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Ivo van Hove on Directing Scenes from a Marriage and Angels in America

Theater director Ivo van Hove has made a habit of breaching borders.

Ivo van Hove on Directing Scenes from a Marriage and Angels in America
Photo: New York Theatre Workshop

Theater director Ivo van Hove has made a habit of breaching borders. Born in Belgium, he currently runs the internationally renowned Toneelgroep Amsterdam in the Netherlands and also brings his work to New York with welcome regularity. More significantly, van Hove makes an art of erasing the barrier not only between actor and audience, but also between one scene and another.

During the presidential 2012 election, his epochal production Roman Tragedies, which played at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, ran for nearly six hours without any breaks. Van Hove edited Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, Julius Caesar, and Anthony and Cleopatra to focus both the text and the theatrical experience on the relationship between politicians and the public. Audiences were encouraged to come and go where and when they pleased—even up onto the stage. The production became an exhilarating and indelible exercise in democracy, mounted by one of the reigning auteurs in global theater.

In van Hove’s most recent work, Scenes from a Marriage, which runs at New York Theatre Workshop until October 26, the three scenes of the first act play simultaneously. The entire audience is divvied up and escorted into one of three makeshift spaces, where they watch the scenes play out in a different order from each other. Three sets of actors perform the central roles of Johann and Marianne, at various phases of their relationship. In the second act, seats and playing areas are spread throughout one open space. The three sets of actors often perform simultaneously mere inches away from a group of spectators. The play’s collection of everyday relationship dramas become fodder for a mass ritual of coming together and tearing apart.

Soon after the production’s opening, I spoke with van Hove, as he prepared to leave his American cast temporarily and bring in Toneelgroep Amsterdam once again to BAM, which houses his stripped-down version of Angels in America (October 24 – 26). Both plays focus on doomed relationships, yet the reputedly renegade “bad boy” of the theater could be more accurately defined by his fondness for long-term commitments.

Passionate conflict, with balls-to-the-wall brutality, tends to dominate your productions. But that seems to run counter to the relationships you’ve nurtured with theaters, actors and designers. You choose to work with the same people repeatedly.

I like loyalty, because it creates an atmosphere of confidence. Trusting each other is always the best environment to be creative. I don’t like conflicts in my rehearsal room. I’m never provoking fights between my actors. I like an atmosphere where it’s pleasant to work with each other. That’s the best basis to build a solid building, supported by everybody because everybody is important. In rehearsal, the first days are there to create an ensemble that cares for each other, that wants to make each other better, and not just wants to make him or herself good. Helping them be aware that the others are equally important in a production is what I do. I don’t know how I do that. It’s from being very patient I think. Jan [Versweyveld], my designer who’s always there, says I can be very full of temperament, but I can also be very patient with an actor and give them time to discover things. For me, it’s important that the personality of an actor shines through and that the actor doesn’t pretend to be somebody else because that’s an illusion.

Your vision of personality seems to foreground contradiction. Here, they show both tenderness and selfishness.

That’s true. And that’s the character. I don’t like texts that have only one dimension. The actor has to discover the Macbeth in himself when you do that play. The Lady Macbeth in yourself. You can’t pretend that by putting on a wig and having a funny walk or something that you’re somebody else. Then you’re imitating somebody else and imitation is not art. So I want them to connect with the part in a personal way. That’s the theater I like.

You said Jan is always there. That’s uncommon for a designer.

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He’s not a designer who makes a design, then comes back for the last two weeks for tech. No, he’s really interested in the collaboration with actors. For him, it’s very important that they feel good in his set, that they understand the set very well. Also, when things are getting difficult, he tries to talk to them, to see how to make it better. For me, I have the feeling it’s sometimes not clear who directed and who did the design. Of course, I do all the talking to the actors. But he also has a lot of ideas about me directing, just as I have ideas about designs. It feels like a Jan Versweyveld and Ivo van Hove production. It’s a real collaboration.

And it goes beyond the theater. He’s your partner off stage as well. How do you manage that?

For us it works very well. It’s completely private, you know? A lot of the times when I’m a guest director in opera, or when I was in London, people aren’t even aware that we’re a couple until the end. We really have very different opinions. It’s not that we always say, “Yes, you’re right.” Not at all. But we don’t bring our private life to the rehearsal room. We keep it separate.

So when your actors are brawling and pouring water over each other in Scenes from a Marriage’s second-act fight-to-end-all-fights, they don’t look to you two for advice? You don’t say, “This is how we do this at home”?

[laughs] No. I’m also not a director who gives a lot of examples from his own private life. Sometimes I do, of course, but not a lot. To illustrate something or to inspire other people. A private thing is a private thing.

Yet making the private public seems at the core of your work. It’s remarkably intimate, even if not in the specific details of your or your actors’ lives. The films you’ve chosen to adapt, Scenes from a Marriage or Cries and Whispers and Opening Night, were all intensely personal to their original writer-director.

I think any production by me is a piece of my autobiography. So, yes, these are very personal to me as they were to Bergman, to Cassavetes. It makes no sense to turn a movie into a theater play unless there’s really an urge to do it because it was intended to be a movie. I only do that when I think I can tell something which I cannot do with any existing play. A movie is made by the edit. The big challenge for me then is to invent a world for it theatrically.

Do you know when you start how you connect with a piece personally or do you discover that as you go along?

Choosing a text is like being struck by lightning. It’s something impulsive, like suddenly falling in love with someone. It happens that I think, “Oh, this would be great to do on stage.” For instance, in Cries and Whispers it was staging death. It wasn’t important for the public to know, but my father had just died a year before. I had witnessed it, so the production was perhaps my way to say goodbye him. And I wanted to stage death in a truthful way because it’s always pathetic when people die on stage. I wanted to make it believable. It’s challenges like that I’m searching for. Then, later, because I have to work with lots of people and I have to inspire them, I have to try to rationalize why it is that I’m in love with this. If I just say to everybody, “Be in love also because I am,” that will not work. I have to give it words. And that’s my preparation. I really prepare a text. I really think about it, about what it can mean. And then I discover new things again, I hope, during rehearsal. When I do a remake, like here with Scenes from a Marriage, which I did originally in Amsterdam, I found five to 10 pages of Bergman’s text that I thought would interesting to deal with. Even with a tour, the performances develop more and more. It becomes deeper like a good wine. It’s the same wine, but it becomes better.

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Besides an instinctive connection, what do you look for in a text?

I need texts that are layered, that allow me to find—that provoke me to find—my own path in the roots of the text. I’m rehearsing now a monologue that Simon Stephens [adapter of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime and the upcoming Punk Rock at MCC] has written for me. A monologue is the hardest thing to do on stage. But this is beautiful. And we’re making great discoveries. “Why is this line here? Why is this character all of a sudden popping up there.” I like discoveries.

Do you also learn something new when you bring different actors to a text or when a production plays to different audiences from country to country?

I try to create the same feeling of a temporary family. One of the reasons I like to work with American actors is that I love the American language. It’s very earthy, very feet-on-the-ground. The actors here tend to go for emotions, which I love. It’s also who I choose. I search for a visceral quality in actors. And that’s true for audiences here as well. But it depends on where we are in New York. BAM is different from New York Theatre Workshop. At BAM you have people who go on an adventure for something foreign. We play with supertitles. At New York Theatre Workshop, it’s in English and they pay more. They’re treated very well. In Europe, we don’t wait for one person who’s a little bit too late. We start. Perhaps it has to do with the prices. In Europe, it’s more democratic, more accessible, because you don’t have to pay so much money. In New York, they’re also a little more responsive. When they laugh, they really laugh. Americans are also very loud. You’re also very open. It seems there’s nothing to hide. I’m from Belgium, where it’s totally different. Belgians are very quiet during the performance. A little bit like the Japanese. But when it’s over, we show, “Wow, we really loved it.”

Watching your work, though it’s extraordinarily distinctive, I wonder if you’ve been inspired by another Belgian, Pina Bausch?

It’s dance theater, but she was a huge influence on us at the end of the ’70s. It was totally new, totally innovative, in the form that she presented it: the way she spoke about the relationship between men and women in a sometimes very hard, but also sometimes very sentimental way—sentimental in a good way. The fact that you could do this in a theater, go from pathos into raw realism, that’s what opened up my mind toward what’s possible in the theater. My kind of theater is totally different except we share the physical side, the bluntness of showing how people act towards each other.

Your productions push the actors and even the audience to a level of exhaustion.

When I started as a young man, I was influenced most by performance art. The physical exhaustion and the physical reality of what’s happening right before your eye inspired me. I like in my productions that what you see is what you get and what’s real at that moment. That’s the difference between a production to me and a performance. When Marina Abramović sits there at MOMA for all those hours, she really is there and she really looks at you. And that’s what it is. There’s not a character; there’s nothing else. And that’s what I like in my productions also—when things become totally real at a certain moment. That’s the moment I always search for.

In Scenes from a Marriage, you help the actors and the audience see the reality of performance by casting three actors for each of the main roles. Dallas Roberts has a different essence from Arliss Howard. The actresses are of different races. So I quickly stopped looking to make connections between them and just became aware of how each connected to the role itself.

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Yes, totally. I rehearsed every scene separately so they didn’t look at each other, only at the very end. For me, it was important that Dallas is Dallas and Arliss is Arliss and starts from himself, and not by, “Oh, Dallas is doing that so I’ll do that also because we have to create together a character.” No, for me it was very important that this Johann character is like everybody. Everybody is Johann. We all have experienced the things that these people experience in this text. That’s the genius of it.

Is that also why you sometimes place your actors so close to the audience?

Yes, there you cannot fake.

And the audience can’t fake.

Because you’re visible. It’s quite light. People can see how you react, so by having the public on stage, everybody’s part of the same experience. You can look at each other. And in the second act, people aren’t just looking at what the actors are doing. They’re looking to each other.

And in the first act, even though we can’t see most of the other audiences, we can hear them. I heard an audience laugh at a scene which my audience had watched earlier in silence. I wondered whether the actors were playing it differently or if that third of the audience was just in a better mood than mine.

That’s exactly what I wanted. I wanted to have you remember some things. And think, “Oh, we didn’t laugh at that moment. What’s happening there this time?” So it creates like a collective memory. And it’s like past, future, and present are all part of one time frame.

Bergman creates that sense of time in his films, so I imagine that’s one of the reasons you’re drawn to his work. What are some of the other reasons you’re so attracted to adapting films?

I have to invent a theatrical world for them that has never existed before. Most of the time I am the first to do that with this specific text. Opening Night was never produced on stage before I did it. Husbands I also did on stage. Nobody did it before me. So it’s like a world premiere of Hamlet. I’m almost 56. Over 30 years I’ve been making theater. And these works provoke a huge creativity.

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How does that compare with approaching the much-produced Angels in America?

That’s my other love affair. In the beginning, I wrote my own texts and made productions based on improvisation. But when I was 25 doing Troilus and Cressida, I discovered I could be even more personal in my work using a text that was over 400 years old. I could be totally myself. So I love to work with classics and contemporary classics, which is what I consider Angels. It will survive. I read the text and started thinking, “How does this text want to be produced?” That’s my job. In the case of Angels, people may be surprised here because it’s an empty stage. When Tony [Kushner] saw it for the first time in Amsterdam, he thought, “Well it’s empty now. But the office will move in next, then the hospital will move in and this and this,” but nothing moved in. It was an empty space, a space of imagination. The actors become really important because when you’re on an empty stage your physical presence becomes very vulnerable and fragile. And I thought that was the best way to deal with this specific text.

It’s always different for every text. I don’t have a recipe like Bob Wilson, whom I admire a lot. But you know when you enter a Bob Wilson production [whose Shakespeare’s Sonnets played BAM earlier this month], you don’t even have to stay for two minutes and you can say, “Oh, this is Bob Wilson.” I don’t think that’s the case with my productions. In Scenes from a Marriage, there’s not one inch in our brain that’s been thinking of beautifying it. This is like a raw house. What is in a house? A bed and a table. That’s enough for this. Together with Jan and Tal Yarden, my video designer, we’re looking for how does this play want to be produced?

And when casting actors, do you ask how does this character want to be played?

Yes. I’m not so fond of auditions. That’s a very artificial situation. Everyone is nervous, me included. So I make it as short as possible. I don’t pretend we’re going to work with each other because it’s stupid to do that, for me anyway. I follow my instinct a little bit there. I met Dallas Roberts at a party, for instance, and knew his work from movies and a little TV and I thought this might be interesting.

And your instinct led you to a different feeling when you met Philip Seymour Hoffman for your production of Streetcar Named Desire at New York Theatre Workshop?

I was really looking forward to working with him. But I just got afraid a little bit. It’s a personal thing that happened. It never happened with anybody else, and I don’t think it will happen again. I work in opera with big stars like that. So it had nothing to do with that. He was brilliant and it just overwhelmed me a little bit at that moment and afterward I thought, “I was totally wrong.”

Are there other instances where you feel you would do something differently now?

All the time. But I’m content, and I mean that, with my life, with my mistakes, with my successes, and with my doubts. I have very good equilibrium in my life in the theater. I can live with critical reproaches. I, of course, want only good reviews. But for a day I’m depressed and then life goes on. To direct theater isn’t a job for me. It’s my life. I want to bring a text or an idea to the stage in the most extreme way. Something that’s unique to me, to Jan, to the actors. It really means a lot to me. A very famous grand old lady of the theater in Belgium came to one of my early productions and said, “You and the theater, that will be a very good marriage.” And it’s turned out to be that way.

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Scenes from a Marriage runs through October 26 at New York Theatre Workshop and Angels in America will play October 23 to October 25 at BAM.

Jon Magaril

Jon Shear directed, co-wrote, and produced Urbania, which was nominated for the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance. He teaches at New York University and Columbia University.

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