Adapting David Foster Wallace for the Swiss National Stage: An Interview with Yana Ross

Abstract

Bryce Lease: For the past few years, you have been adapting canonical nineteenth century naturalist plays, using Chekhov and Ibsen, for example, to assess social taboos in the particular cultural spaces you occupy as an international director. What made you decide to turn to contemporary American fiction for this production at the Schauspielhaus? Yana Ross: It has been a long dream to stage this text. I had personally discovered Wallace in 2010 and since then, I have been completely obsessed with his language, the density and intellectual rigour of the writing, as well as his incredibly funny, dark sense of humour. I have been carrying this book around and pushing it on every theatre I would go into. We came very close to staging it at Nowy Teatr in Warsaw, but we were unable to secure the rights in the end. However, it feels like it was a project that was waiting to happen at the Schauspielhaus Zürich. This theatre is so open-minded and artistically ripe for this kind of experiment. We staged it at the Schiffbau-Halle, which is a fantastic space that has its own carte blanche to really experiment. I am relieved the piece finally happened and it happened here. BL: You always heavily adapt, rewrite, and rework texts. This is often done in collaboration with the actors and your dramaturg – in this case, Laura Paetau, who has worked on queer-feminist and ‘postmigrant’ themes and aesthetics in German-speaking theatres. David Foster Wallace employs artistic strategies such as footnotes and multiple points of perspective – you have also woven a rich tapestry of texts and perspectives, which are fractured and self-mediated. There is no obvious order to the interviews in the book. Could you tell us about your creative process and how you worked with the actors to shape and determine the dramaturgical structure? YR: From day one, I tried to encourage the whole team, and especially the actors, to let go of Aristotelian, linear dramaturgical thinking. Let go of the idea of a beginning, a middle, some kind of relief, a character on a journey – pack this all up and throw it out of the window. We are looking at Plato, looking in the cave, at parallel worlds, in the shadows. We are playing with bits and pieces, and montage, and abstraction. We need to keep a bird’s eye view in rehearsal all the time, so when you get too close to the character or Contemporary Theatre Review, 2021 Vol. 31, No. 4, 496–507, https://doi.org/10.1080/10486801.2021.1990899