{"id":34390,"date":"2010-08-27T14:00:13","date_gmt":"2010-08-27T18:00:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/home.bates.edu\/?p=34390"},"modified":"2018-06-04T09:22:45","modified_gmt":"2018-06-04T13:22:45","slug":"essentialarbus","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/2010\/08\/27\/essentialarbus\/","title":{"rendered":"The Essential Arin Arbus"},"content":{"rendered":"

Off-Broadway director Arin Arbus \u201999 makes Shakespeare sizzle by keeping it simple<\/h3>\n

By Charles Antin \u201902<\/em><\/p>\n

Arin Arbus \u201999 and I are about to share a bottle of red wine at Bar Henry, a bistro on West Houston Street in Lower Manhattan. Arbus has just arrived; I, however, have been here 20 minutes, drinking a beer to calm my nerves.<\/p>\n

Arbus is, according to critic Charles Isherwood of The New York Times<\/a>,<\/em> the \u201cmost gifted\u201d new theater director to emerge in New York in the last year. Her off-Broadway production of Othello<\/em>, he wrote, handled Shakespeare with the \u201ckind of artistry we always hope for and rarely find.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"arbus-6417\"<\/a><\/p>\n

At present Arbus is an associate artistic director with Theatre for a New Audience<\/a>, a highly regarded New York City company that focuses on Shakespeare and classic drama. But it\u2019s not her professional stature that has me nervous.<\/p>\n

As a writer, I\u2019m just wondering if having this t\u00eate-\u00e0-t\u00eate is an effective way to understand Arin Arbus. I had assumed, perhaps naively, that to know a director you have to see her directing. But she\u2019s between theater projects at the moment.<\/p>\n

Such an interim, she tells me, is \u201cthe time to try to understand the successes and failures in past productions and to dream about future ones.\u00a0It\u2019s an essential time for me. A time to recharge.\u201d<\/p>\n

With that cue, we talk about her recent volunteer work at Woodbourne Correctional Facility, a medium-security men\u2019s prison in upstate New York. She works for a program called Rehabilitation Through the Arts, leading a theater company of prisoners in a variety of productions, such as Of Mice and Men<\/em> and, recently, a play the men wrote about maintaining family life while incarcerated.<\/p>\n

She points her knuckles together while flexing her biceps, meaning that the prisoners are generally burly. Arbus is slender.<\/p>\n

Another recent production began as a modern dance, choreographed by a collaborator and fellow volunteer. Then Arbus gave the prisoners writing prompts, and they performed spoken word during the dance \u2014 a sort of hybrid performance piece.<\/p>\n

Eighty percent of the Woodbourne prisoners have a violent felony conviction, so I ask Arbus to describe them. She smiles and does one of those muscleman moves, pointing her knuckles together while flexing her biceps, meaning that the prisoners are generally burly. Arbus is slender.<\/p>\n

Physical and gender contrasts notwithstanding, I am curious how a director creates a working relationship with actors, whether in prison or on a Manhattan stage.<\/p>\n

She answers by comparing working with a theater company \u2014 as she does in prison \u2014 to working in the style of conventional American theater, where actors come and go from production to production.<\/p>\n

\u201cWorking with a company is different, and I\u2019ve learned a great deal,\u201d she says. \u201cThe group naturally passes through a honeymoon stage and endures periods of frustration \u2014 intense disagreements, hurt feelings, and at times people take one another for granted. All of this is, of course, both healthy and difficult to sort out.\u201d<\/p>\n

But, she adds, the joys of a company \u201care immense. A method of working is established, a common theatrical vocabulary develops, a real sense of trust is generated. People get to know one another very deeply \u2014 and not necessarily on a personal level.\u201d<\/p>\n

The prisoners volunteer for the theater company because it helps them to grow as individuals, she says. I ask if maybe they\u2019re trying to avoid doing something else. She smiles slyly at me, like I just don\u2019t get it, and assures me that\u2019s not the case. Prisoners are busy, she says, and they have to make time for the theater, which they do willingly and with passion. It\u2019s that kind of desire for pure theater, often absent in a professional setting, that brought her to Woodbourne in the first place.<\/p>\n

\"arbus-6279\"<\/a>For example, there\u2019s a Department of Correctional Services rule: You don\u2019t exchange personal information with prisoners. \u201cI\u2019ve found that freeing,\u201d Arbus says. \u201cWe don\u2019t have the chance to cling to the superficial details that give people the illusion that they \u2018know\u2019 each other. We focus on the work at hand, so we encounter each other in a very simple, profound, and almost existential way. Surprisingly, a tremendous feeling of intimacy emerges. I find it humanizing.\u201d<\/p>\n

One writer has heard Arbus talk about the liberation of anonymity and concluded that she\u2019s unwilling to share her personal story. But after 45 minutes and half a bottle of wine, I don\u2019t see that quality, and neither does she. \u201cI don\u2019t think of myself that way,\u201d she says. \u201cI don\u2019t have many secrets \u2014 no more than your average fellow.\u201d<\/p>\n

She says that the spare, intense work with the Woodbourne company \u201cfeeds\u201d her off-Broadway work \u201cand vice-versa.\u201d<\/p>\n

In prison, the theater productions are, by necessity, text-driven and \u201cwithout razzmatazz,\u201d she says. And as Arbus and Jeffrey Horowitz, artistic director for Theatre for a New Audience, start to plan one of their productions, they always return to one question: \u201cWhat are the essentials<\/em> of this production?\u201d And forcing herself to ask and answer questions about her work\u2019s essential nature, Arbus tells me, \u201ccontinually helps me to clarify my own theatrical values.\u201d<\/p>\n

In his review of Othello<\/em>, Isherwood of The New York Times<\/em> alluded to Arbus\u2019 skill at creating eloquence from \u201ctrenchant simplicity.\u201d Arbus, he wrote, \u201cgets out of Shakespeare\u2019s way.\u201d Actors arranged on a simple thrust stage become the setting of \u201crich emotional eloquence.\u201d<\/p>\n

Her career shift from visual art to the theater happened because she felt \u201calone with my ideas\u201d when she painted.<\/p>\n

Originally from Los Angeles, she is the daughter of actors (her father is Allan Arbus, familiar to readers as the character Sidney Freedman in M*A*S*H<\/em>). After graduating from Bates as an art major, Arbus considered a career as a visual artist and painter but veered away. She instead embraced the theater after a summer at the Williamstown Theater Festival, where she directed two productions.<\/p>\n

Arbus has been with Theatre for a New Audience for six years, and was promoted to associate artistic director after Horowitz saw her Woodbourne adaptation of Of Mice and Men<\/em>. She directs one TFANA play of several done annually. She followed 2009\u2019s Othello<\/em> with Measure for Measure<\/em> last winter.<\/p>\n

Her career shift from visual art to the theater happened because she felt \u201calone with my ideas\u201d when she painted. \u201cI found that isolating.\u201d<\/p>\n

It also left her feeling creatively ineffective. \u201cWhat you can invent together in the theater is going to be far more complex and more interesting than anything I could invent alone. There\u2019s something basic in us that wants to build shared meanings \u2014 it\u2019s primal.\u201d<\/p>\n

Charles Antin \u201902, who lives in Brooklyn, has had essays published in<\/em> Food & Wine, <\/em>The Virginia Quarterly Review, and <\/em>The New York Times.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Off-Broadway director Arin Arbus \u201999 makes Shakespeare sizzle by keeping it simple…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":221,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_hide_ai_chatbot":false,"_ai_chatbot_style":"","associated_faculty":[],"_Page_Specific_Css":"","_bates_restrict_mod":false,"_table_of_contents_display":false,"_table_of_contents_location":"","_table_of_contents_disableSticky":false,"_is_featured":false,"footnotes":"","_bates_seo_meta_description":"","_bates_seo_block_robots":false,"_bates_seo_sharing_image_id":0,"_bates_seo_sharing_image_twitter_id":0,"_bates_seo_share_title":"","_bates_seo_canonical_overwrite":"","_bates_seo_twitter_template":""},"categories":[4,7,11010,133],"tags":[1064,2885,10856,10754,71],"class_list":["post-34390","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academic-life","category-alumni","category-arts","category-creativity","tag-arin-arbus","tag-art-and-visual-culture","tag-bates-magazine","tag-rhetoric-film-and-screen-studies","tag-theater"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34390","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/221"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=34390"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34390\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":87708,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34390\/revisions\/87708"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=34390"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=34390"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=34390"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}