THE ARTIST’S WAY

My show “The Vagrant Trilogy” is a conditional trilogy — a bit like the movie “Sliding Doors” (1998). In the first play, a young man and his wife travel from Palestine to London for a conference. Then the 1967 Arab-Israeli war breaks out, and they have to decide what to do. What follows are two different versions of what happens. The play is about what’s lost when you leave and the idea that, once you do, you’re never really going to be of the place you came from — or the one you’ve gone to. The production was meant to be put on at the Public Theater in New York in early 2020, but Covid-19 intervened. We left the theatre and our stuff, thinking, like so many others, that we’d be back soon. It was an odd thing to happen in the middle of a show about displaced people. By no means am I comparing what we went through to the fate of refugees, but it gave us a taste of that kind of stasis and lack of agency, that Chekhovian sort of waiting.

This photo was taken on the first day we were all together in person since that last rehearsal, so it was this self-conscious moment because we’d been talking about our reunion for so long. In theatre, the word “family” gets thrown around a lot, and I usually bristle at that, but with this group, it’s apt. It’s partly because we feel connected by the material; almost everyone involved is either the child of someone who left their homeland or is someone who left themselves. And partly it’s because, on what was meant to be our opening night, we met up on Zoom for what became the first of many poetry readings. “Kindness” (1980), by the Palestinian American poet Naomi Shihab Nye, became our liturgy — we had a different person read it each time — and people brought other poems, too. After some of them were read, there was just silence.

I tend to be a more extroverted writer. I like to improvise potential scenes with actors, which gives me some raw material and a sense of the group dynamic. I’ve had playwriting advisers say things like, “You need to write an actor-proof play.” But I fully believe that the people in the room and the way they are together are part of the whole thing.

Another lesson I’ve learned is to be someone whom people want to be around. There was a time in my 20s when I was trying to be disaffected, but it doesn’t behove you to act uninterested, unless you actually are, and in that case, why are you there? At a certain point, you let go of the idea of what an artist should be.

My husband and I have had this house on an island in midcoast Maine for nearly 40 years. When we bought it, he was teaching at Haystack Mountain School of Crafts on nearby Deer Isle, and his best friend, the painter Eric Hopkins, took us by boat to this island, where his family lived, for a visit. We got stranded here for two days because of thick fog. But during that time, Eric’s mother showed us an old dairy farm — it dates to 1794 and had been abandoned for years — and said, “It’s perfect for young people like you who have lots of time and no money.” We made an offer to buy it because we had nothing better to do.

I have two gardens at the house: one with lettuces, herbs and peas, and a larger one with potatoes, cabbage, broccoli, eggplant, Brussels sprouts, cauliflower, squash, peppers and enough onions to supply my family for a whole year. My interest in gardening goes back to my childhood. When I was growing up in postwar Japan, the country was still occupied by the United States and there was a severe food shortage. I lived with my grandmother, who was an amazing gardener, and though her specialty was roses, she planted vegetables to sustain the family. When we got the house in Maine, there was only a small general store on the island, so we couldn’t buy fresh vegetables. I panicked, too, because we were raising our child mostly in New York City and I didn’t want her to grow up with no idea about where a carrot comes from. So I started the garden both out of need and to educate.

Eventually, I began to think of gardening as linked to my architecture practice. It takes a long time to realise a building, but gardening provides almost instantaneous gratification. You plant a seed, it grows and it’s such a pleasure to see results so quickly. In the long term, though, what’s most important is cultivating a terroir. In architecture, the way we do that is by creating community: you must have consensus, willingness and investment. In that sense, I would argue that architecture is closer to agriculture than it is to industrial production.

When you’re a gardener, you also have to be incredibly observant about the weather, pests, the state of the soil. You need to learn how to weed and to recognise bad ideas, the ones that might be harmful. It’s about cycles, too. There are annuals and perennials, a distinction that offers an appealing metaphor for design. Maybe for an industrial designer annuals are more intriguing, but in architecture we try to plant perennials that get stronger over the years. I’m interested in looking ahead to a time when our primary building materials might be plant-based. So in a way, spending time in the garden is simply part of the habit of creation, but it’s also a problem-solving exercise for me and a source of inspiration for the future. I think sometimes that one day my buildings might actually become edible.

I was at New York Theatre Workshop (NYTW) 25 years ago with my first production: Eugene O’Neill’s “More Stately Mansions” (1964). Since then, people have called me “the man you love to hate or hate to love” — a badge of honour, as far as I’m concerned. Later, I moved on to Broadway, but I kept returning to NYTW. Its rehearsal space is upstairs on the third floor, and I originally disliked it because it feels like a big living room, but eventually I fell for it. I’ve now done eight productions here, the last of which was “Lazarus” in 2015 with David Bowie.

When we took this portrait, I was preparing for a February festival in Amsterdam, where my company and I presented several plays based on the works of the French novelist Édouard Louis. My most recent adaptation of one of his books, 2021’s “Combats et Métamorphoses d’une Femme” [“A Woman’s Battles and Transformations”], premiered in the Netherlands last September. Édouard’s story of growing up gay in a provincial town was also the story of my life — I’m from the village of Kwaadmechelen in northern Belgium — and I connected with his struggle: the loneliness of a young homosexual; the desire to get away.

When you’re adapting a novel, you must find a way to make it into theatre. You have to invent. “Combats et Métamorphoses” was done with actors from my own ensemble, Internationaal Theater Amsterdam, since I like to work with people I trust and who trust me. There was, for example, this one crisis moment where the character of Édouard’s mother loses her mind. It can easily be over-the-top but, during rehearsal, we kept changing the dialogue, cutting things and also adding.

I’m known for my short rehearsal times: just six weeks. My last two weeks are famous among theatre people because things move at a very high speed. In “Kings of War” [a single-play amalgam of William Shakespeare’s “Henry V”, “Henry VI” and “Richard III” that travelled to Brooklyn Academy of Music in 2016], I cut 40 minutes the day before opening night. In these rehearsals, I make it clear that people can tell me anything; we’re all so deep in the material. But I don’t give notes after a full run-through. People are tired, and they just want to hear that it’s good. That also helps me not be impulsive.

This process has taken a long time to develop. In the beginning, I spent weeks talking about the play. Now I don’t do that, perhaps because of those early experiences back at NYTW. For “More Stately Mansions”, I had only four or five weeks before the first preview, and I thought, “Well, if I’m going to sit at a table for two weeks, there’ll never be a premiere.” Against my will, I was forced to immediately rehearse, and I found myself liberated. It’s more freeing to just get into a space and start.

I always wanted to make work that had mystery to it. Like, if you were to look at it, you wouldn’t quite understand how it was made. As a painter, I hoped to be able to add something to the larger lexicon and say, “OK, I contributed a new way of making a painting.” Maybe it’s an ego thing, but I felt like I had to create some kind of formal aspect that was entirely unique to me and my studio practice so that someone could look at a piece and say, “Oh, that’s a Tschabalala painting.” When I was in grad school at Yale, I focused primarily on printmaking. And I’d gotten a lot of success out of that, but there were also limitations. That’s how I started sewing fabric directly onto the canvas. It has a lot of the same qualities as printmaking: embedded colour, texture and design.

My mom collected fabric, and I still use bits and pieces of it quite a lot. She used to sew all the time, mostly as a hobby. So I thought of the sewing machine as a tool that could be used as a creative outlet. When I was growing up, my mom would tell me I should learn how to sew, but I never had the patience to sit down and do it. I ended up teaching myself in grad school. But I can’t really sew. My mom could make a dress, curtains — a whole outfit! I can’t do that.

Sewing is a kind of collaging. Before I found this way of working, people used to ask, “How do you see yourself in relation to your figures?” Maybe I have a Pygmalion-like relationship to the work — to the idea that you can actually build something that’s outside of you but is also an expression of an ideal figure or persona you have in your mind. Plus, people interact with sewn objects every day. And it has this association with my mom, who’s one of the most important people to me. Working this way feels like honouring her.