Interview: Ariel Craft of UTOPIA at Cutting Ball Theater Helms a Wildly Inventive World Premiere by Charles L. Mee

The name Ariel Craft evokes an improbable combination of magic and skill, whimsy and rigor. If that weren't already her real name, I honestly don't think you could invent a more apt moniker for the director of Charles L. Mee's Utopia now enjoying a virtual world premiere from San Francisco's Cutting Ball Theater. After all, it takes a person of uncommon prowess and boundless creativity to bring this kind of unorthodox play to life. Utopia is a quirky, multidisciplinary work incorporating contemporary dance and animated artworks by disabled artists to offer a delightful commentary on life, love and the absurdity of the everyday. Utopia is available for streaming on demand through November 15th. For further information or to order tickets visit cuttingball.com or call (415) 525-1205.

I recently caught up with Craft from her home in Berkeley while she was in the thick of rehearsals for Utopia. She is very easy to talk to - a creative thinker and natural leader who is self-assured without being self-important and quick to admit what she doesn't know. The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

I spoke with Chuck Mee recently and asked him how he connected with Cutting Ball. He said that basically you just called him and asked him to write a play, and he thought you were delightful so he said "yes." Was it really that simple?

You know, it was that simple. I would just say that it is a testament to the power of asking. Because for us the idea that we could do a world premiere Chuck Mee play that he wrote for Cutting Ball was beyond what I thought was possible for an organization of our size. But I thought, "let's give it a try," so I got his email address and wrote him and said, "Would you consider this?" and he was just so welcoming and gracious and excited and game to collaborate.

Mee's plays are pretty unusual and therefore can be hard to summarize. How would you describe Utopia?

Yeah, you totally hit the nail on the head. It's such a difficult play to encapsulate because when you try to synopsize it, it sounds unbelievably small - cause it's a 9-year-old girl sitting in a café eating croissants and watching the lives of different people as they unpack their feelings on love and life and what it means to be happy in the world. That synopsis doesn't really do it justice because the play is this explosive, colorful, vibrant, poetic tribute to how we should treat each other, how great and strong we could be if we operated from a place of love and knowing that the diversity of our experience makes us stronger. There's big sections with wild animation, crazy costumes and huge dance sequences and it's really quite over the top in its style. It plays with extremes and makes something extraordinary out of the seemingly small and mundane.

Mee also said he never attends rehearsals. After he handed the play over to your care, have you heard from him at all?

Yes, absolutely. It's true he does not attend rehearsals and every time he speaks to the production team, he says "I don't go to rehearsals because dead playwrights get the best productions and I want you to know that you have complete freedom." Which is spectacular and something that allows the team to just run and play, though I will also say Chuck's spirit is one that if he were in the room, I think we would still feel free to run and play because he's so game.

We did a workshop together in July of last year. We [Cutting Ball] went to New York and workshopped the play with Chuck, working with New York actors. For a more traditional new play process, that would be a really writer-centric workshop, where the writer is bringing in new pages and retooling the play, and Chuck didn't really do any of that. It was a discovery experience for us, of essentially doing a week of table work, just sitting and getting to better understand the play. So we spent that time with Chuck, but the script did not change afterwards. Then Chuck attended our first rehearsal to hear the read-through and wish everyone well, and to get to meet everyone over Zoom. He and I have [since] exchanged, you know, "Hey, how ya doin'?" emails, but have not been in touch about the progress of the play.

Given that Mee wrote Utopia pre-COVID-19, it was created with the assumption it would be performed in a theater with an audience physically present. How has presenting it virtually altered your approach as its director?

In addition to being director of this play, I am also Cutting Ball's Artistic Director, and when COVID-19 closures began, we were faced with what we initially thought was a short-term closing and it was increasingly long term. We had to decide "Do we take things virtual if we can?" and our general answer at Cutting Ball is "No, not if it does not suit the work." The reason we made the decision to keep Chuck's show on the schedule as planned is because this show lends itself so well to a different format. His work is quite unconventional and experimental so we thought it could flourish in many different mediums. This is not something we're necessarily doing with other plays. Or I should say, we're changing our programming to suit the medium, like we might not do the play we planned to do live in the theater, we might do a different play because we think it'll be better in a virtual format.

We are feeling so very fortunate that this play was already naturally aligned with the idea of going virtual, and of course it's totally bizarre because we did not know when we programmed it for this time slot that we would be in the middle of a pandemic and a justice reckoning in the nation, and in California here are all these fires, and the idea of utopia is so challenging right now. Which is something we talk about in rehearsals a lot, because it feels just so far away from where we are.

To get back to your original question, it's totally changing the way the play is directed. I'm a theater maker by trade, that's the craft that I have honed, and suddenly I feel a little like a filmmaker. I am learning, and the skills are applicable and transferable, but they're not the same skills. I'm learning about how the frame of a camera is different from the frame you experience while sitting in the house as an audience. We have tools in our arsenal that we wouldn't have if we were live in a theater, and we're trying to make the most of those. For example, a split-second jump cut where one person is in one outfit and then - snap! - they are in a completely different outfit isn't achievable in that same way onstage. So we're trying to make the most of those opportunities, to let the format lead our creativity. For all of us involved, it's a learning curve. It's really exciting and kind of feels like reinventing the wheel a little bit with every rehearsal.

Mee has long decried what he sees as a trend toward reductionism in American Theater. He said in a New York Times interview that theater had become a reduced art form "best suited for small television sets" and he meant that disparagingly. Given that you're directing a play of his that audiences will indeed experience on a small screen, how do you avoid that tendency toward reductionism?

I think that the answer is to just enter from a place of "yes" and a place of trying and a place of not self-editing too much. We were in rehearsal a few days ago doing these compositions based on Anne Bogart's Viewpoints Book as sort of a jumping off point. We were doing these compositions, which is like the actors were going into Zoom breakout rooms and we would say, "Take a theme of the play," and they might pick something like, you know, love is a negotiation, and then we would say, "OK, choose five ingredients that need to be in your composition." [For example] you break the expectation of the space at one point, there's music at one point, things like that. Then we gave them 30 minutes and shared what everyone had come up with. The idea was to get ourselves thinking about how we creatively compose in this Zoom/film format, and I'll be damned if what we ended up coming up with did not feel more like theater than a lot of the theater that I have seen recently. Because it was so impulsive, working off the nugget of an idea and seeing how you could take it to its natural, most exploded extension.

It was eschewing naturalism at basically every moment, and that's something I think theater does really well. It creates alternate ways of hearing and receiving and seeing and understanding that are not naturalistic. This is the least naturalistic show we've done in some time, even as an experimental theater company. We're pushing ourselves to be real weird. [laughs] So in that way I think we're avoiding reductionism and we're trying to not shut ourselves off to anything, to just welcome the creative impulses as they come.

The production is being done in collaboration with RAWdance and Creativity Explored. How are they being incorporated into it?

Those partners were already engaged when we thought it going to be a live and in-person show. RAWdance's piece of the collaboration has certainly changed to the format, but less so. If you read the script, you'll see there's quite a bit of dance, like maybe 20 - 25 minutes of it. That normally would be live onstage with the actors and it would just, you know, be like a movement theater piece. RAWdance is still contributing the movement theater parts of the show, but they're filming in separate spaces. The actors are filming in their own homes, and RAWdance will be dancing together, filmed outside, and those will be edited into the final product. Katie Wong, co-Artistic Director of RAWdance and the choreographer of this piece, is also working with our actors to develop a movement language for the show. We have some moments of dance with the actors as well, so she's really a lead artist on the show in every way.

Creativity Explored is a fantastic organization serving developmentally-disabled artists. We had initially talked to them about doing a massive mural in the theater. The set was going to be almost nothing except this big, colorful mural by their artists, and that of course has ceased to be because we won't be in the theater. What they're doing instead is providing animations. At some points during the show it switches over and we move into an animated sequence, which is very cool. I relate it to old episodes of The Electric Company or Sesame Street where the format will suddenly change. There's a variety show feel to it, the visual language of the show continues to change and iterate on itself. So Creativity Explored is doing that. They are just so awesome. We have partnered with them before and we love them, and I'm really sad we don't get to see this mural that they were gonna make, but honestly I think that this will be even better.

You have assembled a super diverse cast, which is a goal theater companies often strive for, but don't achieve. How did you go about attracting such a diverse talent pool?

The diversity of the group was absolutely a conscientious effort, I would be lying if I said it wasn't. It's something we thought about a lot and were quite deliberate about, but we also just pursued the best actors we knew. I go to rehearsal every day and think, "Holy moly, this is a ridiculously talented and intelligent group of people!"

I also want to call out that it is so intrinsic to Chuck's play and the script totally calls for it. The first email he wrote me about an idea for a commission said that it needs to be a really diverse group. So we do have racial diversity, age diversity, ability diversity, size diversity, we see all those things represented in our group. Having Chuck helps. You know, people are really excited to do a Chuck Mee world premiere. A number of people in our show, me included, were fans of Chuck for a really long time and so the idea that we get to bring his work to life for the first time is quite cool.

Your "day job" is Artistic Director of Cutting Ball. Women in leadership positions in the arts are still unfortunately less common than they should be. What was your own path toward getting that job?

I studied theater at NYU and then moved back to California. I immediately formed my own theater company which was run out of the Exit Theater on Eddy Street (which is an amazing theater). I was the artistic director and also directed a number of shows. At the same time I was the fellow at ACT, so I had the experience of [simultaneously] working as the highest-up person of the smallest possible company, and also being like the lowest person on the administrative ladder in the largest theater in the Bay Area. I had both those experiences. I continued to work as a freelance director and for a while was the Assistant Artistic Director at the Custom Made Theatre Company, before I became the Associate Artistic Director at Cutting Ball, which is a job that I held for three years before I became the Artistic Director. It was quite a unique journey to see internal transfer, someone who's worked for the organization and invested lots of time there be put into a position of genuine leadership. I am very grateful for that opportunity and to have been able to assume a position of leadership in a space that I knew so well at that point, and with an audience that already knew me.

It sounds like the kind of career path that in retrospect looks perfectly linear and logical, even if you didn't necessarily know where you were heading at the time.

Yeah, absolutely. And it's I hope something that we see more of in the American theater. We also need to see changes in the diversity in folks who have jobs like I had, Associate Artistic Director, so that we don't just keep reinforcing the same kind of voices in leadership. I think there is so much effectiveness in internal transfer, and of course I had no idea that that was going to happen when I first took the job, but I learned so much. Whether I was promoted within Cutting Ball or had gone on to a job somewhere else, the important thing is that while I was at Cutting Ball, I developed skillsets that would have served me to step into leadership at any theater. I hope that's what we've continued to do at Cutting Ball. We've tried to strengthen the leadership in those roles so that my Associate Artistic Director will be poised when she's ready to move on to a new space - or to promotion at Cutting Ball, should that be the pathway. She will have all the skillsets she needs to move into the next step of her career.

Despite all the current challenges in being in an arts leadership position, what is the best part of your job right now?

I would say two things. One is rehearsing this show, and the reminder that no one gets to tell us that we can't be creative and that we can't figure it out, because we're doing it right now and it's happening. It's not a way any of us have done it before, but that doesn't mean it won't be great. That determination in a team of people is an inspiring thing to see every single day, and so I'm grateful for that.

And then also embracing the pandemic a little bit, I am grateful to have this opportunity of a somewhat forced pause to prep our organization to be better when we come back. To look at what have we been doing well and what have we not been doing well, and to realistically do the things that I would have characterized I was "too busy" to look at and do before. I need to prioritize these things; it's not beyond my control. I am learning in this moment to re-shift my priorities and think about the forest in addition to the trees, and make sure we're doing long term vision planning in addition to making sure that we have content for our audiences.

Certainly, any arts organization that thinks it's gonna just stay the same is not going to survive.

Yeah, absolutely. I am so humbled to look back on March 2020 when we were two weeks into rehearsals for a production of Cyrano and the shelter-in-place was coming down, and I was like "It's fine. We're gonna push opening a couple of weeks, we'll halt rehearsals for like 14 days, and then we're gonna be back. It's no big deal." I just had no concept of what was coming and how seismic the changes were. That is humbling and it is good to remember that I still do not know what I do not know about what's ahead. The best thing I can do is be flexible and responsive and have integrity in the way that we do things.

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