Mark Russell, Under the Radar Festival

Tickets for the performances at the 12-day festival range from just $15 to $25—a steal considering the level of innovation on display in these 18 intriguing productions. (There's also a Festival Lounge set up at The Chinatown Brasserie on Lafayette Street, where audience members and artists can connect until the wee hours with live music, DJ, and a cash bar.) We recently spoke with Russell about what's in store for this year's Under the Radar, which begins tonight and runs through Sunday, January 16th. (Peruse the calendar of performances here.)

Correct me if I'm wrong, but are there fewer productions at the Public Theater this year? Yes, because we're under renovation. The Public is going to get a new lobby by 2012 and so there doing all these repairs to the building. It's basically a construction site, but I still have access to two of the theaters here. And we have about nine things that we're directly working with the Public Theater on here. We're also working across the street with 440 Lafayette and in collaboration with La MaMa and Dixon Place.

So it's all in the same general area? Yeah, there's also the Abrons Arts Center, which was going to host a show here and St. Ann's Warehouse. But the core of the festival is between La MaMa, Dixon Place and the Public Theater. We have slightly fewer productions this year. We were at 20 plus last year, and this year we're at 18.

And Reggie Watts is back. Is he becoming the Mascot of Under The Radar? [Laughs] Oh, no. Reggie Watts is an artist we've been working with over the last 3 or 4 years. This is a piece we're even more involved in as far as helping him produce it. And there are going to be artists we are going to be working with more closely through the years.

Can you tell us about the piece he's doing?Dutch A/V is a crazy—it started with the concept of him and two of his friends, Tommy Smith who co-created the piece and this other guy, decided to get these spy sunglasses that can videotape and take sound. And they went to Amsterdam and had sort of a lost weekend in Amsterdam. All of them were wearing these special glasses at the same time synced up, and so what you see in these performances is a three-screen installation. But then it goes on from there—that's just where is started. Of course Reggie took it on beyond that.

I first encountered the Reggie Watts phenomenon at Under The Radar and he's really seen some more success. It is gratifying for you to see someone that you helped mature and go one to bigger things? Yes, it's the best. Although in Reggie's case, when I saw him there was no question that he was going to be a star. And we're just happy to help him do what he wants to do, instead of just being dictated to by the star machinery. And he actually does have a deeper theater side that he wants to explore. And I think he's an amazing voice for this generation and should be heard. And this is another setting he can work in, which isn't just a comedy club or a concert setting.

Is there an overall theme or common elements to this year's festival that you could talk about? It's really hard to get a performance festival to hold still for a theme. But if there is a theme for this one, it's "resistance." It's a pretty political—although with a lot of fun in it—festival. Especially with Ameriville, coming from The Universes; it's about post-Katrina America. Then the Belarus Free Theater is doing Being Harold Pinter. It's a very strong piece based on Harold Pinter's Nobel literary prize speech that he did a few years before he passed. As well as incorporating scenes from his later plays. And the Belorussians devised the piece themselves. When they do performances in their home city Minsk and the authorities find out about them, they come in and arrest the audience and the artists. It's very oppressive; it's not well known that Belarus is a very oppressed country. It's a dictatorship. They have friends who have disappeared; journalists have been assassinated. It's a very tough situation in Belarus, it's sort of like they're still living in 1965 Berlin. On the wrong side.

In 2008, you said you wanted to bring in this show in particular. In 2008 we were only able to get their solo show to come over, but finally we're able to get the full-on ensemble piece, which can hold its own with any ensemble devised work internationally.

How about Jump? Jump is going to be fun; it's a workshop put on by the Public. It's Nora York's response to Tosca and Sarah Bernhardt, who played Tosca—broke her leg doing it—and it's a meditation on fame and oppression. This is just a workshop production, but it's going to have Bill Camp in it and Joan MacIntosh. It's going to be an amazing production, but it's unfortunately not open for review and we're only doing it four times.

I don't want to have to put you in a position where you have to play favorites, and we can't really talk about all the shows, so I don't really how to do this interview! I think you're catching on to maybe the tent poles of this festival. There are a couple of groups coming in for very short visits, people like Gob Squad's Kitchen. Gob Squad is a really well-regarded group, which is made of Englishmen who live in Berlin, and they've taken Warhol's Kitchen movie, with Edie Sedgwick in it, and transferred it back to the stage. But the way Gob Squad does it with all their video and everything, by the end some of the audience members may find themselves on stage playing kitchen.

That's sounds fun. It's pretty amazing. And then there's only a two night visit by some folks from Slovenia, and they're doing Show Your Face, which is an amazing, beautiful puppet show. Beautiful use of puppets. We have another piece that I'm really proud of, Diciembre, which is coming from Chile and it's done by this artist Guillermo Calderón. And he is an amazing director and writer, and he is a voice that should be heard and I'm hoping to make a home for him here at Under the Radar and the Public in the future.

I'm reading the description now, and it takes place a couple of years in the future on Christmas Eve in Santiago. There is a sort of world war going on between Peru, Bolivia and Chile. It's funny—it's a very funny, humorous piece—but also poignant and moving. Do you know Zach Oberzan the Nature of Theater of Oklahoma?

Yes, Rambo Solo was one of my favorite shows last year. Yeah! Well, he's started making his own pieces, and this one is Your Brother. Remember? And he actually got funding from a festival over in Europe to make it. It's about him and his brother. He went into theater, and his brother went did some time in prison, so two different life choices. But when they were kids they made these movies, videos of themselves reenacting these Jean-Claude van Damme movies, so those are sort of in the Rambo Solo style. Then they got back together and started recreating their recreations of these Jean-Claude van Damme movies! So it's multi-level and pretty hilarious but also, again, really touches the heart. He's a really talented man.

Yeah, I totally agree. So you've spent a lot of time traveling, seeing theater in different cities. Where do you think the places are that the most interesting and forward thinking theater is happening now, and how is it happening? It's happening all over in all sorts of small pockets. I was in Bogota and I was seeing a lot of amazing work coming from South America. And that's one of the ways we brought Diciembre here. I think Belgium is also rich with people who are rethinking the theater moment and why we do theater now, in these times. And we have a company called "Berlin." They're from Antwerp—don't ask—and they are doing a piece called Bonanza, which is a based on a visit they did to Bonanza, Colorado, which has a population of 7. And they are doing a piece about it, however there are no actors in the piece. It's a kind of a video installation, if you will. I don't want to give the whole joke away, but it's also an amazingly funny, great piece with its own sort of look at America and small town life in this day and age.

Expanding on that, what do you see changing about theater? Particularly, what used to be called "experimental theater." In broad strokes, how has it changed over the course of, say, the past 10 years to what it is now. What's new? And what do you see in terms of broad trends? It's a really rich area, it's going in all sorts of directions. There are people making things just for headphones for people to go through the theatrical experience, just listening to headphones while walking through a city. I feel in some ways, theater is getting smaller, because for instance we have Chris McElroen, formerly of the Classical Theater of Harlem, doing a piece called Living in Exile, which is going to have an audience of 15. It's really meant to be done in living rooms, and Phobophilia has a limited audience of 24.

So to some extent, theater is maybe reducing the the sauce to its essence, of why we are collected together, and what gets you to collect together. Because you can tell big stories so much easier on big screens, but to get to the real communal heart of why you would go to a theater and not see it on a large screen or in your TV room, is that interactive part of it. And there are companies that are really experimenting with that. They are also experimenting with lots of different media, including puppetry, visual theater, throwing out the text, reinventing texts, collaging texts. I think its a great time for theater these days, because it's still an instrument of resistance, like the Belarus Free Theater. And so many other things.

I feel like even in terms of resisting the dominant culture, it continues to be something exiting right here in America. I think that's the role of theater; to give voice to often overlooked communities. When you look at the role of the gay struggle, there were so many intense gay plays putting out the issues of the gay community before there was an Ellen and before there was an L Word and before all those things began to eventually intersect the mainstream culture. And I still see that today, to what is a particular community's concerns and what is not being put in the larger media. Some of it's not even being YouTubed. [Laughs]

What are a couple things now that you see happening in theater ahead of mainstream culture? I think now it's a little more refined and not as directly political. It's more things of a spiritual nature, or that are moving, or a desire to get together to have an experience together, that is coming out of this right now.

There is so much great stuff to choose from here at Under the Radar. It may be too rich a soup. I don't know. I'm hoping people will jump in, and bounce from show-to-show, and have a great time with it. There are all these things that New York doesn't that much access to, this more intimate theater from abroad, because some of the other organizations don't have that much cash to put towards bringing people, and they're not necessarily going to sell out big halls like BAM or Lincoln center. This is work that I feel is the real cultural exchange, this is the real story going on.

My last question is, there is something in the press release that says you're the director of the Devised Theater Initiative. Could you explain what that is please? [Laughs] The Devised Theater Initiative is the Under Radar office, working year round to develop work not necessarily just for the Under The Radar presentations, like Reggie Watts, that's maybe even ready to moving it towards the main season. The devised work is work that's not text based. We have a literary department [at The Public Theater] that works really hard, and combs through scripts, but what we're covering here—and it's a small two-person department—is international work and work that sort of moves outside the box of theater as we know it. And we struggled with what to call it, so at the moment we're calling it "Devised Theater," although you could come back at me and say, "What isn't devised theater?" At the moment, people are trying to put their finger on this moving target of experimental theater, avant garde theater, performance art, live art—what do you call it? How do you nail it down? In my book it's just good theater, but we're going to call it Devised Theater.