Interview with Alina Jacobs & Blake Robbins – Reuben Dendinger
December 12, 2024
Earlier this year I had the privilege of witnessing two extraordinary works of theater:
Alina Jacobs presented Repeat Victimization (An Immurement Play) at HERE Arts Center from July 24th to the 27th, having previously performed the play at Westbeth on December 16th and 17th of last year. Jacobs wrote, directed, and acted in the play, which concerns three women immured (entombed alive) in a mysterious prison with only each other and a television screen for company, relating their life stories through surreal, ironic monologues and eerie synthpop jingles.
On the night of October 23rd, on a rooftop in Bushwick, four actors silhouetted against the Manhattan skyline read Public Visitation, a meticulously choreographed tempest of overlapping speech set against a constant heartbeat of bass drum. Public Visitation was written and directed by Blake Robbins, who also acted in the play alongside Jacobs, his friend and collaborator. Though an attempt on the 26th to present the play on the Williamsburg Bridge was promptly quashed by New York City’s finest, a third performance was held at Public Works Administration gallery on November 2nd, the jam-packed audience overflowing into the stairwell of the 50th Street subway station where the gallery is tucked away.
Repeat Victimization and Public Visitation were both marked by a certain defiant mania and tragic whimsy, as well as an exhilarating sense of being authentically new. I insisted on meeting with Blake and Alina to discuss their work and the state of independent theater today. The following interview, recorded in Brooklyn on November 13th, has been edited for length and clarity.
Reuben. Blake, you call Public Visitation a “stochastic drama.” What does that mean? Does that refer to the composing process?
Blake. Yes. It refers to chance-based procedures I used to write the script. “Stochastic” is a word that comes from mathematics. Iannis Xenakis, the composer, used it – I’m a big fan of his. He pioneered the use of probability systems in musical compositions, among other things. For this play I used Markov chains and cut-up methods…
R. What’s a Markov chain?
B. How do I describe it? I’m going to come off as a dilettante with the math stuff…You insert text into a program and it basically generates new text based off the probability given to you by the previous text. Auto-correct is a popular version of this. It was invented by a Russian guy, Andrey Markov. He was denied tenure under the Tsar, and then the Bolsheviks granted him tenure. Xenakis was also a Communist…I’m interested in the Marxist roots of these forms, it’s like how dialectical materialism predicates each era – each mode of production is built off the one that existed before it.
The structure of Public Visitation is modeled after that of a DJ set. There’s 18 tracks within an hour or so. Each track or scene is given a hexagram from the I Ching – I asked the I Ching a different question for each scene. Then while writing I used a lot of cut-up methods, different flavors of Markov chains, and three different versions of Chat-GPT, and the proto-version of Chat-GPT as well. In my opinion Chat-GPT got worse with each generation. You can do some really fucked up Burroughs-esque language with the earlier versions and then they smoothed it out. Anyway, that’s what makes this stochastic.
R. Public Visitation has all of this simultaneous, overlapping dialogue. Can you tell us about that, and how that fits in with everything you were just describing?
B. Around the same time that I had the initial concept for this I had just acted in a production of The Antipodes by Annie Baker. She’s known for her use of pauses and interruptions. I wanted to push that to the extreme, just be tastelessly extreme with the interruptions. I also recently was hosting a reading series of Brecht’s Lehrstücke plays, which sort of use a chorus, and I’m interested in the pre-classical chorus as well, as well as multi-admin shitposting accounts where it’s like a singular face and voice but you don’t know who’s behind it, so it’s like a virtual chorus effect.
R. If I’m not mistaken you have a background in radical, activist theater. Can you tell us about that?
B. I had done some theater that was political with like, punks and stuff, in Texas…I was also involved in a Theatre of the Oppressed group in Austin called Gathering Ground Theatre. Augusto Boal, the guy who originated Theatre of the Oppressed, he argues that most previous forms of theater were defined by catharsis as this fluid motion of social purgation where the mores of society were reinforced by their onstage exorcism. Then Brecht does this thing where the audience becomes the active force and their perception defines the performance, so you stimulate that perception in a way that it invites active viewership into how social realities are contingent and malleable, and this allegedly has something to do with revolution, though Theater of the Oppressed is easily used by HR groups and liberals and non-profits…There was a guy who I worked with in that group, in the last play we did in Austin before COVID, he was the lead in it and then he kind of disappeared. I later found out he died. I feel like Public Visitation ended up being about him specifically. He was in and out of homelessness, and really devoted himself to activism and art. His death really affected me. I ended up dedicating the play to him.
R. You mentioned meme pages earlier. You’re a retired meme admin, can you tell us more about that?
B. I feel like a lot of that stuff is lost to oral history. I think Public Visitation on the level of subject matter is about the desolation of public spaces and, to quote Paul Virilio, the uneasiness of being together, of mass individualism. That relates to non-places like the DMV or an Amazon fulfillment center or a subway platform. But then also the psychic terrain of the digital, which is a hyper-individualistic space where people in their little rooms come together into this network where there’s mass tension of atomized people. I think you’ve got to hit it sideways. There’s a lot of internet artists who will use Impact font in their paintings, and it’s so fucking corny to me. I don’t think it’s enough to borrow the signifiers of this stuff, you’ve got to expose the underlying logic. The logic of this play is similar to context collapse, centrally, which in the most exciting fashion I’ve witnessed in manic-depressive alcoholics on Instagram. I think they embody that zeitgeist very well.
R. Why did you decide to stage it as a reading?
B. There’s two big reasons. One is money. I think I would have done this play two years ago if I wasn’t dead broke at the time, wondering how I was going to eat. The other reason, which is more theoretical…I talked about context collapse, which I think theater is uniquely poised to address. I think the other really big thing that’s uniquely theatrical that I was obsessed with was the concept of off-stage and I wanted to do a play where off-stage was centered. I was wracking my brain throughout the writing process…I probably have 20 pages of stage directions that I deleted, which Alina has seen, that were like somewhat detailed, involving systems of curtains and corny smoke-and-mirrors type stuff, and it was almost going to be like a flamenco ballet, which would have been corny and expensive. There’s probably a reason the universe told me not to do that. I had done a couple of audio dramas in the past, and I realized that audio was the ultimate way to put off-stageness in prime view. It just goes back to the acousmatic sound, and I was reading a lot of Michel Chion, who was an early musique concrète guy. The possibilities of the disembodied voice, even if you can see the speaker, for suggesting a multitude of worlds. If you really want to teleport from here to there, and blur the lines of time and space, audio is uniquely capable of dealing with that.
R. Alina, let’s talk about Repeat Victimization. What inspired you initially to write a play about immurement?
Alina. I was interested in this play by Hrotsvitha called The Martyrdom of the Holy Virgins (also known as Dulcitius). Hrotsvitha was a 10th century secular canoness writing in Latin. It’s about these three girls being martyred for being Christians in the Roman Empire. There’s this moment where they’re all waiting to die…It’s a funny scene, it’s a comedy…This guy wants to rape them, his name is Dulcitius, and he goes into the dungeon where they’re being held and God does a miracle and the guy thinks that these pots and pans are actually these three sisters, and he starts making out with the pots and pans. He gets covered in soot, and everyone makes fun of him, he humiliates himself. And so for a while the idea was just about confinement, but then I remembered the word immurement, and I was like, oh that’s obviously what’s going on.
R. Yeah, it’s a beautiful word.
A. Yeah, it comes from the Latin word for “wall.” I guess I was writing it, I was in grad school, and it was the last semester of the program. I had been writing a lot of, to the extent where I thought it was becoming a bit of a joke, I was writing these historical plays, they were kind of all about my interest in various historical topics…This was the beginning of 2023. I was like, I’m going to write a really naturalistic comedy. It was going to be about an adult iCarly kind of character [laughter]. It was so bad. It was also not funny. It was just so mean and ugly. But I wanted to write something beautiful. So I was like, well I’m going to write a synth musical instead.
R. Repeat Victimization I think is a really heartbreaking and horrific play, but it’s also extremely funny. It’s also very political, and there’s this sense of the absurdity of injustice, this dark humor that reminded me of Kafka. Can you speak to the humor of the play and balancing that with these really dark, political themes that you’re dealing with?
A. The whole drama is around this question of, are we trapping ourselves because of our own mental prison, or are we actually trapped with a real electrical door? Kind of a Kafka-inspired question. I think it is funny, but I don’t know if we’re always laughing at the same things, me and the audience. I was going for dissonance with expectation and reality, or two simultaneous things happening…There’s a scene in the sandwich shop where the customer is going on about their repeat victimization and the two employees are doing this like sexual mime with each other. I was trying to pair expectation and dissonance in a lot of ways…There’s a type of cruelty, I’ve realized, doing the show a second time…A cruelty, not toward the audience in the Artaud way, but I see a lot of me being cruel to the characters as a way of me being cruel to myself in a lot of ways that I wasn’t aware of at the time. I think that might be the vehicle for some of the humor. There’s an absence of compassion in the show, it exists but it is very stingy on compassion. There’s even a part at the end where there’s an indication of faith, the existence of more hopeful simultaneous worlds with the dream, which is a real dream that I had about angels. But then right after that it’s immediately reversed. There’s like a weird defense mechanism against the expression of compassion in the play. It makes me raise my eyebrow a little bit looking back on it.
R. At least for me watching the play, it has this real resonance and sense of urgency in the context of the genocide in Gaza, where people are literally being buried alive, buried underneath rubble in bombed buildings. You wrote the play a couple of years ago but when you were staging it was this something you were thinking about?
A. In the play there’s a video clip about Soha Bechara who was imprisoned after attempting to assassinate Antoine Lahad, the head of the South Lebanon Army, in 1988. So I was thinking about all this while I was writing it. In the second act, the phenomenon of the character, the customer who’s kind of talking about because they were a victim of the previous atrocity they now own the atrocity narrative and they’re the only person who can talk about it, obviously the Zionist manipulation of the holocaust is the most extreme or obvious example of that. This is my experience of the historical event therefore it is the only narrative that matters and it is mine, it is part of my oppressed identity, what I cling to, or why I have this understanding of the world.
However I feel like it would be a little bit sus to be like, marketing oneself as being politically insightful. I hope people in the audience can make the right connections in their mind. But they’re going to make the connections they’re going to make, I can’t demand connections to be made. I guess there’s also a degree of universality in the situation – we all find ourselves immured, our minds immured within our bodies, trapped in cycles, manners of thinking. Not as literal.
B. After October 7th my tune on the liberating potential of raves had a shadow cast over it. I don’t think anyone would walk away from Public Visitation thinking it was agitprop, and I’m not really interested in bending it to be some kind of grotesque statement piece or something, but that just became the psychic reality of the play – blissed-out on Molly, dancing to the four-on-the-floor pulse as some sort of siege or holocaust is happening next door. When I read Alina’s script for the first time I felt like there were similarities. Not dealing with this head on in a topical way but just as the latent reality of the world.
R. Let’s talk about influences, in particular I want to see if there’s like a Venn diagram, if there’s people who you both really like and feel influenced by, and maybe names on either side who you disagree with.
B. I think Sarah Kane is right in the middle. You’re Blasted, I’m…4.38 Psychosis.
A. 4.48!
R. Is that correct? You’re Blasted and he’s 4.48?
A. For these plays specifically…I think literally they’re both Crave. But my play is probably closer to Blasted.
B. For influences we both share, we have Caryl Churchill, and I adore Fassbinder too. But he’s more of a filmmaker.
A. No, he has plays.
B. He does have plays. One of them a little controversial…
A. Garbage, the City, and Death…
B. Yeah we don’t need to linger on that. [laughter] We should probably omit that…On the opposite side I have Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, who I like, but you don’t, right?
A. I haven’t read his new play…I just saw a copy of it on the shelves at [redacted].
B. I was just there earlier today. I shoplifted The Balcony by Jean Genet.
R. Should we include your shoplifting habits in the interview? Are you going to get banned from [redacted]? If anyone who works there reads Expat…
B. And they recognize me…
R. And they’re like, that’s the guy!
A. But Genet was a thief!
B. Yeah, I would hope they’d appreciate the irony.
A. That’s the spirit of Genet. Being gay and doing crimes.
B. That’s right…Hey, I’m not gay! I just like a lot of really gay stuff.
A. There’s a lot of Brecht in Repeat Victimization. When we think about the screen [the presence of a television screen on stage], this object in the play, with this non-theatrical role of broadcasting information. The screen is an object in the first scene in the play. It has this significance in the world of the play, it’s a prop, but in the interludes between the scenes it takes on this other quality – yeah we’re watching a movie but it also reminds us that we are spectators watching something. Maybe the screen also reflects us, I don’t know…Blake created the video pieces.
B. Yeah, its a disrupting presence. The distancing effect is a cornerstone of Brechtian theory. The theatrical devices that take you out of the reality of the play into a more active viewership.
A. Also the songs, the musical aspect. It’s not songs like in a musical, its like the way songs work in a Brecht play, like Threepenny Opera. We are doing a song for you the audience, it’s not like I’m a character and I’ m expressing my emotion in song. We’re actors doing a song for you in this moment in the play.
B. What I like so much about the songs in that play is that they do feel like, its shit that’s stuck in your head from Walgreens.
R. They’re like jingles, but really good. Amazing jingles.
A. When I was in college I wrote an adaptation of Woyzeck by Georg Büchner. At the time I didn’t know how to write plays, so it wasn’t good. But I think a lot about Woyzeck and the way it’s composed in this fragmented manner, the incompleteness of the narrative…It was compiled from handwritten notes after his death, the editors had to guess what certain words were. He died very young of typhus, at like age 23. There’s also a lot of songs in that play, folk songs that the characters are just singing because they know them, but it’s not a musical. I think there’s also a type of weird brutality in it. One of the uniting themes in the stuff that I’ve written is this medical pathologizing of everyday life, and the way we’re all victims of that. In Woyzeck you have this soldier participating in medical experiments by this doctor who has him only eat peas.
R. What about influences from outside theater?
A. My life really changed when I heard about chiastic structure, also known as ring structure. It’s a very old non-linear narrative structure. The most important point is in the middle, and then there’s a feeling of things circling back in new ways. There are many examples of it in the Koran and the Bible. I became really interested in it and there’s a lot of ring structures in Repeat Victimization. I find it very satisfying…It’s a way of organizing chaotic elements into a self-contained logic.
Artuad’s theater of cruelty, in one of his essays he says language should take on the character language has in dreams, I tried to do that. History is also an influence. I tried to integrate historical allusions to get people to figure things out for their damn selves. But I don’t know if people are really doing that when they watch the plays, I think they’re just like “Oh, that was cool…”
B. I already mentioned Paul Virilio. He’s like a philosopher of speed, you might call him. He’s one of those pomo guys where its like every other line you’re like, what the fuck are you talking about? Maybe I’m too dumb for this, this is nonsense. Then every other other line, you’re like this is fucking fire. Also Gravity’s Rainbow, what’s between the binary of the zero and the one, once the V2 rocket has hit you the sound comes after…Time-space compression and speed were big philosophical influences for this. Virilio writes about raves being the ideological site of the times. I got the name of the play from the Kanye West lyric, “public visitation, we met at Borders.” That Virilio quote, something like “Eyes everywhere, no blind spots left. What shall we dream of when everything is made visible, we dream of being blind.” I think Kanye unconsciously living that philosophy, staging that philosophical dilemma…Also the Gateway Tapes you know those, the CIA audio programming shit, MK Ultra stuff. Gangstalking, as a phenomenon. My co-workers, sad people I’ve known – I’m interested in popular working class misery, that’s my greatest inspiration. Hidetaka Miyazaki who did Dark Souls and Bloodborne, in terms of structure and writing, a very big influence as I was doing the last couple drafts of the script. His way of suggesting an excess of lore, or a world beyond what is visible that is hinted at in the visible. John Ashbery – number one influence on language, collage style juxtapositions in a fluid and musical manner. Obscurity of experience but clarity of feeling, that’s how my friend described it. When I get lost in the world I read Brecht, when I forget how to write I read Ashbery.
R. The reason I wanted to interview you two together is because I see you working in a similar vein. I’d like to hear you both remark on what you think you have in common. Could we give a name to it?
A. I don’t think we could give a name to it. There’s no name for it as of yet. I would say there are similarities. Being an actor in Public Visitation I was experiencing the things I was trying to do as a writer. I’m always trying to make things sound inevitable. The words on the page, you’re saying them because they’re the only things you can say. Everything is because it had to be. That’s the goal when I’m writing. Everything should feel inevitable. When you’re an actor and you’re reading a script that isn’t good, things feel miserable to say.
B. This is why I started playwrighting. I acted a bunch when I was younger. I feel like I’m only truly happy when I’m acting. I was in so many shitty fucking plays…I just wanted to write my own after that.
A. I had a similar trajectory, of being in a lot of bad plays. Words that don’t feel good to say. No matter how much self-gaslighting you do, it’s not okay… When I was in Blake’s play, I was excited to say my lines. I think we’re going for the same thing in that regard.
B. The tyranny of the playwright.
A. I’m pretty tyrannical.
R. Are you saying the tyranny of the playwright is liberating for the actor?
B. Maybe this is my Leninist streak coming out…
A. We’re a little bit authoritarian…
R. I think we need more of that in art.
B. Earlier Alina and I were talking about devised theater, she called it “a coup against the playwright.” [Devised theatre – frequently called collective creation – is a method of theatre-making in which the script or performance score originates from collaborative, often improvisatory work by a performing ensemble. -Wikipedia]
A. We were talking about devised forms of theater and how they kind of exist as a measure of austerity because everyone is poor and can’t pay anyone in the theater, and when you devise a play you kind of put the playwright out of a job. But it’s also kind of an ideological coup against the playwright – it’s people saying, we don’t need that, we’re going to just figure it out ourselves. And there’s nothing inherently wrong with that, obviously.
B. Yeah, it can be done well. The ideological thing I’m interested in is just like the pseudo-democracy, this vague democracy that includes audience interaction and attempts like that. It’s this fake democracy. I think like acting is its own task, and if actors are also playwrights that’s great, but the task of acting is endless. Richard Maxwell’s book Theater for Beginners is great on this, everyone should have that book on hand. With acting you’re always approaching this zero, and having a fixed text that you’re able to dive in and exfoliate every single gap…because the beats are endless. You can always find more beats to hit. And that’s the true task of the actor. Having a fixed text that’s good is in service of and respect, and reverence for people’s attention. And the same thing with audience stuff too. But like the active viewership of the audience is sacred. If it’s passivity it’s because you’re coercing them into catharsis. Active viewership is sacred, that attention is sacred. Giving people something to chew on that respects their attention is good. There’s this nervousness around passivity, like oh, are we oppressing people by demanding their attention? It’s like no, just respect their attention. They’ll take the lead later when they re-enter the world. Devised theater is also just lazy a lot of the time…
A. I think both Blake and I were trying to do a little bit of like, deletion of character, in the actor, traditional theater sense. In Blake’s play, everybody was everybody. And then in my play there are characters, but in some parts I was trying to get us to all be everybody. I think of it as like, no the characters don’t exist beyond this hour and ten minutes that we see them. There are backstories, technically, but there’s nothing going on in the play that isn’t what we’re seeing, the play is an experience of our sense categories for the 70 minutes that it happens. It’s like a piece of music in that way.
R. Do you consider your work to be avant-garde, and do you think that term still has any meaning in 2024?
A. I’m just trying to do my own thing. I don’t know that that word really has much meaning in 2024.
B. I feel like the avant-garde, or the experimental, is a term that I use in the same way that, like when my boss asks me, when I’m talking a little bit too much shit about Biden, and I have to explain, “Oh, don’t worry, I’m a leftist!”
A. [laughter] Yeah, yeah, that’s true.
B. I think avant-garde, experimental, these are all genre terms of convenience. Back in the 60s, there were all these people like Richard Foreman, the Wooster Group, Living Theater, and they were just fucking doing shit. And then all the sudden you can get a degree in “Experimental Theater,” it’s like a program you can go through at NYU. As for “avant-garde…”
A. There might be a literal truth to the term “avant-garde,” if it just means the most forward part…
R. But there’s a political dimension to it too, isn’t there?
A. Cornelius Cardew says that the avant-garde takes a morbid fascination with the decaying process of capitalism. And he’s not saying that’s necessarily a progressive thing at all. It’s actually kind of sad and pathetic. Because the capitalist class is not dying off peacefully, it’s doing everything in its power to continue its oppression of working people, etc., even though it’s decaying, and the avant-garde is kind of just watching the shit go down and kind of hee-heeing about it, or not hee-heeing, don’t put that in there…
B. No that’s good, I like that. [laughter]
A. I remember reading this from Cardew and feeling pretty called-out.
B. I feel that too. [laughter]
A. I feel like that’s something I’m always grappling with when I’m writing about very intense historical or political topics. To what extent is this just sicko shit, just voyeurism and tokenizing, sort of just like, eating at the buffet table of calamity, the disintegration we’re all living through and not effecting in an efficient or productive way? If there is an avant-garde in 2024, I don’t know what they are, maybe they aren’t working in the English language at all.
B. There are avant-gardes out there, for sure.
A. There must be, just mathematically speaking. [laughter] Somebody’s got to be the avant-garde, statistically.
R. In the past avant-garde artistic movements were associated with radical political projects, which for the most part no longer exist today. Is that part of what you’re saying, because we don’t have that political horizon, we’ve also lost that aesthetic horizon?
A. There’s got to be a correlation…Thinking about when Cardew wrote Stockhausen Serves Imperialism, things are way worse now, in terms of the development of political movements.
B. Cardew was also head of the musicians union, or whatever, he got David Bowie kicked out of it for being a fascist. He was later assassinated by MI5.
R. He was assassinated?
A. It was a sus car accident.
B. This has been a constant hang throughout my life – being a partisan without a party. Cardew is a little extreme about that…His solution to that was like, we just play folk songs at union halls, which is great but at the same time I think we should just try to make the best possible art we are capable of making, be friends of truth, and align ourselves with political opportunity and development where we can find it. There’s a Brecht quote, there’s actually several relevant Brecht quotes but I’ll pick one – “Will there be singing in the dark times? Yes, there will be singing about the dark times.” I struggle with that. The best thing we can do to make art better is to develop a new society, and we may or may not develop that society through violent revolutionary means, but a society that provides free time and resources through socialism. That’s the best thing we can do for art. Until then we should just be truthful, and I guess we’ll sing about the dark times.
R. What’s your sense of the state of independent theater in New York today?
A. I grew up in New York and I’ve been active in theater since I was a child. I’ve witnessed a lot of the various levels of play production. So, I never got COVID vaccinated [laughter]. Even if I was vaccinated, I was very ideologically opposed to the complete barring of people from theater spaces for medical reasons. I always thought that theater people were annoying, but this caused me to have a serious shift of how I thought about it, of one day hoping to be accepted by mid-level bourgeois independent theater, my opinion shifted to being, well, I’m probably never going to take part in this in the way that I thought, because I was pseudo-legally barred from entering a theater. And the theater spaces kept their vaccine requirements after the city ordinance ended. Some theaters still haven’t updated their websites about it. It caused me to feel a lot of repulsion and alienation.
B. I developed that revulsion without anything to do with COVID…I wasn’t going to see plays because I thought they all sucked. Me and my friends in Austin actually did a play during the pandemic where we aggressively followed COVID precautions, we were all behind plexiglass…You would have liked it. I’m vaccinated, for the record! [laughter].
A. I became pretty like, well I’m never going to do a play in a theater space with a lighting grid or anything like that. I felt pretty comfortable rejecting everything. I don’t want to say that I resent theater people for their extreme devotion to the abandonment of theater at a very critical juncture where they shouldn’t have done that. I don’t resent people because we were all victimized by this. They allowed themselves to be victims without anything in return, basically. So I don’t resent them but I do distrust them, a lot of professional theater-makers, and theater as an institution. I don’t trust them to pick a side. We’re living in an environment of constant crisis, and these crises just keep escalating. I don’t trust theater people to pick the right side in a crisis. But at the same time I do believe in theater as a medium, very much so. It’s complicated.
R. What about independent theater aesthetically, and how you fit into it?
A. I think there are good plays going on, don’t get me wrong. But I think that most theater, I feel like, my work has nothing to do with it aesthetically. All this bourgeois theater, Mac Wellman calls it “the theater of the already-known.” It’s just not what I’m doing, and that’s fine. I do think there is some good stuff going on, but I don’t feel qualified to have the broadest survey of what independent theater is in New York right now. But I do think there’s some very obvious problems. Mostly with space and the accessibility of space. My contention with doing theater in New York is that there’s a presumption that theater spaces can only do theater, and theater can only happen in theater spaces.
B. The tyranny of the lighting grid.
A. I think bringing theater into non-theatrical spaces is pretty important. And that includes other artistic spaces. I find it’s very hard to explain the concept of a play to art world people. I had an interview once with a series at an art institution and it was like “We want to get into time-based art and performance.” But the concept of a play was very stupefying to them. You can’t do a play in an art space, you have to call it like, a “text-based movement piece” [laughter]. The weird separation of different art forms, and what theater is in people’s minds, is a barrier.
B. I feel like the elephant in the room is the Downtown theater scene. I don’t feel like it’s worth mentioning names because I don’t want to harbor any more resentment than I already have. It feels even like, picking out this one playwright that’s in the New York Times more than others feels null because they’re all deeply uninteresting to me. Because it’s all autofiction, whatever that means anymore, but I don’t find the little details of their lives very interesting.
A. I’m going to take a more radical view. There is no Downtown scene, there is no Downtown theater scene, it doesn’t exist.
B. I like this.
A. You were told about it in the media, but it’s not true, sorry! It’s not true, it’s not actually happening.
B. Most of what does happen is in Brooklyn, anyway.
A. If there was proof to the contrary I would maybe consider it, but I would look into who is funding these proofs. I think we have to get into a more radical practice of denial. In a world which says “this is,” it might be constructive or interesting to start saying “this is not, actually,” like the supposed existence of a Downtown theater scene. I don’t even want to say the word “Downtown,” it actually means something else historically. It’s a very strange reuse of the term. I’m going to go with this, no it doesn’t exist, as far as I’m aware. Nothing is happening.
B. I’ll say this. I shoplifted a copy of Dimes Square by Matthew Gasda because I wanted to understand what’s happening. I tried to read it three times, made it about 15 to 25 pages in each time, and I was like, am I illiterate? Can I just not get through a book right now? I don’t know. In that moment though, an illiteracy was produced within me. I couldn’t finish it.
R. What’s next for you both?
A. I feel like I’m ready to go with so much stuff, I just need $5000. I have a lot of plays that are written that will probably never be produced because nobody likes them…
B. We like them!
A. I’ll be playing music. I’m working on writing and recording more pop songs.
B. I’m close to finishing a lot of random stuff right now including some music and a couple movies, but the next big play I’m writing is about radical politics in Texas. It’s going to be an instant classic.
A. One last thing I want to say. This is going to sound really prescriptive but I feel like people who might be thinking of moving to New York should reconsider. Theater should be everywhere. This concentration of theater in New York, it makes sense, but in some ways it’s tragic because we get this weird scarcity where it feels like an artificial scarcity. There’s too many of us for the amount of opportunities there are. I don’t know if I have the right to say this because I am from New York, but I think we should aspire to have theater in every town in America and in the world.
B. I agree with that. More theater everywhere. But theater is not the same glue, socially, that it used to be. This is such a cliché, but I think TikTok has that animating force for society that theater or cinema or literature once had. So if you’re going to do theater now, it should be something that only theater can do.
We need passion, what happened to passion? There are automatons everywhere, and the reactionaries who think they are rebelling are even more trapped by it. I got this phrase from you, Alina, and I sort of adopted it as a criteria: We need work that nourishes the soul.
Alina Jacobs is a writer, actor, and sound enthusiast from NYC. Her work involves disruptive and defamiliarizing reinterpretations of history and language. She holds a BA in Theater from Hunter College and an MFA in Playwrighting from Brooklyn College.
Blake Robbins is an artist from Texas who is interested in politicized aesthetics. He enjoys most every role in the theatre-making process except for costuming, has been getting more invested in film and video, has done some gallery stuff, likes to play the bass, did not go to college, could use some money/resources for future projects, and is freely accepting comp tickets to any and all coming plays and performances. An audio recording of Public Visitation will be released in the near future.