Mona Malec (left) and Danielle Louise Reddick star in Theater Grottesco’s staging of Two Artists in Prison, in which they spend the entirety of the play behind bars.
Mona Malec (left) and Danielle Louise Reddick star in Theater Grottesco’s staging of Two Artists in Prison, in which they spend the entirety of the play behind bars.
The actors, not the audience, are captive in Theater Grottesco’s imagination-driven Two Artists in Prison.
Danielle Louise Reddick and Mona Malec spend all of the play’s 60 minutes in a makeshift prison cell, climbing around as they trade dialogue. Their characters have been jailed amid a crackdown on anyone who is “different”; the play focuses more on their imprisonment than the reasons behind it.
“With the political chaos in America and talk about retribution, it’s like, ‘Well, what happens when the wrong people are in prison?’” says John Flax, founding artistic director of Theater Grottesco. “Artists are rarely talked about as the ones who go to prison, but history tells us that they’re on the list. So it became very timely.”
Reddick’s and Malec’s characters are forced to tell a different story each day to the prison’s guards. In TwoArtists, they relate a story with the Old English play Beowulf as its backbone, delving into the origins of wealth and the need for “the other” to define good vs. evil. One of the jailed artists knows the play well; the other does not.
“I fought to make sure we didn’t have bars on the back,” Malec says, referring to a wall serving as the back of the cell. “It made me really uncomfortable; I do have some claustrophobia. I kept saying, ‘Well, how are we going to get in and out?’”
For Reddick, acting near a set of bars invites deeper reflections about perspective.
“There’s something really intriguing about reaching out through the bars at the audience and feeling as if there’s no separation between us,” she says. “These bars don’t separate us. We are in this together even though I’m in the cage and you’re out there. Don’t be confused because your cage just might be bigger than mine. And, you know, you may not be aware of how you are entrapped out there in the world, outside of the cage.”
Malec says she has been working with Theater Grottesco on and off for more than 20 years, while Reddick is an ensemble member.
“I hadn’t worked with them for quite some time,” Malec says. “So I was excited to jump back in. This is the first time that [Reddick] and I are working super closely. Because of the culture that Grottesco has built over 40 years, it’s easier to be able to trust that you can just jump in.”
Reddick says she trusts the others involved in Two Artists — Malec, Flax, and co-director Apollo Garcia — to see things she might not pick up in a production.
“We’ve worked well together on other projects before, and we have a shared language, but it’s not a language of words,” she says. “It’s a language of aesthetic, which is good.”
Malec echoes those sentiments, adding that she has known Garcia since he was a child.
“It’s really fun to interact with him now as a full-grown artist with his own artistic life that I know nothing about,” she says. “John has a structure, but in my opinion, he has always been really good at working with us and letting us bring our gifts to the table as well. And that’s rare.”
Flax says he has been interested in presenting Two Artists for about a decade. It has its roots in poetry, not as a script. Early on, Flax considered starring in it alongside an actor he worked with in the 1980s in Paris, where Theater Grottesco was founded.
“We’re inspired by [Irish poet] Seamus Haney, and a newer translation by Maria Dahvana Headley, an American writer,” Flax says. “We kind of put together a working script combining their translations, and we ended up really looking at it hard as a stage play as opposed to a poem. Things got edited and rewritten substantially so that the artists felt comfortable delivering [the lines], so it’s really a conglomeration of those two very celebrated authors and Mona, Dani, and myself.”
Like the actors, the audience will occupy an intimate space: the smaller “second space” at Teatro Paraguas, which has 38 seats, Flax says. As a result, Malec says, the audience has a larger role.
“It’s in a very small space,” she says, “We’re right there. There’s no hiding. There’s no distance. So yeah, the audience is going to change [the play]. I think it’s going to change it a lot.” ◀
About Theater Grottesco
Theater Grottesco traveled a long path from its founding to Santa Fe.
John Flax and Didier Maucort founded the theater in 1983 in Paris and were joined shortly thereafter by Elizabeth Wiseman. All three are graduates of France’s famed drama school Ecole Jacques Lecoq. Flax is the theater’s founding artistic director, while Wiseman is its former associate artistic director.
In 1985, the company moved to the U.S.; it was based in New York City and Detroit before moving to Santa Fe in 1996. The company and its creators have produced nearly 20 full plays and more than 40 shorter pieces. To view excerpts of previous works, visit theatergrottesco.org/videos.
Theater Grottesco consists of Flax, Bob Brady (graphic designer), Kent Kirkpatrick (artistic associate), Mariah Olesen (media and administration), Janey Potts (administration), and ensemble members Myriah Duda, Koppany Pusztai, Danielle Louise Reddick, Julie Shapiro, and Susan Skeele.
“We often talk about the different circles of the Grottesco ensemble, and of course, the main circle is the artists who are working on the current show,” Flax says. “But then the next circle out are people who have worked with Grottesco over the years who we still consider company members. We admire their work, we have great respect for them, and we look forward to the next time we work together. And that’s, gosh, 10 or 12 actors. We try to stay in touch with that group.”
Connective tissue
Danielle Louise Reddick, Mona Malec, and Apollo Garcia last worked together in 2006 in Wenomadmen. Elizabeth Wiseman directed, Flax says, adding that he was minimally involved. Garcia was about 16 years old at the time, Flax says.
“That’s another aspect of the ensemble: Whenever we do workshops, we try to identify potential actors we want to work with,” he says. “Apollo’s mother was working at the box office, and she kept talking about her son. We needed a kid for that show. And you know, he’s got a substantial résumé now.” — B.S.
