In an era of increasingly shortened attention spans, when most of us prefer to read a Tweet about a blog post rounding up new Superbowl commercials while half-watching a recap of last week's Vanderpump Rules and having workmanlike sex with someone whose name escapes us, how is it that all the performances for a ten and a half hour play are sold out? We haven't seen Life and Times yet—it premiered last night at the Public Theater—but part of the show's automatic appeal can no doubt be attributed to the talents behind the production: Nature Theater of Oklahoma, which has a reputation for crafting idiosyncratic and entertaining theater out of highly unexpected sources. We've been enamored since 2007, when we wandered blind into their breakout show No Dice, a surprisingly fascinating four hour performance piece adapted from prerecorded telephone conversations.
No Dice was followed up with the equally successful productions Rambo Solo and Romeo and Juliet, both of which we loved. Now the company, founded by husband-and-wife team Pavol Liska and Kelly Copper (and named from a passage in a Franz Kafka story) is back in the spotlight with Life and Times, Episodes 1-4, which is being produced by SoHo Rep as part of the Under the Radar Festival. Mark Russell, the festival's founder, explains it thus:
The story is just this woman's life, this person, that Liska called up. She works with him, and he said, "Tell me your life story." He thought it would be two hours long, he'd tape it. And she just started going, and sixteen hours later, she was up to the age she is. And so, he decided that this text is going to be his work of the next probably ten years. Liska and Copper are making this mega opus out of this sort of banal story of someone's life from Connecticut, growing up and going through everything.
But it's not a catastrophic life; it's a pretty nice life. And yet... you get into this place when you're watching this musical—because the first part of it is set to ukelele music, with a large cast—and you get into sort of running your own life story up against her remembrances of her life story, and it turns into this sort of communal reminiscence and understanding of the present, that is pretty powerful, and really special. And after I saw it for 11 hours, I could have gone for another 24. And this only brings us halfway through, so eventually we will get there.
Earlier this week we spoke with Liska and (briefly) Copper by phone about their work (unless otherwise indicated, Liska is the one talking, due to technical difficulties on Copper's line). And it's worth noting that while tickets for the marathon performances are sold out, there are still tickets available for the individual episodes. Details here.
I didn't realize until after I'd seen No Dice that it was transcribed from actual conversations. Well, it wasn't transcribed. The text was edited in audio, we always work with audio not with script, so the script was delivered, the text was delivered, to the actors via their iPods [during the performance].
How and why did you come upon this way of working? You mean generating text by recordings? Well, we wanted to give ourselves an obstruction and not write, not use pen and paper to write a play, because we consider theater to be an oral art form, and the language was eventually going to be spoken. So we wanted to generate it by speaking and not by writing. And we wanted to generate it socially, because theater is a social art form, a social and oral art form. So we gave ourselves a challenge to generate it socially and orally, and the easiest way to do that was to call people and talk to people on the phone and record our phone conversations.
So No Dice incorporated various phone conversations? Yeah, well, over the course of a year, I generated about a hundred hours of raw material, and Kelly made a play out of it.
So, that must have been an intense process, Kelly. How do you even begin something like that with all that material? Kelly Copper: We listened to it all together and just made notes on what was interesting to us and where there were common themes, and then I edited the audio file. We tried not to put any kind of words to paper, so we worked only with the audio files and made a lot of audio files that we then brought it into rehearsal. We fed them directly into the actor's ear using iPods, because everyone had an iPod and that was a very cheap way to work and to see some of the material on its feet really quickly. They would speak whatever they heard in their ear, trying to keep to the exact same timing and language as the original.
Life and Times (Reinhard Werner-Burgtheater)
How has that process evolved? We are not using the inner ear monitors to deliver the text, because we wanted to challenge ourselves in other ways, and we decided to transcribe the phone call and set it to music. So the music is the keeper of time. Ultimately the most important thing for us in composing No Dice was that we are in charge of time. That Kelly and I are able to control time, and the performers control the transformation of the text into performative text. Now we have found a different way of controlling time, which is through music, in episode one and episode two. Yeah, so, we still use a phone call, but we decided to transcribe it and compose music.
Can you tell us about this phone call? Well, in No Dice, if you remember, I kept asking people "Can you tell me a story?" And nobody was really able to tell a story. Everyone found an excuse. And in the process of not being able to tell a story we told many, many stories. But that question didn't get answered in No Dice, so we continued this process and I said, "Let me ask people a story that I feel like they should know and that everyone around the world knows." So I asked them to tell me the story of Romeo and Juliet. So everyone had a version of the story of Romeo and Juliet and out of these phone calls we had our project Romeo and Juliet.
And I also knew that one of the performers knew the story of First Blood, the story on which Rambo was based, and he told me the story of First Blood and then we made a project called Rambo Solo. Then, we still didn't answer the question of storytelling—we wanted to find a story that is also a common story but is a personal story, a personal autobiography. So I called one of the company members and I asked her to tell me the story of her life.
And how old is she? Well, now she is 40; she was 34 back then. All of this material, all of this audio material that we have been working with in the past seven years was generated within the span of one year, and we're combing through that material and working through it now. And so, for Life and Times, she told me the story of her life. I expected to generate one phone call and have material for one show. But at the end of the first phone call, she, Kristin Worrall, was only at age eight. So we decided to call again, and at the end of the second call she was only at age 14. Etc., etc., until we had ten phone calls. So the material for Life and Times is ten phone calls worth 16 hours. 16 hours of material. And each of the phone calls is its own separate episode.
Life and Times (Reinhard Werner-Burgtheater)
So, you're presenting one through four. How many episodes do you foresee in the entire piece? There are ten phone calls, so ten episodes.
People can watch this marathon production as part of Under The Radar. How long is that? That's going to be ten and a half hours, which includes food and breaks.
Why do you think this works, telling someone's life story like this? Most stories are condensed down to the most heightened moments. What did you find through this process that makes it interesting? I think when you condense a story, then you expect the audience to pay attention 100%, all the time, because everything has equal importance. When you allow this story to be told in the way we actually do tell stories, you allow the audience to get away from the story that they're being told and get involved in their own story, or get involved in other processes that are happening during the performance.
The story is not the number one priority for us. We are not really concerned about the story, we are using the story as a way to connect and reconnect for the audience. Our goal is always to just create. To structure time for the audience, and they can go in and out of it. When the story is distilled and structured it takes on primary importance and you have to pay attention to it all the time. Whereas we... we foster the "getting lost".
Do you envision all the episodes, one through ten, ultimately being performed in one marathon production? Yes, that is something that we're working towards. So we are continuously adding to that and we're thinking about, as we make the shows, about what time of night or day they are being performed and structuring them based on how a human mind proceeds, and how it gets tired and what it needs during a particular time during the day. Hopefully at the end, I'd say five years more, we'll have the whole 24 hour performance finished.
Will there be beds for people to take naps? Yeah, we were thinking about something, a way of allowing them to sleep during a performance or at least closing their eyes. So during episode six we will actively encourage people to actually fall asleep.
Life and Times (Reinhard Werner-Burgtheater)
Is this a world premiere, have you performed this yet? This is an American premiere. We have been performing these shows for the past three years all over the world.
What kinds of reactions have you gotten from the audience? Well, some people walk out, obviously those are always in there. We're used to those reactions in these shows. But less people walk out, less and less, and then people are very enthusiastic, people are actually more hungry for the longer shows, for the marathon performances. Even here in New York, we always keep telling people that, "No, the ten and a half hour production is the one to do." But the presenters say we should give people the option to see them piecemeal. And, ultimately, they have a hard time selling those individual episodes because people, I think, are mostly hungry for that all-encompassing, transformative, radical experience of seeing the piece in its entirety.
Do you have any theories about why that is? I'm also thinking of that Elevator Repair Service production, Gatz, which was eight hours long and a huge success. Is there something going on in our culture where people are really— I think so, I think that people are desperate for mystical experiences. I know I am. There's just less and less of that type of experience. I feel like we have kind of given up on drugs as a way of [getting] into another dimension.. you know, the sixties and seventies where there was a big drug culture and people had revelatory experiences and the LSD and all that stuff and marijuana [laughs]. And now we're trying to figure out how to do that again—how to have life transforming, enlightening experiences and this is one of the ways.
You know, I have never been enlightened even after seeing the best show ever for an hour and a half. I've always been enlightened or transformed when I've had to endure something, when I had to go through something, when I was bored, or when I was upset, or when there was a complexity of my own reactions to the work, rather than being presented with something of high quality at a constant rate for an hour and a half.
