The Downtown Express

and bucks. On the occasion of the 43rd Obie Awards, the Voice sat down with four rising ’90s theater makers — Todo Con Nada’s Aaron Beall, HERE’s Kristin Marting, Elevator Repair Service’s John Collins, and Collective Unconscious’s Robert Berger — to talk about the state of downtown theater in New York City.

VOICE: So — what’s the state of downtown theater in 1998?

JOHN COLLINS: It seems awfully good to me.

AARON BEALL: As younger artists, producers, or directors, it’s an incredibly dynamic time to be making theater in Manhattan.

VOICE: Why now?

BEALL: Over the last 20 years, especially the last 10, so many people have been turned out by the training programs and colleges. They have a lot of ambition adn vision to create new forms of theater. It’s a very heady time. But economically, it’s an incredibly treacherous period to run a theater. You have all this creativity, but Manhattan is no longer cheap. We really run the risk of losing the spaces.

KRISTIN MARTING: It’s a much broader group of people working than it was 10 years ago. That’s the reason you’ve seen such growth in spaces like HERE and Nada and other small alternative spaces. But I also think there’s some spirit in the air that’s saying, “Take charge and do what you want and there’ll be a place for it.” I don’t think that was as true when we started Tiny Mythic.

COLLINS: When Elevator Repair Service began six or seven years ago, it seemed the news was as bad as it could be. But my experience now is of these incredibly successful things happening — in the face of financial impossibility.

BEALL: The energy is so there. But the economics of Manhattan are changing. We’re down here on Ludlow Street running three theaters. Use it or lose it — if we don’t run them as theaters, they’ll be bars or restaurants.

BOB BERGER: Everybody is unbelievably stressed by the economic pressure of “Is the owner of my building going to want to put a Starbucks on Ludlow Street?” But that’s the way it always is, and that’s the way it’ll always be, whether the counterculture migrates to Avenue C, the Lower East Side, Williamsburg, or DUMBO.

COLLINS: Manhattan is always going to have this gravity. The fact that we’re trying to make theater happen in Manhattan is one of the really exciting things, partly because it just gets more and more difficult to do, and it becomes more and more attractive.

BEALL: Like the upper levels of a video game.

MARTING: But I still think it’s community. This is the natural place for us to be because the center of our community is here.

VOICE: What is “downtown theater” these days?

BEALL: I went to London for two weeks. I loved London, but it didn’t rival the energy on these streets. When I got back here I just kissed the ground, licked the pavement, thanking New York that it was here and so dirty, that it’s so itself.

COLLINS: They’re just not oppressed enough in Europe.

BEALL: Exactly. London is the greatest theater town in the world — 45 Broadway-style theaters packed with audiences. But it doesn’t have the vibe, the magnificence of what New York is about.

MARTING: For me it’s about the range and breadth of the work. So many different approaches, so much cross-discipline, so much use of text in unconventional ways. There’s some downtown theater produced on a shoestring that’s completely flawless — pristine and clear and crisp as imaginable. And then another shoestring budget is all over the place. Each is equally exciting. I don’t think we had that before.

BERGER: The most exciting thing for me in the current downtown scene is producing a show and seeing 10-year-old Puerto Rican kids and 80-year-old Lower East Side Jewish people and the gamut of the community in between filling the seats, breathing the same air.

COLLINS: Downtown theater is theater that’s always fighting an uphill battle against its situation. There are so many really good reasons not to do it — and people do it anyway.

BEALL: I have a theory that there’s a search now for great experiences. It’s in our nature to try to get to the South Pole — why would you do that? The dogs are going to die. You’re going to eat your companions.

COLLINS: There’s downtown theater right there.

BERGER: So it’s defined by the struggle?

COLLINS: That’s half the definition.

MARTING: A big part of downtown theater is that it’s founded on human capital. You never have the money to do the things you want to do, but people make it happen.

BERGER: Back in the day, everyone was a storyteller, everyone was a performer. Berfore there was a media, everyone gave to the community on a performance level. Today, that’s what the scene is about all over again. Collective Unconscious is about the audience being involved. They’re cramped. They’re sweating. Actors are constantly sitting in their laps or slapping them or pointing a gun in their faces.

BEALL: Just like New York.

COLLINS: The inextricable ingredient is ambition. And that’s about dissatisfaction too. As much as we get out of what we’re doing, there’s nothing enjoyable or satisfying about those missing resources.

BEALL: It happens with money. Rent to run the theater complex here is $120,000 a year. If we don’t pay, we’re not here.

BERGER: It’s an uphill battle against our allies. When Collective Unconscious was on Avenue B, everyone in the area’s quality of life was improving because we weren’t selling crack, we weren’t a drug front. Today, it’s “You’re visible, so you’re a threat.”

VOICE: How does the downtown theater community fail itself?

MARTING: The burnout factor. We lose so many talented artists because they can’t do it anymore. They can’t have the five jobs, and invest all their money in it. And some artists who hang around get so bitter from the struggle, they lose the talent they had to bring to it.

COLLINS: Diversity of audience is a serious issue, and that’s hugely challenging when people are constantly trying to make a fresh thing. Success depends on a supportive community, on seeing those same people all the time. But that’s also a threat. It’s insular.

BERGER: We shoot ourselves in the foot over making work accessible. It’s partly the stress of needing the insular support of the community — “Here’s my flyer, thanks for your flyer, I’ll see you at your show and give you your 10 dollars back.” The ability to communicate to the mainstream population and tourism could be a boon.

BEALL: During the Fringe Festival, the most TV-friendly of the things we did was Collective Unconscious’s Giant Robots.

BERGER: The primary ethos of Collective Unconscious is pandering. All our theaters can’t be highbrow, weird intellectual experiences that people won’t understand.

COLLINS: The real tension is not about artists doing things they know people won’t understand — it’s about artists having a certain faith in their audience’s ability to go with them to a place they believe in.

VOICE: Does the NEA matter these days?

BEALL: I haven’t thought about the NEA in a couple of years.

BERGER: Everything comes from the money we make or put into it. We don’t ask for anything, because we don’t expect to get it. Certain corporate people do give us money.

COLLINS: ERS has been making plays for about six years, and only in the last few months have we decided to get a development program going. We’re doing full-time jobs now. So we’re going to see what’s out there. But it’s ultimately not going to be what matters.

MARTING: We’ve never been funded by the NEA, so it’s not like we’ve been based on that, but we just did write a big grant proposal to them to try to get expanded marketing efforts and upgrade our computer so that we can communicate better with our public.

VOICE: When do you think this new “golden” era began?

BEALL: When David Herskovits directed Titus Andronicus at Nada in September of 1991. For me, that moment was the birth of this era of downtown theater. A lot of things spiraled out of that show.

COLLINS: Titus was such an audacious thing to do. It was throwing this whole production in the face of all the realities. It was 30 actors, so you needed a lot of commitment where there’s not a lot of money to compensate. It was a small space where you’d think there wasn’t enough room to do a huge-cast production. It was such a clash between the ambitions of a group of artists and the physical reality.

BERGER: The thing that did it for me was the Organism in Williamsburg, in 1991. Hundreds of artists showed up and worked together — that was amazing.

BEALL: The Organism was a response to two warehouse parties in 1990, the Fly Trap and the Cat’s Head. It shows how a culture cross-pollinates and inspires itself.

MARTING: We started looking for HERE that year. We wanted a big space, like Amsterdam’s Milky Way — a gallery, a theater, a movie theater, a hangout joint, a late-night party.

BEALL: The ideal about freedom of expression in this country has been so dumbed down by marketing. But these downtown theaters are about the ferocity of expression. It’s what’s so intoxicating. It’s like speed metal, like punk.

BERGER: It has to be fierce to exploit its niche.

BEALL: We use this expression about running Nada: It’s a fistfight. Every day it’s a fistfight. And we’ve had them.

BERGER: As the scene grows, that struggle gets harder, but it also defines your success. You have to measure your success by the fact that you’re surviving.

COLLINS: The video game metaphor is just perfect.

VOICE: Any game in particular?

BEALL: Any of them — the more violent, the more appropriate.

VOICE: Who are some of the most talented artists on the downtown scene right now?

BEALL: I get to see these great young writers show up on Ludlow Street. Kirk Wood Bromley, who writes verse plays. My personal favorite right now is Mark Spitz, a young Oscar Wilde.

MARTING: There are so many people. David Herskovits and Target Margin. I love Ruth Margraff’s work. She’s part of a whole community of writers who are coming up, not in the tradition of Mac Wellman and Erik Ehn, but as the next generation of Mac and Erik. Their work is associative, visceral, non-narrative, but very emotionally hooked and poetic.

BEALL: Did you see Gum by Karen Hartman? There’s also director Jean Randich.

COLLINS: Playwright and director Rich Maxwell.

MARTING: He works with a lot of nonactors.

COLLINS: He has a real voice, a startling approach to performance.

BEALL: During the Fringe Festival we discovered that dance and dance theater seem to be much more ahead of theater in synthesis of technology. Dance from around the world, especially from Amsterdam, seemed to really understand how to incorporate technology, how to incorporate movement, yet really make it a theater piece. That eerging hybrid with DJ and sound and text and movement is really coming out of the dance world.

BERGER: Dan Green, who’s a producer and writer for a group called IFAM. He makes pageantry and spectacle created with garbage.

MARTING: The Dean Street Field of Operations, a performance group that lives on Dean Street in Brooklyn. And puppeteer Basil Twist.

COLLINS: But the collective ambition of the scene isn’t so much to produce stars. It’s the opposite in a way. It’s to make sure there’s this constant spreading out of the whole field.

BERGER: Here’s downtown theater. When Collective Unconscious opened on Ludlow Street it took over a tailor shop. But it wasn’t really a tailor shop. It was a tailor shop fronting a 12-bedroom whorehouse. When we went in there we found a wall with a door behind it. And that door led to 12 bedrooms, each about as big as three coffins lying next to each other. Unbelievably rancid everything, everywhere. And I remember us standing there with hammers, and saying this is unbelievably disgusting, and then throwing up our sleeves and getting elbow-deep in every kind of nastiness you can think of, then clearing it all out and having a show called Cucho Tailor, which was the name of the tailor shop. Artists installed little things in every room that had something to do with illicit sex. That was it: changing the whorehouse to a theater.