After choreographer Donald Byrd saw the recent Tony Award-winning revival of Oklahoma! on Broadway, he knew he wanted to speak with director Daniel Fish, whose bold production of the American classic reenvisions it for the 21st century. Over the last three decades, Fish’s work as a director has crossed the forms of theatre, opera, and film at venues ranging from The Chocolate Factory Theater in Long Island City to New York City’s Public Theater to the Walker Arts Center in Minneapolis and overseas at the Düsseldorfer Schauspielhaus.
Last fall, while Byrd was choreographing the world premiere of Greenwood at the Alvin Ailey Dance Theater and Fish was in New York City to remount a piece based on Don DeLillo’s novel White Noise, the two artists spoke on behalf of SDC Journal.
DONALD BYRD | Your work has been characterized as edgy or avant-garde. Do you consider yourself edgy or avant-garde?
DANIEL FISH | No, I’m very suspicious of those categorizations. I’m just trying to make the work that I want to make, do the things that interest me, and learn about the things that I’m confused about.
People want to put us all into categories. I get why they want to do it, but do you think that way about your work?
DONALD | I do not.
DANIEL | It’s just work.
DONALD | Yes, it’s just work. But what is interesting about your response is you said you want to learn; you want to discover or know something. What do you look to know?
DANIEL | I’ve been reading David Foster Wallace again. He infamously said that writing was learning what it’s like to be a fucking human being. I kind of like that, and I think of directing as writing in some ways. I also think of reading as performing.
DONALD | You created an experimental performance piece based on Wallace’s writing. There were some unusual strategies in your approach: the texts changed with each performance, the actors navigated a set strewn with tennis balls on the floor. I hate it when anyone asks me this question, but what was your intent?
DANIEL | You saw what I was trying to do. When somebody asks, “What was your intention?” I think, “You saw my intention.” My intention was to make the piece that you saw. If I could explain to you why I did it, I wouldn’t have to make it.
I had read a bunch of Wallace’s work and got really captivated by it. Then I heard recordings of him reading his work and that changed how I read his work. For me, that was the hook. His voice became the hook. His writing wasn’t the text of the piece; his voice was the text.
DONALD | That’s really interesting. I developed a piece with Anna Deavere Smith, using her methods of recordings. We were working with audio of James Baldwin and Margaret Mead. In Anna’s method, you listen to the audio, speak with the audio, and then eventually you stop listening and you just say it. You’re not trying to mimic or be a ventriloquist. There’s a truthfulness and authenticity that comes through: that’s what you’re trying to capture. My experience was I could not ever completely capture what James Baldwin was saying. I would have moments that would go in and out, but there’s something impossible about the task.
DANIEL | Sure. Certainly with the Wallace piece, there was a game about watching the actors struggle to do it; that was part of what was delivered. I felt how I felt when I read his work: like running a race. Difficult and exhilarating. I was trying to capture that, but I’m not even sure I knew I was trying to capture that until I saw it.
I think one of the things that we were trying to do is that the actor becomes a vessel for the material in a way that if it’s really cooking, the song or text is singing the actor. They’re not singing the song or they’re not acting the play; the play is acting them.
I think what happens often is I read or see something and I want to have a conversation with or spend more time with it. And the way I spend more time with it, or to have a conversation with it, is to make a piece of theatre with it. Someone else might write a critical essay; someone else might have read it 10 more times. But for me, maybe I read something and I think I’m not done with it or it’s working on me or it’s a way to try to learn something or discover something.
The other day, I was thinking about the phrase “museum piece.” That is a derogatory term, right? “Oh, I don’t want to make a museum piece.” If that’s a derogatory term, I thought, “Why is that a derogatory term?” I love going to museums. What’s more alive than looking at a painting that blows you away? So maybe I do want to make the museum piece.
I like being turned on by or lost in a painting or a sculpture. For me, it feels very similar to when I’m really excited by a work of theatre. Or a work of fiction. It either disturbs or calms me, depending on my mood, but it’s engaging me on a deep level and asking something of me. It’s asking me to work and look at something—maybe for a long period of time or to look carefully. That’s the work that draws me in.
I’m not sure I’m able to do that all the time in my work, but I’d like to think that I’m working towards that.
DONALD | With the contemporary literary texts that you work with, what in that writing strikes you as being theatrical?
DANIEL | I think it’s writing that turns me on and that, on some level, I want to hear aloud. I wouldn’t say it’s necessarily dramatic, but it feels performative or theatrical.
When I was in performance studies at Northwestern, Frank Galati was one of my teachers. On the first day of class, Frank gave all the directors the first page of a short story. Everybody got a different short story. I got the first page of a T. Coraghessan Boyle short story, and Frank said, “Okay, on Thursday you have to stage it. You can do anything you want, only you can’t cut a single word.”
This was a huge lesson for me because I was faced with a bit of narrative fiction and forced to make all these decisions. Is it one person, is it 10 people? Is it men, is it women? Is it text spoken, is it text visual? I couldn’t make any assumptions; you know, the kind of assumptions that usually come with the structure of a play. There’s no patriarchal figure saying, “This is the form it must fit into.” I had to take responsibility for making that form up. This was extremely liberating for me.
I don’t really look at theatrical text differently. I look at White Noise differently than I look at Oklahoma!, but because they’re different, not because one is a play and one is a novel. One is written by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II and the other by Don DeLillo. The form is kind of secondary.
DONALD | I’m curious about something. You said that when you read, you seem to be responding to things that make you work. To me, I hear that the material challenges you in some way. I often find that people don’t want to experience things that make them work; they don’t want to be engaged that way. They want the path of least resistance when they’re encountering a piece of art. Is that the experience you want your audiences to have?
DANIEL | Well, I want my audience to have a good experience. I think what you’re talking about is something we hear all the time: “Can it be shorter? Why does it have to be so long?” I’m like, “It’s going to take the time it’s going take.”
I think that it’s very easy to blame audiences. But it works both ways. I think we haven’t given audiences work that challenges them, and so that muscle gets atrophied. They become used to something that’s very fast. And, of course, television and everything in our culture is a part of this.
It’s a little misguided to put the blame on the audience entirely. We have a role in that. What happens is that they get scared, we get scared, and we stop making work that may engage people on a level that might just ask them to look at a stage picture or sit with a difficult piece of music for a long period of time before we start changing it.
You start operating out of a place of wanting approval or love instead of actually giving them something that you’ve worked really hard to make, just the way you want it to be.
And then, if you’re lucky and you get it that way—which we all know how hard that is, and there are many, many obstacles—it’s not yours anymore. It belongs to them.
If you’re talking about asking the audience to work, but not asking the audience to work too hard, then I’m not interested. – DANIEL FISH
DONALD | So where is that place in the middle—if one is actually looking for middle?
My experience of looking at Oklahoma!, for example, is that there was no middle ground; it was one intention or focus. I thought that you were not trying to please or seek approval from the audience, but rather you were doing the best work you could without regard to how it might land for an audience or producer.
So how do you think of the work of trying to find a middle?
DANIEL | I’m not trying to find a middle. I’m interested in extremes.
On a micro level, maybe sometimes you’re looking for a sweet spot. You’re looking for the thing that is going to make something click and that may be about the idea of balance. But I don’t think that’s quite what you’re talking about.
If you’re talking about asking the audience to work, but not asking the audience to work too hard, then I’m not interested. I’m making it the way I want to make it. I’m going to do the best job I can. Making it so that you’re seeing, hopefully, exactly what I want you to see and hear.
Work can be entertaining; work can be thrilling; work can be funny. It doesn’t all have to be just hard. But I do think it’s about asking people to be present and alert and asking people to be in the room with another human being with language, music, and light.
DONALD | If producers or presenters enter into an agreement and say, “We want a piece of yours. We want you to direct something,” they know what they’re getting. It seems to me they should say, “We want you to bring the thing that you do—the best of you—to the table. That’s really what we are paying for: the best of how you want it done.”
DANIEL | That’s what good producers do. The folks at Bard SummerScape did it. And Susan Feldman at St. Ann’s Warehouse did it. For Oklahoma! at St. Ann’s, we rehearsed for five weeks on a completed set. No one does that. And I think that shows in the work.
This funny thing happens in theatre. You work for four weeks and then you add lights, costumes, and set. We wouldn’t think of working without texts for five weeks and “adding” a text! We wouldn’t think of working without actors for five weeks and then just “adding” the actors! Why do we think we can just add these things at the last minute and it’ll be good? I don’t get it.
DONALD | I want to ask a question about the space in Oklahoma! Do you think part of the problem at the center of the play is communication and miscommunication?
One of the things that I noticed and was very engaged by in the book scenes was when you chose to put people close together and when you chose to have them really far apart. The communication was affected; the urgency of the communication was dependent on how close or how far away people were from each other. Were you using spatial relationships to amplify misunderstandings?
DANIEL | I think that’s true, but I don’t think I was consciously doing that. I was probably thinking more about composition, dynamic, contrast, and interest.
I started my process in 2007 when JoAnne Akalaitis—who was running the theatre program at Bard College—asked me to come and do a show. Almost on impulse, I said, “I want to do Oklahoma!” I didn’t know much more about it at the time. I hadn’t seen it for a long time, since I was a kid, so there was nothing other than a deep memory of the music.
There is flexible space at Bard. At the time, John Conklin was the designer and we were thinking about dinner theatre. The idea of a table with Crock-Pots of chili and sitting in the fringe grew out of that.
That got refined when Laura Jellinek came on as set designer in 2015. We still kept the idea of the tables and the chili in this long wooden space, which has always been part of it. The idea of everybody being in the room together was part of that. Each time we’ve done it, we’ve doubled the audience size.
So, the chili and Patrick Vaill—who has played Jud throughout—were there from the beginning. I liked that his Jud was so young and had the impulses of a young man.
The first Bard production in 2007 was very different from what we did at Bard in 2015 and then subsequently at St. Ann’s and at Circle in the Square [on Broadway]. The first cast was a bunch of 17- to 21-year-old kids. There was a wonderful scrappiness about it.
DONALD | What in the story or music most resonated with you at the start of your process?
DANIEL | As I got into it, I certainly think that last scene—that trial scene—became very important to me. And the idea of the need for a community to create an outsider in order to define itself. A community is only a community by virtue of who or what they exclude from it.
DONALD | Your production was so much about the “outside.” The Rodgers & Hammerstein (R&H) management tend to be tight about things you can do in production. What was your experience?
DANIEL | I can honestly say it was very positive. From the beginning, we worked with Bruce Pomahac, who was the Director of Music for R&H. He is one of those people who has extensive knowledge of those shows. He can sit down at the piano with the 1943 version and will tell you, “These four parts went like this and in the movie, it went like this, and in 1979…” He became a real resource to Dan Kluger, the orchestrator, and to me.
With Ted Chapin [Chief Creative Officer of the Rodgers & Hammerstein Organization, which publishes and licenses the works of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II and many others], it was always a conversation. It never got prescriptive.
When he saw it at Bard, he raised concerns about the end and asked me to address them. I think it really became about me articulating what I was doing. He saw one thing, and I thought, “Well, that’s not what I see.” I had to go back and try to make clear what it was.
I hope that other estates can take a cue from this. Ted was vigilant, interested, and he was by no means a free ticket to do anything, but it was always a conversation. Right up through when we were on Broadway, we were dealing with the length of the dream ballet. I have nothing but really good things to say about how that went.
DONALD | Now, I may have this wrong, but it’s written that the dream ballet closes Act I. In your production, it opens the second act.
DANIEL | Correct.
DONALD | I’d read a story—a rumor—that you had asked to cut the ballet completely.
DANIEL | That’s not true. That came up at Bard in 2015.
We were struggling with what wasn’t a dream ballet. We used a version of the music and created a stage picture you see at the very end of the ballet, of people in space. But there was no dance at the time.
Then we were in our final dress and I had the thought to move it to the top of the second act because there was something about wanting to slam it right up against “The Farmer and the Cowman” and end the first act with Laurey in the most acoustic, raw way possible.
Ted Chapin saw that and said, “I really think there needs to be a ballet.” At St. Ann’s, Eva Price came on as enhancing producer, and she and St. Ann’s supported a number of workshops for [choreographer] John Heginbotham and I to work with dancers and to try to figure out what would become a dream ballet.
DONALD | It seems to me there is this thing about how much dust and cobwebs is on something. And then when you’re looking at it and you really want to get a clear picture of understanding it—let’s say with Oklahoma!—there’s a lot of noise that needs to be cleaned off.
DANIEL | I guess I would ask, “How can you not do that?” That’s your job.
DONALD | If you think that the job of the director is to create clarity, then yes. But don’t all directors —
DANIEL | No, I don’t think the job of the director is clarity. For God’s sake, clarity? Clarity makes me want to reach for my Luger.
I think it’s about not making assumptions about a piece of material. You look at Oklahoma! and what do you have? Words and musical notation on the page, right? You’ve got that brilliantly put down by Oscar Hammerstein II and Richard Rodgers. Beyond that, everything else is applied.
What I’m interested in is engaging with the words and the music and bringing them to life in a way that interests me, that moves me. If it moves me, then maybe it’s going to move somebody else.
DONALD | I agree with you and you’re absolutely right in the purest sense that what’s there is: text and music.
However, there’s a performance history that goes along with it that many people bring with them as well, including the audience. How does one push through that? I would say, with Oklahoma!, for example, it’s a kind of willingness: you have to be willing to see what’s there. As a director, you’re already coming at it with, “I’m just going to start with the texts and the music and I’m not going to bring all that other stuff there if I’m going to resist having that invade the space of the creation.”
DANIEL | No. I’m not that pure. Of course I looked at the film. Of course I listened to every recording I could find. All of that is useful information, right? But it just goes in, whether it is useful or not. The same way I’d walk out of my house and see something interesting on the street—is that useful? Or reading about something that’s happened in the news. Is that useful? That’s all that it’s about.
I think the dream ballet in the movie is phenomenal. It deeply informed John Heginbotham’s work on our dream ballet. And then we found Gabrielle Hamilton, the dancer who originated the part at St. Ann’s and on Broadway. She blew us away. The ballet was very much made on her; I would say the whole production is made on those actors. I don’t think people quite understand the extent to which this is so.
I think my work—and I know this particularly true about Oklahoma!—is so dependent on the vulnerability and the preparedness and the willingness of the actors to show up every night and bare themselves. If they don’t do that, my work is nothing.
DONALD | I find the same thing. That who is in the room—whether I’m working with my own group or whether I’m making work on other dance companies—determines what the work looks like and what it is. Often, I don’t want to work with other dancers because you have to go through this long process of their getting to know you, hoping that they trust you.
DANIEL | You’ve done Oklahoma!, is that correct? Did you direct it or choreograph it or—
DONALD | Choreographed. In that production, I was very involved in a dramaturgical way. I did a lot of research that I shared with the director and actors on the state of Oklahoma at the time that it’s taking place. The Oklahoma territory and then how many black people there were there—
DANIEL | Right, race riots and—
DONALD | I’m at work now on a piece for the Alvin Ailey company about the race riots in Tulsa. I’m really excited about that.
In the Oklahoma! I choreographed, we cast Jud as black and then there were black people in the community. There was not much attention to race except we felt that the stuff with Jud—because of his blackness— created a tension that was really interesting. Also, when Curly says, “You should hang yourself,” that resonated for people because of the history of lynching in this country. Some people were upset and asked, “How could you do that?”
What was also interesting was when Jud is dead and they’re going to move his body, one of the black actors had the line, “Don’t you touch him.”
DANIEL | Isn’t it amazing, how that happens? Like when Mary Testa, as a white woman, says, “Shut up,” to Anthony Cason [who is black], or when Will Mann, who is one of the black actors, says “self-defense, alright,” and sides with the [white] community. Those lines are fascinating. I’m thinking, “Of course, I hadn’t thought about that.” What you said about “you should hang yourself” resonates in this way.
DONALD | I’ve had two really good times in the theatre in the last 10 years or so, and your Oklahoma! was really good. It didn’t mean that I loved everything, but I was so engaged and happy I’m here. It became really clear to me in the first five minutes that that’s where I wanted to be. By the time we got to the end, I felt like I had been thrown up against the wall emotionally in the sense of how things were ricocheting off each other and in meaning and possibilities. That’s what I hope for anytime I go in and sit down in a theatre. I would say Oklahoma! verged on being profound, if not profound.
DANIEL | Thank you. What was the other one?
DONALD | It was a very different experience: Hand to God [by Robert Askins]. Is it a good play or not? I don’t know. But it was an experience: it was the most diverse audience I have seen in a Broadway house ever.
When I say diverse, it was not only white people—the people that you see going to Broadway shows regularly—but there were a lot of black people. There were a lot of really young people sitting in the audience; a lot of gay people—young gay people, not just the gay people that go to Broadway musicals and stuff like that. And then there were a lot of young, straight white people there. People were all having the same experience and enjoying it.
DANIEL | Well, who marketed that? Hire them.
DONALD | With Oklahoma! and Hand to God, I thought, “Okay, two very, very different experiences and two very different kinds of theatre.” But it spoke to the fact that theatre can really be inclusive without wanting to be offensive or wanting to play safe (whatever that is) or wanting to provoke people. Both were provocative, but I don’t think that’s what they were trying to do.
DANIEL | No, but I don’t think there’s anything wrong with being offensive. I think, particularly in the world we’re living in, it’s a worthwhile act. If it’s not doing anything else, then maybe not.
DONALD | Yeah, but provocative is part of the delivery system. If provocative is what’s needed to communicate, then you can be provocative or should be.
Have you had producers or artistic directors tell you that you have to change something, do it differently?
DANIEL | Certainly. It’s why I stopped working in regional theatre. I started producing my own work because I was told, “If you want to do that sort of thing, you can’t do it here anymore.” So I started self-producing.
My work…is so dependent on the vulnerability and the preparedness and the willingness of the actors to show up every night and bare themselves. If they don’t do that, my work is nothing. – DANIEL FISH
DONALD | One of the things that this issue of SDC Journal is exploring is the idea of what constitutes dangerous art. Do you recall what was going on when you first learned about the NEA Four?
DANIEL | I must’ve been in college or just graduated college. I was aware of Mapplethorpe. I had seen Karen Finley. I was excited by all of that work. The term “dangerous art” is a little suspicious. I think [performance artist] Chris Burden’s work is certainly dangerous because he was harming himself. But “dangerous” is living in toxic waste. Walking out into the middle of traffic is dangerous. Living on the street is dangerous. I’m not sure art is dangerous, unless you’re actually harming yourself or somebody else.
I was talking to someone the other day about [New German Cinema director Rainer Werner] Fassbinder and David Foster Wallace—about people who really look at suffering, pain, abuse of power, and what it is to be human. To look at how wonderful but also awful people can be. Who are the artists able to really go there and don’t let it overtake their lives?
DONALD | I hadn’t really considered what this question was when you started talking, but the dangerous part sounds like fascism to me—the Nazis. So, I think “dangerous art” is a little overwrought. I think maybe the attempt is to say that art disturbs our desire to be complacent.
The outcome of the NEA Four was that the NEA stopped supporting individual artists. Did we lose the war—or is the war still going?
DANIEL | I think there is a battle around censorship—what can be said and what can’t be said. But those are battles that are being fought in different ways right now.
There’s an unfortunate thing in our field and it’s rampant in grant writing right now: money is awarded on a project basis. You’re asked to describe what the project is going to be. I don’t know what the fucking project’s going to be before I make it. If I knew what it was going to be, why would I make it?
DONALD | Are there things in the current American theatre that you think are risky now?
DANIEL | The risk is when one—a director, a designer, an actor—starts operating from a place of wanting to be celebrated, when one becomes driven by the need for accolades or laughs or applause or love. There’s nothing wrong with being praised: it’s human to want it. But there’s a real cost to the work when that becomes the driving force behind it.
PHOTO CREDITS: White Noise by Don DeLillo. Directed by Daniel Fish. Video: Jim Findlay; scenic design: Andrew Leiberman; costumes: Doey Lüthi; lighting: Stacey Derosier. | A (radically condensed and expanded) SUPPOSEDLY FUN THING I’LL NEVER DO AGAIN after David Foster Wallace. Directed by Daniel Fish. Scenic design: Laura Jellinek; costumes: Andrea Lauer; lighting: Thomas Dunn; sound: Daniel Kluger. | Oklahoma! by Richard Rodgers + Oscar Hammerstein II. Directed by Daniel Fish; choreography: John Heginbotham. Scenic design: Laura Jellinek; costumes: Terese Wadden; lighting: Scott Zielinski + Thomas Dunn; sound: Drew Levy; projections: Joshua Thorson. | Oklahoma! by Richard Rodgers + Oscar Hammerstein II. Directed by Peter Rothstein; choreography: Donald Byrd; fight choreography: Geoffrey Alm. Scenic design: Matthew Smucker; costumes: Lynda L. Salsbury; lighting: Tom Sturge; sound: Ken Travis.