“Every clown you talk to is afraid to use the C word. It’s not easy to be a clown.” This was one of the many interesting things Stefan Haves, director and creator of Shambles at The Actors’ Gang in Culver City, told me last week. “Clown work is like improv without a net because they’ll love you or hate you in the first 30 seconds.”

Let’s face it, it’s not like horror movies haven’t created a cottage industry out of making clowns something to be feared. Nor did serial killer John Wayne Gacy who probably inspired many a horror film creator. But the best clowns (think David Shiner and Bill Irwin) have an innate ability to entertain and provoke in equal measures.

Haves knows his way around clowning. A random encounter with Shiner lead to his participation in Fool Moon, a show that featured Shiner and Irwin that was given a special Tony Award in 1999. Haves has also spent time working on several Cirque du Soleil shows.

With Shambles, a show that combines clowning with music and aerialists and drag queens and a car wash for the audience (you’ll have to see it to understand), Haves has created an ironically titled show that is full-on entertainment, but with a purpose. As we discussed in our Zoom conversation last week. What follows are excerpts from our conversation that have been edited for length and clarity.

It’s the holiday season. As we approach 2023 it seems like our world is in shambles quite a bit. Yet the tone of your show, sight unseen, seems to believe that there is still joy in the world. Is there a sense of irony in the title of this show and do you believe that there is still joy to be found in the world? 

That’s a really great question because I actually pivot every interview to that. I like to say that throughout history – I’m talking all history – after a plague comes a renaissance. I knew that when we were in the middle of this dour time in the pandemic, that we’re all becoming introverted, we’re all becoming insulated, we’re all becoming fearful. Lord knows the introvert in each and every one of us has taken root and is pretty darn happy in our house.

It’s going to be the artists that are going to emerge on the other side. It’s really the artist’s job to forge a new trail for everybody. I looked at it as the most amazing opportunity to assemble the world class introverts who have been not able to work for a long time. I have 17 performers in The Actors’ Gang. I have six band members and a band leader. I have six Cirque du Soleil-caliber variety performers all in the same night. I did the same kind of show ten years ago, but that was ten years ago. Life has changed.

So this one is a very gender-fluid and immersive show, which seems to be two directions that I’m learning from the newer generations. I’ve taken this opportunity to really learn and see what motivates people to get into the theater. 

If I look at what’s been going on even pre-pandemic, but certainly post-pandemic, it seems that pure joy is in rare supply in the performing arts. Has the pandemic and everything that’s gone on in the past two-three years made us so entirely serious that we’ve lost our sense of humor and our sense of joy?

I’m really glad you brought this up because I teach clown and clown is in the here and now experience. So when a guy walks on stage, it’s different than improv. In improv there’s the conceit of the who, what and where, things are supposedly happening off stage. But the clown inhales and exhales with the public and discovers things in the here and now. It brings people out of that mind place and into kind of body intelligence of like what’s going on? The child is alive in all of us, asleep in a lot of us, but alive. We give a funny nod to satire in this, but then we don’t really have a point-of-view. We just want to do like a DreamWorks movie. We want to wink to a cat whose name is Feline Musk taking over planets and then we’re never going to talk about it again.

In the clowns that I’ve always loved it’s the pathos as much as the comedic timing that has attracted me them. If pathos is the flip side of comedy is there a flip side to Shambles? 

We come out like gangbusters. Laugh, laugh, laugh, laugh, laugh. All of a sudden it turns around with a song called Walking in Memphis and showing that our actual lead is a lonely man. Then it ends with Hallelujah. So the flip-flop happens, but the flip-flop happens so utterly quick. What I like to say is the clown always has to be hipper than the room. You hate clowns when they’re not like that, when they’re trying to make you laugh. You hate them. That’s why teaching clown is so hard. First 30 seconds you love ’em or hate ’em. You don’t kind of like them. If you kind of like them, you hate ’em.

What makes you laugh? 

Well, laughter is a byproduct. So everybody’s like, oh clown you’re going to make me laugh. No. Buffoons make you laugh. A clown makes you happy and gives you connection. He’s not looking for a laugh. What makes you laugh? An obstacle and what is your prowess getting around that obstacle. It’s very math-oriented as opposed to I hope mommy and daddy like my skit. 

The reason I ask is we’re living in a culture of political correctness and cancel culture. A lot of people who are involved in comedy and the creative arts are concerned that it’s ultimately having a stifling influence on what can be said and how it can be said. Do you have any concerns about the path that we’re headed on and whether this will have a lingering impact and a stifling impact on the creative arts? 

First of all, I’m part of the problem. I’m a 63-year-old baby-boomer white male. My demographic has had a pretty good run for a few thousand years. I have to give over to the fact that for me to have that kind of power other people were marginalized. Although I love Don Rickles, I know Don Rickles wouldn’t work today. However, Don Rickles in his day was inclusive, but that was a generational change. Now do we cancel Don Rickles because he did certain things within the construct of where society was? I don’t know. It’s a tricky thing. People want to cancel Woody Allen and Woody Allen movies because of his personal behavior. Are they going to cancel Charlie Chaplin movies because of his personal behavior or is it just current comedians? So so there’s a real reckoning taking place and there’s a real conversation.

But the thing that I want to pivot from is the blame game that millennials are too fragile to understand. They’re not tough enough. I birthed these kids. So I have a responsibility to find out how we can all go forward and not complain about it; find common ground.

I even had someone say to me when I was teaching clown class “I saw a Robin Williams special. He was kind of creepy.” If you think about it it’s a white guy who’s playing Indian men, Mexicans, Blacks. He’s actually always making dick jokes. He’s doing everything. So I looked at this group of kids that I was with, and I’m like, “He is my idol. I saw him live and he was the most extraordinary being I’ve ever seen.” He fused clown and stand-up.

I said to these kids, “Who do you have today? Let me see and explain to me what it is.” They couldn’t tell me. So I think it’s a slow process of finding who the next person is going to hold the mantle and go across so everybody will be together. But I can’t be judgmental about it.

As you’re discussing Robin Williams I’m thinking he falls under the category, for me, of somebody who was an equal-opportunity offender, which is part of the tradition of comedy.

Absolutely. if you take away archetypes, commedia dell’arte is nothing. If I can’t do a stereotype, I’m dead. 

I saw Bill Irwin in Fool Moon. Then I saw his Tony Award-winning performance in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? It gets my mind thinking about the skill set that a clown has to have to be able to pull off both those shows. What do you think we can learn about clowns vis-á-vis someone like Bill Irwin mastering the clowning that he does in Samuel Beckett’s work, that he did in Fool Moon and then have ability to pull off Edward Albee’s dialogue?

We’re talking about a passionate man who loves performance, studies the greats and comedy. It’s very interesting because another thing about working with both Dave and Bill is David is all about flow. Bill is all about structure. David’s the kind of guy who’s like, let me get out there. When I’m in front of the audience it’s going to happen. Bill is give me the structure in which I can kill. That’s an interesting way to look at at different actors. Are you flow-based or are you structure-based? Those guys were the perfect combination for one another. Bill would discipline David and David would take Bill into the histrionic crazy.

What joy does putting together a show like Shambles give you and how do you think that radiates from you through your ensemble and into the audience?

This is the Bermuda Triangle of depression. Between Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year’s is the time where people feel more isolated, more marginalized. More a microscope on our dysfunctional families. I had a trauma as a kid. My father died around this time when I was nine years old. 40 years ago when I did that first Cardigan Christmas show, I’m like, Oh, these are the people I want to spend the holidays with and we want to invite the rest of our family into the theater.

To actually create a utopian holiday, a theoretic community, for these three weeks, I think that’s a way more healthy place for me to be. All of us in this place, 35 people, we’re the best of us for the hours we’re there. We’re all the best of us and we’re providing and gifting the best of us to other people here in Los Angeles.

Shambles runs at The Actors’ Gang through December 31st.

Photo: Gina Belafonte in Shambles (Photo courtesy The Actors’ Gang)

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Many theatergoers took notice of playwright Rajiv Joseph in 2009 when his play, Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo, had its world premiere at the Kirk Douglas Theatre. He was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for the play which found its way to Broadway in 2011 with Robin Williams heading the cast.

In 2008, New York’s Second Stage Theater gave the world premiere production of Joseph’s play Animals Out of Paper. In that play an origami artist takes a teenage prodigy, Suresh, under her wing at the suggestion of his high school teacher.

Joseph has revisited the character of Suresh for his new play, Letters of Suresh, which is having its world-premiere at Second Stage Theater. The play continues through Sunday, October 24th.

Letters of Suresh is told via letters sent by Suresh to a priest in Nagasaki, Japan, whom he encountered in the first play. After Father Hiromoto’s passing, his grand-niece, Melody, has taken possession of a box of letters Suresh sent to him. She tries to figure out exactly who Suresh is to her great uncle and why all these letters exist in the first place.

Last week I spoke via Zoom with Joseph about his new play, the lost art of letter-writing and the parallels to be found in origami and playwriting. What follows are excerpts from our conversation that have been edited for length and clarity.

Origami master Robert J. Lang said “The secret to productivity in so many fields and in origami is letting dead people do your work for you because what you can do is take your problem and turn it into a problem that someone else has solved and used their solutions.” Do you agree and how much does that represent perhaps what Suresh is doing in Letters of Suresh? 

I mean, that’s really interesting. Dead people. (LAUGHS) You know, I don’t know if that’s Suresh is doing. I think that is a really interesting observation by Robert Lang. I think that Suresh’s reckoning within this play is his own contribution and his own participation in a sort of violence or potential violence that can exist in the world. And I think that what we see in his letters to Father Hashimoto are, at first, kind of friendly getting to know you fuck off letters.

But then I think the play really begins when he writes to Father Hashimoto five years later. And I think therein begins his engagement with this priest. All the while wanting to ask or tell him something that he’s unable to do until the very end.

I think that most people who do origami and are passionate about it understand it on a metaphorical /perhaps spiritual level. They understand themselves in their folds and they understand the world in their folds. And I think that for me as the playwright, and also for Suresh, the examination of that talent is how he thinks about the world and also thinks about his own sort of complicity in his choices and the kind of business that he’s decided to go into.

Though he has major differences with Hashimoto, he still reaches out to him.

I think the reason that he always comes back to Hashimoto is because he understands Hashimoto has wisdom that he lacks. Even as he rails against Hashimoto’s religious tact or approach to life, he is curious about a different way of thinking, a different way of living. I think that the the characters in this play, not just Suresh and Hashimoto, but also Melody and Amelia, are all in these crisis points of trying to figure out a new way of approaching life. What’s interesting to me about spiritual thought is that if you begin to contemplate it in any way, there’s a sort of infinite reservoir of ideas that can come from it. And I think that that’s that’s what I see Suresh is looking for in Hashimoto.

In an era where we’re so used to texting and emailing, has society lost something, in your opinion, by not continuing in the tradition of writing letters? 

Yeah, I think so. I think that we always lose when we gain something else. I’m not one to bad mouth technology. I rely on it as much as anybody else. But I spent three years in the Peace Corps between 1997 and 2000. When I went into the Peace Corps in ’97, I didn’t, and no one I knew, had an e-mail address. And when I returned in 2000, all of my friends and parents and families, they all had e-mail addresses and I had to suddenly get one. My main communication with my friends and family had been through letter writing and through receiving letters from all of them – handwritten on paper and put in an envelope with a stamp and sent across the ocean.

I wonder if I was the last class of Peace Corps volunteers that wrote letters. I still have them, and my parents gave me back the ones I wrote to them. I remember the way that I thought about communicating with people. It was so much deeper, I think. I still think that people have significant communication with each other, but it’s different.

I think that letter writing is a lost art form. To re-engage with it requires a sort of a purposeful fetish with the art rather than necessity. No one needs to write them anymore. So to do it is like going back to vinyl, which people do these days. It’s just going to take, if anyone is interested in doing it, a kind of purposeful reversion to an analog state.

Suresh says in one of his letters, “It’s strange how you can forget about the person you used to be.” I just stopped when I read that line because I started thinking who I used to be, which is something I don’t think we evaluate as we get older. We don’t look back. Do you think that forgetfulness about who we used to be is either a good or bad thing? 

I think it’s a sad thing. I don’t think it’s good or bad. It may be a sad and necessary thing – maybe. I have letters, but I’ve also been keeping a journal pretty consistently for the past twenty five years or so since I graduated from college. Every so often I go back and just read entries from it and they always kind of stun me.

They stunned me in two ways. In some ways they stun me because I’m so similar to that. I am the same person I was. But then it stuns me what my life used to be like and how I used to live and how I used to kind of think and do things.

I think that we have this endless capacity to change, to improve and evolve. But I think that, like in that evolution, you can lose a sense of wonder or lose a sense of curiosity. So there are things to mourn and also things to be like, I’m glad that kid’s no longer be around because what an asshole!

In the very next letter, Melody says, “A few years ago when I was a different person.” I feel like there’s a call and response. I don’t know if that if that was intentional in the way you structured the letters, but it feels like we get opposing views of exactly that concept in back-to-back letters. 

Absolutely. The Melody letter is actually the one that gets to the heart of it because in her case, it’s a very sad thing. She knew that she had this thing that she’s kind of not open for many years. And then the act of re-reading and re-reading Suresh’s letters has finally caused her to remember a mistake that she made that that sent her life in a different direction. I think everybody has those little moments. I know that I think about them sometimes. And I think that a lot of this is play is about considering the paths that have not been taken. For me this is really interesting. 

Are there ways in which playwriting and origami are similar? 

Absolutely. When you have origami you can fold the paper in half and and that can be a bird. You can be like that’s a bird. Then you can also have a crease pattern with hundreds and hundreds of folds, and that can be a three-dimensional bird. There’s not necessarily a corollary between complexity and beauty. I think that for me the most beautiful plays and the most beautiful origami are the surprising ones. And it’s not because they have so many folds or such a complicated structure, but it’s because somebody has taken a simple piece of paper and made something unexpected and beautiful out of it. And the more unique that design can be, and the more surprising it is, the more satisfying the work of art is.

For tickets to Letters of Suresh by Rajiv Joseph, please go here.

All production photos by Joan Marcus (Courtesy Second Stage Theater)

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Alan Menken’s music returns as do the lyrics of Tim Rice and the late Howard Ashman. Chad Beguelin contributes additional lyrics and wrote the book for the show. The original Broadway production was nominated for five Tony Awards.

In this touring production, Adam Jacobs plays Aladdin; Anthony Murphy is the Genie and Isabella McCalla is Jasmine. The magic carpet rides begin on Wednesday and run through the end of March.

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