Last Friday, I received a fairly unexpected phone call.  I had just finished recording this textbook on social work, and was getting ready to go downtown to see my friend Lena in a performance at DR2, which would be followed by drinks with another friend to celebrate her birthday.  I was hurriedly trying to eat dinner and get dressed (simultaneously) when my phone rang.  The number had a 917 prefix, which signifies a New York cell phone, but I didn’t know who it was.  I thought about letting it go to voicemail, but instead picked up.  Then I heard, “Hey this is Daniel Fish.”  Daniel Fish is a smart and innovative theater director, an artist known for rethinking classic work and also for shaping edgy contemporary plays.  Successful as he may be, he remains a decidedly “downtown” director (which, if you ever happen to read this Daniel, I mean as a compliment).  I had no idea how he got my phone number, or why he would be calling me.  I set down my fork, and probably also a shoe, and said hello.  He was directing a reading of a new play by Thomas Bradshaw at the New York Theater Workshop, and at the last minute an actor had a conflict.  Jimmy Davis, who played Juliet in the all-male production of Romeo and Juliet I did a few years ago in DC, had given him my number.  “Would you be interested?” he asked, and “Can you do a German accent?”

(Outside the New York Theater Workshop on E. 4th Street in Manhattan)

When you do a reading of a new play, you usually just have one short rehearsal.  You familiarize yourself with the language, the director makes suggestions, and then that evening (or the next day) you sit in front of a script on a music stand and read the play.  No movement or blocking, just the interaction of the actors and the audience with the text.  Hearing a play out loud, as a writer, is a completely different experience than hearing it only in your head, and an essential step in the writing process.  After rehearsing the play Sunday night, I went to Park Slope, Brooklyn for a dinner party.  Ciera Wells (who you may perhaps remember from the song cycle) was having people over for dinner and wine at her place.  I got to talking about the play, called The Ashes, which centers around an African American artist whose work addresses the complexity of race.  During the course of the play he has a show of his artwork in Berlin.  The role I played was that of a German neo-Nazi skinhead, and needless to say, things don’t turn out well.  The play provides a complex and provocative look at race and identity.  While explaining the play, I got this question: “Why would anyone agree to play roles of incredibly hateful (or racist, or immoral, or pathological) characters?”  And more specifically, “How does playing a role like that affect you?”  The easy answer would be to say that I usually play “nice” characters – the sensitive young man – and that the variety is exciting.  But it’s a little more complicated than that.

(Thomas Bradshaw, the provocative playwright of The Ashes)

What people find offensive is often surprising to me.  Parents who complain about teenage sex in Romeo and Juliet don’t even blink at the murder and hatred in plays like Macbeth or Richard III.  Theatergoers will turn a blind eye to any number of immoralities but write letters of complaint to the theater when a character “takes the Lord’s name in vain.”  But the truth of the matter is that morality usually makes for boring plays.  People are complex, and the essence of drama is conflict.  The play needs an antagonist (or sometimes a protagonist, like in Macbeth) whose actions drive the motion of the play and allow the characters to confront those complexities.  Without Iago, there is no Othello.  Without the neo-Nazi characters in The Ashes, the play wouldn’t arrive at its polemical conclusion. The theater doesn’t try to show the world as it should be, but rather as it is: complicated and beautiful, but also painful and violent.  That is not to say that playing a neo-Nazi is an easy thing to do.  I can’t explain how strange it is to hear certain epithets come out of your mouth, or how disquietingly exhilarating it can be to feel your body filled with rage and hate, however imaginary those intentions may be.  You do feel the need to check in with the other actors, to acknowledge that the tension created is illusory.  But it is only in playing those characters truthfully and without judgement that the audience will be forced to address their own relationship to the issues at hand.  If a performer judges or comments on the character he plays, then he diffuses the culpability of the audience.  They will feel good about themselves because they are “better” than that character.  But if Iago, for instance, believes what he does is justified, or if a neo-Nazi believes his actions are moral, it forces the audience to look more deeply at themselves and their own prejudices.

Which, I suppose, is why we agree to play with darkness.  Yes, it can be disturbing, for both artist and audience.  But that’s the point: it’s supposed to be.

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