David Mamet’s “Edmond” at the Balagan Theatre, directed by Paul Budraitis. Photo by Andrea Huysing.
“I wound up in Seattle because I was going to Indiana University, and I was about to graduate so I was looking into my options,” Paul Budraitis said. “I was pretty much set on going to Chicago, and then a few things happened that kind of made me reconsider. And I wound up talking to somebody that was heading to Seattle, a grad student, and she sort of sold me on the place, saying at least it was worth checking out.”
About a week before the opening of David Mamet’s Edmond at the Balagan (through Feb. 6, tickets $12-$15), which Budraitis directed, he and I met up at Caffe Vita to chat about his history and work. Tall and solidly built, Budraitis has a calm voice but gives off a vibe of quiet intensity that was only heightened by his deferral to wait in line to get a coffee for himself, mysteriously offering only that it did “something” to him and it was probably better that he didn’t have any before heading to rehearsal. This all left me imagining him a pent-up ball of over-caffeinated aggression, à la Henry Rollins, though that owes as much to a video I once saw of his solo performance as anything to do with the man himself.
Budraitis, whose family emigrated from Lithuania, moved to Seattle in 1995 and spent the next five years working in fringe theatre. His time at Annex Theatre was particularly formative, because it was where he first learned Vsevolod Meyehold’s biomechanics method, which continues to inform his theatrical approach. But in 2000, he left to go to grad school in Lithuania, where he trained under the legendary director Jonas Vaitkus, who, along with Oskaras Koršunovas and Eimuntas Nekrošius, helped put Lithuania on the global theatrical map with a radical aesthetic approach developed in the crucible of Cold War repression.
The Lithuanian directors left their mark on Budraitis early in life, after seeing Nekrošius’s production of Macbeth on tour while he was in high school.
“My parents had a couple friends who heard that I like theatre and stuff, so they sent me some videotapes of Nekrošius plays,” he told me. “So when I was in college, I had these videotapes, and they were, you know, like, underground. It felt amazing, sort of smuggled out of the Soviet Union. I used to watch those the same way some people listen to bootleg tapes.”
During the Cold War, Lithuania—then part of the Soviet Union—had just the right combination of social and political tensions to produce directors like Vaitkus or Nekrošius. The combination of suppressed nationalist ambitions and a lack of native theatre literature led directors to approach European classics from Shakespeare to Molière with a radical vision. In their hands, these plays were transformed into visually and thematically complex statements of cultural independence and political criticism of the totalitarian state, under the guise of being no more dangerous than a production of a recognized classic.
“Before every premiere, a committee would shuffle in to one of the final dresses, and give notes on what needed to change,” Budraitis explained of how theatre was made under the Soviets. “And in a lot of ways, that’s really good for art, because if you’ve got intelligent artists working, an obstacle is a great thing, a foil. And Vaitkus became known for that, as someone who could slip things past these people, these fools. And the audience knew exactly what he was saying.”
“Because nationalism was not allowed during the Soviet Union, it’s said that the two places where people could feel like Lithuanians and it was all right were at the basketball stadium, when the basketball team was playing the Russians, it was all right to cheer for the home team, or at the theatre.”
From 2001 to 2003, Budraitis studied under Vaitkus at the state academy in Vilnius, who afterward helped him find work. Budraitis’s first job, in fact, was as a sort of assistant director for Vaitkus. In-demand directors like that rely on assistant directors to lead the first several weeks of rehearsals and development in accordance with the director’s artistic vision, before they step in towards the end to shape the final product. He visited the U.S. frequently, but only relocated to Seattle permanently in 2008, when he directed an experimental production of King Lear that was staged in TPS’s fourth floor studio space at the Center House.
Today, Budraitis acknowledges that his version of Lear was very “Lithuanian,” highly visual and not a particularly generative process with the actors (in Lithuania, as he explained, actors simply expect to be told what to do; asking them to contribute to the process is akin to acknowledging that the director doesn’t know what he’s doing), something he needed to get out of his system. Since then, he’s been moving in two new artistic directions. First, his first solo performance piece, Not. Stable. At All., will be presented in March as part of Solo Performance Festival 4 at Theatre Off Jackson, and in June as part of Northwest New Works at On the Boards.
And second, there’s Mamet’s Edmond, in which Budraitis has done what, in my opinion, is almost unthinkable: he’s re-imagined Mamet in such a way as to make his work relevant. As Michael van Baker pointed out in his review over the weekend, Edmond was the product of Mamet’s move to New York from Chicago in the mid-Eighties, and it bears all his hardboiled hallmarks: anger, racial tension, emasculation, and sexual violence. In all truth, Mamet hasn’t aged well (and to judge by the lukewarm reviews of his new play Race, he hasn’t grown much as an artist, either).
Edmond is a sort of embittered Pilgrim’s Progress set in the urban decay of New York. The titular character, a bland everyman with a good job, turns his back on his safe, secure life to engage the brutal underworld. After being victimized by black men, he turns to violence, eventually murdering an aspiring actress, and winds up in prison for life, where he’s raped by his cell mate. In an odd twist, the final scene of the play flashes forward years into the future, where the two have achieved a sort of homoerotic domesticity in captivity.
“I honestly don’t even think of it as gay,” Budraitis said after I dropped that word to describe the nature of the ending. “It’s beyond that at that point, and to label it that way is simplifying it a little much. It’s so much more than that. It’s two guys in a jail cell for the rest of their lives together, and they find communion. It’s so much more about them spending their existence together than it is gay.”
For Budraitis, the relevance of the play today—aside from its quintessentially existential story—lies in how it explores the rage and hate roiling beneath the veneer of calm American normalcy, which has been on display over the last year in the increasingly hysterical response by Birthers, Tea Partiers, and their ilk to the policies of the Obama administration.
“I’m not saying that all the people at all those tea parties are racist or anything like that,” Budraitis said, somewhat doubtfully. “Maybe some of them genuinely are there about taxes and spending. But it’s really difficult for me to accept that there isn’t a racist element to it. The last president was spending quite a bit of money, too, and there didn’t seem to be a problem with it.”
“I see that movement as an outgrowth of the ugly side of the McCain campaign, with all that mudslinging and the false accusations, the terrorism, the Muslim charges, all this nonsense. And all the hate that came out. Because I feel that all that stuff is just under the surface, and the fact that this guy got elected sort of pulled the scab off.”
Many people see Mamet’s plays as inherently naturalistic, particularly owing to their rapid-fire dialogue and rich language. But in order to make a play that was contemporary more than twenty years ago read to current audiences, Budraitis rejected naturalism for a more presentational style.
“I hate to use this term because it might scare some people away, but it has a kind of Brechtian style to how we’re doing it,” he said almost apologetically. “Introducing every scene, the actors being onstage the whole time. We’re not trying to create this suspension of disbelief.”
“Our goal in that is to try to move away from some of the sort of Stanislavskian ideas, and kind of speak more from ourselves, and not worry about creating some character outside of you, and more bring the text here”—he gestured to his chest—”and speak it from yourself.”
When I met with Budraitis, he gushed over his cast (the word “fuck” came up a lot, as in “fucking awesome” or variations thereof), noting in particular Sam Hagen, who plays Edmond. Budraitis had seen Hagen in supporting roles in other productions and wanted to work with him, but overall he seemed genuinely wowed by his entire cast and their enthusiasm and professionalism.
Asked how his approach differed from the standard rehearsal process, Budraitis said: “I’ll tell you one thing, we didn’t get on our feet until people were off-book. We kept sitting at the table, we kept reading and reading and reading. It’s normally something I don’t like to do. I like to get up on my feet as much as possible. But what we did was for most—all—of December, we did biomechanics training, an hour and a half, two hours every night, and then we would read scenes.”
That process left the actors both physically and mentally prepared to workshop out a performance. “I’ve been much more about trying to develop the partnerships between these actors, and grounding their understanding of the situations so that it can be jazz every night,” Budraitis explained. “So that it can be, ‘Okay, we know this thing, now let’s go at each other. Let me surprise you.’ You know, this stuff that people talk about theoretically, we’re actually doing it.”
The result is remarkable; Michael van Baker called out both Hagen (“one hell of a performance”) and Ali El-Gasseir (“a terrific first impression”), apologized for not being able to detail all the rest of the performances, and described the overall production as “a beautifully formal achievement, an intricate villanelle on bigotry, lust, and madness.”
What will be most interesting is to see how Edmond compares to Seattle Rep’s upcoming production of Mamet’s classic, Glengarry Glen Ross, which features a who’s-who cast of Seattle’s top actors, and is directed by Wilson Milam, the London-based but locally-born director whose production of Conor MacPherson’s The Seafarer at the Rep was one of the best shows of ’09. I interviewed Milam last week (article to come), and whatever else you can say, his approach is decidedly different from Budraitis’s.
Nothing encapsulates that more than this anecdote from Budraitis about his directing style: “Yesterday, we’re doing the scene where Edmond is in jail, and he’s about to get raped. And Sam had been playing it very well, but I was like, ‘I think we’re taking the role too much for granted, and I think he’s literally shaking. He’s so terrified he’s having a hard time trying to speak.’ And this is what I mean when I say that we’re not trying to get too much into this Stansilavski thing. I mean, I say to him, ‘I think you’re shaking here.'”
Budraitis paused for a moment. “Because that’s the thing that I sometimes think is lacking in American theatre, which is the external physicality can inform emotion just as much as the other way around. And I think in American theatre, it tends to be more of a one-way street.” In other words, actors want their motivation for shaking, I suggested, rather than figuring out how they should feel because their character is shaking. He nodded.
“So I told him, ‘Try it.’ And he did, and it wound up changing what’s going on emotionally. And making it even more potent and alive.”