Theatre Beyond Space and Time

The brilliant, visionary artist Reza Abdoh (1963–1995) was an Iranian-born theatre director, playwright, and founder of his own theatre company Dar A Luz. Encompassing theatre, dance, literature, pop culture, video, and myth, his works include Bogeyman, Father Was a Peculiar Man, Tight Right White, and Quotations from a Ruined City, and were primarily seen in Los Angeles, New York City, and Europe. The PAJ Publications title Reza Abdoh, edited by Daniel Mufson, featuring essays on him and the text of The Hip-Hop Waltz of Eurydice, was published in 1999. His play, The Law of Remains, appears in the PAJ volume Plays for the End of the Century (1996). Abdoh's work was so daring and original that the memory of his theatre productions, produced often in abandoned or site-specific spaces, has long remained for those who were fortunate to see his work, and then spread to those who never had that opportunity. Since Abdoh's death, a documentary of his life has been made by Adam Soch. Reza Abdoh, a retrospective of the artist's work, opened on June 3, 2018, at MoMA PS1 in Queens. The interview published here for the first time is from the archive of PAJ Publications. It was taped on April 7, 1994.

Let's start off with the most embarrassing of our questions. You have often been referred to in the press as the bad boy, the enfant terrible of the American theatre. Do you actually see yourself as being deliberately provocative?

No. Not at all. The term enfant terrible is an observer's perception. I never think of myself that way, and I certainly don't set out to provoke. I think provocation is an essential element in any art form. But not to provoke in order to shock or alienate.

Your provocations in the pieces are not in the sense of alienating others, but are very serious interventions into the culture of the times. That does stand for a very deep-seated and complex response to the failures of the American culture and societal values. Could you be more specific as to what it is in the culture that compels you to respond the way you do?

Many aspects of the culture, really. What is most exciting about American culture, to me, is that within its framework of uniformity and homogeneity, there is actually a kind of an oppositional point of view, and always a struggle to create some kind of a perspective, a point of view—whether it's artistic expression or political expression, or it's life stance—that somehow questions the hegemonic structures or superstructures.

It's something that, in America, is more a fabric—a part of the social fabric—than it is, for example, in some of the European countries. America is a sort of tapestry of many different races and many different cultures. But also, traditionally, because of a lack of a centripetal notion of culture, different races and different cultures have somehow worked at their own models. That, to me, is the most exciting thing about the culture But, at the same time, there are some models—models of consumerism, models of mediated information, social hierarchical models—that I have deep-rooted problems with, and that in my work I question and raise issue with. I try to figure out if there are other models that can work better.

Now, of course, your status is both as an outsider and as one born of Iranian and Italian parents.

Right. I've actually been here about thirteen years now. I came here when I was only sixteen. Feelings of alienation and the question of identity were always a very important concern of mine, and also a feeling of belonging or not belonging, or a sense of being, and who you are in relationship to your work, in relationship to your friends, in relationship to the environment that you're in, or with your family. Family structure has always been a major part of my work. Some of the attributes in my work are because of the dialectic that...