Our work is all about form and how to continue to create new theatrical vocabularies.
"Tectonic," he notes, "means the art and science of structure. The feeling we're trying to create in the theater is not so much a presentation as a dialogue."ĭialogue, in fact, is central to Kaufman's approach - not just the interchange with the immediate audience but with the world at large and with the fundamental forms and nature of theater. This is what I know.' You can't do that on film. "It's, 'I'm going to show the person I talked to, that I met. "What's so incredible about working with the original company is that you're just one degree of separation from the person being interviewed," Fondakowski says. Fondakowski has taken on primary duties for restaging "Laramie" at the Rep with the original cast, with some members dropping in or out during the run to return to the filming. "It will be the biggest theater that the show's ever been performed in," says head writer and Kaufman's assistant director Leigh Fondakowski, also speaking from Laramie, where the Tectonics are filming the play for HBO. Its West Coast premiere opens Wednesday on Berkeley Repertory Theatre's new proscenium stage. The play moved on to New York's Union Square Theatre that April and later played an engagement in Laramie. "Laramie," a dramatic reflection on the murder and its aftermath, opened in February 2000 at the Denver Center Theatre Company, the nearest major regional theater to the town, with a number of the interview subjects in attendance. Within a month of Shepard's death, Kaufman and nine other members of the company were in Laramie beginning the many months of interviews with local residents that would result in "The Laramie Project." It was the profits from that play that enabled Kaufman and his New York- based Tectonic Theater Company to respond quickly to the gruesome murder.