Daniel Fish Speaks
Posted by Adam Immerwahr on August 27th, 2007
This summer, we had this rocking intern named Joseph, who did a really neat interview with Daniel Fish, director of Tartuffe. So he transcribed the interview, and we put an excerpt of it in the Stick Fly program. But I’m posting a much longer version of it here.
SPOILER ALERT: If you are the kind who arrives to the theater a half hour early to read the whole program, and you plan on coming to see Stick Fly, then do not read this interview. Cause it’ll totally spoil your program-reading fun. If, on the other hand, you get in at the last minute, and always wish you had more time to read the program, then your wishes have been fulfilled, cause here’s the full interview in all its glory. Enjoy.
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Joseph: This is your second time directing Tartuffe in ten years—you directed an earlier production at the Court Theatre in Chicago. What has brought you back to the play, and what has changed since your last encounter with the play?
Daniel Fish: Well, I’m ten years older. The world’s a whole lot different. Also, I suppose I should start by saying that I’ve always loved working on Molière’s plays: I love their fierce comedy, their muscularity, I love how intense the people in these plays are, how strong-willed they are. That’s always been a part of it.
A few years ago, after the last presidential election actually, I was talking to McCarter’s artistic staff about plays that the McCarter might produce next. This was just after the election when there was a lot of talk about the country being divided between blue and red. And so I brought this play up as an example of what happens when a person comes into a house and fiercely divides the people in it across very strong lines.
And then, when we got around to really talking about the possibility of a production more seriously, I had to look at it again. Now, I’m interested in the issues of power and submission. What is it about human nature that allows us–or sometimes even pathologically requires us–to submit ourselves to a person or a force, be that a political leader, a spouse, a friend, a co-worker, who’s more powerful?
Joseph: Why Tartuffe now, in this particular moment?
DF: Well, I don’t make a play because I want to make a statement with it. I try to do the play in as personal and as honest a way as I can. So I think certainly these issues of submission and power are ones that we’re concerned with now, and we’ll always be concerned with them. The compulsion to sometimes see situations not as they truly are, but in a better light than they are, and to refuse to acknowledge what’s really going on: clearly that’s an eternal problem. And it’s the basis of a lot of comedy.
I suppose one of those things I’m really grappling with is the issue of the seventeenth century. Most of the classical plays I’ve done of late have all been done in a way that was very contemporary, and I think that partly comes from my strong belief that the theater happens now, it’s about the world we’re living in, it cannot but be that. And I still think that’s true with Tartuffe, but it also didn’t seem right to have the actors walking around in contemporary dress.
So I began to research—and get obsessed with—the 1660s. I have a truly vexed relationship with it. On the one hand, I’m fascinated with it; fascinated with the excess of it, and the allure of it, but rather than saying ‘Okay, we’re all going to pretend that we’re in the 1660s , I’m trying to really grapple with the issue of how we look at the past, and how we represent the past onstage, and how a play can be contemporary and still be obsessed with another world.
Joseph: And this question actually inspired a trip for you and Kaye Voyce—the costume designer for the play–to go to France and research at the Musée Carnavalet and the Louvre. Did this trip yield any particular inspiration for the play?
DF: It yielded a lot. When I did Tartuffe ten years ago, I did a kind of crazy version of the seventeenth century, which is mostly what everybody was doing in the nineties. There was crazy makeup and huge wigs that looked like Marge Simpson. It was totally outrageous and it didn’t have a whole lot of reality to it. It was really about artifice.
But the Musée Carnavalet is a seventeenth century building. When we went, we found ourselves looking at the scale of the rooms, and the scale of the doorways, and how light comes into the rooms, and the role played by mirrors, and then of course the paintings. Frankly we ended up looking at a lot of Dutch painting because Tartuffe is quite a domestic play in many ways, and of course most of the French painting of the period is of royalty or religious subjects; and so if you want a domestic scene, you have to go look at Dutch painting. There’s a great deal of Dutch painting in the Louvre from the period, so we were looking at those, and looking at what the clothes really looked like and how they wore them—not in portraits but more in everyday scenes.
Also, we had an interest in the culture of the museum itself, and why we go to museums, and why we look at the past, and how things are presented there… and also all the stuff that’s around a museum: the cameras, and the shops, and the book stores, and the cafes, and the ticket booths: all of this is a kind of strange and fascinating way of examining and fetishizing history.
Joseph: What kind of dialogue do the conventions of the contemporary stage have with those of the seventeenth century stage, with seventeenth century ideas of representation?
DF: This is important, and I think it’s a great question. I begin by saying: “Two really important dates are 1664 and 2007. Okay. These words come from 1664, these people come from 2007. What happens when you put them in a room together for four weeks? And what happens when we put another thousand people into the room and watch that?” That’s the entry point, and I don’t know the result of that yet. We’ll know something about that after we make the play.
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Posted by Adam Immerwahr, Producing Associate at McCarter Theatre.
