Wednesday, November 5, 1997
"Pearls" of wisdom
THEATER Playwright Richard Foreman explains why theater is a
frustrating medium and how this fuels his own work, including
‘Pearls for Pigs’
By Cheryl Klein
Daily Bruin Senior Staff
It can’t be easy being Richard Foreman. The avant-garde
playwright blatantly despises his own medium, and his most recent
work, "Pearls for Pigs," opened at his home theater in Hartford, to
mixed reactions at best. Subscribers didn’t show up, and some
audience members walked out mid-performance.
"They have very sedate audiences used to very conventional
things," Foreman says, his tone more brusque acceptance than
cultural snobbery. "There was a large percentage of the audience
who obviously despised it and that’s no surprise."
Yet the minority of viewers who hailed "Pearls for Pigs"
included The New York Times, who lauded it as "creating upheavals
in form and pretension." USA Today, said, "The play seems to
emanate from a meticulously worked-out world with a subtext that’s
rich, even if it’s too elusive to define."
"Pearls for Pigs," opening tonight at UCLA’s Freud Playhouse, is
the first of Foreman’s works to go on tour in the United States. So
it can’t be all bad being Richard Foreman. Rather, it is a
dichotomy, a battle to perfect a flawed genre and shed convention
for the frightening but fascinating realm of the subconscious.
"Pearls for Pigs" boasts the bizarre visual effects which have
come to typify Foreman’s work. The costumes have the surreal air of
carnival music played off key, as bespectacled characters wearing
ruffled collars and beehive hats hover about Maestro, the central
persona. Maestro is quite possibly a loosely disguised Foreman.
Both are men who find theater frustrating and banal, yet can’t seem
to leave.
"Theater is a very perverse undertaking because people in the
theater normally believe, ‘Ah, but the audience, the collective of
the audience always knows what’s good, what’s right.’ I don’t
believe that for a second. I believe that each individual is much
more perceptive, more open to possibilities than when you have a
collective," Foreman says. "I should never have gotten into the
theater 30 years ago. I can’t help it. I’m addicted, in a way, but
I’m still full of ambivalence."
Foreman loathes theater’s tendency to seek audience approval,
pointing out that painting and even film avoid this phenomenon to a
certain extent. Because theater is live, people can’t go back and
pour over the work on an individual level.
"A person that is painting a Picasso doesn’t sit there saying,
‘Gee, that face is sort of funny looking. It pleases me, but maybe
people won’t like it, so I’d better make it nicer,’" Foreman
mocks.
Though Foreman is a fan of music, literature and other art
forms, he says he never goes to the theater. Perhaps it’s ironic
that the title "Pearls for Pigs" alludes to another theatrical
gem.
"It comes from Shakespeare -‘Pearls for Pigs’ means ‘Cast your
pearls before swine,’" Foreman says. The pearl being the play, the
pigs being the audience. "I even asked the producers, ‘Do you think
this title is too insulting?’ and they said, ‘No, it’s funny.’"
And what if they hadn’t? This concern sounds suspiciously like
soliciting support on both sides of the curtain. The Hartford Stage
even attempted to cushion the blow by holding preshow
"informances," filling the audience in on what to expect and the
artistic thinking behind it. Yet Foreman has a relaxed and
uncharacteristic faith in the legions that will flock to catch
"Pearls for Pigs" on tour, especially college students.
"The aggression, the noise – (others) can’t make sense of this,
whereas younger people can make perfect sense of it since it’s like
a … video clip," Foreman says.
Music plays a vital role in establishing the subtext of "Pearls
for Pigs," as it does in all of Foreman’s work ("I’m not interested
in using sad music if it’s a sad scene," he says. "I want the music
to give another dimension."). He’s been known to embody the Maestro
mentality at this level as well, willingly confessing that he just
threw out all the compositions in his current work in progress for
no other reason than that the sound just wasn’t "right."
Foreman is also something of a perfectionist when he dons his
director’s hat, as he did for "Pearls for Pigs." He directs his
cast (including Foreman vet David Patrick Kelly in the lead) very
precisely but hopes his gut instincts will land them the right
actors for the parts.
"I’m looking for a kind of laser-like intensity. However, 75
percent of it is directed inside. Like something is eating away at
people," Foreman says.
The world may never know exactly what’s eating away at the
playwright himself, but seven Obie Awards and a prestigious
MacArthur fellowship suggest a more than valiant attempt to put his
darkest dreams and most complex theories on stage. Sometimes it
works, sometimes it doesn’t. And one of theater’s most rebellious
offers a surprisingly simple philosophy on the subject.
"Earnest Hemmingway used to say, ‘The one thing a writer needs
is a great built-in shit detector,’" Foreman recalls. "You have to
be able to tell, of all your ideas, the 95 percent that are old hat
and not very interesting. You just keep the pure pearl of something
you never thought you’d think of."
THEATER: "Pearls for Pigs" runs Nov. 5-9 at UCLA’s Freud
Playhouse. Tickets are $25, $10 for students. For more information,
call (310) 825-2101.
UCLA Center for the Performing Arts
"Pearls for Pigs" has its Los Angeles debut tonight at the Freud
Playhouse.
Photos courtesy of UCLA Center for the Performing Arts
(Top) Richard Foreman’s "Pearls for Pigs" has its Los Angeles
debut tonight at the Freud Playhouse. (Above)"Pearls for Pigs" uses
music and avant-garde staging to capture Maestro’s frustration with
theater.