An Interview With
Rick Burkhardt

Conversation Storm

Conversation Storm is a unique piece. Where did you get the idea for it?

Well unfortunately, reality helped.  In recent years, listening to voices in the U.S. mainstream having a "conversation about torture" felt to me like being trapped in a train car with a bunch of people who are having a "conversation about cannibalism."  Of course, a threat of violence isn't really a conversation, either in reality or in a "hypothetical situation" like the famous ticking time bomb scenario (whose relation to reality is strained and tenuous at best), or for that matter in a play. 

I've thought for a long time it's fascinating that people adopt hypothetical personae in order to have conversations about what they would do in hypothetical situations — then, based on those hypothetical situations (which are really fictional stories), they really adopt the opinions of those non-existent, hypothetical people (who are really fictional characters).  The implications for theatre are particularly interesting, because actors do something very similar — except actors are able (if all goes well) to shed those hypothetical opinions and personae at the end of a play (or at any point in the play, actually), whereas for people who don't know they're acting it's not so easy to shed a persona once it's been adopted.  People are willing to say all sorts of things they don't believe in order to appear consistent with whatever they said before.

Then I read a book called A Question of Torture by Alfred McCoy, which lays out a decades-long history of the torture techniques used by soldiers and private military contractors.  McCoy's descriptions of how a torture victim is forced to lose track of time, to lose track of his/her personality, reminded me of similar temporal and character distortions that take place in theatre — sometimes hidden and sometimes (especially in plays that interest me) explicitly.  It seemed to me that conversation, which we all participate in and which is one of the building blocks of "realistic" theatre, could be shown to function as a kind of military operation, planned and executed according to competing strategies, competing time-distortions, which no participant in the conversation was entirely able to control.  Hence the play's disjunctive structure (and title).

Why did you decide to submit it to the FRIGID Festival? 

The phenomenon of Fringe Festivals springing up all over the U.S. is a really exciting response by theatre artists and theatre communities to the massive de-funding of performance in our country.  We've been able to perform this play in over two dozen cities with minimal financial risk (actually we've made a profit — though that was never guaranteed), due to Fringe Festivals and other arrangements based on the Fringe model.  There's something incredible about the way people in big cities and small towns rally in support of their Fringe Festivals (just recently we performed in the inaugural New Orleans Fringe Festival, which was an amazing and moving opportunity to see — and participate in — that extraordinary city getting its culture back on its feet with no help from you-know-who).  The FRIGID Festival was recommended to us by friends we met at the San Francisco Fringe Festival, and we're glad we followed the recommendation, because it's a wonderful way for theatre companies around the U.S. to be able to afford to perform in New York City.  Also, Erez Ziv, managing director of Horse Trade and the FRIGID Festival, is one of the most wonderful and supportive people we've met in our years of traversing the theatre biz.  So, let me pass on the recommendation to anyone who's considering performing in FRIGID — it's an excellent festival.

I understand you first started writing plays at the instigation of your high school History teacher and former U.S. Secretary of Defense Casper Weinberger. True or false?

As Weinberger himself might have said, "not untrue."  My high school History teacher was a brilliant classroom instructor named Chris Butler, who played the Firesign Theatre in his classes to illustrate various historical points.  He also sponsored the school's yearly variety show — which was more of a sketch comedy show than a variety show — and he inevitably had ideas for sketches, which he asked me to write.  In 1985, for unimaginable reasons, he and I cooked up a scenario wherein a high school History teacher, under pressures of various kinds, is impelled to teach his students "both sides" of current events debates — meaning he has to think of some "positive" things to say to his class about nuclear war.  Caspar Weinberger, Secretary of Defense from 1981-1987, had caught my attention by talking publicly about how "winnable" a "limited" nuclear war might be — not exactly something I was happy to hear a public official say, but ideal as research material for our sketch scenario, which by the time I'd finished writing it had mushroomed (ahem) into a full-length play with songs.  So Caspar was the dark muse of that high school project, haunting my teenage nightmares with all the skills of a professional.  He actually died while Conversation Storm was being written.  Still spooky after all these years.  Conversation Storm begins with a quote from Donald Rumsfeld, so apparently Secretaries of Defense still have the power to awaken the poetic in me.
 
You're quite a renaissance man, so let's talk about that a little bit. First of all, you're a member of The Nonsense Company. What's the company's background and what kind of stuff do you do?

The Nonsense Company is an experimental chamber music/theatre trio — a phrase which probably doesn't evoke much for most people.  I try to explain it by saying that we're like a string quartet who doesn't happen to use violins and cellos (though we do use all sorts of instruments, some of them stringed, like ukuleles, banjos, and autoharps, and other objects which aren't instruments but which can be played and scored like instruments):  we rehearse and perform in small rooms for intimate audiences, and we're interested in works that hinge on sonic logic, counterpoint, and tight rhythmic interconnectivity at least as much as on character and narrative — also we rehearse most of our pieces in small, 5-second chunks, as opposed to working on a few pages of script at a time.  We like to experiment with what can be achieved theatrically using musical techniques and vice versa.  These days we mostly perform our own work, but we've also performed pieces by about a dozen young composers and playwrights, and whenever possible we've played the same pieces in both music and theatre settings, letting the audiences figure out whether it's music or theatre (or whether that question even matters).  Our goal is to be as portable as a string quartet, carrying all our performances around in little cases, and being able to set up and perform in any place where the sound and sightlines are good.  This opens up a lot of possibilities most theatre groups don't consider, but it does mean we can't play in bars, which means we can't exactly call ourselves a "band."
 
You're a member of the musical group The Prince Myshkins, a gig you refer to as your "day job." What kind of music do you all play? And how did you manage to parlay it into your "day job?"

The Prince Myshkins are a guitar-accordion duo who play cabaret-folk-pop political satire songs, which I write.  Caspar Weinberger probably had something to do with the formation of that part of my brain too.  I started writing the songs as a teenager, just as a hobby, to make some logical sense of the world as best I could under the increasingly absurd, damning, and often terrifying circumstances which daily events offered up (the theory being that humor is an antibody to fear — the Emperor may ultimately be no less scary for having no clothes, but at least, you know, it helps people get over their fear of nudity).  To my surprise, the political and economic climate of the late 90s (Clintonomics being not quite as rosy at the time as they now seem in blurred and smoggy retrospect) brought bigger and bigger audiences to our shows, interest from local and national radio, etc.  When the "election" of 2000 occurred, followed by the events of 2001, it became clear that audiences were turning to us in actual desperation — these jokes we were making were apparently filling a serious need in people, not just to laugh, but to hear a recasting of current events which, unlike the version of events people were hearing on the news, wasn't fundamentally insane.  We made some CDs and went on the road, and to our surprise (actually by accident) we found we could pay the rent that way, while meeting, being inspired by, and hopefully giving some inspiration back to some of the coolest people I've ever met, often in parts of the country where political activism is supposed to have been dead for decades. 

You're also a trained classical composer whose works have been performed all over the world. How did you first become interested in music? And what made you decide to mash it together with your interests in plays and the theatre?

I grew up listening to the Beatles (in the first extant recording of me I'm two years old, singing along exuberantly with "The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill"), thinking, mistakenly, that the Beatles made normal music.  I've been looking for music that weird, or weirder, ever since.  A question that I never get tired of is:  what is this incredible thing, be it subtle or garish, sublime or idiotic, that happens to words when you sing them — why don't they mean the same thing as when you speak them?  How many ways can that change in meaning be sculpted?  This isn't a brand new question in theatre, but it too often gets forgotten or taken for granted:  King Lear's Fool is constantly breaking into song — but almost every Lear production I've seen basically blows the songs off.  Music is like a light that you can shine on words, to see the shadows of the words that you wouldn't see otherwise — and the more you can modulate the colors and focus of the beams of light, the more you can see in the shadows.  So re-investigating what the word "song" might mean is really my main interest, and anybody who's done that is one of my heroes.  Schubert is a hero of mine.  So is Robert Ashley.  (The play Conversation Storm doesn't have any songs in it per se, but it does have repetitions which impose a kind of counter-form, which I think is basically a sonic form, on the dramatic raw material.)

I hear The Nonsense Company is coming back to New York. What are the details?

We got a wonderful invitation, as a result of our performance at FRIGID 2008, to do an extended run (two weeks, eleven performances) of Conversation Storm and its companion piece, Great Hymn of Thanksgiving, at Interborough Repertory Theatre from February 3-15 (details about performance times and ticket purchases can be found at http://nonsensecompany.com).  During the day we'll be in residence at IRT, developing a new piece to be performed in the Fall (possibly at P.S. 122). By an odd coincidence, that piece is going to be an extended sonic exhumation of the third act of King Lear, filtered through layers of Foucault's Madness and Civilization and the history of political show trials.  I know, it sounds like we're selling out.

Interview with Rick Burkhardt was conducted by Michael Criscuolo January 2009.

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