San Diego Reader

“Theater matters because it’s the only place where one can find hope. Films are manufactured for us, but in the theater, the actors and the audience are getting together to manufacture a narrative, and to me, that’s where hope resides.”

— Moises Kaufman, playwright, 33 Variations, The Laramie Project, etc.

Kaufman’s friend Christopher Ashley, currently in the midst of his first season as artistic director of the La Jolla Playhouse, concurs. For both men, the folks in the seats are not merely a crowd of spectators; they’re participants. “For me,” says Ashley, “there is nothing like being in a live audience, with an actual person on stage, experiencing emotions in front of you. There’s a sort of tightrope thing that happens — everything is being made up in the moment, and anything could happen. There’s a communal experience that’s part church, part circus, and part book club.”

When 9/11 hit, Ashley was running a revival of The Rocky Horror Show on Broadway. “It’s totally ridiculous — a story about how transsexual aliens take over the world. As unpertinent to 9/11 as it’s possible to be.” Pertinent or not, it shut down just like the rest of New York City theater in the attack’s immediate aftermath. “But when we started up performances again a week later, the audience watched it with this electric, jubilant presence: ‘I’m out of the house, and no one has tried to attack me, and I’m together with people, and I’m celebrating being part of a community.’ Going to the theater that night was necessary and important, whether it was light entertainment or serious drama. People needed to be part of a community, together in a theater. When people watch a movie, they’re mostly in their own heads, immersed in the movie. I think people watch a play together…. You’re aware of yourself enjoying the show with other people.”

Of course, that’s coming from a self-diagnosed sufferer of “what Jean Cocteau called ‘the red and gold disease.’ ” By which Ashley means a theater addiction: a love for the red velvet curtain with gold braid. “I suffered from a very early age,” attests Ashley. “Acting as one of the workhouse boys in a production of Oliver! at the Cortland Repertory Theater in upstate New York, it seemed impossibly glamorous at age eight. The sense of community in an acting company was addictive, and staying up four hours past my regular bedtime seemed incredibly bohemian.”

Cortland gave way to Ann Arbor, and Ann Arbor led to Yale, and Yale led to Broadway, and Broadway, after 20-odd years, led to La Jolla. Ashley had wanted to come here ever since the mid-’90s, when artistic director Des McAnuff, the man who had revived the Playhouse in 1983, took what ended up being a five-year break from the position. Ashley applied (unsuccessfully) for the job; he was 30.

Even back then, he recalls, the Playhouse “had a reputation for an adventurous spirit.” He keeps a poster advertising the 1986 season on his office wall; among other shows, the season included a new translation of Sophocles’ Ajax, directed by Peter Sellars. The setting for the play was shifted to the present-day United States, and the final line about the inscrutability of the future was changed to a warning about the future’s ability to “wipe us out” if we aren’t careful. (And of course, in a nuclear era, there are no more godlike warriors, only diabolical weapons.) Also produced: the West Coast premiere of William Hauptman’s Gillette. Hauptman had won a Tony in 1985 after writing the book for Big River. In 2002, Bruce Weber panned a revival of the play in the New York Times:

“I wish I had seen it [in 1986]; perhaps I would now have a clue what Mr. Hauptman had in mind. But as it is, the script is so riddled with juvenilia, borrowed character types and misguided flights of poetic fancy that it feels like the work of a teenager who has seen too many B movies. Either that or Mr. Hauptman was intent on writing a straight play with the cartoon heart of a musical.”

Gillette may not have been entirely successful — or perhaps it merely failed to age well — but Weber’s last sentence does sound like evidence for that “adventurous spirit” Ashley admired. “Those playwrights and directors were such an exciting crowd to bring here. I use the poster to remember what’s become a kind of rule for myself: bring in the most exciting artists you can find, and make sure they can do their best work.”

Moises Kaufman was one of those artists. When Ashley learned in April of 2007 that his second attempt at landing the artistic directorship had proven successful, he was already committed to three directing jobs, including the Broadway musical version of Xanadu (a roller-disco story that had flopped at the box office in 1980, only to be reborn years later on stage in all its glittery glory). “I arrived in La Jolla, and I had about two months to program our first season. The first thing I did was sit down with the staff, and we wrote down on three-by-five cards every project we could think of that would be fun to do. We filled a wall. Then the question was, ‘How do we trim that to six subscription shows, two Edge shows, and a couple of Page-to-Stages?’ ”

Kaufman was an easy choice for Ashley. “Part of my application process was that the board wanted to know what artists I was interested in bringing in. That’s one of the great things about being a producer; I get to support other artists in a way I never could as a freelance director. I developed a list of about 150 writers, directors, designers, and actors, and Moises was right at the top. I’ve known him for 15 years; he’s one of the people I would invite in to dress rehearsals when I was directing to give me supportive feedback. I love his eye, and he’s kind and critical in a really good mix.”

And in 33 Variations, Kaufman had a play in development. That meant it had already debuted at Arena Stage in Washington, D.C., but might still need, as Ashley put it, “another stage to explore itself before it ended up in New York. I saw it in Washington and almost made a call at intermission to offer for him to come here. I was that excited.”

The play tells the story of Katherine Brandt, an ailing musicologist who becomes obsessed with Beethoven’s obsession with a “secondhand waltz” written by music publisher Anton Diabelli. Diabelli invites 50 composers to write a single variation on his waltz; Beethoven winds up writing the titular 33. The play skips back and forth in time, from Katherine to Beethoven and back again, allowing for the occasional chronological mash-up. As she struggles against time to unravel the mystery of Beethoven’s obsession, Katherine must also confront her disappointment with her own “secondhand waltz” — a daughter who is loving but worryingly unfocused, seemingly content to spend herself little by little on this thing and that.

Kaufman was happy to accept Ashley’s invitation. “There was a lot he wanted to work on,” recalls Ashley. “He’s a perfectionist; I think he’s had plays that have been four years in workshops. Here, he kept working right through the previews.”

“I wanted to increase the character of Beethoven,” says Kaufman. “And I wanted to deepen the relationship between the mother and the daughter.”

Ashley elucidates: “In Washington, Beethoven was a much more rudimentary character. He had a lot of stage time but almost no development. The present was where all the complete thinking had happened, and the past was kind of sketched in. Moises wanted to explore the questions of ‘Who is Beethoven? What’s he going through? How is his journey paralleling Katherine’s? How are the two story lines working toward colliding at the end?’ And he fleshed out the way the daughter was debilitated by her mother’s disapproval and how their relationship developed through time. This draft is very different than what he had in Washington.”

There are a number of reasons for that difference. Kaufman’s own questions came first, but those of others followed. “He’s very collaborative,” says Ashley. “Every single night, questions would come up in rehearsals, and he would go home and redraft and rethink.”

Says Kaufman, “I work very much on my feet, with the actors on their feet, improvising, making changes. I do listen to the actors. It was funny — I was directing a couple of episodes of The L Word for television, and I would go on-set and ask an actor, ‘What do you think your character wants at this moment? Why is she behaving this way?’ The actor’s eyes would open up — she was so grateful, really. ‘You really want me to tell you what I think?’ Most of the time, the director just says, ‘Stand over there and say your line,and then come over here and say this other line.’ In theater, you’re in the same room for many hours a day. Remember the scene in 33 Variations where Katherine comes over and sits down at the table and leans her head on Beethoven’s back? That scene doesn’t have a line of text — it was arrived at entirely through improvisation.” Kaufman is quick to acknowledge that there are some film directors who are interested in actors’ opinions, but still, the story plays to his notion of theater as the more communal milieu.

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