Telephone interview with Donald Forrest, co-artistic director, director of Education Through Art

By Mark McKenna

Mark McKenna: What is pretty remarkable about Dell’Arte is that you three artistic directors have been there for a long time. You talked about not only getting good people, but people who were ready for nesting. Have you felt the need to have other folks? Have you wanted to expand?

Donald Forrest: From the beginning we have been privileged to work with really excellent people. In terms of the nucleus of building a company, it was a group of three or four people who were really ready and willing to put down roots, what I used to call, jokingly, downwardly mobile. You had to take less money and prestige than jobs might have offered in L.A. or New York. You did that because you could control the artistic product in a way that you couldn’t in any other place. We began working together, and continued working together, because the product was strong and we had a sort of unspoken group belief in the work, that it was important work. That was the core of the company.

When we hired people to come in it was often not to join the ensemble or become a part of the governance, not to take on roles within the school or the other programs that Dell’Arte was involved in. It was strictly to work in the acting company. We were able to get fairly high quality people to job in for the shows because we were able to put out a consistently quality product. Before Steve also made roots here we had people from the San Francisco Mime Troupe and the Pickle Family Circus. Victoria Thatcher, Andrea Snow – all very accomplished actors. Peter Coors was here for two seasons. People with long histories who share a vocabulary with us from their work in the Mime Troupe, who had also great juggling skills and were fairly evolved in what we are calling the hybrid of circus and theater. If we told them that we were evolving a play in a cartoon mode of presentation, they knew what we were talking about. That was good.

The essence of it is that if we would have had a pick-up company, if there was just an artistic director who was picking up actors from in and around the area for each show, we wouldn’t have had the freedom to play our plays as consistently and as often as we did in the early years.

MM: You talked about finding others with a common vocabulary and reference points to the work. In your response to me you talked about being a throw back from the future in the movement and theater field. Can you talk more about that?

DF: Disney is now working a lot of the concepts on Broadway that they perfected in their theme park, the giant mask that has a kind of disembodied, or sometimes sampled or prerecorded voice attached to it. It is kind of a money-saving technique. Steven Spielberg and George Lucas defined in "Star Wars" that the lead characters would be robots or musclemen in a giant suit, and they would hire James Earl Jones to do the voiceover. The way we worked is really more on an older model than the traveling commedia dell’artes. We were like a Greek company, in that in any given show we tried to fill all the parts with three or four actors. Always playing multiple roles, and the virtuosity extended to things like fast changes and your ability to double in special effects, your ability to play three or four characters with an instantaneous change. Those seem like really ancient values. They are the values from the Greek theater. But also, the commedia companies was the first time women appeared on stage. Women took on leading roles. Certainly Joan has always been in a leadership role in the company. If not in terms of practical management, certainly in terms of a certain feminist thought and ideological leadership.

When I say a throw back to the future, it is because we believe that the future is emerging. The actors are on the stage and there is some human beneath the costume. The players are on stage treating the audience as though we were all playing with them, responding to things that are happening in the audience when appropriate, using the audience’s timing that differs from night to night, from town to town, given the demographics of your audience. It is a different speed of comedy in San Francisco, in New York, in Bethlehem and in Blue Lake. A great company can play all of those and get the right response to get the show to move and play. I think that is what the audience of the future is going to demand. We perceive the physical theater that we do, the ensemble work that we all do, the in-depth investigations that we do – the old shamanistic role of the theater to grapple with the unknown, with the fears of a community, the hidden secrets of a community. To grapple with them and to process them in our own hearts and to share – that is the shamanistic role of the theater . We believe, even though it is ancient, that it is the future. "Throwback to the future" is actually something that I meant precisely.

MM: There aren’t that many places that an actor can go, besides Dell’Arte, to learn about availability to an audience and the virtuosity that you are talking about. Do you think a future for theater like that is viable? How do you see other companies falling into step to that?

DF: I can speak from my own journey. I trained in the college in classics, and speech, and stuff and then I went to New York. I worked in the off-Broadway scene, where you do three plays in three weeks. At the same time, I was training as an acrobat so that I could work in the circus and actually make money. I went from that to developing a street act. I played that on the streets of San Francisco for five years. I made more money doing that than I did in a Broadway play. It was very lucrative, but it was very limiting. You had to be a good athlete to work on the street. You had to be a master of the audience’s eye. Think of all the incredible distractions when you are working at Fisherman’s Wharf or Union Square, a huge amount of diversions. You have to be loud and boisterous. What I missed was doing any kind of delicate work. When I got the opportunity to work at Dell’Arte with lights and an indoor theater, and I could be funny without keeping the clubs up in the air all the time, I was so happy. It was the right hybrid of circus and theater. We could be loud and commanding, overwhelming. But we could also do the quiet stuff.

People that are coming up – where they are working on the street in big hats, working outdoor festivals – they are not able to develop also the quiet skills where you get a whole audience leaning forward, where you can hear a pin drop while you wait, where the audience is watching just your hands. You can find actors that are interested in that kind of virtuosity, but it is rare now to see someone who is developing them in an eclectic fashion – like going from the circus to the street to the outdoor theater to the indoor theater to mime training to acrobatic training. I think that is unique. I think all of those things go into making a complete performer today. Again, that is an ancient idea. You need to have the soul of an actor, the heart of the poet, the hands of the mime and the body of a gymnast. You need all those things, and strength, a lot of strength. I think the day has passed where you can hit your mark on stage and look good in the costume. There is no doubt that the British can really talk. To hear them handle Shakespeare or any text, they can really talk. But it is more than that now.

MM: How you have been able to really hook in and let the community really express itself in ways that they may not have done without you guys there. What kind of impact do you think that has had on your community?

DF: The first piece we really created as actors was "Intrigue at Ah-Pah". By that time we had been living in the community for a year. Joan, Michael and I were fishing constantly with both Natives and rednecks. We knew them. They became the inspiration for the plays. The things that they dreamed about were just as important and universal and far-reaching as the things that people in New York and London dream about. Those people that inhabit our world up here became the people of our plays: a newsboy, a logger, a big-machine operator, a down-an- out vet, a social worker, the person who does the government checks, a mill worker who is unemployed. Those are the people that we knew in the bar. This ["Intrigue at Ah-Pah"] was a play about Indians and rednecks and fishing – fishing wars. A lot of it was between fishermen and Indian gill netters. We discovered that they maybe had more in common than they thought.

We had a really funny, offensive way of censoring ourselves. If we said something that was going to offend the conservative, redneck aspect of our audience, we would say to ourselves and to each other, "Marge, take the kids to the truck and bring me back the shotgun." If we thought we were going to offend Indians, we made the sound of an arrow hitting a target. It became real simple. If someone said something that we knew was going to be offensive to the crowd that hung out at the Logger Bar, we would just go. "Marge –"

You’ve seen our "Korbel" plays. They are truly outrageous, extreme archetypal characters, and yet they are painted with love. The thing that endeared us to the local community was that we didn’t come in as an environmental group and paint the loggers as the bad guys. We painted them as sometimes hapless, sometimes shrewd, sometimes smart. We painted the people who made their living from the land and from the woods as The People. The first big play that we did in the "Scar Tissue" mystery was called "A Road Not Taken". We borrowed a Raymond Chandler plot line and put it along with James Crumley plot line. We had Ray Chandler with a situation with his mother. The environmental lawyer is tied up in this awful scene with his mother. He is the villain of the piece. He is the one that started everything into play. We didn’t just do that to appease the loggers. We did that because it made great historical sense. It was good in terms of the form. The mystery, detective form. We went back to the masters. We did things with love towards the local characters of the community, but in strict accordance to the form. We would get into trouble politically – because when you talk about justice and trees, and justice and distribution of water in California you step on some pretty powerful toes. Even though we got state and federal money to do our plays, no one could ever accuse us of doing propaganda because of our dedication to our ancient form, and the form of detection, to the form of a live play was so scrupulous and precise. We could always justify with a historical reference where we were going as playwrights and as authors.

The interesting thing is that we were never big locally until we made it big in L.A. and San Francisco.

MM: Who did that matter to?

DF: The locals.

MM: Just the folks in the Logger Bar would go –

DF: "You’re back! You ain’t fartin’ higher than your ass. Glad you came home. What was it like in L.A.? Anybody famous?" It would be nuts.

MM: Then they would come out more next time.

DF: Yeah. We have this rule-of-thumb for the work that we do here. It has got to appeal to people who have never seen a play before. So when we tour, it has obviously got to appeal to people who have more sophisticated theater tastes. That has been our charge. To the level that we have been a success, it has been to that measure.

MM: What do you think it gives somebody who wouldn’t normally go to theater up there, but they have come to see you? Do you think they have a hunger for going to see other theater?

DF: If they come to see one of our summer plays and they laugh from the beginning until the end, they say "Hey let’s go see a play." It is not such a burden any more. I know it is true.

MM: What were the key moments in the company’s history from your perspective?

DF: Whether or not we have a writer actually providing our words, all the actors are fairly well steeped in the issues. When we first came to this neck of the woods there were huge issues here with nuclear power and logging and redwood park conservation. We found, and I take this to heart, that if you really wanted to do an issue-oriented play geared towards social change, then you just couldn’t. The people whose hearts you wanted to change were people with different values than you. You couldn’t come up here with a purple beard wearing a skirt and talking about nuclear power to people who had kids in school and worked here. It had the opposite effect. If you didn’t look a little bit like them, if you didn’t have material that was good enough to entertain them, then people who came to see your work or appreciated it were people already a part of the movement. That was something that we brought with us from the old days. From the Mime Troupe and earlier groups. We wanted to become part of the community because, in that older shamanistic sense. We thought we were ministering to the community. So we didn’t want to look different from them. Michael and I had really long hair and Joan dressed as a hippie. I’m not saying that we pretended to be middle-class or suddenly feigned being rednecks. We found a way, not so much by changing the way we dressed or changing our lifestyle, but we found a way to make peace with all those different various groups and different lifestyles. We made a place for ourselves in this town so that we could talk to people about values and change and issues. That was a major step. In retrospect, it happened slowly, but it happened. We became part of the community.

MM: What is the next big step for Dell’Arte now? What is the next thing they need to grapple with?

DF: We have to push the form. We have to continue to experiment with virtuosity, to experiment with new forms and new content. We just have to find a way to make it really damn good. It takes a lifetime to build an audience, and one bad show to send them away. Mediocre show. I think mediocre, or good enough is death. We’ve been building an empire here. We work in so many different areas. The Education Through Art program, the Mad River Festival, the Christmas Festival, the student plays. We have three or four different levels of company work. Somewhere in there we’ve got to come up with a play that is excellent, that amazes the critics and the locals and everyone alike. A player’s play.

Mark McKenna is artistic director and an ensemble member of Touchstone Theatre, in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. He is a graduate of the Lecoq International School of Theatre in Paris. He has taught theater classes at Lehigh University and the University of Pennsylvania, and the MFA Theatre Program at Towson State University. McKenna is active in the growth of the Network of Ensemble Theatres. He is a board member of Alliance for Building Communities, a regional community-development corporation.

PERFORMING COMMUNITIES
Carpetbag | Cornerstone | Dell'Arte | Jump-Start
LAPD | Pregones | Roadside | WagonBurner
Commentaries