Part: XV




Moises Kaufman

Hometown: Caracas, Venezuela

Current Town: New York, NY

MOISÉS KAUFMAN was awarded the National Medal of Arts by President Obama in September.  He is also a Tony and Emmy-nominated director and playwright. Broadway credits include The Heiress with Jessica Chastain; 33 Variations (which he also wrote) with Jane Fonda (5 Tony nominations); Rajiv Joseph’s Pulitzer Prize finalist Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo with Robin Williams; and the Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award-winning play I Am My Own Wife.  His plays, Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde and The Laramie Project, are among the most performed plays in America over the last decade. Kaufman also co-wrote and directed the film adaptation of The Laramie Project for HBO, which received two Emmy Award nominations for Best Director and Best Writer. He is currently directing and writing a new Broadway-bound adaptation of Bizet’s Carmen with Grammy-winning composer Arturo O’Farrill. He is the artistic director of Tectonic Theater Project and a Guggenheim Playwrighting Fellow.


Tell me about Torch Song:

The play takes place in New York City in the 70s, where Arnold (played by Michael Urie) is on a quest for love, purpose, and family; he’s “fierce in drag and fearless in crisis and won’t stop until he achieves the life he desires.” Harvey chronicled the next 30 years of the movement before they happened. It prophesied gay marriage and gay adoption. The great thing about Torch Song is that it is about a man who wants to create identity for himself and follow through on it.

Tell me about your process and concept of this show.

For me Torch Song is about one individual’s ability to imagine his future against all odds, and then making it happen. It is, in part, because of the countless members of our community that imagined their future, that we are here today. And this production is also about us today revisiting this play -- this artistic artifact -- that not only touched so many of us, but in a way helped us visualize what was possible. And of course we’ve embraced Harvey’s humor as well as the enormous heart the show has. It’s a masterful piece of work — it still resonates, and I’m so glad to share it with today’s audience. I first saw it when I was 17 and it played a huge role in my life. It connected me to characters that I never knew existed. Coming from an orthodox Jewish home in Venezuela, seeing four completely different gay men in the play made me understand my life was possible. So I was thrilled to revisit this play and begin to consider its relevance to an audience in 2017.

How would you define your job description for this piece?

To me the best directors are excellent collaborators and even better communicators, and that’s what I strive to be in the studio. Some of the most important things directors do are recruiting the right design team and making casting decisions. And then it’s my job to make sure that we are telling the story and serving the play from moment to moment.   Directing this piece was about breathing life back to this iconic work and allowing this powerful story to be told to the world again.

What else are you currently busy with?

Tectonic Theater project has about six shows in development at the moment. I am particularly proud of our fall production of Uncommon Sense, by company members Anushka Paris-Carter and Andy Paris. It is about four people on the autism spectrum and it’s a stunning production. It opens at The Sheen Center on November 2nd. Right now I’m working on two new plays: one tackles the experience of long-term survivors of the AIDS epidemic, and the other is about a historical artifact newly discovered by a Washington museum. So they are as diverse as can be. I try not to spend too much time trying to figure out why I am attracted to a certain idea. Writing the play is answer enough.

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

When I was growing up in Venezuela, I didn’t know that there were any other gay people. I didn’t know that anybody else went through what I was going through – that thought never crossed my mind. I thought I was the only person in the world going through this. So, the more that we go into the different professions, communities – the more that we try to reach children everywhere we can, the more we’ll be saving lives.
The thing that people have to remember is that other minorities are born into homes of minorities, so that if you’re Jewish you’re born into a Jewish home, if you’re African-American you’re born into an African-American home. The LGBTQ kids are born into homes that are usually not LGBTQ, and that creates an incredible sense of isolation and loneliness – and that makes them much more vulnerable to virulent discourses. Children hear what we say. When children are bullying their gay and lesbian brothers and sisters, they’ve learned it somewhere – we’ve taught them. We have to not lose track that there’s still an incredible backlash going on in our culture against our community. That backlash takes the form of acceptable discourse, and that that acceptable discourse finds very virulent and vicious ways of penetrating the zeitgeist.
I knew what it was like to be an outsider looking in on my own community, but I always had empathy for everyone. I think that is what is so powerful about the theater- to make an audience feel empathy for another person.

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

I need to feel that I am going into a rehearsal room to crack a play open and to keep thinking about this magnificent, mythical art form that we’re all involved in. That’s what drives me to do the work, and how I feel like I’m doing my job. I think that the question we need to ask is not only, does this belong in the theater, but how is theater uniquely qualified to articulate the deepest ideas within the story? That is a really exciting question because it leads you to find theatrical solutions. I have found some of the deepest, richest and most profound discoveries that I have done in theatrical terms and in theatrical ideas when I am dealing with: “how does the theater articulate deep rich and interesting ideas?”

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

The model by which we work in the American theatre is that a playwright goes into a room, she spends twenty years in the room, and we all have an image of what that room is like, right? Cobwebs and empty vodka bottles. Right? And she comes out of that room with a play after twenty years. Then she gives it to a director, and then, three weeks of rehearsal and one week of tech later, you have a production. To me, when you articulate the model in those terms, it is clear that the model has severe limitations. The problems are multiple. There’s not enough time to interpret the work. If a writer creates everything out of dialogue and text— what happens to the “theatrical?” Where are the theatrical moments opportunities that involved music or lights and or costumes, or sets. Sometimes writers can image these moments in their dusty room—but why not start the process by creating “theatrical” moments? In moment work, actors can use any and all theatrical elements: emotion, movement, shape, sound, light, costume.

Who are or were your theatrical Heroes?

Venezuela has a very important international theater festival, so I grew up seeing the work of Peter Brook and Pina Bausch and Tadeuz Kantor and Jerry Grotowski, who at the time were the people who were really leading the kind of more rigorous research and development into new forms of theater. The first time I saw a realistic play in Venezuela, I thought, “this is so avant-garde, look there’s a kitchen sink, ah, that is such a fantastic vocabulary.” And I wonder if I didn’t have the same experience that the Russians had when Stanislavski staged The Seagull the first time. We forget that naturalism was a real, gigantic core of the avant-garde and that now it has become vox populi and it has become the way that we speak in the theater, unfortunately.
            Brecht always talked about the distance between the actor and the character, and that when you go see a play, what Brecht loved is to see both the character and the actor on stage. And I was very influenced by him and by his thinking. And what I wanted to write was a dramaturgy that had in the text the separation between the actor and the character.

What kind of theater excites you?

At Tectonic, we’ve never started with a political agenda in our work, but for us, the very nature of theater is political. And as artists living in these perilous times, our work invariably reflects that. There are events in our culture that galvanize us, that bring us together as a culture, that bring us together and that allow us to create a societal narrative. The arc of progress is long, but it bends toward justice. Because we are here, we continue to bend the arc toward justice.

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?)

When I decided that I wanted to be a director and a writer and create my own work, I came to New York to study at the Experimental Theater Wing. When I left I asked Arthur Barto, who was the dean and who had seen all my work in school and been incredibly supportive, “Okay, so how do I work as a director?” And he said, “You’re going to have to start your own theater company because no one is going to hire you.”
And at the time, I was thinking, you like my work, why are you saying that nobody will hire me? He said, “Well, because you’re interested in posing questions about the nature of the art form that really requires a certain kind of exploration. And nobody is going to pay you to do that exploration. You’re going to need to embark on that exploration on your own. And when people see the work that exploration yields, then they will hire you.” Best advice I ever got. But I think that the thing I found is that each path is so very different. When I was a young director, I remember freaking out a lot because I felt, “Why doesn’t somebody just tell me how to do it?” In any other field you would go to an office and you would start at a job and then you would go to the next job, and you would go to the next job, and you would rise up the ladder. But not in the arts. Well, certainly directing is not like that. And it’s a lot of initializing yourself and being motivated to do things and to put things out there.


Shout out to the designers and stage crew.

Thank you to the wonderful cast and crew. To the designers that made the piece come alive: David Zinn (scenic design) Clint Ramos (costume design), David Lander (lighting design), Fitz Patton (sound design) and Telsey + Co (casting).






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