Our winter intern Tenara Calem sat down with lead artist Susan Hyon to talk about her upcoming Lab show, Three Gifts for Lenny Bruce.  Make sure you reserve your tickets!

TMT: What drew you to this piece?

SH: This particular story had a lot of theatrical potential.  There were images that came out of the story, like justice in heaven and scales being balanced, good acts of kindness, etc.  I was working initially with a playwright friend of mine, so we were looking at material together and this happened to be the piece that we both found the most interesting.

TMT: Somewhere along the way, the Three Gifts main character evolved from a wandering, nameless soul to Lenny Bruce.  What was that process like?

SH: The playwright, Jim, this was his total imagination. We started out talking about karma and what it means to be affected by the pay it forward idea.  I like the idea that things happen that are then somehow incorporated into your own experience and appreciation for life.  Jim and I were having meta conversations about this idea, and it wasn’t really about Lenny Bruce at that point.  I was thinking about Yoga philosophy and combining it with the Yiddish cultural idea of how we’re all connected, and spiraling into that direction.  And then, as an exercise, he wrote a very dry police statement version of the story.  This was his creative process.  When he read it, we were thinking that maybe we’d have actors read it out loud or something, but he took it in a whole other direction.  He heard Lenny Bruce’s voice in the piece.  His dry narrative turned into something that he could imagine this particular comic performing for people.  To be totally honest, it wasn’t my inspiration, I just really liked what he wrote.  It turned into this total one-act, whimsical play that is really in the spirit of this strange little story.

TMT: Can you talk a little bit about the good deeds in this Yiddish story?

SH: Well it’s weird.  The good acts are not very stereotypical.  It’s not like someone’s about to get murdered and someone stands in the way to defend them.  The good deed that stands out most strongly to me involves a girl who’s walking on the wrong street at the wrong time of day, and she’s the wrong member of society or something – she’s really done nothing bad, but then is going to be punished for this action by being dragged by the hair on a horse to her death.  The first puzzle is that, okay, she shouldn’t really be punished – to me, that’s weird.  Then she seems to kind of stoically accept her conviction, and she asks for a pin before she’s going to be led to her death in this torturous way, and they give it to her.  It’s weird and vague and whimsical, you know, it’s not explained that you get one thing before you die or something, but they do give her this pin.  She takes it and she stabs her dress into her thigh, I think.  I just imagine it as this really bloody and gruesome act.  She pins her fabric to her skin in an effort to preserve her modesty, so that when she’s being dragged around, the dress won’t lift up and expose her naked body.  So if there’s a lesson in that?  I guess it’s to protect your modesty, regardless of the cards that you’re dealt.  I guess it’s also the act of another person seeing a total stranger do something like that that makes it even more important.  It’s not like the spirit is going back to his life and remembering or recalling or seeing things that were related to his own experience.  These are all disparate, unrelated interactions that he’s watching of strangers across time and space.

TMT: Last question.  What are three words you would use to describe your Lab show?

SH: Funny, hopefully.  Minimal.