Andrew Lazarow Explains How the Satori Group Makes Awesome Theatre

"My belief is that you can only get so far, sitting in a room, thinking about something silently to yourself," Andrew Lazarow said of the Satori Group's intensive development process. "Or only so far sitting in a room, talking about things. You want to be way more up on your feet, playing with your body, with designs, turning on and off lights, and seeing what happens."

A founding member of the group and the director of their current show, Ashlin Halfnight's Artifacts of Consequence, which closes this weekend with sold-out shows, Lazarow showed up for our meeting at Bauhaus a scant week-and-a-half before opening night impeccably dressed in suit and tie, with a camel hair overcoat that he casually cast over the back of his chair before sitting down to talk with me about the company and the play. Since bringing themselves to Seattle's attention with their production of Will Eno's Tragedy: a tragedy, as well as their collaboration with Washington Ensemble Theatre for their much discussed production of Titus, the Satori Group have been garnering the sort of attention that you don't usually associate with a company that's only just over two years old and none of whose members, to my knowledge, have yet reached the age of 30.

Their success lies in the eleven core members' unusual devotion not only to the process of creating their work, but to group itself, to the point of relocating themselves to Seattle to set up shop. Over the past year I've had the chance to meet most of the members, and have had long discussions not only with Lazarow but also Adam Standley, another of the founders whose acting career in Seattle has led him quickly from a role in a fairly weak an uneven production of Ibsen's Ghosts with Eclectic Theatre just last December, through a stunning performance in an off-night production of Peter Morris's Guardians, to a supporting role in Sheila Daniels's Abe Lincoln in Illinois, which just closed at the Intiman last night.

In a discussion over beers at The Stumbling Monk earlier this year, Standley, whose rapid-fire delivery and unbridled enthusiasm in person are glaringly at odds with the carefully crafted characters he brings to the stage, told me about how the company came together and how the eleven core members wound up in Seattle.

"I went to a conservatory in Cincinnati for four years, and in that time, I met a group of people—basically who I always wound up hanging around, but also because we shared an aesthetic in some sense," he said. "That, in combination with a couple professional performances that we did around town, with companies who were already established there, I met a guy named Andrew [Lazarow] who was from Cincinnati, who was going to Williams College in Massachusetts, who also had a group of five people who were the same. And that led to this idea that we were going to make a theatre company that was this half-breed between conservatory acting forces, with strong muscles and an eye on the goal, and these broad-based, kind of—dare I say—non-theatre artists, academes, really powerful thinkers, and a couple powerful administrators as well."

"We often got together and were like, 'Well, there's so much wrong with the current regional theatre system, and so much right work that could be done,' that we all kind of agreed that now was a good time for young people to be making theatre because it seems in desperate need of an evolution. So we all said, we're going to do the ensemble thing, but we're going to do it right. We toured four cities: Portland, Austin, Chicago, and Seattle. And we decided on Seattle, and all eleven of us moved out here, none of us having any roots here at all."

Once here, the company began an aggressive workshopping and training process. When not producing a show, the company manages to aggressively maintain a three-part weekly process including training, a laboratory workshop, and the development of their main presentations, which they refer to as their "Body of Work." Artifacts is the first show in this season's Body, to be followed by an original adaptation of George Saunder's short-story "Winky" (from the collection Pastoralia), and closing out with a new staging of Complicite Theatre's The Three Lives of Lucie Cabrol, as well as presenting an experimental work as part of On the Boards' Northwest New Works Festival in June 2010.

Satori's process for bringing a show to the stage is a long undertaking. Standley offhandedly mentioned that the company had workshopped out at least a half-dozen shows to near completion before staging Eno's Tragedy, none of which have yet seen the light of day, save for the odd (and unpromoted) workshop performance. One of those was an original interpretation of Peter Pan that, as Lazarow told me, the company performed as a work-in-progress both around the Seattle Center campus as well as on the waterfront, up and down the Harbor Steps, to the mystification and excitement of both passersby and sleeping homeless people.

Another show they worked on, by way of demonstrating their process, was an re-imaging of The Importance of Being Earnest as seen through the lens of Andy Warhol's Factory.

That "was my personal darling," Lazarow told me. "The idea was actually going back to how Andy Warhol actually made his films, primarily Chelsea Girls, which was the first split-screen film. And his big thing that he said, that I loved about it, was that he didn't want a real VHS—or in today's world, a DVD—copy to ever exist, because he wanted the projectionist to always decide which reel matched up with what on the other side, and what order they came in. So with that happening, plus as you watched, you would decide what to listen to and what to watch, everyone would self-edit the film. So everyone had a completely unique experience."

Satori's idea was a bit like Marat/Sade, a performance within a performance, featuring Warhol—who Lazarow sees as having many similarities to Oscar Wilde—producing a film version of Earnest starring the predictable Factory members, who constantly drift off-script (as they often did), "high on whatever," as Lazarow put it. Two live-feed cameras would run, re-projecting their work, replicating in a live performance the effect Warhol sought with Chelsea Girls.

"That's sort of what theatre is to me," Lazarow said. "Every night is different, and everyone sits in a different seat, and everyone chooses to look at different things, so your experience—even though it's a communal event—you have your own experience."

The process the company followed to bring Artifacts of Consequence to the stage was no less rigorous. Lazarow and several other members spend quite a bit of time reading plays, and the ones that catch their eye they bring before the group for discussion and possible development. That process, in turn, supports how they craft their season, which is itself an open discussion with the ensemble, in terms of what and how many shows to produce.

Lazarow stumbled across Artifacts when someone suggested he look into the work of Electric Pear Productions out of New York, because they were a more text-based experimental theatre company than Satori. Ashlin Halfnight, a former NHL player with the Hurricanes who turned to theatre after "a few concussions, a botched contract, and, to be honest, a lot of boredom," is now the artistic director of Electric Pear, and the company debuted Artifacts earlier this year to rave reviews in New York.

Artifacts is set in a post-eco-apocalyptic future, where a group of scientists in an underwater facility are attempting to catalog the achievements of their lost civilization by evaluating artifacts brought down from the surface and determining which are important to keep, and which should disposed of and forgotten. One of the core bits of the play is the requirement that the audience actually vote in the process. Against this background, a drama unfolds as food supplies run low and an outside influence threatens the delicately constructed society in the research facility.

For Lazarow, the show's appeal lay in the complicated central question it poses about culture. "Part of it is just the reminder that we, as a culture, actually determine what passes and what doesn't," he explained, with reference to the audience's participation in the grim process of sorting the wheat from the chaff. On the other hand, the story explores the idea of how our identities are defined by our culture, through the development of the characters who were born into the post-apocalyptic era, and how they relate to the lost culture that is the central concern of their small society.

"On one level, our culture decides who we are," said Lazarow, noting his background is more in anthropology than performance. "Whether you're mainstream or alternative, whatever part of culture you fit in, it gives you rules to follow. At the same time, like I said, more often than we remember, we decide what our culture is. So there's this two-way thing, where our culture writes us, but we also write our culture."

Once the company decided to produce the show, the workshopping began. "The first step was finding our own personal connections to the piece," Lazarow explained. "We had everyone, before I cast it, say what roles they were interested in and basically said, 'Okay, go through the script, write out the givens that we know about your character, present and past and future, and from that, distill it down and explain your personal connections to those givens.'"

After the show was cast, the script was actually put aside. The first round of workshops fell into the traditional category, with the company relying on Meisner-based exercises to explore the relationships and conflicts between characters. At the same time, they began exploring design concepts as related to performance. One of the play's central themes is the idea of legacy, so the company developed another piece as an exercise that they took to a festival at Smoke Farm, in which they explored the idea in a performance for audiences who could only experience the work through sound and feel.

"Another thing was saying, 'This mimics a family, where Minna is like a mother, and Dallas is like a father, Ari's like the daughter and Theo's like the boyfriend who neither of the parents like,'" Lazarow said. "So we went through those scenes and mapped out with movement how the power structures worked within the actual scenes. And three of the actors came up with this incredibly intricate dance, that—dear God!—if it could fit into the piece I'd be excited! Like, chair flips and turns and all of this stuff, that just got to what's underneath the play.

"So essentially with just their bodies, they staged eight scenes in a row in four minutes or less, and I walked away knowing what the power structure is and who's the focus in what scene, from what didn't look anything like a scene from a play, but what was straight from the scenes in the play."

From there the company began doing staged readings with minimal props and design, and receiving feedback from selected audiences that could look at the play through fresh eyes, before turning to a more a traditional rehearsal and development process to stage the play at the Little Theatre, the point at which most companies would start the development process.

The reviews for Artifacts have been almost universally positive. Kaia Chessen in The Stranger wrote that "the delivery is smart (there is not a single weak link in the eight-character cast), and the set, equipped with waterworks, never-ending abysses, and underfoot lighting, convinces us that we have entered the story’s bleak sanctuary." In Seattle Weekly, Kevin Phinney said, "In terms of production, I haven't seen a better, more well-rounded cast this year." All of which should signal that Satori's methods—even if you can't match the devotion of eleven company members with sometimes dramatically different backgrounds—can produce dramatic, powerful results.

"The heart of what Satori offers—or what we try to offer—is a complete experience from the moment you walk in the door," Lazarow told me. "The moment you walk in, even the way the box-office is set up, the way we'll treat you in our lobby, the way you enter the theatre space, all of that is altered to the specifics of the show, and to the specifics of the people coming. So that the moment you walk in, you are a part of this, and we're going to be connecting, introducing you to other audience members, sort of based on, 'Oh! You look interesting! You should meet this person! Come on over here, I'll wait with in line for Fuel just so you can get to know us.' So really what we're about is building that connection by changing what the experience is, and making it a cohesive whole."

"We think that the theatre thing needs a turn," Adam Standley told me over our beers, treading, as most company members do, the fine line between ambition and humility. "Not that we can provide it—we just want to be there when it happens. Because we're ready for that kind of thing. Like, our mentors have said that television killed radio. But it didn't kill it, it made it grow into its essential self. And so film, people have obviously said it killed theatre...well, I'm firmly in the belief that it's still evolving into its essential self."