Bastion Carboni justifies his No Exit strategy
Controversial director and actor turns non-pandering focus to non-nostalgia
Carboni's Poison Apple Initiative players, from left: Jen Brown, Helyn Rain Messenger, and Rommel Sulit
Local stage director and actor Bastion Carboni likes to talk shit: In his last interview with Decider, he derided large swaths of the Austin theatrical output as "a fucking abortion" and said that the biggest problem with the local community was "the pandering focus on nostalgia." So we were surprised to hear that Carboni and his Poison Apple Initiative would be following up their original FronteraFest hit, A Matter of Taste, with a revival of Jean-Paul Sartre's classic No Exit at Domy Books. In light of his previous statements, Decider asked Carboni about his decision to stage a 65-year-old play, and he shot back with typical candor, giving reasons to hate Barack Obama, and why he thinks reality television is an equally theatrical experience to a night at The Vortex.
Decider: In your previous interview, you came off as an angry firebrand issuing challenges to Austin theater-makers to drop the nostalgia, stop pandering to audiences, and be more concerned with art than longevity. Now you're doing a revival of a 65-year-old classic. What happened?
Bastion Carboni: No Exit's not really a part of what I was admonishing previously, because it's a play about philosophy. It's not tied to a certain situation, a certain moment in time, or a certain location. It's tackling the same issues that we're still tackling in our daily life, so it's pertinent for that reason.
D: Couldn't you make the same argument about Romeo And Juliet?
BC: Yeah, but Romeo And Juliet doesn't deal with philosophies. Plays like that are dealing with timeless themes, but they're not dealing with themes that are consistently unanswered. When you have a play that defends love, like Romeo And Juliet, it more makes a comment than raises questions.
D: What about Hamlet?
BC: Hamlet raises consistent questions, but I wouldn't say that it's outlived its pertinence. He's not dealing with issues that strike every human being.
D: "To be or not to be"?
BC: Yeah, that does. But Hamlet's so locked into his particular situation. No Exit is an everyman proposition. Hamlet is a royal emo kid of the stage, where these are full-grown adults. Plenty of people in their 30s, 40s, and 50s are still dealing with what Hamlet is dealing with, but a lot of that pathos is relegated to a certain age. No Exit stretches across every age group, across every ethnicity—its scope is just wider. And it is comparatively a newer play.
D: But it's still a classic. Your earlier statements didn't make it sound like reviving classics was something you had a lot of respect for.
BC: There are some revivals and adaptations that I have a lot of respect for. I have seen some really beautiful work. Dustin Wills' Ophelia was the kind of adaptation that just busted my sack wide-the-fuck open. But there are theaters that find a niche and don't break out of it. In theme, mode, or scope, we see a lot of the same shit here across the theatrical spectrum, and also from certain theaters—The Vortex, for instance. It does the same tits-and-blood shit every time. And then sometimes there'll be, like, someone fucking an anthropomorphized cobweb or something. A few decades ago, that'd be cool. But now?
D: Theater's not really a mainstream art form right now. With the space to work without as many commercial constraints as other media, why not do a play that really comments on contemporary culture instead of looking for reflections in something that's 65 years old?
BC: Well, people watch theater all the time. It's just televised, and it grants people fabulous prizes for wrestling in a pool of Jell-O. We call it "reality television." And No Exit does comment on this contemporary culture. It's funny—Sartre was living in a society, and so are we, where we're solipsistic, but so paradoxically dependent on these other entities to define us. That's the reason the fucking president was elected. We just elected a man based on how many nice things he said about us. He sat there and said, "You guys were never assholes. They were the assholes. You guys, you're the future, and I can represent that for you!" We're glued to Twitter, Facebook, MySpace—these institutions that allow us to purvey these images of "self." And that's what this play is all about. The hell of trying to make other people believe that you are this thing that you are not.
D: A cynic might say that you're cashing in, trying to trade on the prestige of No Exit to build your own name. Is that what you're doing?
BC: [Pauses] A cynic could make a lot of comments that I'd probably agree with.
D: Is that a "yes?"
BC: If you want to use your dirty terms! Kind of. You have to do work that people want to see. It's preferable if you're not doing work like Neil LaBute or David Mamet. I'd rather do something that's actually good. But we go for new work, primarily. This is a one-time thing to try to reach an audience that wouldn't necessarily go to theater. Then we can afford to focus on new work.
