The Jag (Photo: Geve Penaflor) There’s a less rigorous, more familiar version of The Jag that’s all about the flattery, obsequiousness and gamesmanship that goes into seducing a rich person to fund a young artist’s work. But, productively, that’s not where Schavoir and Felton take The Jag. The trio’s circling of each other is twistier, more unpredictable, and more entwined with each’s fantasies and, perhaps, self-delusions. It’s a depiction of the artist/patron relationship (yes, the Medicis are discussed), for a post-Kickstarter, post indie-film-collapse era of smaller dreams and grander, yet possibly just as fragile, defense mechanisms.
Filmmaker: The drama in The Jag is fueled by a conflict between art and money. One character, Tyler, believes he is an artist; the other, Brian, tries to dissemble around the idea that his only worth is his money. But this isn’t a simple story about an artist eager to be funded. Tyler seems accepting of the idea that his screenplay may never be made — that doesn’t take away from his own self-image of himself as an artist, nor does it diminish him in the eyes of his ex, Cori. Both of you have been in the arts for many years, and I’m sure have come across financiers with whom you’ve entered into ambiguous, and possibly conflict-filled dynamics. So tell me a bit about the inspirations for the play and how much you mined personal experience when it comes to the various characters and relationships.
Schavoir: Until I wrote The Jag in 2011 I had never encountered anyone you could call a “financier.” I maybe had an odd start to a film career in that I dropped out of college after a few months and didn’t have any experience in film. Didn’t even know anyone who’d P.A.’d or anything. My experience in film was that I was just this person that wanted to make films and wrote scripts with huge page counts that no one would ever read. The idea of making a short film to use a “calling card” — a very common piece of advice back then — was the most insulting thing you could say to me. This purist mindset put me in a comically ill-equipped position to “realize my visions” and it was a constant source of torment. When I saw the Richard Burton biopic about Wagner and how he out of the blue was summoned to Bavaria by a newly crowned King Ludwig who wanted to produce his operas I felt that that kind of thing should happen to me. But other than these vague, naive dreams of getting funding I had no idea how to go about it. But in 2011 I was invited upstate and there was supposed to be a movie made of something I was working on and the basic scenario as laid out in The Jag, actually took place. There was a wealthy man, there was a wishbone, there was a fireplace with a broken screen and a log did roll out. There was no reunion with an ex lover — that was all fantasy — but the basic set-up was real. And it was during this awkward residency that I wrote the play, clandestinely at that very desk while all the awkwardness was going down. It was more like a fanfic closet drama than a planned script. Probably why I wrote it so fast (it was a marginal project for me).
Aside from these personal connections, The Jag is inspired by the tale of the Ant and the Grasshopper. It was hard to convey this during a summer heatwave in the concrete jungle that is Greenpoint, but the play is set in Autumn with winter approaching. The image of a grasshopper shivering outside an ant’s door in rags after having spent the spring and summer playing his violin has always been sad and ominous to me, and I think The Jag is very similar. It would surprise some people but The Jag is more pro ant than one would expect.
Felton: My own experience with individual financiers has, for the most part, been very pleasant. I’ve yet to make any deals with devils — no devils have asked me to‚ which is probably why I’ve yet to make money doing any of this.What was immediately accessible to me about this play was its diagnostic aspects. I think it’s really sharp on the neurotic relationships that Americans have with money, and particularly the ways in which anxiety around money can derange and/or create in people a kind of defiant resignation. And I am very intimate with the mixture of resentment and deference that goes along with asking people for money to make things — or is part of any job, really.
Filmmaker: Robin, after I saw the play I did some online research and came upon the iMDB listing for a 2014 version of The Jag, done as a film directed by Peter Parlow and Yarrow King. “Peter Parlow,” of course, is the collaborative pseudonym you used to direct The Plagiarist with James N. Kienitz Wilkins. Could you tell me about this piece’s origins as a film, why we can’t see it and how it then transformed into a play. Did you rework it much for the stage as well as for the 11-year-gap?
Schavoir: I did make a Jag film in 2011. The name Peter Parlow is a name I’d used before as both a penname and the name of a character I often write for. We used Peter Parlow as the director’s name in The Plagiarists because Tyler in The Plagiarists is the same Tyler from The Jag but a little bit older. The idea was to use Tyler as a stock character. I actually wrote The Jag film as a teleplay and because of this the script was changed very little in its transformation into the play you saw last week. But there was a scene which needed a lot of retooling, and that is maybe the main reason why the film is kind of hidden away. Also the Brian we had cast was too young I think (when I was 29 I didn’t know anyone over 35, which made it kind of difficult). To me the generational gap is almost as important a dynamic as the wealth gap, and in the play I think the casting works really well.
Felton: One of the ways I prepared was by acting! Which I’d never done before. Matt Gasda knew me a little bit from a screening series Nick Newman does at BCTR, and after I’d subbed for somebody else at a reading of his play Doomers, he convinced me to play an arrogant venture capitalist (according to him I have the “perfect cadence” for this). We did something like 35 shows, so I got to know the space intimately from that side of the stage, which gave me a sense of both its strengths and limitations.If my artistic process has any essentials, they are simple. Cast well and then trust the actors. Surround myself with people more experienced than me and don’t pretend to know more than I do. That’s what I did on the movie and that’s what I did here. Once I was able to establish a mutually trusting relationship with the people working on this play, the rest was just solving interesting design problems.
I know there’s a lot of talk about the difference between film and theater acting, theater is “bigger,” etc, but honestly, this space is so small and these actors are so good that I can’t really say there was much of a difference between my work with them and with the Slow Machine cast (many of whom were also established theater actors). Also on Slow Machine we did so many camera rehearsals before we even turned the camera on — we were shooting on film and so could afford very few takes — that some days felt more akin to staging a play than making a movie.
Schavoir: I take issue with Paul’s description of my desired budget. As a non-union carpenter, I could probably build a balcony for less than a million dollars but yes, I thought it was not really possible to stage this play in a one room loft in Greenpoint. Of course I was proven wrong, and the staging that Paul and Bree came up with worked better than I could have ever hoped. It’s astounding how readily you believe something once the story gets going. When I saw the play the first time along with the audience it felt like magic.
Felton: I guess what I meant was that the play was written to be staged like that — it was presumptuous of me to say what Robin’s ‘ideal’ would be. The immediate problem that presents itself is, how do you approximate a two-story Woodstock Craftsmen house in a funny little room? I knew that we needed to be minimal — to lean into artifice, and not pretend the space we were in wasn’t the space we were in. So I started talking with our set designer Bree Merkwan about a few significant objects (a painting, a curtain, etc.) that could almost stand in for entire rooms, and thinking about a staging that subtly indicated each of the characters’ zones, so to speak, based on their movements.
One significant problem we faced was the kitchen. There’s a kitchen in the play that has great symbolic and dramatic significance, and originally (by which I mean like two weeks ago) we had characters gesturing offstage to the actual BCTR kitchen, which the audience has to walk through to get to the theater. At the time it seemed to me like enough, but when Robin came to see it he felt like it was weird and muddy, and he said, “Why don’t you put the kitchen in the theater?” Which I was pretty sure was a great idea, and so I did the thing you’re never supposed to do on the first day of tech, which was to suggest a huge blocking change to the actors. And they kindly didn’t kill me and were in fact totally game, and there the kitchen is.
Filmmaker: As you tease in your materials, a downtown NYC icon voices an off-screen character, heard on the soundtrack in key moments reciting email communication. Tell me more about adding this additional character as well as layer of information to the piece via the soundtrack? How did you want her to function when it came to your storytelling?
Schavoir: In writing The Jag I was very aware of its symmetry. There are three acts. Each act has two scenes which are causal/dramatic. Each act has an epilogue which I’d describe as ideal or extra-temporal. Each act has a prologue which is an email which I think of as material. Kind of like evidence in a trial. The point of the emails is to supply important information but to do so in the opposite way and of the opposite kind as is supplied in the epilogues. The character Heather is mentioned so often and I think it’s nice to hear her chime in every once in a while oblivious to the drama brewing in her country home. I also think it’s a wonderful spark in cosmic wheels that this downtown icon voices Tyler’s “benefactress” because this is exactly who Tyler would choose as his benefactress if he could. It’s very hilarious to me and I’m so utterly grateful.
Felton: That character was always in the play, and I knew early on that I wanted to get said icon to read those e-mails – something about a voice that was both familiar and seeming to emanate from somewhere higher, outside of the play proper, seemed like the thing to do. And I always wanted to make the staging as simple as possible so that people could actually listen to those e-mails, which contain important information that moves the story forward. Sound design in general has been a huge part of staging this piece — it has close to as many sound cues as anything ever performed at BCTR, and we weren’t even able to fit in all the cues as written in the play. On top of the emails, there’s a near-constant drone of era-specific NPR and music and leaf blowers — it’s wild. Our sound designer Emi Verhar came in and wove everything together in about three days like some kind of wizard.
Filmmaker: Paul, you spoke on the podcast about encountering downtown theater alongside your early days in film. What elements of those early productions you saw stuck with you and perhaps influenced how you approached directing The Jag?
Felton: One of the things that was so exciting about the work I was seeing when I first got to New York — at the Ontological, or the Performance Garage, or The Kitchen — was its utter disregard for verisimilitude. These plays felt like they were happening for the first time in front of you (even when the staging and multimedia aspects were very rigorous) and could only and ever be performed live, not adapted to some other medium. They felt very risky. I think the work of Richard Maxwell and Annie Baker has probably informed my work on this play more than any other. Their stuff has a haunted, uncanny quality — both in the writing and the staging — that also incorporates a lot of humor and isn’t afraid of quietude. Sam Gold’s production of Baker’s Uncle Vanya adaptation at Soho Rep is something I will never forget — so spare and intimate, a cast full of titans, totally unfussy, very few props or distractions from the text — I was in awe when I saw what they’d done, and it suggested so many possibilities for how to make a play.
I think Baker has been a bridge for a lot of film people to the theater — maybe, in part, because of The Flick. But there’s a cinematic intimacy to her work that feels very sui generis, very much the opposite of whatever weird associations film people in America seem to sometimes have with theater people, like they’re too outsized or something. I heard Baker say in an interview that she’d always basically thought of herself as a filmmaker, so it makes sense that she knocked it out of the park with Janet Planet.
Filmmaker: Robin, in your author bio, you mention an upcoming feature project. Can you tell us a bit more about that?
Schavoir: Yes, a feature I wrote and codirected with Matthew Schroder called Frogs is currently in post production. I would describe it as a breezy romcom set in a single sunny day in 2009 NYC (I swear I write things not set in this era). Carmen Borla plays Sofia, a disgruntled trust fund girl/actress who, in a moment of self doubt and aspirational anxiety, decides to relegate her best friend and fuck buddy Andre, a hapless plant sitter/writer (Matthew Danger Lippman making his feature film lead debut), to lowly best friend status. Taking this as a starting point we follow them as they traipse around the East Village, attend a brunch in Williamsburg. A couple cases of mistaken identity. A cat problem. The recession always in the background. I wont get into the weeds but I think it’s a very sunny, happy, funny, heartwarming film. Pigeons cooing, bossa nova, cigarette smoking. Breakfast at Tiffany‘s for the aughts, maybe. It also stars Peter Vack as a vape-obsessed techbro and Emily Davis as a broke, basement-dwelling aspiring thespian.
Filmmaker: Anything else either of you would like to add? I’d particularly like to hear about how audiences have been responding so far, and if their take on the film’s themes and characters have been expected or not.
Schavoir: I’ve loved the reaction from the audience so far. It’s very intriguing. Back in 2011 when I shared the Jag film with people they were for the most part somewhat perplexed as to why a protagonist would be so unlikable. For better or worse in this current era no one seems to mind that Tyler is unlikable and people seem to really absorb the drama as a whole, in the way it was intended. There’s a joke about Hegel and Cheerios in The Jag, but The Jag is a really a dialectic. It’s supposed to be a trio. A dramatic argument between three people. This really comes through in this production. Something I noticed that really surprised me is that people laugh throughout, even during the scenes when the mood turns somber. It’s a very surreal effect, as a writer, to watch your character give this heart-rending speech, her eyes welling with tears, and have people chuckle throughout. One might think a writer would be offended by such a reaction, but the effect is very magical and very specific to what theater can do.
Felton: The response has generally been very enthusiastic. People have cried! People have also been coming out on the BCTR roof afterwards and discussing, sometimes at length, whether they’re on Team Brian or Team Tyler. I think there’s a right and a wrong team to be on but I’m not saying what I think they are.