every time I tried to make it more sane, the play got smaller to me instead of bigger. The other thing Blythe Quinlan, the set designer, and I knew from the beginning is that we wanted to keep things real, not build fake sets, no fake columns or stones. So we're using real things that are found, which is the way, I think, Chuck constructs things too. We're using the bottles of bleach in the corner of the theatre, the hose that comes out of the wall, the backstage dressing rooms, we're using the architecture of the theatre in a very environmental/installation type way. Oh, and we've got lots of music!
SE: Chuck, do you have anything to add?
CM: No, this is great. Where you're going.
TL: Also, Chuck and I obviously work very collaboratively, and I love casting because, the truth is, I don't know a lot about what this is going to turn out to be before I start work with the actors. Chuck lights a fire and I come and fuel it a little bit, and then I pass it on to the actors and let them take it somewhere I couldn't ever have imagined. So I was asking Louisa [Krause] and Seth [Numrich], who are playing Iphigenia and Achilles, "Oh, do you guys sing? And do you guys play instruments?" And we'll see what they bring into the room, and what their responses are to the material, and who knows where we'll go.
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