Phillyist Interviews... Lane Savadove of EgoPo

(Previous question, cont'd.)

At the time, in my young twenties, I wanted my own company that I could explore with on a regular basis, and we trained really rigorously right from the start. Three hours a day, five or six days a week. And when we’re in full swing, that still is the model.

I was in love with the idea that you could have actors who were absolutely capable of things that normal people weren’t capable of. We accept that in dance. Dancers should be able to do something that your average citizen literally isn’t capable of doing. But I feel actors are the same way. They really should be capable of a set of skills. And in order to do that, we accept that dancers train from the time that they’re six years old, and that they would never go a day without taking a class, no matter how far they are in their professions. I feel the same way about acting. If you commit that level of rigor to it, you can be capable of doing the kind of very bold theatrical work that your typical person could neither physically nor vocally do. My actors tend to have a really large physical and vocal palette that they develop over time.

I’ve always wanted to do classic plays, as opposed to classical plays. The time period from Ibsen to Tennessee Williams, and, some might argue, up to Albee and Miller. It could also be considered modernist work. When I was growing up, everybody was going postmodern, including myself for a while, but I suddenly felt, you know, every time I’m seeing a Robert Wilson piece, I’m seeing the same piece. And am I really getting excited about Robert Wilson, or am I just excited about seeing a visual display I haven’t seen before? In the end, it was that. And I really missed the interface with the actors, which is really a modernist thing. The actor was becoming sort of a puppet of the theatre, and I wanted to go back and cling to the really theatrical playwrights.

And to pull off an O’Neill play, for instance, especially a really expressionistic O’Neill play, as opposed to naturalism, is just killer to pull off. Actors tend to think: “I have no idea how I can fill this language.” The language is soaring all over the place, and yet, it’s not necessarily wordy. It’s like, it’s soaring, and you have to ground it. It still fits American form in terms of writing—it’s not like German Expressionism. It just requires an enormous amount of rigor, and I like the challenge of the classic plays. I like the enormity of the plots, the complexity of the actions. They usually trace many, many characters at the same time, which contemporary theatre tends not to do because it’s too expensive. It requires a full cast that’s all very good.

I kind of see it as my responsibility, because I feel like I happen to be very good at it, to do it. Because audiences won’t get a chance to see it otherwise. Williams and O’Neill aren’t boring, and they’re not dated. They’re not even remotely dated.

On your website, it mentions that EgoPo works with Viewpoints technique. Could you elaborate on how EgoPo’s own technique intersects with Viewpoints?
Viewpoints at some point became the real base foundation for what we do, but it was a time period before it was called Viewpoints. It didn’t exist yet. I had decided that through the physical self theory, an actor could develop a character about how that character perceived the rest of the world. Perception was everything, and my job was to get an actor’s censor out of the way, so he went directly from perceiving to reacting. I remember one day, walking into the company and saying: “Guys, I was watching my kittens play today, and I realized exactly what your challenge is: they know how to do it exactly right, and we have forgotten.”

And I use that metaphor to this day. I can click my fingers twenty feet away from my cat and his ear twitches. And he’s not aware that his ear is doing that, but his perception is just incredibly hyped. Cats aren’t relaxed creatures at all, but they have this high level of attentiveness within a relaxed or patient place. It’s not like they’re spazzes, either. They can sit for hours at this highly perceptive level, and it was my goal to get my actors to the same place, to be able to follow an impulse before they even recognize it as such.

That, essentially is what eventually became Viewpoints. I was teaching at a physical workshop in San Francisco, and Anne [Bogart] came out and was teaching at that same workshop, and she was just privately using the word “Viewpoints” at the time. In essence, I use the word Viewpoints because I don’t have another word. But what actually happened is that Anne and I taught and studied with very similar figures in the postmodern dance world, and then brought all those discoveries from postmodern dance into the theatre world, and that was Viewpoints.

Do you think that bringing EgoPo’s technique and Viewpoints to these classic works of theatre means that you’re reimagining them, or do you think that you’re just picking up on something that was already there?
I think we’re reinventing a way to approach them for our contemporary times. Do I think that dramatic actors in the 1920s and 30s were necessarily good at perceiving what was around them? No, I think they weren’t. But they had a kind of physical palette that was really large, that actors today would almost be embarrassed to do. They really committed to that. If you look at an early-40s Tennessee Williams film, like Baby Doll, the acting is so extreme. It’s crazy huge, and yet completely buyable. And I think that most of us have had that experience of looking at the 1930s or 40s acting and saying, “My god, I completely believe that! I completely buy Elizabeth Taylor in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof! She’s totally over the top!” But really committed to it. And Viewpoints is a way to approach works with that level of theatricality.

EgoPo started in San Francisco. Did you move straight to New Orleans when you left the Bay Area?
No, there were a couple of stops along the way. We received a fellowship in which I ran the National Cultural Center in Indonesia for a year, combined with creating a sister company for EgoPo. A few of us went out and lived there for a year and created a companion company. The very specific reason for it was that Indonesia was going through a huge transformation of its theatrical language, and yet it was missing a history of having a company model, and so I was sort of paired with the best performers of every discipline in Java, and we formed a company. Unfortunately, the present political situation there doesn’t allow me to go see them yet. Someday, the Islamic wars will die down, and I will be able to return to Indonesia.

I then came back, to New York. I actually studied with Anne at Columbia, to get my graduate degree. It was after that that I decided that New Orleans had everything I needed as far as an environment to create theatre in. San Francisco did at the time. At the time, it was very inexpensive. There was a dearth of theatre, and yet there was a very interested artistic community. Then, the Silicon Valley boom came along and rents became impossible and the people who could afford to live there had no real interest in seeing the arts. New York was—and is—impossible to produce the way that I want to produce. I need to have a rehearsal space home, I need to have a performance home, and we need to train several days a week. It’s ridiculously impossible in New York.

So New Orleans was amazing. It was inexpensive and had a huge need for theatre. There was nobody doing any of the work we were doing.

When did you relocate to New Orleans?
2002. The year after 9/11.

And you ended up in Philadelphia two years ago, after the Fringe Festival?
About a year and a half ago, yeah. I had always wanted to take the company to Philadelphia, and that year, we decided that we had the right play to tour.

What play were you doing?
The Maids, x2. It’s two versions of Genet’s The Maids: an all-male cast and an all-female cast in two different locations.

All that we knew, when we left, was that it was a bad hurricane season. We were scheduled to leave in the morning one day, and we heard there was another hurricane evacuation possible, so we left a day earlier, in the afternoon. We left twelve hours early because we wanted to avoid evacuation traffic. We didn’t know until about a day after we were up here. We came to the theatre in the morning to continue our load-in, and every news van in the city was outside. We had heard that there was a hurricane, but, you know, things were fine. We didn’t know about the levy breaks because we were so busy in the theatre. They took the company downstairs and Fox and NBC filmed the company while they got the news from CNN. They filmed them watching CNN. It was really terrible on Fox’s part, especially. It was really slimy.

We just went into a long period of disbelief. But, we still put up the show, and we ran it for three weeks in Philly.

And you never left?
That is true. We had no idea how long it would be before we could go back, even at the one week mark, or the five week mark. We still had no idea if it would be a year before we could go back, if it would be a month, what the city would be like in five years. No idea. I knew that it was going to be a couple of years before the funding community could be even remotely back to where I’d feel comfortable asking for money for the theatre, and I was staying in a hotel paid for by FEMA, downtown, and I would walk around and try to imagine if this was the place where I would be next. This was like someone had taken an eraser and erased our lives, so it was literally like: “Could this be it? I’m here, and I’m from here, which is nice. I could build the company much quicker than I could in a strange place, and I have no reason to be anywhere else.”

So it became a reality. And I was at the Barrymore Awards that November and it just hit me during the awards. I decided that we were going to stay. And I announced it that night.

How many people from EgoPo were here at the time?
Nine were here at the city when the hurricane hit. And then, in different orders, we all went back to where we knew we could live, and where our parents were so they could support us. And then slowly they started coming back out here. And we got a run Off-Broadway of the show we’d been performing in Philly, so a lot of the company reunited for the show Off-Broadway and then stayed, so it was sort of a catalyst that saw me moving back here to Philly. At some point, we were all scattered in different states: there weren’t even two of us in the same state. But by about four months in, there were about five of us living here full time.

We’d heard a story about your cat and the hurricane?
My cat Audrey was nine weeks at the house in New Orleans. My house got eight and a half feet of water, but Audrey lived on the second floor. And we couldn’t get in there to rescue her. At about nine weeks, the army broke into the house to feed her. We had messages flying around.

Has she rejoined you here?
Oh yeah. I went down as soon my neighborhood opened up and claimed her and got my stuff and drove back here.

After all of that, do you see performing Spring Awakening as perhaps a bit of a metaphor for EgoPo’s first production after the hurricane?
Certainly. I think so. It is a new adolescence for us in a way. It’s weird being a fifteen-year-old company but looking like a start-up to the rest of the city. So it really is like going through adolescence again.

We built our new theatre in New Orleans with Spring Awakening. It was our inaugural performance at the Jewel Theatre. A lot of our physical infrastructure was created for Spring Awakening’s set, which is a very expensive set. That was all destroyed by the hurricane. In a way, I feel like rebuilding the infrastructure in Philadelphia with Spring Awakening was also the way to go.

Photo of EgoPo by author. Clockwise from left to right: Sarah Schol, Leah Walton, Megan Hoke, Lane Savadove, Terry Brennan, Colleen Hughes, Doug Greene and Nick Martorelli. Spring Awakening will run at the Mainstage of the Adrienne (2030 Sansom) through March 25. For more information, see EgoPo's website.