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Constructive criticism
WHAT takes on modern architecture
BY SALLY CRAGIN

Has there been an architect who wasn’t a megalomaniacal "master builder"? It’s a profession whose practitioners presume to know how the rest of us should live — or at least in what we should live. Yet every now and then, along comes a writer with insight into these complicated personalities. In the case of playwright Oren Safdie, son of famed Habitat ’67 designer Moshe Safdie, insight comes with pedigree.

Safdie spent part of his childhood in Habitat, the prefabricated housing complex his father designed for the 1967 Montreal World Exposition (he was the paperboy and "designated tour guide"), and he later studied architecture at Columbia. But another profession beckoned. His most successful play, Private Jokes, Public Places (written for his wife, actress M.J. Kang), centers on Margaret, a young, Korean-American architecture student undergoing a "charette" or oral thesis presentation of a plan for a public swimming pool. Since she grew up in public housing, her ideas about private versus public space are at odds with those of her interrogators, a dean and two visiting architects, all male. Although there’s plenty of fascinating industry-speak, Safdie views his play as primarily a power struggle. "It’s a play where the alliances keep shifting because she puts her foot in her mouth often," he says over the phone from Toronto.

Private Jokes debuted in Malibu in 2001; last year, it had a successful run at La Mama ETC in New York. Productions are being mounted in Toronto and London. Beginning next week, Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theater presents the regional debut; it’s directed by Theatre Cooperative founder Brendan Hughes and will star Ann Hu, who understudied M.J. Kang in the New York production. Hu notes that Margaret is "incredibly outspoken. Her strengths are also her downfall. But what also works for is her naïveté and youthful exuberance."

Hughes, who’s a recent graduate of Yale School of Drama, views Margaret as a rebel who "bucks the conventional philosophy espoused by her school." He relates to Margaret’s passion, which powers the play: "The teacher critiquing the hotheaded, principled student with something to prove — no one is completely right and no one is completely wrong." And though Private Jokes percolates with intriguing arguments about architecture and philosophy, there’s plenty of humor, he points out. "The characters come on as these elemental forces grappling with each other. It’s packed with debate, and also, it’s a knee slapper."

For Safdie, Margaret’s story echoes some of his own academic experiences. "Sometimes you get two architects on the panel who have opposing viewpoints. I’ve heard of chairs flying across the room, and often people break down in tears." His time at Columbia in fact coincided with a transition in the department. "Architecture was developing into something more theoretical and artistic than buildable. The priorities were changing, and a lot of professors I liked were being pushed out, and a lot of professors who advocated the dean’s point of view were brought in."

Dismayed, Safdie wrote letters to various officials, and though he completed his degree, he realized that he didn’t want to follow in his father’s footsteps and that he had plenty to say on the page. (He penned the screenplay for the film You Can Thank Me Later and has had several other plays produced.) "My father would be the first to say some of the best architecture comes not from architects. You see these Greek towns in the hills, or in Iran, the mud houses. There are no ‘name architects’ on these buildings, but just by following the form of the land, the beauty comes from within."

Private Jokes, Public Places is at Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theater, Wellfleet, September 30 through October 24. Tickets are $23 and $25; call 508-349-6835 or visit www.what.org


Issue Date: September 24 - 30, 2004
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