Quick Chats: Matt Schwader on Travesties

Welcome to our Quick Chats series, where we take a peek backstage and ask questions that are almost completely related to the show. Today, we're chatting with Matt Schwader, who plays Tristan Tzara in Travesties by Tom Stoppard. APT's production of Travesties has been called "a fact-based fractured fairy tale" (The Wall Street Journal), "bizarrely entertaining" (77 Square) and even "anarchic" (The Isthmus). What Travesties really is is impossible to classify, but here's our shot at it: Aged British bureaucrat Henry Carr weaves a tale of the famous people he knew in his youth. Artists, writers and revolutionaries are all regular visitors to Carr's memory, if not to his reality. But as the years have passed, those memories have become muddled with his long-ago portrayal of Algernon in The Importance of Being Earnest, becoming a continually shifting conversation on art, war and twill jodphurs. And now to Matt. APT: What's your favorite Dada art medium? Matt: Live Performance. We once did a Dada piece, in my college days, called Hey, I Want My Money Back. For weeks we drummed up buzz that we had written an extraordinary new play and that it was really something to witness, when in truth we hadn't written a word. When the audience came to see the show we seriously started what appeared to be a "play," but gradually one of the lead actors ended up having an absolute mental breakdown. We stopped, apologized to the audience and "attempted to start the play again from the top." The actor broke down again which eventually lead into an off-stage argument that got out of hand developing into an audible and unnerving fight. The audience, not knowing what to do with themselves was then subjected to up close ramblings of a drunken man on the subject of "good theatre," followed by an improvised sound concert with rubber tubes, a garden-hose, and a plastic horn. The least Dada thing about it was the title. APT: If you could name your own art movement, what would you call it? Matt: Siphonophorism. Community driven artwork comprised of separate contributions, generated by multiple individuals, collectively assembled for the purpose of adding up to a single piece of art. (Named, by the way, after Siphonophorae.) APT: This isn't your first go-round with Stoppard. What's your favorite thing about working on his plays? Matt: I love that he gives no answers. He posits extraordinary and justified perspectives on opposing sides of a debate, but leaves the conclusions up to the audience. I always walk away from a Stoppard play thinking or feeling something new. APT: Best fashion option: monocle or pince nez? Matt: Anyone can wear pince nez. It takes commitment to wear a monocle. APT: Which Travesties character do you think holds viewpoints closest to your own? Matt: As much as I want to say Tzara, I am deeply moved by a line that James Joyce says... "What now of the Trojan War if it had been passed over by the artist's touch? Dust. A forgotten expedition prompted by Greek merchants looking for new markets. A minor redistribution of broken pots." This sentiment hits home for me. The historians of the victorious record humanity's past, but artists who have an allegiance to truth above all else rescue our stories from oblivion and, thankfully, lessons that might be lost to time had they never been recorded, illustrated, fabled, and shared.