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It's the 'Aha' experience Julian Olf's vision of the performing arts

Christopher O’Carroll

AIMING FOR THE SURPRISE that takes the breath away: Julian Olf in the Rand theater. (photo by Ben Barnhart) MY VERY EARLIEST EXPERIENCE OF performance was the circus,” says Theater Professor Julian Olf. “I loved the circus. But I didn’t just love the circus because of the crazy clowns. There was something about it that fascinated me and frightened me, too. And I’ve been trying my entire career to figure that out. I was fascinated by the grotesque aspects of the sideshow. As a little child I was just thunderstruck, awestruck, by these people. As awestruck as I was by people who could balance far up above the ground on a tiny little wire, who could subject themselves to extraordinary danger in front of so many onlookers. There was something about the circus, its danger and its grotesquerie, that somehow got a hold on me and has not ever really let go.” Growing up in New York City, the son of two musicians, Olf did not subsist entirely on an entertainment diet of three-ring thrills. He was exposed to plenty of respectable “high art” performances as well. He can’t have been more than 5, he recalls, when his mother took him to his first opera. Later, he attended the city’s famous High School of Music and Art, concentrating on classical music as a serious clarinetist. He went on to earn a doctorate in theater from New York University, and has chaired two college theater departments, in Toledo, Ohio, and here at UMass. (He resigned the chair about eight years ago, giving up his administrative responsibilities to focus on teaching and directing.) But through it all he has never lost his reverence for “low art” or “popular art” performance traditions. As a teacher striving to provoke a mix of intellectual and visceral response from his students, and as a director orchestrating a range of powerful effects on an audience, Olf has always aimed, as he puts it, “to activate both sides of the brain.” Last year in the Fine Arts Center’s Curtain Theater, he directed a production of Georg Buchner’s “Woyzeck,” a 19th-century German drama, which used acrobatic stage movement and actors in clown makeup to tell a dark tale of murder and insanity. “Laughter is the direct pathway to terror,” he told a Valley Advocate interviewer at the time. “In every expression of joy lies anguish and tears.” EVERY SO OFTEN, real life conspires to remind us that aphorisms about laughter and terror, joy and tears are more than just theatrical catchphrases. On September 11, 2001, Olf woke up in Los Angeles, expecting his wife to fly in from the East Coast later that day to join him for a professional staged reading of a prizewinning screenplay he had written. His script, titled “Anthony,” can be summed up in Hollywood pitch meeting jargon as “‘Hamlet’ meets ‘The Sopranos.’” It transposes the story of a murdered father, a remarried mother, an uncle- turned-stepfather, a suicidal girlfriend and other aspects of Shakespeare’s tragedy from a medieval Danish court to a contemporary New York crime family. Olf had spent the previous night at a rehearsal and was looking forward to seeing the piece presented to an industry audience, with the possibility of a production deal in the offing. Then he heard the news that all the rest of us heard that morning. “I experienced the same shock and horror that everyone else experienced,” he says, “plus a sense of alarm because my wife was scheduled to take an airplane from Bradley to L.A.” In the anxious hours before the couple finally managed to get in touch, Olf and his Hollywood hosts could stand to watch only so many reruns of the now-familiar building collapse footage. Finally one of his friends, television and film director Joel Zwick, offered to take everybody’s mind off the overwhelming news event by sharing the just-completed final cut of his new movie. And that’s how Olf got in ahead of the rest of the country and saw “My Big Fat Greek Wedding.” Midway through the private screening, he finally got the eagerly awaited phone call from his wife, who put his mind at rest by letting him know that her flight had been canceled and she was safe on the ground. His demeanor changes at this point in the recitation as he describes sitting down with Zwick to watch the rest of the film. “It’s a wonderful, uplifting movie,” he says happily. “I was even able to laugh a couple of times.” lf knows Zwick from his graduate student days in the late 1960s and early ’70s. That was a time when a variety of counterculture concerns, foremost among them opposition to the war in Vietnam, were rippling through American culture, energizing the political/artistic endeavors of such troupes as the Bread and Puppet Theatre, the Open Theater, the Living Theatre and La Mama Plexus, where Zwick was just launching his directing career. While Olf applied one side of his brain to the linear, rational demands of his Ph.D. program at NYU, he exercised the other side as a La Mama actor, rehearsing and performing in a variety of Off Off Broadway venues, and embroiling himself in some of the most challenging and controversial work of that era’s avant-garde theater world. That experience, too, has helped to shape his vision of what theater can accomplish and how boundaries between high art and popular culture can be blurred and even eradicated. Tall, almost imperially slim, with a neat mustache and a crisp crest of white hair, Olf could readily be typecast as a circus ringmaster or vaudeville magician. He carries himself with a certain air of top-hat and tailcoat elegance even when he’s walking around in jeans and sandals. And while he’s never actually worked under the Big Top, he was a serious student of stage and parlor magic in his youth. He has also published scholarly writing on the subject, using his academic training in performance theory to analyze the special relationship between the sleight-of-hand illusionist and the willingly bamboozled audience. “With magic,” he says, “you’re not asking the audience to believe that this is a shaman with extraordinary God-given powers. No stage magician who has any integrity expects an audience to believe that he or she is capable of subverting the laws of nature. No, what the magician is doing is asking the audience to believe in spite of their absolute dead certainty to the contrary that something has occurred. They’re certain it hasn’t, but they experience that it has. And that conflict between what one knows to be the truth and what one sees before one’s eyes, there’s the entertainment, there’s the startle, there’s the aha, the surprise.” In Olf’s vision of the performing arts, that startling moment, that aha experience of being yanked free from everyday reality, is what it’s all about. “If I can communicate to my students what excites me about theater,” he says, “I’m talking every bit as much about circus and magic as I am about theater. That surprise when you come upon the circus sideshow. That surprise when 12 clowns get out of a tiny car. That surprise when the magician reveals that the handkerchief is not burned. That surprise when Woyzeck in our production, moving in three-quarter time waltz fashion, in slow motion, murders the woman who is more important to him than anyone in the world. That surprise takes the breath away.”

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It's the 'Aha' experience

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