David Herskovits - The Marriage of Figaro

Nytheatre Voices – nytheatre.com

As artistic director of Target Margin, could you give us some background on the beginnings of the company? How did it come about? What does "Target Margin" mean?

Anyone who has a particular and strong idea about what she or he wants to do in a theater, who recognizes that there is little place for idiosyncratic artistry in institutional American theater, and who has the impatient temerity to demand work now, will quickly find that going it alone is the only avenue.

I'm like that, so in 1991 I started this company. Target Margin has always been motivated by an artistic idea (more about this below), and a commitment to create that particular kind of work. Our first production was a hit in a small way, Titus Andronicus at Nada. Many of the people who worked on that show are still with the company. I soon recognized that I'd be relying heavily on the support of like-minded collaborators, so the company's membership was born. It's really a pretty loose group of people, actors, designers, directors, production people, administrators, who chip in and help out when they can. We keep a mix of old hands and new blood in every production, which sustains the benefits of long-term understanding but also keeps us open to other views. Everyone in the company has a deep understanding of what our work is about and, though I started the machine running, has made it their own.

Now, the artistic idea. Our work is all about finding an unexpected detour that brings you back home. We look for twists and turns, for disruptions and shifts in tone, for eccentric ways to frame the stage event, because we believe that these are the gestures that make artistry most potent. The paradox is that you take a step away to make the original impulse hit home more forcefully. In that way, our work is very traditional. We work on classic dramatic texts, hoping always to bring them to the most powerful and vivid immediacy possible. We like telling stories, and we celebrate big characters, resonant silences, cheesy gags, sheer entertainment. But we are deeply committed to making those detours. And that's where the work can look odd: disrupting the scene with a deft hand can be the best way to make the scene really happen.

And that brings us to the name. It's the Target and the Margin; the play between a focal point --a goal, a cynosure-- and the halo of rings around it. To me, that cloud of marginal epiphenomena looks something like a golden road to heaven. The Target or the Margin; oscillate between the two and release a new kind of music. The Target is the Margin; maybe your goal isn't even what you recognize it to be, so look for the release into sublimity yielded by the aleatory surprises of the process. Target Margin.

This is your 11th season and you are doing something quite different. Why a 'theme' season rather than renderings of the classics as you have done so well in the past?

Actually our seasons have been themed for some years now. We started with a "Lost American Classics" season in 1997-98, and last year the rubric was "Christopher Marlowe," all the great man's dramatic writing. I have found a focus for the season very fruitful. It imposes a curatorial discipline on my planning, and it allows us to offer our audience a year-long experience that is more than the sum of its parts. If you actually come to see all the work we are creating this year, you will have the opportunity to consider what opera is through many lenses, which we hope leads to an especially satisfying experience.

Why is the audience invited to ponder the question of 'what is opera?' How will this question be answered by your production of The Marriage of Figaro which is, in fact, a play and not an opera?

Isn't opera weird? I have come love it, but it took me a while; opera has always struck me as something you need to be initiated into, like coffee. It's a strange, highly developed form, which commands passionate devotion from its acolytes while provoking bafflement and derision from some of the rest of us. And it's theater too, a family of our tribe that has struck out far to the east of Eden. It also evokes a set of social conventions. In our country opera has become a black tie affair that demands $150 a ticket. But that is only one way of producing opera, albeit the dominant one. I want to tease apart the web of interlacing conventions that has become opera. This means many different things, Mozart is one, Wagner another, and Puccini something else again, all of which lead us to the question of what opera can or should be now.

A good look at source material appealed to me as an entry point into one of the greatest canonical operas. It is always enlightening to investigate how something was adapted in order to understand what it has become; we look at what it is not to see what it is. Producing the play The Marriage of Figaro will thus open doors into the opera. That our audience here in New York is more likely to know the opera than its pretext, only adds to the value of the exercise. We can invite them to rethink the opera they know while exposing them to a great play they may not know.

What differences do you see and are you trying to have the audience see between the classical play and the opera? What similarities?

We're not exactly trying to have the audience see any particular point, so much as hoping to open up the entire field of questions while provoking thoughtful discourse. Is this play especially suited to musical treatment? How "musical" does a play have to be to make a good opera? Could any play be an opera or are certain kinds of writing better suited for opera-ification? How have Mozart and Da Ponte [the librettist] transmogrified the social concerns of the play, representing them musically? Or have they? How do the experiences of encountering this story in two different genres compare? Is one more entertaining, more sublime, more serious? One way to see a production is as a set of questions.

If one is not an opera buff and unfamiliar with the opera The Marriage of Figaro is it still important to see this play? Why?

Ever wonder why certain men still seem to control the levers of power? Have you noticed how the smartest people often come from the humblest origins, but nobody gives them much credit? Still confused as to why women are consistently paid less than men, despite the glass ceiling they hit? Ever get turned on by a sexy offer or a sexy speech? Sentimental about love? Fond of tricks? Ever thirst for a cool drink of sheer joyous escape from this troubled world? Come see our Marriage of Figaro!