Traveling at the Speed of Thought

John Jesurun is a writer, director, and designer whose unique forms of narrative capture the dislocation and anxiety of contemporary life in real, virtual, and performance spaces. His work has been produced extensively in North America and South America, Europe, and Japan. His production Deep Sleep won the 1986 Obie Award for Best Play, and he is the recipient of numerous grants, including a MacArthur “Genius” Award as well as a Bessie. Jesurun’s most recent projects are the web-serial Shadowland (2012–present), Fragments from a Triumphal Arch (2014), and new episodes of his “living film serial” Chang in a Void Moon (1982– present), which effectively started his career in the theatre at the Pyramid Club. He is currently working on a new play with Japanese playwright Takeshi Kawamura. Collections of his plays include the PAJ title Shatterhand Massacree and Other Media Texts, and John Jesurun: A Media Trilogy. This interview was conducted in March 2014 in New York City as part of a book on Jesurun’s work considered as postdramatic “mediaturgy,” a concept coined by PAJ editor Bonnie Marranca.¹

In 1986, you went on record stating, “Mine is a multimedia generation that has grown up on TV, records, and film. We may not all have read Shakespeare, but we know how a TV works.”² And much more recently, in a different vein, you’ve also asserted that “Language has the potential to be very fluid.”³ I address your work from this angle: while working at a crossroads of signifying systems, you are staging a battle for the spectator’s perception. Am I correct in assuming that you are ushering the spectator’s gaze towards this potential of fluidity?

That’s a good way of putting it, actually. Everything’s got to be floating in the spaces I create, floating in motion, in flux. You look one way, you have to look the other way. The audience is invited to be part of that, they are also implicated into being that as well. You know—as a mind, or as a person. So, yes, they are invited to be part of it.

It seems your work attracts two kinds of reviews. Some critics capture this idea of flux, while others simply surrender by making statements like, “This is too much information, I can’t keep track of what’s happening.”

In a way, I agree. Sometimes there is indeed too much information in my work. But that, in itself, to me is kind of a sensation. I mean, it’s a physical sensation and it’s a mental sensation. It’s a stab that, hopefully, can instigate something. So I agree when they say there might be too much information, and I would even say that for me as well there is too much information. But I think that people should be able to express that. Yes. I have been saying that for a very long time, and people would respond: “You know, that is an American problem. It has always been like that, just look at the internet. . . .”

. . . yet you were saying that long before the internet.

Yes, absolutely. Because I could sense it back then that there was, already, too much information, and I always wondered where all this information was going to go. But in a way it is like energy: it never really goes away and always turns into something else. In my work, you still get the effect of the reality of the “too much information”: here it is, it is like an object in front of you. I am not explaining anything to you. I am not indicating things. It is not even a representation of anything. It is a theatrical reality happening on stage, and in the theatre I think it is important to bring an actuality to the stage.

That is profoundly realistic, I would say.

Yes, very realistic. But of course not the kind of realism that the theatre traditionally asks for. What traditional theatre seeks is a kind of “authored” realism, and I always objected to that. I object...