ARTicles vol. 6 i.3a: As Sassy As You Dare

Catching the audience off guard is Arthur Nauzyciel’s artistic signature. “I want to create uneasiness, the anxiety of a quasi-dream state,” the director explains. “What happens onstage is a dream, but at the same time, it is not a dream. It exists in concrete reality and at the same time it’s an unsubstantial vision. The stage lives in between the visible and the invisible.”

One way the director conjures up this dream state is by creating stylized movements that explore the subtext. Directing Mike Leigh’s Abigail’s Party for the A.R.T. Institute last season, Nauzyciel and his actors captured the rage roiling beneath the polite veneer of a middle-class cocktail party. Nauzyciel turned the play’s finale into a terrifying yet hilarious revolt against British decorum. Interrupting the party, the host put on a record of Beethoven’s “Fifth Symphony” full blast to drown out his guests’ vapid conversations. Conducting the music while performing a strip tease, we discover he is in fact staging his own death: a violent heart attack takes his life, stiffens his body, and turns him into a human sculpture as Beethoven’s grandiose chords pound away. Caught off guard, the audience does not know quite how to respond.

No matter how bizarre Nauzyciel’s movement may appear at first, it always emerges from a thorough excavation of the text. He is an archeologist of the word. The director spends several weeks with the actors at the table, treating the text like a body to dissect. He refuses to bully the words to fit a preconceived concept. By tracking word choice and rhythmic patterns, Nauzyciel forces the actors to listen to the writing with fresh ears. Only after the actors have established an intimate relationship with each word does the director begin to block the show. “Have fun with the words,” Nauzyciel insists, “and you’ll never be lost.”

Encouraging a playful mood in rehearsals, the director likes to challenge actors trained in psychological realism. “Try to tap-dance the rhythm of your lines while having that telephone conversation,”Nauzyciel told an actor during rehearsals for Abigail’s Party. “You see, it’s fun, right? And much more interesting to watch.” Trained as an actor himself, he knows how to stir an actor’s imagination: “Strike a pose worthy of Donna Summer,” he chuckled, goading the lead actress to heighten the imperious tone of her lines. “Use the gesture as an exclamation point. Internalize the written text, transform it with your body, and play it up as sassy as you dare!”

Njål Mjøs is a second-year dramaturgy student at the A.R.T./MXAT Institute for Advanced Theatre Training.