ArtAntica Interviews Matt Sax, the creator and performer of Clay
From The Clay Issue of ArtAntica
Mentioned in this entry: David Catlin
ArtAntica: What do people need to know about Clay before they come to see it?
Matt Sax: They need to know that it’s a one-man hip hop musical, and that it’s different from anything they’ve ever seen before.
ArtAntica: What made you decide to produce this with Lookingglass and About Face [Theatre]?
Matt Sax: I originally produced it by myself and I was looking for a way to produce it here in Chicago. I felt the best way to do that was to do it at Northwestern and try to bring some of the faculty members that I knew who were in the business to come and see it. I ended up bringing Frank Galati to come and see the show, and he brought Eric Rosen, the Artistic Director of About Face. [Eric and I] started working closely with one another, and we decided that it was something that he thought he could add his presence to. We started shopping it around to all the theaters in Chicago. I was doing a show here at Lookingglass at the time called Manuscript Found in Saragossa. We gave [Artistic Director David Catlin] a DVD, and the two theater companies, Lookingglass and About Face, started talking about producing together.
ArtAntica: Now there’s a Northwestern connection that sort of runs through this—you just graduated, Eric did his graduate work there, most of Lookingglass comes from Northwestern—do you think there’s something about Northwestern that supports this kind of work?
Matt Sax: Northwestern is an incredibly supportive community where, if you have the initiative to create your own work and that’s something that you want to do, then it is absolutely available to you and encouraged and supported by the faculty. Nobody’s gonna do that work for you, but if you have the drive to do it there are so many resources available to you at Northwestern. And here in Chicago it feels like everybody who’s in the business went to Northwestern, so it’s definitely a very very cool community that has been created here.
ArtAntica: How has your improv background affected Clay?
Matt Sax: I wrote all the book scenes at first entirely through improv. As we’ve evolved, it has taken more and more form. I think that is probably my best writing tool, to write through improvisation.
ArtAntica: What sort of hip-hop or musical influences have found their way into the show?
Matt Sax: The first hip-hop album I ever bought was The Notorious B.I.G.’s “Ready to Die,” and that was a hugely influential album for me as an artist—people with sort of a more poetical side to hip-hop, less of the glitz and gloss of what happens to be very popular today in mainstream. What really appealed to me initially about hip-hop and using it in theaters [was] there’s a certain theatricality that hip-hop music possesses inherently that seems just right for theater. It seems as poetic as Shakespeare was, but this is that language of today.
ArtAntica: What sort of initial inspiration did you have for Clay?
Matt Sax: I saw Hedwig [and the Angry Inch] about five years ago when it was still running off-Broadway with John Cameron Mitchell, and I was just floored by the power of the musical. I’d grown up seeing musicals in New York and never had an experience quite like that one and was totally blown away by the structure of it and by the absolute virtuosity of John Cameron Mitchell as a performer. I thought this would be an interesting form to explore through a hip-hop guise, through a hip-hop lens, and so initially, in terms of inspiration, this was something that really really inspired me a lot.
ArtAntica: How has the show changed in the three and a half or four years that you’ve been working on it?
Matt Sax: When I started working with Eric, he asked me the question, “Do you want it to be a concert or do you want it to be a play?” because either way we were gonna work on it together and we were gonna make something of it. I thought, y’know, it was a play, but it always was a play. Its influences draw from Henry IV, Part I and II, and a lot of Shakespearean themes, and also a lot of Greek themes, so I always thought it was a play. And so what it has done is it’s taken what has initially been a concert, sort of a concept album if you will, and really turned it into a dramatic play with an arc, and also cleared up a lot of the narrative frames. There are a lot of different narrative frames in place during the course of the play—there’s the concert frame and then there’s his story and then backstage, and there are a lot of different things that shift in time, shift in perspective that I always had in my mind. But what Eric did is certainly make them clearer and help me to redefine them for myself. And the music itself has changed a lot. We have sort of evolved as hip-hop has evolved, the technology has gotten better, we’ve been able to do all sorts of things with the score and make it sound, I think, really good. Hopefully if the show has life after this then we’ll be able to continue to sort of evolve with the music and the show will continue to evolve.
ArtAntica: What’s your hope for life after this?
Matt Sax: I don’t know, man. I think it’s important, the piece is important. I think it’s important for youth culture to come out and see this. It was written in mind to change people’s perspectives about what theater is. It’s not that expensive to come and see this show compared to other shows in town, it is sort of a reduced rate to come see these shows, and that’s really important because you’re not gonna get a person who’s not interested in theater to come into the theater when it’s $80 to buy a ticket. And so the goal has always been to try to get youthful ideas and ideals into the theater. It seems like we are making the world smaller because we all can get in touch with each other on the computer and with our Palm Pilots and everything. There is a need I think, now more than ever, for live performance and for a shared community experience. And that is what theater is.
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