The Possibilities Are Endless: A Conversation With Seph Mozes

Seph Mozes is a Chicago-based dramaturg and director whose evening of Gertrude Stein's plays, TURKEY AND BONES AND EATING AND WE LIKED IT, will be presented at Facility Theatre in Humboldt Park from March 14th to 29th. I sat down with him to discuss the unique challenges of presenting Stein's plays, landscape theater, and having fun in theater.

This conversation has been edited for clarity.

RSA: How did you first encounter Stein's plays?

SM: I first encountered Stein's plays in college. I was working on a thesis project about TWELFTH NIGHT, and what I was trying to examine is the way that queer possibility is opened up in the middle of TWELFTH NIGHT and then foreclosed at the end of it. Given this… disappointing tragic nature of the comedy from a queer perspective, I was trying to figure out if there's a way to do a production of TWELFTH NIGHT that doesn't end homophobically. And the idea that I had is, “what if the play gets to the middle point and then starts going in circles?” I found that Stein had a play called A CIRCULAR PLAY. And that was really helpful to me… in terms of thinking about plays that don't go from A to B to C. I ended up using a lot of her text in the performance that I ultimately created, which was a deconstruction of TWELFTH NIGHT with a cast of all trans people. I've kept learning more about her over the years, but I think I seriously encountered GEOGRAPHY AND PLAYS and [her] lecture on theater for the first time over the past year. I encountered David Greenspan's performance of [Stein’s lecture “Plays”] which really helped me to understand it for the first time. When Joseph Lark-Riley came to Chicago for RhinoFest to perform her plays, I met him. I think those things together were what sent me on being excited about directing Stein.

RSA: In “Plays”, Stein talks about an anxiety, which she refers to as “nervousness”, born from the information gap between the play and the audience. Does Stein’s “landscape theater” address that anxiety?

SM: It's not really reducible, but it is generative. The way that I think about it, and speaking with Joseph Lark-Riley has helped me to understand it, is: instead of a play being a sequence of events, what if a play is an environment in which various things happen? In the way that, when you're looking at a landscape, you might see a flock of birds fly by, and then five minutes later a dog [might] run by the flock of birds. The dog might be responding to the flock of birds, but not necessarily. [T]hey are in relation to each other in the sense that they're both in relation to the landscape. And in that way, things that happen in a piece of landscape theater are part of the environment. But whereas, in a traditional Well-Made Play, each thing builds on the thing before it, in a landscape play... each moment is almost its own play. Another one of my big heroes is Richard Foreman, and he says that he wants each moment [of his plays] to be like the first three minutes of a play, when you're trying to figure out what's going on. And I think that's what landscape theater is. It's like, there aren't rules for you to learn, so that you can digest the story in a normal way. You are released from the pressure to have to do that. And instead, you can simply experience what's happening before you, the way that you would experience the small bits of movement in a landscape.

RSA: This reminds me of REM[‘s] music video for the song “Imitation of Life”. It’s one shot of a party that zooms in on all these different conversations within the party, and then pans back out. It's really just one clip that playing on a loop, but they focus in on individual moments. Like you said, there are all of these things happening, but you are moving in and out rather than following one path.

SM: Yeah, or HERE, that comic that's that shows one room and jumps back and forth in all different time periods.

RSA: For a play to move you through an environment, rather than having the audience sit and watch conversations filter in and out, is still such a different way to consider theater.

SM: There's definitely the more carnivalesque SLEEP NO MORE version of this, which is, “you're having an experience.” First of all, I don't have the budget or the ambition to do something like that. But second of all, I don't think I'm trying to make the audience have an experience [too] different from the experience they always have seeing a play. I think what I'm interested in is, what if what's interesting about a play is watching people behave and interact, and we're released from the confines of story to just watch that? What does that do?

RSA: Why did you want to stage these particular plays from Stein's body of work?

SM: I guess there was a little bit of a contrarian impulse, where I was like, “when people do Stein's theatre, they always do FOUR SAINTS IN THREE ACTS or DOCTOR FAUSTUS LIGHTS THE LIGHTS”. What if I do the early stuff that's even harder to understand? [laughs] She has two books of plays, GEOGRAPHY AND PLAYS and OPERAS AND PLAYS. I'm interested in GEOGRAPHY AND PLAYS, an [earlier] book of formal experiments in trying to create landscape theater. I like how there are no or almost no dialogue tags, so there's an adaptation task... to make them into plays. They're very mysterious and beautiful in a way that's different... from the later stuff. I also like thinking about the context in which she wrote them. She and Alice [B. Toklas] were maybe vacationing, maybe war refugees, in Mallorca that context really runs through these texts, [a] feeling of, on the one hand, “everything is very normal and fine and we're in a normal domestic situation, we're on vacation.” And on the other hand, “the Great War is happening.” I think because I saw Joseph Lark-Riley do pieces from GEOGRAPHY AND PLAYS, that made me really interested because they're so open-ended. [There’s] freedom that comes with doing those pieces. And then they also have really good titles. I didn't end up doing this one, but there's one called, “they must be wedded. to their wife”, which is so fun.

RSA: Would you mind speaking a little further on the possibilities of adaptation in producing Stein’s work?

SM: I consider myself a dramaturg. I love doing text adaptation. I did an adaptation of LA RONDE for The Meat Machine last year, [which] was really fun. One of my favorite things to do is sit with a text and think about how it could work on stage. When I was in college, my main task in the little college theater community was taking the Shakespeare [play] every quarter, cutting it down, and adapting it to fit the requirements. I don't really find that I'm a writer in the sense that I can have a blank page and create something, but I do find that if I start with a text, and then have the task of thinking about how that text can become a performance, that’s very generative for me. And with these texts, I had to pick how many actors there are. For example, I was originally going to do three and then I decided to do five. So then I [had] to go through the dialogue and figure out what is a response to what, who the characters in each scene [are], and the little subdivisions of the scenes. What I found was that… I really didn't understand the text until I heard the actors saying it. And when I heard the actors saying it and working with it, it immediately made so much more sense than I could ever have made of it on my own.

RSA: After you brought actors in, what was the process of creating the shape of the text?

SM: We did a few days of Viewpoints stuff before looking at the text at all. That was really helpful to let the actors get comfortable with each other and with the space and with the possibilities of creative expression that they had. [When] we read the plays, everyone was very overwhelmed and confused by it, just reading it sitting down. But then, when we started to work on it piece by piece, moving through the space and having actions and interactions, I asked the actors, “How do you feel now [as opposed to] when we just read it?” They were like, “[It’s] so much better, it's so much clearer now.” Any play is a series of interactions between people, and once you are embodying those interactions, it [made] sense. I'm just very grateful for the work that the actors are doing. They're really... self selecting. They wouldn't have auditioned if they weren't down to clown. But they're very open to the kind of telescoping that this work requires. Sometimes, you are trying to create a literal interpretation of, “What am I saying?” And sometimes, you're working in a more abstract frame of reference, where you're not trying to decode everything and make it into a normal scene. But you also need to have emotional stakes for the interactions you're having. If it feels like it makes sense in your body, and if it makes sense emotionally, then it makes sense. So, it's not a devised process, because we have a text already and I’m directing it, but it has been... a very collaborative process in a way that's been delightful.

RSA: Through listening to the lecture, reading the plays, and also just my general knowledge of Stein and the legendary salons that she and Alice hosted, there’s such an interest and investment in human conversation. How does that present itself in these plays?

SM: It's funny, because when I was trying to understand how these plays are landscape theater, I [thought], “these are definitely all taking place indoors.” They're very much drawing room conversation pieces. I think one... anxiety that [Stein] had about herself and her own writing was that she wasn't able to create anything. She was only able to transcribe her experiences of life directly, which is interesting. It's almost like observational comedy. It's, “here are the kinds of things people say to each other,” and I think one way of understanding it – it's a little cheap to make it all about the war, but I do think that is helpful to always bear in mind – [there is] tension between normalcy and horror. Not just thinking about the war, but even thinking about modernity, modernism, and the way that normal life continues, but also all of the expectations and understandings of how life is supposed to progress are in question. One of the main dynamics and rhythms of the plays that we found [is] safety versus danger. When do I feel safe? And when do I feel like I'm in danger or there's a problem? So in the interactions between the actors, when are we in agreement, having a good time and really vibing with each other? And when, all of a sudden, have we encountered a roadblock, and now there's a problem? Those are the things that make up any scene in a play. Those are things that we've been returning to. The other thing that's fun about [the plays] is that it's obviously written in an experimental style. For example, there's a line where someone says, “It is good that it is her hands”. We had to look it up yesterday and make sure that it's not “it is good that it is in her hands” and it's not. But also, it's 100 years old, so the way that people talk is a little bit antiquated. And that's fun too, because it almost gives the feeling of a play that's written by space aliens. The language is already defamiliarized[,] which I think gives us more room to make the language [something] to play with.

RSA: What do you make of Stein's controversial political history?

SM: The way that I think about it is political stupidity. I think she was really smart about aesthetics and really stupid about politics. To the extent that… regardless of your own politics, she was just wrong about stuff. For example, she has this book, EVERYBODY’S AUTOBIOGRAPHY, published in 1937. And she says [something along the lines of], “All my friends in America keep asking me, is there going to be another war in Europe? I don't think so... the main thing that's going on is... class tension inside France, and there's going to be another French revolution, but I don't think the international tensions are really the main thing.” She's just wrong about politics. I think it's interesting to think about Stein's relationship to landscape in the context of her being a settler in California who grew up there only 30 years after the treaty that made it part of the United States, but I don't think that Stein is thinking about that critically. It seems to me like she was living through the cataclysms of the first half of the 20th century, and she was responding to those things as someone inside them who was not politically minded and who was very much blinded by her class privilege. Her experience of the world was, “I have money and I'm very charming, and if I'm nice to people, they're nice to me, and that's how I get through life.” And she was right, she did manage to get through life that way, and it prevented her, really, from seeing what was actually happening around her to a certain extent. I think of [Stein] as a queer Jewish ancestor. And when encountering and working with ancestors, we have to have a dialectic between reverence and being critical. And so I feel that her work is very generative and beautiful and that her contributions to aesthetics are tremendously important. [But] I also think she was wrong about politics. Not in the period when she wrote the work that I am examining, but later in her life, she does become complicit with fascism in Vichy France. I think the main thing is not, “can we use her work to create art?” The main thing is, “are we trying to not be complicit with fascism in our own time?” and to try to learn if we [are] trying to learn from her mistakes and not repeat them.

RSA: That tension in and of itself is generative. In fact it's probably better if you don't uncritically love every single thing this person did or believed, because then you're putting them on a pedestal.

SM: I also think my subject position is so similar to hers, in that I am queer and Jewish and have class privilege, and so learning from her mistakes is actually very important to me. The way that she disavows her minoritized identities in order to be able to move smoothly through society serve[s] her, but it cuts her off from solidarity and… a sharp political analysis. I do actually think about her a lot when I think about my own limitations and trying to see beyond my own subject position to understand what's unfolding around me. It's not just that she was wealthy and… charming, it's also that she was very obviously gay. The fact that she was able to move through life as smoothly as she was because of [her charm] was really singular and unusual. I understand why she felt like she lived a kind of charmed life and that the rules didn't really apply to her. But I [also] think that is the wrong way to think about things.

RSA: What is important for people to know about Stein's work and these plays?

SM: Yeah. I think if people have heard of Stein at all, they've probably heard of like her as a difficult modernist writer. She was interviewed on American radio in the thirties after her American tour, and the radio interviewer was... very hostile to her and [told her], “nobody understands your work.” And she said, “if you like it, you understand it. And a lot of people like it.” So a lot of people understand it. And I think her work is very oriented around pleasure. Whether it's sensual pleasure, there's a lot of stuff about food, or aesthetic pleasure, [or] the pleasure of words and how words sound together. The idea going in is not that you have to strain to make it into something it's not. You don't have to try to decode it so that it makes sense in the way that you're used to texts making sense. What you have to do is allow yourself to enjoy it. That's what it's there for. It's entertainment. And that's what we're trying to do with it, make it fun, and [facilitate] the experience[s] of enjoying it and noticing how you react to people interacting in ways that you're not used to. I think that has a transformative potential that is worthwhile on its own. You don't need to go into it with a feeling that you're being given an English assignment, right? The point is to have fun.

RSA: Talking about a sense of fun in theater, in general, is underrated.

SM: I think when people think about Experimental theater, they think about very confrontational New York downtown theater of the late 20th century, or they think about Beckett. I love Beckett… but I think [that] people think of experimental theater as something that's angry at the audience. I don't find that having that attitude toward people convinces them of anything. I think what is better is to let the audience have an experience that is outside of their normal experience, but also pleasurable in a way that can, as people used to say, expand their minds a little bit.

RSA: What has driven you through this process?

SM: One way that I think about the purpose of theater, or the quality of the theater that I'm trying to make is [by] thinking about Richard Foreman's idea of atomic theater. He says that people think about their lives as, “I have this problem. That's a big square shape [of a] problem… And I'm carrying around my big shapes. And when I go to the theater, I need to see plays that are on an even bigger scale to help me understand my big problems.” But actually, [to Foreman], life is not made of these big shapes. Your life is made of a lot of little particles, whizzing around all the time, and maybe what the theater needs to be is not these big epic shapes, but instead a lot of little particles. [Those particles] can allow you to see that things aren't necessarily related the way that you think they are. That's really helpful to me. I'm [also] trying to think about landscape in a politically grounded way, in the sense of, where are we and what are we doing here? The geographer Ruth Wilson Gilmore talks about geography as not “Where is Nebraska,” but “Why is Nebraska?” And so [I’ve been] thinking about, “What is this place Chicago? And what are we doing here? And what is the historical context that has landed all of us here?” And even “What is Humboldt Park?”, which is where the play is being staged. And “What are we doing here?” I think those are good questions to ask in any context, but particularly if you're trying to do landscape theater. It's important to not fall into the trap that I think particularly… queer artists and academics can sometimes fall into of, “if I create a beautiful little space where we're all having a good time in this room, then that's radical utopian visioning.” No space exists in a bubble – all spaces are in a context. So, [we’re] trying to think about the contexts in which we're performing the play and the context in which it was written, rather than simply creating a play that's a tiny world in itself.

TURKEY AND BONES AND EATING AND WE LIKED IT, will be presented at Facility Theatre in Humboldt Park from March 14th to 29th.