2007-2008 Season: Tranced
INTERVIEW BY KIRSTEN BRANDT: A Word with Playwright, Robert Clyman
INTERVIEW BY KIRSTEN BRANDT: A Word with Director, Barbara Damashek
SET by STONE: An In-Depth Look at the Set of Tranced
INTERVIEW BY KIRSTEN BRANDT | A Word with Playwright Robert Clyman
KIRSTEN BRANDT is the Associate Artistic Director of San Jose Rep. In her numerous roles at the Rep, she serves as the host for the Ghostlight Forums and Post Show Discussions, and as the Rep’s dramaturg. Brandt’s many directing credits include Rabbit Hole and This Wonderful Life, which she directed for the Rep in 2007.
KIRSTEN BRANDT: How did you go from being a clinical psychologist to writing plays?
ROBERT CLYMAN: About 10 years into my practice I started to feel like there were parts of me that were not getting used. I like practicing. I always have. But a psychologist is always the hand-maiden to other people. There were always things I wanted to say which just didn’t belong in a therapeutic setting. But I could say them in a play.
KB: How is Tranced different from some of the other plays you’ve written?
RC: I think I write two different types of plays. I am always very concerned about story. I read that someone said, “Every play should be a thriller,” and that inspired me. There should be a page-turner element to stories -- a narrative drive. But, I don’t like to feel that character gets sacrificed to plot. In these plays, I look at characters from a psychological and ethical standpoint. The other type of play I write is more linear and character driven.
KB: Can you talk more about the “ethical standpoint” and politics of Tranced?
RC: There is a global attention in Tranced like my other play, Secret Order. In that play the topic was cancer - which has global implications, as the disease affects everyone. Then, while I was developing another play that was like Tranced -- four characters, sharp, smart people at high levels in collision -- [someone] gave me a tape of a Charlie Rose interview with Samantha Power. [Samantha Power’s book is A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide]. That got me caring about the issue of genocide in a way I hadn’t before. It’s hard not to care about genocide, but we have become desensitized to it. That interview led the way into what became Tranced.
Then I thought of the setting. Where would something like this be able to go on? Where would people’s attention not automatically be ignited? I thought Africa. Isn’t that interesting? Part of the theme of Tranced became the idea that horrible things can go on and that not only would people not care, but not know. It’s all under the radar in a sense because people say, “Sure, that’s what happens there.”
KB: How does journalism factor into this play?
RC: I thought, “What would I do if this happened?” Of course, there would be all the problems of confidentiality to meander through. But, ultimately, if I thought the most important thing was to stop atrocities I would have to figure out the most effective route. I don’t know how to reach a mass audience -- I work with one person at a time -- so a journalist would be the person.
Since I started writing Tranced, it seems that the whole issue of a journalist’s right to protect sources has come to the fore. There are so many issues in the global consciousness regarding information: who is entitled to it, who controls it, etc. Logan has a line where he says, “You’ve got it backwards. Reporting will make it news.” When we read the news, part of us takes it literally and part of us knows it’s completely unreliable.
KB: What do you hope an audience walks away with?
RC: At the risk of being trite, I want audiences to have an experience – an intense experience – about something that alerts them in a way. I can’t compare it to what hearing Samantha Power did to me – she mobilized me. I don’t want to mobilize. I want to make the audience more fully conscious of the issues so they can invest in them and feel intensely about them. And then they can do what they will. I never have a position on what is the right way of thinking; I want the arguments to be as balanced as possible. I want everyone to have a character in the play with whom they can most identify and who they think is the most reasonable paragon to follow, as opposed to there being one clear protagonist and admirable person. I want to leave the audience awash in the ambiguity of things.
INTERVIEW BY KIRSTEN BRANDT | A Word with Director Barbara Damashek
Associate Artistic Director Kirsten Brandt interviewed
director Barbara Damashek about Tranced for the Rep’s Ghostlight Forum. Here is a snippet of that hour-long interview.
KIRSTEN BRANDT: Tell us about your take on the play Tranced.
BARBARA DAMASHEK: Tranced is a kind of psychological thriller. The intellectual appetite in this writer [Robert Clyman] is fantastic, and he has brought together so many big ideas, including political issues, as well as writing a compelling and intriguing mystery.
I use the phrase “film noir” a lot in terms of approaching the essence of the play because its world, in many ways, resembles the world of film noir. It’s a world in which there is a lot of paranoia. You have to go through mazes -- governmental mazes and mazes of personality -- to try to get to the truth of what the mystery is. It’s less of a who done it and more of a what happened kind of mystery. One of my favorite classic themes in film noir is that there is usually a femme fatal who is a woman of mystery and the downfall of all the men. Much of that is true of the character Azmera, except that she’s doing it for the right reasons. She has cornered everyone in the play into an ethical dilemma that mirrors the kind of ethical choices we have as citizens of the richest, and allegedly freest, country in the world.
KB: One of books that Bob Clyman mentions as a catalyst for this play is Samantha Power’s book, A Problem from Hell. Can you talk about how that impacts this play?
BD: Yes, there are actually four fantastic books that he recommended to me and which have all become obsessions for me. One was the Samantha Power book, which I’ll get back to in a moment. Another was an essay by Arundhati Roy. She was a political writer and essayist before her novel, The God of Small Things, put her on the world stage. She has written extensively about the excesses of Capitalism and the World Bank and its impact on Third World countries. She writes particularly about India. Her essay “The Greatest Common Good” is about a series of dams being constructed in India. She talks about the Iron Triangle of Democracy: apitalism, the World Bank and Politicians/Government and how they are in cahoots as they o into Third World countries. The World Bank gives out massive amounts of money at exorbitant interest rates before the projects are assessed. It locks these countries into a cycle where they can’t pay back the interest and it is impoverishing them. This kind of procedure is subsidizing big projects, particularly dams, in India, in the Congo, in China… So that is one political engine that is going on in this play. 
The bigger issue is the cost of these dams [in human terms]. In most cases it means the displacement of the populations that live in the areas where the dams are being built. It impacts the more aboriginal elements of the culture, not the urban elements of the culture. This means displacing tribes and villages who have ancient ways of living, without any provisions for rehabilitation and relocation. The governments take no responsibility for resettling these people. These dams are displacing millions of people.
The issue of “relocation” takes us to the Samantha Power book, which is wonderful and terrifying. It is about all the genocides that have happened in the 20th century, beginning with the Armenian genocide and going to the Holocaust, then the Cambodian genocide, the beginning of Sarajevo, and then it switches over to Rwanda and Saddam Hussein’s “chemical attack” on the Kurds. The book is comprehensive and documented in a way I’ve never seen. In every instance we had government officials and journalists in every country saying “pay attention, genocide is going on.”
The UN resolution on the Genocide Convention in 1948 defined the symptoms and characteristics of the crime of genocide. One of these characteristics is 
targeting populations for transfer. So when certain groups (usually isolated tribes, specific groups of people with specific identity) are targeted for transfer due to the building of dams, this act in and of itself is an act of genocide. There are ways to see the symptoms of genocide before it occurs. These are big alarms calls, but nations of the world have a system of responses to these calls that ensures we do not respond promptly. Warren Christopher was approached from every direction during Sarajevo but would not act. When we use the term “ethnic cleansing,” [rather than genocide] we are not obligated to act. Warren Christopher called it all a problem from hell.
KB: Bob Clyman mentions that he read Edward Said’s memoir and was influenced by his life.
BD: The only thing I can say about Edward Said is that he was a man without a country. He grew up with so many nationalities. He lived here, was born in Jerusalem, grew up in Cairo, has a family with a genealogy that is absolutely international and crosses every cultural line. In some ways it makes him a 20th century existentialist. One of the metaphors that Clyman borrows from, is that Philip Milaad, the psychiatrist in the play, is literally a man without roots. Due to some shady circumstances by which his family was chased out of their native country, he was actually born on the open sea. Philip has made his home in his work and he has carefully built a prominent career as a therapist - but without roots, without family or friends - he lives for his work.
KB: So then what is the fourth book that Bob Clyman recommended?
BD: A Coursebook in Hypnotherapy. Milton Erickson is the founder of hypnotherapy. I bought the textbook and managed to get hold of a tape showing the Master hypnotizing an aspiring hypnotherapist… which is very different from what is going on in the play. It wasn’t exactly a textbook for what we are doing, but it showed me some of the techniques a hypnotherapist would use. The concept of trancing fascinates me because it has so much to do with what the root of theatre and what shamanism is about. It is about going to some altered state and being a conduit, a channel - accessing some source of information that we all know but have repressed or hidden. There are some people that can go to the other side and come back again and we call them shamans. There are other people that go into other people’s lives and bring them out to us, and they’re called actors.
SET by STONE
KRIS STONE is the award-winning set designer of Iphigenia at Aulis. Stone’s designs have been nominated for the Irish Theatre Award for Best Set Designer, an NEA/TCG Award for Set Design, a 2006 Bay Area Critics Circle Award for Best Set Design, and she was a Featured Designer for the 2007 Prague Quadrennial, highlighting her design of Iphigenia at Aulis, representing the U.S. and Ireland in Stage Design. Kris Stone discusses the set design processes behind Tranced.
THE DESIGN FOR Tranced came from many threads of thought, as most designs do, so unraveling it to source its incarnation is never an easy task, but I will try…Looking through the primary research we examined after the initial reading of the text [of Tranced], the themes that repeated were: water, dams, office cubicles,Washington, D.C., mazes, memorials, flooding, droughts, genocide, construction, and trancing objects and methods. Barbara [Damashek] felt that the fluidity from one space to the other was vital for the primary playing area and that this contained microcosm, or, “cubical cogs in the machinery of Washington, D.C.,” as she called it, would be surrounded by an environment that would reflect the emotional landscape of the play. Without being too literal or placing us exactly in any one location, we searched for an atmosphere that could change and morph as the story unfolds; hinting perhaps at a no man’s land hidden by a repetition of vertical blinds that mask an industrial looking composition alluding to an aggressive barrier. The presence of water, whether as a literal element or as an expression of an internal underlying architecture, seemed vital for the play’s visual impact. We hoped that the environment would suggest a component of spirituality and foreshadow the conclusion of the play in a subtle, but enduring manner.
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Set Mock-Up
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