The Poetics of Bradley and Joel

THE CAST The Actor: Bradley Greenwald The Director: Joel Sass The Dialect Coach The Stage Manager The Intern The Thirty-Six Characters Played by The Actor THE SETTING Jungle Theater, house lights up. It is late morning, one week before the opening of Doug Wright’s “I Am My Own Wife.” The CAST is arrayed in house seats, each holding a mess of script pages and notebooks and coffee cups, except for THE ACTOR and the THIRTY-SIX CHARACTERS, all of whom exist, entirely separate, clearly delineated, sharply limned, within the person of BRADLEY. THE COSTUMES BRADLEY stands twirling the broad skirt of a mauve-ish, shapeless muslin dress, beneath which are visible two legs in khaki pants. He also wears a black headscarf, which he periodically adjusts over his ears. THE DIRECTOR (JOEL) sits in third row center, clad in various shades of black and gray, his gray hair neatly tousled, looking very hip. THE BACKSTORY The Jungle mounted this play, starring Greenwald and directed by Sass, to huge critical and commercial acclaim in 2006. The play itself is tricky; playwrights tend to get a little snarky at the fact that Doug Wright made himself a character, while actors often relish the opportunity to attempt pulling off that many characters in the space of two acts. Making things a little unwieldy in concept, and potentially disastrous in execution, is the fact that the play uses a sea of characters to examine questions of identity and persona, construct and reality, players and play. It is a piece that begs for mad deconstruction by academics and theoreticians. It is ready-made for critical theses on the performance of gender and sexuality. And it has been, on Broadway and here in Minneapolis, an unlikely and enormous hit. The play, Greenwald, and Sass are all heavily award-laden, and come to this morning’s rehearsal bearing spectacular resumes and reputations. And they come aware of the fact that the theater-going public of the Twin Cities remembers the last time they did this play and hit it out of the park. Remounts can be disappointing. Or remounts can be dull. But this iteration of Wright’s messy, unruly, difficult, mostly brilliant play is better than the last, and it is one of the best things I’ve seen on stage, ever, seriously, and it demands a level of artistic excellence that’s a little alarming, but it really just is that good, and it is that good in part—not in whole, but in part—because of the poetics of Bradley and Joel. That the two men are talented, experienced, and skilled is obvious. That they were a good match was established in their first go-round with I AM MY OWN WIFE, and made even plainer when Joel directed Bradley with Stephen Epp in THE MYSTERY OF IRMA VEP last year. That both could navigate difficult scripts, difficult characters, and the massive general difficulty of a one-person show was clear. But now it appears that they have, like twins, developed entirely their own language, an elliptical lexicon that occasionally eschews words, gives equal weight to pause and gesture, flows back and forth from one to the other in a fluid, almost continuous stream, where lines end and conversation begins without taking a breath, where thirty-six characters, in their public and private moments, in crowded streets and in prison cells and in a strange museum, are eerily summoned into palpable, real, vivid existence—each person, each place, seeming more to emerge from this two-headed imagination than from the usual director/actor collaboration of skills. They are, actually, a little like two boys who are so immersed in their game of make-believe that they have tapped into that deep, absolute, willing suspension of disbelief, that lifting of the burden of self, that most of us lose at childhood’s edge, and never feel again—except, in a rare gift of moments, at a play. And perhaps that moment of giving ourselves over, completely, to theater—that moment of absolute, childlike faith in impossible—is what we are after, every time.

The Prologue: Bradley warms up after a break

BRADLEY, in dress, headscarf, and khakis, whispers awhile, turning a tight circle on stage. Then he does an entire scene in a tiny sphere of silence, lips moving, eyes darting, hands gesturing, taking a few steps upstage, turning and taking a few steps back, sitting down and standing up from a chair, and then, somewhat startlingly, swinging his arms above his head and swinging them down with enormous force, holding the shape of something heavy and sharp. BRADLEY [as CHARLOTTE, shrieking]: And I SWUNG and HIT the blade—[pauses. Drops arms, turns to look into house. As BRADLEY]: Better? The voice I think— JOEL: Yep. Is more her own. Less— BRADLEY: Her father’s. JOEL [laughing]: Yep. Yep yep yep yep. BRADLEY nods, and, without pause, crosses to stage left, flings himself into a chair, crosses and uncrosses his legs half a dozen times, seeming to get comfortable in a couple of bodies—seeming more to let them get comfortable in him—and dives into rehearsal for real. * Bradley—as himself, in a conversation the next day—speaks to the challenges of developing a one-person show (primarily exhaustion), but also the possibilities created by the space created in this two-person process. He says, “When you’re in a space when it’s just a director and a performer, there is more license to let the imagination fill the room. To poetically approach something, rather than trying to chisel down a big piece of granite into something that’s in high relief. You have the luxury of going off poetically for a while, and maybe trying more of a poetic idea than anything else. “Joel is a poetic soul,” he continues. “He works extemporaneously from that source. And I understand what he says. I know where he’s speaking from, and I think he knows where I’m speaking from too, so even when we’re struggling to articulate that, it’s something we both empathetically understand. We know. “And when you can identify an ineffable without articulating it, and then do it, without having to take the time to articulate it, that can save a lot of time. It can also spare them moment, too—when you look at it, you kill it, sometimes. So I think we can both talk around it without damaging it with words.” *

Act I: On not damaging things with words

JOEL: It feels like she’s got a definite opinion there, and I feel like— BRADLEY: Oh, it’s too— JOEL: Yes. And she brings it out to the audience, and it feels like there should be some sort of—head-gestural thing that accompanies that. Does that make sense?” BRADLEY: [nods] Mm-hmm. [Proceeds without pause into his line.] JOEL: Now on that, I feel like—especially given the life that she’s led—and the short memory that perhaps others have—the anecdotes about the Turkish women and the asylum seekers could maybe have even more editorial inflection about how she— BRADLEY: Feels personally— JOEL: And as a citizen, as a citizen of a country that she hopes would be better now. BRADLEY: Yep. [Turns and begins his conversation onstage again.] JOEL: Yep. Cool. Cool cool cool. Oh. A little one that I think I caught—from a little further back…when she says, ‘And from behind me, another loud voice’— BRADLEY: [In char] ‘Behind me, another loud voice’— JOEL: Yeah, and then snap—upstage. BRADLEY [AS CHARLOTTE]: And from behind me, another loud voice—[BRADLEY snaps head] JOEL [firmly]: Yep. Yep yep yep. Mmm-hmm. * The rehearsal process is a hell of a thing, no matter the show, no matter the actor(s) or director, but when it happens to be a one-person show, the process requires and entails perhaps a few different facets than a show with a large cast, in which rehearsal can seem a little like herding cats. But in a one-person show, Joel says—and he’s something of a master of the form, having recently done scenic design and direction for Sarah Agnew in THE SYRINGA TREE (Jungle) and Kate Eifrig in NINE PARTS OF DESIRE (Guthrie), both powerful and highly praised productions—there are a few ingredients that must be there. “You really do need to cast well, and there’s got to be something beyond the superficial,” he says. It really does need to be somebody who’s got a well-developed sense of their own performance persona. “Part of the trick with these one-person shows—if you’re going to do something artful with them, that’s not just someone parroting a bunch of voices—it’s figuring out what’s the movement vocabulary, what’s the particular mechanism for how those characters hand off.” BRADLEY sits in a chair and silently shapeshifts from one character to the other and back again, very rapidly, several times, moving between the prim, physically restrained person of CHARLOTTE, and the flashy, flamboyant character of TV personality ZIGGY. The two "characters" converse under BRADLEY’S breath and take turns occupying BRADLEY’S body, while the rest of the CAST waits patiently. BRADLEY rips into a peal of hysterical laughter, as ZIGGY, and recoils from this laughter as CHARLOTTE. JOEL: It’s great, it’s great, you’re doing just fine. Now I’m just asking you to help me go, “I wonder what if—“ BRADLEY: Yep, yep. JOEL: I wonder if “Not so much furniture to dust,” which she kind of brings out here to the studio audience— BRADLEY: That always gets—yep. JOEL: Yep. And that he’s smiling, but there’s like a brittle— BRADLEY: Yeah, he’s really—he’s not gonna help her at all. JOEL: He’s not going to help her at all. BRADLEY: His opinion about the whole thing comes out there. JOEL: She subsided into the ocean. BRADLEY: My ratings just went way up. JOEL: Everyone will be running this clip. * In this rehearsal, it does appear that Bradley and Joel are almost sharing a brain. More correctly, it should probably just be called collaboration, if of an unusually attuned sort. And collaboration is not always a word used to describe the dynamics of the actor/director dyad. But it is the accurate word here. Joel (also as himself, the next day), “You can’t go in and impose a directorial mechanism on top of that performer. I like doing these [one-person] shows because the stance of the director—the role is not subservient exactly, but it’s so much more equal. Well, I always like to think it’s equal. But it’s to your advantage to be able to cast someone of some gifts to make a room or a space or a rehearsal environment that’s going to enable them to wrestle with the material. “You watch that, and that reveals to you how you can best bring that into greater relief or contrast or clarity. Basically you make them do most of the work. [Laughs.] And then you can provoke them, or challenge them, or really encourage them on something they weren’t aware they were doing, but that’s key to putting the story across.”

Act II: On directing the eye

ACT II: ON DIRECTING THE EYE JOEL: It might be interesting if we see a physical attenuation—is that the right word?—in Doug— BRADLEY: At his moment of, “Wait a minute.” JOEL: Yeah, “Wait a minute.” You know, like whether the gaze lands—wherever it goes, whether it starts with the gaze landing on something, or whether it starts with something up here that then begins to get connected from— BRADLEY: Mmm-hmm. JOEL: [Looks up from script]. If any of this feels right to you. If it doesn’t [waves hand], make your own deal. The next day, Joel says, “It’s one thing to…make an observation or inducement directorially, and another to do it so that it feels very connected for the performer—so then you have to sit and watch them sort of saw off their own arm essentially. So you gain a lot of respect and admiration for a performer who’s willing to work that hard or take those risks, because there’s only so much you can do to help them. “There’s something about the relationship of the performer to the audience,” Joel continues. “Where they are in space; who they’re talking to. Is it a show where they’re aware of the audience all the time, or is it something that’s maybe a little more private? But then, nothing will kill a one-person show quicker than having it be totally private. So they’ve got to find a way to place their scene partners who don’t exist. “It’s a very intimate relationship, but it’s also very lonely, too; because when the going gets tough, or if it’s always tough onstage, there’s no one else to look to.” * Bradley, in the individual and often lonely process of working with the script on his own, had to not only differentiate the thirty-six characters he plays, but make them discrete entities, with separate bodies, dialects, mannerisms, habits of hand and eye, began with an approach to the script as simply storytelling. “Then,” he says, “it became a matter of going back and setting boundaries. I’m a classically trained musician, so relegating a certain character to a certain part of my range—like, within a fifth, or the lower fourth of my range, and not really going out of that in order to keep it separate. Some of the accents are more educated than others; sometimes a German character may be more facile with English than another.” In fact, the number of German dialects on display in this production, from the mangling of the language by a character from the American south to the fluidity of the main character’s German and her awkward English, is alarming, and indicative of Bradley’s German major in college. This linguistic range plays an enormous role in the separation of character. So does Bradley’s musical background, which makes of the play almost a piece of music, antiphonal, multipartite, and almost without pause for breath. “I think that’s changed over the years,” Bradley says. “Since I came from the music theater world—opera, operetta—there was always a music element. In those kinds of pieces, character is really defined, for me, things were already set—pitch, rhythm, emotional content, style of line. That work was already done for me; it was a matter of allowing them to be expressed. “But when I was asked to do my first play [TORCH SONG TRILOGY at the Jungle], I was at a loss, because there was nothing to tell me. I mean, of course there was—there was language. But I wasn’t refined enough yet in my sensibilities to immediately see that source, to mine that source of material. “So when I started approaching characters then in plays, I would figure things out a lot beforehand, not just technically, but really kind of dictate how, in my brain, things would go. And then you get into the rehearsal process and—usually, I’ve learned, that kind of preparation doesn’t work. Sometimes it would; for a while; but then you start fighting against it, and it doesn’t live anymore. Over the past couple years, I’ve gotten better at closing my eyes and jumping in.” Joel echoes the notion that music is a significant piece of developing character in this sort of play. “I think it helps if someone who’s doing a one-person show has some ear for music, because there’s no one else there to underscore or provide the backbeat or the counterpoint to what you’re doing. You really do need to know how to architect with your voice and your movement a really strong and varied terrain of tempo and rhythm and pitch.” “This is also where the director hopefully is paying attention, as the chorus of voices spools out across the stage, where they’re pitched vocally, so that it doesn’t become caricature. The director is paying attention to the sound of the show, to how the transitions are done, so that they’re interesting and creative and not like bad high school interpretive theater—which is often what you see.”

Act III: Sound and space

BRADLEY [AS FRENCH REPORTER]: “…did the Stasi really pay you in contraband?” [Stops in his tracks, looks at JOEL.] So that’s— JOEL [Looks up.]: I’m sorry, I was listening and not watching. BRADLEY: So, the other foot? JOEL: Yeah. Yeah yeah yeah, so, the more there’s—the more there’s like a, depth, yes, if you can get that—snap around— BRADLEY: I have to start with the other foot. JOEL: That’s cool. BRADLEY: [mutters, then begins] “Francois Garnier, Paris. Did the Stasi really pay you in contraband? [without pausing for breath, voice drops to own voice] Now, her focus here. JOEL: When she comes back. BRADLEY: When she answers—that feels ambiguous to me. JOEL: It feels— BRADLEY: Should he not be out [upstage]? JOEL: Give it a try, see if it’s angled. BRADLEY: [begins as CHARLOTTE, transitions to FRANCOIS]: “…contraband?” JOEL [firmly]: Yeah, thanks, you know what? They do all need to be out. They lose their interrogative force if they’re— BRADLEY: Their bluntness. JOEL: Yeah. I think it’s in her reaction. BRADLEY [Mutters a line, then]: Should we do a slight physical shift? For her? JOEL: Uh huh. And I also think that when he says that, she could be potentially—it’s an interesting—well, this is what I wonder, you can see if it will do anything for you. That there’s a deeper affront. BRADLEY: Mmm. Yeah, of course there is. JOEL: A deeper affront. BRADLEY begins as CHARLOTTE, becomes FRANCOIS, takes on a sharp female New York (Bronx, to my ear) voice breaking in, shifts to Japanese reporter—pauses. JOEL: I wonder, with Daisuke—The turn was in the neck. It’s in the neck. The shoulders up, and then suddenly we had— BRADLEY [picks up in character]: Shirley Blacker… He makes a sudden physical shift, folding into himself on a sound cue and beginning to turn. BRADLEY: Turn on the—where you hear it go phwoomp? JOEL: Yeah, yeah. You hear it go phwoomp. * Joel, a skilled and deeply imaginative designer, designed his show. He seems to see and hear and feel the shape and nature of a space in such a way that sound and set seem inseparable from actor, concept, and text; they are integrative rather than imposed. His design for this production is flat-out beautiful, imagistic, suggestive, and precisely detailed. He says, “I think that there’s something design-wise, visually, about the spaces where these one-person shows occur—they tend in my mind not to be literal. They’re more—oh, what—they’re like Magritte, they’re abstract, they’re surreal or somewhat evocative.” For this show, he looked at photos of the New York show, but also was looking at Magritte at the time. “I was flipping through some Magritte and saw a painting of an armoire on a wooden floor with the door ajar and a nightdress hanging in there, but there was no closet rod, so it was one of those optical illusions.” “They cradle the show and the performer and also make a reflector that continues to amplify what they’re doing. Everything is not so much about making the reality of that world as you are making a Joseph Cornell box, that doesn’t overpower that one person—or that doesn’t make them seem too isolated, because we’ve all seen the one-person show that dies on the vine; I’m sure there’s something cool going on up there, but they’ve left the space so wide around that performer, all of their energy is leaking off into these vast, empty, aesthetically empty spaces.” And Bradley, in rehearsal, is memorizing the terrain of this rich, full, evocative space in his feet and body—or, it begins to seem, is memorizing the bodies of his characters, and how they themselves would navigate that space.

Act IV: Texture and terrain

JOEL: I think certain—like, Shirley?—could walk herself down—it’s sort of nice that we get this sense that people keep moving, pressing forward in the throng, so that as you travel, if you find yourself with opportunities to bring yourself up, let the next reporter bring it down again. BRADLEY: [Looks puzzled.] Seems like there could be some cleaning up of switches. JOEL: Mmm-hmm. They pause. Pages are turned. JOEL: I think there’s some clicking there, and then you’ve got a little bit longer passage before Carl asserts himself. She can travel—it seems to my ear—like she can travel another couple footsteps— BRADLEY: Before Carl breaks in? JOEL: Before Carl breaks in. BRADLEY mutters rapidly, travels that extra few steps—approx. two—downstage and to the right. He traces and retraces these steps, refining their angle and length. DIALECT COACH [thoughtfully]: Did the French guy used to have a cigarette? Or is that just me? JOEL: I don’t know, I’m not remembering the cigarette. BRADLEY [looking up]: Hmm? JOEL: Oh, we’re just wondering— COACH Did the French guy used to smoke? BRADLEY: Francois Garnier? I can’t remember. COACH: I can’t either. Maybe that was part of it. BRADLEY [mutters Japanese reporter’s lines, then out loud, hand holding invisible cigarette]: Francois Garnier. Francois Garnier.[He runs line, fussing with accent and position of hand.] JOEL: There is something in the texture of the smoking. BRADLEY [from CHARLOTTE to DAISUKE to FRANCOIS: Francois Garnier, Paris. [He takes a deep drag, completes line, exhales from the corner of his mouth] JOEL: Yep, yep yep yep yep. When she first has that intake of breath when he asks her that first thing— BRADLEY: Yep, connect it to the thing. JOEL: Yep. BRADLEY: Did the Stasi…did the Stasi…did the Stasi…[speaks in three distinct voices, each getting tighter and higher; BRADLEY takes imaginary hit, giggles, and squeaks out “Did the Stasi really pay you…” and exhales hard. As CHARLOTTE, he gasps and says, “What are you smoking?” Without pausing for laughter in house, BRADLEY continues]: Francois Garnier… JOEL: And some other lovely little like non-word vocal textures in there too, in terms of— BRADLEY mutters the name, repeats, repeats, plays with the newly acquired cigarette. * The sheer number of characters that Bradley becomes, or who occupy Bradley for awhile, is stunning, but is not the point of the play. The point of any play is arguable, of course, and every audience member comes away with a different theory about what that is. But for Bradley and Joel, this is a play about the dynamic between a fascinating woman and a playwright who tried to know and understand and write about her; a woman whose character shifted before that playwright and shifts now before the audience’s eyes, and a playwright whose illusions about character shift and as well. In both the 2006 production of I AM MY OWN WIFE and even more so in this new production, Bradley and Joel felt the play was not another World War II story, not just a biographical sketch of an eccentric, not about the obvious questions of gender and identity that the topics might suggest; they agreed that the play was, ultimately, about the character of Doug Wright, and the painful process of illusion falling away. Bradley says, “That for us is the reason for the play—what do you do when hero worship is compromised by reality? What do you do when a hero or a historical figure or even someone you love—when you learn too much about them, what do you do? “I think Doug’s struggle is even more recognizable to people now. That kind of a struggle that one goes through is being pushed onto more and more people; people are being made to consider their heroes.” “And that’s not something that can be read about in one essay, or thought about in the shower. You have to really live with these people and come to your own religion about them. “So when Doug gets to the end of this play and says, “I have no idea what to do. I’m curating her now, I don’t know what to edit, I don’t know what to preserve”— I think that struggle is one people have. I think that aspect of the play is what’s going to make it timeless.” Joel puts a finer point on it. “When you’re given one impression of this singular individual, and then suddenly they get very complicated and contradictory information—I like that. I find that really interesting. I’m sometimes agonized over the fact that there’s a certain section of the theater-going or art-attending public that wants their package wrapped up in plastic and vacuum-sealed. “The incapacity to deal with contradiction or ambiguity in a revealed life onstage is demoralizing to me, because it’s so essentially how we are in life. Those very people who are distressed over, ‘But the play didn’t tell us whether she was a good person or a bad person’ are oblivious to the fact that their own lives are made up of the most sometimes outrageous contradictions, or convenient hypocrisies, or willful conjoining of disparate impulses—so I like these shows for that reason.”

Act V: "What do you do when a piece loses its luster?"

JOEL: It’s really interesting to see her; it’s the image of her that Doug really hopes—you know what I mean? BRADLEY: That’s true, that’s—yep. JOELL And then Doug, because he really is the closest filter to us, I like that he comes close. JOEL: So this is all good, you should have that intensity, but you can parse it out, I think, even a little more specifically, “That a little boy,” you know, honoring his [the playwright’s] italics, “in his mother’s housecoat—survived” this awful, awful thing... JOEL: And one little note, “The two most repressive regimes the world has ever known, the Nazis and the Communists,” the moment that’s being inflected maybe somewhat parenthetically? when in fact it wants to, in the uttering of those two names—there is compressed all of the oppression and horror and long endurance and suffering that—not just one but two blows—does that make sense? BRADLEY [nodding firmly]: Mmm-hmm. JOEL: “In a pair of heels,” you know, that’s the most absurd but awe-inspiring— BRADLEY: Detail. JOEL: Detail. Of a form of keeping one’s individualism and resistance in the face of something like that. * Joel says, “I do find myself frequently and repeatedly moved by some of these one-person shows in particular, because the whole notion of them is that, even though they might have a whole lot of voices behind them, contributing to the story, it’s a really extensive and deep encounter with a particular human being, whether they existed or not.”

Act VI: Rehearsal Ends

BRADLEY: …And as the scarf comes off, Doug appears. JOEL: Yeah, I like that. I like that that’s sort of the time frame. I would like it not—my suggestion would be to not try to underscore or make overly explicit the notion that a scarf is like a mask. BRADLEY: Oh. JOEL: You know, because that makes it seem too self-consciously performy for me. BRADLEY: Ah. JOEL: I like the fact that it just happens to be that as the kerchief is coming off, Doug is returning to us. And he has on this expression like there’s—there’s a certain ease, you know, there’s that afterglow of having had an awesome visit— BRADLEY: Yep. JOEL: With someone. JOEL & BRADLEY stand facing each other, BRADLEY downstage center, JOEL at approx. 3rd row center. They they cross their arms, feet planted wide, BRADLEY in muslin dress and khaki pants, JOEL in his hip shades of gray. The two of them shift their weight slowly back and forth, mirroring one another’s motion precisely, saying nothing for awhile. JOEL: Cool. Cool cool cool cool. BRADLEY: Yeah. [Thoughtfully.] Yeah. [Pause.] It’ll happen. JOEL: Mmm-hmm. It is. [Long pause.] BRADLEY: Yeah. JOEL: Yeah. BRADLEY: Ok. JOEL: Awesome. [They smile.]

Epilogue: Opening night

JOEL is at the back of the house on the steps to the tech booth, knees akimbo and arms on knees. He stares intently at the stage. House lights go down. BRADLEY (as CHARLOTTE, in costume sans pants) bursts through a set of double wooden doors, a sly smile on her face. Behind her, a dress lit from below in hazy light appears to dangle in midair. The audience, slipping already into the world onstage, makes no sound. * I AM MY OWN WIFE runs at the Jungle Theater through December 18.