A Conversation with Rick Lombardo
On December 23, Don Cohen talked with Rick Lombardo about Quills, the third play in New Rep’s 2004–2005 season.
Cohen: So why have you chosen to do this shocking and literally sadistic play at New Rep?
Lombardo: I first read the play six or seven years ago and loved the theatricality of it. It’s an immensely theatrical, macabre play in a good 19th century way, with an amazing use of language. I loved the play’s exploration of the issue of where to draw the line between the freedom of expression of the artist and the need for society to enforce the rules of civilization. But at the time, in the early nineties, it didn’t seem a pressing issue, so I didn’t feel a burning desire to produce the play. I knew that someday I would like to. Also, seven years ago, New Rep’s programming wasn’t as adventuresome as it is now. A lot of forces converged in the last year. For one thing, our programming has reached a point where this kind of play can exist in the panoply of what we do. We’ve done a play about a barber who murders people and chops up their bodies and turns them into meat pies. We did that dark, sexy, scandalous Threepenny Opera last year. More to the point, the question of what rights the state has to curtail the freedom of the individual, not just in artistic expression but in all forms of expression, is a burning issue now. When we have librarians campaigning against the Patriot Act, when issues of individual privacy and the state’s right to police behavior are prominent in the news, when Janet Jackson’s exposed breast becomes one of the biggest news stories of the year, when states pass laws to prevent two individuals from expressing their love through the marriage vow, the issues of the rights of the individual and the rights of the state are in front of us all the time. So I thought, what better time to produce Quills?
Cohen: Are you letting those themes speak for themselves or are you doing something to point to the connections with the current day?
Lombardo: I think you have to let plays speak for themselves. My job as director is to make sure that all of the notes in the play are rendered as clearly as possible so that the play speaks in the most potent possible form. That’s the New Rep aesthetic. There are other theaters where the aesthetic is more that the director is the auteur of the theater event. New Rep’s aesthetic is to find a way to have the play speak directly to the audience. In Quills, the issues of freedom of expression and censorship and dangerous expression are so clearly there that I don’t need to do much to allow them to emerge.
Cohen: Does the play come down on one side or the other of that argument?
Lombardo: No. Doug Wright is not saying, “The artist has to have total freedom; it’s always wrong to censor.” There’s an incident in this play where one of the Marquis’ stories provokes a homicidally insane inmate to brutally murder an innocent young woman. The Marquis has to confront the fact that perhaps not all expression is a good idea. Doug [Wright, the author] makes us confront the question of where civilization draws the line and who gets to choose where the line should be drawn. In the Freudian sense, the play is a brilliant exploration of how the forces of the id—the dark, primitive, animal forces—the beast—exemplified by the Marquis, and the civilizing forces of the superego, which in this play are the church and society, exemplified by the hospital administrator, Dr. Royer-Collard, clash to produce the ego. A healthy tension between those two means a healthy ego. But when both of those forces try to dominate, the individual is driven mad. That’s what happens to the young priest, the Abbe de Coulmier. He’s a reasonable man of God who also happens to be a scientist, as much a secular humanist as a priest. He tries to reason his way between the two poles of the play. He finds it an impossible path to navigate and he’s driven to madness.
Cohen: You’re two weeks into rehearsals of Quills?
Lombardo: About a week and-a-half.
Cohen: Is it developing as well as you’d hoped?
Lombardo: It’s developing much more quickly than I thought it would, considering how difficult it is. We struggle with some plays. This rehearsal is magical. I feel that we’ve found the cast that can completely devour this material. This is a play with fantasy scenes of necrophilia, sado-masochistic behavior, murder, mayhem, and dismemberment. Name it and it’s in this play. Every day when we start rehearsal, I think, ‘here we go into the dark journey of the soul again.’ And it is, but it’s as if we’re being led on the journey by Milton Berle, and that makes it OK. No matter how far I push these actors to take that journey, to go deeper into hell, they do it ravenously and find a way to make it incredibly powerful and funny and horrifying at the same time.
Cohen: New Rep’s last play, Permanent Collection, though very different in terms of behavior, also presents a moral dilemma with no clear sense of which side is right. When you plan a season, are you looking for potential themes to carry through or are you looking for contrasts?
Lombardo: Putting a theatrical season together is a difficult alchemy. It’s a process of weighing what plays have something cogent and provocative to say about what is going on in the world we’re living in right now, what plays appeal to me as an artist, what plays I think will appeal to the audience that we’ve developed here at New Rep. And it’s choosing plays that, when put together, will somehow create an interesting journey for someone who comes with us for all five of them.
Cohen: How would you describe this season’s journey?
Lombardo: Much of this season seems to me to be about the individual grappling with the frailty of our humanness and searching for meaning. It started with Moomtaj, with someone reeling from the aftereffects of 9/11, looking at a life lived well or not to that point, and how to go on. In Permanent Collection, individuals had to determine what values really matter to them. This play deals with the fringes of human experience to try to determine what we are, essentially, at our core. The Marquis’ perspective is that nihilism should rule because there is no code, there are no laws, no moral absolutes. The Abbe de Coulmier believes that there are. The essential question of this play is: are we good or bad at our core? Topdog/Underdog is about two brothers living a Cain and Abel existence, trying to find a way to survive by one-upping each other. They’re bonded by blood but one has to overcome the other to survive. I think it’s a natural extension of this play. Then there’s Into the Woods, which says, life isn’t a fairy tale. Happily ever after occurs in the middle of the play and the real question is, what happens after happily ever after? How do you live a life once all of your dreams have been fulfilled? What are you left with? You’re left with yourself, so what are you really?
Cohen: In some of Shakespeare’s comedies, people go into the woods or to an island to straighten out problems caused by a corrupt society. They get away from civilization—back to nature—to make civilization healthy again.
Lombardo: In Into the Woods, people do have to go into the woods to find their true selves. In Quills, the Marquis represents the forces of nature, but nature is violent and bestial and purely about survival and power. When the priest loses his faith, he says that he is going to try to find his true constitution in nature. He thinks he can take that Shakespearean journey into the woods and be reaffirmed as a human again, but he never gets there because they don’t let him out.
Cohen: Earlier, you talked about Sweeney Todd and Threepenny Opera preparing the way for Quills. Do you think you’ve trained the audience to accept difficult plays, or is it more a question of coming to know the audience over the years?
Lombardo: I would never presume to say one trains an audience. Individuals are drawn to become subscribers or members of a theater because they get a sense that that theater’s ethos is exciting to them and of value to them. An audience and a theater form a relationship; each begins to know the other. The more I’ve come to know this audience, the more I see that their capacity to be pushed outside the box is pretty large. And as I’ve produced or directed plays that stepped outside some audience members’ comfort zones, perhaps we have developed enough of a relationship of trust so that they think, “This is a New Rep play and ultimately I’m going to find value in it,” even though their initial reaction might be uncertainty or discomfort. That trust is developed through experience. When you have trust with an audience, you can take greater and greater risks.
Cohen: Those of us who’ve been coming to New Rep since you arrived have certainly seen the seasons become more challenging, and richer.
Lombardo: The biggest hit of my first season was Sylvia, the A.R. Gurney play about a middle-aged man’s relationship with his pet puppy, played by an attractive, nubile young woman. I also did American Buffalo that season, which I think is a dark, brilliant play, and I got some letters from outraged folks saying, “I don’t recognize those people, those characters are not in my frame of reference, I don’t appreciate that kind of profanity on the stage.” The New Rep audience wasn’t monolithic. There were folks looking for comedies, for lighter fare. Luckily, we’ve found the audience that wants the work that has the most impact for me. Maybe some of the other folks have fallen by the wayside or maybe they’ve said, “What the heck, we’ll see those plays too.”
Cohen: I suspect Quills may be a stretch for more than a few members of the audience.
Lombardo: I’ve taken the unusual step—I’ve only done this once before at New Rep—of writing a personal letter to all of our subscribers, which I think will reach their homes in the week between Christmas and New Year’s. I wanted to do it because Quills is quite shocking. I felt that I needed to reach out to people before they saw the play to help create context for what they were going to experience—not that I feel our audience needs to be led by the hand, but I wanted to acknowledge that I knew many people will experience moments of serious discomfort at certain episodes in the play. I do; I’m not patronizing. The play asks us to experience how easy it is to be desensitized to brutality and horror if we’re led further into the chamber of horrors bit by bit. I sometimes use the analogy of the otherwise normal happy German who, three years later, is turning on the jets in the gas chamber at Buchenwald. How does a human go from point A to that point? We know how the monsters do it, but how does the ordinary person do that, as so many ordinary people have?
Cohen: And part of the answer is: more easily than we think.
Lombardo: It’s right under the veneer of civilization. It’s in our nature. You know those psychological experiments cited during the Abu Ghraib incident—the prisoner-guard experiment and the shock experiment? They show how easy it was for otherwise normal undergraduates to resort to violent brutality because of pressure from authority. The play makes us confront these things. I wanted to write a letter that acknowledged, Yes, I know you’re going to feel discomfort and I want you to know that I’m not doing it gratuitously. Here’s why I think the play is important; here’s why I think, if you’re willing to go on this journey, we’ll wind up at a valuable place at the end.
Don Cohen is a writer and editor who also spent seven years as technology manager of the school division of D.C. Heath, the educational publisher. His articles on knowledge management initiatives and ideas have been published in California Management Review, Knowledge and Process Management, and by The Harvard Business Review. He is also the co-author of several books on social capital.. Also a playwright and fiction writer, Cohen lives in Lexington, Massachusetts, with his wife Helen and their two daughters, Rebecca and Sarah.