FORECASTING HURRICANE SEASON

TOWARDS A SACRED THEATRE OF DISASTER WITH SAWYER ESTES

In an out-of-the-way black box off the corner of Church Street, writer and director Sawyer Estes rattles on about the vernal and the sere. Like a crazy preacher man, Sawyer tests his southern audience on the laws of human society. But not for religion’s sake. Instead, the Lonestar Texan built his following for the love of theatre.

Sawyer :

I like to think of myself as a better adjusted Hazel Moats.

Alex:

In what way?

Sawyer:

He’s in the big city without a sense of decorum about himself. Completely misguided and extremely offensive. I’ve learned how to hold a punch.

Alex:

Flannery O’Connor described him as “Christ Haunted.”

Sawyer:

Right. She described him in that way and claimed it to be an intrinsic value of all southern fiction.

Alex:

Was Hazel Moats ever redeemed?

Sawyer:

Eh, I don’t know. But he’s always paying penance. He puts glass in his shoes, wraps sharp objects around his torso and drives this lemon of a car that barely runs, determined on it being his form of transportation.

Alex:

Hmmm.

Sawyer:

Of course, it's a metaphor for the vehicle that is faith and religion. "No one with a good car needs to be justified."

Alex:

I think it’s good for your audience to recognize the grappling with religion that’s put into the work you do and I’m curious how they perceive it. Is it really avant-garde?

Sawyer:

I think avant-garde is bullshit. Anybody that does anything slightly off the beaten path now is avant-garde. It’s absurd. I’m not avant-garde because there is no avant-garde anymore.

Alex:

What makes you believe that?

Sawyer:

Well, avant-garde is connected to 20th-century theater. It’s connected to modernism and anything that’s made now is past modernism. We’re probably all just post-modernists pulling from an endless supply of resources.

Alex:

Are you saying you’re nothing new?

Sawyer:

Yeah, there’s nothing I do which hasn’t already been done. I combine one source with another and shade it with a specific way of producing and a specific way of being. At times, it may appear strange or off-kilter but the reality is that it’s recognizably rooted in some modernist movement.

Alex:

Reinvention rather than invention?

Sawyer:

Consider a great chef. All they do is put this and that together slightly differently from the restaurant around the corner. Does that make them avant-garde? I think people’s impression of my work is much stranger than it actually is.

Alex:

So how do you label it then?

Sawyer:

Whatever the dish calls for, you know? We often use poetic language because theater is best when based in rich language. But the dance and the movement exist because we have it available to us. To me, theater is all of the art forms combined.

Alex:

You’ve compared making theater to working on an oil rig. What’s funny to me about that is you actually have first-hand experience doing both. Tell me a little bit about working on an oil rig.

Sawyer:

The simplified version that I like to tell is that I paid for a liberal arts degree by fracking.

Alex:

That’s definitely the best way to put it but tell us more.

Sawyer:

Any chance I got, be it spring break, winter break or summer break, I would drive out to the middle of west Texas to this tiny camper with no running water. I’d squat there for 24 hours a day, 7-days a week, overseeing the production of these volatile new oil wells.

Alex:
Like in ‘There Will Be Blood’?

Sawyer:

Close to it, sure. And every hour, on the hour, I had to wake to ensure everything was running properly, miles and miles away from any point of contact. I did a lot of writing and reading.

Alex:

Surely.

Sawyer:

Did I ever tell you the Samuel Beckett story though? It’s one of my favorite stories to tell.

Alex:

Never. Let’s hear it.

Sawyer:

This story is essentially an indictment of conventional theater in America because it speaks to its presumption of people's lack of insight and knowledge. Anyway, I was lying in the bed of a pickup truck, reading Samuel Beckett, while these truckers were pulling a load until one of them asked me what I was reading. Imagine a beefy man in his mid-forties, with arms like logs and a jutting belly.

Alex:

Got it.

Sawyer:
I hand him Endgame and he starts reading the damn thing. Before long, he just starts laughing out loud to himself. And I’m like: holy shit. I asked what he thought of it and he said it was hilarious. Then I asked if he understood it and he just started reciting it back to me.

Clov (Trucker) Why didn’t you leave?
Hamm (Trucker) There’s nowhere else to go.
Clov (Trucker) Well, why don’t you go find someone else?
Hamm (Trucker) There is no one else.

Sawyer:
And this trucker is dying. It resonated. Meanwhile, every theater company in America has chosen to believe Beckett’s unproducible, esoteric or too difficult a writer for anyone to understand him. They might give Waiting for Godot a try because it’s the most adjustable one but rarely is Endgame ever done. There I was sitting with this guy who got it immediately.

Alex:

Big lesson there.

Sawyer:

At that moment I realized a disconnect. Where we go wrong as artists is we think we’re so fucking smart. That these lay people couldn’t possibly get these things. Then we make art we think they'll understand and it sucks. Nothing in that moment with the trucker told him he couldn’t understand Samuel Beckett. We were on his turf. It brought meaning to his life. I’m convinced that guy understood Endgame far more than anyone I have ever met.

Alex:

You learned to never underestimate your audience.

Sawyer:

Exactly! A lot of people believe theater is this smart thing (which is total crap). People are much smarter than we ever give them credit for. Yeah maybe I’ve read a few more plays and have a certain grounding in theatrical history but when you arrive at the core of what a great play does and what it’s all about, I think anybody can understand these things. The culture surrounding theater is one of my least favorite things about it.

Alex:

It’s cool to hear you say that. I thought theater was only for people who read Shakespeare in their spare time.

Sawyer:

I’d much rather be watching the Cowboys in my spare time. I’d much rather have been an NBA basketball player than a playwright but that life wasn’t meant for me to have. So now I’m tending to this other thing. We’re made up of so many different parts. Theater is the spiritual side of me. I think that’s important for people to know.

Alex:

How so?

Sawyer:

It took the place of my religious upbringing. Speaking in tongues, fasting for days on end. So when you made the connection between me and a crazy preacher man, it wasn’t entirely wrong. I’m just not preaching redemption.

Alex:

The analogy I pictured was of some person who felt they had an important story to tell. Someone who was overflowing with their own version of enlightenment.

Sawyer:

My father dug materials from the earth to create comfort in his life but that was never going to be enough for me. My question to the world is pointed to these things within us that have been lying dormant forever. I must dig those things up; that which I would rather turn away from. It’s a grueling, arduous process to make theater in this way. Watching it can have the same effect. My hope is that our audience sees a very carnal, physical, emotional and spiritual labor at least, if not in the sweat on the actor’s bodies, than in the sound of their heavy breathing.

Alex:

Let’s talk about leaving the oil rig for New York City.

Sawyer:

I left under the assumption that my voice was unique. That people would be interested in it and make way for me. But it was an illusion I had to dispel. That first year, I bussed tables at Balthazar.

Alex:

Did you make theater in New York?

Sawyer:

I was able to direct one play there. But the actors barely learned their lines and I was paying some exorbitant amount of money to rent someone’s living room next to Madison Square Garden. I think we paid SEVEN THOUSAND DOLLARS for that tiny space. It happened six months after being there. I realized pretty quickly that I didn’t matter. The world wasn’t waiting for me and it would continue to go on fine without me.

Alex:

How is Atlanta any different?

Sawyer:

In Atlanta it was the same thing. It's not like anyone split the water for me either.

Alex:

So, what exactly did you take from New York?

Sawyer:

I learned that if I wanted to make theater, I would have to produce it myself and I’d have to be doing it for myself and if I was able to do it with other people and have an audience show up, I would need to consider myself a very fortunate person. That was the beginning of where I’m at now.

Alex:

Another important lesson for artists.

Sawyer:

You can’t worry about getting paid or recognized. You can’t give undue thought to those things because you could wait forever and it won’t come. You have to put yourself in the best position to make the work. I couldn't make the work in New York so it wasn’t the place for me. You're either too young or not good enough to work at any of those signature theaters anyway. Life is so expensive that people are torn from living and thrown into surviving. Space is costly. I moved to Atlanta having never visited before because I knew I wanted to start a theater company.

Alex:

You started from scratch in a city you had never seen before. Years later, the shows are sold out. What happened?

Sawyer:

It took us a year to make anything. We couldn’t find anyone who wanted to do our first show in a living room. Most people thought it was sketchy and weird. So no one wanted to work with us. But eventually, we found a space and the people who would do it. The first show only sold ninety tickets. Word of mouth grew so we had to squeeze a hundred people into a forty seat black box. People either stood or had to sit on couch cushions.

Alex:

And how many tickets did your last production sell?

Sawyer:

We sold over a thousand seats. Pretty decent growth for a span of five years or so.

Alex:

That’s encouraging.

Sawyer:

Other companies say our work is too esoteric for Atlanta in the same way they think Beckett is too smart for the oil field worker. Still, we do it and it’s a big point of pride for me to say that the audience in Atlanta has gladly come along with us and appreciate not being pandered to. They appreciate us challenging them. For me, a big part of the success is when a person comes to see us who’s never seen a play before and leaves caught off guard or surprised or bewildered. So often you go see a play and it's exactly what you expect it to be.

Alex:

Atlanta is under a lot of reconstruction I think. Lots of talented folk are content.

Sawyer:

Some of the best musicians in this city are working at a tattoo shop or some other place, trying to make a living. I think that’s fucking awesome and I’m really proud of it. Too often, people think artists who have to work real jobs are failures. But you don’t have to tie economic success to artistic ingenuity.

Alex:

A major theme emerging in this interview is how we labor to create and how the jobs we work make for wonderful hideouts in a way.

Sawyer:

Totally. I love that - hideouts.