Steppenwolf Theatre Company, About Face Theatre and Tectonic Theater Project present the world premiere of Tennessee Williams's One Arm, adapted for the stage and directed by Moisés Kaufman. The pairing of Moisés with a powerful text by Tennessee Williams promises a theatrical event that is not to be missed. Moisés is the founder and artistic director of Tectonic Theater Project, with whom he has developed and directed the highly acclaimed plays Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde, The Laramie Project and most recently the Pulitzer- and Tony Award-winning I Am My Own Wife, which began its life here in Chicago. Associate Artistic Director Curt Columbus caught up with Moisés at Tectonic's office in New York City to discuss his fascinating artistic process.
CC: I want to start by talking about your process, because it's fairly unique in the American theater. You don't pick an entire season of plays, you focus on projects as they catch your interest. What led you to create work this way?
MK: My company, the Tectonic Theater Project, is more a laboratory for new works, as opposed to a theater company with a season. I don't find the model of a season of plays very useful. I find it much more useful choosing the work that we really want to do and then spending the time that it takes in developing it. Form must follow ideas in the way you construct your theater company, and not the other way around; so for us to stage four productions a year would have been very unhelpful. Developing The Laramie Project took a year of research in Laramie. In order to do the kind of research we're doing, we need a laboratory where we can work on one or two productions at a time and really give them the time to develop.
CC: So when you're focusing your attention on these pieces, is a lot of the process spent in a singular kind of development, in other words in developing your text, or on group creation?
MK: It varies from piece to piece. I penned Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde, and while it had several workshops, it was mostly me writing. The Laramie Project was much more of a collective effort. We're really interested in theatrical form and in how you create work for the stage. A lot of the way that happens in America is a writer goes into a room and writes a play, and then gives it to the director who stages it. We're trying to fracture that process and see if we can write from the stage. We talk a lot about writing performance as opposed to writing plays.
CC: Can you talk about that with regard to I Am My Own Wife?
MK: When I first got to that project, there was no text. It was the first occasion where we used all of the techniques we'd been developing in Tectonic with a writer outside the company. The playwright, Doug Wright, had done all of his research, but he was blocked when we started. I said to him, tell me why you love the main character, tell me what it was about her that is so interesting to you, but you cannot tell me in words. Tell me in moments on stage. We put Doug in rehearsal with this beautiful actor, Jefferson Mays, and he began really creating theatrical moments, like the moment with the dress, like the moment with the gramophone, like the moment with the Berlin Gay Guide. So, using a lot of the techniques of Tectonic, we were able to develop that play.
CC: So, what is it about Tennessee Williams's One Arm that fascinates you?
MK: There are very few pieces that Williams was trying to get made until the end of his life and never succeeded in making. This is one of them. He wrote One Arm first as a short story in 1945, and rewrote it as a screenplay in 1948. It never got produced because of its openly gay characters, but he never gave up on the piece. The fact is that he wrote it in the 1940s, and while he goes on to write other gay characters, they either get eaten by cannibals in Cabeza del Lobo or they're Brick in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof married to Elizabeth Taylor. Or they're gay men trapped in women's bodies. And here is a representation of something that was very close to his heart and he is writing very openly about it - but the time was never right for it to be spoken during his lifetime. And now is the time to have it be spoken. I'm fascinated by what it would have been like to be a gay writer, a gay artist at that moment in our history. I think it's a way of looking at our literary canon and saying: How much of it is still valid? What happens when we discover pieces by important writers, important contributors to our cultural dialogue that were not, for one reason or another, able to be done then? How does that change our cultural context? But beyond all of that, it's just a beautiful and compelling script. Oscar Wilde talks at length about beauty and what it does for us, and I'm a firm believer in that. I find this to be a glorious work of this brilliant mind.