Featured Associate Artist: Aysan Celik

Welcome to our new blog series of Featured Associate Artists! We'll be asking a new Associate Artist each month the same ten questions so that you can get to know some of the many faces that have been working with us over the years and contributing their talents to our projects. Many thanks to our first, actress Aysan Celik!

Name: Aysan Celik
Year Joined The Civilians: 2002
Where you’re from: Claremont, CA
What City You’re Living In: The San Francisco Bay Area, and out of a suitcase.

How did you first get involved with The Civilians? 
An actor had to drop out of Canard, Canard, Goose?, and Michael suggested me to Steve as a replacement. Michael and I had worked together at the American Repertory Theater a few years prior, when we were both still in swaddling clothes.

What have you done with us, both in terms of investigating and performing? 
Performing: Canard, Canard, Goose? (the original production at HERE Arts and the 10th anniversary concert at Joe's Pub), This Beautiful City at the Studio Theater in DC (I covered the set of roles originated by the wonderful Alison Weller), the cabaret series Let Me Ascertain You (specifically Porn and Atlantic Yards), many a benefit, and almost every reading and workshop production of Paris Commune over the past ten years (and I am thrilled to be in rehearsals for the premiere right now).

Investigating: due to timing, I have missed a couple of chances to create pieces from the very beginning/interview process. I have experienced this on pieces outside of The Civilians, and I am hopeful for another opportunity with the company.

Tell us about something that surprised you, either in an interview, in using the investigative method, or in a rehearsal process.
If Steve looks like he is shocked at what you are doing, it could mean he is actually tickled.  (Could)

Sometimes it can catch me by surprise how absolutely strong and hopeful people can be while in dire situations, or when faced with censure or derision.

Why has it been interesting to work in this way?  
The text in the pieces is from people simply answering questions. They have not tried to shape their thoughts into a play, a film, or a novel. They're sharing their stories, speaking their truths. Granted, there is potential there for crafting or dramatization, but because a question is being answered in a moment, live, spoken, I think it’s less worked over. It’s direct. Most of the time, it does not seem to me like they planned what they are saying so that they could create something that is stylized or polished. This text then of course becomes developed into a theatrical experience by directors, designers and actors, and yet those words are still there, as they were spoken. That interplay of the un-crafted with the very crafted is interesting to me.

What is the last project you worked on outside of The Civilians? Ingmar Bergman's Persona - adapted and directed by Craig Baldwin, at HERE Arts this past August. It was a stage adaptation of Bergman's shooting script for the film, in which he wrote beautiful, weird and haunting commentary, and very vivid narration that is not necessarily reflected in the film in an obvious way. Any fan of the film should read this shooting script - it is a revelation. Bergman was fittingly a character in this piece, and was portrayed by Michael Rudko. Nick Westrate played Sister Alma (the nurse), and I performed both the doctor and Elisabeth Vogler (the actress who has a nervous breakdown and stops speaking).

What artist has had the biggest impact on you? 
There are so many. A few major ones: Pina Bausch, Yoshi Oida, Shinichi Suzuki, Jim Henson, and Gene Kelly.

What’s the last play you saw? 
A Bird in the Hand, by Jorge Ignacio Cortiñas. It just opened at Theater For a New City. I highly recommend it. It is magical, cruel and funny. The birds are exquisite. I love his writing.

What’s your favorite bad movie? 
She’s the Man is a teeny bopper take on Twelfth Night, to which it bears very little resemblance. So many of the performance choices are so confounding, so deeply awkward, and sometimes even unintelligible, that they are kind of ridiculously funny. At moments, you wonder if it's all on purpose! Also David Cross is in it, so yay.

Do you like sports?
Yes. I love the Olympics - everything makes me cry.  I absolutely love watching tennis!  A few of of my all time favorite players to watch: Martina Navratilova, Venus Williams and Serena Williams.

What question would you like us to ask our next Featured Associate Artist? 
What book do you re-read?

Click HERE for Aysan's bio!

Meet the R&D: The Illusive Truth, or Peter Sellers is a Funny Man

Today's post is from Jon Kern, one of the playwrights in our R&D Group. The writers in the group are contributing posts that will give insight into their processes: what they're thinking about, what material they're working with, how their research is informing their writing. For more info about the R&D Group, Jon, or his project, please click here, and without further ado, here's Jon's post!

The nature of beginning a new play is that you start to see it everywhere. The nature of me when reworking an older play is that I look for any chance to distract myself. So when I was researching a scene for Tapefaces: Legend of a Kung Fu Master – Season1 DVD [click this for a disturbing photo], I hopped away from clips of Dick Cavett to land on an interview between Peter Sellers and Michael Parkinson from 1974. Toward the end of the interview, between an Inspector Clouseau blooper reel and some goofy non-sequitur about a bad British performer, was a moment of personal reflection.



At around the 2:40 mark, Parkinson asks Sellers, “You’ve had fairly sort of turbulent, mixed-up, uh, private life throughout—throughout your career, haven’t you? Are you kind of happier now then you’ve been at other points in your career?” And Sellers obliges by talking about his failed marriages, holding himself accountable without revealing too much detail, any pointed analysis lost in an ellipsis and a wave of his hand. In this moment, the actor stops looking to the audience, and the impression is given that he’s searching himself for a square view of his past. And I was captivated imagining this as honest.

The project I’m working is a look at how people deal with compulsive behavior, particularly internet addiction. What I’m really curious to explore though is how people become honest with themselves. I don’t think honesty comes naturally. I don’t know when human beings first realized they can construct their own identities, but I expect that as soon as groups had leaders, some clown in that group figured out how to impersonate a leader. Without breaking out my old sociology syllabi, it’s taken as a pretty evident fact now that we create our identities as much if not more often as we be ourselves. Even the idea of acting natural is a frequently performed posture.

Understanding the constructed quality of self-presentation doesn’t stop us for searching for something unconstructed. I’m pretty obsessed wondering if there is something in humanity that is like what Georg Simmel called “an unknowable core.” Compulsive behavior I imagine forces a reckoning with at least the uncontrolled aspect of personality. This in turn leads people to be very honest about their faults, their past, while perhaps never truly putting that past behind them.

Peter Sellers himself represents this question. He represents in a fairly generic “Behind the Music” kind of way. A drug addict. A self-destructive personal life. An early death. A diagnosis – heart attack – related to his addiction. An actor. An actor whose best performance likely came in a movie where he played a man with no personality [Being There].

The Parkinson interview is a part of Sellers legend as a man with no self. Sellers initially refused to go on in front of audience and camera. He apparently was gripped with stage fright. When told he must by Parkison because everything for the interview was already ready, Sellers replied, “I can’t do me!” Parkison, in what sounds like a showbiz-y pro thing to say, retorted, ““Look – I don’t care WHO you come on as – just so long as you COME ON.”

So Sellers came on as an antic WWII German soldier. Watch Part I of the interview. He’s the one shouting in the heavy coat and helmet.



Then Sellers does his striptease out of that character only to step into another amusing bit as a crappy magician. When he finally sits down, it’s supposedly as Peter Sellers.  But this “Peter Sellers” is still mostly a prepared routine. At the end of Part I [beginning at the 8:10 mark], he launches into “an old actor’s story” voicing the old actor – Warrington Minge - who is trying to cash a check. When he comes to the mention of the check, Sellers unbuttons his left breast pocket and pulls out a slip of paper the size of a check. He had walked on stage with his props prepared. This, like so much else in the interview, is just another set piece.

Only when I concentrated on writing this blog post, really looking at what I had selected for inspiration, did I start to doubt that the moment I first saw held any honesty. Sellers answers Parkinson’s question about his happiness with an immediate “Yes.” He performs the role of the penitent ex-husband, confessing that his relationship troubles are “maybe—probably due to the fact I’m impossible to live with.” Is this a reckoning with himself or just the proper line to play the part?

There’s a moment in the first part of the interview [the 4:00 mark] when Parkinson asks about Seller’s father. Just the mention of the word “father” causes Sellers to take his only real sustained silence. Perhaps that expression at 4:02 is the most penetrating insight to be gained from this interview.

Ultimately, understanding our motives may come down to fairly prosaic tropes. My interest in the play I’m working on is less why people behave compulsively but what does a person do once she learns why she behaves compulsively. Certainly, in the case of internet addiction, the source of the compulsion is difficult to avoid and still remain in this century. [Google “hermit” and you can find suggestions on where to go to be alone.]

In my obsession with “an unknowable core” I have told myself, when I’ve remembered my own thoughts, that our labors to overcome a lack of understanding of ourselves only serve as proof that this core must exist. That lack equals the existence of the inviolate unknowable. We struggle with our ignorance as a way to learn about ourselves and what we really come to know is the struggle.

I want to learn how in knowing that struggle at least, we can gather pieces to form an impression of who we are. And when we look at this jigsawed portrait, we can tell ourselves, much as Sellers tries to convince before launching into a captivating apocryphal joke about a musician friend, “This is . . . probably true—probably based on fact.”

UNRELATED ADDENDUM: Over the weekend, I went to a wedding in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, where Moravian College is located and where the heart of the U.S. steel industry used to be located. Walking to the chapel, I passed by an Occupy Bethlehem encampment, a handful of tents cluster in a small patch of grass by the Bethlehem Area Public Library. Unfortunately, I was running late to the wedding. It makes me wonder, Internet: what is the most obscure town where the Occupy movement has set up camp?

Post by Jon Kern