Year 2

Part XIII

Pitr Strait

Hometown: Oak Park, IL

Current Town: Brooklyn, NY

Pitr Strait is a New York-based director and teacher. After graduating from The New School's MFA program, he co-founded Torn Out Theater with Alice Mottola in 2016. Prior to his work with Torn Out, he has directed numerous works by William Shakespeare, Caryl Churchill, and Don Nigro. His film work includes directing words & actions, a short film written by Allan Staples; and co-writing the story for Alexis and Bodine Boling's feature film Movement + Location, winner of Best Screenplay at the 2014 Brooklyn Film Festival. Pitr's education work includes both graduate and undergraduate classes at The New School, as well as Concordia Language Villages' French immersion programs.

Tell me about  Hamlet:

Hamlet, I mean, it’s only the most famous play in the English language. It’s a terrifying thing to try and sum up, let alone produce. Obviously, there are as many different interpretations of Hamlet as there have been productions of it, so I don’t pretend to have the Rosetta stone here. That being said, I think there are some ideas at the core of this play that are pretty essential.

I think Hamlet is about a search for truth. Prince Hamlet lives in a society that is tainted with lies and deception. His friends are spies, his lover is turned into a tool to test him, his king is a murdering usurper. His society is fixated on appearances, his parents tell him that his clothes and demeanor shouldn’t match the pain he feels inside, men and women wear false faces all around him. Even the Ghost, purporting to bring terrible truths from beyond the grave, is suspected of being a manipulating devil assuming the face of his father to trick him. Hamlet has to turn himself from a tangle of raw, unfiltered grief into a detective, a sharp, incisive investigator and judge of a nation of liars and thieves.

Hamlet is also, like many of Shakespeare’s plays, about what it is to be a man. Hamlet has to learn how to choose his friends wisely, who will be true to him through trials and tribulations. He labors under the immense pressure of his father’s memory, and of his promised inheritance. His search for truth in Denmark runs parallel to his search for the truth about himself, about who he is and who he wants to be. Ultimately, his story is one of radical individualism, a man determined to choose his own friends, his own path, his own truth.

Tell me about your process and concept of this show.

Our Hamlet was devised as a follow-up to the all-female performance of The Tempest that our company, Torn Out Theater, produced last summer. That performance was intended to explore non-sexualized female nudity as an expression of personal freedom and identity, as well as to challenge the notion that the naked female body is necessarily an object for sexual consumption. The production started a lot of discussion among audiences, but also online, where news coverage of the performances circled the globe and lit up comments sections with some pretty extreme reactions. One of the most prominent themes among the internet reactions to our female-focused production was, surprisingly, about men’s bodies. Many said that it was easy to present female nudity, but no one would ever be able to do with naked men. People would be disgusted, they’d riot, we’d get arrested; male nudity, we heard from men and women, was inherently frightening and undesirable. We had to try to engage with that.

We went looking for a play that told a story that responded to these reactions in some way. It seemed to us that men were being told to hide, to hide their feelings and vulnerabilities, to cover themselves. We wanted to find something that investigated the challenges of being true to yourself, even when everyone around you was telling you not to be, that you’d be crazy to be. Hamlet seemed like the natural choice. For us, this play became a way to present a kind of radical truth-telling. Hamlet’s “madness” is, of course, honesty. He says what he means, he tells the truths no one wants to hear, he mocks the powerful and hypocritical. This is his freedom, how he cuts through the bullshit of the world. Although he says it is an “antic disposition” that he puts on, everything he says is true, and that is what disrupts Denmark so deeply. In a society that tells him to dress a certain way, to smile through his grief, to be a nice boy, Hamlet says, fuck that. He’s not going to hide. No masks, no disguises, he’ll walk through the kingdom stark naked to get to the bottom of the plots that surround him.

How would you define your job description for this piece?

We’re a small company, so everyone wears a few hats. As director, my primary job is to put the show together on the ground level, working with actors and designers to tell the story in a clear and exciting way. At the same time, as one of the artistic directors of the company, I’m involved in fundraising, hiring, and marketing (although I’m blessed to have amazing colleagues who carry significantly more of the weight in those areas). Meanwhile, I’m a driver, a production supervisor, a social media manager; whatever job needs to be done that I have the skills and time to help with, I have to do. At the end of the day, though, I’m the director. My job is to make sure that every moment on stage, every prop, every line, every image tells our story.

What else are you currently busy with?

Torn Out has been developing a new piece for the past year or so, an anthology of fairy tale adaptations geared towards gender and sexuality. Now that Hamlet’s over, we’re directing most of our energy towards that project, hoping to be ready for some kind of workshop performance next spring. Looking beyond that, we’ve already started discussing next summer’s outdoor play, which will feature nudity in a similar way to Hamlet and last year’s Tempest, but with a multi-gendered cast.

Tell me, if you will, a story from your childhood that explains who you are as a Director and/or as a person.

Wow, um, this is kind of a big question. I mean, I had a babysitter when I was little, Katie, who used to come over and narrate the plots of Broadway musicals to me and my brother. She’d also bring cassette tapes of the soundtracks, but I was so much more excited to watch her jump around our living room, bouncing between subplots and telling us stories of epic battles and love stories, often leaving us on cliffhangers, forcing us to wait until the next babysitting visit to find out how Les Miserables ends. She definitely sparked my love of the big, sweeping musical, but more importantly, she taught me that you don’t need huge sets, fancy costumes, and big budgets to tell a story. You just need an inspired performer, right in front of your face, desperate to get a story out of their head and into yours. Dazzling production values may be nice, but without an honest and passionate performance, it’s just set dressing.

What’s your favorite source of directorial inspiration? Why?

I love watching dance, whether it’s classically staged choreography or kids on YouTube. Movement is a huge part of my work, and I think it’s important to keep absorbing different textures and styles of movement from around the art world. I also have a huge folder of snippets, just tiny scraps of whatever from conversations, books, the news, jokes, anything that catches my eye. Although I also enjoy doing real, focused research, a lot of what inspires me is made up of random, partial ideas that crop up in my day-to-day life. Most of them will never make it into my work, and that’s probably good, most of them are probably nonsense. Still, one or two of them turn out to be perfect, sometimes years after I jot them down.

If you could change one thing about theater, what would it be?

I’d make tickets cheaper. Finances pose such a huge barrier to entry for so many potential audience members, especially when the biggest shows in town can cost hundreds of dollars a seat. How did we get here? How did theater turn into this niche, insular medium, where audiences are routinely populated by comfortable, privileged people who can afford the price of admission? Most people don’t have time to stand in line for twelve hours to get into Shakespeare in the Park. They don’t have the bandwidth to figure out lotteries and standbys. Easier to browse Netflix. Don’t get me wrong, Netflix is great, but we need to make theater accessible to all kinds of people, not just “theatergoers,” and a huge part of that is making it cheaper.

Who are or were your theatrical Heroes?

I think Emma Rice of Kneehigh Theater is, hands down, one of the most exciting directors working today. Her work is electric and immediate, unapologetically “theatrical,” overflowing with music and spectacle and heart. She and her company understand what can be done on a stage that can’t be done in any other medium, and every piece of hers I see reaffirms my dedication to the power of live performance.

Thomas Ostermeier is another hero. Like Rice, almost all of his work is an adaptation of existing plays, but his productions aren’t interested in simple revivals. His Richard III, his Enemy of the People, they feel immediate and necessary. He makes you grapple with the challenging, scary questions of our time, and he does it with goddamn style.

What kind of theater excites you?

Theater that frightens me. Theater that upsets me. I love a spectacle, I love a song and dance, but I want something that’s going to thrust its fingers into my chest and squeeze the breath out of me. I want to be scared. I want to be worried. Lord knows I’m scared and worried in the real world enough, and I believe that theater, that art exists to help us confront and process our fears. Theater is a safe space where we can pretend, we can pass through death and go to war, we can commit unforgivable crimes and surrender to forbidden passions, all in a contained environment. At its best, it’s an opportunity to test ourselves, to find out what’s lurking inside us, and to look directly at it for an hour or two.

What do you know now, that you wish you knew when you were just starting out? What advice do you have for Directors just starting out?

Do your homework. Don’t assume you can wing it. Inspiration is great, and lots of great things happen in the moment, but your job begins long before you step into rehearsal. Read the play. Read it again. Read it again. Sketch. Journal. Take notes. Research. Build models. You don’t have to have all the answers when you walk into the room, but you need to be prepared to find them in rehearsal, and that means doing your homework. As a director, it’s rare that someone else is going to hold you accountable for that, so get used to keeping yourself honest and busy.

Anything else you’d like to add?

Only make theater if you genuinely think you can make an audience walk out differently than they walked in. Try to make work that’s focused and has a specific goal. That goal can be whatever you want, but know what it is and orient your work around communicating that message to an audience.

Shout out to the designers and stage crew.

Aaron Crosby, our costume designer, was invaluable; if you’re doing a show about nudity, the clothing is incredibly important, and he nailed it. Lisa Kopitsky, our fight choreographer, is a joy and an amazing collaborator. Gina Costagliola and Britt Berke were our stage managers, and I couldn’t have been luckier or happier to work with both of them.

Links, please:

Personal website: www.pitrstrait.com

Torn Out: www.tornouttheater.org