nytheatre voices Tim Cusack, Jason Jacobs, David Koteles Bald Diva http://www.nytheatre.com/nytheatre/voiceweb/v_cusack.htm

[Recently Tim Cusack sat down with Jason Jacobs and David Koteles, the director and playwright of Theatre Askews inaugural production, Bald Diva! The Ionesco Parody Your Mother Warned You About. Full disclosure and warning to the reader: Tim is a member of the cast, so any pretense of journalistic objectivity was abandoned at the door of the upper Broadway restaurant where this interview took place. The reader should also be alert for instances of self-serving encomiums, cliquish in-jokes, and desperately futile attempts at emotional distance from a project all three men have been working on for over a year.] Cusack: Lets pretend I dont already know the answers to all these questions. For a warm-up well start with an easy one: How do you know each other? Jacobs: We met in that bathroom stall. Koteles: Ah, yes. Cusack: Well, THATS something I didnt know. Jacobs: Actually, we both started the MFA graduate program at Columbia the same year. We quickly found some common threadswe both grew up in LA Koteles: And being gayand being older than most of the other people in our program. Cusack: I understand that Bald Diva! began as a class project. Jacobs: My group of directors was studying Ionesco in Anne Bogarts second-year class. We had the choice to do a play by Ionesco or about Ionesco or create a new piece inspired by him. Cusack: Why Ionesco? Jacobs: She felt that his time was comingthat he was on the brink of rediscovery. A lot of what Ionesco was writing about was the absurdity of life in the face of death. He was a voice of fear and paranoia. Koteles: PostWorld War II. Jacobs: Right. He was writing in the aftershocks of the war. Koteles: Here everyone forgot the war as soon as it was over, but it was very different in Europe. Jacobs: Well, actually, I think post-war complacency is a big part of the Bald Soprano. Cusack: Why not just direct one of the existing plays? Wouldnt that be easier? Jacobs: Believe it or notI thought this would be easier. I had a strong personal and spiritual connection to the idea of transposing Bald Soprano to contemporary Chelsea. By channeling Ionesco and invoking him, but in this new way, I could make a piece that was actually personal. Cusack: Which you couldnt have with any of the other plays? Jacobs: Not as easily. At some point very early in the process I read the play and thought what it would be like to do a gay version of it. The problem is that Ionesco creates this very specific, English, heterosexual world. Cusack: So thats where David came in? Jacobs: I knew immediately that David was the writer for it because of what we had discovered the previous year about our shared vision and because we come from similar backgrounds. I dont think we had talked about the Chelsea boy phenomenon, but I was sure he was familiar with that world. Koteles: I thought it was a good idea but that he was out of this mind if he thought I was the right writer for it. Then again, I had played Mr. Smith in high school. Cusack: What is it with high school productions of the Bald Soprano? Do teenagers get the play? Koteles: I know we didnt understand it in high school. Jacobs: Yeah, but think about itsix basically equal roles evenly divided between men and women. One set. Koteles: And if someone forgot a line it didnt matteryou could just make something up. Roger Martin, who played Mr. Martin, would just keep repeating Bananas, bananas if someone dropped a line, and wed go on from there. Cusack: Does the present cast ever do anything like that with your play? Koteles: (laughs) They better not. But seriously, I really wanted to work with Jason againand he kind of implied that it wouldnt be a lot of work (laughs) What really sold me was when Jason had the creative team over to his apartment to read through the original play and hearing this certain actor* read the role of Mrs. Smith got me excited to do it. I was terrified to say yes, but I said yes because it felt right. The key thing that came out of that first discussionand I think it was that actor who articulated it so wellwas the parallel between the conformity of the post-war bourgeoisie in Europe and the contemporary, urban, affluent, post-AIDS gay culture in Chelsea. Jacobs: Both groups had lived through this horrible experience and now they just wanted to have a comfortable life, but the price for that is a certain conformity and lack of individual spirit. That crystallized for me what the mission was of the projectwhat we were looking for. Koteles: So that unnamed actor wasnt merely a brilliant performer, but had tremendous insight. Cusack: Was this actor in subsequent productions? Jacobs: We couldnt get rid of him. David, why dont you talk about writing the roleits such a marriage of actor and part. Koteles: For me when I writewhen its workingI hear the voice of the character. But in this process, from the beginning, after hearing this actor read Mrs. Smith, the character existed for me. He wasnt born in my head; he was born in the rehearsal room and brought into my head. Jacobs: You have to tell him about our lunch meeting over the pile of magazinesHX, Metrosource. Koteles: We had our piles of gay rags and a copy of Bald Soprano. Jason and I collected everything we could get our hands on that were images from the gay community. Interestingly, Ionesco wrote Bald Soprano by creating a kind of collage out of the phrases from an English grammar book. Jacobs: The characters came from the book also. Koteles: We felt that our play existed somewhere in those magazines. Jacobs: Theyre the way gay men learn the language of being gay. I think the images contained in those publications have such power over us as gay men in terms of telling us who were supposed to be. And it works on so many different levelswhether you want them to affect you or not. Koteles: A lot of the experience of writing the play was a painstaking process of going line by line through the original and trying to translate the Ionesco into its gay essence. Jacobs: But the plays moved more and more into its own being. It doesnt require knowledge of the Bald Soprano to enjoy it or understand it. Its really a new piece. Its a gay absurdist play, and I dont think theres been anything like that since Charles Ludlam. Cusack: So is the play anti-Chelsea? Jacobs: I think the play is a critique of the culture and not of individuals. We see these characters as casualties of the culture, so were very sympathetic to them even as we make fun of them. Koteles: I think were making fun of ourselves as well. I dont feel that removed from the gay community. Cusack: And yet I detect a lot of rage in the text. Koteles: I think its healthy rage. I think gay men have a lot to be angry about and I think its healthy. Didnt we learn anything from Larry Kramer? Jacobs: My rage comes from when I see the oppression happening within the culturethe ways gay men oppress other gay men. Ive always found that unfathomable. Cusack: You started this piece before the whole Queer Eye cultural moment. Jacobs: It seems in the year after we first did the piece theres been this explosion of gay men suddenly being the hottest thing in mainstream pop culture. The context within which were doing the play has completely changed. This popular image of gay men is now tied to capitalism, commodification, and consumerism. Koteles: Its brought the worst values of gay culture to the wider world. It teaches us that its just important to look good, have the right apartment. Its all about appearances which in turn is equated with being happy and successful. Jacobs: There have been times in the past when the gay community has been intensely political and cohesive and effective. Koteles: It used to be about creativity and liberation, but the last ten years have become about assimilation. What ever happened to the idea about us being different and fighting for acceptance of who we are? Jacobs: Before I came out, I had this vision of a gay fraternity or brotherhood, and wed all love and support each other. I dont know if that ever existed, but what I found was that its all about competition and status and how much money you make. Maybe I was just being naïve. Koteles: Maybe the play has so much anger in it because Im poor and cant afford Prada shoes. *All references in the article to this certain actor or that actor are to the interviewer.