JustArts: What motivated you to join the production of Art?

Aaron Fischer: I saw the play when I was much younger, and for a project I was doing about a year or two ago, I reread it. My plan was to read [the play] over a week, but I was so gripped, I couldn’t move away from it. It’s a terrific play. The words just jump off the page, and the characters are so clear—you don’t even need a performance to make it come to life. It’s witty, and it’s interesting. The subject matter is really captivating.

JA: What’s it like working with such a small cast?

AF: It was great! I was a little worried about it, because if people don’t like each other—but it turned out to be a really great group! Raphael [Stigliano ’18] and Dylan [Hoffman ’18] and Max [Moran ’17] all just sort of meshed really quickly. As a director, the best part is just seeing the actors like each other. That’s the most fun part of the process.

JA: Did you have any challenges as director?

AF: It was hard to figure out space. A big part of the vision for the show was to get away from a Proscenium stage and to do a really intimate setting. It was really hard to find an intimate space on campus, because we don’t really have a lot of spaces like that—you know, like a black-box stage. The search was tough, and we ended up with Ridgewood [Quad], which turned out to be a blessing, because Ridgewood is awesome. It has this very sort of “apartment” feel, which is what the [play’s] set is, so that worked out nicely.

JA: What was your favorite scene to direct?

AF: The show is not really broken into scenes. It literally doesn’t have any scene numbers. It’s just 90 pages. So—the first scene.

JA: How did opening night go?

AF: It was brilliant. It was just awesome. We had a full house, and the actors just owned it. All the set pieces came together, all the props came together, all the costumes—everything came together really nicely.

JA: Was there something that the cast was most excited for?

AF: A big part of the idea for the show was to really engage the audience. The script itself has a lot of monologues or soliloquies, and they really encourage you to engage with the audience. We took that idea and expanded on that, and that was what we were doing with the intimate space. It can be kind of tough to rehearse—I’d give the actors notes, like make sure to say that line to the audience, and when I said the audience, what I meant was like those 12 empty chairs over there. And that can be really tough. [The actors] dealt with it really well in rehearsal. But I think it was just awesome for them to have an audience.

JA: Was there one thing you wanted the audience—those 12 chairs—to take away from the show?

AF: Yes and no. There’s didactic theater, which is theater where there is a message and you’re supposed to come away with some sort of new information. I think [in Art] there is a moral to the story, but I think it’s really bad practice to preach. I think of it in terms of like the difference between normative and descriptive: I’m not trying to tell the audience anything, but you sort of have to know what’s happening. And I hope the audience understood what was happening. To me, the show is about—and the way I phrased it in the description was—how small arguments can end friendships.

It basically boils down for Yasmina Reza, the playwright, to the idea that we put people into boxes and we sort of limit their roles. We assign them roles in our lives, and when they suddenly stop playing those roles, we start having a problem with them. I hope people saw that that was what was going on, but I hope that no one felt like they were being preached to. The play does a really good job of that. [In] the ending, it’s hard to tell what [Reza] is trying to say. There’s a final moment where each of [the characters] has a monologue and it’s not really abundantly clear what she’s trying to say, and I think that’s part of the avoiding getting to preach-y.

—Brooke Granovsky

Editor’s note: Max Moran’17 is the forum editor of the Justice.