Sean Graney takes on 9/11 conspiracies in Milwaukee Rep's Yankee Tavern

Sean Graney doesn't seem like an instant match for the normally staid Milwaukee Repertory Theater. The rising-star Chicago director, who founded The Hypocrites Theater Company when he was 24, is best known for taking modernist classics apart and slamming them back together, as well as for careful attention to emotional truth. When the director originally scheduled to do Steven Dietz's conspiracy-obsessed play Yankee Tavern withdrew due to the imminent arrival of his new baby, Dietz recommended Graney to The Rep. The A.V. Club recently met with the puckish, thirtysomething Graney to discuss his approach to the play. 

The A.V. Club: Why do people call you a punk director?

Sean Graney: I think it's because I have a piercing and tattoos. I do a wide spectrum of shows, from children's theater to really aggressive interactive art pieces. I think it's easy to label me that way. I don't know anybody that is truly punk to consider themselves punk, especially now.

AVC: How do you approach the conspiracy theories at the center of Yankee Tavern?

SG: The idea of conspiracies has always interested me, like the idea that there's a truth behind the accepted reality. Even if you think that they're these paranoid fictions that people buy into, it's fascinating—the thought process that causes people to create conspiracies. And some of the coincidences are just so amazing. Like last night. [Laughs.] Because I'm in a hotel—so there's not much to do—I was watching this show with Jesse Ventura, Conspiracy Theory. And I don't watch it regularly—please! They had this double-header; the first one was about 9/11, which a lot of this play deals with, so I was really interested to hear echoes of this play. But then, just so he didn't seem too left-wing, he did global warming as basically a conspiracy for Al Gore and all these environmentalists to get rich. [Laughs.] It was fascinating, because the first one, I was like "Oh, I didn't hear that before" and then with the global warming I was, "How could they do this? This is horrible—this is a crock of shit!" Knowing my political opinions, and seeing how I react to conspiracies knowing they're—I don't want to say crazy delusions—but knowing that they're both fictions that have a lot of echoes of truth, but what causes people to believe in them is where they come from and what they want to believe.

AVC: How do you connect the emotional reality of the characters to the larger political issues in this play?

SG: It's really easy to see this play like there's this big scary world out there and this little island of people in the middle trying to latch onto each other. But I'm more interested in having it be about the problems with the relationships with the people in the play. The people in the play don't trust each other, and they don't trust each other not because the world is this untrustworthy place. But the world is this untrustworthy place because people don't trust each other. That's what I'm trying to focus on, that if we just started trusting each other and just started talking to each other and exploring each other's ideas on a real simple, personal level, then the world will be a better place, I think. But that's kind of idealistic—not that I'm an idealist by any measure.

AVC: You started out doing absurd, nonrealistic theater, and now you're working in a very naturalistic style. How did that happen?

SG: I was really brought up on bad naturalism. I so desperately wanted to fight against that. I decided to direct Cherry Orchard; Chekhov called it a vaudeville in four acts. And as we got into it, I also found the emotional story really, really connected with me. It was at a time when my mom died, so I was very emotionally open and receptive and sensitive. We started exploring that play in the way I had fought against for so many years, and then I really discovered the power of letting actors exist in a character and a world, and it really changed my mind. I still hate bad naturalism.

AVC: The Rep is famous for its technical resources. Is that always good for theater?

SG: I've worked with some large theaters—not this large—but, you know, there are benefits and drawbacks. With my company, I pick the show, I do it the way I want, don't worry even about necessarily the audiences sometimes. [Laughs.] It’s a real labor of artistic love. But then, we don't have resources, so if I want crazy props, we can’t get them all the time, or the actors have to do day jobs so we rehearse at night and they're exhausted. Here, there's this support network, and there's so many other things you have to keep in mind, which is great, but it’s different. It's like the difference between being social and being masturbatory. You know, like sometimes you just like to masturbate, and its great and freeing, and sometimes you just want to make crazy art, experiment and see what comes out of it. But sometimes you're part of a group, and it's really interesting to be a cog in a large artistic machine, in a good way. I couldn't, to be honest, do jobs like this if I didn't make discoveries in The Hypocrites rehearsal room, and I wouldn't make those discoveries if I didn't have this. They feed on each other so, so, so much.