duke

On a cold evening in February, well-dressed theatregoers in cravats and crisp white shirts gathered in the lobby of the Duke Theater on 42nd street.  They were there to see ‘Measure for Measure’, the latest Shakespearian offering from Theater for a New Audience and its most fashionable director, Arin Arbus. What began as patches of hushed conversation soon escalated into a cacophony of sound with the arrival of more audience members and anticipation hung in the air.

After a critically acclaimed and much lauded production on ‘Othello’ last February, the New York Times identified the young Arbus as “a star in the making.” The production, created on a shoestring budget, was uncomplicated and unassuming. The language was allowed to carry the show completely and the story to unfold delicately. Arbus privileged the relationship of Othello and Desdemona and spoke purely and without encumbrance to the nature of human relationships. Snippets of overheard conversation suggested that a lot of people had turned up just to see if she lives up to that statement by the Times.

A week later, the ‘Measure for Measure’ finally opened to mixed reviews. It seemed that Arbus had not lived up to the hype. Critics cited underdeveloped characters, lack of clarity in setting and a weak sense of what this puritanical problem play had to offer to a contemporary audience. Most of all, they argued that the play’s vision was somewhat unclear: it lacked an intention or artistic stamp. When, at the close of the action, wronged Isabella is proposed marriage, she must make a decision about her fate. Most productions make that decision, Arbus let it hang there in ambivalence.

Arbus had been too brave. She had avoided miring the Shakespeare play down to directorial manipulation and deconstruction and allowed the text to speak for itself. Accustomed to Shakespearian interpretations that place the action whole heartedly in the contemporary imagination, extracting errant lines to fit one imposed vision, a production like this can be jarring for audiences. More importantly, it denies us a favorite pastime- linking the artist to his or her work.

Arbus’s work does not reek of her personality. In fact, it does not give off even the mildest of odors. The work is simple and understated. Clean lines and neutral costumes fill bare spaces. The entire production is set up to frame the actors’ work and facilitate a communion of audience and text. The audience may leave the play knowing Shakespeare a little better, but they know nothing of Arbus, the play’s elusive director. In fact, everyone, including the cast and crew, leave ‘Measure for Measure’ wondering about Arin Arbus.
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Los Angeles born Arbus, is the child of actors Allan Arbus (M*A*S*H) and Marieclare Costelli (The Waltons). Her face, much like her father’s, looks carved from stone. Long mahogany hair frames elegant high cheekbones and dark pupils. In technical rehearsal, a week before the show previews, Arbus has her hair tucked into a square shaped hat with forest green earflaps. The hat is her uniform but today she pairs it with an army jacket and leggings that hang loose at the knees. She surveys the rehearsal from all angles and seems incapable of stillness: eyes fixed on the action, her fingertips following the curve of the earflaps and fiddling with the felt elbows patches on her jacket. She is a voyeur of the highest order, intent on consuming every moment and every look.

“Her observations were smart and incredibly astute,” says Jeffery Horowitz, remembering his first meeting with a young woman, an aspiring director. The artistic director of Theatre for a New Audience first encountered Arbus in 2004 while searching for a director to work on ‘Engaged”, a W.F. Gilbert play. Acclaimed director Gerry Gutierrez loved the script but would do it on one condition; Horowitz must also hire his young assistant, Arin Arbus. He should work out the money with her, Gutierrez said.

When Gutierrez died suddenly of the flu, he left a grieving Arbus behind, along with an unhelmed production of ‘Engaged.’ Arbus worked diligently to support new director Doug Hughes and to stay true to Gutierrez’s vision. When the production closed, Horowitz invited her to stay at Theatre for new audience. She would work in the office and assist on future productions.

When Arbus announced that she would be working at the weekends at Woodbourne correctional facility in upstate New York, Horowitz was intrigued. Presiding over a room full of men who have committed serious crimes, she would direct ‘Of Mice and Men,’ a play about lost dreams. She would use a bunracu-style puppet to represent the play’s female characters.

A sceptical Horowitz was astounded by what he witnessed at Woodbourne. “She had found some way to get these men inside the play. The audience of inmates was completely enraptured by the story,” he says. These anonymous men had collaborated with an anonymous woman to make an intimate piece of theater that spoke to the human experience.

Arbus had done what she does best; removed the obstacles. Never having a huge theatrical concept or thinking in those visual terms, she is free to find the humanity in a character and a sense of what animates relationship between individuals. ‘There are some directors that awe you with their vision,” says Horowitz, “Arin is not one of them. People want to reveal themselves to her. She draws them out.”
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I have spent time with Arin Arbus. I have interviewed her in depth and simply existed in her company. She speaks of vision, of integrity and of value but never once of herself, preferring to be articulated by her colleagues. In fact, no one seems to know anything about her beyond basic information about her family and her behaviour in the rehearsal room.

Alfredo Narciso (the actor playing Lucio in ‘Measure for Measure’), describes her as intriguing. “I wish I knew her better,” he says. “She seems content to concentrate on the work and then go off and do whatever it is that Arin Arbus does. She has created a moat around the personal; I’d like to see the drawbridge come down.”

The moat that Narciso describes seems to be a distance that Arbus consciously creates between herself and her work. She sees a value in remaining as anonymous as possible. Her work at Woodbourne, which began as a reaction to feelings of doubt she was having about her work, has taught her that value.

“I went through an extremely cynical time a few years back,” she tells me over a glass of wine at the 42nd street Hilton. “I started doubting if the work I was doing was important to my collaborators and to audiences. Did it have an impact on anyone emotionally, intellectually, spiritually, or politically?”

Working with these men in prison is different and Arbus remains amazed by the sophistication of the prison hierarchy. She has no idea of the crimes they’ve committed and they have no idea of her life outside the prison walls. Yet, they can come together and make theater that is bursting with life and human understanding.  Working in makeshift theater spaces with primitive sound systems and without set or lights has forced Arbus to concentrate on actor and text driven work and to clarify her own theatrical values. “The prisoners believe that our work impacts their world. I think that’s a wonderful starting point when making a work of art. They’re hungry…starving.”

Horowitz speaks of Arbus’s private nature as a by-product of her dedication to the work. “I have no idea about her life. She doesn’t see that talking about it is going to make a difference to the work.” Her appetite for complicated human relationships does not extend beyond the stage. She enjoys knowing as little as possible about the men at Woodbourne: it’s freeing to look at issues outside the realm of the personal.

Arin Arbus’s mind is intriguing: capable of deep understanding of the contradictions in people and yet an outsider. It seems her lack of curiosity in the intricacies of the colleagues’ lives does not symbolize a general disengagement but rather a conscious choice to put aside the personal for those precious intimate moments. Her infectious guttural laughter assures me that there’s a beating heart inside her lily-white chest.