Michael
Hunter Director & Co-Founder, Collected Works

Michael Hunter has a PhD in Drama and Directing from Stanford, which is the kind of credential that either means everything or absolutely nothing depending on whether you’re trying to get hired or trying to make work, and those two activities have almost nothing in common no matter what the flier says. We went through that particular circle of hell together: same seminars, same theoretical clusterfucks, same late-night arguments about Brecht that started lucid and ended somewhere past lucid, in that territory where you’re not arguing about Mother Courage anymore, you’re arguing about whether anyone has ever made anything that mattered, ever, in the history of the form, and the answer keeps changing depending on whose round it is.

We co-directed Genet’s The Balcony at San Francisco‘s Old Mint, and if you don’t know that building, picture a fortress that the 19th century built to hold gold and the 21st century mostly forgot about… massive, imposing, all that imperial grandeur gone soft around the edges, dust in the air catching the light like it had nowhere else to be. Perfect for Genet. You can’t, well shouldn’t, do The Balcony in a black box. The Balcony is not a show, it’s a descent: into mirrors and brothels and the specific power games that emerge when people start putting on uniforms they didn’t earn and discover they like the feel of them. It’s the kind of play that either welds the people making it together for life or melts the collaboration down to the studs. Ours melted. We parted ways a few months after the production closed, for the usual reasons collaborations end… some on his side, some on mine… I think about that work often. I don’t see him anymore. Both of those sentences are true and neither one cancels the other, and if you’ve made anything serious with anyone you already know what I mean.

Before the end, though (and there’s always a before the end, that’s what makes endings so goddamn unbearable or wonderful) there was Gombrowicz’s Princess Ivona. We staged it at the Performance Art Institute, and I use the term “institute” the way people use the term “wellness retreat” to describe a broken, algae soup and mosquito infested hot tub in someone’s backyard. It was a warehouse. People lived there.  Meth addicts. Wiring snaked across the ceiling like the fire code was a rumor someone had heard about once. No heat. You could see your breath between shots of bourbon, which Ryan and I drank to stay warm and to remind ourselves why the fuck we were doing this in a space that was actively trying to kill us. I did some lighting design and these wall-sized video projections, the kind of thing that either elevates a production into something nobody’s ever seen before or swallows it whole and leaves the actors flailing inside someone else’s vision. There was a food orgy scene. Glorious. Disgusting. Exactly what Gombrowicz would’ve wanted, which is saying something, because what Gombrowicz wanted was usually for you to feel a little bit assaulted by your own appetites. It was excess as art form in a space that was itself excessive in all the wrong ways — cold, dangerous, full of people who shouldn’t have been there, doing work that probably shouldn’t have existed. In the end it was alive. I’ve had years to revise that opinion downward and haven’t.

We also worked together on the Franconia Performance Salon, which evolved directly out of what we’d been doing at Stanford, the way most good things in your life evolve directly out of whatever you were doing when nobody was paying attention. Niki was there from the beginning. Ryan Tacata and Angrette McCloskey came along: people who actually gave a damn about making something that mattered, which sounds like a low bar until you realize how few people clear it. We built a space where weird, difficult, necessary work could happen. Michael was central to that period. I’m not going to qualify that sentence.

By the time we split, he’d directed in the Bay Area and the UK: Calderón, Orton, Genet, Ionesco, Kushner. If those names don’t mean anything to you, we need to have a different conversation, possibly over drinks, possibly with me doing most of the talking. These are the playwrights who understood that the theater shouldn’t make you comfortable. The theater is in the get under your skin and stay there business. The theater is supposed to unsettle you, provoke you, send you out into the parking lot feeling like the world is slightly less stable than it was two hours ago, maybe make you want to put your fist through a wall.  If it didn’t do that, what the hell were we all doing in there, sitting in the dark together, watching strangers fake it?

He’d written his own work too, and had the guts to take it to the Edinburgh Fringe, which takes either serious courage or a masochistic streak or both, depending on the year and the show and whether the run sold out or played to your aunt and three confused Scotsmen. Co-founded Collected Works, the company that produced The Balcony and Princess Ivona. Spent a few years as at California College of the Arts, actually teaching instead of just talking about teaching, which is a distinction more academics should make and almost none do.

What he’s done since, I know less about. Mutual friends. The occasional headline on a Tuesday afternoon.

We made some things together that I’m still proud of. That part of the record stands on its own.