A story you make up for yourself

If you want to know what's going on in 'deadpan guy' Richard Maxwell's plays - well, you decide. He talks about his ideas to Belinda McKeon.

Richard Maxwell has been watching a lot of Westerns, and the signs are on him. The names of the great films, of the great actors and directors, weave through his speech as naturally and as frequently as do the names of those experimental theatre-makers who have long formed a kind of touchstone for Maxwell's own work, and along with whom he makes up a triumvirate of sorts on the contemporary New York scene: Elizabeth LeCompte (of the Wooster Group) and Richard Foreman.

Sharing mind space with the avant-garde for some time now have been the outlaws, the gunslingers, the bandits and the bounty hunters: Ms Lecompte, meet Mr. Wayne; Mr Foreman, meet Mr Cooper, Mr Ford, Mr Leone. But the limitations of mind space have never truly been a problem for Maxwell, whose work as a playwright, director and composer with the New York City Players over the last decade has made his name as one of the city's most significant theatrical auteurs.

Working with actors of different levels of experience, Maxwell has developed an aesthetic which cuts through notions of psychology and pretence - that is, through conventional notions of character - to explore the live moment of theatre itself, the real-time dynamic between the artist and the audience. Labels have attached themselves to this aesthetic, as labels will, and there's nothing to etch a grimace across Maxwell's face like the mention of "the deadpan guy", a term which, in the critical shorthand that dashes off such descriptions, refers to the apparent absence of all affect, expression and immediate emotion in his work. Maxwell's dialogue is spare, his staging is austere, and the intonations of his actors are as flat as the desert plains which his latest play, Ode to the Man Who Kneels, manages to evoke using only a single light source and a starkly bare stage.

Ode, which comes to the Project this week, is a musical, and a paean to the Westerns upon which Maxwell and his wife, designer Tory Vazquez, have been bingeing of late. In it, Maxwell pushes his experiment with expression to new limits, knuckling down to the demands of unabashed melodrama, of an old-fashioned American dream, with only the skeletons of narrative and form. The characters (and even the storyline, such as it is) are allegorical - Standing Man dispatches Kneeling Man before going on to square up to Dashing Man over the affections of Waiting Woman and her younger counterpart. It's a deliberately, gleefully, strange piece, meditating as often on the conventions of its own creation - "I'm an actor," Kneeling Man tells the audience, as he kneels with Standing Man's pistol pointed at his head - as on the absurdity and sadness of the lives it (almost) portrays.

Maxwell has written the music as well as the words for the play, and by the side of the stage, in a scenario reminiscent of a parlour room or a saloon, he plays his lonesome, beautiful melodies on guitar, with Mike Iveson on piano. Music has always been central to Maxwell's theatre - he has composed the music for almost all of his own productions, and plays in a country band (nameless, at least most of the time). He grew up in a musical household in Fargo, North Dakota, and the echo of that time still sounds, he reckons, in his theatre work - and in his firmly held conviction that past experience should be no decider of who can or cannot step up on to a stage.

"I work with people who have never been on stage before, and sometimes people who have never even sung before, publicly," he says. "For me, this opens up the possibilities of what can happen on stage, but it also creates a family or community kind of feeling. It comes, maybe, from growing up in a big family of people who really appreciated music. We'd play the ukelele, and my dad was big into singing songs, and I feel pretty lucky to have been brought up in an environment that was created like that. The idea is that anyone can join in, and it's okay. I guess most people would look at that and say that's amateurish, putting that up for public display. But I like it."

Maxwell created Ode to the Man Who Kneelswith a group of actors he knows well and with whom, for this reason, he has a creative shorthand. The show came together quickly and fluidly, with music and text merging in a "symbiotic" process, but Maxwell is well-acquainted with his own tendency to keep tweaking right through the rehearsal and even the performance period - and he knew he had to take action to curb that enthusiasm.

"One of the reasons why I'm in this show is to keep my hands busy," he says. "Because otherwise I'd just be writing useless notes, which is my habit, or has been. I was getting into a bad habit of micro-managing people's performances. So playing in the show has been a nice filter for me. It filters out the things that aren't important. And the things that are, I'll remember."

One of the things most important to Maxwell in creating Odewas finding a way to stage the particular preoccupations which emerged, for him, from his viewing of Westerns such as El Doradoand Once Upon a Time in the West. These were preoccupations not with the most familiar tropes of the Western, with the traditional morality tales, with bandits and bounty hunters. Maxwell's take on the Western, or rather, Maxwell's take from the Western, is a matter of shadow-play, of ghostly whispers, in terms not only of the look of the play but also in the sense of what is present on stage, in the characters and in the spaces, the silences, the glances between them.

"Anyone who's seen these Westerns has an idea of what it's supposed to have: the bank, the saloon, the inn, the stable . . . standard buildings and a standard kind of infrastructure to these places that are in the middle of nowhere, completely isolated," he says. Watching the westerns, Maxwell liked to imagine the spaces, the moments, outside of the typical elements on screen. "What I liked was the more imagined geography of these very small towns, the idea of what might be in the corners of the screen. All that potential space, all the stuff you don't see but can imagine, based on where they walk, and where they go . . . it has a lot of mystery there, in these small places. And in the context of a new town, you know, there's so much that doesn't get explored in the Western. Like, what are the kids doing? What time do the kids go to bed? Really normal things I was imagining, just the mundane transactions.

"There are always these epic events, like gunfights and whore-fights, that happen inside these movies, and watching so many of these movies and having so much of this routine over and over again, you start to think of . . . what is this, in terms of the whole timeline of the existence of these towns? This is like a nanosecond of time, when an event like a gunfight would happen. What happened all the rest of the time? And so that started to take over my imagination and I started to take the simplest event and imagine what would happen around that."

From this comes the disorientating ghostliness of Grid, the one-horse town inhabited by Ode'scharacters; from this come the sometimes bizarre layers of their soliloquies, in which the packed earth beneath a dying man's feet can drive more narrative than the whole of that man's life and death. That said, to call these figures "characters" is to take liberties with the play which are not, it is clear, entirely sanctioned by its creator. Maxwell puts actors on stage, not characters, and for him, to do so yields enough challenge and complexity for several plays - for a different play every night, in fact, depending on who comes to see it and on what baggage or framework that viewer might bring.

"Let's look at the practical situation here," Maxwell says. "You're stepping up on stage.You're saying lines that are not your own. And you're wearing clothes that are not your own. What else do we need to provide for an audience? Let them do what they're going to do anyway. Let's let them do that better, and not try to interfere with that by feeling that we need to add some notion of another psychology. Because there's nothing wrong with your psychology." The psychology of the actor, that is. "The actor, period. And when you put that period on it, the actor is now a person. Not 'actor in this', or 'actor doing that', but a person. So, then, where do we get the character from? That's the audience's question. Even if we put you up on stage and you're wearing what you're wearing, and people are watching, people are going to start telling stories about you and who you are, where you're from. It's just automatic. And it's a good thing, in theatrical terms, that the audience is telling stories for themselves. That's what we want."

What Maxwell wants less of, one senses, are stories about "the deadpan guy", stories about how his plays are hilarious first and foremost, because of the deadened manner in which his characters speak, because of the edging of irony that seems to glint on every word. The label irritates him, it's clear; he seems to worry that the subtleties of his work will be lost under a torrent of knowing titters from the audience, as certainly seemed to be a risk during the New York run. Irony, he says almost despondently, is something he fights. But it's also unavoidable - there is already an irony, he points out, in putting people in period clothes on a stage in the 21st century, on Wooster Street or in Temple Bar. So how to resist it? And why?

"I guess because it just feels facile to me," he says. "Like a shortcut. And it feels like something has been severed when it's perceived only as ironic. Like, it used to be ambiguous and now it's not, because it's ironic."

The ambiguity, perhaps, is part of the bind here - audiences will seek points of access, and if scenes are dryly comic, as they often are in Ode, that comedy can become not just a way in but a whole way of seeing. Maxwell knows he can't tell audiences how to come to his shows, but part of him, it seems, wishes that he could. "I'm not against things being funny," he shrugs. "It doesn't drive me up a wall. It's just that that's not part of the design. But I'd like to think that there's more going on than that. And I think there is."

Ode to the Man Who Kneels , written, composed and directed by Richard Maxwell and performed by the New York City Players, is at Project Space Upstairs from tomorrow until Sat, 8pm