Red Room Where the Writers Are

Issue/Publication: San Francisco magazine

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Plays well with othersBerkeley Rep’s Tony Taccone has helped create some of the most brilliant one-person shows in recent memory. So why does he stay behind the curtain when he should be sharing the applause?

BY PAMELA FEINSILBER

If Tony Taccone is not a giant of the theater world, it may be because he directs so many kinds of productions—from classics to experimental work, big ensemble pieces to solo shows—that he seems to have no signature, attention-getting style. In his 10 years as artistic director of Berkeley Repertory Theatre, Taccone has directed and produced more than 35 plays, and that’s not counting all the productions from other cities that he’s brought to the Rep’s two stages. Nationally, he’s still remembered for commissioning and codirecting Angels in America in 1992, when the world first heard of Tony Kushner. Of course, Taccone has brought many other playwrights and actors into the limelight, even if he avoids sharing it. Just look at his outstanding collaborations with solo performers. Taccone has worked on five original shows with the Bay Area’s great Geoff Hoyle, and Bridge & Tunnel, which he created with New York actress Sarah Jones, later went to Broadway and won her a Tony. At the moment, he’s helping develop two very different solo shows due to premiere this month and next. Taccone says he tried for a decade to get Danny Hoch back here from Brooklyn, ever since Hoch’s one-man Jails, Hospitals & Hip-Hop blew the Rep’s audiences away with its complex, sociopolitical view of a city via a wide-ranging cast of characters. Hoch’s new play, Taking Over, is about the gentrifi cation of his neighborhood; expect to meet another vivid crew of urban characters, all portrayed by one remarkable actor.

The other show is by Carrie Fisher. Yes, that Carrie Fisher—daughter of ’50s Hollywood royalty Debbie Reynolds and Eddie Fisher, author of Postcards from the Edge, and, of course, Princess Leia. Taccone says that her show “plays off the image of her life that began when she was a baby and was part of the popular currency, and then Princess Leia became a piece of popular tchotchke. The focus in her show is, ‘Who am I, really? And who do you think I am?’” In a wide-ranging interview, Taccone talks about why he took on Fisher’s show and reveals the unseen emotional mechanics (and complex credit-sharing issues) of cocreating a successful solo work.

So one of your new shows is broad-based and political, and one is very personal. One calls on the actor to become lots of different characters, and theother calls on a humorous, acerbic writer to be herself. That’s the illusion of any solo show: it’s Carrie Fisher. But even in stand-up comedy, you’re creating a persona, because it’s not you. I mean, like Jack Benny, OK? He created a character: a kind of wry, bemused…

 

Cheap… Very cheap, with a tone of eccentricity because he was a violin player. As opposed to Bob Hope’s persona, this kind of garrulous song-and-dance man.

When you think of the styles of current local performers who do comedy, who do you think of? Someone like Bobby Slayton does stand-up, where it’s more or less one joke after another. When you move into the Josh Kornbluth school, with characters with a narrative inclination, that’s a monologue. It can be an invented character or “Josh Kornbluth,” using stories from his own life.

And that would be Carrie Fisher. Absolutely. Or Spalding Gray. He is the perfect example of that.

Then there are the physical actors, people like Bill Irwin and Geoff Hoyle. They became wonderful actors—Bill Irwin even won a Tony last year for Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?—but they both started out locally as silent characters. Geoff Hoyle and Bill Irwin come out of a tradition of clowns. But both go beyond psychological, character-driven impersonations in their solo work. Geoff will be telling you a story about how he went to see a movie about a dog, and he’ll start being the dog, and then he’ll impersonate the soundtrack. He has a different set of physical and verbal mimetic skills.

When you say “verbal mimetic skills,” I think right away of Robin Williams. He might be in a class by himself. Robin Williams is like a stand-up comic on steroids, you know? One of his most outstanding features is the speed with which he’s able to fl uidly move from his own inner monologue to a thousand other different little characters. What he does onstage requires somebody to be in unbelievable psychic shape. Really, they have to have all cylinders firing.

He seems like total improv. I don’t know. With a lot of shows that appear to have improvised lines, it’s shocking how much is not improvised. Any form where people feel they’re being directly spoken to as an audience feels like it must be more spontaneous.

Just out of curiosity, who among this general realm of soloperformers do you enjoy watching? Who do I enjoy watching. [Thinking] Um….[long pause] As a director, you’re kind of ruined from watching anything the way the audience does, because you’re breaking things down in your head, you’re trying to understand how they got to a particular moment….

 

So if you’re always analyzing what’s working and what’s not, there must be some shows you’ve seen that you know you could have improved on. You’re actually trying to get me on public record to say whose work I could improve? I would be killed, I would be strung up and quartered—I mean, there’s no way I’m doing that. You could print that.

My job is to ask. To be honest with you, the people I enjoy watching are a lot of the people I’ve worked with.

Like Sarah Jones. She was incredibly good in Bridge & Tunnel, with all those different characters and accents. But I’ve heard that it almost didn’t happen. When I met Sarah, she was doing a workshop version of a piece called Surface Transit in New York. I told her, “I’d love to bring you out to Berkeley Rep and direct your show in a fully produced version.” It was a big success, and we were supposed to take it back to New York, but she wanted to change it, so it wasn’t the same as the workshop show. A couple of nights before rehearsals were supposed to start in New York, she called me here and said, “Are you sitting down?” I said, “I never sit down [laughs] when I talk to actors.” She said, “It doesn’t work.” As soon as she said it, I completely got it. To sort of randomly take something apart and stuff other parts into this puzzle that’s spent years fi nding its own voice— it usually doesn’t work.

Very understanding of you. I had already sensed that she was having trouble, so I didn’t fi ght her on it. I just went, “OK, what do you want to do?” And she said, “Well, I’ve got 35 minutes from another thing I’ve been doing,” and she performed the characters for me on the phone. She did about 15 minutes, and I said, “OK, I’ve heard enough. I’m coming out and we’ll do it, whatever we have.” So I went out there—we postponed opening by a week.

I guess so! But we hurled ourselves into these characters and built upon them, with her husband, Steve Colman, and it was a constant swirl of

activity. It was like being in a jazz band, and you’re up all night jamming for three weeks. We came up with something we felt very proud of, and that became Bridge & Tunnel.

 

In this case, you were developing the script, so why not consider yourself a cowriter? There’ve only been a couple of cases where I’ve taken a credit. It gets really muddy really quickly.

I can see that, but—well, listen to this. The New York Times theater critic said, “Proof that Ms. Jones has put her actorly gifts in service to something larger than self-display is found in her writing for these fully imagined characters, which is lively, compassionate, mildly sardonic, and smart.” He also noted in passing that the production had been “smoothly directed by Tony Taccone.” I think when you direct a solo show, it’s very diffi cult for anyone to know what the director did at all.

But to get a review like this, it seems like— Short shrift?

Yes! You’re used to your actors taking the bows, not you, but still—she might never have had that hit if she hadn’t worked with you. Yeah. Part of the perils of the profession.

You really think of it like that? Of all the various jobs in the theater, the director’s is the most mysterious to the public. Now, if you went to see my production of Coriolanus in Ashland one year, there’s no way you could have not known a little bit about what it was I was doing. But with Sarah Jones—Sarah Jones on Broadway was really the coronation of a great actor.

You’re describing a job that’s more like a midwife. Yeah. Geoff Hoyle calls me his midwife.

But some directors get called a visionary, an artist. This seems like the height of humbleness on your part. There have been times in my life where that has been… um, uh...sometimes hard to accept. Colleagues of mine and friends sometimes think I should insist on more of a prominent, um, acknowledgment of credit. I really don’t go there. I mean, I’m not trying to be falsely modest. I have an ego; it’s pretty healthy. I feel like I, you know, have gotten enough support, and certainly critical praise, to feel validated and confi dent in my work.

Yes, but wouldn’t you like to be more well known that way, more famous? More well known and more fame usually translates into more work and higher pay—but if that’s

what you’re doing this for, in my experience, you’re dead. The joy, the strength, the rewards of an artistic life are mostly found in the process of making the work. Period, the end. When you start obsessing— and a lot of my friends obsess over this, including me at other times—about why you didn’t get this, this, and this, it’s cancer. It’s psychic cancer. I mean that. I have, I think, erred a little bit sometimes on the side of not fi ghting for myself. But I run a major regional theater; I have a consistent stream of support and critical feedback both locally and nationally. So it’s been enough for me. It’s interesting. I was just talking with my son Jorma. He’s a writer for Saturday Night Live, and he and my other son, Asa, just won an Emmy Award for their Dick in a Box video; one of them wrote the music, one of them wrote the words. Jorma’s becoming pretty well known, and certainly he works with people who are really famous, and he was saying, “I’m becoming much less enamored,” because he watches the lives people who are famous have to lead. Sometimes it comes at great, great cost. I mean, with Tony Kushner, after Angels in America—he couldn’t write anything for fi ve years. Paralyzed.

 

The Don McLean syndrome. You know, with “American Pie”? Tony could not write, and he talked to me a lot about it. He said, “Forever I’m gonna be the guy who wrote Angels in America.” It took him a long time to appreciate what he had accomplished and find the internal sustenance to go back to writing. It’s different for a director. I’m writing more myself—not plays, I would never write plays—but satiric essays, and I’m just starting to show my work. It’s a vastly different experience; you’re the primary creator, not an interpreter. My empathy for solo artists is enormous. You try to create a safe environment so that they can hear criticism, hear feedback, not take things personally as much as possible. But God, when you’re talking about your life, that is a hard thing. You know, a lot of people will tell me when they want to work with me, “You get it. You get what I’m trying to do.”

Does that happen a lot, people calling you and asking— It happens a lot. [Laughs] By now I’ve developed a sliding scale to assess which level of physical suffering I am

gonna have to endure with this particular project. With solo work, you’re really in there with the person. You’re defi nitely not trying to be some therapist, but you’re in the psychology of someone and motivating them. If you’re working with someone who’s really needy and neurotic, you’ve got to parcel it out, and then also create dialogue.

 

So, getting back to the two upcoming shows. Danny Hoch works in a genre called hip-hop theater; can you describe that for me? In general, it’s theater that’s an expression of the next generation’s worldview. It tends to use techniques from poetry slams to breakdancing to beatboxing to—

Does Danny do all that? Well, he doesn’t dance that well, he’s not a breakdancer, but his sense of rhythm can be extremely fast, really explosive. It’s dynamic, and his appropriation of that generation’s physical and aural vocabulary—and music, obviously—he’s really comfortable using that worldview in creating his work. On the other hand, he’s a traditionalist, with a particular fl air for language. He’s a really good comic writer. Taking Over is a portrait of the people who inhabit Brooklyn: the people who are moving out, the people who are being forced out, the people who are moving in, the people who are making money from it, the people who are losing money from it. The same thing is happening here—the neighborhoods that have been gentrifi ed are cleaner and safer and whiter and more expensive.

What’s the process of working with him? It’s a constant dialogue about what’s happening with the characters, which characters are overwritten or underwritten, what views are underrepresented. I really want a character whose politics you hate but who you love.

To keep the social commentary from being too simple, I guess: this is good, this is bad. So it was your idea to have that kind of character in the mix? My encouragement is gonna make him think harder about it. And sometimes I may feel the piece is a little too didactic. Or I’ll say, “This doesn’t feel true,” or “This speech is in the mouth of the wrong person,” or “What if so-and-so went here?” All kinds of things come up. How it’s supposed to look. What’s the interstitial music in this thing? How is it supposed to feel and move?

And Carrie Fisher’s play. Excuseme, but she doesn’t seem to be in the same league with the other people we’re discussing. She’s not in their league as an actor.

 

Or writer. She seems witty, sometimes insightful, but she’s not much interested in examining or critiquing the culture. To the extent, though, that the particular phenomenon of her life is an expression of society, I think there’s potential there. And she’s a really good writer.

With all due respect to Carrie Fisher, she focuses on the social interactions in her life. Her worldview is in Beverly Hills and Hollywood. Exactly. But she’s smart enough to understand that she can stand outside and watch her own life. I’m not trying to change her DNA. I’m trying to get her to acknowledge the seriousness of some of the stories she’s telling.

What did you have to start with? We had an evening of stand-up.

And did she come to you and say, “Help”? Jonathan Reinis, the producer of the show, had seen her perform in L.A., something put together by her and a friend of hers. It was the story of her life, but it was more like a stand-up act. He came to me and said, “This thing, I think, is incredible, but it needs work. Are you interested?” And I was like, “Me and Carrie Fisher?”

So he envisioned that you could take it to the next level. Everyone was acknowledging that something needed to be done with it, and Carrie did, too. It was very funny and very popular, but his intention was to go to New York with the piece, and he wanted it to be more grounded in a dramatic evening.

And you said, “Me and Carrie Fisher?” Yeah—“That seems really strange.” But I went down to her house. The fi rst meeting is always like feeling each other out, and she was worried that I was gonna try to make it into a tragedy.

Did she know of you? She’d heard of me. Theater’s a strange animal to her. She’s spent her life on movie sets. But immediately I thought, “This is a smart woman.” I had read the script and thought, “This is drop-dead, fall-off-your-couch funny.” But there were places where I thought, “This doesn’t feel like it’s flowing, this is gratuitous, this doesn’t feel like it pays off, what’s the emotional payoff of the evening?” She’s blowing off these really heavy, tragic incidents with a one-line joke. So I told her,

“Look, if we decide to work together, there are two places where you need to tell me a different story. You need to talk about your stay in a mental hospital, and you need to talk about the death of your friend, in your bed, of an overdose. I mean, it can be comic, but you have to tell me about this.”

 

And she said… She was ready to hear it. We spent a few more meetings kind of talking through stuff, then I went down, and we went line by line and cut the play. I had my notes, and she had her notes. And right there, we made a huge change in the play. Then I said [tapping table with his pencil], “Here, here, here, here, and here: you need a transition, why are you telling that story, what’s going on here, I’d like to hear this”—you know, boom. She was like, OK.

Well, I just have to wonder. Everyone knows theaters aren’t exactly fl oating on a sea of money these days, and… This doesn’t really feel like our typical fare, does it? I’ve been asked that a lot.

Yeah, it feels like—understandably, you need to make some money, you need to sell tickets, and she’s a famous name. And we’ll see the extent to which that becomes a source of excitement or a source of criticism. We’re always getting criticized for something, so it’s fi ne.

Well, you probably won’t lose money. I’ll tell you what, though. I probably shouldn’t say this, but this is gonna be under more critical scrutiny than any show we’ll have done all season. When we go really esoteric, it’s within our brand. We have a wonderful audience here, well read, unafraid of ideas; they get quirky, eccentric, somewhat intellectual humor. It’s a huge advantage for me— huge. But we rarely go what looks to be a commercial route, and this looks like it’s a commercial route. But frankly? I don’t think it is gonna feel that different in content from some of the other shows we’ve done. Bridge & Tunnel was a very politically savvy and subtle show because of the compendium of characters, but the comic rhythm was very strong. But that show was very socially conscious. We can be less didactic with this one because it’s Carrie. She has really interesting feelings about George Bush. I’m sure she can be funny, but I guess I want you to

tell me that I’ll want to hear what she has to say. I think you will want to hear what she has to say.