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Photo Melenie Freedom Flynn
André Gregory talks theater, and why he likes the danger of the unexpected and unplanned-for. |
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André Gregory events cancelled
By Lauren Johnson
Banner Correspondent
Avant-garde theater director André Gregory was scheduled to be featured in two special benefits for the Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theater but both events were cancelled after press time. The first night a screening of the now-classic film “My Dinner With André” (1981) had been scheduled; on the second, Gregory was to perform his play “Bone Songs.”
(Web editor’s note: We are using the web to announce this cancellation. Despite the cancelled events, we thought our readers might still enjoy this interview with Gregory.)
The playwright’s screened-in porch overlooking the Truro woods is certainly a dramatic, if not theatrical, setting for a talk with one of theater’s most unusual and influential directors — one who has always avoided theaters as setting for his work. Sitting barefoot, nursing a cup of tea at the home he shares with wife, Cindy Kleine, André Gregory could be your favorite uncle, or the insightful English professor from undergrad that you never could quite forget. Except that he isn’t. André Gregory is, instead, by his own admission, a dangerous man — or, at least, a dangerous artist.
“‘Bone Songs’ is different every time I perform it, which of course adds an element of danger,” he says. “In Los Angeles [at REDCAT, where it received outstanding reviews], I found the audiences fascinating — not jaded, much more demonstrative than a New York audience. One night, I was talking about Cape Cod, and one man stood up and said, ‘You pretentious shit, why don’t you go back to Cape Cad and leave us alone!’ Another night, one of my distant cousins was in the audience, and he shouted out that my stories about my family just weren’t true.” Gregory smiles over his steaming tea. “That’s the kind of theater I like.”
It’s not only in its relationship to the audience that “Bone Songs” treads dangerous territory, but also in how it explores the landscape of pain and loss. The play was inspired by Gregory’s wife Chiquita, who died of breast cancer at age 53. It chronicles, non-linearly, the relationship of a married couple — the peak experiences of their life together. But it is much more than a relationship play, and Gregory is quick to point out that it is “no more autobiographical than any other work.” And it has evolved, over the 23 years he has been working on it, into a meditation on the mysteries of time, and on the importance of speaking the truth to those you love.
“It was the structure of the piece that kept changing as I worked on it. It is influenced by Solomon’s Song of Songs; in fact, I kept the quote ‘Love is as strong as Death’ on my desk as I wrote the play.” When asked why he finally chose a structure and stuck with it, Gregory smiles again and says, “I was forced to. I had a deadline.” (The play was published by Theatre Communications Group in 2006.)
“Bone Songs” is also about the relationship of the storyteller to the audience — who is this narrator, and how true is what he is telling us? Is he talking about his own life (he is) or about a fictional life (he is) or about something he thinks he remembers (he is) or about something we remember from our own experience when we hear him speak? And how reliable is any of it, when you come down to it? How real is memory? A “Bone Songs” audience must decide for itself.
“Bone Songs” has had many different incarnations onstage. While it is most often performed by Gregory alone, as it will be at WHAT, the piece has also had numerous other productions, most recently at Dickinson College in Pennsylvania and at the Pendragon Theatre in upstate New York. When the play was performed in New York at the 92nd Street Y in May 2006, writer Deborah Eisenberg and actor Larry Pine — Gregory’s friend and long-time colleague — joined him onstage as the married couple.
“I’m interested in an active, not a passive, culture,” Gregory says. “This [upcoming performance] will be the first time I have done anything in a large theater since 1965.”
Why is this?
“Because I think film has changed our way of seeing — the size of the screen is so large that no one has to strain to see the images. In large theaters on Broadway, for example, the audience is so far away … you can’t see the actor’s faces … a smaller theater allows a true engagement with the experience. I like to keep my audiences to 40 people at the most.”
Clearly, in today’s theater this is not practical — André Gregory has never, as an artist, been interested in the practical — another reason he was often considered to be a dangerous man by producers, theater owners (and accountants, no doubt). He is interested, rather, in what engages the audience, in what changes from night to night, from performance to performance, from day to day.
And what does he do now, in the day to day, in Truro? He paints. Looking at his paintings, the Gregory danger is not necessarily evident, but happiness is.
“As a young man — a dank, driven Russian — I was attracted to plays. All plays are dark. But now, as an older man, as a painter, I am attracted to the light. One thing that the experiences of ‘Bone Songs’ taught me is that each piece fits … that things are as they should be. If I had not lost Chiquita, I never would have met Cindy. You could say I found my structure.”
Or you might just say that André Gregory is a happy man.
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Cunningham to read in HRC benefit
Bruce Vilanch in single show
Outer Cape Gallery Listings
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Jul 12th, 2007