Stage Persona: Joanna Settle
Performink, September 1, 2000
I want the audience to have to organize their position
themselves in relation to the work. That’s why I
work site specifically. At the same time, it’s not
some Artaud exercise in torture. I love the audience.”
Director Joanna Settle describes her drive to blast through
the confines of a neat little proscenium and into the real
of chaotic humanity. She has to feel right about a space
and its ability to embody a work’s inherent conflict.
She also has no qualms about stripping a space bare or
flinging open its doors or dumping a ton of gravel on the
floor for a Greek tragedy so that the audience can feel
beneath their own feet the deafening crunch of a society
at war with its tormented conscience.
Settle’s work can be, dare I say, blissfully unsettling.
The artistic director of Thirteenth Tribe, a multifaceted
troupe whose compelling environmental productions soar
through a disordered universe, is a kinetically driven
presence. Although a bit calmer these days, she still craves
the energy of life-altering moments. That’s why,
for Settle, the traditional theatrical blueprint can be
repressive.
To paraphrase the director, it depresses her to walk into
a lobby, purchase a ticket from a typically surly box office
employee, trudge across a stained carpet, get coffee in
a styrofoam cup and, once inside the theatre, pop up and
down to let people into one’s row. By the time the
curtain rises, she believe such tedium can drain the Mac
out of what should be a transcendent experience.
What, then, inspires this bold experimentalist who is
not a slave to concept over content?
“I’m interested in epic existentialist work,”says
Settle, who basks in the musicality of her own description. “It
might be a new play or an old play. What counts is that
I have to mean what’s on the stage. I have to be
able to stand behind it. It’s a very non-academic
approach. The language has to be of a caliber, and there
has to be room for me in the language to do something.”
Interestingly, her next project is set in what appears
to be a bona-fide theatre. But like the play’s subject,
it’s just an illusion.
Through Sept. 24, Settle is directing the world premiere
of Hurt McDermott’s How to Be Sawed in Half, a play
about a washed-up magician and his assistant’s journey
through an act that conjures disturbing psychological realities.
Presented by Flow Arts and Thirteenth Tribe, it will be
staged on the Athenaeum Theatre’s mainstage. The
idea is that of a box within a box–two desperate
hacks performing in a faded movie palace-like space to
underscore a certain vacuous glory.
“I’m very specific,” says Settle, 30. “I
approve all the material. With me, you don’t just
hire a director. It’s like hiring a way to do the
play.”
The New York native was invited by her relocated college
friends – the founders of Thirteenth Tribe – to
direct Jean Genet’s The Balcony in 1996 at the Chopin
Theatre. She and her colleagues created a sensual and sardonic
atmosphere in which funhouse mirrors made the audience
co-conspirators in this pointed argument against specious
morality.
“During The Balcony,” says Settle, “I
realized this [Chicago] is where large-scale ideas can
happen.”
She spent much of her young years living in Brooklyn with
her mother and in New Hampshire with her father. After
majoring in theatre at Hampshire College in Amherst, MA,
Settle was one of three students accepted into the Juilliard
School’s inaugural Andrew W. Mellon Directing Program,
where she did her graduate work and met her mentor, master-director
Joanne Akalaitis.
Despite the prestige of the Juilliard name and her involvement
in the Lincoln Center Directors Lab, Settle was living
in a warehouse near the docks in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
She grew exhausted from the drudgery of making ends meet
while honing her expansive creative vision.
“It can be such a monumental struggle to just survive
in New York,” notes the director. “It’s
not just the high cost of producing a show, it’s
the difficult living conditions.”
“When I came to Chicago, I thought it was so cute
to drive a car. I didn’t do that in New York. I wanted
an apartment with hardwood floors and a kitchen. And when
I work, I need space.”
Settle opted to stay in Chicago. She then directed a provocative
production of Megan Rodgers’ Bombs in the Ladies
Room in the basement of a Wicker Park art gallery. Its
surroundings reflected the sensory deprivation imposed
on an imprisoned woman accused of being a terrorist. Samuel
Beckett’s Play was set in the window of a furniture
store for Around the Coyote Festival. The Enduring legend
of Marinka Pinka and Tommy Atomic turned the Theatre Building
into a clinical, plastic-coated refugee camp in Bosnia.
But one of Settle greatest Thirteenth Tribe triumphs was
Blood Line: The Oedipus/Antigone Story, featuring a new
translation by Nicholas Rudall. It was staged two years
ago at the Viaduct in the space’s raw form before
it became a more legitimate theatre. In addition to the
aural antagonism of the gravel, this contemporary interpretation
created stingingly unforgettable images – like the
moment Antigone exits and the huge warehouse doors are
rolled up to reveal bonfires rising from trash cans framed
against comfortable neighborhood back porches.
The director details her process in relation to Blood
Line. “How do we do this is my big question,” Settle
emphasizes. “With Blood Line, I asked, how many people
are in the chorus and who the fuck is the chorus? I determined
that they have to like real people.”
The chorus also left the building – they; too, quit
on Antigone in a stunningly dramatic way. Had they stayed
inside the theatre, it would have felt false.
She continues, “I’m a visual learner. I remember
things for a long time. And I’m very associative.
I was reading Antigone and watching CNN at the same time.
Between all this news, a human interest story came on about
a little girl in Palestine who hit her head on a rock.
It was this boom, boom, boom of the news; then this extended
human interest story. That turned out to be the tempo structure
for Antigone [within the Blood Line saga.
In Antigone, one woman says, ‘I’m going to
do the decent thing.’ But she, really doesn’t
do anything. She does this.”
Settle makes a delicate gesture with her fingers, like
she’s sprinkling dirt over a grave (symbolizing Antigone’s
desire to bury her brother).
She adds, “The play indulges one question, then
Antigone dies. As soon as that occurs, all these other
tragic events happen –boom, boom, boom – like
the CNN news broadcast.”
The director also had to determine the kinds of psycho-sexual
obstacles these epic characters encountered. This was mirrored
in the angle of columns and the pattern of the carpet.
It’s not surprising that Settle came to theatre
through painting, installations and lighting design. She
also enrolled at Hampshire College as an undergraduate
physics major, but switched to theatre.
“I had been in plays in high school,” explains
Settle. “In college, I got involved in carpentry
and as an electrician in theatre. I was drawn to the physiology
and how the eye recognizes light. I saw a play with light
and objects. I originally thought I would major in physics,
but I spent all my time in the damn theatre. And I’m
so bossy, I wanted to direct.”
Because she is such a multidisciplinary thinker, Settle
chose directing. It encompasses, in her words, technical
aspects, design, reading, interpersonal skills and intellectual
questions. Her approach is very malleable.
“Theatre is about telling the emotional story. My
work is about no transition. One reality is true; another
unrelated reality can be equally true. People in life don’t
transition. They just flash.”
Settle has assisted Akalaitis on four productions in Chicago
(including Court Theatre’s Iphigenia Cycle) and New
York. The experimental director also served as Settle’s
mentor at Juilliard and continues to be very supportive
of her development as a theatre artist. They enjoy a candid
relationship in which they can honestly critique each other’s
work and allow for ongoing creative growth.
“I think the mentoring relationship is gone from
the arts,” Settle remarks. “JoAnne has had
as much to do with me as a person as she has as a teacher. “I
think the mentoring relationship is gone from the arts,” Settle
remarks. “JoAnne has had as much to do with me as
a person as she has as a teacher. “She’s a
more experienced human. There’s a generation between
us. She is still living a very full life in the arts. I
feel lucky and hugely grateful that I’ve had the
pleasure of spending five wears with a master artist who
really believes in the theatre of ideas.”
Settle will have the opportunity to continue her pursuit
of the “mentoring” model. She was recently
one of six directors chosen from a highly competitive national
search to receive a 2000-2002 NEA/TCG Career Development
Program for Directors. The $17,500 fellowship is sponsored
by the National Endowment for the Arts and administered
by the Theatre Communications Group. Over a period of six
months within the next two years, Settle has the option
of creating her own work, observing a director’s
process, assisting a master director, or experiencing various
theatrical projects.
She survived a rigorous six-month application process,
which culminated in an interview before a panel of distinguished
directors in New York City. Settle recalls how storms prevented
her from flying out of O’Hare. The adrenaline kicked
in, and she drove non-stop with Thirteenth Tribe ensemble
member Anne DeAcetis in torrential rains all the way from
Chicago to New York. She arrived one hour before her interview
and found herself strangely relaxed.
Some of Settle’s more immediate plans for the fellowship
include participation in a Dramaturgy Convention at Los
Angeles’ Mark Taper Forum; a visit to Perseverance
Theatre in Juneau, Alaska; and possibly assisting director
Ping Chong.
“I’m mainly interested in exploring how the
actor develops character,” she says. “I come
from a very design-centric background. I want to improve
my toolbox in terms of choices. I have a tendency to tech
from the beginning. I can put bodies in space in a way
that’s interesting and poetic. But I’m wondering
what I’m cutting off?”
At present, Settle’s mind is on How to Be Sawed
in Half, and Thirteenth Tribe’s production of Eugene
Ionesco’s Macbett scheduled for November. For How
to Be Sawed in Half, Thirteenth Tribe teamed up with a
commercial company called Flow Arts. For Settle – who
directed a tumultuous South American tour of Grease a few
years ago – the merging of a for-profit and non-profit
entity may be a new model to follow.
“I’ve worked in so many different environments,” Settle
notes. “I also saw the commercial world, which can
be very ugly. But I believe there is a way of combining
these different types of theatres. The commercial world
needs something that’s heavily aesthetically driven.
One way that can be achieved is through a partnership with
a visionary non-profit theatre.”
The director, who acknowledges that her family experienced
financial struggles, prefers dramatic material in which
hard-luck characters don’t necessarily win in the
end. She is not drawn to Chekhov or upper-class dramas
or sentimental works. She often resorts to a physics state
of mind.
“When you strip things down,” Settle contends, “we’re
very small. This is physics. Senseless things happen and
there doesn’t have to be a reason for it. Life is
chaotic; it’s not comfortable. I don’t think
there are heroes. I think people live incredible lives.
“In life, there’s barely an ending – et
alone a happy one. Our experiences are dragged one into
the other. My idea of theatre is having the audience take
more questions than answers with them.”
- Lucia Mauro -
