LARRY KORNFELD INTERVIEW with Steve Bottoms, 9.95 - Judson ...

worked for me, he had his own theatre for a while ... But he's truly, truly non-camp,experimental... One of his great plays has about 25 characters in it, he plays all thegirls and all the boys, absolutely straight and at a furious pace. A great actor, and hewrites wonderful plays ... Do not overlook Jeff Weiss.LK: Well of course, there were certain plays I knew were campy. Gorilla Queen wascamp.Promenade I never thought of as campy, in fact I thought it might be -- when Ithought about Promenade at all, I would think in terms of Restoration theatre. It has avery high style, an elegance ... the production itself was physically very elegant, bothat Judson, which was done by young artists, and at the Promenade Theatre, theBroadway production, which was done by Willa Kemp [?] and Ruben Terrara Junior[?], who are two great theatre artists, and Jules Fisher did the lights. They were bothequally beautiful productions: they were elegant in movement, in space, in the flow,the characterisations were highly stylised, the songs were both delivered out andintensely to each other, they were well acted and yet performed ... I think that theJudson style, to go back to that question of a while ago, I was looking through someof the old reviews for a book I'm writing, and after a while I noticed that there werequite a few critics that by the end of the 60s were beginning to say that the Judson'style', or Larry Kornfeld's 'manner', or the Judson 'spirit' .... and I remember onereview said something about how somehow or other I, Kornfeld, was able to get theJudsonites (he used that term, I think), by hook or by crook, to perform and sing andmove in a very 'bewitching' way. Now I wasn't bewitching, they were bewitching,they were released, open, they were freed on the stage, they were not stuck by rules,they were inventing new things on the stage ... So the style became one of being open,being surprising and open, and after a while they began to say that Judson performersare as good as anybody else. My most satisfying review I ever got in my life wasfrom Richard Gilman, and he said that I directed Gertrude Stein the way the MoscowArt Theatre did Chekhov. Something like that. That I was tuned to her, and Al wastoo, in that same way that the M.A.T. was tuned to Chekhov. And I feel I was tunedin to other writers too, like Irene, and other people. The style was always for me tofind out what the author really, really wanted, and then to find an original way to dothat that would satisfy the author. That was important: that it surprised me, andsurprised the author, and we'd both say, it's right. Want an example? A play byRobertNichols, The Wax Engine. There was a scene in that that said, 'She sits at the table,and suddenly the green light hits her, and she doesn't say anything.' This is thecharacter of Jean Harlow, the movie star: the play was full of histroic figures, beforeit became such a thing to do. A beautiful play. And I felt, well the green light, that'stacky. What did he mean by that? He meant that something special happens, andsilence is heard. I had an idea and I tried it: I said don't sit, stand there, and just freezeat that point. Become a statue, which is what he meant. And then I had the character