{"id":48,"date":"2016-04-05T17:14:34","date_gmt":"2016-04-05T17:14:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/10\/?p=48"},"modified":"2023-03-01T16:58:54","modified_gmt":"2023-03-01T16:58:54","slug":"contributing-to-the-culture-%e2%94%81-interview-with-tony-taccone-artistic-director-berkeley-repertory-theatre-playwright","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/10\/contributing-to-the-culture-%e2%94%81-interview-with-tony-taccone-artistic-director-berkeley-repertory-theatre-playwright\/","title":{"rendered":"Contributing to the Culture \u2501 Interview with Tony Taccone, Artistic Director, Berkeley Repertory Theatre; playwright"},"content":{"rendered":"

by Lissa Tyler Renaud<\/strong>[1]<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

\"Director.Playwright.TonyTaccone-copy-8x6\"<\/p>\n

The success of Tony Taccone\u2019s career might offer hope and inspiration to directors in \u201ctributary\u201d arts communities everywhere. Taccone spent the years 1981-88 as head of San Francisco\u2019s small, experimental Eureka Theatre, a theatre quite the antithesis of Broadway\u2019s mainstream, commercial venues. There, he and his cohorts developed, among others, Tony Kushner\u2019s Angels in America<\/i>, a play that won both a Tony Award for Best Play on Broadway and the Pulitzer Prize, and generally captured more than the usual level of the U.S. public\u2019s interest.<\/p>\n

Taccone moved to the Berkeley Repertory Theatre (BRT), where he has now been full Artistic Director since 1997. Berkeley is not only not in New York, it\u2019s not even in the larger West Coast city of San Francisco: it is a university town across from it, in the \u201cEast Bay.\u201d Taccone has turned it to artistic advantage that he works away from the \u201cadrenalin\u201d of the U.S.\u2019s better known theatre cities on the East Coast: in Berkeley, he has a devoted audience, committed to intellectual and social engagement\u2014eclectic, adventurous, witty. Rather than satisfy these audiences with conventional seasons consisting of a range of older and newer dramatic classics, Taccone has instead formulated the goal of keeping his local audiences \u201csurprised,\u201d always developing new works along constantly moving aesthetic lines. Then, through a network of professional friendships and partnerships\u2014relationships that have grown organically over Taccone\u2019s decades in the field\u2014shows that were developed at his East Bay theatre can move to larger theatres across the country. With this strategy, he has been able to stage over thirty productions in Berkeley, send nearly two dozen shows to New York (the BRT\u2019s tally on the website includes two shows that moved to London and another on its way to Hong Kong), and move even more to major regional theatres nationally, all the while winning a veritable avalanche of the theatre\u2019s most coveted awards and recognitions, both for his own work and for the theatre under his leadership.<\/p>\n

Taccone says that his ultimate aim is to \u201ccontribute to the culture,\u201d and he is certainly coming at it in a sustained manner and from several directions. It already takes a special ability to balance the two complex jobs of offering new works locally and nationally. But in addition, Taccone has recently been introducing himself as a playwright, and quickly won the Margo Jones Award for playwriting, for his \u201ccommitment to the living theatre.\u201d<\/p>\n

Taccone emphasizes that, although he is working both close to home and more broadly, his focus is on challenging those audiences at home, and anything that moves to New York does so on his own terms. To describe the characteristics of the plays he and his teams aspire to fostering, <\/b>Taccone lists: \u201ca guiding intelligence, a progressive ethos, and imaginative power.\u201d<\/p>\n

I invited Tony to make a statement concerning alternative criticism for our Special Issue. We caught up with each other late on a Friday afternoon and made time for a couple of additional questions about his artistic process.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve been teaching and writing mostly abroad for ten years and am just now spending a little more time here. One of my projects is to bring more international focus to Bay Area theatre and its cultural life in general.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I\u2019m afraid I don\u2019t have much to say that would be informative on the subject of \u201calternative criticism.\u201d It\u2019s too early to tell what it\u2019s really going to turn into:\u00a0 trendy comments or legitimate feedback. Right now, the entire genre of criticism feels fractured, damaged, and capricious. A testame<\/a>nt to the lack of real intellectual discourse. Newspapers have abandoned criticism for the most part: the SF Chronicle\u00a0<\/em>gives less and less space for reviews, and feature articles focus more on the personality of the artist versus the content of their work. Bloggers are out there, but the quality of the writing is usually fantastically poor. Twitter is stupid. Period. Sorry to be so judgmental, but it\u2019s the height of reductionist thinking. Maybe okay for telling your \u201cfollowers\u201d that you just bought a pair of new shoes at Nordstrom\u2019s, but pathetic for reacting to a piece of art.<\/p>\n

Anyway, it\u2019s all very early in this tech revolution. Hopefully, there\u2019ll be some impulse to create insightful context within the critical field and people will seek out providers who aspire to revelatory insights.<\/p>\n

Tony, those remarks alone further the discussion.\u00a0I also have a special interest in how things outside the theatre influence or inspire someone\u2019s work in the theatre. For example, Sidney Poitier fell in love with astronomy, and Jack Nicholson with modern painting\u2014they\u2019ve both talked about a kind of interplay these have with their acting work. Biochemistry, flower arranging, boat racing\u2014directors have told me about these and more. Anything outside the theatre itself make what you do in the theatre richer, deeper, more satisfying for you, more\u2026 something else?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Honestly: everything. Every single thing. My father (an artist) always said that the secret to life was curiosity, which I heartily believe\u2026<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve been writing a lot lately, so, observing people, observing writers\u2026 watching myself to understand how I compromise my powers of observation\u2026<\/p>\n

I love to watch sports to see how teams are put together and how different coaches lead\u2026<\/p>\n

I have an interest in neurology and have made the rounds with doctors at a memory clinic in San Francisco\u2026<\/p>\n

I recently took a 12-week cooking class to learn more about the culinary arts\u2026\u00a0it all leads into the funnel, where it gets channeled, fed, and processed by the unconscious and spit out again in the form of something called art\u2026<\/p>\n

Directing requires a lot of leadership and management skills, in addition to conceptual sophistication and the ability to translate ideas into action. Writing is more personal, requiring more access to one\u2019s inner life and a reverence for everything invisible\u2026<\/p>\n

So yeah: every single thing.<\/p>\n

Well, I have a lot of further questions about all that\u2014but here\u2019s a different question:\u00a0You\u2019ve spent your life in the arts, particularly theatre-related arts. How has your thinking about your work changed over the years? I mean, your \u201ccreative process,\u201d or your \u201capproach,\u201d or something like that.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In short, I\u2019ve slowed my breathing down. I listen more. I\u2019m still very driven by planning and I don\u2019t really believe in improvising Shakespeare or crowd scenes, but I have more patience and confidence to let other \u201cthings\u201d emerge from the actors.\u00a0 I\u2019m much more comfortable with silence. I also believe in working on more than one creative project at any given time. Not so much when I\u2019m in rehearsal, but I find that moving off the obsession of one project to focus a bit on another is healthy\u2026 it can release one from the exhaustion of rolling the same problem around in your head (that\u2019s going to happen anyway), so finding a way to break up the mental process can be liberating.<\/p>\n

Thank you.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\n

\"1176770868\"<\/p>\n

<\/a>[1] Lissa Tyler Renaud<\/b> (M.A Directing; Ph.D. Theatre History\/Criticism) is director of InterArts Training, based in Oakland, California. She has taught, lectured, and published widely on acting, voice, body alignment, dramatic theory and the early European avant-garde throughout the U.S., at major theatre institutions throughout Asia, and in Mexico, Russia and Sweden. Recipient of Ford Foundation and National Science Council grants, she is an award-winning actress, a director and popular recitalist. Publications include her co-edited volume, The Politics of American Actor Training<\/i> (Routledge 2009, 2011) and her chapter on Stanislavsky\u2019s voice and movement work (Routledge Companion to Stanislavsk<\/i>y, 2013). Renaud is Senior Writer for Scene4<\/i><\/a> international cultural magazine, and founding co-editor (English) of Critical Stages\/Sc\u00e8nes critiques<\/i>.<\/p>\n

Copyright \u00a9<\/strong> 2014 Lissa Tyler Renaud
\nCritical Stages\/Sc\u00e8nes critiques<\/em> e-ISSN: 2409-7411<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

This work is licensed under the
\nCreative Commons Attribution International License CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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