The Brooklyn Rail

Jerry Lieblich, an experimental theater artist whose work has shown at The Tank, Joe’s Pub, and Clubbed Thumb, has been thinking about language a lot—its rhythms and musicality, certainly, but its discrete power, the way it takes on a life when implemented in theory, then casting the reality around it in its shadow. Paul Lazar, co-founder of Big Dance Theatre and an associate member of the Wooster Group, found resonance in the way language’s very function in society and politics was at once submitting the fantasy that politicians like George W. Bush wanted to erect as well as hammering in concrete those oligarchical aspirations into something that impacts the everyday lives of the rest of us. A resignation speech can say everything and nothing at the same time, while doing little but transforming the day to day banalities, even incrementally, with the stench of irreparability.

Together, Lieblich and Lazar, after a long gestational period that was interrupted by the COVID-19 lockdown in 2020, explore the intersections of theater, politics, power, performance, and language in the bright, acerbically witty and linguistically acrobatic play The Barbarians, coming to La MaMa February 14–March 2, 2025.

The Brooklyn Rail caught up with Lieblich and Lazar over Zoom during the winter holidays to talk about sincerity, nonprofit talk, and speech acts.

Kyle Turner (Rail): Your script includes a note at the very beginning. It’s a quote from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: “Sincerity is a paradigm condition for the felicity of speech acts.” And I was just wondering what both of your respective relationships are to sincerity as both people and as artists?

Jerry Lieblich: I think sincerity is really important both as a person and as an artist. I think it’s such tricky territory for art. I love irony, I love humor, I love playfulness, I love double talk and exploration, and if that is not in service of something that’s actually there, I don’t know why you’re doing it. What’s tricky about sincerity in art is that it’s vulnerable. To say something sincerely, it takes courage.

Paul Lazar: About half an hour ago, I was just watching a bit of a rehearsal on video, and it’s a little love scene, and it’s very funny. But what the scene requires is that it be played sincerely enough so that the humor comes through, which is paradoxical. So this is a very funny play, among other things, and if played with the right level of sincerity, the humor will come through. So where that sits on that spectrum between irony and earnestness is a subtle place. So there’s some place where you mean it, but you mean it in a playful way. When you’re making this painting, and sincerity is one of the paints that’s in the palette, sometimes it needs a little bit of thinning, sometimes some thickening.

Rail: And to go back to the very beginning, and forgive me for referencing Merrily We Roll Along, but what came first: the speech acts, the speech, or the acts?

Lieblich: The speech acts came first, and that was sort of the very first germ of the play. I had a friend who was getting his Ph.D. in philosophy and he was studying promises, and we were talking about that and talking about speech acts, and it got me interested in what a speech act would be on stage. Even as a formal exercise, what if I tried to make a play out of speech acts? And I found very quickly that two interesting things happened, which is to say, the next thing that came were the speeches. I was like, “Oh, let me look at some historical speech acts, like Nixon’s resignation, for instance.” I read it, and I thought, the speech is just so good. I want to just use it as it is. And it felt really interesting, and had a kind of heat around it, just putting it in as it was. And then that also made this interesting thing where, the language did something in the real world, and it doesn’t do the same thing here. It does something else. The other interesting thing that happened in the work is that there are statements that are speech acts on stage that aren’t speech acts in real life. Me declaring “I’m Hamlet, Prince of Denmark” does not make it so, but saying it on stage does make it so. The world of the play can actually be created by saying it so, and I was just sort of riding with that as far as I could, which I guess then led to the act.

Rail: And you’re both in the theater or film worlds, you’ve worked with a lot of nonprofits, and the nonprofit world involves a lot of double speak, involves a lot of play with language. I was just wondering if having to be in that environment shaped at all the trajectory or the gestation of the play.

Lieblich: It has brought to mind for me something Mac Wellman said at some point when I was studying with him at Brooklyn College. I think I was feeling a lot of difficulty about how to talk about my work. And he basically said, “Yeah, just engage in that double speak. Realize what people want to hear and say that and talk about your play to yourself in a different way than you talk about it to other people,” which I actually think I’m very bad at, but that’s what it brings to mind. What do you think, Paul?

Lazar: Well, it’s funny that Mac said that, because when he applied for either a Fulbright or a Guggenheim, his entire application essay was, “I shall write a work of dramatic fiction.” So in that instance, he didn’t bend to the pressure to engage in double speak. But the funding world, certainly the art nonprofit, art funding world, requires a ton of what you’re talking about, an insane amount, because a lot of times funding institutions—and maybe this is getting less so because there’s less money and fewer funding institutions—but they invent concepts, the purpose of which are to perpetuate the funding institution. In other words, how about if we make a fund that pairs a composer with a playwright. Now in the real world, if a playwright wants to work with a composer, they call them on the phone and say, “Hey, do you want to work together?” But what happens in the funding world is, you see this frigging application and you say, “Okay, well, I want the money, right? So let me see if I can bend what I really want to do to fit the thing, to fit this funding institution’s sexy concept.”

I mean, as far as I’m concerned, all funding institutions should do one simple thing, just give money to artists. Believe me, any serious artist that’s surviving in this environment is scrappy and strategic and perfectly capable of figuring out the best way to use the money. They don’t need an institution to tell them this money is for administrative purposes or it’s for this or that.

Rail: If we could go back a little bit, could you talk about how your creative partnership began?

Lieblich: I first met Paul working on a play in 2017. It was a reading of a much earlier draft at New York Theatre Workshop, and my agent, Antje Oegel, suggested Paul would be good for it, so she sent it over to him, and the rest is history, really. We had a bunch of other developmental opportunities after that, and kind of kept working with each other and kept working on the play, which was supposed to happen in 2020, but then COVID happened. Then I saw Paul about a year ago. I was doing a show at The Tank called Mahinerator that Paul came to see. And Paul said, “We should really do The Barbarians.” And I had sort of thought the project was dead and buried, but that was all it took.

Lazar: It’s not that common that I feel in sync enough with the material to reach out to the person that sent it. But the material immediately spoke to me, because it was really funny in an immediate way and intellectually sophisticated at the same time. Jerry was very cool—it’s extremely helpful to have them in the room. They’ve got the right instincts for letting things evolve according to the directorial impulse, but also being a resource for clarity and ideas.

Rail: This has been gestating since 2017, and the world and its relationship to language has changed dramatically since then. How has it changed your relationship to the work itself?

Lazar: There’s been a lot of change in the world upon which this play comments, and initially the politics of the piece sounded very rooted in the George Bush era, so in the Trump era, we’ve gone from being internationally overextended to being dangerously isolationist.

Lieblich: It feels to me that what those things have in common, which is still the very bedrock of the play, is this idea that as a tool for power, people in leadership positions will define an enemy. You create a “Them” to create an “Us,” and to create an obedient and pliable “Us.” And I think the shift that Paul is talking about is like the one that occurred in the Bush era. The “Them” were sort of shadowy terrorists, which basically meant anyone outside of this country. And I think now the “Them” is interior to the country, whether that’s immigrant populations or radicals or whatever you want to call it.

Lazar: The Enemy Within.