You’re a theater director, dramaturg, festival producer, teacher, and arts activist. How did your artistic journey begin? And have you always been interested in theater?
My journey in the theater began when I was a child. My father was a drama teacher at a high school in California and he also directed all the student productions. He put me on stage in almost all his plays and musicals, so I basically grew up in theater. Looking back it was a magical time, exciting, often terrifying too, and it profoundly shaped me in many ways.
I continued in theater in high school and eventually went to study drama at the University of San Francisco graduating with a theater degree in acting. But I had too many ideas in my head and moved into directing not long after I graduated. I moved to New York and dove into the experimental theater scene in downtown Manhattan and basically never left.
Later I went to study at Columbia University where I got my Master’s degree in directing. So, to answer your question, yes I have always been interested in theater, and somehow it has always been interested in me.
In the past, you’ve staged Dorota Masłowska’s or Sławomir Mrożek’s works. Was there something specific about these Polish writers that caught your attention?
I first encountered Polish playwriting and dramaturgy at Columbia University in the aftermath of 9/11.
I read and staged the works of Różewicz, Mrożek, Gombrowicz, and Witkacy, and they really resonated with me in those days of terror and the aftermath. But they also touched me in another deeper way, with their wild form and imagination, black humor, and philosophy of the absurd. They were, in a very concrete sense, the writers I had always been looking for.
I ended up staging Mrożek’s Striptease at the end of that semester and it really struck a nerve with the public when we showed it. It was the perfect metaphor for that post-9/11 moment, and it somehow gave us permission to laugh at the tragic absurdity of our situation.
I took it downtown where it ran for eight weeks on the weekends and eventually, it came to the attention of the Polish Cultural Institute in New York. The director loved it, and it was produced along with another act of Mrożek at LaMaMa this somehow launched my career and started a long collaboration with the Institute in New York that produced many productions, of Mrożek and later Dorota Masłowska, and also took me to Poland for the first time.
Speaking of Poland, please tell us something about your two theatre initiatives: Teatr Trans-Atlantyk and Eldorado Teatr. How did they emerge and what’s the idea behind each of them?
I moved to Poland in 2011 after seventeen years in New York and basically started a new life from scratch. New York had become too expensive and too difficult to work in. I had also been working more and more in Europe, and so I decided to leave.
The first important project I made was a documentary theater piece about the perpetrators of Auschwitz called Album Karla Höckera at the Sopot Non-Fiction Festival. Teatr Trans-Atlantyk was born out of that project and with the actors I collaborated with we founded Fundacja Teatru Trans-Atlantyk, an arts NGO to support our work. We made numerous projects together, all in the documentary theater vein, until the pandemic closed all the theaters. We are now starting to get back together and think about new directions and projects.
Eldorado Teatr emerged as a response to the pandemic. I gathered the team and we started making digital broadcasting projects, mostly on YouTube and Facebook in a studio out in Mordor [A humorous name for a cluster of office buildings in Warsaw] that let us have it for a song.
The name was inspired by the original Eldorado Theater, a Jewish theater that existed before the war, and was the first theater to operate inside the Warsaw Ghetto. To the best of my knowledge there was never another Eldorado Theater in Warsaw after the destruction of the Ghetto, and so reanimating this name was both a memory project and a tribute to the spirit of those Ghetto artists who faced the apocalypse from the stage with art.
Since then, the project has evolved to include activism including several projects with the LGBTQ and Ukrainian communities, and also as an incubator for a bigger dream: A professional foreign language stage in Warsaw.
You’ve lived and worked in New York for a long time before moving to Europe. It may be a naïve question to ask, but in terms of art, people, and culture, do you think these two worlds have something in common or are rather fundamentally different?
It’s really night and day. Most importantly, there is no public funding for the arts, so a career in the live arts is almost impossible unless you have independent means, can manage a film or television career, or have a full-time job in academia.
Outside of the commercial theater of Broadway, I think theater in America is more of a hobby or the terrain of wealthy auteurs or poor fanatics. It is not a professional or national theater as it is understood in Europe. I would also say that it’s generally considered only a stepping stone into commercial film, television, and streaming.
I have always wanted to stay in the theater, and one day I simply could no longer afford to live in New York, so I emigrated to Europe, where the live arts are largely supported by public money as a public good and a professional career is not only possible but held in general esteem and respect.
Through your projects, you advocate for LGBTQ, Jewish, and Ukrainian communities in Poland, and their history and heritage. How do people in Poland react to these projects?
Generally, the response has been very positive, especially from the communities I have been working with. All of these communities are in one way or another marginalized and discriminated against – in Poland that has been especially true for the LGBTQ community. So giving them a stage and a platform changes the narrative and helps the general public to see these minorities as the real national treasures that they are.
Warsaw was always a cosmopolitan city before the war and communism erased that. Now with the mass immigration of Ukrainians fleeing the war, and the large immigration of queer people from the villages and small towns of Poland, combined with the increasingly visible and vibrant Jewish community, Warsaw is really returning to a cosmopolitan character that was for most of its existence the norm. There are also a lot of people like me here, random immigrants from all over the world, who chose to make it home.
What are you currently working on?
I am developing my foundation, writing a lot of grants, and laying the groundwork to establish a permanent international stage in Warsaw with my colleagues at FestivALT under the framework of the Eldorado project.
In the meantime, I am doing a lot of work in the field of dance. For the past six years, I have been working with the choreographer Maciej Kuźmiński in a partnership that has created six pieces of dance theater. The most recent is Every Minute Motherland, a piece with Ukrainian and Polish dancers that has been touring extensively in Poland and Germany, and Memoryhouse, a piece with the Tanz Linz company in Linz, Austria, that is currently performing in repertory there.
