Theater artist Geoff Sobelle is a dedicated absurdist, drawn to illusion and the surreal in performance works like The Object Lesson, Home, and Food. In the following conversation, Sobelle retraces his creative upbringing, describes new clown work underway, and explains the active role of the audience in his work.

Jessica Gomez Ferrer: Can you talk about your journey from magician to actor to clown?

Geoff Sobelle: It's not like I was ever really a professional magician in the absolute sense of the word, but that was definitely the first thing that got me into performance. I don't remember exactly when, but I was captivated and something clicked: "Oh, whatever that is, I want to do that." I got really excited about magic and spent hours upon hours practicing tricks. I made a little nook in my room and it became a private little practice.

When I look back, it was quite empowering in a way because in those days — now, I think a lot of it is done in a really interesting way on video and YouTube — it was all books. So I would pore over these books that in a funny way are almost like cookbooks. They describe the effect and then they describe how you achieve that effect. Then you would have to make your own props and I would have to go and get bizarre objects for a kid. It was a kind of entré into DIY art, making these props, figuring out how they would be effective, and working up the gumption to introduce a trick to kids at school or parents or if there was company over or something. 

Those early days of all of that stuff fed into a particular kind of brain and a way of making. I always saw the theater stuff at school and wanted to be a part of it. My first play was in my sophomore or junior year in high school. It was A Midsummer Night's Dream, which is what I think a lot of people have as their first foray into acting. I would make suggestions to the director, who was a phenomenal teacher — we were close until he died just a few years ago. I would suggest magic tricks because it's a play about magic and fairies. The theater has always been a kind of playground for me. It was storytelling, but it was also a place to play with these effects. There was something really delicious and fun about how something would be achieved technically in setting up the moment.

When I was in college, the DIY thing continued and the experiences that were the most fruitful and impactful to me were getting together with other students and putting stuff on with very little money, without any real production assistance. At one point, one of my very closest friends, a woman named Caroline Laskow, had gotten a grant to put on this series called Full Moon Fairy Tales. The idea was that fairy tales were rewritten and reinvented with a feminist take, and would be produced under the light of the full moon every month. It was an open invitation to anybody who was interested to join in; you didn't have to audition. If you wanted to write, you could write. If you wanted to perform, you could perform or play music, whatever you wanted to do. We would find a space and it was awesome. It was so fun to figure out. We were teaching ourselves what we would later understand to be site-specific devised theater. 

At some point Caroline got a grant to go and study Irish folk tales or something, I can't remember exactly what it was, but she went abroad for a minute, and when she came back she was like, "Geoff, I saw this play in London and it was the most amazing thing I'd ever seen." And it was Theatre de Complicité's The Street of Crocodiles. This was early Complicité, like 1994 or something. She said, "It turns out they all trained with this same French guy, and I'm going to go and you should go too." She found the information and it was this school in Paris called the L'École Jacques Lecoq. And so we went.

I spent a year at the Lecoq School, and it was an unbelievably eye-opening thing where all of a sudden there was a vocabulary for all these things that we had been sort of teaching ourselves. There were actual modes of study and a rich history of people who had been doing this for a long time. I was so excited and so turned on by this school and the idea that you could even be in school and not be picking up a pencil or looking at a book. It was all corporeal. It was all embodied learning.

Lecoq was where I first saw a study of clown and an understanding that it was a kind of pinnacle moment. After two years of deep study at the Lecoq School, you arrive at the clown. It takes two years to expose and touch and learn about who this person is and then at the very last moment, it's a kind of celebration and skewering of all the foibles of who this person is at this moment, at this time.

And I think at the Lecoq school too there was an understanding of this idea of a theater before language, that we are expressive creatures way before we learn to speak. Language itself, the problems of language, the possibilities with language, these were always things that I was excited about. I've always been excited about a theater outside language, or at least that's using language in a particular kind of way, and the rich study of embodied movement and physicality and physical comedy from the Lecoq school, and then this deep dive into critical theory and deconstruction theory. In college, I was a literature major and studied theater, and those two things blended and mixed into the early days of an interest for me.

There was also an early experience when I was at the Lecoq school in ‘95, during the war in Bosnia, and I saw the film Underground by Emir Kusturica. That film really hit me. And again, it was something about clowning, something about politics. The film follows the story of Yugoslavia from 1945 through the war in the ‘90s. It’s a complicated and tragic story, but one of the most hilarious films. It’s like something out of Fellini with people running with trombones in a constant drunken party. People never enter through a door, they're just breaking through walls and it's total chaos and total clown.

Through another set of circumstances I ended up in the former Yugoslavia a year or two later with another really close friend from college, Sonja Kuftinec, who was using theater and teaching theater games as a way towards nonviolent political action, and bringing kids from different parts of Yugoslavia together. I had a firsthand experience of seeing this stuff working in a recovering space. Those are my early days. That's what magic meant to me and what the theater was for me and where the clown has come from and what it's been.

Jessica: I know you're developing a new “falling apart clown show.” What excites you about clown as a form today and how is that project coming along?

Geoff: The project's coming along, and so far I think really well. We're about a year into the process at this point, and I think we have about a year to go — maybe more like nine months. This is a project at first that was born out of a milestone — I'm turning fifty this year. I was thinking that I wanted to create something that was actually a celebration of things I love with people that I love. That was the first impulse.

About a year ago I was working on a different project, it was the moment that Donald Trump and Joe Biden were having their now infamous debate, arguing about golf. It was a terrifying, obscene display. The term “clown show” gets thrown around a lot in the political arena, but this was truly ridiculous. I decided to change tactics and begin our own clown show in earnest — as a way of putting my own energy into trying to digest something about the US at this moment. This stupid moment. 

The idea of the political arena referred to as a circus or a clown show is not new. I think it’s frankly as old as the circus itself. This moment is no different — there's a brilliant cover from The Atlantic from last fall — Trump racing towards the US Capitol on a nineteenth century circus wagon carrying a sad-looking elephant with a whip in his hand. When I think of the American circus in actuality, I think of Barnum and Ringling Brothers and this exaggerated idea of the “greatest show on earth,” this absurd bravura that seems very much to get at the heart of something quintessentially American. It’s big and loud, with a painted smile, making a few people a lot of money and only made possible by an army of exploited invisible labor. It’s confectionary, but also undoubtedly impressive and totally fun, if just a bit juvenile. When I think about America, I think about the big show. In a way, isn’t the whole “American Experiment” just an enormous business venture designed to profit a small group of elite European guys, then dressed up as a nation? But what’s at the core? Freedom? For who exactly? There are a lot of myths, a lot of stories, a lot of ad campaigns, but it’s kind of just like the circus: a big show that churns out nickels from the dust bowl. Trump is not an aberration; he is, in a cynical light, the perfect American personification. Pure business and entertainment. He's like the medicine show huckster, the charlatan showman, the ringmaster of the inevitable concluding act of a flailing circus empire. What is the country built on, apart from stolen land, stolen labor? I think the brilliant spin of stories. Moving pictures. Smoke and mirrors. It's a lot of, "The show must go on." And a lot of making something happen against all odds, but a thing that probably shouldn't have ever even happened in the first place. It's astounding, appalling, darkly hilarious; but in the light, empty and sad.

And I think of the circus as all of those things. So I'm imagining a circus where all of the acrobats have left, musicians have gone, anybody who could actually do anything has either left, quit, or been fired, who knows? And it's just the clowns left. I love clowns, by the way. It's nothing against clowns, it's just that's who’s left. And in a way, the clowns, at this point, they're us. It's us who are left here. It's us who have kept this American thing going. It's us who've tried to make the best of this American machine that’s breaking down. And that's what this clown show is.

We’re mid-process, so it’s hard to say what the project is exactly. But I think it's more of a fever dream than anything else. It’s certainly not a story or a play in the traditional sense of the word, but it's a chance to play and meditate at speed on things falling apart, on entropy. The end of an empire.

The clown is such a rich archetype; they always appear around collapse and chaos. Maybe it’s because of their humanity, their naïveté. In the political sphere, people are talking about clowns and the clown show, I think often as a negative thing. And I don't think of it that way, I think of it more human — failing despite all best efforts. It's the part of us that no matter what we're going to try and do, it's all going to fall apart. There's something poignant in seeing a group of people trying to hold it together, and you just know it won't. And then what? So that's what the impetus of the piece is.

Jessica: And how do you think about the audience's role in your work?

Geoff: Well, in a really obvious way, there is nothing without the audience. I learned a long time ago about a warm theater versus a cold theater. I only make things with people in mind. I don't write plays that are meant to be discovered at some point. It's not a written form, it's a performative form. So it works with a viewer. And I think even with the magic, those old lessons about perspective, it matters whether your hands are here or there. It really matters where the audience is sitting. And if you take that as a metaphor, it's helpful. To be able to make multivalent work that will hopefully read differently to the person who's sitting over here and the person who's sitting over here, the person on the left or the right or the center. Pieces should be able to hit you at different moments.

The real power of performance comes after the performance, in the bar or talking about it in the car ride home or some days later. Hopefully, it hits you. And as you're describing the project or the piece to people in the aftermath of seeing it or experiencing it, that's where the ideas start to come. It's about how it lingers with you.

I think of it as a very active thing and in a way, a more catalytic process than something that is finished and sealed. It's a kind of food; it's a banquet. It's a space of sharing and nourishing ideas through experience — and it's a place of reverie. It's a space of contemplation where you, the audience are there, you're watching, but your own stuff is happening too. My job is to keep you there. And I'm interested in elements like mystery or surprise or suspense or humor toward that end to keep you engaged, and as you're engaged hopefully these ideas are bouncing around somewhere inside of you.

In the last ten years, I'd say I left a particular kind of approach where I was working mostly in Philadelphia with a company called Pig Iron Theatre Company as well as my own enterprise called Rainpan 43. And those were really more like plays in a way. They had characters and stories and fictional places. But I've now made three projects that sit with a different set of concerns. These are The Object Lesson, Home, and Food. These projects have no story, no characters, no fiction; they are projects that engage an audience a little bit more in a concrete way, less porou. They're designed for the audience to reflect directly on their own experience of a given subject.

Each project also has in common a particular moment at the center, some moment where audience members are behind a microphone. These are non-prepared, non-performers, but they're talking about the given theme. So in the Home piece, they're describing the architecture of the place that they first called home. It could have been an apartment, could have been a house, could have been whatever it is, it doesn't matter. But they go back in time and describe this, and it's an amazing thing that we all apparently seem to be able to do. It is very riveting to me to watch somebody go through that process of remembering. We can't help but attach a story to those details, and as an audience to that audience can't help but go through our own. There's something similar that happens in Food and something similar that happens in The Object Lesson. So that little moment, I just like that it echoes through those three pieces.

Jessica: Thanks for sharing all of that. To close, I'm curious what the USA Fellowship has afforded you?

Geoff: Well, I'll tell you at the moment, I haven't done anything with the money yet. But I’ll tell you what it's afforded me is actually a chance for real reflection and time to articulate a lot of these thoughts. On one hand, applying for grants, awards, and fellowships can be a kind of unpaid burden. That's true. We all know that. But there's something else, and especially at the possibility of it being an award like this, which is an opportunity to take some temperature or get a perspective of the journey and ask, "What am I doing and what is this landscape and how do I fit into it?" As the parent of two little kids and having a crazy — as we all do — life, having that space to be able to have that kind of consideration is really a phenomenal opportunity.

I'm trying to figure out how to make as rich of an experience for my family as possible. And part of that is not separating the family life from the art life, but really trying to bring them into that. They know so many people in my community, they're friends with grown up clowns, all these wacky people that are their friends too, and I love that. I think it's really special. I want to create with them and my wife, Sophie, and to be on tour together. We try, when it's possible, to bring these things together a little bit. So as I'm thinking about how to best make use of these funds, I have that in mind, whether it's even in a very banal way, using it towards plane tickets and childcare so that they're with us as we're creating the clown show, that's one aspect, but also as we're developing work and figuring out spaces where we're living and working and all of that, it's a factor as I'm thinking of the different ways to fully use the support of the award.