By USA Goldmines 
It’s a chilly spring day in New York City, but inside Eric Bogosian’s office, the sun is streaming in warm through the windows, and the scent of incense and coffee mixes with the sound of classical music that drifts through the air. There’s a pleasant, eclectic clutter to the space that’s filled with books, notes to self, plants, photos, and other marginalia from Bogosian’s work throughout the years. We start with some light teasing about the way I take my coffee (two sugar lumps and cream) and what I read as a sincere exchange of pronouns, layered under some snark for good measure. Bogosian immediately says afterward that he’s really “a typical boomer,” but I tell him I don’t think so because even before it was “cool” or people feared cancellation, Bogosian refused to make fun of queer people and other marginalized groups in his work. That’s no guarantee for some. “Yeah, it’s too easy. All that stuff.” Bogosian says with a laugh, after emphasizing that it’s true, he wouldn’t do that. “I mean, it’s kind of interesting because if you go in front of an audience and you’ll discover that if you say, ‘Fuck,’ people laugh. So now you have a choice.” And the choice he’s been making since 1976, I feel is admirable.
The coffee mug that I’m drinking out of, it turns out, was made by Bogosian’s high school girlfriend. He grins and shares, “Everything has history here. Every single thing. You could get me started on every single thing in this room, there will be a story that goes with it, but then we would be here for the rest of our lives. Maybe that would be a good piece.” I agree that “A Lifetime with Eric Bogosian” certainly has a ring to it, but the talk of history gets us on the topic of how he started out in the NYC theater scene.
“For me, it all started with this. I was a theater person who came to New York and decided, as an intern, there was no way I was going to cut it in the theater. And then I decided to live here anyway. I got a job at the World Trade Center, which I found in the newspaper, trading Japanese Steel.” Bogosian shares, “I don’t even know what that meant. I still don’t know what it means because on the day that I was supposed to go to that job… The next day, I had just come to New York with all my stuff into an apartment, one of the roommates-to-be at this apartment held up the other roommates at knife point, and the apartment became a crime scene. So I had to call my dad back in Boston and say, ‘I’m not going to be where you thought I was going to be.’ He said, ‘Somebody’s trying to reach you.’ This guy, Bob, at The Kitchen. And I called him up and he said, ‘You left your resume here three months ago.’ I had just graduated from college. He said, ‘Do you want come here and be my assistant?’ I said, ‘Well, you’re going to have to pay me. So he said, how about a hundred bucks a week?’ So I said, ‘Okay.’ So, I never showed up at that other job.’
And the rest is the history that brings us to this office full of things with history in them. Bogosian shares that he began as the guy who answers the phone, and had no idea what The Kitchen really did. But as he notes, “Things happened,” and he just “fell in love with everything they were doing there.”
“I fell in love with the people.” Bogosian adds, “It became like the crossroads of Soho in 1976. And everybody was coming through there, choreographers, composers, everything. And nine months later, everybody who ran the place, without telling each other, had decided to go do something else. So, me and the couple of people who were working there as assistants, we were suddenly running the place.” Bogosian reminisces a bit about performing in a second-floor space that’s actually just around the corner from his office, the sentiment feels like it has a full-circle energy to it. He goes on to say, “So suddenly I was in the thick of it, and then everybody else is making shit. I might as well make shit too.” As a trained theater actor, Bogosian was first approaching his work from the perspective of the theater, but in ’70s Soho, “nobody knew what any of that meant.” Still, Bogosian persisted in “making shit.” He explained, “I started making these weird little pieces, and they got more and more ambitious.”
For example, he shows me an image from a play he wrote where he “cast an entire Latino cast of like eight people or something. And I had them translate the play to Spanish. I don’t speak Spanish. So the play was all in Spanish for an Anglo audience who couldn’t understand what they were actually saying.” Another wild outing for Bogosian included “The Rick Paul Show,” where the idea was to “completely insult the audience and get people to throw bottles.” A bold proposition.
Some of the other “weird little pieces” are the solos for which Bogosian became incredibly famous. He notes that he was emulating what his friends were doing in the visual arts, creating a gallery of characters that were not stereotypes, but also not specific things. Instead, they were archetypes. He shares that he had a whole crew of people that he’d sit around with and ponder these creations, painting a picture of late nights in diners and the like. It honestly sounds like an amazing and creative era that can never be replicated. It sounds a bit like a movie.
We move to the couch and shift focus to Bogosian’s currently performing play, Humpty Dumpty, which touched me deeply. The play was written around 2001 and is set in the year 2000, but remains truly salient today. Bogosian muses on some of the ideas in it that transcend time and help keep it relevant. He shares that the question of prestige, where it comes from, and what it means, really drove him. “If you say 2000, that’s the end of the ’90s. And look at who I’m hanging around with, who my friends are. My friends are like Cindy Sherman and Sonic Youth and whoever is hanging out, plus all the new movie people I’m around, and everybody has all this cred because of… of something that was written. But put them in the woods naked. And it’s like, what can you do? And for me, that has always been a question, and it was enhanced 9/11.”
His proximity to the attack on the World Trade Center had a profound impact on Bogosian, and the sensation of it lingered with him for a long time, influencing his creation of Humpty Dumpty. “I was living here and we saw it, everything, and it was horrific. And when she [Nicole, a character from Humpty Dumpty] says, ‘I have this feeling in my stomach and I feel a little faint, what is that? Is that fear?’ That was a feeling that I had had for the whole six months after the attack.” Beyond this core vulnerability, Bogosian adds, “I’m just trying to grab lots of different things. For me, it is a struggle to say, on the one hand, I want to be kind of punk rock expressionistic, and on the other hand, I want to make the well-made play. But what I absolutely don’t want to do is make anything pretentious. So I’m trying to make entertainment that does things that I need. First of all, I can’t be bored. If I sit in the theater and I’m ahead of the thing, it really bothers me. I want it to be really good for the actors, and I don’t want anybody with a part that isn’t really great for them. And I want to hit a big theme that I don’t necessarily have an answer to. It’s in my head all the time, and I’m wrestling with it.”
It’s that faint/fear/uncontrollable sensation that really struck me, alongside the brutal isolation the play depicts, which brought Humpty Dumpty into our current world of pandemics and quarantines. And for Bogosian, that means the play was a success. He shares that he tells the cast to simply think of the one person they might be touching on any given performance night and hold onto that idea. “I think if you look for things that come from your heart, then it’s going to speak to somebody,” He notes. “So yeah, maybe you drop a line or something in the second act, so fuck it. Just keep going. They don’t know. Nobody knows. This is the amazing thing of live theater.”
Sharing Humpty Dumpty in New York City has also been a great experience for Bogosian, “I am writing for my tribe.” He explains, “An overused term, but it is. A tribe is the people who share experiences, as they say in the play, ‘We do these things.’ Nicole says, ‘We all watch the Oscars.’ And then she says, ‘ironically.’ We share a whole bunch of things right now that are shifting all the time. At any rate, I want to make a play for my tribe. When I write for my crowd, I know that they’re comparing it with their own personal experiences. And when they do that, that puts me more in a hot seat. I think it’s harder to write that way. And the people I love write that way.” Bogosian muses that a lot of his work has been phenomenal and emotional, but he also wants to write plays that fall into the “people talking to each other” category, though in a way that still captures immediacy, event, and emotion. I feel he manages to thread all these ideas together in Humpty Dumpty.
Ultimately, what Bogosian wants is for his audience to think when they leave his plays. And while Humpty Dumpty has some conflicting ideas about the good or ill of needing or craving your work to be perceived, for a play, it’s obviously an important component. “My agenda is to create some meditation while you’re sitting there and maybe even past after the show is done.” He says, “I absolutely want it to be perceived. I want to be interlocked with my community in these things now. My thing is not, ‘I got to tell you something.’ I’d rather be, ‘Let’s hear some questions, and let’s sit around together, and maybe you’ll have an argument with it afterwards.’ That’s my goal. So I try to stir up stuff, but I absolutely want to enter into a kind of a dialogue. I think we are fighting against some things now, which is, there’s been a lot of shrinkage in the theater, especially the off-Broadway theater and the ticket prices are so fucking expensive that you can’t go see your friend’s thing.”
But for Bogosian, it’s a critical fight. He adds, “When we, especially in theater with an audience, when we gather and we see something there develops a kind of consensus in the audience about what we think about this thing that we’re sitting in. And that becomes how we as a society, and not to get too heavy about all of this, but that is how we develop a bias in a particular direction. For example, my wife, Jo Bonney, did a play at the A.R.T. called Trans Scripts about trans people, and it was a beautiful piece. Basically, my mind was opened in a way that it hadn’t been before. I had thought about the ideas in it beforehand, maybe in a kind of abstract way, but I didn’t really understand things. But here are seven people telling their stories and they were trans, and then I had a new place that my head could go to, and that’s all we ask for. It’s not like you’re going to go to the theater and thinking ‘What do you want people to think after they see it?’ I mean, I don’t know.”
I suggest he just wants them to think, and he laughs. “Yeah, that would be good. It’s a habit of mine. It’s important to play.”
Bogosian asks me about things I’m a fan of, and the conversation shifts to Interview with the Vampire. We both lean in. However, since it’s such an extensive part of the conversation, I’ll direct you to a second piece to read all about it. If you’re also a fan, it’s worth it. Spoilers, the words “Does he get his hands on me, or do I get my hands on him,” come up around Daniel and Armand.
We’re getting into the final stretches of our talk when Bogosian invites me to see a piece of artwork gifted to him by the late Val Kilmer. “This isn’t stable,” Bogosian shares, “It’s fading away.” The artwork, it turns out, is made of Kilmer’s own blood.
Bogosian speaks about some of the great actors he’s known as we look at the painting, including Val Kilmer and Vincent D’Onofrio. They could be difficult, he shares, “But in both cases, all I knew was I fucking loved what they did when they did great shit. And to have greatness in you, that is, it’s often not even conscious in themselves. They’re just going for whatever they have… The acting world is filled with a lot of two-dimensional stuff that we kind of accept as dimensional because we see it so often. The actors don’t know that they’re doing this. I mean, they’re there, they’re doing their thing, but it’s just not that interesting. And if you get to do what I do, and you get to be opposite somebody like a Damian Lewis or a Paul Giamatti, and you’re looking into each other’s eyes, and you’re in a scene, and you are in the scene, that is an incredible feeling. It’s just amazing. You get to fly. And I love that.”
We bring it back to Humpty Dumpty to close off. “One of the things I really love about the Humpty Dumpty gang and what they’re doing is that, first of all, nobody knows these guys. They come to the theater. They have no preconceptions. I mean, if you go to see George Clooney on Broadway, he’s going to be George Clooney, you expect it to be George Clooney. You already know about George Clooney. You don’t know anything about these guys, and every character changes over the course of the play. But they are also in a highly dynamic point in their acting career. And I think the material is rich enough that they can keep exploring for the entire run. And that’s exciting because you’re not looking at something that’s set. It is changing, and it’s learning, and they have to be into that. Like I said, you’ve got that one person in the audience tonight. Don’t worry about like, ‘I got this thing set in concrete and oh shit, I dropped a line tonight, so therefore it’s no good.’ That’s not what it should be at all in a live performance. It needs to have all this unexpected stuff. And every audience brings in their own set of reactions.”
It’s a beautiful ethos and a beautiful conversation.
Humpty Dumpty is now playing at The Chain Theater in NYC. Tickets are available here. If you’re not local, you can buy the screenplay to peruse at your leisure.
The post An Afternoon with Eric Bogosian: On HUMPTY DUMPTY, IWTV, Art, and More appeared first on Nerdist.
This articles is written by : Nermeen Nabil Khear Abdelmalak
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