Q & A with Paul Budraitis: I Love That For You

Theater artist Paul Budraitis, who has long history performing and directing in Seattle, recently brought his solo show to On the Boards for its West Coast premiere. I Love That For You, which dealt death as fundamental part of human life, performed to sold out audiences Jan 16-19. Post-show, Paul reflects on the tour, speaks to his processes, and shares how the audience informs his performance.

What has it been like to bring this piece from Berlin, to New York, to Seattle? How has the show shifted for you over the course of the run? 

It’s been a great experience performing the show in all the places that feel like home to me in different ways. Together with my lighting and sound designer Evan Anderson, I started out doing the show in my new home in Berlin, followed a year later with a run at La MaMa in New York, which has gradually started feeling like an artistic home for me after doing Timothy White Eagle’s show there the previous two years. Then, coming back to Seattle, where both Evan and I have long histories, and having the chance to share it with audiences at our beloved On the Boards, was literally a dream come true for both of us.

In terms of how the piece has shifted over the course of the run, I think it’s been mainly in the way that getting to perform it so many times has given me the chance to keep working on being more present with the audience each night and being more sensitive to whatever might be happening in the room. I think the piece speaks to very basic things about being alive and being human, so it’s felt like regardless of where we’ve shown it, people have been connecting with it on that basic, human level, regardless of where in the world they happen to live.

I know it’s a cliché in performance to say that each audience is different, but because the audience arrangement in our show is a single row surrounding the stage, I’m in such close proximity to people every night that I’m able to feel how true that cliché is. It’s one of the things that keeps me excited about performing the piece night-to-night, because it really is a unique experience each time.

Was there a particular show that went really well? What happened/how did you know?

I honestly love performing this show, so every performance has been interesting and meaningful in some way. That said, the fact that the performances at On the Boards were all sold out meant that the show was functioning the way that we hoped it would, with a full gallery of audience witnessing the show and each other every night. This created a kind of focused of energy in the space that I won’t forget.

There’s also a story that I tell in the piece about a dear friend of mine whose wife was navigating life with Stage 4 cancer, and that friend was able to come see the show one night in New York. I wouldn’t say that I gave my best performance that night, because I was so focused on doing the show without messing up, but I won’t ever forget looking him in the eye from time to time as it was happening and feeling how deeply he was connecting to the work and feeling the years of our friendship in the room.

How was this show a departure from works you’ve made in the past? What did it teach you?

This show is quieter. In the past, I think my insecurity led me to want to add a lot of performative fireworks to my work, out of a fear that I might lose people’s attention. I think now I’m just allowing myself to trust the work and the audience more, to trust that people want to lean in and listen, to trust my ability to connect with them and keep them engaged, even if there aren’t a lot of those so-called fireworks.

I’m assuming you’ve been able to talk with audiences after the show. Have things you learned from these conversations given you more information or a different perspective on the work? 

I have had those conversations, and I wish I could have had more.

One memorable example happened in New York, where an older man came up and introduced himself after the show and told me that his wife had died from cancer less than a year before, and that he wanted me to know that I really “got it”.

There’s obviously no way for me to know all that is contained in such a brief comment about  such a complex personal experience; there is an entire lifetime implied by it. But I think this interaction and others like it helped me trust that the show was operating in a way that I hoped it could, as an offering that inspires whatever personal meaning it might for each person who experiences it.

An acquaintance also wrote to me after the show and mentioned one of the transitions in between scenes and how much he appreciated its metaphorical meaning. That particular transition is a technical one for me. I remove four gallery pedestals from the space, one at a time, using a particular physical and rhythmic pattern. I try to do it with as much precision and specificity as I can, and there is an underlying meaning to it for me, but I’m so focused on executing the sequence of actions well that I’m not really thinking much about the metaphorical value as I’m doing it. But this person not only saw the metaphorical ideas as they were intended, but also saw something more in it that wasn’t something we were thinking about when we created it. His response ultimately led me to appreciate that transition in a new way, and I incorporated that new awareness into the way I was performing it.

In this work you discuss the idea of the body as an archive of life. Where and how do you think this show will be archived in your body?

I am definitely someone who processes my life and my experiences much more through my mind and my intellect than through my body, though I do have an awareness of that imbalance and try to remedy it by bringing as much attention as I can to the way that my life experiences land in my body.

It’s probably true that I start making new work from a place of ideas and intuition, and that I then try to move those ideas and intuitive hunches from my mind into my body through the act of rehearsal and performance. I certainly feel like that’s true with this piece, even if I can’t point to a particular place in my body where the experience of performing it sits.

One thing I can say is that a consistent aspect of performing this show is that I never know from night-to-night when an unexpected, resonant feeling of connection to the work will suddenly arise in my body. It can actually feel a little out of control when this happens, like a wave that’s suddenly rising up inside of me, and I have to actively work with it to try to prevent it from washing over me and taking over that particular moment of the performance. I have to admit that I don’t always succeed in keeping it in check the way I’d like to, and I don’t think that it necessarily serves the work when this happens, because in those moments the performance has the potential to become more about what’s going on with me, rather than about what I’m trying to offer to the audience. I can’t control that it happens, though, so it’s just become a part of the internal experience of performing the show, these unexpected moments when body, thought, and emotion suddenly rise up inside me.

All the stories you tell are stories from your life. Can you talk about how your understanding of these experiences changed going from memory to script to performance?

I think this is an essential part of my experience creating and performing this work.

Whenever I talk about the show, I always make a point of emphasizing that it is a work of fiction, and that although all of these things happened, my memory is just as subjective and flawed as everyone else’s. And of course, the additional step of transposing my memories into text is a subjective one as well, with its own practical and aesthetic filters influencing the process. This is what makes the subtle relationship between reality and fiction so interesting to me.

I have to confess that I had the experience recently of going back to one of the physical locations of one of the stories that I tell in the show, and I realized that one of the details that I mention in the story is wrong. When I had that realization, I got a kind of sinking feeling, a feeling like I had been lying to people. But then I was able to remind myself that I’m doing not documentary work, and that the point is much more about being as truthful as I can about how these situations happened, with the understanding that, in the end, the source material that I’m relying on to tell these stories is flawed and deeply subjective. It’s one of the reasons that I was feeling some anxiety around my friend coming to see the show, whose experience with his wife’s cancer I reference. I knew for sure that his experience of the story would certainly be different than my version. 

It’s an interesting thing to experience, the process of taking subjective experiences from your life and transposing them into fiction and then sharing that fiction as an offering of truth. There is something mysterious and strange about it to me. It’s one of the reasons why I deliberately try not to rehearse the piece at full performance level whenever we’re doing technical rehearsals, because I want to leave space for that mysterious process to happen, and I’m afraid that if I practice the performance full-out too often to empty chairs, what I might wind up doing in front of a live audience is just giving a solid performance, rather than creating and holding a space where some kind of truth might emerge.

At what moments in performing the show do you feel most connected to your body?

This might seem unexpected given the simplicity and minimal approach to physicality in the show, but I actually feel very connected to my body throughout the performance. There are some obvious moments where I’m not doing anything other than performing a physical action or a gestural sequence, but there really isn’t a moment when I’m not aware, even just lightly, of the way that I’m using my body in order to tell a story or share a thought.

You use repetition quite a bit inside your storytelling, circling back to the same phrases. Can you talk about returning to ideas, why it was important to this piece?

I took a music theory class in graduate school which turned out to be one of the best directing classes that I’ve ever taken, because of how much it was specifically focused on structure. I’ve been interested in and focused on structure in performance ever since. And in a very simple way, that’s what repetition does in the show. It creates a structure and a kind of big-picture rhythm for whatever I might be doing on stage.

I didn’t set out to use as much repetition in this piece as there is. In fact, I wonder sometimes whether I’m using it a little too much. But as the piece developed, it became clear that simplicity and clarity were going to be a guiding part of its overall aesthetic, and I think that’s part of why I leaned into repetition as a simple and clear structural choice. I think it also gives the piece a quality of refrain that at its best might even create associations with a ceremony or a service, though again, sometimes even as I’m doing it I wonder whether the way I’ve chosen to do it is too simple, or too obvious and repetitive. But as with everything else about how we made the piece, the impulse to have it be this way was intuitive, so I’m choosing to trust that over whatever doubt I might feel about it.

During the show you talk frequently about creating “a medicine” for, essentially, living with the knowledge that we are all going to die. Was this show the medicine? Did you do it? Are you cured?

As I say during the performance, I made the show in order to address my own fears around death, as well as to share with an audience whatever I discovered while making it, in the hope that the resulting shared experience might be something that frees us from that fear.

That said, no, making the show and sharing it hasn’t cured me or freed me from that fear. It would be nice if it did. And I don’t suppose that people who come see the show will suddenly be freed from that fear, either. I know there are people in the world who have managed to successfully free themselves of this fear. I’ve met them, and I admire them and aspire to be like them. But I think most of us still wrestle with these questions whenever we choose to actually consider them.

And I’m lucky in that I’m an artist and get to try to engage with these kinds of underlying currents of being alive through my work. Just the process of making the work helps, even if it hasn’t cured me, because for a time I get to work creatively in collaboration with a group of brilliant people. My mentor, retired Professor John Wilson from Cornish College, would say that whenever I’m feeling connected to my creative self that I’m also connecting to my life force.

So I would say that this work is a medicine without necessarily being a cure, because it does help me see the world in a way that helps me appreciate it more, and it does help me appreciate the people in my life more. My hope is that it does that for the people who come see it, too. But I’m not sure that any art is actually capable of being an outright cure for this fear or for anything else. Art can provide relief, or catharsis, and it can ask questions and help us feel less alone, but any art experience is inherently just one experience among all of the ones that a person has in their own exploration of these life-defining questions.

I just want to create work that is helpful and perhaps hopeful for anyone who might want to engage with those questions, knowing that, ultimately, whether a person is ever going to be cured, so to speak, whether a person is ever going to be free of that fear or any other in their lives, is ultimately up to them. And of course, the same is true for me.