Our first glimpse of The New York City Players' unique brand of performance was from a bed in the dark, with a small audience of strangers at a Toronto Holiday Inn. Three feet away, Showcase was being performed by a naked man and his shadow.
Richard Maxwell was not this naked man, but he is the writer, director and composer at the helm of the New York-based company of performers whose bare bones, unorthodox approach to theatre-making revels in the excitement of live paradox. Quite honestly, you’ve never seen anything like it.
Interview by Sue Balint
There's the big question of how would you describe what you do? I like working with limitations... there’s something about having something to betray, that’s really what it is, something to push against or push off of. Which is a kind of betraying, I guess.
Betraying of... ? Betraying of the orthodoxy, or myself... There are a few meanings of ‘betrayal’ but all of them seem to involve treachery, disloyalty. One is “to treacherously reveal.” Probably the one I mean is “to reveal the presence of, the evidence of.”
So, you generate a text, go into a rehearsal hall and is that your main intention? To create a template you’re going to betray? Yeah, that's my M.O. It’s funny, things get made through this kind of destruction, but that’s something I’ve always been drawn to. It goes away though: the betrayal gets betrayed. And you feel, at least I feel like I come back around and get sincere. There’s distance and emotional opposites at play.
Do you feel that you betray the audience, in a sense of them feeling cheated? Like, this is not what they expect from theatre? Not really. I don’t do what you’re describing for its own sake. I keep coming back to this idea of community. The trickster seems mythically integral to the overall health of a community. Maybe I play that role, I don’t know.
I do know that I have strong convictions about what is interesting on stage to me as an audience member, and I guess that determines a lot of what I put on stage. I like to watch people who are able to understand the difference between preparation and control, the shelf life of esoteric musings and the logistics of getting from A to B on stage. My feeling has always been to embrace what theatre can provide: the body in real time, inside a story.
I try to be fair and understand other ways of making theatre, but what I see is theatre makers are beholden to emotion, to making something so realistic it moves the audience. People tell me it’s necessary and it’s part of the mirror that we hold up to society, but what I see—and this is reflected in the fact that fewer and fewer people are going to see theatre—is that that mirror is not accurate.
It’s a different world. Almost like the Theatre Machine. Well I don’t know, there are plenty of interesting things that get made in a machine-like way. It’s just that I look for a way to talk about what I do and I find I’m always having to reference it against the larger picture of mainstream theatre.
It’s the companies that feel a similar way about verisimilitude and whatnot that I will be inclined to go see. These companies and me, we tend to get qualified with terms like ‘downtown’, ‘experimental’, ‘fringe’ or ‘performance art’. It’s never just ‘theatre’. I just want to be a theatre person, but I can’t control how people view what I do.
What about your list of paradoxes (actor is audience, house is stage, your approach is mine etc.)?
The notion of paradox is something I have discussed with different theatrical entities that I’ve been a part of. About finding the balance between passion and indifference. I’ve been reading Joseph Campbell lately and it seems he was greatly influenced by Eastern philosophy. I don’t know what you’d call it... I guess a Zen notion of dealing with paradox?
And for me, that place of balance becomes acute in a theatrical situation when you have someone step up on stage. These paradoxes are flying around in the ether and there’s a lot of pressure on the performer to do this or that, to make the performance successful.
So you, the actor, have to stay rooted in what you’re doing. A lot of what performers do is about either neutralising the paradoxes or somehow trying to reconcile them. And I don’t see the need to do either. Let me put it this way: I find it very interesting to see what happens when we allow the paradoxes to be.
Can you give a concrete example of a paradox that is allowed to be? An actor is in a scene with another person and they forget their line. There’s that critical moment when they’re not sure how to proceed and right there, in just that little moment, you have a whole universe of paradoxes: of professional and amateur, of right and wrong or good and bad, of actor and character. This is supposed to be one of the tenets of theatre – that anything can happen. It’s this universal chaos that’s always threatening which makes live performance so electric.
Each person might deal with that situation in a different way, but the way that pretends it isn’t happening is not so interesting to me. It’s not reckoning with what’s going on. You can never be sure about things and that’s where my heart is, in pursuing this realm of the unsure. It’s the people who are sure of things that I tend to stay away from. 
NYC Players, see it to believe it.
Interview © 2010 Wheel Me Out. No part can be used for any purpose without prior consent. Please contact editorial@wheelmeout.com
