Zele Community Table
September 19, 2006
“There has to be that truth. We’re after that truth. That’s why it’s hard.”
Theatre Aspen artistic director; David McClendon; photographer and poet Owen McGoldrick; Zele marketing director Lisa Zimet; and Michael Conniff
Michael Conniff (MC): You came to Aspen with a big vision about what you wanted to happen with Theatre Aspen [then called Theatre in the Park]. How close are you to making that vision happen?
David McClendon (DMC): I was brought here to accomplish specific goals, and to be to the theater, what the [Aspen] Institute is to thought, with not only the highest level of traditional theatre, but the ability to attract many of the best—the best playwrights, producers, set designers, actors. We want Aspen to be one of their artistic homes.
MC: Does Aspen have a special attraction for them?
DMC: It’s the same thing that attracted me. The atmosphere here is so conducive to creativity. It goes back to The Aspen Idea and also the physical beauty. To solve something you can go for a stroll, or come to Zele.
Lisa Zimet (LZ): Make sure that gets into the blog.
DMC: It’s just the environment here. Place is so important. It’s true of music, painting, writing. It’s the requirement of a certain physical aesthetic. Like the Aspen Ideas Festival, you bring them together for the first time. I’ve always loved that the theater is an exercise in trust. It’s probably the most collaborative medium, with so many different elements, artistic and pragmatic. We’re all interdepenedent.
MC: When you came here, you took over Theater in the Park. To what extent have you been trying to escape the park and the tent with Theatre Aspen?
DMC: It would be lovely to build in the park, but we can’t. It’s in a floodplain. The city has plans for it. But it’s an absolute necessity for us as an organization to have the facilities to attract the level of theater artist I’m talking about. Even with substantial improvements in the tent, there are certain things one can’t do there. The size of it, the rain, the ambient noise.
MC: What does it sound like in there when it rains?
DMC: It’s like a drum. We even tried putting up a canopy.
MC: A tent over the tent.
DMC: So we’re contacting the company who made the tent to see if it’s possible to do that. It’s incrediby hot in there. We’ve got huge fans and we’ve explored the possibility of air conditioning.
MC: How did you come to your vision of Theatre Aspen?
DMC: My vision is predicated on my experience at The Old Globe in San Diego. I learned that our responsibility is to our audience infinitely more than to ourselves. The Old Globe had 53,000 subscribers.
Owen McGoldrick (OMG): What years where you there?
DMC: 1980 and 1992. I still go back there.
OMG: There’s a surprisingly strong theater community in San Diego.
DMC: Whatever you do must mirror the audience. Also, I learned at all the theaters I’ve directed, the reason there are those that work and those that don’t is a sense of ownership, of pride, like the music [Aspen Music Festival and School] is in Aspen. “That’s our music festival.” That’s our goal with the theater.
LZ: How much local talent do you draw upon? I’ve heard the criticism that we’ve lost a venue for local talent.
DMC: I get it all the time but I take great exception to that. The fact is we employed some 30 local actors this year.
LZ: People should know that.
DMC: They’d still complain. It makes sense for us to hire local people on many levels. It’s good public relations, yes, but indeed those locals have to compete with a broader span of people.
LZ: There’s Thunder River, the Hudson Reed Ensemble in the valley.
MC: You used local musicians this summer, didn’t you?
DMC: Another eight musicians and local designers
MC: And choreographers.
DMC: I was greatly disappointed when we did the Aspen auditions, not many people showed up. There’s not much I can do about that.
LZ: How long have you been here?
DMC: Two and a half years. My responsibility is to the audience. Organizationally, our responsibility is to the audience.
LZ: Before you came here, David, the theater was seen as more a grassroots organization. There was a certain unevenness. As a paying customer, I appreciate what you’re trying to do.
DMC: You have to make this covenant with this audience. But you know it’s a benchmark and you have to improve the quality of the work. This summer, we had [local actress] Peggy Mundinger [in “Dinner With Friends”] and she was wonderful. The wonderful thing with her was to bring in other actors from the outside, so it made her all the better.
LZ: You gave [playwright and mayoral candidate] Andrew Kole a shot. It doesn’t get much more local than that.
DMC: No, it doesn’t. Exclamation point.
LZ: Do you want to keep using local talent?
DMC: I believe in it passionately, bringing in both new playwrights and major existing playwrights.
LZ: And the children’s program.
DMC: It’s stronger and more viable. I brought back Marisa Post, who started the program, and it’s stronger and better than ever. The school we have in the summer is extraordinarily successful. And we’re trying to expand and change that experience, and also to do outreach. Basalt doesn’t have a theater teacher. Aspen can just do so much. That troubles me greatly. Marisa will teach a class at the [Aspen] high school. Because that is our audience of the future, bringing in the parents as well. So it serves us, and we’re expanding year-round. Marisa’s working with a teen group, a prep school in the arts. It’s in Aspen, and we’re using the Black Box Theatre. We’re also going to have classes from Glenwood on up.
OMC: Have art classes been cut, like painting and fine arts? In the public schools, it’s been cut.
DMC: That’s very much part of our responsibility.
OMC: I went to the Old Globe a couple times. Nothing is more fascinating is real dialogue. I admire people who can make up dialogue.
DMC: I’m a director not a writer. You pick up who and what they are. That’s how you speak, that’s who they are. In the same way there are those life experiences that make us what we are, those are all the things that have made us who and what we are. How we speak and react and how we move. It’s no different in a play. There has to be that life, there has to be that truth. We’re after that truth. That’s why it’s hard.
OMC: To invent dialogue.
DMC: That’s the gift the actor has. The time in the rehearsal hall—it’s a blessed place and it’s an amazing experience. People doing things you can only dream of—that’s actors and designers, too. It’s a treat. It really is.
OMC: Biographical experience.
DMC: And mounds of research.
OMC: Let me tell you this story. I was begging my mom to get me this ant farm. She was distracted. One hot July day I left the peanut butter ajar and it was swarming with ants. She said “Here. Here’s your goddamn ant farm.” The truth is the most fascinating thing.
DMC: Shakespeare said our job is to hold the mirror to nature. That’s our job. It’s about who we are, who we were, and who we might become.
OMC: San Diego has this reputation, and yet I’ve gone to a few plays that seem bourgeois. I know there’s a range. When you see a “bad” play, it can turn you off.
DMC: I think that’s true. The audience every night provides the final element. The audience guides, their energy provides what you need to finish the play. They are indeed a character in the play.
MC: Are there nights when “Dinner With Friends” seemed different because of the audience?
DMC: Yes, because of the nature of the play. It depends on the ratio of male to female, how they react and speak to the play. It was palpable. Also, it had to do with the age of the people, how much they’ve experienced in relationships—and the choices they made. Sometimes people were weeping or laughing at the same time.
LZ: How about “Love, Janis”?
DMC: Sometimes the audience would take absolute control. That’s one of the things that’s lovely about it. One women came to “Dinner With Friends” four times. She said it was like therapy but cheaper and more entertaining.
LZ: You had two different actresses with “Janis.”
DMC: One actress who had played it on Broadway. She was older. The other one was the age Janis was when Janis Joplin was Janis Joplin. She’s playing it in San Francisco right now.
LZ: There the audience made a huge difference.
DMC: Yeah, they enjoyed it.
MC: What about “It Seemed Like A Good Idea At The Time”?
DMC: It’s one of the challenges you have when you work months and months to make the germ of it into that would affect an audience more. With all that work, we weren’t successful. We hit the ceiling. The way I approached it with our actors and stage managers, we started from scratch in a lot of ways. Certain aspects of that Andrew could hear, and certain aspects he couldn’t. We made something out of it. And it was a joy with the actors in the rehearsal hall.
OMC: So you guys see it night after night after an audience changes. It’s kind of invisible for you.
DMC: I’m ready to move on to the next thing. That’s the beauty of the work. It’s very exciting.
OMC: Stick a fork in it.
DMC: Like raising a kid, you get to the point where you release. We just took our youngest daughter to college. It’s a beautiful gift you have. In the theater I feel really blessed.
LZ: Did you ever act?
DMC: Not really. In did it in undergrad and grad school but never since. The whole idea of directing just seemed like what I wanted to do.
OMC: Any interest in film? I would think it would be easily translated.
DMC: I’ve done movies, films. As a director you have a Director of Photography, that’s what they do.
OMC: Also the symbology of the image.
DMC: You have to be able to articulate what you want.
LZ: But it will never replace theater—the liveness of it—like what was that play, “Glengarry Glen Ross”?
MC: I saw the movie and it really didn’t come across because of Mamet’s language. It wasn’t a movie.
DMC: But the performances were great.
MC: Great acting but not a movie.
DMC: Rhythmically, his language is so important.
OMC: Is there a yearning to get it captured? Film can. Video can.
DMC: To try to meld the two is hard. “To Kill A Mockingbird” was a great movie and a great novel. Being raised Catholic and spending time in the seminary I’m fascinated by that stuff. I go to David Lean, “Lawrence of Arabia” and his movies. They match the scale of the books.
OMC: That’s an example of movie as a medium. “Out of Africa” is an okay film with Meryl Streep and Robert Redford. You’re asking: “When are they going to sleep together, when are they going to sleep together, when are they going to sleep together?” Then I saw the two oranges on the table and I said: “Done.”
DMC: I think it’s unlike anything else, that live audience, that immediacy, the relationship between actors and stage. That palpable kind of reaction. There are certain plays that show how little we’ve changed. There’s the beauty of language, the chance to watch this amazing skill, these people who have these gifts. That’s why we still today are going to listen to a great symphony live, though we could have our iPods and our Bose speaker at home.
OMC: There is something different about hearing it on the radio.
DMC: The audience breathes with the performers. No two performances are the same.
OMC: Has anyone done a play about the assassination of Lincoln?
DMC: I’m sure someone has. There are plays about plays, and plays about the theater.
LZ: I’d rather see a mediocre play than a great movie. But are young people filling the ranks of theater-going?
DMC: No. That’s why it’s so important to make it part of the culture. We had a Globe Theatre grant to figure where the audience of tomorrow is coming from, particularly in Southern California, where the projection was the Spanish population would be growing. We had a Hispanic wing of the Old Globe. We went everywhere to find what we needed to do. It didn’t expand the audience. When we wrote up our findings it was pretty simple and obvious. Our resources needed to go into educational programs. In the schools. So we put the resources and put them into educational programs. Since their parents weren’t taking them there, we show them the magic of the theater. We make it part of their lives, and something important to them. That’s what we have to do. Otherwise we will become archaic.
OMC: As a creator, we all have an audience. The sobering thought I have is, are we getting to a point where it’s just not worth writing a play for the vandals? We’re definitely on the decadent side of empire. It’s not a sophisticated audience.
DMC: Nevertheless, we are there to serve them and to teach them and to show them who they are and what they could be. In the schools, it teaches them how to collaborate with one another. All those lessons in life that, together, my goodness what we can accomplish!
OMC: I would find the younger audience very difficult to get through to. Have you been in schools lately? It’s very depressing.
DMC: As missionaries, we can do so much. If you focus your energies—if you cast the net too wide, the impact you will have is less—but it you focus and engineer you can do it. Our goal on the education side is the entire valley, Rifle to Avon to Aspen. Not just the kids in Aspen, but the Hispanic kids downvalley. Our responsibility is as much. You have to win them over. You have to earn that investment in time and energy. That’s the pact we make with our audience.