“The rules are very simple. It’s an upstairs-downstairs play. There are ten actors, ten people live in a very real mansion, and you can follow any one of the ten masters and servants, as long as you’re following somebody. There are always between one and nine scenes happening simultaneously. So you create your own story.” While this description – a multi-room environment, simultaneous scenes, multiple characters to follow and a sense that each audience member creates their own personal edit – may sound strangely familiar to fans of immersive theatre, it’s not Punchdrunk’s latest show that playwright John Krizanc is describing.
He is actually talking about his own play Tamara, which premiered in Toronto in 1981, and went on to run for five years in New York, nine years in Los Angeles, and spawn productions across Europe and South America.
We welcome John into the Voidspace to talk about the process of writing, performing and directing Tamara, the community it created, and the why “sometimes, if you follow the sex, you miss the climax.“
Voidspace:
John, welcome to the Voidspace. To start, I’d love an introduction to who you are and what you do in this space.
John Krizanc:
My name is John Krizanc. I began life as a poet/playwright. In the last 20 or so years, I’ve mainly made a living as a screenwriter, writing various dramas here in Canada.
Voidspace:
What we are talking about today is work of yours that has involved an element of interactivity. The thing that you’re best known for in this space is a play called Tamara, which I understand premiered in 1981. It was a free roaming show, where the audience could choose which of ten characters, and plot threads, to follow through the rooms of a mansion.
Can you just tell me a little bit about Tamara, the premise there?
John Krizanc:
Tamara: it’s a play about art, sex, and politics. It follows the visit of the Art Deco painter, Tamara de Lempicka, to visit Gabriele D’Annunzio, who was Italy’s greatest poet and war hero, on January 10th, 1926.
The play came into being because we were a young theatre company. Richard Rose, who was the original director, and myself, we had a theatre company, Necessary Angel, here in Toronto, Canada. There was going to be the first world theatre festival happening in 1981. Richard wanted me to write a play. I’d written several plays, and they were self-referential: a Pirandello-like play about a poet named John Krizanc, who hates the theatre. Those kinds of plays: where an actor is killed and the police come in and interrogate the audience for the whole second act about why they did nothing.
Voidspace:
Very meta. We love it meta in the Voidspace.
John Krizanc:
I’d read a book published by Franco Maria Ricci, about Tamara de Lempicka. The editor found the journals of Gabriele D’Annunzio’s housekeeper for the week that Tamara came to spend with D’Annunzio. That was what inspired me.
We had no space, and that’s how we came to visit this castle in Toronto. There’s a guy who went bankrupt building a castle in the turn of the century. As we went through that house, I kept thinking of narratives: You could follow this person to the kitchen, and you could set a scene in the swimming pool, in the stables. As we went around, then it became like an upstairs-downstairs story in my head, and then why not follow everybody all at the same time?
That’s how it evolved. The rules are very simple. It’s an upstairs-downstairs play. There are ten actors, ten people live in a very real mansion, and you can follow any one of the ten masters and servants, as long as you’re following somebody. There’s always between one and nine scenes happening simultaneously. So you create your own story. And a lot of people come to the play and it’s like they were in parallel universes, when they talk to each other afterwards: “That guy was Jewish? This guy did that?” They’re quite shocked when they compare notes.
The best part of the play – sadly, for me, the writer – is the intermission, where people talk to each other. We serve a full dinner with that intermission, and we moved dessert to after the end of the play, because people at the end really wanted to get together and compare notes, and follow different people.
Voidspace:
So, it was the space that came first, and that led you to the structure?
John Krizanc:
Yeah, because we couldn’t afford a theatre. And it turns out it’s largely about real estate: you have to have a building. When you’re young and hungry, you just can’t get a space. It’s true today. Necessary Angel did a lot of site-specific work. We would do it in shopping malls and places that had a storefront that would give us a space for a couple of weeks. We wanted to get out and close to people.
Voidspace:
Break out that way.
John Krizanc:
I was always somebody who was uncomfortable with the theatre, and was very self-conscious about being in it. But the thing that I like the most about Tamara is that it is a play for people who don’t like the theatre, because they just want to run around this space and stuff. They stand right beside the actor. They’re deeply connected to the experience. When the actors are cooking food, they really are cooking it, and sharing it with the audience.
Voidspace:
There’s food shared as well? Gosh.
John Krizanc:
It is immersive in the sense that we have a real kitchen and we cook garlic before the show, and every room has its own perfume that is scented with, and there’s a soundtrack.
Voidspace:
I’d love to hear if you had any particular influences in terms of what had come before, because as I start to look at the history of this stuff, it feels like every 20 years or so everyone reinvents the wheel again. Someone, somewhere, will say “Hang on a minute! Why don’t we make something site-specific [or environmental, or immersive, or whatever the definition of the day]? What a great idea!” So, I was interested if your approach in Tamara sprung from necessity or if there was anything else driving it.
John Krizanc:
You can go back to the Middle Ages, right? When they used to do those processional plays: the Stations of the Cross, the Mystery plays. They were environmental plays.
I think that the difference is that when people talk about immersive, Punchdrunk or something like that, it’s an environment and you discover the play. Tamara has all of those things. You can open the fascist Finzi’’s drawer and you can find files on people, guests of the villa. It has all those little details in terms of the set, and stuff like that.
But it mainly is about point of view. I think that what’s unique about Tamara. You can’t change the events. There’s no world where Anna Karenina doesn’t jump in front of the train. But you can tell the story from Vronsky’s point of view. Jesus is still going to die on the cross. But whether Mary Magdalene tells the story or one of the apostles tells it, it’s a very different story.
Tamara is about the role of the artist in society. Most of the ‘upstairs’ characters, they’re all artists. But if I have a fascist, then I have a liberal, and I have a Communist and an agnostic, and a super religious person in the mix, you’re going to be seeing the situation from some very different perspectives.
Voidspace:
The thing that jumped out for me as being quite distinctive is how audiences are not allowed to wander off by themselves. They have to stay with a character.
John Krizanc:
Director Richard Rose and I used to fight about this in the early days because he really wanted people to just wander. But we found that if you just walk in on a scene, you miss how that scene began, you disturb everybody, and you’re always getting this sense of incompleteness. When we opened in Los Angeles, the first review we got from the Los Angeles Times was really bad. And it turned out that the reviewer hadn’t stuck with a character, he’d just wandered around. We had very simple rules, and he didn’t obey those rules, and that’s why he had a bad experience at the play. It’s true that if you just wander around, you always feel unsatisfied, because you’re really not clear about what the actual story is.
We tried just assigning audience members to a character, and that was terrible, too. Because If you do that, then the audience feels like they paid all this money and got stuck with the wrong character.
Voidspace:
There’s a balance to be had there.
John Krizanc:
It was a big mistake that I called the play, Tamara. I just liked the sound of it.
Voidspace:
I read the play a few times from different perspectives. Actually, the first perspective I went for was Emilia, one of the servants, because I always think the best thing in this kind of show is to follow the low status characters because they tend to have juicier stories.
John Krizanc:
That’s right.
Voidspace:
But I definitely assumed that Tamara was going to be the main character, so I went through from her perspective next.
John Krizanc:
When you watch the play, when she enters and then D’Annunzio – he was known as this “great seducer” – when he takes Tamara off to her room, everybody thinks something’s going to happen. He’ll take 50% of the audience. Suddenly, nobody is following the other eight people in the house.
Then they quickly realise that Tamara’s not the most interesting character. There’s this chauffeur guy, and he seems to be running around with a gun. And the maid. Her life is super stressed out. Even when I go to the play, I just tend to stay ‘downstairs’. Usually the director will say: “Could you follow somebody ‘upstairs’?”
Voidspace:
When this became apparent, was it a bit of a shock for people? Was a bit of settling in needed, to get audience flows right?
John Krizanc:
We used to give young students free tickets because it’s like having a plant in the house. They would be the ones who would be really hungry to get to a certain scene, or whatever. They would dart across the living room to follow Emilia, the maid, down to the kitchen. They would do it with such force that people would think, “Oh! That must be important!” and they would draw an audience.
Voidspace:
You’d give people progressive discounts the more times they came. That feels like a financially crazy proposition, but also fantastic.
John Krizanc:
Well, a third of people who came to see Tamara in LA and New York were there more than three times. There was a whole Tamara 10 Club that was several hundred people: after you’ve gone 10 times, you get a free ticket, provided you bring another couple. Those were real fanatics, who kept coming back.
Voidspace:
How did you feel about them?
John Krizanc:
I was fascinated.
I saw Tamara in Pittsburgh a few years back, and I kept coming across scenes I had no memory of writing at all.
When we first did it, of course, there were lots of holes in the script. We’d be in previews, and actors would ask for lines to fill downtime, and you’d have to always keep writing. Then also we found that if the whole thing wasn’t completely scripted, then you would get it. Actors would start to improvise. Some of those improvisations (a character playing an instrument, for example, some business with orange peels) became part of the script.
It’s funny because when I’ve seen Tamara somewhere after it’s been running for years, it tends to get a little worse as a show, because the acting style devolves. It devolves, because each of the actors is trying hard to get an audience for their character, which makes it a very different experience. That’s not something that even entered into my head when I wrote it.
It becomes very competitive. Some of them have these grand high hand gestures that will sweep four audience members out the door with them.
Voidspace:
The question is how you keep directorial control, because you’ve got so many stories whizzing around, it’s going to take you 10 times as long to make sure you’ve got a handle on everything as you would in a regular show.
John Krizanc:
When we were starting the second run of the production, in LA, we decided not to have ADs prompting on mics, or doing any of that stuff. The way that Richard Rose conceived it, is we do a table read of the entire script on the first day, and from the second day of rehearsals, they’s be on their feet and and we would run the whole thing. What they learn is that If they go all ‘methody’, as I call it, and do their little thing, and throw in all of the pauses that they want, then they quickly find out that they are screwing up the whole show, because all the timing is going to be off.
If you’re in this together, it’s a collective thing. The timing of the whole play does not usually work for at least a week or two of rehearsals. That’s the painful bit.
Voidspace:
I was going to ask how you get the timing without using a soundtrack. Punchdrunk performers are counting in their head all the time, and a lot of it is about keeping to the beat. But when you’re trying to use dialogue more and deliver something a bit different, how do you get that working?
John Krizanc:
I don’t know if this is actually true, but certainly people tell me that it’s true, that if a bunch of women work in the same office, they find out their periods are all happening at the same time. They become synchronised with each other, entrained. So they just know.
There’s a scene where Emilia, the maid, is in the living room, and de Spiga, who’s this dilatant composer. He wants her to drink cognac, and she’s never had it before. He’s just amusing himself by trying to get her to drink it. And there are two doors, and one door opens, and Dante Fenzo, the valet of the house, comes through the door. On the opposite side, Aélis, the head housekeeper, comes in, and they catch this action, and they both shout at the same time,”Emilia!”. It’s a silly moment, but there’s this incredible frisson when it happens because everybody is like, “How is that possible that they all just entered at the same time from opposite sides of the room?” And that’s when I know that the show is starting to work.
Some actors feel like they ought to quit if no one follows them. I remember one actor asked me what they should do if that happened. II said, “Well, then you have to do the scene as if you had an audience.” He said, “If nobody follows me, I’m going straight down to the bar!”
Voidspace:
I suppose no one’s going to wander in in the middle of your scene, so I guess you could get away with it, if no one follows you.
John Krizanc:
But you’ve got to stay in it, haven’t you? You have to stay in it. You have to know your timing. That’s the only way to keep the rhythm of the night.
Voidspace:
Completely. There are points, aren’t there, where one of the house rules at the beginning is that you can’t open any doors yourself. You can’t follow someone if they shut the door behind them. Does everybody get a little bit of downtime behind a closed door? Was that part of your equation?
John Krizanc:
No, there’s no downtime. The only downtime is for Carlotta, who she leaves halfway through the second act. She just storms out of the house. In the second act, some of the actors go to Gardoña, so they drive off in an actual car, so you can’t follow them. There’s a 1927 Bugatti waiting outside, and they just zoom off. And the audience are left standing there going “Well, what do we do now?”
Voidspace:
I’d just wanted to be in that Bugatti with them. Check the boot.
John Krizanc:
We did used to have audiences like that. When we performed Tamara at the Park Avenue Armoury in New York, on the top floor of that building, there was a homeless shelter. They had their own dedicated door, but somehow one person got in through our space, through our kitchen door, and he had an audience with him. They phoned us and said, “We have some of your Park Avenue ladies are up here, and they think it’s part of the play.”
Voidspace:
Art imitating life!
John Krizanc:
Then there was this handsome actor who at the top of the second act, after intermission, starts naked in the shower. Somehow, a bunch of the audience knew in advance, that’s where you go see this hot stud naked in the shower.
Voidspace:
You were saying that the play is about art and sex and politics. What does that mean for the audience, who were choosing which of those strands to follow and seek out?
John Krizanc:
I think that it is very much about the audience member. You know what I mean? Because I would say: sometimes, if you go for the sex, you miss the climax.
Because you’re making decisions on the fly, and then you have to question yourself about, what was it that made me leave the room and follow Emilia the housemaid, or Luisa Baccara, the pianist? Those edits are happening all the time, and it is fascinating.
I was really interested in the tyranny of linear narrative. I realised that as a theatregoer you just experience something from the very manipulative position of the playwright. “Look at me! See what I see, and I will convince you of my views.” Your gaze is being directed. With Tamara I wanted to try not to direct the audience’s gaze, to try to give a lot of integrity to all of the characters. No matter how repugnant their views might be to me personally, I tried to find a human way through their story.
Voidspace:
Was there a sense of a evolving audience or fan response, to Tamara? Nowadays you’ve got the internet and you know that something has become a cult hit because a new Discord or Facebook group has popped up about it, and people are feverishly sharing their experiences. Was that something that happened in the pre-digital age, too?
John Krizanc:
It certainly did. I’ve written other plays, and usually in intermission, as the anonymous playwright standing there, you listen to the audience, and they’re talking about where they’re going to go next or what happened in some sports game last night, and nobody’s talking about your play. That’s not the case with Tamara. A fond memory for me was being at Tamara, LA, and Yevgeny Yevtushenko was the guest of Warren Beatty, and Jack Nicholson was there. Everybody was talking at intermission, and nobody said, “Hey, Mr. Nicholson, I like your movies.” They were like, “Who did you follow?” And that, to me, was the highest compliment.
A lot of people got married and met because of Tamara, because it turned out it was a great place to date. You’d break apart and run around to different rooms, and then talk about who you followed afterwards. Or you could come up to a total stranger, and it would be perfectly acceptable to talk to them because you would want to know who you followed and what transpired, and you’d compare notes.
That aspect of it probably is the best part of the play, I think. It’s just wonderful to see people connecting.
Voidspace:
I’d like to talk a bit now about the many restagings I Tamara that there have been across the United States and Europe. When it comes to site-specific theatre, restaging always seems like such a problematic thing, potentially.
John Krizanc:
You would think it would be really hard, because timing is everything in this show to some degree. But the show seems to contract and expand to the space fairly well. That said, I always reread the play when it’s restaged and rewrite some scenes. Some things that were a bit more of their time.
I think for me, Tamara worked best in the layout of the LA production. We had done it for a year in Toronto before we went to LA, and I spent another year rewriting it for the LA production. That house had a really good flow because it was designed for public assembly. When you’re doing it in a mansion or whatever, often some of the servant rooms are too small, or you get into these narrow hallways and it’s structurally awful.
We’re negotiating now, some people want to do it on a cruise ship of all places!
The biggest problem with mounting Tamara is that it has a cast of 10, and you’re limited by the square footage you can have. In order for it to work, it has to vaguely resemble like you’re in somebody’s mansion. I like the audience at 100, then it feels like the right balance, and you become a community, as we were talking about earlier.
Voidspace:
You’ve kept Tamara running for 40 odd years, with multiple restagings of an ostensibly site-specific work. How do you keep the engine running on that?
John Krizanc:
It’s not really through any effort on my part. It’s just that people keep finding it in different stages of their lives, or they hear about it and then they become curious. But I maintain that it is because theatre, ultimately, is always about character.
Site-specific, environmental, immersive, whatever you call it. That’s all fascinating, but that’s just a matter of surfaces. Ultimately, we’re drawn towards characters. That’s why I think the point of view part of Tamara is the key – just to have characters all living their truth within the context of this thing. Then the audience gets invested. If they don’t care about character, they just don’t care about your show.
Voidspace:
What advice do you have for anyone starting out in this field?
John Krizanc:
I would start from the space. I’d say, try to find the space you want to inhabit and then figure out things from there. I would always start with, “Here’s a great idea, and I can use these two actors”. I’d write that scene and then slowly add in everybody else.It will start to happen organically, in terms of how you start to structure these things. It’s like climbing a mountain. It is just a question of one foot in front of the other, but it’s a bloody big mountain.
Voidspace:
If you can start with a single rock, maybe you won’t notice quite how big it is. Thank you.
The playtext of Tamara is available to purchase.