Day Sixteen (belated) - LCT Directors Lab

(June 5)

Aubrey Sekhabi is the artistic director of the South African State Theater, a large, six-stage complex in Pretoria that must draw diverse audiences, and serve as both a magnet and developer of the theatrical arts in a country that is both old and very new. Sekhabi spoke unpretentiously and without stopping, for over an hour, telling us of his journey from a township where he made theater in community halls as a teenager, to being the leader of one of the largest theaters in South Africa. Sekhabi spoke with wonder, humor, naturaly humility and joy. His stories were dizzying, beginning in the 1980s during apartheid and carrying him and us headlong into the present. He spoke of arrest and interrogation, long travel to find work, seeking out and losing fellow theater-makers, and a series of improbable successes: all of his experiences seemed always to be punctuated with the notion “That would make a good play!” One amazing example he gave was the real-life tale of an abused woman whose husband would take all the knives from the house after beating her in order to protect himself from her possible retribution. Without the knives, the woman had to peel potatoes and skin chickens with her bare hands. Sekhabi, typically of him, made this into a play. He spoke of other plays he has written and produced that similarly held a mirror up to the lives of those in the audience. I don’t think I have ever been in a room with a theater practitioner so unabashedly enthusiastic, so very intelligent and intuitively committed to the idea that storytelling can change the life of a community.

In the afternoon, we continued our international conversation of the previous day. Beginning with smaller groups, we ended up all together, with perhaps eighty or more people in the room: lab directors and international guests. It was during this session that thoughts gelled and people expressed their ideas more freely – many more ideas than I can possibly relate here. Wouldn’t it be more valuable for a director to go to a different country and, rather than bringing a pet project of his or her own, direct one of their plays, so that the people there could see how they may be seen by a director from the outside world? Is it cultural imperialism for Americans to take plays about The United States to other parts of the globe? Can Americans – in any meaningful way – represent their country culturally? And what is the culture in America anyway? A number of us expressed our desire to travel without an agenda, to be open to learning a new foreign text, and to work with actors in their home countries. Anne proposed the idea of a global “web” of theater spaces that might be made available for rehearsal investigations and/or productions.

More than anything else, I was struck by just how different our cultures are from one another, and at the same time I felt that theater people the world over have much in common. The recent artistic director of the Royal Danish Theater noted that our conversation, so large and non-competitive, would be quite improbable in the political or business worlds: he seemed notably impressed by this. At least a few of us from different countries – in the final days of the lab – began talking with one another about the future. I hope these conversations will continue ...

Finally, a number of participants said they thought that the future of theater must be international. Most of those who said so were from abroad, which I think says something about us here in America. In a comfortable society oversaturated with mass media, much of our theater is perceived as a luxurious leisure activity, not a cultural necessity. Most of us complain about funding, but I think our relative lack of subsidy accurately reflects the priorities of the majority. Is it any wonder that theater in America is dominated by psychological realism, sentimentality and escapism, and that so many of the more serious plays are about minority identities?

In Europe, the evolution of theater seems more closely tied to larger conversations about national identity and more existential questions about cultural reality – questions that have been actively addressed in the post-WWII, post-Communist, and post-European Union periods, respectively. But something else is beginning to happen here, too. In non-institutional settings of late, there has been more work created that is devised from scratch, ensemble-oriented or community-related. Our final guests, Bartlett Sher and Anna Shapiro (about whom I will write in an upcoming post) both expressed their belief that America is undergoing a cultural and political crisis, and a period of important change. I think that the American theater could change in distinct ways, too.

In the evening, many of us went downtown to see Theater Mitu's The Apostle Project, sponsored by New York Theater Workshop. Afterwards, we went to The Scratcher bar on East 5th St.