The 54-year-old London-born director Mark Wing-Davey is a man of strong convictions. For him, theatre is a necessary coupling of the visual with the ideological; one informs the other and together they forge a drama with a committed viewpoint, whether or not the latter is clearly definable. Ambiguity also has its place, he asserts.
Doubtless, Wing-Davey has found his project with Naomi Iizuka's "36 Views," which bowed Off-Broadway at The Joseph Papp Public Theater/New York Shakespeare Festival on March 27. This stuff is heady, although Wing-Davey, who is talking to us on the phone from his home in London, prefers the term "intoxicating."
Regardless of what one calls it, there are themes aplenty running concurrently throughout the work, all of which, Wing-Davey agrees, fall under the lofty category of what's real and what's not real. How do you present yourself as opposed to who you are? What do you say in contrast to what do you mean?
Authenticity vs. forgery in art is a central topic here. And if nothing else,"36 Views" is a play that examines the quest for status in the world of galleries and the academy through acquiring rare—and expensive—objects of beauty. The title, "36 Views," refers to, among other things, a series of woodblock prints of Mount Fuji by a 19th-century Japanese artist.
And then there's the play's consideration of the West's exploitive and condescending relationship to the East, and conversely, the East's compliance and willingness to embody stereotypes in order to move up the professional hierarchy, advance, and sell.
"The play is about authenticity and value in a larger way," says Wing-Davey, "in personal relations and in gender identity. Everyone's identity [and every painting's authenticity] in the play is brought into question."
The play's multileveled central story considers what happens when an 11th-century Japanese pillow book (a noblewoman's diary) is discovered and everyone—from the professor to the curator to the restorer to the reporter—has a stake in proving its authenticity or inauthenticity. All of the characters have one or more defining personal secrets, each is obsessive, and duplicity is the name of the game.
"One of the things that attracted me to this play was its schematic structure," notes Wing-Davey. "Of course, any structure is inauthentic. Although we are led to believe, for example, that there are 36 scenes, in fact there are 46 scenes. Throughout the play there are contradictions, and it is a self-referential work. At the end, the actors step out of character and then back into character. Like the art that is being displayed, the play becomes an object with its own artificial construct."
Philosophical discussions aside, Wing-Davey is equally concerned with the look of a work, both for its own sake and as a reflection of its themes. Consider the play's high-tech geometric set (inspired by a "Go" board, a kind of Chinese chess game), shifting translucent Shoji screens, and projections of paintings—or more usually snippets of paintings—onto rectangles extended from the ceiling and functioning not unlike supertitles.
"I wanted to create for the audience the gallery experience, with its shifting angles and changing perspectives, observes Wing-Davey. "And there is a voyeuristic element in being a gallery viewer. Everyone on stage has become objectified.
"The major challenge, however, is to maintain the play's urbane tone, its unsentimental view, while keeping the strength of the ideas and the emotions in focus. I also want audiences to enjoy the exoticism of the Eastern art world, but without shortchanging it. We don't want theatregoers to feel like tourists."
Wing-Davey, who is largely identified with the complicated work of playwright Caryl Churchill, is perhaps best known, at least in America, for his direction of her piece, "The Skriker," which played at the Public in 1996 and earned seven Drama Desk nominations, including best director. Recently, Wing-Davey directed Churchill's "Light Shining in Buckinghamshire" at the Royal National Theatre, and he was the originator of her play, "Mad Forest—a play from Romania," inspired by the Romanian revolution and fall of Communism in that country in the late '80s. For that work, which was mounted at the New York Theatre Workshop (in addition to the Royal Court in London), Wing-Davey garnered an Obie.
A Political Component
Most of the plays Wing-Davey has helmed have, within parameters, a political component. "When I say 'political,' I don't mean programmatic," he stresses. "I use the word 'political' with a small 'p,' although I suppose I would define myself as somewhat left of center."
Wing-Davey also boasts an ideology in the way he interacts with his actors. "My goal is to weld a company ethos. I don't work with stars, although the actors may become stars later."
He admits that his approach to both text and actors is "rough, rigorous, and unsentimental. I like long rehearsal periods where we can truly explore the play and find its truth on a moment-to-moment basis.
"One of the things I like the actors to do, when possible, is interview real people who are represented in the play. For example, with '36 Views' the actors who played the artists, professors, and curators went out and talked with artists, professors, and curators. The actors then came back in character and the rest of us interviewed them. Their new knowledge informs their performances and may even inform how the writer reworks the material, after he or she assimilates what the actors have presented. I've always felt our job is to be accurate; if not factually, then at least remain spiritually true to the material."
Wing-Davey has theatre in his blood. His late father, Peter Davey, was an actor, and his mother, Anna Wing, is still acting at age 86. Indeed, after graduating from Cambridge University with a degree in literature, Wing-Davey launched his career as an actor, too, performing with repertory theatres throughout the United Kingdom.
From 1988-1990, Wing-Davey served as artistic director of the London-based Central School of Speech and Drama, where his artistic vision was most pointedly articulated in his collaboration with playwright Caryl Churchill. Interestingly, their aforementioned joint project, "Mad Forest," started out as an acting exercise of sorts.
"It was 1989 and I was aware that young people were being killed in Romania who were the same age as my students at the School of Speech and Drama," Wing-Davey recalls. "And I was also thinking how far removed young actors had become from almost all plays that weren't psychological in character. So I thought it would be useful for all of us [with Churchill and Wing-Davey leading the group] to go to Romania and see what the experience [of being in a war-torn country following the collapse of Communism] was about by living there and talking to Romanians [of all stripes and ages]."
The students, along with Wing-Davey and Churchill, lived in Bucharest for more than two months, immersing themselves in the culture. Largely inspired by their man-on-the-street interviews, in addition to conversations with the political and religious exiles of Romania, the acting students improvised scenes—playing with the idea of what life was like before and after the revolution—which, in turn, served as the basis for Churchill's episodic 44-character play.
Wing-Davey maintains that the experience was valuable for the students, the theatre community at large, and the Romanians themselves. "No, I don't believe they felt exploited by us. Quite the opposite, and when we performed at the National Theatre in Bucharest, we were very well-received."
In fact, Wing-Davey suggests that perhaps a fair number of Romanians—specifically, the students who were drafted (as it were) to improvise various scenes with the young English actors—were able to formulate for the first time their own ambiguous political views.
"In two improvisations, we asked the students to line up left to right, depending on their political views before and after the revolution, respectively," remembers Wing-Davey. "In the after-the-revolution improvisation, everyone was clustering on the right, and that led to a discussion of how one defines the political terms 'left' and 'right.' It was interesting how many realized that while they hated Ceausescu, they couldn't abandon all the ideas of Communism."
Wing-Davey acknowledges that the students' political responses, as dramatized in the unscripted sketches, in some ways echoed his own. His "left of center" views had been challenged by the events in Romania and perhaps he needed to place them, he concedes, in a larger context. More important, Wing-Davey's sense of himself as a Westerner was brought into sharp focus.
"I could no longer take so many things for granted—like easy access to food. All my ideas about physical comfort were challenged. Romanians have had such a spare existence."
Wing-Davey is convinced there should be many more plays that consider the experiences of peoples living in other parts of the world. Without discussing the specific virtues and/or liabilities of a play like Eve Ensler's "Necessary Targets" (a work that looks at the refugee women of Bosnia), he says he is pleased that it was written and produced.
His interest in political-global plays notwithstanding, he acknowledges that one play he'd love to direct is "King Lear," only his version would bring to the forefront (of all things) the domestic sphere, "the kitchen worlds of Goneril and Regan."
But that's all down the road. At the moment his thoughts are centered on "36 Views" and his hope that audiences leave the theatre "having taken an exhilarating journey that is a love story, but so much more. It's a caper, a mystery, and an aesthetic experience."