An Oak Tree is presented by Odyssey Theatre Ensemble, Beth Hogan with Page One Productions, Dan Fishbach, William Adashek and Michele Spears in association with Marc Platt. Opens Jan. 6; plays Wed.-Sat., 8 pm; Sun., 2 pm; closes Feb. 14. Tickets: $30. Odyssey Theatre Ensemble, 2055 S. Sepulveda Blvd., Los Angeles; 310.477.2055 or anoaktreela.com.
Imagine you’re an actor. You have a play, learn your role, memorize your lines and, like any professional, prepare as best you can for the job you’re hired to do. Then there’s a twist. You meet your co-star an hour before you go on stage. He or she will have never seen the play you’re going to be performing in. The person won’t read it until he or she is beside you, in front of an audience. There is no rehearsal process, no research time and no chance to go back and fix any of the mistakes in future shows.
Sound like a nightmare? Not for Tim Crouch. Far from intimidated by the task of leading another actor into the unknown, Crouch thrives on the sense perpetual recreation.
“There’s an actor who I will meet right before the performance,” Crouch explains. “They haven’t seen the play, they haven’t read the play. I meet them an hour before and I don’t tell them about the play; it’s just a chance for us to meet. The play is scripted but what the actor brings is different every time because every actor is different as is every human being. It’s the emotional interpretation of their trust in the piece, their confidence in the piece.”
A Smith and Tim Crouch
Even after he finished the script, Crouch continues to perform nightly as co-star and co-director. “I guide [the other actor] through the piece and they will be transformed but they won’t be transformed because of a lengthy rehearsal process; they won’t be transformed because they went through a whole checklist of psychological research; they’ll be transformed because of the context they’re in and the information the audience gets and the effect the audience has on that actor.”
Crouch, like so many successful actors-turned-playwrights before him, began his writing career frustrated. He had been an actor up until his mid-30s and wasn’t happy with the trends he was seeing in the theatre.
“My primary frustration is my concern that theatre be unique in relation to film or TV in that it doesn’t have to realistically mimic reality,” Crouch explains. “The experience of theatre is live; it’s the thing that makes it unique. I get tired of watching actors pretending to make discoveries. In An Oak Tree, the discoveries the actor makes and the discoveries I make are happening then and there in front of the audience’s eyes. They have not been rehearsed and re-rehearsed, finessed and polished and made to look real. They are real.”
More than just frustrated with stale, over-rehearsed performances, Crouch says he was also frustrated by how some shows patronize the audience with realism. “Even though the audience is aware of the truth of the situation, they are transported into the fiction of the story being told and that happens with every audience. My frustration with some theatres is that they don’t trust the audience to do that.”
For Crouch, that story is key. “My priority is to tell a story. If I didn’t have a story to tell, there wouldn’t be a point in doing the play.”
His frustrations as an actor led to his first play, My Arm, which debuted in 2003. An Oak Tree came soon after in 2005, inspired by another artistic medium. “The primary inspiration came from a piece of art called ‘An Oak Tree’ made by an Irish artist named Michael Craig-Martin in 1973,” Crouch says. “I think the ideas in visual art are light years ahead of ideas in the theatre. They are all around the idea of the figurative art. The confidence and the maturity of the ideas in visual art sometimes put theatre to shame.”
Artwork by Craig-Martin
The artwork “An Oak Tree” is a glass of water sitting on a shelf with accompanying text informing the viewer the work is, in fact, a fully-grown oak tree. Iconic in the conceptual art movement, Craig-Martin’s text explains: “It’s not a symbol. I have changed the physical substance of the glass of water into that of an oak tree. I didn’t change its appearance. The actual oak tree is physically present but in the form of a glass of water.” Instead, the text goes on to suggest, the glass of water is an oak tree because the viewer accepts the figurative change.
The change from glass of water to oak tree in the artwork is done by the viewer, just as the reality of a play is created by the audience. “There’s something very important to me about that idea of transformation in art and in theatre that is done not so much by the object but by the viewer of the object,” says Crouch. “Rather than spending a lot of time and energy on transforming the physical reality of the actor into something else, it’s the audience creating that transformation. My work is about empowering the audience in a way much more than traditional theatre.”
More than just empowering the audience, much of Crouch’s work is to empower his co-star. “My job is to be as open to what they’re bringing as they are open to what I’m bringing. I need to release that second actor on stage, to let them know that nothing they would do would be wrong in any way, and to work with whatever they bring. It’s a really liberating process. The show works best when the actor takes the lead and I am responding to what they do,” Crouch claims.
Such co-actors have included Mike Myers, David Hyde Pierce, Academy Award winners F. Murray Abraham, Frances McDormand and Geoffrey Rush, among others. But on the subject of his specific co-stars, however, Crouch is respectfully quiet. “I make it a point never to name any individual performers because I think any actor who does this show with me deserves my ultimate support,” he says. “I’ve had extraordinary experiences with the play and some frustrating experiences with the play but always the play succeeds on its own terms.”
And succeed it has. Crouch has performed An Oak Tree over 250 times with 250 actors all over the world – from New York to London, Moscow to Melbourne, even bilingual performances in Portugal and, this coming spring, Tokyo.
Bilingual performances? Doing a play with a co-star and audience who speak another language? How did he handle that? “That screwed with my head,” he laughs. “In those foreign language performances, my lines were in English and theirs were in another language. They had to understand English so I could guide that performance but in terms of the audience my lines were translated and then subtitled. And the play is pretty layered, so to add that other language layer sometimes just did my head in, actually.”
Meagan English and Crouch at the Odyssey
Luckily he won’t have to worry about that with his Odyssey performances but he admits to being both excited and intimidated by the Los Angeles theatre scene. “This is an actor’s city so I’m very excited about that. I think we’ll have some extraordinary actors coming to do the show with me and I’m very excited about that.”
The currently slated talent for the Los Angeles run includes Jason Alexander, Peter Gallagher, Clancy Brown, Beth Grant, John Rubinstein and Kurtwood Smith among other guest actors to be announced as casting continues. But with those extraordinary actors comes their long and award-winning resumes. “My job is not to be phased but meet each actor who comes as themselves, really,” he insists. “If I start going, ‘this is a favorite actor of mine,’ then I get in trouble. I am aware there is a weight to the city and I am resisting that weight.”
As with any of his performances, Tim Crouch promises a unique theatre going experience during his run at the Odyssey Theatre. “I think the thing that’s been amazing with the history of the show is people often come back two or three times,” he marvels. “They understand that whenever a play is done, it’s fundamentally different from how it’s ever been before and how it will ever be again because of the presence of a live agent in the middle of it. Someone is discovering the play at the same time as the audience, and that’s really empowering for the audience. There are thousands of choices made in a six week rehearsal process but they are often swept under the carpet so no one realizes they’ve been made. In An Oak Tree, you’ll see those choices being made instantaneously, in front of our eyes, and they are coupled with the story that supports those ideas.”
Feature image of Crouch and story image of English and Crouch by William Adashek. Story image of a smith and Crouch by Nina Urban courtesy of News from Nowhere. Story image of Craig-Martin art courtesy of Wikipedia.
Article by Janet Thielke
