By Victoria Guthrie
Interview my friend and director extraordinaire (in my opinion) PETER JENSEN.
Taken from Facebook Interview at https://www.facebook.com/VGUTHRIEACTOR/posts/540047309417258
Question One:
Victoria – Hi Peter, I know you waited three years to get the rights to produce The Pillowman at T.Schreiber Studio and that this play was your first choice of three plays which you submitted for potential production. What attracted you to the material so much that it was your top choice and you had the patience to wait three years for the rights.
Peter – Hi Victoria – So, why The Pillowman, and what attracted me? My favorite kind of plays to direct have dark themes mixed with a lot of humor. This also has a theatrical feel to it which I like to work with as a director. Especially thru design elements, though I like realism a lot and try to bring the level of detail and realism to theatrical things, like in dreams, there is something heightened but its weirdly real. I think that approach leads to the scariness of the piece and the audience’s belief and I hope in the way that we did it. Playing up the style of a piece is generally I think not a great idea, its already theatrical, why play that up, find the commonness perhaps instead. On a deeper level the play speaks to me in regards to art, having had an artistic parent who was kinda too interfering or competitive not unlike katurian (but not so bad) But those experiences can also provide you with some juice and pain. Which if you can work thru some of that, can be accessed and serve your growth as an artist and a person. I like what I think is the final message of the play, that Michael decides to live despite knowing he will suffer great pain, as we all do to greater or hopefully lesser degrees. And we all have to live knowing we are going to die, which is pretty amazing that most of us except that bargain or maybe manage to not think about it. The waiting for 3 years to do the play was also interesting.
Victoria – As an actress in the play, I must say it has been an awesome ride. I believe the realistic work we did before adding some stylized on top really solidified the scenes. Of course, your childhood violin in the scene, always gives me a giggle because I feel that part of you with the “overly enthusiastic” parents being carried into the scene.
Question Two:
Victoria – Peter you are great with cliffhangers! Please tell us about the “interesting” 3 year wait to do the play.
Peter – Barb Kielhofer our former Producing Director was in love with The Pillowman and very much wanted to produce it. We applied and while waiting for the rights I read it for the first time and as I got to the Little Jesus bit, I thought to myself I can’t direct this play, this is too gruesome and seems to have no point other than to be shocking for shock sake. After finishing it, I could feel some of the plays merits but wasn’t convinced it was the play for me. But since we were slated to possibly do it, and I was embarrassed to say I didn’t love it, since everyone else seemed to and was expecting me to direct, I decided to start doing some research. My daughter Robyn was and is in a Russian Lit program and had several books on Stalin, so I thought I would start there. I was struck by how helpful getting the sense of a totalitarian government was and was beginning to get more excited. We were turned down around then for the rights. And I was kind of relieved, to not have to direct it, knowing how much people loved it and was afraid cause I was still a little ambivalent that I would mess it up. A year later we tried again, started up the research, read a great novel based on Stalin, “In the First Circle” by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and again it opened up aspects of the play in new ways. Of course along the way I would read the play over and over again, not my favorite thing to do as a director, but important. On certain reads suddenly the play opens up and you can begin to feel its power and ideas can come hopefully. Then we were turned down. We tried again the next year and in the middle of an acting class I was teaching Barb texted me to say we got the rights! I was excited and like some relationships without knowing it had begun to fall in love with The Pillowman . Once the designs began to come into focus and casting happened and the work began, I was hooked and was able to tap into the play and all that it had to offer and off we went. And the experience of working on it was very pleasurable and a lot of fun, despite the content or maybe because of it.
Victoria – That’s a great story! It seems The Pillowman found you in some way.
Question Three:
Victoria – What was the most satisfying aspect of the process so far, be it, casting a specific role, rehearsal for a particular scene, a finished performance? Was there a particular ah ha moment of satisfaction for you?
Peter – The most satisfying moments? Well overall, the rehearsal process was a lot of fun, we laughed a lot despite the darkness of the piece, or maybe because of it. The fondest memories were the improvs we did. Early on we improvised the two interrogation scenes that would have taken place offstage. One with Ariel interrogating Michael (the retarded spastic brother as he is referred to by the interrogators). Watching Tommy Buck who plays Ariel try to have a “regular” interrogation with Michael played by Alexei Bondar was very amusing. He asked Michael to scream, so Katurian his brother in the next interrogation room could hear it. Michael enjoyed the screaming and wanted to do it more. And Michael I believe requested a ham and cheese sandwich, without the lettuce, which Ariel went to get with a sort of bewildered look ending the improv. Then we put Ariel and katurian ( played by Josh Marcantel) together , for Katurians torture which we hear offstage at the top of Sc 3. This wasn’t as fun, except when we used an old 1940’s radio we had in the prop closet from a production of “You Can’t Take it With You” as a substitute for the electrodes Ariel uses to torture Katurian. Ariel wrapped the cord around Katurian, and just as he was about to flip the imaginary switch to send electricity into katurian the back of the old radio fell onto the table, cracking up those of us watching, and highlighting the ineffectualness that poor Ariel suffers as well as the deterioration of the equipment in the run down totalitarian regime of the play.. We did several improvs between the brothers, (Katurian reading stories to Michael, Michael wanting to stay home from school, them talking about sex, and particularly touching was Katurian visiting Michael in an institution which Alexie had imagined might have happened) . We did a parallel improv to get the feel of Katurian’s motives in telling his stories to the interrogators with Josh as himself pitching an actual screenplay he wrote to Tommy and Don Carter who plays the number 1 interrogator Tupolski. Don and Tommy took on the personas of two Hollywood producers. Needless to say they gave Josh a lot of shit. With the story scenes as you might remember Victoria, we did a very intense improv of the torturing of Michael as a small boy by his parents played by you and Lance Olds and Katurian discovering it, in real time. That was pretty harrowing and a little disturbing. Though Michael as an adult isn’t actually in that scene we brought him in for that improv. Later we asked Aliya Victoriya who plays the Little Jesus as well as the mute girl to be Michael as a small child in that scene in the play. I think after we finished that particular improv we sat around in a kind of stunned silence, said our goodbyes and went home for the night.
Other Questions:
Qurrat Ann Kadwani – Hi Peter, I saw the show yesterday and I’ve worked with both Josh and Victoria in other plays. I felt the production was very moving. Did you work with the actors on the rhythm of their lines or did they develop it themselves?
Peter – Hi Qurrat, I don’t tend to spend much time on rhythm in general and let the rhythms take care of themselves and address them more thru character and needs. And the actors in this case are very talented and worked really hard so that makes my job a lot easier. But for the first time as a director I asked Crystal the stage manager to give “pause notes” (where they were added, take out, where they were missing add in) along with line note earlier in the rehearsal process then I normally would. And I asked the actors which I haven’t done before, as they learned the lines to learn the pauses (and not pauses). McDonagh is very specific about pauses in the text and they really work, a lot of the humor and pathos come from where he places and doesn’t place them. On occasion I would ask the actors to move thru a line with more pace, or a better way of saying that is probably play the line into the other actor with more specific intention. In general it seems if the text is springing from the actor spontaneously with content and need the rhythm could and will change from performance to performance even if just slightly. The danger is to find a good pace and then just repeat the pace. But maybe worse is slowing it all down to feel it more! Especially with a longish play.
Barry Jason Schneider – Peter, I was caught by two things when I saw that this play was being undertaken by you at TSS: How could they possibly pull it off when the original set was so hugely dramatic in scale and special effects–a section of a house, showing 4 quadrants? And one character in particular seemed custom written–Jeff Goldblum’s top cop (it wasn’t). I walked away from your show with a more intimate relationship to all the characters, and a whole new take on its powerful storytelling without such elaborate set tricks. It totally worked for me. My question now is: How did you have the courage to take it on? And how did you envision modifying it for a black box sort of theater? Or did you find your way into it though experiment, exploration & intuition?
Peter – Hi Barry thanks for your comments. A lot of the way it’s staged in the space came from talks between me and Sky our set designer. He then came up with ideas, drawings which we modified as we went to some degree. I tend to be very practical, like where will the chairs go, how much space between the table and wall etc. And Sky thinks more thematically, which we talk about, colors and the look, thank god. So we are a good combination. I love the tss space, a lot can be done there and I have worked in the space a lot so I have a feeling for it. As for being scared, I was a bit mostly cause people love this play so I didn’t want to mess it up.
Justin Chez – Hi Peter, I’m a drama performance major at Hofstra University in Long Island. I came to see the show about a week ago with some peers after we were assigned by our professor to see a show and write a paper about all aspects of it, including lighting, sound, costumes, and vision. Though this was my first time seeing this show, I researched some past versions of it and found it being placed in such places like soviet Russia, places that a totalitarian police state might be more likely. My question is: what made you choose to set the show in a more American setting? And how does this choice contribute towards your vision of the show? Thanks!
Peter – Hi Justin, I appreciate you coming and bringing your friends, send the rest of your school our way, or some of them, we extended thru this coming Sunday. As for your question – The playwright specifies that it takes place in an unidentified totalitarian government, so that’s what we did. It probably comes across American because we aren’t using accents. The original script had many more British words which we changed. I always felt it was in some eastern European type place, without the accents of course. The play has a European feel do it for me. But I wanted to leave it for you to decide and didn’t impose any specific place, because that I think would have taken away from other aspects of the play.
Victoria – Hi Peter, it’s funny you mention the improvs as being favorite moments for you and that you mentioned the improv with Alexi (Michael) and myself and Lance Olds. That gave me so much naturally created back story which I always use before running on to comfort Katarian from his nightmares. Those other improvs sound compelling. I wish I could have seen them.
Question Four:
Victoria – What was most difficult or frustrating for you during the process? Be it preproduction, rehearsals or whatever stands out for you?
Peter – Hi Victoria, it makes me happy to think that you are using the improv as motivation, the work does pay off! As for frustrations in the rehearsal period, not to sound Pollyanna or insincere but I can’t think of any, except minor inevitable preproduction delay frustrations. There were of course difficult artistic things to tackle. As you know the Little Jesus scene was a tough nut to crack, but also very rewarding in the end. Gus Soloman a wonderful person and chorographer was of great help in giving physical form to that story. I struggled with deciding on what tone or feel to have with it. We worked on it in many ways, first purely sensorial, slowing down all the action to real time and allowing (or making) the actors feel sensorialy all the aspects of the scene. It was really depressing and kind of horrible. I knew we wouldn’t do it that way ever but it was I think a good rehearsal technique. Then in normal speed we went for real motives and as close to reality as we could within the context. It wasn’t feeling quite right to me. At times Gus’s suggestions and the actors took us into a more stylized and theatrical place, but I couldn’t decide if I wanted that or not, so we kind of went back and forth for a while. In the long run when I finally decided, first preview, ha, to do it in the vein of style and broad choices, some face front, more abstract etc., and worked it in with actors an hour before first performance, they did great btw. I think in the long run the earlier work in realism grounded the piece and keeps it in anchored in a kind of weird nightmare reality with style on top and motivated by real inner drive. Having started with style may not have produced the results we got I think or certainly that I wanted. And I am happy to say it has grown during the run in a really nice way, and has found both the humor, which I wanted very much and the horror. I have new ideas for it of course, if we ever do it again! Ha-ha there is no end to it, which is the joy and subtle dissatisfaction of art, there is no end to this stuff. No final product.
Victoria – LOL Yes, it is the plight of the artist to never be satisfied.
Question Five:
Victoria – My final question – If you were not a director what other career would you choose?
Peter – hmm concert pianist please or writer so I could direct and act in it. Thanks for the conversation Victoria, it’s been fun!
Victoria – It has been a pleasure. Thank you!
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