Are the men in the play called midgets or dwarves; what is the preferred nomenclature? Okay, the most sophisticated word is a French one; they refer to them as little lilliputs, from Lilliputian. But actually the accepted term is "little people." "Midget" is a no-no. Midget is like "nigger." And "dwarf" is a possible term, but that really applies to the specific medical condition of dwarfism.
Is it difficult to find actors who could fill the roles and rise to the level of Mabou Mines, while also meeting the height requirement? Almost impossible. Because most of the little people are trained to do little comedy bits, portray elves in a Christmas show, or be leprechauns. And none of them get the chance to play real classical roles, so it's very, very rare that you find short-stature actors—another term you can use is a short-stature—who have had the training to do what I've asked them to do. And a lot of them developed tremendously as the show moved along. I think the performance is twice as good now as when we started.
Richard Termine
Is it the same cast as when it originally premiered? It's exactly the same cast. Except there is a different woman playing Kristine. She came in when the woman who was originally in the role got sick after three years and had to leave the cast. But everyone else is the same.
It's been going on for years now. Has it been difficult for the performers to sustain their energy and excitement during such a long run? It's been very, very positive, because we've done five years of touring and we have enough space in between, so everybody got a bit of a rest. And I kept changing it; the production has gotten 40 minutes shorter. I've eliminated one intermission and made many changes; I'm still consistently making changes.
Why do you think the production has been so successful? Most revivals of classic plays are performed for a month and then they disappear. I wish I knew. I think we're very lucky. The inspiration first came in 1968 when I saw a Brecht-adapted production of Coriolanus. It's the first time I saw a tragedy turned into a comedy, and they also did it with scale. Because the two stars of the Berliner Ensemble represented the patriarchy and they were about five feet tall, and the armies were about 6'5". And it worked for sending up the aristocracy, so I thought the same idea would work for setting up the patriarchy.
I noticed some little people in the audience last night. Have they been coming to see the show around the world and what is their reaction? We've had almost exclusively positive reaction by all the little people who have come to see it. No one has been offended. I think they understand that it is a chance for them to do roles that they would never be cast in otherwise.
I don't feel like the production parodies little people at all but I'm wondering if you had some trepidation at first when you were directing it. I never asked the guys to do anything that they objected to. Some of the more dangerous moves like when Death carries out Dr. Rank or when Mark [Povinelli, who plays Torvald] is lifted up and things like that... I was very clear we are all in this together, we all knew we were making an ironic judgment on patriarchy and were using scale to do that. I said to Mark, "What do you think about being lifted like this?" And he said, "Well, lets try it and see if it works." We're very professional and very positive and that helps make the show work. Of course they knew their size was being used and they collaborated on how to do it. When it gets really dangerous, like Mark's nudity when he takes his pants off... Once when we were in France, a lot of students cat-called and whistled and we cut it out. But then when were were in a more sophisticated city, we put it back and it worked fine.
Have you gotten a different reaction depending on what country you go to? Absolutely. This is the most interesting thing. I've found there's a difference between a patriarchal culture and a macho culture. I thought we were going to get a lot of trouble from big macho cultures like Australia or Spain or stuff like that but they loved it in these countries. But then I found there were patriarchal societies that really objected to it. The two worst were really Israel, and the other one was North Carolina at the Spoletto Festival. They were very conservative and they really objected to a great number of things in the production, and they were kind of nasty about the little people, making comments like, "The circus is in town," and things like that.
They really had some problems with the height issues and there were some nasty comments in Israel about little people as sexual objects and size and sexuality. Very often Margaret [Lancaster, who plays Helene] was asked how she would like to go to bed with a little person. It was really out of line, I think. Most of the time it's been very accepted but then a few people really look at it like a gimmick and want to get to the bottom of it and are very nasty about it.
What do you think your approach reveals about the play? There was a very interesting book written about Ibsen by a woman, a scholar at Duke University, I believe. And she made the point that Ibsen was usually credited with inventing realism, but in actuality he was a modernist. Because if he wasn't a modernist, if he didn't have the structure of a modernist, you couldn't have taken a deconstructive or postmodernist take on it like we did. We shook up the modernism, in a way, and deconstructed it. And what I think was most interesting was to find out that you could make it work; you could get to the poetry under this kind of realism and you could send it up and still play with the melodrama, you could play with all those images and still it would hold together as a pretty great work.
I think that it truly did define feminism for the stage. It was the first major feminist statement and probably is still one of the greatest major feminist statements. Of course feminism has changed, and you can send it up a little bit. It was very romantic at the time; it was, you know, a classic liberal statement. However, what we tried to do is find a bridge to the present, to take these politics out of 1850 and 1860 and bring them to now by adding a kind of post-Beckettian point of view, adding irony. There wasn't this kind of irony originally in the script but there was the potential for it to be there.
Is that where the ending comes in? Let me tell you the story of the ending. We understood that Ibsen was not really a cutting-edge feminist. In fact, he often denied being a feminist at all. And his wife was a big feminist. He was kind of dragged along into feminism and he always did things just to create a liberal interest in humanitarian issues, not so much women's issues. But we feel that all of this philosophizing at the end was really pretty cornball now. And it really wasn't philosophy, it was more like an anthem. It wasn't revolutionary philosophy, it was like La Marseillaise. And in that sense you had to sing it. In that sense it was the operatic melodrama, and in that sense we had to do fake Puccini or fake Verdi.
And we found out that singing it really was the right way to do it, because it really emphasized—and at the same time balanced with irony—the romanticism and the liberal statements at the time. We really thought that if you have an anthem, you've got to sing it. It was just like La Marseillaise, you know. Women are marching out, you have women climbing the barricades and they've got to be singing!
Have you seen any theater lately that you've enjoyed? You know I haven't particularly gone to the theater lately. I don't go to a lot of shows. I really liked Waltz with Bashir a lot. I liked particularly the very intricate use of animation, and in a way that's what I'm trying to do on the stage. I'm trying to play with style and use elements that would be done in a complex, animated sense like Waltz with Bashir. I did see Martha Clarke's The Garden of Earthly Delights and I was pretty impressed, that was pretty nice. Martha is a good friend and I had never seen it the first time around. We just saw it recently and I really was impressed. I thought she put it together very beautifully.
So you don't see much of what used to be called "experimental theater" that's being performed by these new companies? You know we were part of Under the Radar, but we've been performing and touring so much I rarely get around to catch up on everybody. I see my friend's stuff; Basil Twist had a great drag show in Arias with a Twist and I dug that quite a bit, too.
How do you think the Mabou Mines approach to theater differs from your contemporaries, like Richard Foreman? We really differ from both Richard and Liz LeCompte [The Wooster Group]. This is it: we have a certain approach to acting that is a mixture of motivational and formal. It's a mixture of Stanislavsky and Reinhold. I'm a member of the Actor's Studio, I love old-style motivational acting, Brando and Dean and all that stuff. And at the same time I love formalism. Richard is a total formalist; he's not interested in knowing much about acting. He's an artist and he does really interesting work and is very visual and very dynamic, but he's not interested in the psychology of acting. I'm interested in the balance between psychology and formalism, and being able to go back and forth.
That's why a lot of the stuff in DollHouse is kind of moving and then suddenly we step back and make jokes about it. Now Liz for the same part is very technologically oriented, a very, very brilliant director, but also more interested in the formalistic elements. She's more interested in acting than Richard, but more in the formalistic sense. She's always had some great actors; Ron Vawter was a great actor. Spalding was a great actor. Kate Valk is a great actor. But their approach is mostly formalistic. We're a little bit more complex and, in a way, old-fashioned, in that we try to mix up the formalism with motivational acting.
I go down to the Actor's Studio; Harvey Keitel is my friend, Morgan Freeman was my friend, All of these are old-style actors who deal with motivational and film-style acting. Liz, for example, Liz has a very modernistic, formalistic approach to acting and it's very strange that Willem [Dafoe] became a movie star because he was trained in this very formalistic approach. I think the epitome of great Wooster Group acting was Ron Vawter and I actually feel that we're onto something new, this combination of the motivational and formalism, going back and forth where the formalism makes jokes about the motivational and the motivational takes the formalism and deeply embeds it in psychology.
When that happens it does feel very contemporary with what other newer experimental groups also do now, where there's no hard line drawn between the formalism and also having this deeply-felt, emotional approach to performance. We work very hard at trying to combine the two, really.
Does the DollHouse tour end here or does it continue performing elsewhere. What's next for you? I think that this is it. We've been touring for five years, and we've come back to where we started. And the big joke about this is that we've made it across almost every ocean in the world but we couldn't make it across the river to Manhattan. But I think that's fine because I think we belong in St. Ann's. I think it's really good that we didn't get picked off and taken over and try an off-Broadway run and all that stuff. I think it's better that we stay in our world, which is St. Ann's. It's not even the Brooklyn Academy. Brooklyn Academy has moved on to a much more international and star-studded cast of characters. St. Ann's is our home. I'm glad that we're back and I'm glad it's a success there.
We've got many things going; we've been commissioned to do a show for the Moscow Art Theater and a couple things in the future. And also a little thing that I did for Under the Radar may eventually be at the New York Theater Workshop next year. So there's some new stuff cooking but I think we're going to table DollHouse for a while. But we're not destroying the set in case something fabulous comes up. Like if we get the chance to go to London, I think we'd go.
