Interview with Director Brian Katz and Dramaturge Perry Aliado

Optimism and Its Discontents:

Thoughts on Voltaire and Candide with CMTC Artistic Director Brian Katz

Recently, CMTC Resident Dramaturge Perry Aliado sat down with Artistic Director Brian Katz to talk about his upcoming production of Candide of California, or Optimism, a play adaptation of the French novella Candide, ou l’Optimisme by Voltaire. Prior forays into literary adaptation for Brian Katz include directing The Soldier of the Sorrowful Face by Nicholas Leither, an adaptation of Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes. Some topics in this chat included the process of adapting literary works to the stage, addressing current events in the play, and the philosophical idea of “Optimism” (and the great disillusionment it can bring about).

Perry Aliado: Why did you decide to adapt Candide back in 2008, and re-stage it again now in 2011?

Brian Katz: For some history on the project – we did Candide, but just the 1st act (up to the second departure from Cunegonde) for the San Francisco Fringe Festival in 2008. It is a “top 5” book for me, first of all, and so when looking for projects to adapt, you start looking at things you’ve already been obsessed with. And I am obsessed with Candide; I re-read it about every year because I always get something new out of it.

What we’ve done with Candide (in ’08 and ’11) is modernize it a bit by doing a hybrid. I wanted to keep most of Voltaire’s words, because they’re just that funny, but I also wanted to make sure the play was immediately relevant and recognizable to our time. We lose the French history and instead use events and places we are familiar with, wars we are familiar with, and then hopefully find funny and creative ways to adapt the mystical places in the book, like El Dorado.

PA: Were there any specific then-current events from 2008 that drew you further into wanting to adapt and stage Candide?

BK: Well it sure seems to be a funny time around here. We had Schwarzenegger, and he makes a cameo in our play. Obviously the wars in Iraq – when I was writing the play in 2007 – seemed to be never-ending. Politicians appeared to be on the news daily justifying this war, sometimes with religious overtones, even after all of our initial reasons (including the presence of Weapons of Mass Destruction) just went out the window. The religious fundamentalists in Afghanistan certainly remind me of the Inquisitors and other religious figures in the book. That said, the Church is not a big part of this adaptation. They show up once in a while in the play, but you have to remember that the Church was the State back then; they had an extreme influence on the State.

We also wanted to connect the El Dorado to the abuse of natural resources – we moved El Dorado to Antarctica, with the slowly disappearing ice shelf. We’re trying to draw parallels between what the explorers of the El Dorado did then with what we’re doing to our planet right now.

Perry: How about for 2011?

Brian: For better or worse, I think it’s really just more of the same. For this production in 2011, I wanted to second act to take more time to discuss Voltaire’s philosophy; it’s partly because of me just getting a little older, three years later, and having more of an interest in drawing out these philosophical ideas of the show. Whereas the first act is a little more vaudeville and goofy and definitely fun to do, now I have become much more interested in really breaking down the concept of “Optimism” and the different philosophies we have brought into the show to contrast against it.

Perry: Speaking of philosophies, are there any philosophies of Voltaire’s that you strongly connect with, or strongly agree or disagree with? And how do you connect these ideas with the present day?

Brian: Well, Voltaire was a Deist. Voltaire did believe in a God, but he did not believe in organized religion, which was tied to the State. Personally and politically, I absolutely respect religious figure, like Catholic Priests, Reform Rabbis on a lot of issues. They’re at the forefront of a lot of poverty work and anti-war resistance and all kinds of other great stuff. But like Voltaire, I have some distrust of the institution of religion.

The whole book is written against the idea of “optimism”, against this idea that everything that happens (good or bad) is for the best. If you believe that everything is for the best, then Voltaire says that you have to take that way thinking that to its extreme. From there, you can become passive and complacent, accepting all things as they are, or worse, you manipulate things to fit your personal wants and desires like all the evil people in the book do.

Perry: Can you talk a little bit more about your own thoughts about Voltaire’s “Optimism”?

Brian: Candide’s path to his disillusionment with Optimism is a path that everyone finds when they go from being the “optimist” or “romantic” to understanding that the real world rarely functions that way. We should feel happy that we don’t have to go through the extreme and satirical crap that Candide has to go through, but I think Candide’s journey to reaching his enlightenment is a hysterical one. He learns quickly that there may not be an all-encompassing “good karma” or religious God looking down and reassuring us that everything will be OK in the end. Then does genocide happen for the best? Or starvation? Or rape? And personally, people who try to justify these acts as being “for the best,” done through God’s good will or the nature of the Universe, drive me insane. Candide is my most favorite reaction to that way of thinking. It’s done through biting and hysterical satire, and it’s a laugh-out-loud funny book.

Perry: Could you talk a little bit about your process of adapting a literary work for the stage, because I know this isn’t the first classic work that you’ve turned into a play.

Brian: First and foremost, I’m a director and not a playwright – in spite of the fact that I write a play once in a while. I had the honor to watch the Mary Zimmerman process when she was working on Journey to the West [first produced in 1995 with Chicago’s Goodman Theatre]. I’m not brave enough to do what she did, which was bring in three pages of text a day to rehearsal based on what happened the day before. Her rehearsal process is a scary but exciting and unbelievably organic process. But I have some similarity to that process in that I didn’t want to write a ton a text that was already set before the rehearsal process began. I really wanted to see what the actors did with the text and how they adjusted to the words. It makes it very difficult on our Tech staff, as well as the actors of course, who constantly have to memorize text that could change at a moment’s notice. But it’s allowed me to see what the actors can do and see what creative choices I can make with staging.

As far as the actual writing, I just stare at the book at lot. I steal a lot from the book – we give Voltaire authorship credit, and there’s a reason for that, because the witticisms are so great in the book, you just want to keep them and say them in the play. Then I put the book down for a bit and begin to write some filler to make it into a play – some narration, some dialogue so that people are talking to each other – but throughout the process, I keep going back to the book. And when things aren’t working, the solution has almost always been in the book itself, especially when I try to get too creative and silly. Voltaire is a much better writer.

Perry: Generally speaking, what are some of your pros and cons of working on a new work versus working on an already-established play where you don’t have to tweak the text a week before Opening Night?

Brian: There’s a separate question in there, in that if I had a playwright with me and I was solely doing the directing, then that’s already an established process – the playwright is there to make all the adjustments to the script, while I only worry about directing. As both director and adapter, the challenging part is trying to figure out where the issues or problems truly lie. Perhaps it could be directorial instincts, in that maybe my staging doesn’t flow, or I need to work with the actors on interpretation. Or maybe I’ve just written some bad dialogue or I’ve been unclear in the transition from the book to the script.

When you’re doing an [Edward] Albee or [Tony] Kushner or Tennessee Williams, it’s much easier to act a great playwright, because they have an unbelievable wonderful control over how the play flows. And when the play is coming from someone like me, we all have to work a little harder to make things work. That said, I would love more opportunities to do this work; it’s a hard process, and getting better at it will be lifelong, I’m sure.

Perry: What have been some of the really great or experiences you’ve had with the cast working on this piece?

Brian: Pretty much from the first day, I told the cast that I’m not married to anything. I’m more likely to defend a line from the book than one of my own written lines. I had a discussion with some cast members the other day – they were asking about why Pangloss says that syphilis is good even though he got it. Voltaire calls it a “gift” in several different versions I’ve read – and I held fast on that one to keep Voltaire’s language and poetry intact in describing this disease. But even then, the actors have always been great. They offer suggestions – because I’m a director first – and if they have a better way of saying a line, then it goes in the play.

We’ve also been doing some improvising. There’s a bit in there where we figure out Paquette’s backstory to help explain why she hasn’t been seen or heard from on stage for the last hour-and-a-half, only to then “magically” re-appear at the end of the book. We have the actors improvise the different people Paquette has been in contact with during this time. And just like the book, it’s sad and disturbing when you see and think about her fate, but it’s absolutely funny in its presentation.

Physicality is a very important part of this showt. Some challenges included how to depict roasting Candide on a stick, or how to make an airplane. And so we had to get back to the basics. Some of this stuff we figured out at the Fringe. But I also kept going back to when I watched Mary Zimmerman’s work in Chicago, she was so open to whatever happened in the process – so we would throw out some ideas on how to depict flying on stage, try them all, and see which one sticks. And all that work is done in collaboration with the actors.

Perry: Any final things you’d like to say, especially to potential audience members who might want to come to see this show?

Brian: It’s a really funny show. And for the people who’ve never read Voltaire, or who may have read Voltaire back in high school but forgotten his writings, he’s really, really FUNNY. There are intense political and philosophical discussions in his writing. But when he does satire – and this book [Candide] is considered his masterpiece – he’s probably one of the funniest guys who’s ever lived. He’s Mark Twain funny. And in the book, it feels like every four paragraphs or so, for quite a few chapters, Candide is whisked off somewhere else. It’s almost like the original travelogue play. And that’s a lot of fun in itself, because you get all these different set pieces and it goes by super fast – it’s like a “fasten-your-seatbelt-and get-ready!” kind of ride.

I also love this kind of past-paced, high-energy theatre. It’s probably due to growing up with Chicago theatre – especially late-night Chicago theatre which was really goofy and really irreverent, pass the bottle of whiskey around the audience, and we never worried about offending anybody. And Voltaire offends everybody. On purpose. Equally. To make us question and challenge the ideas we believe.

Candide of California, or Optimism opens Tuesday, May 17^th at the Gough Street Playhouse in San Francisco, and plays until Saturday, June 4^th. Visit www.custommade.org for additional information.