Gary Indiana.

The Roman Polanski Story played for a three week sold out run at The Performing Garage last May. Its Writer/Producer/Director, Gary Indiana, has written several plays, Alligator Girls, and Who Killed Rex the Wonderdog, being his other most recent productions; he’s also worked on several film scripts for independent productions in New York, and written criticism and essays on film. After rereading the interview I was surprised to find most of our conversation centering around tragedy— Polanski and most of Gary’s other work being comedies. I can offer no other explanation for this other than the following quote from Flannery O’Connor: “All comic novels that are any good must be about matters of life and death.”

 

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Betsy Sussler When did you start writing?

Gary Indiana When did I start? I was about nine.

BS Oh yeah? What did you write?

GI This stupid little novel. God, I can’t remember, some bizarre little adventure story about a submarine.

BS And now you write plays? and film scripts? and direct plays? and act in plays? and in films?

GI Yes. The funny thing is that I always wanted to write novels, and thought I would never write plays. I have written essays for years. And for maybe 10 years I continually tried to write one novel after another and I didn’t think I had any aptitude for playwriting because plays have to have this dramatic structure. I guess I assumed you could fudge in a novel—you know, there’s so much room. Actually the first play I ended up doing was taken from one of these unpublished novels.

BS What was that?

GI It was called The Talking Opera and was broadly based on the Rothko estate scandal. All I did was give chapters of it to the actors to recite while doing other things like throwing drinks or playing with paddle balls or watching TV or eating. One actor would say the first three words of a sentence, the next would say the next three, and so on. It dissolved this rather somber text into something totally farcical—one chapter described the main character visiting his father in the hospital; the father had just had a stroke and the actors sounded like they had had strokes.

BS Your last play, The Roman Polanski Story, was structured as if it were in chapters. Why Polanski anyway?

GI It was almost arbitrary. A lot of my things have their genesis in jokes. People ask what I’m working on and I think of the most provocative, ridiculous thing I could say. And then I often go ahead and do it. As it happened, Cookie Mueller and I were leaving the theater one night while rehearsing Curse of the Dog People and Cookie said, “We should do something else. Something really vulgar.” And I said, “Yeah, like the Roman Polanski Story.” And actually it hadn’t crossed my mind before. The same night I ran into John Heys and offered him the part of Polanski; then I went home and wrote the play. I told John it was all written, of course.

BS Did you work with the actors on the script during rehearsal?

GI No, but if they come up with something good I let them throw it in. Cookie came up with that little story the mother tells when she’s dying, in the beginning of the play. Originally I had her reading Nietzsche, but she wasn’t happy with it. So I told her to write her own story, which was much more amusing.

BS What part of Nietszche?

GI It was a passage from Good and Evil.

BS So the beginning of the play starts with the beginning of Polanski’s life?

GI Yes. It starts with his childhood. I took a lot of liberties with the facts. He grew up in a Jewish Ghetto in Krakow and he escaped through the sewer (when all of the adults were rounded up) to stay, I think, with a Catholic family, but I had him sent to his uncle’s in the countryside. The whole play is based on a slapstick principle. He goes from escaping from the Nazis to being sold by his uncle to gypsies, to then being abandoned by the gypsies, to then being discovered by the swineherd who obviously rapes him…and that’s where the break begins in the play in a broad parody of Freudian dogma. He goes from being a victim to being an oppressor in the style of the people who victimized him. After being used by all of these people…

BS He becomes 21.

GI Yeah and he starts to learn how to use other people and exploit them.

BS What’s your attitude towards tragedy and humor? Do you think Polanski’s situation is tragic?

GI No, because the play is about journalism more than anything else. The idea from the beginning was not to try for any verisimilitude in presenting the life of a real person. The subject sprang into my head because it was a complete story that I’d heard many times—people can’t even write a review of a Polanski film without repeating all the sordid details of his life. I don’t know him so I don’t really know what he’s like and I don’t really care. What interested me was to treat the events that found their way into the play in a parallel way to the way the media treats it. In other words, pre-digesting them and giving them a particular kind of flippancy. The most conspicuous examples were at the beginning with the Nazis extermination of the Jews and, later, the Manson Family. These events, no matter how tragic they are, have become the property of morally smug people who, because of the way these events are treated by the media, feel they know how to think about them. For instance, we show the co-operation of the Jews with the Nazis. That’s one of those unpleasant facts that the media tends to gloss over or romanticize into something other than what it was. If you make a play about human nature you have to deal with everyone’s human nature, rather than just the villians or the good guys. And again with Manson, it was absolutely disgusting the way national media siezed upon the Manson killings.

BS By mythicizing them?

GI The killings were used to reinforce so many other myths. Myths about Hollywood decadence. That what the hippies were doing invariably leads to this death cult…

BS Do you think acting has to be camp in a farcical form? Do you think the acting was camp?

GI I don’t think it has to be. Yeah, I think it was probably a little more broadly camp than I originally thought it should be. But I got so tired of straining for those cramped little effects after awhile. In Polanski, I wanted the thing to move very quickly so I set it up in the hopes that no one would ever leave the stage—they would change costumes on stage behind this opaque curtain—you know I write plays like movies.

BS Jumpcuts?

GI Yeah, unfortunately, and it can’t really be done on stage. but the actors didn’t want to be seen naked behind the curtain so they were always crammed into the electrician’s booth which is very very tiny and made it very difficult for the technical people. I kind of expect things like that to happen and I’m not disappointed when they do, although…

 

Scene from The Roman Polanski Story.

BS You said you were more aware of your obsessions now. What for instance?

GI The media and the effect of the media…

BS You mean journalism?

GI Journalism has alway been the big enemy for me.

BS Yet you’re a journalist at times.

GI At times. Well, there’s a paradox. On the other hand I don’t chase fire engines or write profiles of film idols. I guess the real enemy is the level at which people understand what happens to them today. One sees the effect of the media on people’s ability to comprehend what’s going on in the world beyond them. Television is the worst; it completely destroys your ability to concentrate. It normalizes the most repulsive events and makes them small enough to fit in your living room; it destroys people’s ability to deal with events. For the Tate murder sequence, originally I had the victims surprised while watching television and reacting to their own murders as if it were happening to someone else.

BS You use a similar structure in the play—short quick scenes…

GI I’m presuming that people can’t concentrate for long periods of time; otherwise a play like mine wouldn’t be popular. But the quality of information is much more complex than anything on television.

BS How popular do you want to be? Or rather how popular do you think you can be? I mean, you live and work in a very protected scene—not financially but intellectually.

GI I don’t want to be that protected. It’s been good to generate things in that environment but after awhile it’s like preaching to the converted. My plays aren’t designed for intellectuals. They’re designed for a larger audience. The audience for Polanski was very Catholic, not just downtown. We had T.D.F. vouchers for instance—those are people who go to Broadway plays, well, that’s the upper classes, but we got some working people as well, I’m sure.

BS How?

GI It happened by accident. Rona Barrett heard about the play, somehow, I don’t know how and mentioned it on her program and The Daily News mentioned it and so did Page Six of the New York Post, so there was a gigantic amount of free publicity—probably more publicity than anything else I did ever got and we didn’t do anything to get it. We didn’t have a publicist or a press agent and I didn’t call any journalist or anything. I think I called one journalist from the Village Voice and I was so paranoid about having to talk to people in the papers that in the middle of the conversation I said “Is this boring you? I mean, am I wasting your time?” And I ended up hanging up in the middle of the conversation because I was so paranoid.

 

Scene from The Roman Polanski Story.

BS The material is spectacular and more interesting than most people’s lives and the media uses the Polanski stories to generate an audience—in the same way you do in the play.

GI That was calculated. I tried to think of the most outrageous thing that we could do and I thought the Sharon Tate murders would be the height of tastelessness that no-one…I thought that we have to go beyond the boundaries of tastelessness and beyond realism into some kind of Meta theater. And to me this is what theater is about anyway, if you go back to plays like The Bacchae, that was what those were about. If Sharon Tate had been murdered in ancient Greece, they would be reenacting it on the stage every night. And that’s what people think is Classical Drama but most people have never seen it performed or never read it so they don’t know what it’s about. There were riots in the streets when The Bacchae was performed. These deeds of blood are nothing new in the theater. It’s just precisely the fact that all of the participants have been so stereotyped in the media that people think Charlie Manson was just this goggle-eyed creep. I think he was the scum of the earth, but then you have to look back at some of these Greek plays. They were the scum of the earth too. When the men come home in Lysistrata they act like a bunch of pigs—and that was the point, it was a real feminist play—up to a certain point. So we knew the murders would be outrageous simply because people don’t think of theater in these terms anymore. They think of theater as comedy of manners, tragedy of manners, melodrama of manners, but just using the popular sense of manners, we don’t live in a world that has any anyway and I think that maybe the theater should go back to broader forms…

BS Have you ever used a chorus?

GI We had a chorus for Polanski but I got rid of it at the last minute—what I was going to have was a revolving chorus—where we’d have a different narrator every night, who would explain the play to the audience as it went along. Some of the narrative found its way into the inter-titles that appear on the slide projection. Alligator Girls also had a chorus but only in the very beginning. I liked very much the beginning of Wedekind’s Luke, where the playwright comes out and he’s dressed as a lion-tamer in the circus and says, “You’re going to see human beasts, animals, blab blah blah.” So I had a woman come out in black leather with a bull whip and she introduced the play and then there’s the S.S. man in the beginning of Polanski who did the same.

 

Scene from The Roman Polanski Story.

BS You didn’t want to answer my question about storytelling before, but all of the Greek plays were obviously oral stories or songs before they were performed and the Romance Literature of the Middle Ages was first performed by troubadours who traveled from town to town…

GI Well, the trouble I have with the word “story” is the popular idea that a story is very complicated mechanically because of the novel and its mutations over the years. The kinds of stories I tell in my plays have more in common with fairy tales, or the narratives the troubadours made up when they sang the news. I’m hesitant to say I want to tell stories when people’s ideas about storytelling relate to very modern, contemporary methods—this doesn’t interest me.

BS Do you mean modern in the sense that they are supposed to be realistic? Or in the more popular sense of realistic, believable?

GI Most plays that I’ve seen in the past ten years have tended to eliminate the imaginary from the stage. I mean you can just walk out into the street…

BS I was looking out my window yesterday and saw someone get run over by a motorcycle.

GI In Polanski I wanted to blur all the facts. The troubadours brought news from one place to another like newspapers; but this oral newscasting all became gossip—the way someone starts a story in one place and it becomes completely transformed on the other end. I told the story of Polanski the way a very ill-informed person a hundred years from now might tell it, rather than someone from today who has access to all the facts.

BS Would you ever re-create a play in the classical style—with a tragic hero, the idea of Fate, etc.

GI No. DeKooning said it first; there is no tragedy in the modern world, only pathos. That’s why Polanski is neither good nor evil in my play, but both, mixed with a great deal of mediocrity. I’m planning to do a play this winter about a movie star—I don’t want to say which one…

BS Male or female?

GI Female.

BS Dead or alive?

GI Dead.

BS Blonde or brunette?

GI Blonde. One of the most pathetic stories that I ever read was the biography of this woman. It’s the kind of story that appeals to me because—well, one thing that does obsess me is the way people try very hard to get certain things and then get them and—you know, it’s a cliche, they realize it’s not worth it. Sartre said in an interview…The interviewer said, “In other words, life has given you what you wanted?” and Sartre said, “Yes, it’s been very good to me, it’s given me what I wanted and at the same time shown me that it wasn’t much.” That’s the sort of theme I’m comfortable with. I don’t think that this is a tragic age, I think that since the time of Hegel it’s been extremely difficult to have a totalizing identification with a movement of history. In other words, although today, people can still go blindly to their death in some sacred cause, we now also recognize how stupid that is…

BS Stupid or futile or…

GI Both, on the one hand you have the consciousness of the individual in relation to these things and also you have a social consciousness. The things that impelled history in the past are not necessary anymore. The problem today is figuring out whether it’s a biological imperative because we’ve reached the end of the rope. You can’t have another war—not in the grand old style, but at the same time our politicians today have reverted to talking about it as if it were even thinkable. Whether or not that kind of blind stupidity prevails, if it does I guess we have to assume that we are biologically fated that way but it’s not a tragic destiny if even ten people realize it’s not necessary. In the past I don’t think there was so much mediation between what happened on a day to day basis. For one thing, it was before the so-called democratic days and there were rulers and monarchs and you owed your life to them. The French Revolution, all these events in modern times have made people think about them. Maybe it was a very reflexive thing in the Middle Ages to go off to Constantinople and get your head chopped off. It isn’t anymore, it’s not natural, it’s not normal anymore. Maybe human beings have just become conscious in comparatively recent history…fully conscious of the implications of every act. Once the world is closed off, every act reverberates on everything else. It’s not a tragic age. It doesn’t need tragic figures. I think that’s a big mistake, that people perpetuate the myth of the hero. Human events being somehow fated and tragic. I mean the nature of tragedy is that two opposing groups of people are right. And at least in classical tragedies this is the nature of…

BS And now, in any particular instance they’re both wrong.

GI Yeah, and that’s the birth of Irony. Israel’s wrong and the Palestinians are wrong. The Soviet Union is wrong and the United States is wrong. That’s not tragic. Even with the perpetuation of the myth of the hero there’s also a corresponding debunking going on in most people’s minds. They don’t really believe it. And what I would like to do is make plays that people really believed in what was being presented.

BS Believed in what way?

GI In a psychological way—believed that what I was showing was true.

BS But pathos now implies a certain self-consciousness…

GI Strangely enough I usually end up writing characters who are remarkably lacking in self-consciousness. And quite often I reduce them to an almost animal level because in some instances they represent a typical “play of bad ideas because that is what I want to show—I’ve only done one play where the main character was smitten with self-consciousness. Bill Rice, and I did a play called Who Killed Rex the Wonderdog. Actually, it was only Act I of Who Killed Rex the Wonderdog, but it was a rewrite of Hamlet as a shipboard romance in the Caribbean. I played the Hamlet figure.

BS Who was Bill Rice?

GI He was Old Petie, the Sea Captain. Well, there’s no real Hamlet figure in Polanski, there’s a Macbeth figure and of course that makes all the difference in the world because Macbeth was one of the few Shakespearean heroes or anti-heroes who hadn’t the slightest insight into his own behavior, no matter how much he babbled about it, he was sort of blindly lead to whatever he was doing. So I had John come out and be Macbeth, Macbeth dressed as Hamlet but Macbeth. You know, the kind of superstitious person who believes in auguries and miracles and particularly in the salubrious quality of his own fate. But I wanted Polanski…and this goes back to what we were talking about—I wanted to present it like a media story.

BS Is that what you are talking about when you use the word believable?

GI No, I wanted people to believe in a psychological truth about this that we were trying to get at. It was only around the edges of things that it had this peculiar resonance. Obviously, it was very broad satire, very campy and cartoon-like in most places. It was also Brechtian in the sense that I wanted the audience to see the whole thing as an idea about something—even the style that it’s presented in is just an example of this kind of thing. I’m not fervidly espousing camp acting or anything like that…

BS It’s simply a method…

GI Yeah…For example, the presentation of Tate and Frakowski and all of these people is always that they’re these little vulnerable kids playing around in a big expensive house and we make a very strong class indictment of these people contrasted with the scungy Mansonites who don’t live on Lavender Hill. Not that the Manson clan is praiseworthy, or indicative of the working class, or anything like that; we wanted to make those kinds of suggestions in the corner of the frame rather than beat people over the head with it.

 

Scene from The Roman Polanski Story.

BS Your theater is obviously influenced by film in the mise-en-scéne , etc. How much do you think your film scripts are influenced by theater?

GI A lot. For one thing, I’ve come around to really enjoying films which are extremely theatrical. Werner Schroeder’s films, or Carmelo Bene’s, also Syberberg, these interest me more than anything else in the cinema. This grandiose presentation of acting Meta Acting, just being outrageously theatrical, appeals to me very much. My film scripts tend to rely heavily on dialogue, not on action, and a very operatic dialogue at that. I’m not interested in ‘real’ film acting—the kind of film acting that is blemishless and tries to duplicate reality. Fassbinder’s films interest me because the acting is theatrical. I don’t think that ‘real’ people are interesting to watch in a privileged situation like the theater or in the movies—This is why I detest Warhol films. I can’t bear them. A film like Chelsea Girls repulses me—I think the cult of the Warhol films is utterly moronic except in those instances when he had those splendid creatures who couldn’t be anything but theatrical, moving through them: Taylor Mead, Jackie Curtis, Ondine, Viva. I mean, where it really was a camera nailed to the floor pointed at a bunch of people moving through a room it was boring. When the people were good they were splendid, but what’s been touted as the aesthetic innovations of the Warhol films are those long turgid scenes in which nothing happens. It is an aesthetic but the way that has spilled over into less classy underground filmmaking, with the result that we now see real bromides with zero brains and no capacity at all for improvisation parading around these swank apartments in surrealist cocktail dresses being filmed in the manner of Warhol. Nothing could be less attractive…

TAPE RUNS OUT

There has to be a place where entertainment and Pop Art come together and it has to do with exhibiting and maintaining and projecting a very high level of energy. And I think it has to be optimistic energy. I mean one reason I admire Charles Ludlam, is when you go to one of his plays you know you’re not going to be bored and that things are going to zip along at a fast clip and that you’re not going to be asked to contemplate four people standing motionless for an hour…I think that one has to realize, if you’re doing theater or film or whatever, that your ideas should be evident in whatever you do but that they shouldn’t be boring. The trouble with most people in the arts is that they assume they are dealing with an audience of total philistines, who don’t have any taste, intelligence, or sophistication so they’re constantly explaining things to their audience.

BS And consequently excluding taste, sophistication, and intelligence…

GI Exactly. There’s no purpose to me in brutalizing an audience. I like having an audience or I wouldn’t have gotten into the performing arts in the first place. A lot of what’s wrong with theater or film of a serious nature is that they’ve excluded the notion of pleasure—and joy and ecstasy and sensuality and everything else. It’s true that life in a technological society can be extremely gray and alienated and horrifying, but I don’t think this is a good time to keep creating what Valery called “machines for creating more anxiety.” It’s a period that requires positive energy. People should get that from a work of art, otherwise I don’t think that the work of art is doing its job. There is such a thing as spiritual utilitarianism.