Magazine Spring 2009 Almost a Full Cycle

24 February 2009, 13:59
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Almost a Full Cycle

We met with Eric Bogosian upon his arrival from Vassar College, where his new play, “1+1” was finishing its run as part of the New York Stage and Film summer theater festival. An accomplished playwright, actor and novelist, Eric Bogosian has achieved everything he ever dreamed of – recognition for his work and a happy family life in the city of his dreams - New York. In his career he has explored a wide range of themes and media. Nevertheless, there is a road he has yet to explore, the path of his Armenian heritage. This journey to his ancestral land is the driving force behind Bogosian’s current creative endeavor.

You grew up in suburban Massachusetts. How did you come to New York?
I attended Oberlin College as a Theater major, in spite of the fact that I saw this as a very impractical career to pursue, sort of a pipe dream. I then moved to New York, after a brief stint at a theatre here as an intern when I was still a student. I tricked myself into moving to New York by saying to myself, “I won’t go to New York to work in the theatre; I will go back to New York to do other things.” I got hired in a non-theatrical job im­mediately, ironically, because I was of Armenian descent. I went to a job interview to be a steel trader at the World Trade Center. The guy hired me on a spot saying, “You are an Arme­nian, I know you will work very hard; you are smart people.” So I got a job, but the complication was that on the same day I became a steel trader I also got a job at a small arts center in SoHo for which I had applied months earlier. At the time nobody knew about SoHo, and I thought, “I am twenty-two years old. I don’t have to be making a mil­lion dollars right now. It will be fun and interesting.” So I decided not to trade Japanese steel.
I took the job at a place called “the Kitchen.” I had no idea what I was stepping into. At that time I had only a vague idea about the visual arts world, and even less of a sense of the new music and jazz scene, per­formance art, video art and dance – all media that were presented at the Kitchen. For about six months I worked at the front desk, absorbing, learning. Over time, I integrated into that world, and in a few years I also was making pieces off, off, off Broadway. The downtown per­formance and art scene was its own small community. As it was later described in the New York Times, “…nobody knew what was going on there and nobody cared, but in fact, something very important was happening there.” It was the mid-seventies, and a “brave new world” was forming. All sorts of creative people were hanging around the place where I worked. I got to know and work with people who later became very famous composers and artists - people like Cindy Sher­man, Robert Longo, Phillip Glass, David Byrne, and Laurie Anderson. Gradually I started producing dance concerts and small pieces of my own, which I thought of as theatre pieces - experimental plays that weren’t particularly commercial.

You are famous for your monologues and your solo performances. Many of your plays and books are collections of various characters telling their personal stories. Why monologues?
Around 1979 I came up with this idea of a solo performance in which I would play different characters, not as a showcase, but because I was interested in tak­ing a kind of an inventory of the different characters who lived inside of me. This piece became something of a hit, and I was booked into a number of different theatres. Eventually, the New York Shakespeare Festival’s producer Joseph Papp, the man behind a number of great shows in the late seventies, asked me to perform at the Public Theatre, which at that time was the most fertile theatre in New York, perhaps in the world. I received a pretty good review in the New York Times for doing the same show that I had been doing for the last couple of years. In my mind it was not that big of a deal. But the fact that the review was in the Times, and that the reviewer was Frank Rich, probably the most powerful theater critic at the time, was meaningful to other people, and suddenly I was getting a lot of attention. Joe Papp decided to call me back the following year to do another solo called “FunHouse.” Eventually, over the next twenty years, I ended up writing and performing six solos. After “Men Inside” and “FunHouse” I wrote “Drinking in America”, which ran for four months at the American Place Theater. I was signed by the William Morris Agency. By 1986, I felt my career had really begun.

I want to ask you about the process of creating your characters. How does it happen? Do you first sort of “goof around” in front of your friends and then record your ideas, or does it happens the other way around?
It starts very privately. Originally, the solo stuff was done with tape re­corders, long improvisation sessions, from which I transcribed the parts I felt were interesting. Then I would memorize these transcriptions, and begin the process of improvising again. It was a process of layering. Eventually, I would end up with a script of four or five pages of what I considered to be good and worth­while monologue. Then I would shape that into a piece of writing. After a period of editing, I would go to a rehearsal and then edit it again and work on it often with my wife and director, Jo Bonney. Even then, a monologue might not necessarily have ended up in a show. I would collect fourteen or fifteen of these monologues. Sometimes I would drop one from one show only later to incorporate it in a subsequent show, if it made more sense in a different context. For example, while writing Sex, Drugs, and Rock-and-Roll, I composed a piece called “Medicine.” It was about a doctor who gives a prescription to a patient. The pre­scription causes more problems than it cures. I wrote it at a time when HIV was raging, in the late 80’s. It was very dark, very disturbing and I felt that it was too upsetting to put in that show, so I put it aside. Later it ended up in “Pounding Nails on the Floor with My Forehead” and because some time had passed and people were ready for it, it was one of the more effective pieces in the show. Another example is a piece called “The Specialist”. It was writ­ten in 1983, during the Reagan era, and it was about an Army officer who instructs how to torture a pris­oner, how to put electrical wires on the prisoner’s body, etc. I read it very recently at a benefit, and it was like something torn from the headlines. It was chilling. Everything this char­acter was saying was exactly what had recently been described in the media: the water boarding, etc.

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