Director Schweizer: The Strategies of Seduction

“I do a lot of weird work formally, and I accept the responsibility for seducing an audience into the work,” said David Schweizer, director of Marlane Meyer’s “Kingfish.”

“I don’t care if they’re young or old, conservative or wildly sophisticated. If they’re presented with a world that seems to be in charge of itself, they will go along with it. But it really is a seduction.

“Actually, I was prepared for ‘Kingfish’ to be regarded as much more exotic than I think it is being regarded. Marlane is writing from this entirely open, vulnerable place about human experience. Then she’s filtering it through this voice--which is distinct and uniquely her own. “But she’s not coming from somewhere esoteric.”

For playwright Meyer, the core of the story is “an aging homosexual who’s at an age where there are no connections; he’s by himself. Straight people make the connection with children. But what if there will never be children?

“I hope audiences like the piece, get it, aren’t confused. But I’m not going to simplify it. I need a certain amount of complication in my work. Ambiguity is good; it makes it mysterious.”

The play was first read to an invited audience at the Los Angeles Theatre Center in March. “I knew we were onto something,” Schweizer said. “By stripping away the naturalistic movement and keeping the performance live and accurate to the characters, but also creating an atmosphere around them in which they existed in a kind of psychological limbo, we were freeing the subtext of the play.”

The set is minimal: black floors and walls, black catwalk, black chair--and Kingfish, the dog, is merely a barking black box.

Some of the props in the show are real; others are “stated but not seen,” Schweizer says. “Buck Henry holds a real chewed-up newspaper, a real chewed-up slipper. There are some drinks, cigarettes, He (the character) is an alcoholic and he’s smoking himself to death.”

The director smiled, stubbing out his own cigarette.

“It’s like, ‘Here’s the direction from one point of view--and here’s the actor on stage with another point of view.’ It gives audiences an opportunity to fill in their perceptions of what it might be. That’s what the core of the play deals with: perceptions of reality.

“Someone’s reality is not another person’s reality. Someone’s belief system--about what they want to do with their life, how far they think it’s possible for them to evolve--is not laid on them by someone else. I wanted the audience to see something, feel something, and fill in that gap.”

With Meyer’s approval, Schweizer imposed several conventions that were not a part of the script.

“There’s nothing in there about the stage directions being read aloud. And the script doesn’t say, ‘An actor is seen on a microphone barking.’ It just says, ‘Bark. Bark, bark, bark.’ ”

“These are strong choices to make on a new work,” he said. “They’re the kind of choices that are usually seen in terms of a deconstructionist (staging) of a known theater piece: ‘Oh, this is an interesting way to do Chekhov.’ ”

But he doesn’t see “Kingfish” as a style exercise. In fact, “at this moment of my life, I need a very strong emotional hook to the material to pull it off.”

In 1986 Schweizer, Philip Littel and Jerry Frankel created “Plato’s Symposium,” in which a group of men ruminate about life, love and an approaching health crisis. Frankel has since died of AIDS.

“So when I do something now, I have to find some core that’s relevant to the battle for transcendence we’re all going through, in the face of this plague.

“And I was very touched by Marlane’s play: the method by which one travels out from a feeling of isolation in the universe, to the creation of a family--out of nothing, out of whatever’s there.”