David Muse talks about Mike Bartlett and his play Cock

“I’ve been a fan of Mike Bartlett and his writing for years.  Four years ago I got to know him personally, and I’ve been paying a lot of attention to him.  It’s impossible to over-emphasize what a big deal he is in London right now.”

David Muse, Artistic Director of Studio Theatre, talked about what brought Bartlett’s play Cock to his attention.  Knowing Bartlett’s work well, and knowing he wanted to present that work to a Studio audience, Muse told me that the choice of which Bartlett script to do depended on “issues of which and when.”  It turned out, for a “variety of programmatic reasons,” and for considerations such as the availability of rights, that Cock fit Muse’s bill.

And the play has garnered rave reviews.  In The Washington Post, Peter Marks described it as a “crackling play, staged with acerbic brio at Studio Theatre by the ace director David Muse…Muse and company bring this provocative argument to an intriguing boil.”  On DCTS, Jayne Blanchard observed that “given the savage tenor of the performances, sharpened by David Muse’s forceful direction, it is amazing that the sand is not slick with blood and the odd eviscerated organ by curtain call.”

Studio dipped into the Bartlett oeuvre last year when it presented the American premiere of his Contractions.  Muse described that as a “soft introduction” to Bartlett.  The current example of his work not only became an Off-Broadway hit, running for several months in 2012, but was also considered incendiary enough that its title needed a euphemistic place-holder in “family newspapers,” whose ads referred to Cockfight Play.  (That’s supposed to sound more palatable?  Whatever.)

But it wasn’t the play’s notoriety that appealed to Muse.  “This play in particular represents one of the things he’s been up to that is exciting to me.  He’s interested in a certain kind of theatrical minimalism, a distillation.  He wants to strip away the artifice of theatre to reveal the grimy core of human relationships.  He’s writing about competitiveness between people over sex, over love.  His style is fascinating to me; the content is incredibly interesting.  But it’s the sheer quality of the writing” that compelled Muse toward the play that Studio seems comfortable referring to as, and which The Washington Post seems comfortable listing as, Cock.  (So far, no major cultural debasement has been detected, and I was able to handle e-mails from the Studio press office with the subject line “Feature on Cock.”)

Muse made the decision to keep the play located in Britain, even though “one could choose to do something different with it — there is very little about location in the text.”  He told me that there was a conversation about shifting the play to a U.S. setting.  In fact, that’s what Studio did with Contractions last year with Bartlett involved in some tweaking of that script to Americanize it.  But Muse ended up feeling as if the rhythm of the language was “inherently British” as was the “patter between people,” and he got a sense from Bartlett that “at the center of the play, something is going on about indecision, which is a trait at the core of the British people.  Americans are more direct and action-oriented.  The play makes less sense in an American idiom, so we left it accented.”

Since Bartlett had crossed the pond for the Studio production of Contractions, I asked if he had come over for Cock.  (Hmm.  Maybe I’m beginning to see why the euphemistic title was used in New York.)  Anyway, since he is a new father, and since his latest play King Charles III at London’s Almeida Theatre has become, in Muse’s words, a “sensation” for which you “can’t get a ticket,” Bartlett was sufficiently pre-occupied that a trip wasn’t possible, although he’s made himself available for phone conversations during Cock’s rehearsal period.

I asked Muse about the design.  “It’s meant to be produced with no scenery or props, no showy sound and light cues,” Muse responded.  “He wants to strip all that away” to achieve “a minimalist sensibility.”

In New York, Muse told me, they “essentially built a theater altogether, seating and stage space, creating a very close relationship between the actors and the audience.”  But Studio’s Milton Theatre “in large part brings that sense without having to do anything at all.  It’s semi-circular, with a close relationship to the audience.  We concluded quickly that we didn’t need to do anything to its architecture to support” that sense of intimacy achieved in New York.  “We researched places where people compete.”  Bartlett was inspired by having seen a bull fight in Mexico and “that inspired our design as it had him.  The space is vaguely reminiscent of a cockfighting arena.  It’s a simple circle.  The floor is dirt.  The actors step into the ring and they compete with, and love, each other.”  The play, he stressed, is trying to capture a spirit where the audience reacts more as spectators at a sport than as an audience at a play.  The play is “written with a showman’s delight in how people watch a competitive event.”

David Muse on entering his fifth season at Studio

I asked Muse how he was feeling now that he is a few years into his post as Artistic Director at Studio.  “There’s a surprise every day.  I knew coming in that, to really start to feel at home in a job with a company like this, in transition from its founder, the time horizon would be long.  A lot of people told me that.  I was under no illusion that it would happen in a couple of years.”

As he began planning next season at Studio, Muse said he realized that it would be his fifth season in the post, and he thought, “You’re kidding!  It feels so new in so many ways.  But although I’m still settling in, I’m proud of what we’ve accomplished, though aware that there is a distance still to travel before I’ve done what I set out to do.”

As most readers of this article will know, Muse, before taking the Studio gig, was on staff at Shakespeare Theatre Company, where he directed several critically successful productions of the classics, and that provoked a question:  Now that he is more focused on contemporary plays, does he miss the challenge of directing Shakespeare and other time-tested work?  “Maybe I’ll feel that way at some point.  I hope to do some of the classics in the coming years.  It was exciting while I was at STC to be able to come across town and do contemporary plays at Studio.  I got to work both sides of the equation.  Hopping back and forth between the two worlds is something I love.”  That said, “I didn’t mind a break.  It’s something I miss sometimes but, mostly, I’m pretty happy.”

Muse then pointed out that, since assuming his current job, he’s only directed once outside of Studio, and it was Shakespeare’s Coriolanus at STC.  And looking to the future, (and, perhaps, a midway point between Elizabethan plays and 21st century work), he told me that “Studio’s relationship with classic plays of the 20th century is something I think quite a lot about.”  (And it was a 20th century classic, Torch Song Trilogy, with which he lured STC’s Artistic Director Michael Kahn over to Studio last Fall.)

With the recent news that Muse’s predecessor Joy Zinoman has taken a role in next season’s Round House Theatre’s production of Uncle Vanya, I had to ask Muse about that.  “I’ve never seen her on-stage, so, for me, it’s not so much a chance to see her return as it is my first chance to see her.  I look forward to it eagerly.”

I hoped I wouldn’t embarrass Muse by bringing up his own acting experience.  After all, I had seen him in an early version of Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa’s play Say You Love Satan.  It was at DCAC and was probably in the late 1990s.  Should we expect to see him treading the boards anytime soon?

“I don’t know.  Right now, I have no hunger to do it.  I think I’ve found myself on the right side of the table.  It took a few years to figure that out, and I’m very happy to have spent time onstage.  It continues to inform my work, with actors as well as with directors.  I know how difficult it is, what they [actors] are going through.  I continue to feel that.  But it’s not something I hunger to do.”

And now that Cock is running …

We spoke after Cock (speak the name proudly!) had just begun previews.  “This really is one of those plays when the final partner doesn’t show up until the audience is there.  The things we’ve learned are difficult to articulate.  There’s a sense in which the actors are paying attention to one another, but, now, another part of the brain is activated and they think, ‘How do I get the audience on my side?’  We’ve been talking about how that sensibility manifests itself.  I’m gratified to see that it’s as alive before people as I thought it would be.  I’m happy to see that it is the event that I suspected before that it would be and that I hoped it would be.”

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