Photo by Drew Foster courtesy of the Risk/Reward Festival

One of the cool things about covering the arts—and I mean covering, as in, it’s a beat you follow for a while and engage with on a meaningful level—is that over time, you watch things come to fruition. Case in point: local theatre artist Paul Budraitis, whose first evening-length solo work (IN)STABILITY opens at On the Boards’ studio theatre this Thurs., Feb. 3, and runs through Mon., Feb. 8 (tickets $20/$12; they’re already waiting list only, so check here to find out more).

I didn’t actually see the very first iteration of the piece, which took place sometime before the fall of 2009 at OtB’s 12 Minutes Max. But I did see a video of it sitting on the Northwest New Works Festival panel at On the Boards that fall, when the as-yet untitled solo performance was selected for the festival in June 2010. A couple months later, I finally caught up with Budraitis for a long interview during rehearsals for David Mamet’s Edmond, which he was directing at the Balagan, and proceeded to see the WIP versions of what was first titled Not. Stable. At all., and has since become (IN)STABILITY, at Solo Performance Festival at Theatre off Jackson in March 2010, and later at NW New Works when it was presented there.

So I suppose in the end, it was with Budraitis that I most fully followed through on the logic Sean Ryan (OtB’s Regional Programs Director, in charge of NW New Works, and who also is directing Budraitis in (IN)STABILITY) used when he decided to put me on the New Works panel in the first place: It’ll be interesting, he told me in so many words, because you can see how a work develops from end-to-end.

All of which is to say I’m fascinated—and disappointed not to be able to see in person—how the show finally turns out. Budraitis has impressed me both as a performer and a director, which suggests that he’s more than capable of both inhabiting the roles he’s creating as well as self-editing his performance, which is a skill—despite even the most competent sort of help provided by the likes of Ryan—every artist requires.

Budraitis really got his start here in Seattle, and particularly at Annex Theatre, where he first studied Meyerhold’s Biomechanics in the 1990s (though his work with Degenerate Art Ensemble was no doubt also good training), before heading to Lithuanian to study and work with some of the world’s top directors (read the interview for more background). But even after returning, Edmond was a change of pace for Budraitis, an experiment in a different way of working.

His first directing gig in Seattle after Lithuania was a production of King Lear that, by his own admission and in the opinion of others I’ve spoken to (I didn’t see it), was too Eastern European-style. Although it didn’t make it into the interview we did as such, one of the things Budraitis has made clear to me in subsequent conversations is that part of the reason Lithuanian directors like Jonas Vaitkus (who he’s worked with extensively) developed their highly visual style was that often, their actors just weren’t that good. It was a legacy of the Soviet funding system, in which past-their-prime actors got tenure at theatres and then refused to retire for fear of low pensions. As such, the directors could usually expect little more than competent performances from indifferent actors (and, given the rates of alcoholism Budraitis made clear existed, sometimes not even that), so they had to shift the focus to the mise-en-scene and just tell the actors what to do, posing them like set pieces.

Budraitis’s Lear was too much inspired in that mold, so with Edmond, he resorted to an intense workshop process that prepared the actors to navigate shifting possibilities onstage—a process based in trusting his actors deeply, the opposite of treating them like poseable mannequins. He likened it to a jazz performance, improvisation based on a solid underlying melodic component (in this case, the script).

While Edmond is, unfortunately, unsalvageable taken as a whole (it’s Mamet at his most ridiculously sophomoric), Budraitis worked wonders with it as a series of vignettes, each one painstakingly realized in the most subtle and effective way possible. (See Michael van Baker’s review for a fuller description.) What should have been unbearably awful turned out to be one of the best shows of the year; I nominated it both for best production and Budraitis for best director for the last Gregory Awards (neither made the short-list, unfortunately).

One scene stands out in my mind. The story follows a sort of middle-class Everyman named Edmond (played in an understated tour-de-force by Sam Hagen). He’s fed up with his emasculating suburban home-life, so he abandons his wife and comfortable home to take an adventure to the heart of darkness: in this case, the New York City of the 1980s. In search of real fulfillment, he chases fruitlessly after prostitutes, gets robbed, and then gets angry, racist, and violent, which allows him inexplicably to pick up a waitress-slash-struggling-actress played by Carolyn Marie Monroe (Mamet at his misogynistic best), who takes him home.

The play script is really that bad, the sort of thing a college freshman who thinks he understands Sartre might write, while really he’s just channeling his Catcher in the Rye fantasies of idealized adolescence. Edmond, like Holden Caulfield, is disgusted by the “phonies” he finds himself surrounded by. The difference is that when Edmond discovers his lover is an “actress” who’s never acted in a play, he kills her in cold blood. The scene as scripted is tedious, but Budraitis’s direction is shockingly compelling. Monroe’s character is completely carried away in the moment–she’s in love with being liberated to express what she really thinks (which mostly takes the form of being racist and expressing her deep-rooted fears of others), and Edmond likewise is finally able to put into words the way he’s feeling.

The actors both achieve a sort of exposure you rarely see onstage: it’s more revealing than if they were actually naked. And in spite of yourself and the weakness of the script, you squirm uncomfortably as you realize how much she’s disappointing Edmond, how angry he’s becoming, and ultimately, how terrified she is of who she’s actually let into her life. Instead of her character existing as just a plot point for Edmond’s journey, Budraitis leaves you uncomfortably shaken with her final realization: the world is a very scary place, she was right to be afraid, and she never should have trusted anyone.

Interestingly, both concepts at play in that scene—the risk that heightens the theatrical experience of a not entirely scripted scene, as well as the danger posed by the outside world—course through (IN)STABILITY. While I can’t speak to what the final product will be (it’s no doubt changed a lot), the two WIP showings I saw both worked as a series of thematically-related, monologue-driven scenes. The work is structured around a set of ideas or concepts rather than a set narrative that takes you from points A to B. Instead, Budraitis explores the ideas through a set of characterizations.

At SPF, one scene in which he played a cunningly matter-of-fact agent of an unnamed police state gave way to a moment of seeming release. Having channeled so much creepiness in villain mode, he took a microphone and started wandering around the stage, letting off steam and chatting up the audience, almost apologizing for having been so weird. Comments about this and that from the news, the general financial mess and the economy and so on led to a series of inquiries of the audience until he zeroed in on one man who he got to mention he owned a house rather than rented. Budraitis, seemingly not in character, inquired further: What neighborhood do you live in? What street? What color’s the house?

The night I saw it, the man picked up on how creepy it was to reveal something about his financial situation (employed homeowner, money plus not home during the day), as well as the details on how to find where he lived. Instead, the guy resisted about halfway through; according to Budraitis, usually he got much further. Not that it mattered—whether you realize it up front and resist, or only after you’ve already revealed too much, the creepiness, the threat of revealing too much, and the fact that perfectly charming Paul Budraitis, not even seemingly playing a character, is not someone to be trusted (he may not be out to rob your house, but how does he know who else is in the audience listening?) is discomfiting to say the least.

In the end, I have no idea how (IN)STABILITY will turn out. There were certainly other moments that I cared for less, but with over a year invested in developing the show, to say nothing of Sean Ryan’s collaborative help (if I’m not mistaken, the last artist Ryan worked with in this fashion was Allen Johnson), Budraitis’s show has the potential to be one of the big moments of Seattle theatre in 2011. He is, in the end, one of the city’s most fascinating performers and competent theatre directors. We’ll all be watching to see how he brings together those gifts in one of his first big generative pieces.