Lawrence Kornfeld: Theatre Director
In 1975 Lawrence Kornfeld was asked to write about his experiences directing the plays of Gertrude Stein. It is written in the style of the times, experimental and non-linear. The essay is a retrospective of the directors' experience working with Stein text, directing technique and the relationships between collaborators of Stein at Judson Poets Theater, one of the first Off-Off Broadway houses in New York. The essay is presented in segments here, not in it's entirety.
Larry Kornfeld was the Managing Director of the Living Theater before he left to found the Judson Poets Theater (most known for Stein Productions created by Mr. Kornfeld and Al Carmines, as well as the Judson Dance Theater which was in residency at Judson at the same time ). Later Mr. Kornfeld founded the Theater for the New City. He was also the Head of the State Council on the Arts (NY), was a professor at Yale School of Drama, and now acts as Dean ex Meritus at Purchase College (State University of New York,) Theater Arts and Film Division. Mr. Kornfeld is one of a group directors who helped define the "avant garde" style of the modern theater, and has set presidents in style and content for the current "post modern" theater. Gertrude Stein has played a critical part in the identity of contemporary theater. Directors of Mr. Kornfelds' generation created productions with the belief that Stein was and is the revolutionary mother of new form in modern art.
Judson Poets Theater approached Steins' work with muscialilty, movement, visual surprises and deep emotional and dramatic subtext. The work of Kornfeld and Carmines was not deeply analytical in style or presentation, it was ment to be a complete experience, emotionally and physically for the audience. Paul Goodman played a large part in the theoretical background for the Judson poets theater, with his statement that "the theater is a tabernacle." Stein at Judson was ment to be accessible by all viewers, tactile, deep in feeling and provocative of conflict and questions in those who viewed the play. In this way, the idea of the tabernacle; a meeting place, a community, a place of change and transformation, was often the moving force behind the productions. Judson Poets Theater was housed at Judson Church, and over the years the church used, and uses today, songs of the steins productions in its liturgy. Stein, her words and deep insight into the human condition, affect that community today.
Mr. Kornfeld has directed IN A GARDEN, WHAT HAPPENED, PLAY I PLAY 11 PLAY 111, IN CIRCLES, THE MAKING OF AMERICANS, A MANOIR, DR. FAUSTUS LIGHTS THE LIGHTS, PROMANADE. He is the recipient of five OBIE awards, many for the Stein productions. He has directed Stein Off Broadway, in Regional Theaters, and uses her work to teach directing and acting, nationally.
When asked how he works with Stein today, and the "fighting" he experienced with Stein work in '75, he states:
"In 1975 the theater was fighting to find a place for itself, as well as question plot and narrative. Today, as a director who has matured and become more confident, I don't feel a need to create situations where people must "battle" for a character or scene - I have come to believe in the actor, their technique and ability to create and move with the music of Steins' language. The article I wrote in 1975 must be looked at in context of that time; very self reflective and combustive. Today, after thirty years in the theater, I see Stein as one of the most overlooked playwrights we have, as well as one of the most brilliant social/psychological commentators of our time. In 1995 I don't see Stein as a way to fight with a play, but an opportunity to tell a story, make something beautiful and exciting for all involved."
We urge any directors who have directed Stein to submit their writings on their approaches, experiences and thoughts on Stein and the Theater.
HOW THE CURTAIN DID COME-1975
Very fine is my Valentine
very fine and very mine
very mine is my valentine
very mine and very fine
very fine is my valentine
and mine very fine very mine
and mine is my valentine
Gertrude Stein
Since 1957 I have been the director of at least sixty plays. Six of these are by Gertrude Stein: IN A GARDEN (1957), WHAT HAPPENED (1963), PLAY I PLAY II PLAY III (1965), A CIRCULAR PLAY A PLAY "IN CIRCLES" (1968), THE MAKING OF AMERICANS (1972) and LISTEN TO ME (1974). These six production are "very mine" even though they are by Gertrude Stein and Al Carmines and Leon Katz and Meyer Kupferman and especially the people who acted and sang and danced them. But they were all very mine even though they were by the people who wrote them and played them. What happened in these productions was what happened to the people who did them; the words and music were not what happened: what happened was that the people who acted and sang and danced were the action the music and the dancing. Only THE MAKING OF AMERICANS was a little different: it was a story about something remembered and continuous most of the time: a story that was about what it was actually saying (most of the time) so the actors were sometimes pretending. They were pretending most of the time that they were other people being remembered and living in this time but not themselves. I mean not themselves, the real actors on the stage, but people from another place. The other five productions are about what the actors, singers and dancers did on the stage, when they were on that stage at that time they were doing it. Many of them don't know this or don't believe this, but it is true and they are mistaken: they were only doing what they were doing at that moment on that stage, and even though the repeated the same thing night after night and were not improvising, they were doing what they were doing, not remembering something from somewhere else.
Even though sometimes the actors thought they were pretending, except sometimes in THE MAKING OF AMERICANS, they were not pretending. They were saying the words and singing and feeling many deep and beautiful things, and also fighting a lot, mostly with me, and sometimes with each other. Also they moved around beautifully and were sometimes happy too. Most of the time they were fighting with each other and with me; but they were always mine. When they spoke what they felt, and sang what they felt, even if I didn't know what they actually meant of felt, it was still all very mine, and the more they fought the better it all was; and all this time I moved them around into pictures and pushed them into fights: fights on the stage, not fights with each other, although that happened too, but not on purpose, only because we were always very volatile. The pictures I made on the stage are always about about fighting or not fighting. That is why I have the belief that if Gertrude Stein saw them she would find these plays mostly exciting and not boring, even though she said she said she didn't like plots, but I know she liked fighting because I know that her life was a fight and her Susan B. Anthony in THE MOTHER OF US ALL says "Life is strife, I was a martyr all my life not to what I won but to what was done". What we did with our fighting was always joyous and tragic, that is, we felt many things around us, and our times were tragic and joyous. I am happy about the fighting, the strife, in the plays, but of course I am very saddened by the fighting that was not on the stage, but, that's what we were doing and it seems that what was happy and loving in these plays was when our fighting stopped for a while.
When I say fighting, I mean strife; not just being angry, but also wanting something for yourself that belongs to someone else, or wanting to toward a certain place and it's hard to get there. Fighting and strife are not only wars and painful affliction on the innocent (boxing and wrestling and the history of settlers and Indians, and all those aggressions that the body feels as pain and the mind feels as grief); fighting and strife as artists and other people who do creative things feel it, is about finding a way to that very special certain place that feels right. That's what I did in these plays about fighting, and that's what the writers and performers did too. All of us wanted it "very fine and very mine".
I could weep, if I weren't so angry, about all the fighting being mixed up with all the beauty. I cannot reconcile fighting and beauty, although I know that everyone all the time talks, quite correctly too, about creation and strife being one out of the other. I cannot reconcile it, so I fight for beauty and am not happy until the beauty is out on the surface, and then my happiness doesn't last long because the memory of the fighting is so strong that it overpowers the beauty most of the time. I could weep then I feel the memory of the fighting swallowing the beauty right there in front of me. And then what do I have to do? I have to fight the memory of the fighting in order to recover the actuality of the beauty. This makes me realize that I am so mortal, and that the world is just as I feel it, and that my tears could be the tears of most people. But I have never wept because I was too busy fighting. I weep at home when I'm unhappy or sick, but with these plays, I never weep: I rage and people think that my temper is toward them. It isn't: it's at the plays and the fighting, and especially, the beauty which is so hard to find and to keep. I have to dig this beauty out of the words and the songs and the people, and of course it belongs to them, but I have to fight them and make it mine. This process of striving for possession of beauty is the action of each of these plays. The audience barely knows this; they are aware of it but they don't know it. They think and feels, each one of them separately, many things, but only about the fighting that they see on the stage. For me, the real play is the process.
Gertrude Stein's plays can be very boring if the director tries to make them all about the words and ideas, or the words of love, or the words of painting, or the words about words. This is wrong. The director must fight the plays and then he or she will find out what the words mean, not what the words are about. Only Gertrude Stein knew what the words were about; we can manage to hear what they mean if we put up a good fight. Only Gertrude Stein cared what the words were about and maybe some of her friends for gossip cared, but I only care about what they will mean after we all fight over them. Sometimes the fighting is vigorous and fun, and sometimes it is dreary and terrible, and always there is my problem of feeling the fighting more than the presence of the beauty, and not being happy with that situation, as so many people who enjoy fighting are in fighting situations; but always it was "very fine". The fighting meant wounds and scars and some people not liking each other anymore, and that is very sad, but it has to be so, and then when I look back, it is very fine that the plays are so beautiful.
Other questions arise.
What is it that happens when it seems to the actors that I am doing nothing and won't even tell them what to do, except move someplace or stand in a certain particular place JUST SO!? This is one of my ways of fighting with a play: I know something and I won't tell it, but they, the actors, know I know something, so they fight and then the strife begins to fill up the space on the stage. Now, a director has to be very very careful with this technique because it could very easily look like, and in fact very easily BE, just plain stupidity. So much directing, even when the director says many words and seems to be explaining much, is really just stupidity disguised as style. So, if the director is using lots of words and instructions, he or she must be sure that the simple facts he plants on the stage are fertile and can make a place for the actors to ripen with time and strife. The director does not actually make performances come from actors. Actors give their own performances inside a "landscape" that the director has helped actualize from the words and music and settings. To "get" a performance from an actor means really to place him where he can do it. So I'm always very busy making a place and putting actors into it; along the way I try to help them find out who they are there, and why they are there.
This technique is best for plays by Gertrude Stein and must be used much less with playwrights who have stories to tell. It can and must be used in all plays, but, in plays that are about something that is being told from another place and time, and the actors are pretending to be people who they are not really exactly like, then, the director must use words and instructions about how he understands the people in the play to behave. However she should only do this if the actor either asks for advice or is doing something that the director believes is all wrong, or will lead to being all wrong. What is best in all kinds of plays is to let the written plays and the actors and the place find each other and fight out a truce and then repeat their existence every night to the audience. The director's part is not well defined in this process, and mostly he should mind his own business and make the place for everything to happen.
What is PLACE? Place is anywhere that anything can happen! For me place and the things in it have to have a certain "look" that makes me happy. It is the manipulation of things so they appear to me as if they are extensions of my perception of myself in relation to the world of the play and the world of my existence. I am told by people that this place that I make can be very pleasing and moving for them also. That is why the funniest thing that ever happened to me was when a Broadway producer was scolding me and demanded that I "do my own thing" and that I do it his way. I should explain also what I mean by a "look": I don't mean decor necessarily. I have made things look right for me with elaborate sets and environments, and also with practically nothing more than lighting. Sometimes I am very happy even without lighting: just people in the perfect place for them and an audience looking at it. Of course I know also that the audience is part of this "landscape"; in my work they are the unknown factor every night: they re-interpret the play and change it every night; their synthesis is different every night; the play is different every night because the energy of their perceptions changes every moment of the actual place and action that they are perceiving. Nothing changes on the stage but everything changes in the theatre. I believe that it actually changes every night and is a different thing, but that I put on the stage remains the same (except of course for the wonderful and necessary growth that every play and performance undergoes with running.), remains the same although every eye renews it every night. I have noticed that most of the time when my play opens I do not really want to see it every night, because I don't enjoy being a mere technician watching the errors; nor do I enjoy being an audience every night to the same play. So mostly I stay home and feel that I should be there. What I miss when I'm home is not the play (I've fought through that) but I miss the audience fighting, so of course I often come to the play if it makes me happy to watch the audience. I did a play recently that I did not enjoy the audience watching and fighting. It was because the play meant very little to me, and the only fight and strife I had with it was to help the audience understand it. I felt, when it opened, that there had been nothing in it for me except that some people thought it looked beautiful. JUST looking beautiful is not enough. A play in rehearsal is a tabernacle and the god must be evoked; if this does not happen, no matter how nice the look is, it is all an empty ritual for me.
What is an audience? The audience is everybody, and Gertrude Stein's Susan B. Anthony says, "a crowd is never allowed but each one of you can come in".
IN A GARDEN was my first Stein play. and that was what it was about: my first fight. That the words the characters are saying are fighting words, and that the characters fight, is coincidental with my first fighting. IN A GARDEN was about discovering fighting and trying to make it interesting. It was interesting and the fighting was strong on the stage and in me. There wasn't much fighting with the singers because I was too young (and I thought at that time that I was only directing) but the music helped because I had to fight with it because I didn't, at first, like it. After the fight I did.
This is the hardest thing about plays: pretending and reality. We pretend what is real and we really pretend, but what we pretend is not real and what is real is only a pretence. What happens on the stage is not an illusion, it is real, but it is pretending to be another kind of real thing. What I always try to do is find a way for everyone to pretend doing whatever they are doing, and that pretence is actually the same thing they are pretending to be doing. It is like Judith Malina in jail pretending to be frightened when she was frightened. She didn't know it, Dorothy Day who was watching her, did. People on stage don't have to know it either. Actors don't like this. They want to pretend that they know the fine differences between real and pretend. I spend a lot of time fighting with them about this, but usually I'm the only one who knows there's a fight on: they usually think I'm directing.
My fight is no longer for mastery or beauty, my fight seems to be for meaning, and what there is left to be done as actions, so that meaning can be left over. Discovering is dormant. Action is a simple demand. Doing is necessary, like the first animals in history looking for water who, accidentally discovered travel en route. So now maybe we should do theater pieces that take skill and not much fighting: Operas, Checkov and the Greeks and whoever speaks to one at the moment. I try to remember her words,"I leave you there do not do not dispair, remain in a circle and do not dispair." Today, we fight with the theater to be the theater. What will it become if we stop fighting? Will we remember what was won or what was done?
Copyright Lawrence Kornfeld 1975
A few cuttings from the Press over the years about Stein/Carmines/Kornfeld:
"The Judson Poets Theater performs Gertrude Stein the way the Moscow Art Theater does Checkhov...all perfectly choreographed by director Lawrence Kornfeld who turns Stein into behavior as beautifully as Carmines turns her into music."
Jack Kroll, Newsweek
"...'Listen To Me', the Gertrude Stein play which Al Carmines and Lawrence Kornfeld have realized at the Judson Poets Theater...I do think is the best thing I have ever seen anywhere. What sort of comment can you make about a play which you suspect of having changed your life? You don't get many of those...it is a good theatrical trick, and all the best living directors can do it - Andrzej Wajda did it last week, and Andrej Serban will probably do it next week. ...Kornfeld's production, a painstaking lesson in weaving complexities out of simple statements, is so attuned to the text that at times he appears to be breathing with [Stein]. Absolutely nothing is fussed over or muddled, and the big risks - like playing against Stein's words to bring out her feelings - are all successful: the use of space and groupings, which sometimes harks back to Graham, and sometimes forward into some nameless sci-if future...so is the very daring and sensitive use of divided focus and repetition....the cast, like Kornfeld (and presumably because of him) is remarkably attuned to this demanding production."
Michael Feingold, Village Voice
.The meaning of 'Doctor Faustus Lights The Lights' is in the seeing. And seeing Gertrude Stein set to music by Al Carmines and Directed by Lawrence Kornfeld has always been special. But this, their 6th collaboration, is my favorite. Here are Stein's words at their sparkling wittiest and most poignant, Carmines' music at it's most refined and melodic, and Kornfeld's staging at its surest and most imaginative. In short, here is delight itself. ...the generosity and affirmation that warm all her [Stein's] work are surely the qualities that make her such an essential part of The Judson Poets Theater and the work of Carmines and Kornfeld. Their theater says Yes to the human spirit, even at its darkest and most complex, and they insist on its human integrity."
James Leverett, Soho News
"...'What Happened'...without any question, a minor masterpiece, more inventive, more high-spirited and more animated than anything I have seen recently...A triumph of total theater...the most hopeful event this increasingly desperate pilgrim of the theatrical apocalypse has witnessed in many a week, month, and even year."
Richard Gillman, Commonweal