John Collins: Accidents Will Happen

by Wendy Weiner

It seems fair to say that a guy who, at 27 years old, is the artistic and technical director of his own performance group — and a staff sound designer for the legendary performance company the Wooster Group — would have to be intensely ambitious. But John Collins’s low-key approach to his career defies that assumption. Sure, his group Elevator Repair Service, after gaining considerable acclaim in New York, just completed a tour of festivals in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. And yes, just before that he co-designed the Wooster Group’s The Hairy Ape on Broadway and toured with the company to Vienna. But Collins doesn’t attribute his early success to ambition, or even to his multifaceted talents. Instead, he sees his life — and his art — as the result of a series of happy accidents.

After all, Collins didn’t set out to be in theatre. “I had it all mapped out that I’d become a lawyer and go into politics or something,” he says. But an interest in acting, which he explored while an undergrad at Yale, ultimately led him to a passion for lighting design and directing. Still, at that point, he says, he “hadn’t even thought of sound design as a separate discipline.” Then, in his senior year, he took a directing seminar taught by David Herskovits, artistic director of the innovative young company Target Margin Theater.

A real trial by fire

When Herskovits assigned a 15-minute directing project for the class final, Collins was “really busy with this job as an assistant lighting designer at a Yale Drama School production and with classes,” he says, “and I just didn’t have time to rehearse. One of the people I was working with was a composer and he had all this sound equipment. So we decided, just because we didn’t have any time — like all interesting decisions, it was just made out of necessity — to record most of it. We put it on tape.” When Collins presented the final, Herskovits was so impressed with how it sounded that he asked Collins to work on Target Margin’s New York production of Titus Andronicus.

To Collins’s surprise, “Titus Andronicus got these big audiences and I met a lot of people who thought of me as a sound designer, even though I still had this idea that I was a lighting designer.” One of those people was Richard Foreman — the writer, director and designer who has created theatre pieces out of his own idiosyncratic sensibility for nearly 30 years. Foreman enlisted Collins to help create the soundscape for his 1991 show The Mind King.

Although thrilled at the prospect of working with Foreman, Collins was also nervous: “I’m trying to think of the right way to say this . . . I had no idea what I was doing,” he laughs. His work with Foreman led to an interview with the Wooster Group. Although the company had already hired a sound designer, they met with him in 1991 and, again, an accident came to Collins’s aid: Another sound designer quit the show in the middle of a run. “I got a real trial by fire there, and then they hired me for the next show,” Collins says, and then the next — since late 1993, he has co-designed nearly all of the company’s productions.

Collins’s penchant for sound spills over into his work with his own group, Elevator Repair Service (the name comes from a career-placement test Collins took as an adolescent, which suggested that he pursue a future repairing elevators). Over the past six years, the ERS company has collaboratively created seven pieces. The irreverent nature of their work is evident in the titles of their pieces: Shut Up I Tell You (I Said, Shut Up I Tell You), Marx Brothers on Horseback Salad and Mr. Antipyrine, Fire Extinguisher.Inspired by such diverse topics as comic Andy Kaufman’s life story, Salvador Dalí’s never-produced screenplay for the Marx Brothers and the life of a modern-day office temp, the company’s work eschews conventional narrative in favor of a more playful, pop-culture infused sensory montage.

Subverting expectations

The company often develops work from an audio rather than text-based, framework. ERS’s resident sound designer Blake Koh, for instance, joins the process well before the first rehearsal. “We’ll be sitting around, no idea what we’re going to do,” Collins explains, “and we’ll hear a piece of music we like, we’ll hear a bizarre clip off a sound effects disk” — their current favorite CD is called Organs in Orbit — “and we’ll build something around it.”

Sometimes their use of sound is literal, but always so flawlessly literal — so eerily accurate and perfectly timed — that it takes your breath away. At other times, the sound serves to comment on the event on stage: in the 1994 piece McGurk: A Cautionary Tale, a man seduces a woman, who is represented by a beer bottle. As he reaches over and runs his finger around the rim of the bottle, the multi-layered sound reflects the physical action, but also evokes an inexpressible sexual subtext. Then, just when you think you might know what to expect, ERS uses sound that is completely inappropriate to the onstage action, subverting in an instant all your expectations. In Mr. Antipyrene, Fire Extinguisher, the office boss opens up her mouth and instead of hearing words, we hear the sharp, percussive sound of a gunshot.

The sense of surprise that exists in ERS’s work seems due to the fact that the company is always surprising themselves. As a director, Collins sees his job in rehearsal as creating a structure in which things can — and should — be allowed to go wrong. “I got into directing,” he explains, “because the thing that I was enjoying most about acting were things happening in rehearsal outside of the script. They were usually things we couldn’t incorporate into the play because they weren’t appropriate, because there was a plan. I wanted to make things where that wasn’t the case.

“I’ve always said this,” he adds, “and I will always say this: The best things we’ve done as a company are the things that happened all by themselves, by accident.”